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Dream Masons

photo Michael Rayner

Dream Masons

To the oom-pa-pa of the band water cascades from the stage, shadow-puppet fish swim in the windows of Salamanca Arts Centre, a boat floats above the street audience and performers climb ladders and moving ramps on a uniquely vertical stage. These impressive theatrics leave you smiling. Dream Masons is worth attending just to observe the amazing set design that turns the façade of the Arts Centre into a stage with unlimited opportunity.

The rigging is fantastic: ramps appear out of nowhere allowing performers to scale the building; a washing line strung between windows allows a performer to swing from one to another; and skilful wiring allows a fisherman to row in mid-air. Projections and shadow play reveal scenes and sub-plots further accentuated by the deftly changing music score as each window lights up.

Mood is largely dictated by the music and lighting, and most of the characters are defined by their musical accompaniment. The excellent small cabaret-style band, comprising tuba, drums, keyboard, bells and accordion, generate the ominous quality of a scene with a whale that would make Hollywood directors jealous. And many members of the audience cannot help but bop to the more upbeat music.

The building is populated with clown-like stereotypes: the helpless bourgeois lady in a wheelchair, the woman hanging out washing and yearningly holding up a wedding dress; the muscular sailor showing off his strength to a ditzy girl; and the ‘old hag’—a woman with a hunchback. The characters visit or intrude on each other or party—until the plumbing goes wrong. This is where the production comes to life. The building is flooded, resulting in an evacuation to the top storey providing suspense and interest so far lacking in the production. The water rises, fish and shadowy water demons and finally a giant whale appear, impressively filling the windows of the entire façade.

After the initial introduction to the building and its inhabitants, large banners had been unfurled to announce the five chapters of the story, revealing the production to be an allegory of the flooding of Lake Pedder. (Really! What did the first part of the production have to do with this?). For me Dream Masons relies a bit too heavily on glitzy stunts and theatrics, dated gender stereotypes and a trivialising of the Lake Pedder disaster to form a coherent and convincing story. However, the design, with its vertical staging and clever use of windows, rigging and lights was fantastic; so let’s hope that this approach is used again in the future in a more coherent production.

Lucy Bleach, Circumnarrative

photo Craig Opie

Lucy Bleach, Circumnarrative

A low wooden structure snakes around the pillars of the Long Gallery. A series of plaques on the wall proudly display fragments of local roads. An easily missed lightbox hides outside the gallery window. This is Lucy Bleach’s Circumnarrative.

The wooden structure is probably the most puzzling of the three works. Two parallel lines of 10cm high plywood curve around the timber floor forming the likeness of a walled road or some other passageway. It dodges the gallery pillars in a way that a plant would, the organic nature of its movement suggesting that nature may have been an inspiration. Yet it still looks very much built, with its exposed supports and its likeness is to roads which track a journey through what appears to me to be the gradually evolving shape of Tasmania. I strain to remember the locations of the roads I have travelled in my own short time in the state: Eaglehawk Neck, Burnie, Launceston.
Lucy Bleach, Circumnarrative

Lucy Bleach, Circumnarrative

photo Craig Opie

Lucy Bleach, Circumnarrative

The five plaques mounted vertically on the nearby wall each display a section of bitumen dug up from Hobart roadworks. Between the cracks, delicate green embroidery pokes out, just as hardy plants would amongst the urban landscape. Engraved professionally below each section on a brass plaque are the details of the location of the road, its coordinates, the date of the removal of the section, the names of the crew, as well as quotations from people involved in the works or looking on. These observations fight the cold objectivity of the plaques, some describing an experience relating to the road: an old man who named the particular crack in the road which he has been watching for many years “Nellie.” Other sentences are brutally honest: “Bumped into Pete Jenkins who watched the crew scraping back the road with me and told me Mary had lost their baby girl.”

The third work, the lightbox mounted outside on a neighbouring wall depicts a landscape view with a freestanding gate, through which can be seen the edge of the land over the ocean. Even without the gate, the typically bleak Tasmanian landscape would seem hostile; but the gate adds an extra physical barrier to the land. It is also cleverly placed out of reach in the space between the buildings—an island of colour and light against the sandstone wall.

Circumnavigate is an initially incohesive work, but on closer reflection, the three parts share an underlying theme. I perceive an outsider’s view of Tasmania. As with many small communities, Tasmania has a cliquey nature that many newcomers to state find initially alienating and hostile. Perhaps, coming from Sydney, Bleach has experienced this ‘outsider’ phenomenon. The wooden structure may suggest the roads of Tasmania, but also a sense of exclusion: these ‘roads’ are created out of relatively tall barriers, preventing not only entrance but also escape. The wall plaques share with us intimate comments, but are presented in a strangely objective manner, suggesting the view of another kind of ‘outsider.’

Circumnavigate is beautifully mysterious: the structure which evolves as you walk around it and consider the shape of the whole and the journey within; the intriguing plaques with the fleeting stories of ordinary Hobart workers and the overlooked remnants of their efforts made permanent; and the landscape, sectioned off twice in a bid to keep out the stranger. It takes time to enter Lucy Bleach’s work, however the reward is coming to a unique understanding of Tasmanian as ‘an other place’.

Austin McQuinn's Bogeyman

Austin McQuinn’s Bogeyman

photo Craig Opie

Austin McQuinn’s Bogeyman

There’s a neverending conversation in much artwork that emanates from Tasmania and is about Tasmania, which is about This Place (a current local advertising campaign virtually orders us to Love This Place!) that was eventually named Tasmania, after being Van Deimen’s Land for a period of time, and presumably had an Indigenous name before that. There is a particular sensation that the place seems to evoke, formed by distance, being dwarfed and awed by a landscape huge and even intimidating. The South West Forest (possibly the most internationally well-known part of Tasmania) was named Transylvania on early maps, setting into motion a strange unnamed kind of Tasmanian Gothic that has dominated much artistic production here ever since.

Austin McQuinn’s Bogeyman offers a particular vision of this place, a vision of Hobart, that is familiar and Other at once. A video projection introduces us to an odd figure constructed from dark cloth that covers the entire body except for the head, which comprises a clump of those old woollen CWA toys made into a slightly sinister amorphous blob. Interestingly, the use of old toys is fairly common round here, due in part to the presence of the Resource Tip Shop. The regular Art From Trash exhibitions usually feature something like the Bogeyman’s headpiece. But there’s more to this Bogeyman than his appearance.

He wanders out of place, pathetic and forlorn through regions that for me are rich with personal memory. I know the region of the mountain Bogeyman stands in, the steep street in South Hobart he carefully feels his way down, looking ever more awkward and displaced. I know which courthouse he’s been in, and I wonder if his story is formed in part by the sad tale of the Irish political exiles that ended up here. The guy who made the work is Irish after all, and for the purposes of this exhibition, the Irish are apparently Other as well.

So, the Bogeyman is alone in a place that I find so familiar. He doesn’t have my local know, is blind to the resonance and ripples that he creates, re-writing the landscape with his small presence. It’s a landscape he’s removed from—he can’t see, all his sensory equipment muffled by the thick black costume and the heavy headdress. He’s been made that way—he is a construction.

I see the places he’s in as some of the most obvious places an outsider would go when they come here; then I wonder if I’m being smug and insular. Maybe. Maybe I’m tired of the same story of this place being told by those from outside it. That’s if it is the same story, but if it is not, why do I recognise it? Even some things about the Bogeyman seem familiar. The way he seems to be put together, made out of residue, discard and children’s nightmares. I’ve seen him before somewhere; somewhere here. He’s unfamiliar and yet sympathetic in his lonely plodding. And I do think of him as character, yes, somehow. Somehow he takes that on in this work, bringing me back to where I sit, staring at him, wondering if his mere presence has re-written my home town even for me. I watch him sadly slide under a bed that no one sleeps in anymore.

That’s it. He was under my bed. He was under yours as well. Remember?

Andy Jones, To the Wall

photo Michael Rayner

Andy Jones, To the Wall

It’s immediately and alarmingly clear that you’re locked in a room with an eccentric. You’re a captive audience. You pray it’s a non-participatory one. Newfoundlander Andy Jones comes on, an engagingly pushy mix of lecturer, spruiker and preacher, flogging a thesis that will explain why humans are so bad to each other, and what we and God, should he exist, can do about it. The extrapolation of the thesis, he advises us, will take the whole performance. In the meantime he kicks off with something terribly contemporary—anxiety about anxiety, specifically the human wiring that triggers: “future possible, possibly horrible” (which he titles fitposs, economising from a French-Canadian rendering). We’re all very attentive and the brisk texturing of references French, Irish and Newfoundland layers the thesis-making with something very particularly cultural and possibly personal—as in Jones’ droll description of his intensely exclusive Roman church upbringing as “Hasidic Catholic.”

Most of the time fitposs (“a déjà vu of the future”) prepares us for the worst, but September 11, 2001 shocked the atheist Jones into prayer—what else could you do, he asks. This plunges him into a big question—are we God’s experimental failure (God wanted equals, got nasty supplicants and is profoundly lonely, and therefore absent)? He offers some big solutions—let’s invite God to a public meeting, in this theatre, tonight, and propose some genetic tweaking. Without fitposs we might be a nicer species (Jones rattles off a history of the demise of earlier humans not fitted with fitposs—the first of our kind were, of course, Adam and Eve). While modifying our anxiety generator might seem a reasonable idea, Jones is not reasonable in any ordinary sense, suggesting that we have anxiety thermostats visibly implanted over our nipples (slide of Uma Thurman at an Academy Awards thus technically adorned). This will not only make us more aware of each other’s emotional fluctuations but generate some new language: “Go fluctuate yourself!” Wilder evolutionary engineerings are suggested later in the show, but in the meantime there’s much else to rapidly absorb and to reflect on: what would be the saddest story you could tell a rabbit such that its tears would turn to ice and lock it to the ground (and provide you with dinner)?

This is discursive theatre, Jones playing out a persona doubtless rooted in the real man and stylistically reminiscent of the American Spalding Gray, if without the incantatory poetry or darker personal musings, and the UK’s Ken Campbell (Jones was a performer for a period with the Ken Campbell Roadshow). Like Campbell, Jones is in love with the big picture, generating wildly improbable theses that nonetheless tell us much about what worries us and the kinds of not always silly fuzzy logic we apply to such mysteries. Again like Campbell, there’s a mix of real if distorted science and wacko cosmology. Some episodes seem simply off the air, smutty, over elaborate but usually arrive at a kind of meaningfulness, as does the seductive rhetorical illogic of a good sermon (which he illustrates at one stage). Jones introduces us to the Newfoundland beef bucket (used to tenderise tough brisket in salt) deployed in an experiment with his three nubile assistants, seen on screen. They fling sand from such a bucket millions of times, looking to form by chance the perfect shape of Newfoundland and Labrador and they get close. But of course God created randomness. What can you do?

That Newfoundlanders would indulge in such flights of scientific fancy and many other bizarre activities, Jones attributes to the N-factor—a Newfoundland facility for doing things in very odd, lateral and sometimes surprisingly successful ways. This takes us into the country’s history, back to the 18th century, and the Jones’ family’s connection with it, climaxing in the story of his aunt Mary, a Newfoundland beauty who eloped with a protestant English diplomat who was then posted to Berlin in 1939. There it was rumoured Mary, now with an imperious upperclass British accent, snubbed Hitler, so mortifying him that he gave up on invading Great Britain. That’s lateral. The story includes delightful photographs (by Louise Abbott) of a family wedding on a windy Newfoundland day, bridesmaids tottering about the uneven landscape. “No one seems to notice they’re living on a rock!” quips Jones.

If Ken Campbell seems to teeter on the edge of madness in his wilder flights, Jones is on safer ground, for example diverting any extreme nuttiness into the portrayal of a Catholic priest, with Jones asking us stamp our feet when the clergyman has crossed the line into insanity. We’re stamping pretty quickly, but Jones signals that worse is to come.

Like Campbell and Gray, Jones is a deft weaver of tales and ideas, leaving many threads hanging and then ravelling them with bravura sleights of hand. But there are still always surprises to come: “You’re wondering what this show is all about? … Mating!” The cosmological weft is suddenly evolutionary (an earlier thread now picked up) and we’re warped into an hilarious fantasy of genetic tweaking providing the inadequate male with the voice of JFK and bigger buttocks.

There’s plenty to take away with you from To the Wall. Just how many human problems are generated by ‘fitposs’ and what would we be like without it? Why does a confirmed atheist turn to God in moments of extreme crisis? Jones, garbed in a plethora of priestly vestments from different cultures, invites God to join us. He doesn’t turn up, but Jones trips, falls to the stage, and with good Catholic logic, suspects He has been silently present. What are the odds? Other questions linger. How can Catholicism continue to be a creative force when such a punishing one? Above all, is Jones’ account of Newfoundland quirkiness (the N-factor), a condition compounded by Catholicism, true just of his home culture, or is it recognisable, in other ways, in Tasmania or Australia—whose people are so often inclined to insularity, especially now?

Occasional sillinesses aside, To the Wall is amusing and sometimes bracing, performed with affable ease and a self-mockery which fellow islanders from all over will recognise. Best of all, Jones takes the edge off our own troubling fitposs for a while.

For the last month I’ve been walking under a jetty to get my morning coffee. I was oblivious to my underwater journey until Dream Masons exploded over the face of the Salamanca Arts Centre with a spectacular display of mechanical wizardry, bawdy hijinks and vaudeville-style theatre.

Dream Masons was commissioned as a celebration of the Salamanca Arts Centre, a place that has housed and supported Hobart’s creative community for thirty years in a jumble of linked sandstone warehouses. The buildings themselves are the stage for the work which is performed across the vertical surface of three buildings over four storeys. Twenty windows were utilised and the entire facade was fitted with scaffolding, rigging, ladders, a twenty metre long bridge, a boat on a rope, three balconies, a fridge and a toilet. And of course, my jetty.

The windows depict apartments within the building occupied by a mixed bag of tenants. The characters are easily recognised types played out in with vaudevillian overacting, repetition and an abundance of sight gags. We meet the hapless fisherman, the bawdy babe, the strong-man sailor, the henpecked husband, the prissy wife, the weeping spinster who is always washing and a boy in a Superman suit. Living at the top of the building, hoarding ice cubes like currency and screaming through a loud hailer is the cantankerous hunch-backed landlady. Each of these lives is highlighted through the changing focus across the facade as windows are illuminated in turn.

Gibberish aside, there is no dialogue and the plot is deceptively simple. Each of these characters goes about their lives until disaster hits. A great flood—possibly created by evil means—threatens their building and the group help each other to escape to the apartment of the unwelcoming landlord. The weeping spinster makes a dramatic escape across her clothesline to safety, but the boy is lost in the waters and eventually swallowed by a whale as big as the whole building. Saved by his snorkel, the boy spectacularly finds his way out through the whale spout and saves the day by releasing the waters.

The main players are backed by a cast of extras, a large band, giant banners to announce the main episodes of the story, a gospel choir and a busy backstage crew whom I imagine running madly between buildings throughout the work. They fill each window with back projections, creating the rising water and the huge whale which are highlights of the show.

While it is easy to take the show at its cheesy face value, anyone who has ever had anything to do with the Salamanca Arts Centre will know that Dream Masons is like taking the place and turning it inside out so that all the melodrama, personalities, politics, shoddy construction and leaking roofs are all revealed on the outside for one hour of madness. I’ve often thought the place was ripe for a multi-storey sit com, but this show goes ten steps further and I now wonder if the centre was also a hub for the protests against the Lake Pedder flooding which is hinted at as a parallel disaster in the show. I clapped and laughed like a seven year old, but also enjoyed Dream Masons as a regular of the Salamanca strip and I will miss those underwater coffees over the weeks to come.

How do we experience place? How much can we ever understand of a foreign place? If we read the signs will they tell us the story? These are questions that arise in experiencing works by Julie Gough and Austin McQuinn in AN OTHER PLACE.

Julie Gough’s work We ran/I am is composed of a series of black and white photographs matched against pairs of rough-sewn wool and calico trousers. The trousers hang as physical evidence of the photographic content. As the artist is documented running through the horizontally mounted images, the trousers underneath bear different levels of soiling that could reflect falls to the ground or lost footing. A map mounted on the side wall shows the marking of the Black Line, part of a notorious campaign in 1830 by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur involving a moving chain of Tasmanian residents intended to round up all Indigenous islanders, most of whom would eventually die as a result of imprisonment and disease. Interspersed between the active images are stills of the tired signposts welcoming travellers to towns along the Line with the standard claims about being “Historic” or “Tidy”. As an adjunct to her title, Gough quotes a journal entry from George Augustus Robinson: “The people all seemed satisfied at their clothes. Trousers is excellent things and confines the legs so they cannot run.” (sic) In similar trousers, Gough relives the escapes of her ancestors.
Austin McQuinn, Bogeyman

Austin McQuinn’s work also journeys through a series of places, but with a different kind of energy. Bogeyman is a wall-sized video projection with a five minute loop showing a series of locked shots of Hobart. Coming into the work at a particular point I was confused by the intent as it flicked through a number of shaky views of Hobart backed with questionable sound. Almost to the end of the fifth shot, my patience waning, his Bogeyman appeared. This creature is presumably the artist or a projection of McQuinn, dressed in sagging black knit pants and top, hands and feet encased in what could be mittens. His head is completely covered by a headdress of knitted toys. The figure is both pathetic and absurd as he walks slowly through each of the shots from the top of Mount Wellington to a single cell within the old Hobart Gaol. In what could be the final shot, he disappears under the bed, like the bogeyman of childhood.

Together these works address a condition that I believe is intimate to Tasmanians and visitors—the sense of experiencing, but perhaps not understanding the place you inhabit. Gough’s work reveals a dark layer of Tasmania’s past that makes a parody of the “historic” in the worn out welcome signs within her images. Her Tasmania is definitely “an other place” from the pristine island that we see in the advertisements and its people are to be feared. McQuinn’s figure also reveals an experience of distance from the landscape. I imagine that his moping monster represents the artist’s feeling of isolation as a resident of Ireland attempting to make work in a foreign place, walking blindly through a landscape he may never understand.

They called me a thief. I was innocent. They called me a thief, so I decided to be a thief. A false accusation at the age of ten may have been the first defining moment in the chequered life of Jean Genet, French playwright, political spokesman and hero of the Existentialist movement.

These words are uttered in disgust and defiance by Robert Jarman as he plays Genet in a solo show entitled Spectre of the Rose. The show is staged in Backspace where a small audience is party to the confidences and musings of Genet from prison. His cell is defined by a brick wall at the rear, a sleeping bench, a few personal possessions and a strong white line marked out on the floor. Throughout the work, Jarman remains behind the line, even while leaning his body out emphatically toward the audience.

The show begins uncomfortably. Genet is prone on his bed, placed centrally in the cell. He is clothed in pants and singlet that are thin and holed. Low restless music accompanies his breathing for an indeterminable time and he seems to be struggling with thoughts or nightmares, his body stiff with tension. I sense the spring of a dancer in this man and as if to prove this Jarman’s Genet leaps from his bed and begins his monologue like a ranting madman. He runs around the cell, listens at the wall and is wide eyed as he describes the voices of other prisoners that surround him—some murmured, some screamed, some inaudible. He climbs up high to listen and runs laps around his bed describing the ritual of the discipline yard where men are forced to continually run in a torture that is accompanied by the indignity of defecating in a can in full view of the others.

Once Genet has articulated his dreadful circumstances he quietens and begins to explore his thoughts. It is now that he makes sustained eye contact with audience members and there is a sense that he has decided to trust us. We are his confidante.
Genet’s imagination is rich and dark and perhaps that is how he survived lengthy incarceration. He appears to have the capacity to build relationships with imagined foes and lovers to the point where the heights of experience with those he selects bring him a kind of satisfaction, sexual or otherwise. He shares his heroes with us—they are murderers whose faces he has pasted to a board concealed in his room. He is excited by their crimes. As he says, “The only way to escape horror is to bury yourself in it.”

This portrayal of Genet reveals a complex man. While I believe that we are expected to feel some revulsion at his delight in the worst of human behaviour, Jarman’s Genet is also tender and loving. As he describes his relationship with a fellow prisoner and re-enacts an afternoon of slow dancing in a cell—the only permitted form of affection—the depth of feeling, the love, the grief for this lost love is very moving. To some extent, he is a slave to his own desires and we witness the inability to gain distance from his turmoil culminating in self mutilation. Perhaps this is the inspiration for the trilogy of which this play forms part—Prisoner of Love. Seeing the show is a visceral experience that could be confronting for some as it involves blood, nudity, masturbation and simulated fellatio, but beyond this are moments of lucidity and stunning observations that inspire reflection on the condition of being human in such extremity. Seeing the show is a visceral experience that could be confronting for some as it involves blood, nudity, masturbation and simulated fellatio, but beyond this are moments of lucidity and stunning observations that inspire reflection on what it might mean to be human in such extremity.

Hobart’s City Hall has been transformed into a caravan park. Inside the corral of five crusty old caravans, chairs and picnic rugs face a small stage and a screen. We have each been given an esky filled with surprising gourmet products—confit of scallops, sugar and grapefruit cured ocean trout, and smoked wallaby. Not your standard family picnic fare. But then, there is nothing quite standard about Big hART's Drive In Holiday.

One caravan serves as technical hub and radio station from which the actors keep us informed about what we are eating, what to do and where to go. The other vans house installations representing four Tasmanian coastal townships. The Crayfish Creek van is particularly engaging as every surface including the vinyl seat covers and the internal surfaces of the cupboards, is postered with naïve illustrations by Rebecca Lavis. She has even created a photo album to flick through and decorated blocks and a jigsaw to play with. The Tomahawk van has illustrations by cartoonist Reg Lynch glowing on a lightbox above the sink while Euan McLeoud’s acrylic and oil landscapes adorn the Trial Harbour van. For Southport, Christine Kilter has created a haven for kitsch with crocheted cushions, gaudy figurines and a series of snowdomes with pictures and stories from the area. The vans are intriguing and warrant time to absorb but we are instructed to return to our seats, or picnic blankets to watch the show.

While we sample our exotic edibles a duo sings a sweet and melancholy acoustic number and the “movie” begins to roll. We see a woman, Crystal (played by Kerry Walker) through the window of a caravan. Surprised by the appearance of a police officer, she chokes on a piece of food. There is sharp edit, and we realise that the action is now live, being filmed in the Couta Rocks van to our right. We can choose to watch the live action surrounded by a young crew holding boom, camera and lights, or we can view the action on screen. This is a movie in the making.

Pre-recorded footage offers the unhappy back story of divorce, custody loss, and a sea change. In a live scene in the van a gentle friendship between Crystal and Keg (Lex Marinos) unfolds as she helps him write his will. Back to animations and prepared material and the tale of a freak discovery—a human toe in the guts of a fish. Then we switch back to a repeat of the live scene as a policeman delivers Crystal the message of her ex-husband’s unfortunate demise.

And this is just the beginning. It’s a mini-series and the drama continues to develop, using a connection to Keg as the binding agent and taking in the towns we have experienced via the van installations. We meet a young girl, his niece (Dawn Yates), playing a piano in the middle of the bush at Southport, her mother with Alzheimer’s (Kerry Walker) in Tomahawk and eventually there is a love story in Crayfish Creek (or is it Trial Harbour… I’m a bit lost now).

As with all of Big hArt’s work, Drive In Holiday is made as part of a larger community development project, so in addition to appearances in the fictional material, local people are included in brief documentary segments telling stories and recollecting details about their towns. The fictional scenes that follow illustrate how this is incorporated into the narrative.

The shifts between live and set footage gradually break down, the switching between lines of recorded and live dialogue becoming unwieldy. The actors abandon the filming scenario and simply stand on the stage reading from their scripts. Originally I suspected a technical hitch as Marinos receives instructions from the blue-coated floor manager but, as the actors are directed to play the scene as though it were a soap opera, the mock rehearsal reveals another layer of artifice. Again we are reminded that this a story, and a story in the making.

And the story is not finished. As the show progresses the initially tight hold on the narrative begins to unravel. Some of the imposed details and fragments of stories from the community are not completely woven into the plot but rather just hang there, perhaps waiting for the next episode. Why does Crystal take the name of her deaf and dumb sister? And the rapidly developed lesbian love story seems expedient. In the end we are left with another gentle sweet song and an ambiguous kiss.

The scale, complexity, and the integration of interdisciplinary elements in Drive In Holiday is very impressive, and the environment created is completely immersive. However there are are a few elements that niggle. The overwhelming nostalgia of the content—a golden era of baby boomer Australian kitsch—is curious considering the material was developed with a workshop of young mothers and their children. And within this atmosphere, the gourmet food, although thoroughly enjoyable, might more appropriately be replaced by a sausage sizzle. The material does also seem to thin out, as the work progresses, less integration of live elements and more scattered plot devices. Despite this Drive In Holiday is a unique and thoroughly engaging exploration not only of a slice of Tasmanian culture, but of the potential of hybrid performance and expanded storytelling.

A strongly familiar story that deals with the cold and lonely death of an innocent girl might seem to be a strange choice for a piece of children’s theatre, but then again, perhaps discussing such a difficult topic is exactly what we need from theatre. It’s a brave thing to even attempt, so a great delight to experience something that must have been so difficult that achieves as much as Denmark’s Gruppe 38’s production of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl.

Children’s theatre has different concerns from its adult counterpart, and there’s a common assumption that the performance has to be responsible for the emotional wellbeing of the younger audience. Given that both story and outcome, are well known, the nature of this responsibility looms large, and the company’s reaction to this has shaped the nature of this production in quite particular ways. From beginning to end the cast are visible, and they acknowledge the audiences’ presence. The set, and general appearance of the performers has a hint of genteel poverty, which gives the whole thing a clownish, unthreatening quality. The performers use their own names, introduce themselves to the audience, have their roles explained and produce ‘scripts’, which are not scripts in the traditional sense but images. All perfectly elegant and deft deconstructive moments, and indeed there was much of this throughout the performance: a piece of paper being moved about with a long thin stick to create an illusion of wind is eventually grabbed, revealed as a long thin stick and not wind at all. It’s an illusion. It looks amazing but it’s not real. It’s just a story you’re watching: we’re reading it from scripts, using clever theatrical tricks; you can see us using them. It’s all right. It’s fine.

The set, stark and simple, utilizing projection in many ways, had one particular premise that fascinated – the performance took place within a smaller square on the stage, that was clearly defined early on as a dangerous place to be. Performers entered it at their own risk, a little nervous but with brave hearts. They would take whatever risk necessary for their story, unselfishly keeping the audience a little safer still.

It’s not always dangerous in the space however; a simple projection onto a shoulder-high silhouette of a four-storey townhouse is raised from the floor giving the performers a chance to create images of warmth and food and comfort. It’s all done with a small projector, visibly worked by the performers. It’s all an illusion; it’s not real. We are telling a story. This is how we are telling it, using these clever little things that are simple and easy to use. What’s extraordinary is how many of these things there are, and how much is evoked by their clever, economical usage.

I found this work extraordinarily satisfying. It was everything I look for in strong theatre – intelligent, even witty use of theatrical devices that do not overwhelm or cheapen the story and its attendant emotional resonances. The energy that was created, controlled and shared was very involving; I was caught up: charmed by the way the company told stories and moved by the story they told.

Do you know the type of sound which massages the back of your skull? No? Yes? Well… it is my best attempt at quantifying the intensity of sound that Leigh Hobba managed to create in his performance at the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery. I tried to keep my eyes open to the shadows, the video images and the live dancer but it occasionally became necessary to lull in the pulsating sounds of Hobba’s clarinet playing and avoid sensual overload by just closing them.

Leigh Hobba is a performance, sound and video artist who announced this event as a “distillation of 20 years work”: favourite performance pieces dating back to 1976. As one of the younger members of the audience, I had never seen any of these so I had no idea what to expect. In the darkened room, two wide screen television monitors sat on each side of the stage, and on a plinth next to the microphone and music stand, a tiny monitor blinked with static. From behind a black curtain, an elongated shadow of the clarinet spreads across the white wall, the monitor revealing what I finally decide is Hobba's pulsing stomach. He alternates between repetitive, modulating series of notes and the bending of long single notes. The effect is ultimately spine chilling. Combined with the rhythmic tapping of the keys, Hobba’s desperate breathing—due to the pressures of continuous playing and circular breathing—and the ever present shadow provide an almost overwhelmingly sensual introduction to his work.

Hobba’s collaborator, Wendy Morrow, enters the room as the sound ceases. My view of her is blocked so, as with the introduction, I am captivated by her shadow. The quiet that follows Hobba’s work fills with dancing until Hobba returns and reads text, accompanied by images that flash up on the various screens: a young boy acting out a brief movement routine, a baby curled up, the jet trail of a plane and the flags of nations fluttering in the wind with repetitive flag pole clanking.

Later that night, when I am sitting through a different performance, A 1000 Doors, A Thousand Windows, I am struck by similarities in the projections, the use of digital sound distortion and the hypnotic effect created by repetition. Hobba calls his work performance art, and Xenia Hanusiak, the singer and co-creator of A 1000 Doors… calls hers music, but both challenge the traditional boundaries between visual art and music.

Leigh Hobba’s performance created a sensual environment that was almost overwhelmingly magical and evoked a strong emotional response, an experience not dependent on prior knowledge of his work.

One of Hobart’s beloved landmarks is the stage for a festival extravaganza, one that could not be contained in a theatre or gallery space. Ten Days on the Island wouldn’t feel a complete festival without the outdoor theatre spectacle, Dream Masons.

In Australia, there is a tradition of labelling large-scale outdoor productions ‘community works.’ This often translates to loads of ‘emerging’ community artists working for no money in exchange for ‘training’ from ‘professional’ artists. Dream Masons is not a community work. Expert artists have been sought from the US (co-director Jim Lasko) and the ‘mainland’ (Joey Ruigrok Van Der Werven on design and construction) to work alongside many exceptional local professionals (co-director Jessica Wilson and Tania Bosak, Justus Neumann and Ryk Goddard). Dream Masons has also provided a training opportunity for many budding theatre technicians from the Salamanca Arts Centre’s SPACE course. All of these artists and more and many volunteers have collaborated on the transformation of the Salamanca Arts Centre buildings, making Dream Masons a truly site specific work.

The inhabitants share this liquorice-all-sort of a building and speak in gibberish, howling, laughing and accosting each other as they dance over three levels of the Salamanca Arts Centre façade. Their introduction is perhaps a little uninspired and drawn out but includes some considerable aerial feats. All have white faces with comically exaggerated, doll-like features. A hunchbacked landlady who collects rent in the form of ice cubes, a weeping widow who washes clothes in her own tears, a virile sailor who gets the girl and a confused fisherman are some of the motley crew we meet.

A team of volunteers create vivid underwater scenes with shadow puppets and an amazing whale using old-school overhead projectors. A live band and choir confidently belt out a water-themed repertoire, finishing with Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Large painted banners of popular Tasmanian landscapes are unfurled revealing summations of the action: “The Problem Deepens: a tipped bottle, a never-ending sponge and the sad demise of the overlooked.” They are a little unnecessary and, if anything, tend to confuse rather than add to the story.

The plot however is simple, the premise of the work a kind of cleansing in which a young boy is the catalyst for change and a symbol of hope. As the building and indeed world are flooded he is swallowed into the belly of a gigantic whale to be later ejected from the whale’s blow-hole—depicted by an impressive jet of water shooting out of the arts centre’s roof. With the help of a fisherman suspended high above us in his boat, the boy wields the wheel that will turn a giant tap and purge the building of water. And so he becomes the hero of the story.

Like the characters, the scale of the production is BIG and the big audiences are young, making Dream Masons a refreshing and unique addition to the Ten Day’s festival program

A pulpit and priestly vestments await Andy Jones on the stage. Religion is almost a compulsory subject for comedians today so I am not in the least bit surprised. As the spotlight focuses on the short, stocky and balding man, Jones takes on an evangelical persona and quickly establishes the character of the show.

Describing his Irish Catholic upbringing in Newfoundland, Jones colourfully re-enacts a ‘psychotic’ priest, childhood memories and the odd Newfoundland-Irish character with the help of projections. He calls a meeting in the theatre to which he invites God, suggests new additions to the human body (such as sexually attractive thermostats making visible emotional fluctuations), and uses a Newfoundland beef bucket as a metaphor for the randomness of life and the universe.

The premise of the show is that Stephen Hawking has a theory of the universe, however Jones has a better one. So in a one hour show Jones backs up his evolving theory with evidence. This is hard to follow at times with Jones’ liberal borrowings from scientific language, rabbits, randomness, throwing beef buckets of sand to form perfect maps of Newfoundland and Labrador, and finally the formula “TBP (Teddy Bears Picnic) = x [to the power of u to the power of u]” which supposedly created humans.

Funnily enough, many of his arguments seem logical and convincing, thanks in part to his charismatic personality. In fact, at the end of his psychotic priest impression, when he makes the sign of the cross, he is so convincing that a woman seated in front of me is compelled to follow.

Jones’ theatricalised standup formula is amusing, although at times he
crosses the line into ‘dirty old man’ territory, focusing on projections of female breasts, lusting over the young girls who are his onscreen assistants and making desperate ‘mating’ jokes—especially tiresome after he hands a gift of chocolates to a female audience member willing to confirm his sexism.

Despite these flaws and uninventive use of screen projections, Andy Jones educates a willing audience about the finer points of Newfoundland and its eccentric culture (and the fact that it is built on a rock). He’s convincing as an actor, and the vivid theatrical moments are easily the most amusing parts of his performance. Andy Jones did not make me laugh ‘til I cried, but To the Wall was a unique and entertaining introduction to an island culture on the other side of the earth.

What were you doing when you heard about 9/11? Andy Jones was working on his theory of the universe, and though a self-proclaimed atheist, he prayed to God. And like many of us after these events he was left asking ‘Why?’ What God would allow such a thing to happen? Why are human beings able to inflict, and suffer, pain and misery? Worse still, why are we able to imagine such awful possibilities? These questions lead to his current thesis, delivered in the irreverent and humorous self-devised solo performance To the Wall.

Inspired by the popular writing of Stephen Hawking, this is a journey of amateur philosophy, theology and science. All the big questions get asked, and yet Jones finds many of his answers in the parochial tales from his own family history and their long involvement in the town of St John’s, Newfoundland. His overactive imagination is as ever expanding as the universe itself, seeming to drag everything and anything into his vortex of “N factor” reasoning (Newfoundlanders apparently do everything slightly different from everyone else).

The set is simple yet a little bizarre. There is a desk covered with a piece of crushed velvet, a ‘salt beef’ bucket, an old desktop computer, a wardrobe full of priestly vestments and a gold-detailed podium. Collectively they do not create a setting so much as provide Jones with a selection of props used at various points to elucidate his ramblings. The bucket for example aids Jones’ metaphor for chance: “How many times would you need to throw a salt beef bucket filled with sand to create a perfect image of a map of Newfoundland?” Image projection is used to similar ends with Jones’ wonderful family photographs from the early to mid 20th Century, epitomising the microcosmic dimension of his metaphysical investigations.

The intensity of Jones’ narration played on the anxiety I have experienced when cornered by a talkative boozer at the pub, or when a relative reaches for their photo album. It’s the fear of getting stuck in somebody else’s reality. Jones has studied the techniques of Newfoundland’s Irish Catholic preachers, and the ‘priest gone mad’ strategy has clearly influenced his own performance style. It’s akin to stand-up comedy, even Jones’ appearance—middle-aged man in nondescript black outfit with loud, open shirt—pays homage to this genre.

Jones is very much an entertainer and audience participation is part of his act though no one leaves their seat. Questions were posed to us and I was pulled into hypothetical scenarios, called upon to support his nutty ideas by raising a hand or stamping my feet. I became embroiled in Jones’ world by being made to laugh. To the Wall has many genuinely funny moments, and though it deals with life’s hardest questions this is essentially a light and engaging play.

Apparently, God invented randomness in the Big Bang in the hope of indirectly creating a “lovable equal other.” Jones establishes this role for himself in relation to his audience. Theorising that humour is a biological method of exuding “non-specific attractiveness”, his ridiculous imitation of a bird mating dance doubles as metaphor for the courtship between actor and audience in the theatre. Deviation into sexual innuendo and quips about gender politics however constitute the least interesting moments of this otherwise intelligent show.

Unfortunately the conclusion was abrupt and weak. Jones issues God an invitation to join us in the theatre for a question-and-answer session. He doesn’t come, and in frustration Jones proclaims his atheism. God instantly strikes him down! Or, was it just that he tripped over the keyboard cable? Either way, through the resultant paralysis Jones’ belief in the almighty is renewed and the final scene is a conversation between Hawking and Jones, projected in text and ‘spoken’ through voice synthesisers, where they debate their different theories about the origins of the universe. As Jones himself says, we may be alone but at least we have science. However, all the effort of setting up his theory of the universe over the course of the performance never seemed to pay off. Perhaps, as with science itself, the point is that theories are not always about proving a hypothesis correct—the value lies in the journey of inquiry itself.

Agapanthus, geranium and lavender bushes line the white picket fence. Inside the front door is the living room, home to an old dial telephone which sits on a small table with a crocheted tablecloth. A homemade sponge cake is ready for visitors and a turntable (His Masters Voice style) sits poised to play the nearby Elvis record. I could easily be describing my grandmother’s house; but this is The Knitting Room and all of these objects have been knitted, crocheted or woven to make up the exhibition at the Moonah Arts Centre.

The Knitting Room is intriguing for its colourful detail, its historical and cultural value and its surprisingly raw humour. A knitted tyre-swan, iced Vo-Vo’s, Flick bug-spray container, the milk bottles sitting by the door, are all iconic items now disappeared from everyday life. These specific objects of an era now passed, have been created by the over 300 participants in this exhibition whose average age is around 70, with the oldest aged 96. The Knitting Room arouses affectionate memories. The objects are so lovingly made and the room emits this enjoyment.

You enter via the front yard; and from there you are invited to step into the living room, the kitchen, the laundry and then the backyard. The living room is obviously primed for potential visitors, but the kitchen and laundry sit behind-the-scenes for the regular visitor. I feel as if I’m intruding as I observe a knitted woman relaxing in the privacy of the laundry with her feet up, a cigarette close at hand. Adding to this feeling, the rooms are all roped off giving it a distinct museum aura.

Jennie Gorringe, the Arts and Cultural Development Officer for Glenorchy Council, informs me that this exhibition is a collaboration between nursing home residents, community and environmental groups, the CWA, day centres “and artists”, which explains the eclectic mixture of styles, objects, methods of making and materials. I have to question Gorringe’s use of the word ‘artist’ however. Knitting has long been associated with craft, and more specifically with “women’s activity” and consequently, is rarely seen in the context of high art. I am aware of a number of female artists who are trying to subvert this assumption and, observing the skill displayed in The Knitting Room, it’s easy to see why. I believe all the participants in this exhibition should be acknowledged as artists. Labelling the exhibition as a ‘community project’ also somehow undermines the worth of these participants’ efforts. On the technical side, I am greatly in awe of the skill and time that created such a feat. I know from my own disastrous attempts at knitting!

The Centre expects 4000 visitors over the course of the exhibition, and has had a great deal of interstate interest following coverage on ABC TV’s The Collectors and The Arts Show. By the time I arrive at Moonah Arts Centre, the exhibition has been open only half an hour, but 55 people have passed through the doors. This is a true testament to the wide appeal and novelty of this theme, and entirely appropriate for such a moving exhibition.

“Even in an academic context I would never talk about the work of et al, still less ‘explain’ it… the process of viewing art provides the explanation, and it is invariably particular to the viewer. The artist is exactly the wrong person to explain their work…”

This statement by dr p mule (sic) on behalf of the collective, et al. is a telling introduction to the show by this New Zealand group entitled Maintenance of Social Solidarity.

Mounted in CAST Gallery, the oppressive atmosphere of the installation is established immediately by the deep grey walls and ceiling. While the construction of individual objects is rough there’s a strong sense of deliberation and formality to the arrangement of elements within the space. At the entry, I’m confronted with two rows of easels facing each other. I hear a kind of chant bleeding from the other side of the room. Each of the easels displays a poster that has been defaced by cut and paste and packing tape then overlaid with thick, dark, handwriting. This text is like an abstract poem that triggers thoughts about war, solidarity and human rights abuse without really saying anything:

Degrading treatment is
never
Hostility hate
& contempt
day of dooms
a morally
permissible
option
infidel

Hanging from each easel is a set of headphones with soundtrack, the overlaid digitised voices immediately reminiscent of Stephen Hawking. These voices relay excerpts of speeches from key figures in the current war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and responses to 9/11. Stripping the actual voice and intonation of the speakers—George W Bush and Osama Bin Laden are featured—places each on the same platform for debate without the prejudice or limitation associated with language or accent. While the idea is interesting, there is a generic quality to the soundtrack –I quickly return the headphones—I feel like I’ve heard it before, another exhibition, other artists.

The remaining elements in the show hang together as one. In the centre of the room a cyclone fence encloses a large projection screen. Twelve chairs sit under a spotlight in their own cell—taped markings on the floor—as if to house a jury or audience at an execution. A desk is lit by a bare bulb like a monitoring station in the midst of the gloom. The chairs and desk also suggest presences that watch and wait. Three more easels sit beside the twelve chairs and on the wall behind them is a grid of images that map mathematical equations, again, defaced by loose, hand written text.

Within the fenceline, the projections are from Google Earth. In digitised tones I hear—“Stockholm”, “Cairo”, “Frankfurt”, “Washington”, “Baghdad.” The projection responds, spinning across the surface of the earth in that familiar Google way before settling just above an airstrip, as if about to land. At first I thought it searched out actual locations, but after a few repeats of the loop, I realised that these were fictionalised places where all else but that which immediately surrounds the airstrip seems blurred, missing or perhaps obliterated. It is as if I am witnessing a series of virtual airstrikes, perhaps from a simulated cockpit. At a certain point in the recording, most notably after “Baghdad” is uttered, the screen freezes and the recording switches to the haunting chant I heard upon entering the space. Given its Middle Easter edge, I read this like a prayer sung prior to attack.

I feel as though I’ve stumbled into a military monitoring or strategy room. From what little I can find about the secretive collective et al., this show is both typical and unique. The consistent aesthetic, the deep grey paint and the elements that appear to be modelled on some militaristic institution are typical. What is not is the minimalism of this piece – the group is known for using a mass of outdated sound and screen technology, quite often to build a cacophonous atmosphere. The use of headphones here allows the sole soundtrack to dominate and the space is easy to read in its arrangement. Given the introduction suggests the work should stand alone, I expected to be able to come to some sort of conclusion about it, but this obtuseness is also typical of et al. While I don’t feel like I’m treading any new ground I am intrigued by this show and the visual imagery—quite beautiful in its own way—stays with me.

The Nightingale of the Adriatic crooned and swooped in the crazy cage of the Crystal Palace last night, christened by the chants of the crowd The Baltic Stallion—they were swiftly corrected by the charming Balkan.

Mikelangelo’s statuesque form, clad in high black pants, danced in the mirrors beneath the chandeliers and disco ball of our devil’s kitchen. His voice soaked in sauerkraut, he truly was the devil sent from heaven. At one point, he enters the room like the Lone Ranger, guitar slung over one shoulder, dances on tabletops, caresses members of the audience, enticing even the most conservative of us into a fleshy sing-along—La, lah, lah, la, la. I left the show with blood thicker than wine racing through my veins, chanting La, lah, lah, la, la through Elizabeth Street Mall.

Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen are a quintet—guitar, accordion, double bass, violin and clarinet. Each brings his own unique flavour to the mix—Moldavio recites a poem about his tragic downfall from taxidermy; an accountant who was sold to the circus as a child bellows a mournful song from the bar (“like love, sometimes the sweetest grape is the first to go rotten”); and Guido Libido suspends our disbelief in a fantastic short silent film sequence achieved simply with a screen and strobe light. The Gentlemen howl like dogs, crow like roosters and all openly and willing support their front man’s formidable persona.

Besides dubious Eastern European accents, the threads that bind these men are strong musicianship and a genuine sense of improvisation. Together, they radiate a lust for life. From the moment they enter the stage (and kiss each other on the cheeks three times) to the final encore (“seven hours worth of blood, sweat and tears in our home country but here rolled into three and a half minutes”!) there is a striking sense of humanity, a liveliness that opens up the possibility of even the humble potato becoming sexy.

Nothing is staged, rather it’s lived and shared. To be so genuine is risky but this is precisely what makes them so captivating. They embody a mock Slavic gloom and traverse a landscape in A minor where the sea leaves villages stuck in mud flats, where the weather is always bleak and where “we’re all just skeletons dancing in a sea of flesh”.

Mikelangelo demands attention like a Spanish bullfighter, and he and his Black Sea Gentlemen have written polkas for the 21st century that you won’t see on Eurovision.
All this and sauerkraut…I fear I may have become a groupie.

Mercy, the Raewyn Hill-Tasdance collaboration, proved curiously memorable, not the whole production, which problematically aestheticises imprisonment and torture into something quite beautiful (reds and blacks and columns of misty light evocative of fascist chic and movie concentration camps by night), but in a number of individual scenes and a final series that suggest a kind of narrative as an intimate couple go to their deaths.

The whole work, in its choreography, music and design is markedly formal. The brief passages of Pergolesi’s Marian Vespers determine the duration of each scene and evoke, of course, a religious formalism matched in the choreography by gestural imagery of supplication, benediction, crucifixion and pieta-like cradlings. Even their opposites—images of torment and torture—share a Baroque neatness, a dancerliness at times courtly and with evidence too of the balletic underpinnings of much modern dance. It’s when this formalism is broken or a series of images suddenly coalesce into something more potent that Mercy makes its mark in the memory.

A man, stretched out on the floor, wrestles with his chains but what disturbs is a sudden and repeated sharp stiffening of the whole body at the moment he puts his hands behind his back as if to have them bound. One victim struggles desperately in a swathe of red ribbon delicately wrapped about him by his tormentors. Another victim uses her body to plead with her gaoler, wrapping herself around him, climbing and clinging to him, losing grip to fall from his temporary or denied grasp. He catches her exhausted body one more time and she falls, totally and frighteningly limp, face down across his extended arms. He leaves her body behind. Is the gesture he makes one of perverted benediction? Another powerful image is of inert bodies carried in a slow dance across the stage, as if in rigor mortis.

Amanatidis and Dunn stand out in a somewhat uneven ensemble. Daniel Zika’s powerful lighting creates spaces both epic and claustrophobic. Greg Clarke’s costumes include identical bodices and striking skirts for male and female dancers (and the principals share short-cropped hair) creating ambiguity and dark elegance—creatures transcending gender and too beautiful to be destroyed. Unfortunately the balance of the costuming—bare-buttocked, leather strapped—looks the cliched stuff of S&M fantasy, reinforcing a feeling that the content of the work is at the mercy of a sleek aesthetic that undercuts the immediacy of its concerns—fortunately not always.

In a final series of images, Derek Amanatidis dances a remarkable solo of supplication, arms reaching high in a convincing embodiment of prayer, circling low
and returning again and again to stretch up for grace. Amanatidis and Trish Dunn whose bodies have hitherto remained apart but are drawn to one another now entwine in movements of subtle caring such as the gentle cradling of a head. The two separate and lie passively on the stage as a row of torturers advances slowly on them. There is no mercy here, perhaps only in the care they have shared and a dream of grace for those who believe in God’s beneficence—a distant prospect here for all the beauty of the music and the empathy of the choreography. Mercy is at its best when its images of suffering, supplication and caring are at their strongest, when the extremities of torment and yearning are palpable in the dancers’ bodies.

The major retrospective of Leigh Hobba’s work currently at TMAG offered the opportunity for live performance, and the potential was not wasted. Live work has formed an important part of Hobba’s practice since 1996 when he was involved in a number of collaborations at Adelaide’s EAF. This performance was a kind of ‘greatest hits parade’, as Hobba noted when introducing the work and himself. This disarming moment thankfully lightened the tone, which had become tense as an assembled audience of museum patrons and Tasmanian Arts intelligentsia scrambled for the limited seats. This was to be an event.

What then transpired was a gloriously ragged presentation of individual works that moved in and out of each other, creating a serendipitous whole that was strikingly engaging. There certainly appeared to be accidents and human error, but this added an element of informality that freed the work from being a mere rehash of past glories—here was a whole made of parts, like the stark self portraits of Hobba visible elsewhere in this retrospective. Not quite new work, but not a bloodless retread.

Variations 1, a work from the beginnings of Hobba’s practice was deemed the sensible place to start. Its striking use of shadow and the introduction of circular breathing—a technique of playing long, extended forms without interruption—was immediately arresting. This was ritual. Light and dark playing on the wall, the performer hidden yet totally audible, his disembodied silhouette huge, the image of his clarinet extending out to a vast length, every small movement exaggerated.

Unsure where one piece ended and the next began I gave up trying to decide: yes there was a change of pace here, the mood perceptibly shifted, Hobba spoke of Tasmanian tiger hunters, revealing how spoken text figures in his varied palette. Dancer, Wendy Morrow, a frequent collaborator took the stage and the focus for a time, but the sensation that every moment was an extension of the work prior, a growth out of it, was hard to shake. There was progression in the changes as the onstage monitors blinked awake, almost independent of the actual performers, they seemed to have a life of their own, competing for attention. Screen images were being triggered from assistants in the audience, yet the appearance was random, and the question of technical mishap seemed to hover—was this the intent? What was I seeing? And what was I hearing in the gorgeous trilling arpeggio that ended the piece as Hobba wandered out of the room and into the distance? He seemed elated somehow as he took in the applause, waving his clarinet in a gesture of triumph. Something had been achieved, something with deep significance to the personal world Leigh Hobba investigates.

The curatorial premise is promising. Free Range is an exhibition featuring 28 of Tasmania’s leading designers and their prototypes and one-off pieces of jewellery, furniture, sculpture, lights and ceramics. It claims to provide “…a rare opportunity for the participants to venture outside of the constraints of the designer/client relationship and to try something new or different.” I was hooked by this proposal and excited to find out what results when the creativity and imagination of skilled craftspeople is let loose. My hope was that it might be something truly original, aesthetically challenging, and possibly fabulous.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, given that the show is presented by Design Objects Tasmania, all works are object-based. Nevertheless, there is a contingent of works which range into conceptual or artistic territory. I was drawn to these pieces as they represent the furthest deviation from designers’ usual concern for functionality. Textile artist Grietje van Randen for example creates a very tactile full-scale replica of a potbelly stove. It’s made entirely from felted white merino wool and comments on lifestyle habits exacerbating global warming, and urges us toward sustainable living. Ceramicist Zsolt Faludi contributes Three Islands, a beautiful sculpture of clay, glaze, glass and resin symbolic of the hermetic nature of island culture. Rebecca Coote’s two light objects (the largest sized 100 by 80 centimetres) are tentacle-like architectural installations of glass that wrap around corners and dangle from ledges, while Martin Warren’s intensely coloured slumped glass baskets stretch down from above like cooling toffee. These pieces reflect artisans taking delight in challenging the physical and visual potential of their media, as well their own skill.

Furniture is perhaps the most conservative category of works in this show. A number of unchallenging but nevertheless elegant table, seat and cabinet designs feature the precious indigenous timbers (such as Huon Pine, King Billy Pine and Celery Top Pine) ubiquitous in handcrafted Tasmanian furniture at present.

Patrick Hall’s Typeface is a notable exception. A visually heavy, boxy structure 1.8 metres in height, this piece grapples with recollection through the form of an archival cabinet filled with drawers. The collection—ceramic fragments illustrated with photographic images of faces, labelled with strange catch phrases—are not hidden inside but encased behind glass in the drawer-fronts themselves. This exquisite and conceptually complex object evidences Hall’s statement that his practice “is based in craft, is informed by design, but deals with ‘fine art’ concerns.”

Peter Prassil’s Recreational Device is a reclining lounge chair of aluminium, stainless steel and black leather, gadget-ed with microphone and amplifiers. Stylistically sitting somewhere between a dentist chair and the space age interior designs of the 1960s, this furniture piece also stands out for truly shaking off concerns of practicality and commercial viability in favour of fantasy.

The setting of Mawson’s Waterside Pavilion, a purpose-built design showroom, ensures this exhibition maintains an industrial feel. It could have been interesting to view these pieces in a gallery setting, and a number would certainly have benefited from controlled lighting. Alternatively it would be wonderful to actually sit in Prasil’s chair and find out what the microphone and amplifiers did, or to see Megan Perkins leather belts with luscious enamel buckles modelled.

As it is, these disparate works are collated in Free Range almost like an expo and not quite like an art exhibition and as such fail to capitalise on the opportunities of either format. A picture of avant-garde practice from the creative hybrid zones beyond commercial design is not quite realised overall, yet I sense Kevin Perkins could have addressed this to a degree through stronger curatorial direction. There are undoubtedly many very beautiful objects in Free Range and if I think of the show simply as a loose survey of creativity in contemporary local design, it is an excellent indication of the breadth and vibrancy of the industry here in Tasmania.

The Hobart Chamber Orchestra and Tasmanian Chorale’s concert for Ten Days on the Island lovingly entwined the music of Britain’s Henry Purcell and Ralph Vaughan Williams with works by Tasmania’s Don Kay and Peter Sculthorpe in an engrossing program that for good reason felt more British than Australian. That’s largely because Kay’s Matthina in the Red Dress and Sculthorpe’s My Country Childhood, despite local references, evoke the pastoral tradition of British music (Delius, Bax et al) in the finely modulated long lines of their writing for violins and violas and the darker, often telling underpinnings from cellos and basses. The Kay is inspired by an 1842 portrait by Thomas Bock of a young Aboriginal girl in an elegant dress; the Sculthorpe ‘country’ is in part the Tasmania in which he grew up.

A copy of the Matthina portrait sits to once side of the orchestra in the Town Hall, the girl’s apparent serenity and the quiet directness of her gaze captured in the gentle lyricism of Kay’s composition. There’s nothing programmatic about the score, but there is a gradual if always subtle darkening of mood from the cellos, a few sudden silences, like a dance interrupted, and some later plucking and then firm bowing of the double basses (perhaps a moment of disquiet about what the composer sees in the portrait), ending softly and fading with just the slightest hint of discordance. It’s a work more about the viewer of the painting than its subject—there’s a certain elegiac quality although none of the melancholy of nostalgia.

The Four English Folk Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams are an acquired taste, but the Tasmanian Chorale under the direction of Stephanie Abercromby acquitted them with ease, attentive to the complex layerings with which Williams embroidered and sometimes laboured such simple songs. Their interest resides in part in juxtaposing them with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the first English opera, written some 200 years before the Vaughan Williams and presented in the second part of the concert.

Sculthorpe’s My Country Childhood proved a fine companion piece for the Kay composition, opening in a similar way in part one, Song of the Hills, with a fetching iterated melody and a slight darkening from beneath before a solo violin sings out above the rest. Part two, A Church Gathering, although warmly contrapuntal, evokes a sense of yearning and again the solo violin rises heavenwards. In part three, A Village Funeral, cellos and basses brood, the cello this time dominant in a kind of keening followed by a surge of affecting anguish, heightened by the violins and concluding with diminishing cadences of the same hurt—death now almost accepted. Finally, in Song of the River rapid soft fiddling provides a sense of a speeding current over which run slower waters suggested by a melancholy cello before the whole speeds up in almost frantic ripplings—it’s a wonderful dance of a river as much as a song.

Conductor Myer Fredman paced Dido and Aeneas at the speed it warrants—brisk, allowing the spare drama to unfold without strain and for the listener to feel the considerable force of a string orchestra fattened out with harpsichord, an experience aided by the intimate, clean acoustic of Hobart’s Town Hall. The soloists were all in fine voice, Jane Edwards above all, her Dido heartfelt, unmelodramatic and the continuo playing (cello, Tony Morgan; harpsichord, Stephanie Abercromby) providing firm underpinning for the vocal action. The Tasmanian Chorale were allowed to display their full power and, in the sad final song, their capacity for nuance. This was not a period instrument presentation but the continuo playing and Fredman’s dance-like drive yielded the requisite crispness, elegance and passion.

Entwined was an unusual experience—a traversal of 300 years of music largely out of one tradition, moving broadly from the present to the past, and teasing out kinships between islands—sharing elegance, reflectiveness and a subtle dancerliness in these works. Then again, there was nothing like Sculthorpe’s Sun Music on the program to point to some palpable differences.

We live in a world of make-believe. We access more information than ever before but the technologies that make this possible can also blur our vision of reality. We are under the misconception that information is knowledge. We become insecure and, as we struggle to connect a constructed view of reality with our own lived experiences, ours is no longer a shared reality but a shared ‘dis-reality.’

The strongest point of audience engagement with et al.’s Maintenance of Social Solidarity appears to be in unpacking the theories it presents. The exhibition notes present six introductions to the New Zealand collective which investigates our systems of belief and defines our current state of disconnection. Etal suggests our freedom is at stake when we can no longer choose what we see and hear, perversely distorting our image of the ‘real’ world.

The room is set up like some self-ordering information bunker. The walls are gun-metal blue and a high wire fence encloses a large projected image of the Google map search engine, constantly scanning city to city around the world. As we zoom in on landscapes (bunkers, airstrips and military installations) devoid of any cultural detail, a computer animated voice tells us where we are. This sense of removal is a reccurring theme in the work. Through various technological means (headphones, projectors, laptops etc) we are reminded that ours is a constructed reality that we do not control. Political jargon and religious discourse rather than geography keep us distant from other peoples and lands, generating a sense of us and them and consequent insecurity.

A section of the space is set up with a series of easels to which are pinned large printed posters that have been defaced by a variety of packing and adhesive tapes. Each easel has a set of headphones attached. Some have a mouthpiece so you feel like a scud missile launcher when you put them on. But the mouthpieces don’t work and so the potential of dialogue becomes monologue as computer enhanced male and female voices speak in what first appears to be a familiar media discourse. It soon becomes apparent that the information we hear is mumbo-jumbo. Suddenly I feel angry, as if my time has been wasted listening to a distant rhetoric that pollutes my reality.

At the foot of each easel is a pile of street press style publications which you can take away with you. They are filled with abstracted imagery of sun-spots and quotes from George W Bush, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein relating to God, freedom and change. Selected words in each quotation have file paths attached, abstracting them and making them seem computer generated.

Sporadic musical chanting is a reminder of our need to connect for more than just information exchange and heightens awareness of our isolation in a room full of technological equipment and computerised voices. Without being culture or gender specific, the Maintenance of Social Solidarity suggests that these notions of isolation and shared dis-reality are everyone’s concern. We are collectively, not individually, to blame for the displacement of our culture. By creating an awareness of how media and political middlemen make meaning for us we become aware of just how distorted our world view may have become. It makes me want to get straight to the source: to have a cup of tea and conversation with someone across the other side of the world and to hear about their reality.

Alex Pentek’s Otherness is a monumental metre-wide Mobius strip constructed from a single length of cartridge paper approximately four metres long. The paper sheet is brought into relief through a meticulous process of scoring and folding. Beginning as a repetition of diamond shapes the folded texture morphs into rounded scales before gradually returning to the original pattern. The loop and twist of the overall structure is simple and graceful.

Amidst the already eclectic range of work in the exhibition An Other Place, Otherness it is an odd entity to encounter. It is big, white and its place within the exhibition concept is at first obtuse. Initially, I complacently assume I understand its investigation: something along the lines of a formalist pursuit of perfection. And I am only vaguely interested.

The sculpture is accessible from all angles and as I wander around its girth peering over its lip into its folds, I begin to realise I’ve been too hasty in judging it. Suspended on wires, it all but fills the volume of space between gallery ceiling and floor. In a dialogue of bodies I warm to this “white elephant” and begin to notice its surprising subtlety.

Natural light passes through the semi-opaque paper, bouncing off and between its surfaces. The interior has the luminescence of a seashell from some angles and elsewhere the gallery’s lighting throws facets of the paper into contrasting yellow and shadow-blue. Disturbances in the air trigger a gentle bounce across the paper structure, a reminder of the material weightlessness of Otherness.
Alex Pentek, Otherness (detail)

Crinkles, dents, small tears and holes made accidentally in folding mark the entire surface. No effort has been made to disguise the join in the paper strip, nor the reinforced attachment points of the hanging mechanism. Perhaps the artist was pursuing consistency and perfection, but this work is very much handmade and it bears testament to the fact that the artist is human not machine. The humility of the work renders the concentration, accuracy, care and persistence involved in the Pentek’s labour all the more potent.

An Other Place brings together three Irish and three Australian contemporary artists to explore the notion of ‘other in place’ (felt especially in island places) and curator Sean Kelly in his catalogue essay writes of the slippage between familiarity and confusion associated with this precarious state of being. This concept made tangible in the shifting pattern of Pentek’s work and the eternal loop of the Mobius strip is a powerful metaphor for transition occurring between assimilation and difference within one continuous entity. The play between inside/outside and the twisting that turns both sides of the paper outwards speaks of inversion and extroversion.

Pentek’s sculpture is a floating island: physically self-contained and visually at odds with other works in the show. Its scale makes Otherness impossible to overlook, yet its presence is paradoxically unassuming. What at first appeared a cold rather conceptual and self-referential work turned out, through interaction, to be sensual and receptive.

Mikelangelo pauses to run a comb through his slicked-back hair “ This song is a rumination on gloom” he announces to the teary eyed audience. That’s right folks; don’t wear your mascara to this one. Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen is an hysterically funny gypsy cabaret group playing at the Crystal Palace this week.

Mikelangelo is the handsome charismatic ringleader with a voice so absurdly deep that it competes with the double bass. Rufino the Catalan Casanova is a shifty looking violinist with the ability to jump onto tables without missing a note. On the clarinet is The Great Muldavio, a taxidermist on the run from an avenging duchess. Guido Libido, on the piano accordion, looks suspiciously like Uncle Fester (unlike the other Gentlemen, he refrains from singing because his tongue has been cut out in a battle over a woman and replaced with the tongue of a bull). Little Ivan, the bass player, may have been behind the killing of Mikelangelo’s entire family. These characters are completed with immaculate suits, intriguingly sexy European accents and morbid tales of their past.

This is black humour at its best. The truly macabre stories are told through monologues, dramatic re-enactments and satirical songs for which the Eastern European style arrangements are perfect especially for songs like It’s one of those A-Minor Days.

My favourite has to be A Formidable Marinade, a klezmer-themed tune. Besides the song itself which demonstrates the group’s expert musical and song writing abilities the melodramatics that accompany the performance are pretty impressive: Mikelangelo slides through the audience and between the tables like an animal possessed, while singing:

“Sodomy is not just for animals
Human flesh is not just for cannibals
I’ll feast on your body if you feast on mine
Blood is thicker and redder than wine
Lay ourselves out upon the table
Ravish each other ‘til we’re no longer able
When juices mix in the heat of the fray
It will make a formidable… marinade.”

At this point Rufino leaps onto a table and, ripping into his violin, plays a spine-chilling solo, his fingers climbing up the fingerboard to the bridge, higher and higher. The tortuously high notes truly make the described lust real.

The smoke and lights filling the circus tent- style venue provide the perfect stage for a group that enjoys interacting with the audience, jumping onto tables and visiting the bar mid-show (which reminds me: for the ultimate Gentlemen experience, make sure you have a glass of vino in your hand).

Their encore which they describe as a seven hour ordeal squeezed into three minutes of blood, sweat and tears, was rejected by Eurovision, and I probably don’t have to tell you that the producers haven’t any taste. I was trying not to mention the word taste but these are classy gentlemen. However dubious their subject matter, they pull it off, and they pull it off well. Although the band sound great on CD their utterly seductive show has to be seen to believed.

It seems that you can’t have a festival in Australia these days without a Famous Spiegeltent. But sometimes there just isn’t one around when you need it, so an inventive New Zealander decided to build his own. Internally the Pacific Crystal Palace is faithful to the original—wooden floors, ornate booths, stained glass windows and mirrors—perhaps lacking the subtle sensation that generations of festival goers have lived, loved and caroused in its plush seats since the 1920s but including modern comforts such as insulation. Made of corrugated iron and white vinyl the exterior has a very rural feel. But at Ten Days on the Island it is certainly fulfilling its role as festival hub and haven for live music and cabaret.

Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentleman

They must have put something in the water in Canberra which produced a generation of wild and wonderful performance groups and bands: Splinters, The Bedridden and P.Harness all share a fantastical, chaotic humour, with more than a waft of feral exuberance. Once the barely clad thrust behind P.Harness, Michael Simic (Mikelangelo) has cleaned up his act over the years, left the nation’s capital and now appears immaculately suited and slicked, leading his Black Sea Gentleman through a Balkan cabaret of parodic ballads and dark entertainments.

The lyrics are BLACK. One song is introduced as a ‘rumination on gloom’; another talks of ‘skeletons on a beach of flesh, drowning in a sea of organs, with lapping waves of blood.’ But somehow it’s all rather amusing. Mikelangelo has the charm of a Croatian Elvis, with constant banter, and audience provocation. Other band members also have their moment—Muldavio, the clarinettist, recites a poem about his days as a taxidermist to the rich, while Guido Libido, the accordion player, ‘performs’ a silent movie in front of a blank screen with a strobe light. They are also fine musicians, pillaging styles from around Europe, swinging between Parisian chanson, gypsy polka and Yiddish lament. In a quick slip across the Atlantic there is even a Western epic. By the end, of course we are singing along, and yearning for real or imagined European roots. If you can’t afford the airfare you should check out Canberra.
Lura

Lura

Lura hails from Lisbon but now lives in Cape Verde on the West Coast of Africa. In her concert she takes us on a tour of the rhythms of her country. She is a diminutive figure with a big voice, warm and liquid in her lower registers, full bodied and punchy in her upper range. Backed by a band of piano, guitar, bass, drums and other percussion, the music is energetic but with a hint a of world weary melancholy. Lura is charming and persuasive, at one point encouraging us to repeat a word after her. She then reveals we’ve been saying “Vaseline” with a Portuguese accent—African hair gets very dry she tells us with a wry grin.

Most haunting were the songs that used the batuku rhythm—those belonging to women. These are slower songs, in which Lura drums on a kind of cushion of folded cloth. The instrumentation is sparser allowing us to appreciate her expressive nuances and gorgeous tone.

And of course there must be dancing. To conclude the show, Lura removes her shoes, ties a swathe of material around her hips, turns her back to us and shakes her booty. The smouldering sexuality that we have been sensing now breaks through as she manipulates the drummer with hip lifts and drops and stamps. Then it is our turn to dance (which you kind of wanted to do all along) and we shuffle between the chairs and tables of the Crystal Palace. Maybe next time we see Lura, the audience should be able to dance for the whole show—it certainly enhances the enjoyment of those hypnotic Cape Verde rhythms.

Christine Anu

Christine Anu appears in a sparkling caftan, thick curly black hair adorned with a massive frangipani. She tells us she is from the Saltwater people—of the swamp bird and the shark—and she welcomes us with an unaccompanied traditional song. And then she and the band launch straight in: “without a word of warning the blues came in this morning.”

Black is Blue combines blues standards with originals, joined by little anecdotes and reflections—Anu dawdling to church and slipping in late; her favourite scenes from The Color Purple; sharing how “the blues is a state of mind.” She does some fine renditions of Wade in the Water, Sister and Night Time is the Right Time interspersed with new songs, one particularly beautiful—My Grandma’s Hands—talking of the strength, comfort and guidance of her grandmother when Anu was growing up on Mobiac Island in the Torres Strait.

She has a big, gutsy voice and she’s not afraid to belt it out. In the second half, she curiously dons an oversized afro wig and the songs seem to get bigger, and brasher. Her tone in Georgia on my Mind, and Hold On becomes relentlessly strident, losing warmth and subtlety. But she recovers them for Fever and No Woman No Cry. Of course, as Neil Murray’s My Island home is the theme song of Ten Days on the Island, she couldn’t leave us without that, and considering the cringe I experience due to its hijacking for marketing purposes, it still holds its own as a strong and soulful song.

Anu is a polished performer and Black is Blue is slick and controlled, each segué and audience excursion meticulously prepared, falling just short of contrived. The initial format of standard followed by original provided a clear structure, allowing for some strong connections and resonances that unfortunately thinned out in the second half. As far as the fake afro for the entire second part including encore? Even in bad hair Christine Anu is a fine performer who gave her audience just what they wanted.

The curious history of windows (pondered by Bachelard, Virilio et al) and their metaphorical standing (windows on the soul; windows as eyes) are called to mind by Xenia Hanusiak’s A Thousand Doors, A Thousand Windows, a multimedia recital for soprano, recorded musical and electronic scores, and projected video imagery.

The Barn at the Historic Rosny Centre has no windows that we can see, just big wooden doors, a high timber rafted roof and richly textured, unadorned stone walls. We are enclosed in its darkness, our ears this time are the windows to whatever we might conjure from the musical creations of Xenia Hanusiak and Constantine Koukias. Yes, there’s a little stage business (occasional movement and gesture from Hanusiak) and video projections (alternating between blandly literal and irritatingly opaque), but the real drama of these works is in the singing. Hanusiak adroitly negotiates the demands of the composers, Hobart based Koukias and the Paris based Finnish composer, Kaija Saarahio, both requiring the soprano to plunge from ecstatic soaring to spoken and whispered text, and to leap back again to the heights. As well, the scores that Hanusiak sings with and against are far from the traditional notion of accompaniment—they merge into eerie wholeness ostensibly musical elements and recorded and created sounds.

Koukias’s Incantation Echoi II (1996) focuses on “the enunciation of pure vowels”, the open-mouthed, uncluttered tools of spiritual transcendance in ancient Christian and other ritual, here felt in passionate cries as well as lyrical flights in the big church ambience that is electronically provided. Lohn (from afar) (1996) is from the first part of Saariaho’s wonderful opera, L’amour de loin, in which a Christian prince in the European Middle Ages corresponds and falls in love with an Islamic princess in northern Africa. They never meet—he dies on the journey—but their relationship has evolved with an ecstatic intensity, here amplified by words sung, spoken and whispered in a shimmering percussive world and echoed with voices off in Occitan, French and English and ending in a heaven of bird calls. Appropriately Hanusiak holds the red-bound score, reading it (the text is the work of a mediaeval troubador) as if a letter from the lover prince. The singing is supple, full-bodied and finely integrated with the recorded material.

A Thousand Doors, A Thousand Windows (2003-04) is a work written and devised by Hanusiak and composed by Koukias. The text has the simple imagery and the aphoristic quality of ancient Arabic and Persian texts: “Do not shut the door/ The excuse is more shameful than the offence.” The authors write that their work is about estrangement and “the need for stillness and contemplation”: “The traveller in the journey knocks at the door seeking acknowledgment and a sense of sanctuary.” They find their inspiration in “the Call to Prayer and the Christian Ringing of Bells”—the bell sounds and a haunting church organ provide anchors in a world of uneasy electronic detail and dark vibrations further tempered by Koukias’ entrancing Greek Orthodox and Middle-Eastern musicality. Hanusiak engages with the condition of the traveller, from whisper to full-throated passion, singing with her own multiplying voice.

The three works of this concert were indeed like windows on the soul—one soul full of yearning for grace, for love, for acceptance; one soul achieving moments of hard-won transcendence in a musical cosmos of unexpected, beautiful sounds.

Everyone loves a Diva. The ability to wrap a whole audience up in a gaze and have them smiling unconsciously at your beauty and glowing presence is rare and I imagine it’s a quality to which many female performers aspire. Both Lura and Christine Anu summoned up the spirits of the great divas in their performances in the Pacific Crystal Palace with varying degrees of success.

Raised in Portugual, Lura has made her home in Cape Verde—a series of islands off the coast of Senegal. Christine Anu, more familiar to most of the audience, is a Torres Strait Islander whose rendition of “My Island Home” is played on any available, celebratory occasion in Australia. Both women are utterly gorgeous and magnetic—ticks one and two in the list of how to be a diva. With front row seats for Lura (a single name is also a diva trademark), I was transfixed by her face, her amazing crop of fine curls and gorgeous smiling face atop a tiny frame clad in traditional African skirt and top. There was a sense of knowing and control about each of her moves and an effortlessness in her earthy voice. From my seat at the back of the room, Christine Anu also glowed like a mermaid in her shimmering dress. Her oiled, long curls magnificent, her smile wide. From the first moment, she captured our gaze. Going well so far.
Lura

Musically, the journeys that each took the audience on were quite different. Lura’s show was entirely composed of the music of her Cape Verde home which she textured with stories and explanations of particular rhythms. I enjoyed the nonchalance of her predominantly African backing band. With that diva quality kicking in, Lura transformed the feeling in the room from exuberance to melancholy in the flutter of an eyelash. The sadness in her ballads was palpable and she seemed to need a moment at the end of each to recompose, such was her engagement with the song.

Anu’s program was more mixed. In the first half she worked alternatively with originals and blues standards. Songs were introduced with delightful stories about her Islander upbringing and her identification with the feeling and form of the blues. I particularly liked the way she sang the negro spiritual Wade in the Water after telling a story about making her way to her village church via the beach, then went on to a beautiful song about her grandmother’s hands. Taking a lengthy break which was covered by her band, Anu re-emerged wearing an enormous, red, afro wig and proceeded to complete her program with a solid block of blues standards. She lost me at this point and I found myself withdrawing from the show, crossing my arms and sitting back in my chair. Why? She can crank out immaculate versions of these tunes – Natural Woman, Georgia on My Mind, Fever – and has the most beautiful hair, so why the wig? Deduct a tick for distancing.

I guess the final tick on the diva checklist is crowd response and for this Lura and Anu came up trumps. Lura’s audience responded to her sexiness, her rhythms, her engagement. When she commanded the entire group to “get up” to dance at the end of the show, there were no arguments. Christine Anu’s audience were feverish. I heard a woman behind me say “Did she touch you?” after Anu had just done a lap of the room handing out touches like an evangelist. There was much hooting and stamping of feet to bring each of the singers back for an encore.

There is no doubt that each of these singers is a diva. Lura and Anu matched each other on beauty and magnetism and the ability to fill the room with their voices. But Lura won the diva contest for me with her emotional connection with the music. Her contagious smile and long pauses, eyes closed, at the end of particular songs were compelling. Diva or not, I was left wondering about Christine Anu. I feel that she lost her footing when she took on a wigged persona. I wished that she’d been comfortable enough to make the blues standards her own and know that she could do so without somebody else’s hair.

There is something very intimate about listening to music or voice through headphones. It is as though the sound hovers in the middle of your head, making itself comfortable in your own thoughts. A haunting musical score and a personal, heartfelt conversation fill this place in the opening scenes of Small Metal Objects.

Staged in Salamanca Square, the construction of a story through sound provides the structure for the show. The audience is housed in raked seating at the end of the square. Each wears a set of headphones for the duration of the show. The remainder of the Square, the city and the mountain beyond form our stage. With an apparently empty stage in front of us, to any passerby we are quite the spectacle.

In the opening minutes we are all expectant. The music begins and with that, we search our stage for any person or sign that could be part of the show. A conversation opens in our headsets with, “I cooked a roast last night.” This is chat between two male friends that mixes ordinary observations with personal thoughts on life and love, “You know what you should do? Get a pet. A pet brings out the love in people.” The voices are slow and stilted. These are two men for whom speaking takes some labour and thought, but the content of the conversation is common place–loneliness, love, fear–“Are you scared of dying?” Garry and Steve seem close, they talk openly about their affection for each other.

It takes over five minutes until the two men are revealed in the square. I become aware of the sound of falling water in my headphones and realise that it is in sync with the fountain in the square, allowing me to locate the men about 60 metres away from the audience. They wear wireless mikes so that their talk reaches us in real time. The conversation continues as they walk toward the audience and we see that each of these men might be labelled as having a disability. It is at this point that the plot speeds up. Without wanting to give away too much of the story that ensues, Steve and Garry become engaged in an apparent drug deal involving two others who emerge from cafes and restaurants within the Square. Alan and Caroline are a high flying lawyer and change management consultant. The deal falls apart when Steve has a crisis: “I want people to see me, I want to be a full human being” and the couple are unable to get the two dealers to cooperate.

I have to admit to finding the set up for the show compelling but confusing at first and I found it difficult to get past the fact that the square is almost empty at our show’s timeslot – there is something lost in the absence of innocent bystanders as I imagine that their reaction to the play would range from complete ambivalence to avid curiosity. A crowd would have also given the players an environment within which to hide more successfully. It is only in the hours that follow the show, in considering and reconsidering the content, that I realise the greatness of Small Metal Objects.

Certain people within society, particularly the aged and disabled, are often the “unseen” to quote from the show’s program notes. I understand now why Steve’s crisis abates after the bungled deal: “I feel better now.” In the context of the deal, he is not only seen but in control. The high-powered pair, who are accustomed to getting anything they want, going anywhere they please, are rendered helpless. Their money and influence mean nothing and they are forced to operate within Steve’s sense of time. And what a perfect cover if Steve and Garry are actually dealers—would you suspect them?

This is a slow-burn show that left me puzzled at first, and worked its magic afterwards. Small Metal Objects found its way inside my head just like the music in the headphones.

I am sitting on tiered seating at one end of Salamanca Square, headphones on, exposed to the wind, the rain and the gaze of passers-by. I am a spectacle In this unique way Small Metal Objects challenges notions of community and judgement in society.

This public space is converted into a stage, and the public are the performers. A conversation between two men is heard through the earphones, punctuated by electronic music, while the audience looks out at an almost empty square searching for the source of the voices. I spot the pair as they pass the bakery; the square is so empty that it’s not hard. They wander towards us, while people walk past and stare at both the performers and us.

The characters, Gary and Steve, both appear to have a disability, made obvious to the public by their physical appearance; and so the stares they receive have a different focus to ours. We have voluntarily placed ourselves in this position, and we can slip out of it after the show when we remove the headphones. I must admit, this is of particular interest to me, because I have worked in the disability services field, and have regularly witnessed quite negative reactions from the public towards people with physical and developmental disabilities. This theme makes Small Metal Objects personally compelling, even more than the dialogue unfolding.

It begins with a conversation about marriage, sexual orientation and the death of Steve’s cat. The language is slow and simple, caring, patient and understanding. Then Gary takes a phone call from a nervous sounding man, Alan, who enters the square, carrying an envelope of cash and talk of a ‘deal’. A ‘business partner’ of Alan’s, a corporate psychologist, is called to the scene when Steve refuses to cooperate in the deal, and she takes over from Alan using different methods of persuasion. Steve needs time, Gary explains to the anxious, pacing Alan, while the music becomes deeper, percussive and suspenseful, matching the tension felt by Alan and his partner. What follows is a sickening display of misunderstanding and disrespect.

However, there is an element of humour in the production, a welcome addition to a grave subject. The introduction of the ‘corporate psychologist’ for instance, where a jargon filled job description designed to impress the listener, fails on the uninterested Gary who obviously holds different values. Later, Steve turns to Gary and says of Alan: “I know he’s famous and all but he just looks like an ordinary guy”.

I did wonder what the production would be like if the square was filled with people. Due to the cold weather and time of the day, the space was almost completely empty, whereas the production is designed for a crowded public space. The actors utilised the space well, traversing the entire square; and I can imagine that my response would be very different if the figures were blending with the public and often blocked from view. In saying that however, the empty square did work as a positive in some instances, such as when Alan was first looking for Gary. Despite standing near him, Alan walked away approaching the few other people in the area, before finally returning to Gary, an emphatic last resort.

The values manifest in Gary and Steve’s characters and their relationship are beautifully observed and played out in the production, in distinct opposition to Alan and his partner. These are accentuated by the body language, contributing in particular to the key interactions between the characters. I have never seen such an original and entertaining attempt to challenge social attitudes that discriminate against people with disabilities.

Scouring the scattered groups passing between the restaurants and bars in workday twilight I am trying to match the intimate conversation coming through my headphones to people in the square. Two males speak frankly about love, relationships and loyalty. The lines are delivered slowly and deliberately. Steve is depressed, he wants a girlfriend, he’s also wondering if he is gay. From my vantage point on the raked seating tucked into the side of Salamanca Square I focus briefly on a group of young men smoking. The other guy, Gary, is understanding, “You’ll work it out mate…I just want to see you happy.”

Disparate piano notes and a deep repeated reverberation form an ambient, almost cinematic, soundtrack supporting this dialogue. I start thinking that perhaps I will not meet these characters. Couldn’t this almost be anyone’s conversation? I watch passers-by watching me. I am completely comfortable in my voyeurism, elevated and aurally insulated. Shit weather is rolling down off Mount Wellington, it’s cold and windy and the square is emptying out. Behind the voices, the recognisable sound of falling water suddenly emerges and I immediately look to the fountain. The protagonists are easy to identify—not because they are miked up actors in a public space—but because they look and sound like they might be people with a disability.

An outline of the story is insufficient to explain this performance. However, as it develops it involves a young property developer named Alan who is desperate to buy $3000 worth of drugs from Gary and Steve. Like the businessman, I am unsure whether what ensues is merely the result of a miscommunication, or if the dealers have a very unorthodox way of doing business. The “goods” are never named and neither Steve nor Gary ever directly confirms they have them. The correct money is handed over but the trio never walk to the locker to collect because, as Gary explains, “Steve won’t leave that spot and I won’t leave him alone.” A distressed Steve has decided it’s time to be seen—he wants other people to value him as a full human being. The deal is off.

In desperation Alan calls in colleague Caroline, a corporate psychologist in the business of ‘change management.’ She tries all of her manipulative, condescending tactics and eventually loses her last thread of integrity when she tries, unsuccessfully, to lure him with the promise of sucking his dick. The executive pair leave in anger, chasing an alternative score. Steve and Gary are nonplussed. In fact, Steve feels better now.

The performance finishes and I am utterly bewildered. It’s like I never quite got to connect the dots, and yet I don’t feel it entirely went over my head either. I enjoyed the show, so why do I feel I don’t get it? And what were the ‘small metal objects’?

I’m thinking the title could refer to the money exchanged (though that was in paper notes) and Steve and Gary’s comment early on, “Everything has a fucking value!” Having the right change doesn’t necessarily get you what you want. Being loaded doesn’t make you happy. Being ‘less fortunate’ doesn’t always mean you’re missing out. Money, after all, is just small metal objects.

In a funny way the small metal objects could refer to the radio microphones. While these are hidden on Gary and Steve, Alan and Caroline wear highly visible headsets. This technology gives the high-powered professionals an aura of authority, like they’re privy to more information than the others. The radio microphones connect the audience to the action in a manner of surveillance, which in this age of terror, operates through the identification of difference.

It’s fair to say that the general public pay no attention to those performing out there in public space. Not even when Caroline yells insults at Steve. Not even when she’s pulling his arm and Steve cries out “I don’t want to go.” Suddenly this scene takes on the sickening likeness of a child-snatching in a crowded shopping centre, where later everyone wonders how no-one saw or did anything. How would you react if you saw a drug deal underway in public? Or an aggressive argument between a woman and man? Social awkwardness often leads us to look away thinking we’re not implicated, thinking, I’m sure they’re alright. How do you behave when simply you encounter someone with a disability?

Dependency is the recurring theme of this performance. Gary provides emotional support for Steve, who supports Gary when it comes to ‘doing business.’ Between those two there is a short discussion about pets. Caroline accuses Alan of displaying needy behaviour when he calls her for help, yet they are both desperate for the drugs. And underlying all this is the idea that people with disability are people with ‘special needs.’ Implied in this euphemistic phrase is the belief that these people depend on others to live an ordinary life. But there is nothing Alan or Caroline have that Gary or Steve really need or want, and they refuse to be used as mere conduits for a transaction.

There were aspects of Small Metal Objects I simply didn’t understand—Steve and Gary’s ‘business’ discussions for example. And I wonder if something was lost because the square was so quiet that day. Or maybe because the culture of Salamanca precinct is so tourist-driven that a little rain completely drains it of atmosphere. I imagine the experience would have been very different in the bustling civic spaces of Sydney’s Circular Quay or Melbourne’s Federation Square. And perhaps even the thoroughfare of Hobart’s greasy Elizabeth Street Mall (where, incidentally, I regularly witness public fights and intoxicated people) could have been a more fruitful setting. The enduring dynamic I am left contemplating is the friendship between Steve and Gary. Throughout all the assumptions, value judgements, transactions, pressures and attempted manipulation these two are like rocks in a stream. They have integrity, they stand by one another, they have love. They may also have had $3000 worth of drugs, but I’m still not sure about that.

Distracted for a moment in Cheryl Wheatley’s Queen of the Snakepit, I found myself mentally revisiting that seminal 70s pedagogical text for actors by Robert L Benedetti entitled Seeming, being and becoming—as you do.

Wheatley comes on strong in her persona as Lois, our guide on a virtual tour to Flinders Island in the northeast corner of Tasmania. Lean and rangy, clad in skirt and blouse, knee-high stockings and plimsolls Lois is an instantly engaging, if brash and bawdy host, shouting some of us down the front a beer (or a shandy), which she whips from her well worn Esky. Later, from this bottomless pit, she’ll also extract a slide projector and a couple of inflatable kangaroos. Like any good guide Lois introduces us to the outstanding features of the island, including its incessant wind. To do this, she lugs an industrial strength wind machine from the wings. When, in the process, she inadvertently knocks the hat from the head of the Mayor of Tasmania (who’s apparently rarely seen without one), Wheatley handles it all with bravura and the audience (Mayor included) respond with even more good humour. Playing the affable guide seems an easy transformation for Cheryl Wheatley who was born and bred on Flinders Island and has a deep love for the place (she identifies its location by referring to her own breast) and the earthy characters who populate it. As in all good performance, it’s often difficult to untangle the persona from the performer herself.

The other aspect of the work demands that, before our eyes, the performer “becomes” a series of women—the ones who stay on the island while the men go to sea and hence, she believes, share a unique understanding of the place. Most are variations on Wheatley’s relatives, among them, Queenie, based on her grandmother, an earthy old lady who holds court in the “Snakepit”, the ladies’ lounge at the back of the pub. Wheatley’s work with mentor, John Bolton, presumably focused on developing each of her personae in this work in situ. Somehow, though, as Wheatley steps in and out of these imagined bodies, she loses her performative footing. She adopts the physique, the vocal tics, a nicely poetic turn of phrase, but now appears actorly, tongue-tied, less assured in her connection with the audience.

Finegan Kruckemeyer has the writer credit on this show but clearly its construction has involved a number of hands including the performer herself as co-devisor. Sound artist, Jethro Woodward’s work provides an important atmospheric layer. There’s also a rudimentary show of slides that fits the homey feel of the show. At another distracted moment, I imagined Lois as one of those well-equipped guides with a video camera that would allow us some quality images of the Island. Principally, though, I’d say this promising work has a way to go to achieve the fluidity of form suggested by the material. Some sharper writing is needed for the island “characters” and a more comfortable performative bridge to take performer and audience safely from the friendly engagement of the guide we meet at the beginning of Queen of the Snakepit to the deeper understanding embedded in the female spirit of place that it seems Wheatley would like us to souvenir from her tour.

It’s good to be surprised. It keeps you on your toes. There’s a moment in The Spectre Of The Rose where Robert Jarman, as Jean Genet, takes a razor to his own wrist. Ugly and abject, this was also a moment of revelation: despite being the third time this work has been mounted in Hobart the text itself is still being interrogated. Each time, some new, darker meaning is dragged into the light.

As Genet’s small bright wound was revealed, the whole performance shuddered closer: I understood something. This show is about Genet in his familiar roles—thief, writer, homosexual—but it’s more: an attempt to get underneath the Genet created by the text to the Genet writing, living the text in his cell, where this play’s action occurs.

The key moment arises as Genet indulges himself in a dark sexual fantasy: rough street sex with a sailor he then imagines murdering for the sheer thrill of it. It’s a fantasy drawing on Genet’s adolescent idolising of famous murderers. In Jarman’s previous versions we witnessed Genet somehow triumphant in his cell indulging like a dark god in extremes of sex and death. Here was the same empowered Genet, but with nowhere to direct the raging energy he has built up, but at himself. There is no sailor. He is alone. He is cutting himself.
That’s all he can do. Is this release?

There is further to go and worse to see. Jarman’s Genet has already told us, epigrammatically, that the only way to escape horror is to bury yourself in it, and that’s the way this narrative goes, into a horror starker than Genet had ever imagined. He is alone, naked in his cell, howling to the stone walls: “Kill me! Burn me!”, a cry competing with a terrible throbbing on the piercing soundtrack.

Genet’s brutish epigram is however realised: somewhere in this awe-full moment is the kind of transcendence Artaud sought in his Theatre Of Cruelty. The performer is naked and open, totally exposed, in a moment of symmetry in his engagement with the text. Nudity is a hell of a gambit in theatre, and may miss the mark of genuine transgression by being simply gratuitous, but here I felt it was successful, adding meaning rather than shock. We were looking at a real Genet, failed by his own fantasy: he cannot kill. He is not one with the murderers he idolises. He’s a thief. All he can do is wound himself, the cut revealing far more than blood, the text exposing an angry human, his articulacy warped by imprisonment, a man mired in consuming erotic fantasies, which despite their ultimate failings are still all he has to sustain himself. It’s a deadlock: there is nowhere for him to go, no God to judge him and give him release. He crawls back into the bed where we first saw him. The performance ended, but there was, and still is, a ringing in my ears.

Lois stands on a chair holding two lit torches as headlights. We’re passengers on her ute tour of Flinders Island and everyone in the audience has been made to put on their seatbelts. She calls the potholes in the dirt road ‘Dolly bumps’ because, while Lois loves Dolly Parton, at times like these you’re glad you don’t have her attributes. On “go” two audience members hurl inflated kangaroos at Lois’s head. Chaos briefly ensues. With manic swerving and cursing she avoids a crash and the guided tour through family history and mythology of place continues.

All the props in this performance emerge from Lois’s Esky, and many of them end up in a strange shrine-like arrangement carefully constructed over the duration of the show. Containing fragments from the stories told, such as Naked Lady flowers, abalone shells, paper nautilus shells, the pieces of a ripped-up crayfishing licence and a windswept tree branch, this assemblage is like a tribute to Flinders Island. Throughout we’re shown a teatowel map and hazy landscape images, but it is this collection that makes Flinders visible for the audience.

In Flinders folklore the paper nautilus shell washes up every seven years. This periodic appearance is symbolic of the islander way of life, characterised by a gradual passing of time that is measured on the ancient scale of the landscape itself. The return of the shell also mirrors the journey of the island’s youth who leave seeking adventure and return home (the place, as Lois found, where your feet grow roots) years later. Coming to shore from the ocean, the shell also links the domains of the men and women folk. We learn that while the fishermen are free of the island when they are at sea, the women are relentlessly land-bound.

Queen of the Snakepit is the story of female life on Flinders told through four characters from the one family. In addition to Lois there’s her cantankerous mother Queenie who single-handedly built a jetty of stones for her fishermen husband and sons to come home to, but now spends her days alone. There’s eccentric aunt Myrtle who, when her complaints to Parks and Wildlife back in the early 1990s were ignored, took the feral cat problem into her own hands. And there’s the memory of young Lily staring out the window asking questions and making observations about this place and its people. She at first seems to be Queenie’s dead daughter, but is later revealed to be Lois herself.

This performance is devised and performed by Cheryl Wheatley. She undergoes impressive physical transformations as she morphs between four women of different generations to create a montage of incidents and memories across time and space. Moments of humour and intimacy created by each character propel the performance. Queenie’s debate with herself about whether or not the old pine tree needs its middle cut out was for me a very tender insight into a life of hardship and isolation. We learn from the dedication at the end that the character of Queenie is actually based on Cheryl’s mother, who passed away only weeks before this show opened.

In contrast to these engaging characters our guide and narrator Lois seems a conglomeration of loud ocker stereotypes—from her op-shop ensemble to her clipped language, hackneyed expressions and tit jokes. Sure, Lois is meant to be a woman of strong personality, the tough-as-guts country type who’s lived most her life in a small male-dominated community. I know this kind of sheila, I’ve got one or two in my own family, but I find Lois an ugly caricature. I see none of the knowingness, the disarming charm or dangerously sharp wit that makes natural yarn spinners of the Australian breed so charismatic. Given Cheryl is a fourth generation Flinders Islander I wonder why she felt the need to invent the ‘larger than life’ Lois.

It is only as Lois that Wheatley initiates audience interaction, and her manner is rather like playground bullying. She plays favourites with some individuals with whom she holds inaudible, rather lengthy, one-on-one conversations mid-performance. In other moments she intentionally invades personal space, helping herself to our drinks, blasting us with a wind machine and spraying us with water. I think I experienced a personality clash with Lois. I suspect, at its root, this may reflect a discomfort I feel with much such theatre. But that aside, I simply didn’t find this “witty and wise” character insightful or funny.

There is beauty, richness, idiosyncrasy and universality in the stories of Queen of the Snakepit. The family connections between characters give this account of place its form and sense of authenticity. Unfortunately however, the crude rendering of the central character meant that intimate and engaging moments were scattered through an often tedious and frustrating show. Curiously, I like the fact that after this ‘tour’ I still have very little sense of what Flinders Island would be like to visit.

How many islands are there off the coast of Tasmania? Do you know how many people live on them? Anything about their chequered histories? What makes these places special? Most importantly, what does it feel like to be an islander? I’m a Tassie girl through and through and I don’t even have half the answers. With a quest to right this wrong Maria Island of Dreams and Queen of the Snakepit take audiences on a guided tour of two Tasmanian islands.

Along with its Indigenous occupants, Maria Island has hosted inhabitants from a parade of countries throughout its extraordinary history including Holland, France, England, Italy and New Zealand. Devised to weave music, poetry, video projection and spoken word, the show tells the story of Maria Island through the recollections of Vega Bernacchi, the daughter of an Italian entrepreneur, and a host of other characters. Accompaniment is by local group Silkweed, on violin, accordion, keyboards, cello, percussion and voice, and whose members are woven into the story telling. Apart from a dancing couple who appear towards the end of the show, the musicians and narrators all stay in place, concert-style for the duration.

For Vega Bernacchi (Sarah Cooper), Maria Island was her first playground. She recalls her delight with the sound of the Indigenous name of the island and childhood re-enactments of the penal settlement era. She is nostalgic for the time when her parents farmed wine and olives and her own life as an adult on the island. Against a projected backdrop of historic images, family photographs, paintings and present day landscape shots, we hear snatches of letters and reports from French explorers, English convicts and their captors, Moari martyrs, an Irish political prisoner and Diego Bernacchi whose dreams for Maria seem to be the inspiration for the show’s name. The male characters are played by Les Winspear. Silkweed build the atmosphere with delicate tunes and folk songs that flesh out the emotions of the events. There is a sense of completeness to the story—we see the life of Maria Island go from uninhabited to agricultural and semi-industrial and then back to nature—as a reserve. Maria Island of Dreams is comfortable, polite—a multimedia recital.
Cheryl Wheatley, Queen of the Snakepit

By comparison, Queen of the Snakepit is brash and loud. We are a captive audience. Lois (Cheryl Wheatley) from Flinders Island takes us on a tour of island landmarks and characters. She is a bundle of love and hard luck with her white cricket hat, high waisted nylon skirt, saggy shirt and slip-on sandshoes. Lois’s Esky is her magic pudding of props—everything emerges from the ubiquitous white lidded box throughout the show. A tea towel tucked into her waistband is the map for the tour and a suspended sheet is her projection screen. With the audience seated cabaret style, Lois weaves between the tables alternatively delighting and harassing us with her demands for attention and participation. While this is confronting for some, there is a disarming sweetness and warmth to Lois’s engagement: “yeah… that’s all you need to do really, say G’day back, then you might get to know someone that you never imagined knowing.”

For the hour of the performance, Lois is all of the women of Flinders as they watch their men come and go from the sea. She morphs into Queenie (the Queen of play’s title), her aunt Myrtle, and herself as a child. Queenie and Myrtle are tough, wise and very rough around the edges. Just like the tides, these women represent the ebb and flow of island life. While Queenie has spent her adulthood giving birth to islanders (eleven children in all) and seeing her men off to sea, Myrtle bears witness at the other end of life, making wreaths for the dead from “the old flowers, that most people call weeds” along with slaughtering as many feral cats as she can get her hands on. Wheatley’s characterisations of these women are both humorous and poignant. We laugh at Queenie screaming for her beer from the Snakepit (a nickname for the Ladies’ Lounge at the Whitemark Hotel), while also registering her grief: “You should never have to bury your children. They should bury you.” Like breaks between chapters, Lois builds a shrine throughout the show that is composed of important objects or island symbols. There are the trees that “grow sideways like the people”, the nautilus shells that keep time, and the ever present snakes that seem to represent fear, wisdom and longevity.

Maria Island of Dreams and Queen of the Snakepit use varying degrees of characterisation to provide insights into the histories and cultures of the islands. Cooper’s playing of Vega Bernacchi is critical to shifting Maria Island of Dreams away from being simply a historic summary. Vega’s obvious affection for the various lives of the island, including her own, is clearly communicated, yet there is still a sense of distance with this recital-style telling that leaves the audience back on the mainland. I can now answer a whole series of questions about Maria and can visualise its topography, but I don’t feel as though I’ve visited. Lois’ tour however does take us to Flinders Islands: there is an uncomfortable sense that we are stuck in the Whitemark Hotel with her and Queenie. Unfortunately the dramatic structure of the play is too loose, some characters are under-developed and the components of audience participation, including getting two people to blow up kangaroos, seem a distraction from the core idea. I come away with an abstracted image of Flinders Island as a place, but feel as though I’ve imbibed some of the longings, sadnesses and frustrations of the Islanders.
I’m a little uncertain about this documentary style of performance because it hangs on the edge of being touristic. That aside, perhaps the shows need to swap directors for a day making Maria Island of Dreams more engaging and less polite and Queen of the Snakepit more rigorously structured, and with more background information, so that their audiences could live a fuller hour of life on these islands.

“In July 1946 the United States dropped a series of atomic bombs over a small ring of coral islands…called Bikini Atoll. That same week French designers…launched a very tiny, very risqué line of swimwear on the world…[named the] ‘Bikini’ on the reasoning that the burst of excitement it would cause would be like the atomic bomb.”

When I read this in the Ten Days on the Island program I assumed it was a joke—a fictional premise for an entertaining performance. The diabolical truth, that the bikini was actually named after the Bikini Atoll, was confirmed by a friend; and drastically changed my expectations for the production (also named) Bikini. Linda Mancini’s production is politically satirical, a one woman, multiple character show connecting Bikini and the bikini, and ridiculing the US army, an ignorant public and the fashion industry along the way.

We are first introduced to the embarrassed Chrissie, a 14-year-old girl trying to change her image in order to enter a bikini contest. “My mother always told me ‘you’re too fat to wear a bikini’”, she announces before taking us to visit the beauty salon to share the experience of her first horrific bikini wax. Another woman with a strong New Yorker accent, playing charades, guesses “the bombings of Bikini a-toll booth”…“What the hell is that Louis?” she yells angrily at her invisible partner, shockingly ignorant of the tragedy. Later in the performance, this woman's sister-in-law embraces a one-off opportunity to travel to the still radioactive ring of Islands, a caricature of the American public and their tendency to holiday almost anywhere.

Rita Marshall is Mancini’s third character transformation: a nationalistic ex-US army officer who served at Bikini Atoll during the bombings. She describes her pride in serving her country, and seems completely blind to the environmental devastation, the deaths following animal testing, the permanent relocation of the indigenous peoples of Bikini, as well as the permanent health effects on the army personnel who were involved. Her husband passed away at a young age, Rita explains, glossing over the fact that the death was related to nuclear exposure. Ironically, Rita adds that her own sight has been affected by cancer.

In a momentary dimming of lights, Mancini promptly changes into a fashion show presenter promoting “Fashion with a conscience.” She decides that ‘the network’ should hold a bikini competition on Bikini Atoll. “Is it safe? Can someone find that out for me?”

Mancini is swift in her character changes and has made each of her characters distinctive. Rita sits straight in her chair, eyes squinting and talking in a slow Texas drawl; Chrissie stands embarrassed twirling her top through her fingers, and has a juvenile style of speech; the fashion presenter stands prepared to dazzle, directing technical assistants to find better images which flash on the screen behind her; and the New Yorker talks loudly into a telephone, at her new beauty parlour Coco Ch’nails, complaining constantly about her sister-in-law.

Bikini is intriguing for its lack of props and simple design – one chair and a screen. The screen also doubles as a table, a door, a beach and finally a bed; and is stretched with an impressively hardy lycra-type fabric, which easily holds Mancini’s weight.

The serious truth behind the Bikini Atoll bombings is at times at odds with Mancini’s comedy. This was more than satire. When shown the photos of animal testing, tears ran down my face. I stopped following the story quite as intently.

Bikini was was clever in its interweaving of characters, often small but poignant observations, and its political satire – a very slick production that left me both enlightened but entertained. Mancini’s Bikini reminds us about a largely forgotten historical event, warning us not to repeat the same mistake.

From pre-cinema visual entertainments to the first Second Life performance art group, RealTime 77 celebrates media arts, a far-reaching field of not always screen-based and increasingly interactive works that are fast disappearing old meanings of ‘audience’, to create an arts experience that is insistently more immersive and mobile, and arts users who mutate into active participants. The new media arts domain of the Australian media arts field, although still vigorously infecting all forms and practices with its innovations, has been battered in recent years by the ill winds of artform envy, category debates, funding losses, reduction in institutional support and a consequent lessening of visibility. The ‘new’ has been struck off the new media arts label, leaving us with a looser, less troublesome, if often meaningless moniker. And yet, while some new media artists have fallen by the way, overwhelmed by costs, scared off by funding detours or exhausted by the sheer duration of working technology into form, many Australian artists and media arts organisations keep doggedly at it, as this edition of RealTime extensively illustrates. Media arts as a totality looks healthy—the history of alternative cinema is being re-explored and old devices and techniques reactivated and refashioned; video art continues to make the most of its second coming: and multimedia performance is thriving. In general, media arts (if not net art, wearables, mobiles, interactives, sound art) are ever more present in art galleries even if often problematically placed and resourced. While not a survey, our media arts feature is indicative nonetheless of the extent and the continuing inventiveness of media arts, old and new.

EARLY IN 2006, WE MET LIFT (LONDON INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THEATRE) DIRECTOR ANGHARAD WYNNE-JONES ON AN ICY DAY, APPROPRIATELY OVER A WELSH RAREBIT IN A CAFÉ NEAR THE LIFT OFFICE IN LONDON’S EAST. WYNNE-JONES HAS BEEN BUSY REVITALISING THE 25-YEAR-OLD FESTIVAL, RADICALLY INTENSIFYING ITS LONG-TERM LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL FOCUS. HER ENTHUSIASM FOR THE 2008 FESTIVAL AND THE VALUES UNDERPINNING IT ARE CONTAGIOUS, HER LANGUAGE PEPPERED WITH TERMS THAT SUGGEST VISIONARY, EVEN REVOLUTIONARY ZEAL AND A REAL SENSE OF QUEST. MORE RECENTLY, IN AN EXCHANGE OF EMAILS, SHE REPORTED ON THE VISION’S REALISATION, AND CHALLENGES, TO DATE.

Wynne-Jones came to Australia as an artist. In 1994 she appeared on the cover of the very first edition of RealTime as the new director of Performance Space. During her time here she staged memorable site-specific works (like Hydrofictions) on Sydney Harbour and was part of Peter Sellars’ team for the 2000 Adelaide Festival until she left to become a mother. Despite that festival’s practical problems it’s clear that Wynne-Jones continues to be inspired by Sellars’ vision as well as the one she inherited from Lift’s founders Lucy Neal and Rose Fenton, but is doing it in her own intensively collaborative way. Lift in 2008 will be created by a large team of “Seekers”—artists and artworkers from London and the world along with representatives from around the UK and East London communities in particular.

Lift’s collaborative model is intended to engender a wider public participation where those attending become something more than an audience, and instead create a festival that is about more than art, to ensure that art is doubly valued. To enable this, Lift is creating as the hub of its festival a New Parliament.
The Lift New Parliament as it might look in Stratford, East London

lift new parliament

Lift has run a major architectural competition for a design for its New Parliament with a brief for a mobile structure that can hold hundreds of people and be used for performances, forums and broadcasting. The aim, says Wynne-Jones, is to place the structure near centres of power, like the British Parliament in London, where its very presence will say, “art is important.” And it can travel the country and the world. Designed by architectural practice AOC with engineers Momentum and Mark Prizeman, its “flexible membrane structure taking the archetypal form of a tent as its starting point”, the winning submission was selected by a jury from four anonymous short-listed designs (out of 56 entries) that were put to the public to have their say in an online vote. Wynne-Jones has written, “At the heart of this vision is…a new concept in performance space, where artists from around the world and the people of London can gather together to share stories, exchange knowledge, and imagine and rehearse new futures.”

constituency

Lift combines the local (East London), the national (via the tourable New Parliament), and the global (the Seekers). Long-term Lift staffer Tony Fagan is coordinating the involvement of East London communities, while the Seekers consult with their own. The Seekers met in London in May 2006 and will meet again in March this year as well as consulting online. The ultimate goal, says Wynne-Jones, is “to have Lift owned by the community by the 2012 London Olympics.”

On the local front, Lift is engaging with local boroughs and their “regenerative agendas.” To do that, says Wynne-Jones, the organisation “has had to learn the language: it was an artificial hoop to have to jump through.” Clearly, having to deal with local government and to seek funds beyond the Arts Council of England (Lift’s principal funder) is a major challenge. When we met, Wynne-Jones was by no means certain that Lift could achieve the financial goals that it had set itself. But, she said, “regeneration is vital for these communities: it is urgently needed or disaster lies ahead.”

Similarly Wynne-Jones sees it as vital that artists face the challenges of their world. Lift’s role, she says emphatically, is “to create context, to move closer to the things we fear…and to have a voice.” The New Parliament will provide a place for that voice, and hopefully its realisation will encourage potential sponsors to give, but also to enter the parliament themselves.

seekers

Asked about the choice of the term ‘Seekers’ for Lift’s collaborators Wynne-Jones explained that it “came from a desire to get away from overly academic associations with the term ‘curator’ in the visual arts world and the product oriented ‘programmer’ in performance. I have read Harry Potter, but it wasn’t a direct crib, I promise.” However, she reveals, “‘New Parliament’ is proving very unpopular with all the collaborators in East London, testament to disappointment with New Labour and indicative of voter disengagement—in the UK you don’t have to vote, so most people don’t. When the parliament does open it may well be called something else. But whatever it’s called—suggestions welcome—it will be a physical embodiment and tangible experience of peoples’ desire and capacity to engage with each other, with theatre—in its broadest sense—and with the things that matter to us most, locally and globally.”

taking it to the streets

To light the flame of its vision, Lift collaborated on a large scale public theatre event for four days in May 2006, a visit to London by The Sultan’s Elephant, a massive human-operated pachyderm created by Frances’ Royale de Luxe mechanical marionette street theatre company. Lift involved primary and secondary school students, young and emerging artists in the event, contributing objects, letters, drawings and photographs about their particular part of London or the UK. These then travel with the elephant around the world. The event also included a day of conversation, “How many elephants does it take…?”, at the South Bank Centre to explore how creative people and city infrastructures can collaborate to change the way the city is experienced.

For Wynne-Jones the estimated million people who turned out to see the elephant confirmed the need for a new public space. At the time she said: “Almost a year on from the bombings of July 7 2005, the people of London came together to celebrate and share an experience, eager to interact with each other and to be in a public space together. We saw a different London and were filled with a great sense of ownership which enabled a generosity between us. The sheer joy and enthusiasm with which the elephant [was] greeted suggests a tremendous need for a space that allows us this freedom to come together more often. One of those spaces is the Lift New Parliament.”

seekers meet

Wynne-Jones said that the meeting of the Seekers happened at the same time as the visit of The Sultan’s Elephant: “We wanted them to experience London at its most animated…We left our intense discussion many times to participate in this reclamation of the city by its citizens.” At this meeting, “the Seekers heard from us about the proposed Lift New Parliament…Inevitably we talked about money and risk. Participation is at the heart of the process and we invited the Seekers to share their experience and understanding of participative work from their very different contexts and asked if audiences can be turned into or should be participants.

“Much of the discussion centred on how individual and collective identity is constructed, how relevant that was to us now, how much of it was constructed from our individual and national histories. Questions arose to do with whether there is a sense of identity that is common to all, irrespective of context or geography. In our dreamings of the space of the Lift New Parliament as a place of cultural equity we talked about what might need to be given up, what needed to be held onto, what protocols we might establish, whether we needed a constitution.

“The Seekers spoke of their understanding of their role and how they inhabited it….They range from artists, initiators and creators to prospectors, prophets, transformers and revolutionaries to messengers and catalysts. Simply put, we got to know each other.”

Asked about the stages leading to Lift 2008, Wynne-Jones explains it will entail further testing of the Lift vision and the first presentations towards programming. “We begin our next meeting in March 2007 with a gathering of the Seekers along with politicians, scientists, cultural commentators and academic theorists to think about the context that we are operating in and the potential for change. Exploring the question ‘How do we live?’, we’ll use Open Space Technology (www.openspaceworld.org), a self organizing meeting and discussion tool which we hope will become one of the meeting protocols within the Lift New Parliament, to make visible the landscape we are operating in and unearth its spiritual and philosophical underpinnings as a prelude to the Seekers’ presentation of the projects they have selected.

“By the time the Seekers leave seven days later we will have a fabulous palette of proposals from existing work, new commissions and linking events between the international work and UK-made work. These will have been discussed with the programmers from our partner venues. What remains is for Lift to raise the funds to produce and present the work. The production process begins in the Autumn of 2007, with a 10-month run up to the festival and the launch of the Lift New Parliament.”

opening parliament

Wynne-Jones is programming “a number of trailblazer events leading up to the opening. These will be created by international artists in collaboration with communities and are indicative of the kind of projects we imagine will happen in and around the Lift New Parliament. In Eat London, a collaboration with Spanish artist Alicia Rios and 300 community members will create a giant three dimensional city made entirely out of food to be eaten on one glorious day by London’s citizens. Auckland’s dance company Mau, will stage Requiem [originally commissioned by Peter Sellars for the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna in 2006 to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth] at the South Bank Centre, and Stan’s Café from Birmingham will create the largest artwork made of rice in the world [the company appeared in the 2006 Melbourne International Arts Festival], in which every living person is represented by one grain.

“The festival, with the Lift New Parliament as its heartbeat throughout June 2008, will begin in Stratford [East London] in collaboration with our partners. The parliament will then be packed up and transported along the river by boat and travel to the South Bank Centre. Alongside the commissioned program within the Parliament itself, there will be debates, celebrations and an exchange of ideas through a whole range of mediums, between international artists, local residents, cultural commentators, politicians and local, national and international audiences. That’s not forgetting singing, dancing, eating, and generally having fun!

“The final design for the parliament will go public in June this year and then it will take a year to tender and build it, test and open it!”

Lift’s Seekers

Caroline Calburn, theatre artist, Cape Town, South Africa; Jeremy Deller, artist, curator, London, UK; Ishrat Nishat, theatre artist and critic, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Oby Obyerodhyambo, playwright, director and writer, Nairobi, Kenya; Jonathan Parsons, director Brisbane’s Riverfestival, Australia; Roma Patel, interactive media and theatre artist, Nottingham; Menno Plukker, theatre , dance and festival producer, Montreal, Canada; Lemi Ponifasio, theatre artist, artistic director of MAU, Auckland, New Zealand; Dawn Reid, theatre director, London; Fabio Santos, teacher, choreographer, arts project coordinator, London; Jenny Sealey, multisensory theatre artist in disability arts, London; Subathra Subramaniam, dancer-choreographer and biologist, London; Lone Twin—Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters, writer-performers, directors, Brighton and Glasgow; Prasad Vanarase, theatre artist, Pune, India; Wen Hui, choreographer, Beijing, China.

SPILL, A NEW INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL IS SOON TO PREMIERE IN LONDON. IT’S THE BRAINCHILD OF ROBERT PACITTI OF THE PACITTI COMPANY, AN EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE COMPANY BASED IN EAST LONDON AND WELL KNOWN FOR ITS WORK IN EUROPE. THE AIM IS TO IMPROVE THE LOT OF PERFORMANCE IN THE UK, TO CHALLENGE LONDON THEATRICAL CONSERVATISM AND GENERATE INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE.
Francoise Berlanger, Penthesilea

Pacitti was one of the mentors in the very first Time_Place_Space hybrid performance laboratory held in Australia on 2002. At a meeting in London in February 2006 and then in a recent email exchange we asked Pacitti to detail his motivation for such a large undertaking as SPILL.

“SPILL is very much an artist led initiative”, he writes. “The festival has grown out of my increasing frustration that our own work and that of many peers, whilst remaining very successful overseas, still struggles to be seen and taken seriously in the UK. There are many complicated—and alas, dim-witted—reasons why radical or ideas based work is a tougher beast to place here than more traditional forms, but few of them are actually to do with what audiences seem to want. So I knew I had to do something to force change, but I also knew I would fail in that if I just tried to better my own situation. Therefore SPILL is absolutely about the company being in service to a larger context, and the implications of that are truly international.”

In the UK there’s an incredible variety of forms of contemporary performance and fluidity between the categories of live art, performance art and experimental and new theatre. SPILL exemplifies the range and diversity of practices, juxtaposing, for example, Forced Entertainment, Raimund Hoghe, Kira O’Reilly, Francoise Berlanger, Hancock and Kelly, and the Pacitti Company.

For all this plenitude, however, Pacitti describes London as being without a focal point for contemporary performance: “London really lacks any ongoing high profile, properly resourced platform for performance. The city likes to ‘big itself up’ as a wild theatre capital, but in reality it still exists within very safe territory. This is clearly evident in the current plethora of site-specific work being made by younger artists who seemingly lack any desire to present content. It’s as if the civil rights movements never happened. So to that end SPILL is deliberately a programme of volatile work shown for incendiary ends.”

grand collaboration

Invited companies and individual artists will not only appear in SPILL in their own works but will collaborate with Pacitti Company in Finale, a work based on Emile Zola’s 1867 novel, Therese Raquin. Pacitti writes that many of them already have a collaborative history of some kind with his company. Finale was originally designed for the company when touring to challenge the notion of what it means to be a visiting artist. “We do this by running a two-week workshop for up to 30 local practitioners around issues of manifestos and explicit bodies, and the local artists then become performers in the piece, presenting their own workshop material integrated with our existing images. It’s crucial that everybody has equity though, and this is always the tricky bit. It’s a risky model for us as we never know quite what we’re going to get, but it means that each performance is a unique event that starts to unpack issues around what it means to host and what the status is of the visiting artist in relation to home-grown talent.”

Now Finale will be played out on Pacitti Company’s home ground: “In SPILL we are addressing a politic of international reciprocity by inviting artists from Brazil, Belgium, France and Australia who have been through this process before, to show their own practices and then work collectively with us as an international group to end the festival with Grand Finale. It’s a new model for us, and feels very political.” Grande Finale will be accompanied by the Swiss cult electronica band, Velma.

the program: scope

SPILL includes more than 50 performances over three weeks, a two-day international symposium on sustainable models for experimental practice; a weekly banquet for audiences to sit down informally and eat with artists; a program of feature films each accompanied by contemporary performance shorts; and “a series of ‘hidden’ messages around the city, accessed only via bluetooth broadcasts and SMS.” Venues include the Barbican, the South Bank Centre and the Soho Theatre.

In London’s vast Shunt Vaults below London Bridge (where the young performance company Shunt work) SPILL will collaborate with the Live Art Development Agency on an exhibition, Future Classic, of documentation of performance activity lineages from across the visual arts, dance, civil rights movements, clubland and film. “Future Classic is a participatory exhibition that will run throughout the festival. Onto a wall map placed deep within the Shunt Vaults audiences are invited to submit key influences that they feel are important to the development of contemporary performance praxis. Over the festival period these influences will accumulate to become a new collective map charting the activities of people and times that have somehow forced change, and in doing so become pivotal to the furtherance of performance making—either deliberately or otherwise.”

the program: artists

Forced Entertainment will present their magical saga of unfinished tales, And On The Thousandth Night (seen at the 2004 Adelaide Festival), and Exquisite Pain, their performance adaptation of the Sophie Calle work (see RT 78 for a report from Christine Evans on that performance and Quizoola by the company at the PuSh festival in Vancouver and also The World in Pictures, in Dublin).

Brazil’s Andre Masseno, a dancer, actor, choreographer, costume designer and stage director, will present his solo work I’m Not Here or The Dying Swan, a dance dialogue with Fokine’s 1907 choreographic piece for Anna Pavlova. Brussels based artist Eve Bonneau interrogates her own nudity in live performance with video in Body is the First Word I Say, her practice focusing on the body as organism: “The passage of experience from the body into the performance, of an organic world becoming a social body.”

Another Belgian artist, originally from Algeria, Francoise Berlanger bases her Penthesilea on the Heinrich Von Kleist version, producing “a work about the shock of falling in love, and the subsequent violence of loss.” Working with her visual artist brother Marcel, two sound artists, and a scenographer, Francoise Berlanger “plunges us into the cruel and haunted consciousness of a woman at war with herself as her flesh and her mind falter with fatal effects. Half-woman, half-animal, the stage is her abyss.”

In Tattoo, Traci Kelly will her have her back tattooed in the pattern of wallpaper from co-performer Richard Hancock’s childhood home. The work by these UK artists is described as “a slow archaeology…The tattoo will form a permanent exhibit; a visceral exchange of memories from one body to another.” The compelling Kira O’Reilly will present a new performance, a SPILL commission, which will doubtless be as beautiful and disturbing as previous works where she’s inscribed on her body with fine blades. Live art practitioner and long-term Pacitti Company member Sheila Ghelani will explore cultural and other hybridities in Covet me, Care for me , about “dissemination, about ‘upping the value of the mongrel’, about rejoicing in cross fertilization…”

Julia Bardsley (UK) will present one part of her Trans:Acts, “an accident at the cross-roads between video and live presence—a smash up at the intersection of performance and the script—a director and actress splayed across the dissecting table, waiting for the understudy to walk on and corpse—a last supper for an audience of twelve intimates.” The complete trilogy was presented at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, February 2005, and the TROUBLE Festival, Brussels in November 2005.

The engagingly idiosnycratic Raimund Hoghe (Germany), former dramaturg to Pina Bausch and solo performer (2003 Melbourne International Arts Festival, RT 58, p6) will appear in Sacre—The Rites of Spring with Belgian performer Lorenzo De Brabandere, responding to the Stravinsky score with “a new, contemporary and minimalist interpretation of the ballet classic: an initiation ritual for two men.”

As well as orchestrating Grand Finale, Pacitti Company will show its video installation, Three Duets, in which Pacitti performs in duets about self, sexual identity and age with Sheila Ghelani, Juliet Robson and octogenarian Angela Rodaway. The company will also present Civil, a significant moment in Pacitti’s personal history as an artist. It is rare for performance works to be presented by anyone other than their maker. Now Pacitti is to pass on one of his best known works about his encounter with Quentin Crisp in New York in 1996 and focused on issues of disobedience and civil rights, to a younger performer, Richard Eton.

Last, but not least, emerging Australian performance company Unreasonable Adults (RT76, p25) will present Last To See Them Alive, a solo performance by Carolyn Daish to a text by Fiona Sprott with direction and sound by Jason Sweeney. In RealTime 75 (p46), Sprott detailed the workshop gestation of the piece, from which has come “a series of monologues which propose a ‘character’ of a single girl and her relationship to a serial killer, distorting the traditional romantic fantasy portrayed in romance fiction to ask: ‘How do you meet Mr Right in an age of Serial Killers?’“

With the LIFT festivals now well in the past and the new Lift moving in a very different direction (p2-4), doubtless SPILL has the potential to satisfy the urgent needs Pacitti has identified. Lke LIFT before it, SPILL may find everyday arts competition in London a considerable challenge. However, the sensible scale of the festival, a strong program and an audience Pacitti believes is ready for challenging work, could create in SPILL the performance platform he yearns for as an ongoing entity.

IN THE 2007 SYDNEY FESTIVAL WE ENJOYED AN UNUSUALLY LARGE NUMBER OF CHALLENGING AND DEEPLY SATISFYING WORKS FROM ARTISTS NOT AFRAID TO THINK BIG, EVEN IN SMALL WORKS.

Time, not merely as content (reflections, memories, forgettings, prophecies) but as form (temporal distortions and suspensions), figured frequently as we engaged with the traps of human intimacy and technological ingenuity, death and a welter of separation anxieties and fears about our future.
Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Zero Degrees

Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: zero degrees

Two men walk downstage, sit and address us lucidly in absolute unison of voice, gesture and mood. We see and hear them as one. In several episodes across the performance they tell us a first person story about travelling through India. There’s a border crossing, the man’s passport taken away briefly by the authorities unleashing fear and humiliation, followed by suspicion he may have overreacted. In a later episode, an old male train passenger dies and the subject of the story is advised not to help the screaming wife with the body, lest he be implicated in the death—“That’s the way it is in India.” After each telling a sustained movement passage unfolds, triggered by the idiosyncratic dance language of one of performers, the other following suit in his own way. However, as the metaphysical angst intensifies, the single being splits, each man turning to a humanoid dummy (created by sculptor Antony Gormley) which he manipulates, like a child, to fondle and assault him, to substitute for an absent other, or to use like a voodoo doll. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui kicks the dummy and Akram Khan’s body convulses.

The story-telling becomes ragged, desperate and single-voiced, the dancing and its evasions more driven until the symbiosis exhausts the pair, one of them seemingly destroyed and carried offstage by the survivor. Zero Degrees is an intense drama of separation anxiety, of the push and pull of like but different bodies and cultures. The dance moves from intimate entwinement of intricate hand and arm patterning (perhaps stemming from Khan’s Kathak tradition and the vocabulary Cherkaoui has developed from everyday gesture) to rapid dervish twirling, to Kahn’s synthesis of Indian and contemporary Western dance and Cherkaoui’s elegant fusion of yoga, break-dance, martial arts and North African dance. These are displayed and shared. They trigger the music which is integral to them rather than the other way round, but the music stands on its own when Cherkaoui sings an exquisitely sad song.

In his program notes, Akram Khan writes about the way bodies are never truly still—breathing is constant and in death the body actively decomposes: zero degrees he defines as the point between life and death, stillness and movement, between merging and separation. Zero Degrees expresses all the pain and beauty of such a notion, with an almost insurmountable sense of loss at the piece’s end compounded by Nitin Sawhney’s elegiac composition for violin and cello. There’s no catharsis here, simply a meditative state sustained long after the performance’s conclusion.

batsheva dance company: telophaza

A company of some 40 dancers suggests all kinds of possibilities. By and large what we are delivered is a mass of movement and colour, the company intermittently breaking into very brief solos and mutliple duets and predominantly left to right waves of dancers crossing the stage. The effect was often of an abstracted chorus line, emphasised by uniform if multifariously coloured unitards. The look of the show is postmodern multimedia, the dancers’ faces initially looming large over the stage on four screens from cameras they themselves manipulate. The one memorable scene has a female dancer upstage directing a camera in extreme close-up to the foot on which her body balances and contorts but also offering a rear view of other dancers entering the space. We see the curl of the toes, the flexing of the foot, the sense of bones, then two feet working together accompanied by a thunderous, cracking soundtrack. A dance party scene with four cameras facing in as the dancers circle and take turns at soloing to a soaring rock guitar promises more point of view pleasures but rewards us with none and some indifferent dancing. In a strange ending, two members of company are caught naked upstage on camera, faces and hands in intimate contact. Another dancer steps her way across the stage lined with chairs while the male dancer from the coupling cavorts wildly around the stage to some ineffectual strobing as if to suggest that suddenly out of the mass of anonymity that the show has largely represented there has been some indecent personal moment or sleazy surveillance of it. Overall there was always something to look at in Telophaza but in terms of surveillance and the desiring gaze this was always a show in which as a last resort there was always someone to look at if never for long enough. The rule of thumb seems to be that the bigger the dance company the more limited and cliched the relationship with technology.

the holy body tattoo: our brief eternity

After an aural prelude taken from the soundtrack of Blade Runner (“Have you ever retired a human by mistake?”), Our Brief Eternity opens (and later closes) with the projected words “Somehow, continue…”, and the company cites Marshall McLuhan in their program notes—“The new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self which generates tremendous violence.” You know where you are, but it doesn’t prepare you for the ear blistering steam-hissing industrial punk or the vision of compulsive machinic bodies in an ultra disciplined type of moshing and with a constant sense of impending mayhem. The dance is a kind of punk minimalism delivered by three dancers first working from flat out on the floor with rigorous single handstands and rapid rolling. Later they stand, pumping as if hydraulically driven. Rare moments of intimacy look more like manipulation and threat. The three bodies perform identical movements, often with one slipping in and out of pattern—no room for error. A film of the company dancing the same work (premiered in 2006 at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts) acts like a kind of mirror, but the relationship between stage and screen is not dynamic. Movement and text suggest a world on the edge of apocalypse or, more likely, rapid entropy, the latter evident not only in the choreography but in the weariness of the real dancing bodies and a certain sameness after a while. How much more can you say about the machinic body? Interesting nonetheless.

lucy guerin inc: structure and sadness

Midway through Structure and Sadness, Lucy Guerin does something very bold and it unleashes great emotion. Having created an abstract world of construction and its tensions in both the bodies of her dancers and in the creation they have just finished building, she suddenly literalises it. A woman in black listens to the radio as she washes dishes at an imagined sink. She sings along to a pop song, Crimson and Clover, which switches between tinny radio sound and full amplification, as if we are moving in and out of her head. Behind her, two other women also in black set up a wailing chorus to the song while balanced on a pliant bridge. The music is interrupted by a news broadcast and women and audience are plunged into the facticity of the 1970 collapse of Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge. Pop becomes a grieving cry, the long black dresses evoke the funereal dress of many cultures (and in the look and movement not a little of the potency of a Martha Graham dance drama). The woman sways, nearly falling, the male dancers in grey, heads hanging low, appear as if among the dead (35 men were killed). The dead weight of the men literally bears down on the women.

Structure and Sadness concludes with a long, consoling, almost courtly dance between the dead and the living, commencing palm to palm in a movement motif we’ve seen from almost the beginning of the work, in a duet where bodies test each other for weight, tension and pliability. In the first part the dancers move on to build a structure from tiny components and then larger and larger ones—into a veritable house of cards. They also balance unevenly on a large seesawing plank under which a living body lies, as if testing for endurance. This image returns in the show’s coda: four of the dancers become inert bodies with the plank laid across them. Another dancer crosses pushing down on those below, reminding us that this bridge rests on the bodies of the dead.

Structure and Sadness is a major Australian dance work (certainly punching at greater weight than its “About an Hour” festival programming) with the courage to think big and ambitiously about work, death and the traps of human ingenuity. The totality of its choreographic and theatrical vision encompasses adventurous design by Bluebottle and media (Michaela French) built into the very body of the work, the dancers, and a musical score that works through and with tension, building on the twang and buzz of wires stretched and relaxed, distorted and at the end resolving to a comforting lyrical guitar played nevertheless over a fast still twanging pulse. Perhaps there’s room for some tightening of the work in the first half and perhaps a closer view is needed for the audience of the initially small work of the dancers as they build, but Structure and Sadness deserves a long and successful life with its frank countenancing of death and grieving.

zthollandia/ntgent: seemanslieder

In his appreciation of the work of Christoph Marthaler, the great Swiss theatre and opera director, Benedict Andrews wrote in RealTime 76 about how “his theatre slows time to a standstill”, creating “ a time between. A time of waiting, of remaindered thoughts, leftover people and once forgotten songs.” Seemanslieder, performed by Belgium-based NTGent and ZTHollandia in a Belgian-Dutch collaboration, epitomised the Marthaler vision.

Time, space and personality are all mutable in this world; songs, narrative fragments and monologues evoking very different periods and attitudes to the sea in a small coastal community over hundreds of years. Tales of fishing, pirating, executions, drownings and yearnings, preaching and drunkenness (especially drunkenness), wives and mothers at home, men at sea, sons in fear of it, drift out into the auditorium from a stage populated by strange characters, familiar yet alien, like the drowned rising up to speak, so much of their business unfinished, wounds still open, lives drifting, memories floating, free associating, coming to the surface. There are also curious inversions—a woman sings an erotic song of seduction to another woman, a song a sailor longing for a woman would sing. Anna Viebrock and her fellow designers’ set looks totally lived in, replete with ceiling, incredibly solid, very real but oddly transcendent, phasing between terminus, ship’s deck, bar and the deep as men flip like fish across its floor. The timber wall at the back looks like an ageing dock or an old hulk from which a pipe pumps bilge.

In this floating world, amplifying the sense of it ghostliness, time frequently slows for song, solos and sotto voice choral works, folk songs, torch songs and lieder gloriously acquitted. Eruptions of farcical action intrude, sight gags out of burlesque, silly but relentlessy persistent—pratfalls, toupee jokes, a clever routine of being swept along by an umbrella in a windstorm. Sometimes the two modes merge: in a haunting rendition of a song from Ravel’s Sheherazade suite sung close to silent by the company, the drum kit player (in an unlikely accompaniment to glorious piano playing) crawls across the floor playing his sticks against it (this kind of crawling and rolling and crabbing one of the show’s swimming motifs), while a sailor taps out the beat on his rubber boot. The company all sing beautifully, their faces expressing reverie, indifference, boredom. One way or another the songs possess them.

Characterisations only slowly accumulate as you get to know these people, their quirks and obsessions like the tall Scot who looks like he’s about to sexually assault a woman (“I want…I want…I want!”) only to be rejected or assaulted in turn and then thank her for her company before disappearing into his room. Later, he surprises us with a long, grotesquely beautiful rendition of “Lowlands”, his wanting now illuminated in a very different way.

Despite death’s insistent presence in tales and songs, the universe of Seemanslieder is essentlally comic, and like most comedy rooted in hysteria and melancholia, a reminder of Marthaler’s Le Coq training. The ship’s barmaid, for example, is a kind of dramaturgical glue, serving the drinks, keeping the customers in order until she herself has too much, loses her shoes and, struggling to slip into them without using her hands, reveals herself to be quite a contortionist; her agony has all the pathos, obsessiveness and vulnerability of a drunk. This is the comedy of recurrent accidents, helpless compulsion and incapacity, which always require skill to play, everything predicated on the worst possible chain of cause and effect. It’s a world of farce—of two toilet doors through which people constantly disappear, get trapped, vomit into or or use to conceal shipboard liaisons. And of slapstick. Or the surreal—the useless bicycle that descends from above. It’s the comedy of escape from pain through alcohol or morose religiosity in hymns that pray for Jesus’ unlikely succour.

Compared with Marthaler’s Stunde Null (London International Festival of Theatre, 1997), the director’s grimly comic account of the conversion of Nazis into democratic politicians, and the only other work of his we’ve seen, Seemanslieder is a delirious reverie, an adroit cut and paste of the songs, tales and anxieties of European sea-going cultures of other times and no time in particular into an absorbing totality with its own sad comic logic.

gate theatre beckett season

In Beckett’s Eh Joe, Charles Dance (substituting for Michael Gambon) in dressing gown in a small dim room, closes the curtains over windows, cupboard and door and sits in profile to the audience. His face appears, gigantic and slowly growing, on the scrim between us, every detail of his face writ large as a female voice begins its litany of accusations—in his head, or filtering through the floorboards, in the air between us. Dance distributes the changes in his expression sparely, initially with glowering intensity and then a weakening into vulnerability as the truth, or whatever it is it, hits home and a tear falls at the end of the half hour performance. If Krapp worries at his own earlier recorded and often forgotten utterances, at least the voice is his own. Joe is like a man haunted and rendered speechless, or is the voice his own ventriloquism, the only way he can admit his doubts and crimes? Directed by Atom Egoyan, the screen device with its double view of Dance, apart and face-to-face with us, worked strongly both emotionally and as an easily accommodated theatre-cinema hybrid.

By contrast, Ralph Fienne’s performance of the novella First Love adapted for the stage was a pretty straightforward piece of telling, but I’ll Go On with Barry McGovern, a master Beckett performer, was a venture for actor and audience deep into the writer’s concerns about life, death and especially language. The selections (made with Beckett’s approval) ranged from passages of relatively broad situational humour from Molloy and Malone Dies to The Unnameable’s nightmare of our entrapment by words—never quite any speaker’s own and here delivered at terrifying pace, the essential poetry of the prose awesomely intact. In the earlier, garrulous excerpts McGovern is garbed in long black coat he reveals to be lined with The Times, while in The Unnameable he is almost naked, laid out it would seem in a mortuary.

The Beckett series was, of course, a festival hit, even though no substantial master work was included, rather an adaptation, selections and the eerie Eh Joe, and some notable star actors. Three short works on separate nights, although I’ll Go On was relatively more generous. Luxury theatre. Since the Beckett film series associated with The Gate (out of which Egoyan’s Eh Joe came) and the centenary of 2006, and perhaps something to do with the nature of the times (there was a noticeably high turnout of politicians), Beckett has regained an audience. But this series was more than a sideshow for a missing main event: Dance was courageous and subtle and McGovern’s performance was a revelatory reminder of the powerhouse that Beckett is: inherently theatrical, deeply Irish and with a glorious love-hate passion for the word.

maly drama theatre of st petersburg: uncle vanya

The Sydney audience, still bubbling with post Christmas and New Year cheer, had some difficulty settling down to this almost exhausting dose of Russian ennui. The actors play it and live it for what it is, and in very real time. Characters are just as likely to think before they speak as erupt into action. Entrances can be languorous, characters placing themselves precisely across the large stage or in small tight clusters before engaging, or moving almost farcically fast through the many doors that frame the low-walled set. As with Venia himself, so Chekov’s Uncle Vanya requires patience, which is richly rewarded.

One of the greatest pleasures of this Uncle Vanya was to be able to hear it in Russian (as it was too with the guttural, watery western-European languages of Seemanslieder), read the surtitles (good ones and the pace mostly manageable) and not infrequently register subtleties of interpretation (if still behind the Russians in the audience). To see Chekhov spoken in Russian is a double pleasure, witnessing words delivered from time to time with large gestures and intense facial expressions that yet never yielded to melodrama. There are likewise surprising moments of physical intimacy: Elena and her husband professor at odds but entwined. This heightened sense of familiarity and intimacy makes the potential for tragedy all the more felt, and the acuity of Chekhov’s quietly comic vision of lives desiring but resisting change all the more sad. As director Lev Dodin, in Sydney with his company, has argued, for all their sense of loss, failure and ennui, the characters “take up the struggle for life with vigour….here everyone wants to live.” As much as they complain, they still make a go of looking for love or, like the doctor, to saving a depleted, neglected environment. In this respect the play’s observations about feminism, environmentalism and the challenges of rural life feel contemporary in a production that, unusually for the Maly Theatre, is conventionally presented.

However, as well as the careful choreographing of the action (‘blocking’ cannot do it justice), there are aspects of the production that subtly counter the traditional costuming. Suspended over the stage on a metal grid are three huge haystacks (“chasing dreams while the hay rots”). In the last scene of the play as Vanya and Sonya work at their desks, having committed to the farm forever, the stacks are slowly lowered around them. Elsewhere a single set of french windows provides a motif for temporary relief and escape, rain pouring down them and, when opened, releasing a very loud post shower plip plop which underscores the action like a demented metronome for a very long time. The playing too was fascinating in its blend of understatement and passion, sometimes declarative—delivered to the audience without overtly acknowledging our presence—sometimes interior, always intimate and at its best in the socially uncomfortable Vanya (Sergey Kuryshev)—obsessed, distracted, out of kilter.

meryl tankard & taikoz: kaidan, a ghost story

Kaidan is a work of great beauty if little else. It is exhaustingly Japanese in style, from the story to its music (by Ian Cleworth for Taikoz, Riley Lee on shakuhachi) and its kabuki and bunraku influenced staging and movement. Looking like a fashion cross between Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and an upper class Japanese matron, a woman (a perfectly cast Sarah-Jane Howard) rids herself of a mirror not realising that it’s tantamount to throwing out her soul, with dire consequences for herself and her community. The storyline is fuzzy in the $8 program, if you bothered to get one, and even less tangible on stage. What begins with a narrative flourish or two becomes increasingly opaque.

Regis Lansac’s projections commence with a widescreen black and white misty riverside scene through which we glimpse the woman’s ghost (before she takes sudden flight in one of the show’s aerial routines) and progress through a series of exquisite, richy coloured natural images of ever changing proportions, presented Rorschach-style. In themselves these are beautiful but in the end add to a superfluity of effect. The treatment of the woman as a bunraku puppet lacks the precision of the original form (and of Theatre du Soleil’s Flood Drummers), nor is it a sustained device. The woman’s final mad dance is well executed by Howard with the requisite passion, but as elsewhere the choreography seems indeterminate.

circa: the space between

The Space Between is an exquisite physical theatre miniature focused on a series of mutating physical relationships in duos and trios with occasional solos. Bodies tangle, wrestle, caress and mutually manipulate each other well beyond the range of normal touch, but tell us much about ourselves. The show is built on close observation and fine detail and not on spectacle, comedy or sex or even conventional routines. The gravity that has to be overcome in this physical theatre is the weight of human dependency and the desire to intensify or to escape it. Every possible permutation of entanglement is entered into and every ounce of concentration is devoted to keeping that relationship balanced—always a tense, tentative affair but the drive is to do it again and again. Circa don’t rush, they enter these states slowly therefore often face more tortuous demands than usual on muscles and the sense of balance. This stress reaches a critical intensity in a late scene where all three bodies clamber up and over each other in a fluid knotting and unknotting of arms and legs.

While occasionally scenes appear perfunctory or oddly placed, and the musical selection is taxingly various (a through-composed score please!), The Space Between is a work which often demands and rewards careful attention, revealing how little real, unoccupied space there is between human bodies.

adt: devolution

Never act with children or animals. You could be tempted to add ‘or dance with robots’ after seeing Devolution. But somehow the fascinating anthropomorphic machines that so demand our attention here share a world with the humans they, and likewise we, watch with curiosity, and who are, in Devolution’s most alarming scene, becoming like them. The first bodies we see are Gina Czarnecki’s naked human apparitions floating hugely before us on a downstage scrim, twisting and turning against each other in a fluid cluster, and then in more and more clusters. multiplying into a universe of these organisms. They then fade to the live action of Devolution—leather-clad ferals peopling the stage with furious energy in brief virtuosic turns, sudden damage free Euro-crash clashes and, most striking, a recurrent creature-like clustering—heads appearing at odd angles, limbs rippling out like tentacles. Devolution offers little of the comforts of individualism.

What we witness is an ecosystem at work where humans and machines co-exist—there’s no obvious conflict, no working relationship. If the humans here once invented these robots they certainly have no control over them now and make no such attempt. They simply occupy a space with a kind of ritualistic fervour observed by the curious machine giants who appear to scan the humans, even bend down and peer at their couplings and tusslings or, in smaller versions, scurry between them like insects.

The robots too dance, in their way: the giant ‘scanner” running on a grid above reshapes its component parts with surprising variety; a row of tall robots across the back of the space undulate with a kind of showgirl finesse; two peering giants each clomp about on their four feet; a worm-like creature unfolds from above and sways about inspecting its domain. All have bright headlight eyes, some have heads that swivel, but there are no limbs that could reach out to, touch or manipulate a human body: their evolution presumably has not required it. The humans are evolving too, into machines (or have they been unwillingly co-opted?)—with horrendous long, mechanical tendrils that whip out from chests and backs. If human and tendril appear to be one organism, the issue of agency however is never clear—which part is in control? Moreover these new humans look like dangerous loners.

In an intensely dramatic passage of near contact, robots and humans move dangerously close to each other before returning to their respective stillnesses and clusterings. How long their ecological mutualism will last is an open question—the merging has begun and the meaning of the final projected image of one cluster of humans disappearing into the distance is clear enough. Obviously, director and choreographer Garry Stewart worries that what we are setting in train with technological development is regressive, a de-evolution, a departure from what it means to be human. However, with roboticist Louis-Philippe Demers, he does it with passion, precision and an escalating inventiveness that, ironically, pushes the robot cause forward with a kind of Robocop, Terminator, Mad Max fascination. It’s a reminder, too, that the work’s form is itself somewhat regressive, looking back to older forms of sci-fi, most recently reinvigorated by the Steam Punk genre evoked here in the heavy duty industrial sound score and the wonderful hydraulics of the robots. In his choreography Stewart textures his trademark high speed dance acrobatics with quivering balletic touches, suggesting finer human things too face loss. The work will tour Europe this year.

lou reed: berlin

Except for cultists, Berlin is not an album that many people, even some Lou Reed fans, seem to know. This sell-out concert version, doubtless destined for CD and DVD, will change that. It was a joyful discovery of a grim song cycle about the decline and death of a female junkie and mother in Berlin that the 1970s found unpalatable. The spare lyrics and stark compositions that foreground Reed as performance poet narrator, the shockingly disinterested observer of disaster, still hit home, the original Bob Ezrin orchestrations updated with a pervasive minimalist pulse but always with the capacity to pull back just to the voice and a lone guitar. The remarkable Steve Hunter, who appeared on the original album, shared lead playing with a very able Reed in a strong band plus a chorus (from the Australian Youth Choir) led by Antony and Sharon Jones, and three brass and three string players, these add-ons all dressed in pastel blue and placed beneath a trademark Julian Schnabel wallpaper cut and paste and a real, suspended lounge with a single strip of white paint banded across it. Less than convincing video projections of someone playing the album’s subject mingled with the imagery. The real power of Berlin was simply in the music, performed with commitment and precision but never departing from the rawness that makes it work. It sounded a lot better to me than the original. Its frankness still shocks.

back to back

In the 2007 Sydney Festival Geelong’s Back to Back Theatre’s Small Metal Objects was a standout amidst standouts. Like Seemanslieder, like Structure and Sadness, Eh Joe and Uncle Vanya, Small Metal Objects took its audience into a very different time and a very different place. As with those others, the production requires a certain surrender, a giving of yourself to the time world of the subjects, here to the slow, thoughtful exchanges between two drug dealers Steve and Gary (Simon Laherty, Allan V Watt). Steve is deep in thought, paralysed with anxiety about his sexuality and his friend’s health. This state is pitched against the cajoling and panic of their bourgeois customers (Jim Russell, Genevive Morris). Other time worlds drift or hurry by as people pass or enter the Circular Quay terminal, and our head-phoned surveillance superiority makes for its own uneasy sense of displacement in this simply scripted but complexly conceived and subtly produced and finely performed work.

the big picture

Inching towards the Melbourne International Art Festival’s current pre-eminence (and likewise eschewing ballets, operas and symphonies) the 2007 Sydney Festival at last showed that it could offer more than two or three exceptional works in a program. What’s more, Sydney audiences went for it with record box office takings. And politicians past and present, mostly federal, were out in force—Whitlam, Turnbull, Coonan, Hawke, Debus and more. Let’s hope the Minister for Water made it to Seemanslieder.

A vital addition to the festival was The CarriageWorks, the new contemporary performing arts centre in Redfern which opened the festival and was in turn opened by it. Temporary seating problems aside, the venue proved remarkably attractive, the vast foyer a great meeting place. Its presence and its performance spaces also signal a great opportunity for the Sydney Festival to do what Melbourne has done ever since the Robyn Archer directorship—celebrate the art of the city, particularly Sydney’s contemporary performance and dance.

Les Ballets C De La B and Akram Khan Company, Zero Degrees, dancers Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, composer Nitin Sawhney, sculptor Antony Gormley, musicians Tim Blake, Coordt Linke, Faheem Mazhar, Alies Christina Sluiter, dramaturg Guy Cools; The CarriageWorks, Redfern, Sydney, Jan 5-8

Telophaza, Batsheva Dance Company; choreographer Ohad Naharin; costume design Rakefet Levi; dramaturgy, sound design Ohad Fishof, Capitol Theatre, Jan 6-10

The Holy Body Tattoo, Our Brief Eternity, choreography, concept and direction Noam Gagnon, Dana Gringas, performers Susan Elliott, Noam Gagnon, Dana Gingras, Music Jean-Yves Thériault, film direction William Morrison; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Jan 8-12

Lucy Guerin Inc, Structure and Sadness, choreographer Lucy Guerin, dancers Fiona Cameron, Antony Hamilton, Lina Limosani, Alisdair Macindoe, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, composer Gerald Mair, motion graphics Michaela French, set and lighting design Bluebottle (Ben Cobham, Andrew Livingston); Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 9-12

NTGent, ZTHollandia, Seemanslieder, director Christoph Marthaler, musical dramaturgy and singing coach Christoph Homberger, design Anna Viebrock, Duri Vischoff, Frieda Schneider, costumes Sarah Schittek; Syndey Theatre, Jan 10-13

Gate Theatre Dublin, Samuel Beckett Series: First Love, director Michael Colgan, performer Ralph Fiennes; Eh Joe, director Atom Egoyan, performer Charles Dance, voice Penelope Wilton; I’ll Go On, director Colm O’Briain, performer Barry McGovern; Parade Theatre, NIDA, Jan 10-22

Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg, Uncle Vanya, writer Anton Chekhov, director Lev Dodin, designer David Borosky; Sydney Theatre, Jan 22-27

Kaidan, A Ghost Story, direction, choreography and design Meryl Tankard, musical direction Ian Cleworth, illuminations Regis Lansac, music Taikoz, Riley Lee; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 18-27

Circa, The Space Between, direction, concept, lighting Yaron Lifschitz, performers Darcy grant, James Kingsford-Smith, Chelsea McGuffin; The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Jan 23-27

Australian Dance Theatre, Devolution, direction Garry Stewart, robotics Louis-Philippe Demers, projections Gina Czarnecki, costumes Georg Meyer-Wiel; CarriageWorks Bay 17, Redfern, Sydney, 24-27. See also RT72, p32

Berlin, music and lyrics Lou Reid, music producers Bob Ezrin, Hal Wilner, direction & design Julian Schnabel; State Theatre, Syndney, Jan 18-20

Back to Back Theatre, Small Metal Objects, directed and devised by Bruce Gladwin, performers Simon Laherty, Allan V Wall, Jim Russell, Genevieve Morris, sound design Hugh Covill, Customs House forecourt, Circular Quay, Sydney, Jan 8-25

ALWAYS ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST EAGERLY ANTICIPATED MAJOR VISUAL ARTS EVENTS BECAUSE OF ITS UNIQUE CULTURAL AMBIT AND THE PROFUSION OF UNFAMILIAR COLOUR, STYLE AND POLITICS THAT COME WITH IT, THE ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART (APT) WAS DOUBLY WELCOMED IN ITS FIFTH INCARNATION.
Gallery of Modern Art

The occasion for joyous and epic celebration was the opening of the magnificent five-level grand pavilion-like Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). The superb architecture by Kerry and Lindsay Clare of Sydney firm Architectus speaks for itself with its grand halls, incredibly high ceilings, a multitude of intimate spaces, ultra-comfortable steeply raked cinemas, views within and out over the river, and a plenitude of natural light. For the artworks it is the most accommodating of Australia’s major galleries, uncluttered and offering, for example, a whole wall in APT5 to one magical work by Anish Kapoor. The wall height alone in the major spaces offers artists and curators some wonderful opportunities.
Nusra Latif Qureshi, Justified behavioural sketch 2002

Nusra Latif Qureshi, Justified behavioural sketch 2002

It’s a mere 150-metre walk to the Queensland Art Gallery, taking you past more impressive architecture in the form of the new Queensland State Library, a facility blessed with state of the art screen and computer facilities, luxuriously furnished and very welcoming. The QAG maintains its charm with a touch of refurbishment including a new wide glass entrance facing GoMA. QAG will now focus on art up until the 1970s.
Qin Ga, The miniature long march (detail) 2002-05

Qin Ga, The miniature long march (detail) 2002-05

APT5 features 37 artists and two large scale collaborations (Long March Project, China; Pacific Textiles Project). The Long March Project is an APT5 centrepiece, a profoundly fascinating re-tracing of Mao’s 1934-5 journey undertaken by a number Chinese artists, a selection represented here, with works created at key sites (www.longmarchspace.com). Performance artist Qin Ga’s Miniature Long March was tattooed on his back as the journey unfolded. You are welcomed to the project by Wang Henhai’s two huge grey statues of Mao, side by side: Mao as Communist Party Chairman, Mao as Emperor of China. There are no illusions in the Long March project although plenty are played with. Zhou Xiaohu’s Utopian Theatre, an engrossing large scale fantasia of rallies and media surveillance with a mass of clay figurines (the artist is also an animator), sound score and video imagery evokes societies both democratic and totalitarian. There is much else to admire in the Long March Project drawing on traditional art practices with thoroughly contemporary energy and insight.
Zhou Xiaohu, Utopian theatre (detail) 2006

Zhou Xiaohu, Utopian theatre (detail) 2006

Throughout APT5 there is ample evidence of art realised through meticulous craft, delicacy and great labour from the Pacific Textile Art Project to Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s (Australia) exquisite wall-based, shadow throwing fine cut-outs of hands or her images of feet with their erotic contemporary detailing, or Nusra Latif Qureshi’s (Pakistan, lives in Melbourne) subtly ironic Mughal miniatures, Fiona Hall’s American paper money birds’ nests, Anish Kapoor’s (UK) deeply immersive wall sculpture, Justine Cooper’s eerie Saved by Science installation or Eko Nugroho’s rebellious surreal humanoids (a giant one looms over you in GoMA’s main entrance). And many more besides. APT5 is a rich visual feast with some performative elements if not quite as extensive as in previous APTs. QAG and APT have always provided well for children and APT5 is no exception.

APT5, GoMA and QAG are generous and accessible. The planning and deployment of the new building is considered and visionary, recognising the mutual needs of artists and audiences. The opening was a wonderful celebration of this. In RealTime 78 we’ll publish a full review of APT5. RT

The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Dec 2, 2006-May 27, 2007; www.asiapacifictriennial.com

IN MARCH TASMANIA WILL ONCE AGAIN WELCOME ARTISTS AND COMPANIES FROM ISLANDS OF ALL SIZES AND OTHER REMOTE AND NOT SO REMOTE PLACES TO TEN DAYS ON THE ISLAND, ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S, AND THE WORLD’S, MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC ARTS FESTIVALS.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/2/276_kg_tendays_comp.jpg" alt="Bikini Islanders receiving gifts of chocolate
from US military personnel as a “sweetener”
to their forced evacuation in 1946, ©Smithsonian Institute;
Linda Mancini as a contestant in the “Bikini “>

Bikini Islanders receiving gifts of chocolate
from US military personnel as a “sweetener”
to their forced evacuation in 1946, ©Smithsonian Institute;
Linda Mancini as a contestant in the “Bikini

They’re coming from Cape Verde, Sardinia, Ireland, Newfoundland, Manhattan, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Canary Islands, Denmark and the Torres Strait. Here’s a good-looking selection from the large program of acclaimed visiting works and new creations from local artists. RealTime will also be there with an intensive review writing workshop, so watch out for responses to these and other works as they go online at www.realtimearts.net.

the corn exchange, dublin by lamplight

In their first visit to Australia, this award-winning company, described as “a renegade version of Commedia dell’Arte”, present theatre magic and tough politics in the Dublin of 1904.

benjamin bagby, beowulf

In the bardic tradition, accompanying himself on six-string lyre and reciting in Old English (with Moden English surtitles), Bagby delivers a big chunk of the beautifully grim, 1000 year-old epic about the battle between a warrior and a monster.

gruppe 38, the little match girl

Denmark’s award-winning children’s theatre company perform the four-hanky children’s tale featuring three performers and innovative deployment of gadgets, projections, music and paper.

dream masons

In RealTime 72 p40, Sue Moss interviewed the makers of this new work at the first stage of their coming together. Dream Masons transforms the façade of the Salamanca Arts Centre into a theatrical spectacle in a work about survival replete with 100 Tasmanian performers, musicians, artists and technicians. Created by Jim Lasko (Chicago), Jessica Wilson (Hobart) and Joey Ruigrok Van Der Werven (Sydney).

is theatre, queen of the snakepit

Fourth generation Flinders Islander, Cheryl Wheatley performs a theatrical collage of island life in “a portrayal of longing, endurance, strength and solitude staged cabaret style in the island’s infamous ladies lounge, the Snakepit.” Deviser-performer Cheryl Wheatley, writer Finegan Kruckemeyer, director Tania Bosak, designer Greg Methé.

linda mancini, bikini

Manhattan Bessie Award-winning performance artist Linda Mancini’s one-woman play juxtaposes the destruction of the mid-Pacific Bikini Atoll by US A-bombs in 1946 with the French creation of bikini swimwear. The impact on islanders and women, respectively, is played out with slapstick and black humour.
Roo’d, Icarus Performance Troupe

icarus, roo’d

Leaping two metres in a single bound, these giant kangaroos evoke at once a prehistoric Australia and a genetically engineered future, old rural toughness and urban brashness. “Always ‘Roo’d’ but never offensive”, they promise.

hsiao hsi yuan puppet theatre

For connoisseurs of traditional puppetry, in this case with its roots in the spectacle of Peking Opera, this will be a must: the puppets perform routines usually only within the abilities of the humans they mimic.

the spectre of the rose

A return season of local performer and writer Robert Jarman’s much-lauded account of the Genet autiobiographical novel directed by Franz Docherty.

back to back, small metal objects

A not-to-be-missed, never-to-be-forgotten experience from Geelong’s Back to Back played out in the street by performers and passersby in a stark tale of affection and corruption [see p39].

ihos music theatre: a thousand doors, a thousand windows

Inspired by WH Auden’s Twelve Songs, this is contemplative multimedia music theatre for soprano (Xenia Hanusiak), projections (Cazerine Barry) and a score by Constantine Koukias, staged in the beautiful early stone barn at the newly remodelled Rosny historic site.

ricky maynard, portrait of a distant land

Based on his Indigenous family background, leading Australian photographer Ricky Maynard’s new work responds to landscapes and oral histories and will appear on billboards around Tasmania.

leigh hobba: tasmanian landscapes in video and sound

Video, performance, installation and sound artist Leigh Hobba is celebrated at the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery in the first major survey of his work and focusing on his response to the island, 1980-2007. The exhibition includes Blues, a collaborative performance with dancer Wendy Morrow. Curator Craig Judd.

tasdance: mercy: a dance for the forgotten

In the festival’s first international co-commission, Mercy explores imprisonment and death in Tasmania’s convict past and in repressive regimes around the world. The choreography and conceptual design is by New Zealand innovator Raewyn Hill.

For more theatre, music, visual arts and special events for the mind and not least the gourmand within, go to www.tendaysontheisland.com

RealTime will be reporting each day of the festival. Go to the features section for more.

GIVEN THE SENSATIONALIST REPORTING OF SOME OF THE MORE EXTREME EMANATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY PERFORMATIVE CHINESE ART (SUCH AS ZHU YU’S PURPORTED BANQUET OF FOETAL BODY PARTS), A FULL-SCALE FESTIVAL OF CHINESE LIVE ART CALLED VITAL ALWAYS CARRIED WITH IT THE VEILED POSSIBILITY OF AN OUTPOURING OF VISCERA AND BODILY FLUIDS. BUT IN THE EVENT, VITAL 06 AT MANCHESTER’S CHINESE ARTS CENTRE FOUND A POWERFUL PULSE WITHOUT RECOURSE TO BLOODLETTING.

Hong Kong artist Leung Po Shan set a contemplative tone in her opening durational performance, Hammering-In-Time. Illuminated by a single candle, a broken tree branch in the centre of the small studio space cast its looming shadow across the walls. In the gently flickering half-light, the diminutive figure of the artist, in a diaphanous gossamer skirt, attempted to nail down the shadow. Following the edges of the silhouette, Leung Po marked out the outline of the tree shadow in a trail of copper tacks, pursuing the shape with the aid of a ladder where the shadow crept over her head until it spilled out of reach across the ceiling.

Hour after hour, she tap-tap-tapped with a dainty hammer, the meditative rhythm interrupted only by the occasional plink of a tack slipping through her fingers to the wooden floor. Post-performance, the course of the shadow survived as a raised dotted line branching across the white walls in an installation viewable throughout the festival. The intangibility of light and shade had been temporarily translated into palpable metal. However, the broken outline hinted at the incompleteness of the picture: a metaphor for everything that is un-pin-downable in live art. From a lived moment, rich with human breath, flame-warmed in the wavering light and a room vibrating as echo dissolved into echo, all that remained was a scantly delineated after-image.

Gamine and slight-framed, with cropped hair, Leung Po also goes by the name of Anthony, thereby injecting a little gender ambiguity into her next multi-sensory performance, an intimate one-on-one interaction called Itchy Scratchy.

The pungent smell of eucalyptus and wintergreen seeps down the corridor. A glass bottle of Chinese White Flower Oil is slipped into my hand with the invitation to enter the studio and rub the embrocation into the artist’s body. Anthony Leung Po kneels naked, on a small wooden platform, staring straight ahead at the incoming visitor. The furled bloom of a white rose pokes out from her silent lips.

A mirror offers both a reflection of the artist’s slender back, and the incomer’s own awkward gaze. Feeling exceptionally ungainly and over-clothed, I drip a few drops of oil onto my palms and try to decide how and where to start anointing this boyish body. Tentative massage of a smooth brown thigh evokes an immediate response as the artist unfurls gracefully, bending to follow the touch, revealing toes tied together with red ribbon. A metronome ticks insistently by her side as a reminder of the present passing moment. I conclude my session too hurriedly, and sense too late that I’ve made the wrong choices, and haven’t allowed this encounter to play to its full flirtatious, sinuous, potential—damn, I’m feeling irritated with myself now. As Anthony takes the rose from her mouth and pins it to my jacket, I realise I’ve misinterpreted the performance title. Itchy Scratchy isn’t the action of the white flower oil on bared skin: it’s the tantalizing mental discomfiture of laying your hands on that proffered body, and all the niggling anxieties it incites.

VITAL interspersed new commissioned live work with a number of documentary presentations, showcasing artists from mainland China and across the diaspora. Patty Chang (USA) introduced films of herself sucking her reflection from a water-covered mirror and travelling to China to reconstruct a plywood and sponge cake Shangri-La. A weather-beaten He Yung Chang (China) reminisced about his days spent incarcerating himself inside concrete. Ying Mei Duan (China/Germany) hid behind a cupboard door whilst screening an intriguing set of performances: accident-prone in gawky dresses and over-sized glasses, sleepwalking, or stranded on top of a high wall, wriggling tummy-down like a stranded insect.

Marcus Young (USA), serene and monkish in pale floor-length robe, and carrying a huge sky blue umbrella, passed daily along Manchester’s busiest shopping streets, gliding at a snail’s pace and smiling beatifically amidst the urban bustle. Lisa Cheung (Hong Kong/UK) created a performative installation, filling the darkened gallery with a confusion of shadows. Kinetic lamps, part child’s nightlight, part lighthouse, flashed rippling texts around the walls—“water sinking…sinking water”. The familiarity of the words began to sink in—these were the last desperate phone messages of the 23 illegal Chinese immigrants recently drowned in the winter darkness while picking cockles in nearby Morecambe Bay.

Exuding menace, in the red and white face paint of legendary Chinese troublemaker the Monkey King, artist duo Mad for Real (Cai Yuan and JJ Xi) invited passersby to join them in the back of a white van. Armed with a juicing machine and a mountain of tomatoes, the pair slammed the van doors locked and held their human cargo hostage until enough tomatoes had been pulped and drunk. Just a few uncomfortable, airless minutes in which to contemplate the unimaginable horrors of an illegally trafficked journey to the UK.
He Cheng Yao, Auction of Very Personal Possessions, bidder Cai Yuan

He Cheng Yao, Auction of Very Personal Possessions, bidder Cai Yuan

He Cheng Yao (China) provided VITAL’s finale with an “auction of very personal possessions.” The nature of the lots on offer remained a mystery even as we queued to register for a numbered bidding card. A shiver of unease crept up on the crowd, jostled and crushed at the back of the room, peering round shoulders and under elbows, as we gradually made out the viewing table and the artist herself, utterly still, kneeling beside it. The event’s organiser, Sarah Champion, took to the podium as auctioneer and lit a tiny birthday candle. We would be bidding on He Cheng Yao’s hair, and the winner would be the last bid received as the flame went out.

A live video feed projected onto a big screen kept in view the ever-shrinking candle and He Cheng Yao with her head tilted uncomfortably backwards and her gaze tilted up, her hair braided into a long black plait stretched out behind her along the white tablecloth.

The severance of hair, whether involuntary or self-imposed is always a potent symbol, simultaneously evoking subjugation and sacrifice, modernity and emancipation. Here was a 10-year personal-history, 112cm of hair, offered willingly for sale, yet in a scenario that evoked an execution. At this time of meteoric escalation in the economic value of contemporary Chinese art, we were invited to question the role of the artist in the art marketplace. Auctions usually unite art objects and buyers without the inconvenient intrusion of artists. No need to think about the unpalatable lives that give rise to the works. He Cheng Yao’s performances are slow-growing and deeply personal. Her work has consistently drawn on intimate, often painful biographical experiences; they do not emerge lightly, and are not performed without emotional consequence. Was her hair just another decorative commodity?

While the ethical considerations of buying part of someone else’s body began to percolate through the room, along with questions about racial and gender power relationships and all the cultural and historical implications of hair-shearing…the first bidder was already marking out his territory with an assertively high offer. Participation in the sale had been swept imperiously out of most people’s reach. Heads craned to spot the big-money investor, and discovered artists Cai Yuan and JJ Xi bidding determinedly until emerging victorious to the tune of £325.

The Chinese-born, British-based duo have made a habit of intervening in other artists’ work since 1999: holding a pillow fight on Tracey Emin’s bed and pissing on Duchamp’s urinal. Was this to be another artistic hijacking?

Perhaps the high bidder was expecting simply to snip off the pigtail and hold it aloft triumphant, for Cai looked uncharacteristically gobsmacked to discover that, like Shylock, he was required to claim the entirety of his prize clean to the scalp. For ten long minutes, He Cheng Yao stared unflinchingly into the eyes of her new collector as he struggled to scissor his investment free. So whose was the crowning glory?

VITAL 06, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, UK, Nov 2-5 2006. VITAL 07 takes place October 2007. www.vitalfestival.org

“When we stand at the edge of the sea, or lift a child high against the sky, or look deep into the eyes of another—with love or sadness or just pure fascination—we are giving ourselves leave to experience what is outside of time. This is precisely the gift of theatre. To give us the extended moment to know what we think and what we feel. It gives us leave to know the beautiful, the disturbing, the unspeakable strangeness of our selves.”
Michael Kantor, Introduction, Malthouse Season One ‘07

Artistic director Michael Kantor is in his third year with the company he and Stephen Armstrong transformed from Playbox into Malthouse. We met in Sydney to discuss the company’s first 2007 season and in particular how the company works, the kinds of theatre it embraces—from plays to intimate performative installations, music theatre and dance—and the aesthetic and political challenges for theatre as concepts of form, of ‘mainstream’ and aesthetics undergo significant change.

malthouse at work

While I’m technically the Artistic Director and Stephen Armstrong is technically the Executive Producer, we work alongside Catherine Jones who’s our Associate Producer and Maryanne Lynch, our Dramaturg in Residence. We’re all very involved in the programming. We can all bring things to the table to be considered. If one of us has seen a show that is interesting because of the particular artists in it or its writing, we quickly attempt to all see it to keep the discussion going. Sometimes this is hard when a lot of the stuff is interstate. But we think it’s important that there’s not a single voice or a single command system. So we work very collaboratively on each season. Of course, the lead-time means that many projects are decided a good 18 months ahead of their premieres. Then it becomes incumbent, particularly on Maryanne and myself, once something has been conceived or a project may have been commissioned, to see it through and to give as much feedback and follow through and help as possible.

Because of our limited resources we can’t really afford to commission a lot. We can’t do that kind of seeding, that ‘well-let’s-just-see’ kind of process, which I’d love to do because I think that allows for a different type of liberty for artists. But I’m finding that what we can do best is support work coming out of the Melbourne independent theatre scene, for those artists to grow into larger theatre spaces because if they don’t get the experience through Malthouse, they won’t get it at all. Then we’ll be in an awful position in 10 or 15 years where there will be no artists who have the training to conceive and understand what it means to put a large show on in a large space. So we like to give opportunities to those artists but also to expose audiences to work which I think is leading the theatre into a new and exciting territory.

whose theatre?

I had to make a choice quite early on. Was this going to be the Michael Kantor Theatre Company, which was an option. The board were quite willing for me to do that. In that guise it would have been four shows a year from Michael Kantor and collaborators, with two or three other things. But I thought, with a lot of consultation, that would be an inappropriate use of this resource—this fabulous theatre building that is really important in the ecology of Melbourne theatre [as] a crossover point for artists to be able to merge with what one may call the mainstream. But the mainstream in itself is indefinable now. It’s changed. So, it’s really about achieving a point of professionalism for artists that leads to greater visions, greater dreams being reached on stage and greater audiences for that work. While the Melbourne independent scene is booming, it’s booming to small audiences. Shows sell out to 60 people a night. And that’s great but we need those artists to be exposed and creating work that can attract 200 people and then 300 and ultimately 500, and fill the Merlyn. Now that’s a struggle for anyone, I might say, at the moment. But it has to be like that because it’s not actually sustainable on a small level—not if those artists want to work all their lives in the theatre.

There are about three or four new commissions a year. There’s no time-line for when they’ll be realised although there’s a broad belief that if it’s taking more than two years to get to the stage there might be something wrong and we’d better think about it. In some cases, a work may be quite well formed. It just needs the injection of rehearsal time, which can be short actually. Some shows have had ‘boutique’ seasons in Melbourne’s smaller spaces, so we invest to bring them to a level and scale that can work in the theatre we’re proposing for them. And hopefully this way we allow those artists to further develop the work and refine it and see it complete, or as complete as theatre can ever be. A lot of these works are small; a lot are solos. Some are four-handers. It’s been rare that we’ve been able to invest in anything larger than that. I dream of a day in which it is possible that a great Chekhov production or a new work created by a group of artists in a warehouse can be taken up, professionalised and attract 500 people a night. Be it a Chekhov or a new work, I don’t have a big hang-up about how many shows are ‘new’, how many are ‘reinventions.’

Right now The Tower is the most likely venue for our support for independents, for financial reasons, although in our first season for 2007 we have The Pitch, Peter Houghton’s very funny solo in the Beckett for the Comedy Festival. It’ll do very well and it can work in that theatre. And Uncle Semolina and Friends will perform OT in the Beckett too. Nowadays there are more options for independent artists through FULL TILT at the Arts Centre, Arts House at North Melbourne Town Hall and what we’re doing at Malthouse.

the director directs

In my first year here I did three plays, the next year I did two. This year I’m only going to direct one. But I have plans for about seven in 2008! But that can’t happen. I think three would be the maximum and they can’t all be large. That’s to do with our finances but also to make sure that I’m accessible and not just in a rehearsal room all the time. Artists find conversations, even if they don’t lead to work with us, are important. We like to keep the door open. We have a process where anyone can submit anything as long as they’ve had a professional engagement of some sort and they can describe their work in two pages.

the german connection

One of our dreams for 2008 is a new work by writer Marius von Mayenburg and director Benedict Andrews [Andrews directed von Mayenburg’s Eldorado for Malthouse in 2006, RT 74, p42]. It’s dependent on a certain amount of funding which is currently beyond us, but we’re very hopeful. We’re simply calling it “The Secret Project” at the moment. Benedict and Marius spent a few weeks last year working on it with a great group of actors. We hope to extend and develop that process over this year. I’ll be able to say more in about a month. But I’m very keen to continue our collaboration with Benedict Andrews: he’s a fabulous director and it’s very important that Melbourne gets past its, “Oh, that’s just some Sydney director” parochialism—it means nothing. He’s just a fabulous director.

open to all the senses

Theatre can work so well as a simple voice under a spotlight in a darkened room, but it’s not the only form and it’s not the form that gets me closest to my subconscious, which is where I want to go. I always worry about the writer’s preoccupation with the word and its central focus in theatre. It can be. But it’s not the only way. I believe that theatre needs to be open to all the senses especially through potent visual imagery. The backhand response can be that such work is overproduced or ‘all style, no substance.’ To me that’s discounting the potency of the image in the first place. As if it had only ever meant to be there as wallpaper for the actors.

catharsis optional

There’s an assumption that every strong piece of theatre will take you on an emotional journey that will be cathartic. It’s a rear-guard action that Melbourne keeps throwing up at me: ‘Where’s the catharsis? Where’s my big, you know, my tearjerking moment?’ Theatre is about rhythms, that’s where a director’s vision or voice or collaborative process with others can be so distinctive. Benedict Andrews has a completely different sense of stage time to me. So do Barrie Kosky and Neil Armfield. I’m always beguiled by it. Mine’s very short, I should say. It’s like bang, bang, bang. Whereas I’m so impressed by the kind of control that can come from slowing time down and allowing that space of dream to open up for an audience. Robert Wilson does it—not always but sometimes fantastically.

outside ourselves

I’m not a great lover of theatre that reminds me of who I am, really. I prefer to be shocked, to imagine that I’m a little bit like something else. A lot of theatre has traditionally, particularly in Australia, attempted to show us ourselves simply, confirming our sense of ourselves. And I’m not convinced we need any more confirmation of ourselves as content and calm, fair and balanced, when clearly we’re not.

one day an ensemble

A company can have so many different ways of being. And there’s a great other model, which is the ensemble model. Ultimately, if I can’t achieve it at the Malthouse, one day that’s what I want. I want to work with an ensemble of actors and creative collaborators on a body of work. Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright’s The Lost Echo (RT 76, p36) would not have happened without the Sydney Theatre Company’s Actors Company. They needed to have worked together in the six months leading up to the work with Kosky for it to get anywhere close to where it got, which was a great distance. You would never expect a string quartet to play a concert without having rehearsed together for nine months. And like finely tuned instruments, actors need that. They feed off working together. In the meantime and for the first time at Malthouse we’ve added to the number of artists working daily with the company by having designer Anna Tregloan and lighting designer Paul Jackson as artists in residence. They’ll work on shows and get to understand the budgeting process and all of the rigour that needs to take place to make a theatre company work. They’re people who might one day want to run a company.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/2/280_kg_malt_black.jpg" alt="Black, Anna Tregloan, collage
with text excerpts from the Black Dahlia”>

first 07 season

Like all our seasons, I hope there’s something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. There’s a sense of bricolage about it. You’re not going to see six like-minded events.There is no unifying theme, but all these projects seem to sit perfectly together—they’re wry, they’re whimsical, all quite quirky in spirit—some of them unsettlingly so. Deep inside, all plays are united by a sense of paranoia and a fear of death. They’re also strongly fuelled by a libidinous urge, that’s theatre—the theatre that I like.

It felt like a strong, simple, bold first choice to open the season with Tom Healey directing Melissa Reeves’ The Spook, about Australia and Communism in the 50s. It cried out to be performed in Melbourne, and while ASIO is out there recruiting ‘spooks’ right now. It’s an interesting moment, a merging of our paranoia about terrorism simultaneously with paranoia about the dangerous words of the artist. Up in the Tower Anna Tregloan’s making a performative installation piece, Black, around the very gruesome Black Dahlia story told by James Elroy. She’s exploring themes around the female body in relationship to glamour and the hard boiled detective narrative but all fused in Anna’s special way with fragments of text. For me she’s designed The Odyssey and The Ham Funeral—big plays—but her mind is much more active than that and she’s simultaneously been doing durational installation works (RT 57, p40). Black runs for three hours but you can come and go, watch and read. The performers include Caroline Lee and Moira Finucane and the lighting is by Paul Jackson.

Ionesco’s Exit the King is the big show in the season. Three years ago I read it with Geoffrey Rush and we both agreed it was fantastic and he said he’d actually read it with Neil Armfield so a conversation developed and now it’s a co-production with Company B with a great cast: Bille Brown, Julie Forsyth, Gillian Jones and David Woods who’s from Ridiculusmus, the fantastic English avant-garde comedy group. We follow up with OT (as in Old Testament). Uncle Semolina (& Friends) is a wonderfully inventive and intriguing group who did a series of works initially in a shopfront and have worked a lot with puppets, dolls and toys but doing elaborate, unsettling, big, mythic stories with them. That grew into a piece called Gilgamesh, which was very successful and is going to The Barbican in London. We commissioned OT from them last year. Christian Leavesley and Phil Rolfe have devised a piece that has a little tribe of Israel, a very jealous God (performed by Peter Snow) and it’s performed on a very simple, strange set. What I love about their work is the enthralling sense of miniature. There’s also Chunky Move’s Tense Dave in a return season—it was one of the favourite shows I’ve worked on as a director.

inspirations

In the third year of the company I always think we can do better. We’ve planted a lot of seeds and they’re growing. Some need a lot of watering. Some of them will be beautiful and some will wither. That’s what keeps me going, the conversations that surround the creation of a work of theatre. But I also get a thrill like no other when a performance works. And particularly when you’ve been involved in helping collaborate with a group of artists to get it there. I’ve got three kids—six, nine and eleven. They keep you going because there are times in life when work just has to stop. There’s just no chance of that conversation continuing when really there’s something much more interesting taking place on a trampoline. That’s really good for me.

Michael Kantor’s enthusiasm for innovative Melbourne theatre and the Malthouse vision is palpable, energetic and eloquent (a trait he shares with the likewise lanky and indefatigable Stephen Armstrong). Long may Malthouse seed and grow.

LIMINAL THEATRE’S THE DAMASK DRUM IS THE SECOND OF DIRECTOR ROBERT DRAFFIN’S INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE WORKS AND WORLD OF JAPANESE WRITER YUKIO MISHIMA. HERE, DRAFFIN AND HIS COLLABORATORS HAVE CREATED A NIGHTMARE FROM WHICH I DIDN’T WANT TO WAKE: A VISION WITH AN EXCORIATING EMOTIONAL BLEAKNESS VERGING ON THE UNBEARABLE, BUT REALISED IN SUCH AN ASTONISHINGLY ORIGINAL AND COMPLETE WAY THAT I COULDN’T HELP BUT BE TRANSFIXED.

Mishima’s story, adapted from a Noh play by one of the form’s originators (Zeami), is of a narrative simplicity that belies the deeper emotional resonances it eventually generates. A man, Iwakichi, is tricked by a cruel woman who gives him a drum and tells him that, should he beat it loudly enough that she hears it from her bedroom, she will be his. The drum’s skin, he discovers, is made of damask, and no matter how hard he beats it no sound can be produced. Despairing, he kills himself but the weight of his anger and desire transforms him into a demon, the literalisation of the woman’s crime, haunting her for all eternity.

It is through the stunning precision of both production and performance that The Damask Drum sounds so loudly for its audience. Light is tangibly, if sparingly employed to both illuminate and limit our senses. Beginning in near total darkness the imposing figure of Alan Knoepfler, a naked and muscular torso emerging from a cloud of billowing skirts, slowly seems to coalesce before us. A pale wraith writhing, seething, spitting his story and gripped by forces beyond our ken, he holds our focus with an almost alarming vocal and physical confidence. The unfolding tragedy he relates is scored by Jethro Woodward’s effects-laden live guitar, like a heavy and mordant Neil Young on a very bad trip, and elliptical and uncertain snatches of grainy film drifting across suspended panels.

When the object of the ill-fated Iwakichi’s desires finally joins him in his half-death, she comes as the kind of oni or spirit entirely appropriate to Japanese mythology, her kimono eventually expanding to cover most of the visible playing space, an ogrish empress who has become, very literally, her victim’s world. But his haunting subsumes her, too, and the endless dance of death and yearning between the two makes for unforgettable theatre.

requiem for the 20th century

The scale of ambition behind Theatre @ Risk’s Requiem for the 20th Century is either its triumph or its unmaking, depending on where you stand. In a sense, any project which seeks to survey and represent an entire century (or even, in this case, only its first half) is a monumental folly. But I found in this case a work whose internal logic seemed aware of its own insufficiency, and which utilised this as a source of motive power.

There are two competing narrative forces driving the work. The first is a love story in the classic realist mode: Cassandra and Red, kept apart by history’s vicissitudes, personal failings and tragic misunderstandings, chart a course that ends in a small moment of reunion by telephone across the oceans.

Against this narrative, driven as it is by the logic of conventional drama, is the historiographic stream of the work, which seems to work against it. Requiem doesn’t engage in capital-H history as an exercise in sense-making, producing a narrative development to very real events matching the fictional drama. Instead, it offers history as iconic moments with little, well, point. Figures from Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Walter Benjamin, along with Brecht, Hitler, Rasputin, Dali, Nellie Melba and many others crowd in only to disappear as quickly. It’s history as catalogue, not story. They’re shown, but not explained. They’re often cartoonish or badly drawn. Which, to me, seems an aesthetically appropriate choice.

History-making, as any half-alert Australian is aware, is an ideological practice, and in choosing a kind of picaresque, even carnivalesque approach to history, Requiem problematises such official histories without denying the possibility of historical understanding. It’s a deeply dissatisfying work, in this way, setting itself a task it cannot achieve; and this is exactly its strength.

apolitical dance

Not Yet It’s Difficult’s most recent work seems diametrically opposite to Requiem. Where the latter work is a taxonomy of historical detail that revolves around a hollow centre, NYID’s Apolitical Dance is abstracted to the extreme. It purports to examine the effects of conservative power on real bodies, but it does so in a purely physical, decontextualised manner. The performers are bodies without identity, in a space without location or time. They are beaten or electrocuted, they march drills, they dance to moronic music, they abuse themselves and each other. But unlike earlier NYID productions, the work doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Some elements seem recycled from earlier works—the extended sequences in which performers throw one another head-first into large padded panels was employed to far greater effect in the company’s exquisite Blowback from 2005. Where that piece was a complex and imaginatively assured meditation operating on numerous ontological levels, Apolitical Dance seems rarely to connect itself to anything beyond the moment of performance. Or it does so in a disappointingly restricted way. I found the final sequence, in which a game of Aussie Rules football is enacted while a Nazi anthem provides a musical backdrop, almost laughable. Perhaps, given the work’s title, this is all intended: movement as an ironic retreat from politics. Then again, given the company’s history of highly sophisticated and engaging work, I expected a little more. (See also Christopher Scanlon, “Lost in Translation “, p43.)

for samuel beckett

I’ve long been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to productions of Beckett; not that I dispute the mastery of his rich and very entertaining writing, but it seems his legacy has often been so strong as to offer a hindrance to new, more relevant forms of theatre. The milieu of Beckett’s postwar Europe provided the fundament for a mode of writing which commented on the world in new and urgent ways, but that Beckettian silence and all it entails seems less appropriate now that it has become canonical. I’m all for messy, polyphonic theatre, which says too much rather than too little, which forges through postmodern chaos rather than looking back to the cresting wave of High Modernism which is Beckett.

Eleventh Hour Theatre’s For Samuel Beckett is as fine a production as I’ve seen. The bulk of the evening is a performance of Endgame, preceded by a series of texts which either inform or were informed by Beckett’s developing aesthetic (a reading from Joyce’s Ulysses; a Bach violin solo; a Buster Keaton film he penned entitled One Week). But these contextualisations don’t really add to the evening in a vital, necessary way. Interesting, but more along the lines of Further Reading or a disc of DVD extras. It’s a relief that the ensuing Endgame is of such an impressively high calibre. The cast, especially Peter Houghton as Hamm, are all able to draw out the subtlest connotations of the writing. Best of all is the way directors William Henderson and Anne Thompson have keyed up the comedy in Beckett’s writing, which is often dependent on finding a rhythm much snappier than that usually effected by those distracted by the pauses.

Eleventh Hour have forged an outstanding reputation for keen-eyed adaptations of classics, and with the exception of the seemingly extraneous additions bookending the evening, this Endgame had me thinking that perhaps there might still be many reasons to pay Beckett that occasional visit.

The Damask Drum, text Yukio Mishima and Zeami, adaptation, direction Robert Draffin, sound design Jethro Woodward, performers Alan Knoepfler, Mary Sitarenos, film Ivanka Sokol, Liminal Theatre, Abbotsford, Melbourne, Nov 15-26; Theatre @ Risk, Requiem for the 20th Century, Volume 1, writer Tee O’Neill, director Chris Bendall, set & costume design Isla Shaw, sound design Kelly Ryall, lighting design Richard Vabre, musical director Victor Bizzotto, New Ballroom, Trades Hall, Melbourne, Nov 17-Dec 3; Not Yet It’s Difficult, Apolitical Dance, direction David Pledger, Arts House, Meat Market, North Melbourne, Nov 28 – 2 Dec 2; For Samuel Beckett: Endgame, writer Samuel Beckett, directors William Henderson, Anne Thompson, Theatre, Fitzroy, Nov 25-Dec 9, 2006

Yusuke Mori, Yoshinao Kobayashi,
Masayuki Sato, Hidekatsu Yamamura,
Chiaki Kato, Matasaburo

THE FIRST SIGNS OF A DANGEROUS DRAMATURGY IN SHINJUKU RYOZANPAKU’S MATASABURO—ANGEL OF THE WIND EMERGE WITH THE APPEARANCE OF SEVERAL KAMIKAZE PILOTS SITTING IN A CLASSROOM AT A FLIGHT INSTRUCTION SCHOOL. THIS SILENT MILITARY PRESENCE AND THE SUGGESTED FUSION OF CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE SOCIETY WITH THE WARTIME RUPTURES OF ITS RECENT PAST IS REMINISCENT OF THE PLATOON IN POLISH AUTEUR TADEUSZ KANTOR’S WIELOPOLE WIELOPOLE. BUT PLAYWRIGHT KARA JURO (CREATOR OF JAPAN’S RADICAL RED TENT THEATRE) AND DIRECTOR KIM SUJIN ARE LESS INTERESTED IN THE INTIMACY OF THE PERSONAL-POLITICAL AND MORE INCLINED TOWARDS CONVEYING THE KALEIDOSCOPIC PATHOS OF CONTEMPORARY JAPAN’S EAST-WEST SCHIZOPHRENIA. EXPRESSED VIA A COMPLICATED NARRATIVE It THREATENS TO BRING THE PERFORMANCE CRASHING TO THE GROUND.

The Shinjuku Ryozanpaku ensemble embodies ‘Angura Engeki’ (underground theatre). Its twin characteristics of ‘kerenmi’ and ‘kabuku’ (adventurous directing and acting designed to attract attention) propel the action forward through a vertiginous array of vaudevillian scenes. A character named the Night Man ritually slaughters others with a chicken and three performers dressed as vultures (their anuses decorated with plastic daisies) brown-eye the audience before sequentially taking symbolic ‘dumps’ centre stage.

Matasaburo is scatological, scatterbrained and spatially dispersed, using the entire stage and the space behind the audience in its purple tent. But it is also a serious and disciplined performance, all the more beguiling because it is directed and performed in such a manner that makes it appear a sham, if not shambolic. But always lurking beneath the apparent madness on stage is a clear directorial hand fully aware of the subtle meanings embedded within Kara’s text: post-World War 2 Japan, a dynastic society haunted by the memory of atomic obliteration; a society defeated and colonised, only to emerge as an East-West economic ‘wonder child’ until recent more anxious times. In Japan, like so much of the West, all seems lost once again.

This tragedy is revealed via a tale of a former mental patient, minus an ear, and a cross-dressing woman descending into an Orphean underworld in search of a trainee pilot who has stolen an aeroplane and subsequently disappeared. The plot suggests a question essential to Japanese and Australian culture: do we feel inexplicably guilty because we lack a clear sense of identity as the consequence of a befuddled and secretive history?

But playwrighting is only part of what is realised as a visual tour de force. The performers propel Matasaburo—Angel of the Wind onto a transcendental plane. They sweat, scream, dance and sing. They hurl their bodies through the space, wearing heavy costumes in 35 degree heat. They slash throats and spurt blood in a 360 degree arch, and do this with a lack of inhibition made compelling because it is disguised as raw and chaotic. The visual language of Matasaburo inundates and disassembles the senses, but at the show’s end reconstitutes them in a powerful image. The rear wall of the tent collapses, revealing a full-scale Japanese war plane and the Rising Sun, suggested by stunning lighting, with the entire spectacle backdropped by evening traffic on Melbourne’s Exhibition Street. You are witnessing an event that will linger in the mind for an eternity.

Finally, its propeller spinning, the turbocharged engine humming thunderously, the warplane is hoisted out of frame by an unseen mobile crane. Yes, it actually appears to fly away into the distance! The performers, composed, beaming, choosing not to bow, re-enter the space receiving adulation from the audience. In the end it is we who are humbled by the utter virtuosity of this astonishing ensemble.

Matasuburo—Angel of the Wind, writer Kara Juro, director Kim Sujin, performers Shijuku Ryozanpaku Ensemble, lighting designer Tsugo Izumi, choreographer Taeko Okawa, composers Yoshio Anbo, Takashi Onuki, costumes Yuka Kondo, set design Satoshi Otsuka, Melbourne producer Matt Crosby, Soupad; 2006 Australia-Japan Year of Exchange; Birrarung Marr, Melbourne Dec 21 – 23, 2006 www.soupad.com/ryozanpaku.html

“IF YOU CHANGE THE GOVERNMENT, YOU CHANGE THE COUNTRY”, PAUL KEATING DECLARED IN THE LEAD UP TO THE 1996 FEDERAL ELECTION. KEATING OVERESTIMATED THE ROLE OF THE GOVERNMENT IN DETERMINING THE CULTURAL CLIMATE; IT WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE ACCURATE TO SAY THAT THE COUNTRY HAD ALREADY SHIFTED AND KEATING AND HIS ADVISORS WERE SLOW IN REGISTERING IT.
Apolitical Dance, NYID

Not Yet It’s Difficult’s Apolitical Dance addresses the impact of such changes, exploring how 10 years of neo-conservative government, along with contemporary social and cultural conditions, have changed our minds and manifested in our bodies.

Five dancers move slowly through a thick fog, four encircling a fifth and central figure. In the distance, the sounds of football commentary waft through the fog. It’s reminiscent of Saturday afternoons in suburbia.

These familiar sounds soon give way to the five bodies convulsing as if pregnant with Ridley Scott’s Alien, readying for its unholy birth and suggesting that neo-conservatism is an alien entity, lodged in the host body politic.

The performers move into increasingly alienated and individualised states, launching their bodies with mounting violence against walls to the strains of The Seekers. The juxtaposition of innocent music and violent movement evokes the unsettling ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, where Stealer Wheels’ “Stuck in the Middle with You” provides a bizarre soundtrack to mutilation. Contemporary life here is anomic and traumatic.

But there is another, perhaps more widespread experience of conservatism that embraces it as pleasurable. For many, as the electoral success of Howard’s Government testifies, these changes are experienced not as traumatic but, on the contrary, as comforting as a pair of old slippers or an episode of Dancing with the Stars.

The roots of this conservatism, moreover, are indigenous to the body politic itself, rather than some imported, alien ideology that has implanted itself in the host culture.

Apolitical Dance never really ventures down this path, only hinting at the pleasures of conservatism through a momentary dip into high camp as the dancers perform to a German folk tune. However, camp suggests a knowing, playful attitude towards its subject, which can be a way of engaging with the unfamiliar while simultaneously holding it at a distance.

In other ways too, the performance shied away from the contemporary conditions of conservatism, opting instead for unpersuasive parallels between contemporary social and cultural life with conservative forms of the past.

The playful Leni Riefenstahl-style climax, in which the performers strike a series of heroic poses in mock glorification of the athletic body before exiting into a blaze of lights, was a good example. A more promising approach might have been to explore the particular relationship of sport and authoritarian politics in contemporary culture, rather than a rather obvious reference to fascist propaganda of the 1930s. The reversion to stereotypes of authoritarianism blunted the potential force of Apolitical Dance’s commentary.

This is not to question the integrity or the urgency of the work. Indeed Apolitical Dance seeks to grapple seriously with contemporary issues, taking inspiration from the works of anthropologist Ghassan Hage, Nikos Papastergiadis, the author of Stasiland, Anna Funder and Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones

The challenge of working with such a diversity of influences and styles is how to translate them into a performance work. These influences were sometimes lost in translation from the page (or the stage) to the bodies of the performers, the vocabulary of movement and gesture straining to articulate the influences, or interrogate them on a fairly equal footing. Contorted bodies, writhing and struggling out of their skin, lacked the nuance to fully realise the potential insights offered by such influences. The problem was particularly acute for a work concerned with the way ideas manifest themselves in bodies: movement and gesture tended to be relegated to the backseat, far behind the intellect.

Apolitical Dance is nevertheless an ambitious work, with a welcome sense of urgency about contemporary political and cultural conditions. However, it too is produced under the same conditions which it seeks to address, developed in a crushingly brief three weeks—perhaps a statement about how a decade of conservative government manifests itself in the body.

Not Yet It’s Difficult, Apolitical Dance, director David Pledger, dramaturg Peter Eckersall, performers Sara Black, Martin Hansen, Todd MacDonald, Carlee Mellow, Ingrid Weisfelt; Arts House, Meat Market, North Melbourne, Nov 28-Dec 2, 2006

NORWAY.TODAY PREMIERED IN DÜSSELDORF IN 2000. THIS ENGLISH LANGUAGE PRODUCTION, DIRECTED BY JUSTIN MCGUINNESS FOR imaGEN AT BAKEHOUSE THEATRE IN ADELAIDE, RETRACES THE PLAY’S SCRIPTING OF NET-MEDIATED ROMANCE. IN THE OPENING SCENE, A YOUNG EUROPEAN WOMAN NAMED JULIE ANNOUNCES TO AN INTERNET CHAT ROOM THAT SHE INTENDS TO COMMIT SUICIDE.

Norway.Today is by Prague-born playwright Igor Bauersima. With actors Pascal Ulli, Alexander Seibt and Ingrid Sattes, Bauersima founded a theatre company called Off Off Bühne in Zürich in 1993. For a decade, they worked at producing ‘Filmtheater’, blending video screening and live performance for a new generation of theatregoers reared on the intimate realism of screen drama.

In the Adelaide production, seated at one side of the stage, Julie (Antje Guenther) speaks what she types and her face is projected onto a screen centrestage. As audience members, we are ‘lurkers’—the internet term for those in a chat room who read but don’t type. Julie is ambivalent about our presence; she turns at one point to address us directly: “Please don’t be upset if I just behave as if you’re not here.”

A young man responds. August (Nathan O’Keefe) has been lurking in the chat room on the other side of the stage—indeed, on the other side of the world because, in this production, August lives in Adelaide. Like Julie, August wants to commit suicide too. And like the summer romance conjured by the cute coupling of their names, they flirt as they chat and swap photos, plan to meet and then suicide together, in a secret location.

A swift video montage from Nic Mollison uses the global imaging resources of Google Earth to transport the couple to an icy cliff top in Scandinavia, overlooking a fjord. The actors climb a white box set, its front face serving as both the cliff and a surface for projections. There are some farcical moments on the cliff top. Each character, at different points, slips on the ice and almost falls over the edge. But it’s never quite the right time to jump.

Despite its initial appeal to the culture of the net generation, the play’s romance narrative is recognisably ensconced in two grand European philosophical traditions: as their relationship develops, the romanticism of sex in the wilderness triumphs over the existentialism of net-induced alienation. Perhaps in multilingual Switzerland and in the European Union this dialogue between (German) romanticism and (French) existentialism would sustain an intellectual tension.

In this production, the talk of suicide seems really just a cypher: deep and meaningful disclosures are a young person’s way of getting close. Why else would an eager Aussie backpacker fly across the world to hook up with a sophisticated European woman? When the couple see the Northern Lights and manage to capture that spectral display with their video cam, suicide slips down the agenda, readily displaced by sex.

As the suicidal Julie, Guenther is cheerful, smart and bossy. Her character tells us several times that when it comes to suicide she is very serious and completely sane. As the hapless August, O’Keefe is often breathless and easily outsmarted. August is talkative as a character and O’Keefe’s words sometimes run ahead of the character’s thoughts. Guenther, by contrast, speaks with precision and with her character’s determination and control. There is easy humour in this inverted portrayal of gender relations: the slightly older woman is rational and commanding, the somewhat younger man emotional and easily swayed.

There is also humour drawn out of their attempts to each record on video a suicide note for their families. But each time one of them records a message and reviews the take, it seems fake, too staged, too unreal. August records a speech that seems authentic, until he reveals that he is quoting from a self-help book. As their attempts on video multiply the singularity of suicide, the playwright revels in the irony of performance: “That was a fake”, complains August. “But it looked real”, counters Julie.

We may learn from this—from the dependence of their actions upon the tools of domestic media production—something of the difficulty of dying in the age of digital replication. And from this production, which was unremarkably effective in its smooth enrolling of video mediation within its live theatricality, we may learn that what was once an experiment in performance innovation is now so fluent in its conventions that it can deliver classic European romance with charm.

imaGEN, Norway.Today, writer Igor Bauersima, translator Marlene Norst (commission, Goethe Institut Sydney), director-designer Justin McGuinness, performers Antje Guenther, Nathan O’Keefe, lighting designer Nic Mollison, sound designer Peter Nielsen; Bakehouse, Adelaide, Nov 4-18

Norway.Today is touring through Critical Stages (www.criticalstages.com.au) 2008-9. Directed by Glenn Terry working with a national advisory panel and supported by Arts NSW and the Theatre Board of the Australia Council, Critical Stages organises and manages tours of independent theatre productions that have achieved successful initial seasons.

Lara Tumak, Amelia Best, Roderick Cairns,
Katherine Tonkin, Austin Castiglione,
Grant Cartwright, Jet of Blood, InSpace

THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE’S STUDIO, DRAMA THEATRE AND PLAYHOUSE SPACES ARE INCREASINGLY SITES FOR THE UNEXPECTED, THE POPULAR AND THE CHALLENGING IN THE ARTS. MELBOURNE’S ARTS CENTRE IS NOW PROMISING SOME OF THE SAME WITH ITS FULL TILT PROGRAM. IN RECENT YEARS THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CENTRE’S INSPACE PROGRAM HAS FROM TIME TO TIME SUPPORTED EMERGENT AND INNOVATIVE ADELAIDE PERFORMANCE, BUT NOW THE WHOLE CENTRE LOOKS SET FOR MUCH NEEDED AND ADVENTUROUS PROGRAMMING THAT COULD ALTOGETHER REVITALISE IT.

The Centre has enjoyed some wonderful times in the 70s and 80s but outside the biennial Adelaide Festival, the annual Cabaret Festival and now Wagner’s Ring Cycle (which led to the rejuvenation and substantial improvement of one of Australia’s few great large scale theatre spaces) it had fallen into cultural torpor, its theatres in the dark for up to 40% a year. The new CEO, Douglas Gautier is determined to wake the slumbering giant into new life. We asked Gautier about his memories of the Adelaide Festival Centre when he worked there as an actor in the 1970s. Wagner’s Ring boomed from his adjoining office.

1970s

I remember it as it was when I first came here as a young actor when George Ogilvie was directing the State Theatre Company. Anthony Steel was running the place. He had the joint title the way I do; he ran the place artistically and administratively. I think that’s important. I remember lots of wonderful things happening here, musically and in theatre and dance. I remember people being around a lot, and Come Out and all those sorts of things. There were lots of ideas, lots of “mulch.” There was excitement and engagement—people coming here locally, nationally, internationally. There was a good sense of aspiration and a wonderful set of venues. And I still think we do have them, but it’s more about what goes in it than the buildings themselves. So, I remember that and I always counted myself fortunate to be part of it. It gave me great confidence when I started to look at other things elsewhere. I went from here to the UK to work with the BBC as a music and arts producer. I found some interesting things there but I also found a lot of it quite boring in contrast to some of the things I’d seen here in Adelaide. The mix here was good. Justin Macdonell was doing his stuff with New Opera and Myer Fredman; Wal Cherry was ‘going crazy’ up the hill at Flinders University; Robyn Archer was here doing stuff with Wal; George Ogilvie with Rodney Fisher and Helmut Bakaitis … all of that was a really good mix and there was a political commitment to it.

leading with programming

When I was tapped on the shoulder for this job, I said, well look, as far as I’m concerned, the best arts centres in the world are the ones that are program-led. If you look at BAM or the Barbican, Sydney Opera House and others we could name—the Kennedy Centre—there’s no question what the driving prerogative is. It’s programming and the centre itself has strong curatorial control, it works with home companies but it has a very large say in the programming that it does. Without that, you don’t have anything. You become like a garage or a hall for hire. So you’ve got to have a program as a start. And from that will come audience development, box office, sponsorship, the fusion, the yeast, all of that… Without it, you’re gone.

the content

On the one hand, it comes from the home companies. There’s a very strong commitment to have the State Theatre Company in here. It’s their home. State Opera do studio productions. All of that is with us, and their Ring Cycle. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra plays here more and more, especially for the big works. The Town Hall is fine for Mozart or whatever but if you’re going to do Mahler or Missa Solemnis or some of the big stuff, Brahms’ German Requiem, Elgar symphonies, this is where it ought to be. Increasingly, we’re doing that. I want to bring ADT and Leigh Warren back in here, Windmill and some of the small and medium companies. The home companies are important. But, at the same time, it seemed to me that we needed to have some real curatorial say about our own destiny. [Gautier exits momentarily to turn down the Wagner.]

seasons

So, we have looked at doing three genre seasons. One is Pivotal: World’s Best Dance. Essentially what we’re doing with that program is joining the dots. Australian Ballet is here (The Nutcracker), ADT (Devolution) and Leigh Warren (Wanderlust). So what else can we put in between? We’re bringing Sydney Dance Company’s Grand and Cloud Gate’s Cursive, from Taiwan (see p38). I had all three parts of Cursive in my Hong Kong Arts Festival program this year. This is the first part. It’s an extraordinary work about the company’s founder, Lin Hwai-Min, taking Chinese calligraphy and ‘moving’ it. It’s had a 30-year gestation and it is just astounding. Quantum Leap is in there too, the Australian Choreographic Centre’s youth ensemble from Canberra.

We want to make the program quite eclectic. It’s got to have some solid backbone for audiences we know we can count on for dance. But what we’re saying to that audience is, look you’ll come along to the Australian Ballet, why not try some other things? And we’re also trying to cross-market to our theatre audience by saying, “Dance covers myriad forms—take a look at what’s there.”

We also wanted to look at international theatre. In our CentreStage program we’re hosting A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Yohangza Theatre Company from Korea. You couldn’t get a ticket for it last year at Edinburgh. There’s a wonderful resurgence in Korean performing arts. We’re also doing Krishnan’s Dairy from New Zealand by a wonderful Indian family who live in New Zealand. It interweaves a story of the Taj Mahal with that of a New Zealand dairy. We’re bringing Theatre des Bouffes du Nord’s production of Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead, directed by Peter Brook. We’re doing Hamlet with State Theatre, which they wouldn’t have been able to do normally—you know what the deal is these days, no cast greater than six or whatever, And, of course, we’re presenting Snugglepot and Cuddlepie with Windmill.

On the music front we have the Sunday Spectrum series in the Artspace gallery—all crossover music; some of it is classical. I feel pretty strongly that we’ve got to get music into the mix. Womadelaide is a good example. But Womadelaide only happens four days of the year. We think there’s a big audience there. We’ve just got to tap it through our trans:mission program with New York guitarist Kaki King, oud player Dhafer Youssef from Tunisia, the Soweto Gospel Choir, the great jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, and sitar player Pubayan Chatterjee.

desination adelaide

Then there’s a whole summer program. For the last four or five years I’ve been coming back from Asia and sitting on the Tourist Board here and find the place dark over summer and Christmas. I hate that! Sitting on that Tourist Board I was thinking about how you brand—terrible phrase—a destination. I still believe the strong points of difference for Adelaide are probably wine and the arts. It’s also that sort of second city thing, like Chicago, or Edinburgh or Kyoto or Barcelona. That’s the thing we ought to really seriously go for. And if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to find points of difference. You have to make sure that the work is really first rate. You’ve got to have some ideas, which make for national leadership.

the asian connection

One of these ideas is the Ozasia Festival. Look, Australia and Asia are having all sorts of dialogue in terms of business and politics and what have you. Interestingly, I think in the visual arts there is some organised interaction, for example in Brisbane [in the Asia Pacific Triennial, see p8-9]. You can see it in the acquisitions policy instituted at the National Gallery in Canberra, first with Myer and then Ron Radford. But I couldn’t see any systematic approach to it in terms of showcasing and contrasting as far as the performing arts are concerned.

What I’m most interested in is where Australian and Asian artists collaborate and the work of Asian-Australian artists like William Yang, Lindy Lee…ADT, Leigh Warren and Flinders Drama Centre have had connections with Korea and Japan. We want to explore that systematically. Ozasia will happen in October with the Lunar Autumn Festival right smack in the middle of it. So we’re going to do a massive lantern festival that anybody can participate in.

guitar, guitar

Then we’ll have the Adelaide International Guitar Festival in November-December. The guitar is to the 20th and 21st centuries what the piano was to the 19th…The guitar has made its way into just about every kind of music; West Africans have made it their own and the Cubans. The idea started from discussions with David Spelman and his New York Guitar Festival (www.newyorkguitarfestival.org)—we’re going to bring all the festival’s artists out and add all the fine guitar players in Australia in a program ranging from classical guitar and orchestra to a final night tribute to Jimi Hendrix out here on the lawns with lots of musicians interpreting his work, and who are not necessarily rock ‘n roll players at all. We’ll have a battle of the bands. It’ll be a two-week festival: 20% content imported, the rest Australian.

inspace

The final piece of the jigsaw is InSpace, which we’re ramping up several notches. Why are we doing that? Well, I walked the city for the first couple of months and looked at all the other places where performance is happening in this city. And, with all due respect to those venues, I just don’t think there is an alternative performing arts centre in the way there is in Sydney or Melbourne, There isn’t one with any real firepower. So I said to Nick Skibinski, who runs InSpace, look, why don’t we take The Space here and rethink it and make it possible for the best of those small and medium-sized companies and individual artists whom we think should be seen by a wider audience and make sure that they have a home. There should be some kind of consistency, an audience thinking if I want to see some cutting edge work, something a bit different, something that’s going to really smack me between the eyes, I know if I go down to The Space most nights, there’ll be something on. So that’s what we’re going to do.

hong kong festival

It was a wonderful experience being Executive Director of the Hong Kong Arts Festival [Gautier was appointed 2002]. I’ve been associated with it since the late 70s when I first went to Hong Kong [to work for Radio Television Hong Kong; later as Director of Corporate Affairs for STAR Television; and then Deputy Executive Director of the Hong Kong Tourist Board] and I’d directed opera for it and some music theatre works in the late 70s and early 80s. I served on the program committee and subsequently the board. The festival has done some fabulous things: commissioned an opera from Tan Dun (Marco Polo); Chinese composers like Bright Sheng had their first major performances at that festival. While I was there we formed an Asian Arts Festival Association. The executive board was Shanghai Festival, ourselves and Singapore Festival and most of the festivals around the region, a crucible for commissioning new work. We commissioned work from China National Theatre which, despite its name, is probably one of the most interesting young companies in China today. That work ended up playing in Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Choreographers and composers from Korea, Thailand, Singapore, India, China and Japan came to work together. And the Hong Kong Festival was very much in the thick of that. The most interesting thing about the performing arts in Asia is that there is great confidence in their cultures because they’re all so deep-seated.

AT LONG LAST, DVDS OF CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE AND INTERVIEWS AND DOCUMENTARIES ABOUT OR WITH THEIR MAKERS FROM THE LAST 50 YEARS ARE BECOMING AVAILABLE TO DEVOTEES OF ART THAT CHALLENGES AND INSPIRES AS IT TURNS YOU UPSIDE DOWN AND SOMETIMES INSIDE OUT. ON THE DOWNSIDE, THE DVDS ARE EXPENSIVE COMPARED WITH FEATURE FILM AND DOCUMENTARY RELEASES AND NOT ALWAYS EASY TO ACCESS. THEY EMANATE FROM SMALL-SCALE PRODUCERS AND DISTRIBUTORS IN BERLIN, NEW YORK, TOKYO, and ALSO FREMANTLE WHERE AUSTRALIA’S CONTEMPORARY ARTS MEDIA HAS A LARGE CATALOGUE RANGING FROM GROTOWSKI TO JENNY KEMP AND FORCED ENTERTAINMENT. REALTIME WILL REVIEW NEW DVDS AS THEY BECOME AVAILABLE.

Foreman Planet

Interview with Richard Foreman
Director Kriszta Doczy
DVD, 2004, recorded 2003, 75 mins
Private $65; Schools $AUS200; Tertiary education $AUS250
Plus GST, packaging and post
Contemporary Arts Media
www.hushvideos.com

Foreman Planet is a 75-minute documentary DVD on the life and work of Richard Foreman—10 time OBIE award winning writer, director, designer and founder of his own influential Ontological Hysteric Theater, in New York.

“Consciousness… spiritual consciousness… to know the unknowable other…” is what Richard Foreman describes as the foundation and ultimate subject of his life and work. His is an investigation of the unconscious that is outside of culture and conditioning which is part of the world that we can understand. To achieve this his theatre attempts to dismantle all “reference points.”
Richard Foreman, Foreman Planet

Foreman equates his own investigations with what he calls a “negative theology,” which is to know God or the Other by knowing everything that is not God or the Other. His two roles of writer and director encapsulate this binary—as director he embodies the ego and performance of being in the world, while the writer remains in the realm of the unconscious. Foreman states that his talent is for “sensing this underlying, unattainable, continual eruption of new things from different directions that are constantly colliding… sensing a rhythm… sensing a responsiveness.” Finally, concerning both the language of his theatre and the language of the world, Foreman articulates that language is, for him, “a statement that is as if dropped to the bottom of a well, where its statement hits, and reverberates…” The language of his theatre attempts to deal with such reverberation.

The style and presentation of this DVD document—and the nature of the questions from interviewer Kriszta Doczy—amounts to more an introduction to the man and a little of his work than an in-depth study. Foreman describes in detail his creative impulses, defines his methodologies and talks about psychic freedom, realism, objects and influences. The sun slowly fades from afternoon to evening as Foreman sits talking in his New York loft. The high quality of Paula Court’s photographs of his productions give the DVD an elegance otherwise lacking. Sadly, for whatever reason, no filmed examples of his work are shown.

In response to the interviewer’s somewhat basic questions, Foreman’s discourses (sometimes rants) are full of linguistic colour and energy. The questions are often used as section titles, giving the DVD the feeling of an educational aid rather than an imaginative response to Foreman’s work. Nevertheless this DVD is a very valuable introduction to the thinking if not the work of an important American contemporary artist.

John Cage Performs James Joyce

Takahiko Iimura
DVD, 2005, recorded 1985, 15 mins, B&W
Private $US100; institutions $US400
www.takaiimura.com/home.html

Taka Iimura is a senior figure among contemporary Japanese artists and has been working with film, sound and video since the 1960s. He was one of several Japanese who, coming from a 20th century tradition of avant-garde intervention, contributed to the Fluxus (NYC) group in the 60s. As a senior figure (1912-1992), active experimentally since the late 30s, John Cage is the subject of a video portrait shot by Iimura in 1985, released in 1991 and made available on DVD in 2005.

Like many media artists, Iimura made recordings of contemporaries and their work. Alongside his making of artworks, portable video enabled documentation (and general note making) more economically than film. As the cycle of experimentation moves through another generation, glimpses of precursors through archive recordings of this kind help ground artists’ surviving words and artworks.

Cage had a long-standing fascination with the work of James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, forming the basis of many works, the best known of which is the Roaratorio—an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake. Commissioned by German radio and IRCAM in Paris the sound recording was completed in 1979, lasted about an hour and was a 62 track mix of the sounds referred to in the text, the text itself as prepared (using a mesostic system) and read by Cage, together with music by the traditional Irish musicians of the day.

Roaratorio is one of the classics of Cage’s oeuvre and in Iimura’s 15 minute recording Cage presents the core of the spoken part of the work. Its composition, like many of his other works, is aided by the I-Ching. Here he briefly explains that none of the sentences (sic) in Finnegans Wake are selected, only words, syllables and letters from different pages according to the chance decisions made by consulting the I-Ching and its representational hexigrams. In this way the 624 pages of the book are compressed into 12 pages of text, and it is one of these pages that we see him holding. He reads from it, sings it, then hustling close to the camera and its microphone, whispers it. At the bottom of the screen are superimposed, each time, two lines of sub-titling synchronised with the text he is using.

Iimura’s presence is felt but not seen, though we hear him responding to Cage’s explanations at the outset. Cage’s voice is not strong (he is in his seventies) and we strain to hear him against the noise of New York traffic in the background coming through the window of a sunlit room. His demeanour remains buoyant, at one point making light of a fumble he makes with a watch he is holding, an event incorporated into the flow of the tape. Like so many of his initiatives, the line between the artwork and its making is blurred, a state aided and amplified by Iimura’s collaboration in its making.

Fluxus Replayed

Takahiko Iimura
DVD, 2005, recorded1991, 30 mins, B&W
Private $US100; institutions $US400
www.takaiimura.com/home.html
oko Ono, Skypiece for Jesus Christ (1965)

oko Ono, Skypiece for Jesus Christ (1965)

In Fluxus Replayed, Taka Iimura documents an event in 1991 held to reproduce historical performances by NYC-based Fluxus artists of the 1960s. The S.E.M Ensemble together with some of the Fluxus artists themselves, perform works by Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Allison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Jackson Mac Low and Emett Williams. Iimura has edited together the sounds and images captured by two cameras as raw evidence of the goings-on with scant regard for the conventions of continuity editing, thus maintaining the document in the space between the moment of recording and that of viewing. Time compression is only obvious in Ono’s SkyPiece for Jesus Christ (1965) as the baroque instrumental ensemble are wound around with white paper, accumulated as a series of jump cuts to the point where their music is reduced to a series of bumps and scrapes before being man-handled off the stage, still attached to their chairs and instruments.

Again, Iimura gives some idea to younger generations of how these early precursors to contemporary performance art appeared to audiences, in a setting typical of the genre—church hall ecclesiastical architecture, painted walls, wooden floor. Though much of this work was sound-based, produced collaboratively for group performance using chance determinations and framed with a sense of the aesthetics of noise, the written scores or instructions for each piece may well have satisfied many members of the audience. Glimpsed in the background, some walking around, others squirming in their seats, the probably overlong evening has been bravely foreshortened into a useful 30-minute document by the man with the video camera.

IN BRANCH NEBULA’S PARADISE CITY, AN INTENSELY ABSORBING, LYRICAL, NIGHTLIFE STREET CULTURE FANTASIA, A YOUNG MALE TEASES HIS SKATE BOARD INTO AROUSAL. BATHED IN BLUE MOONLIGHT, OTHER FIGURES GRADUALLY ENTER, KEEPING THEIR DISTANCE, CIRCLING SLOWLY UNTIL, LIKE SOME EMERGENT LIFE FORM THEY BECOME ONE, AN ORGANIC BLEND OF SKATEBOARDER, BMX-BIKER, B-BOY, DANCER AND A RISK-TAKING ACROBAT FURIOUSLY SWEEPING AROUND THE PERFORMANCE SPACE.

The whole then quietly dissolves into a series of virtuosic solos, individuals filling in very real time in which slowness is as great a challenge as speed. The bike rider (Simon O’Brien) in near zero motion lifting his bike and himself into slow turning one-wheel stands. The skateboarder (Michael Mulhall) accelerates, riding the ramps at either end of the stage diagonal, hanging above them in long split seconds of suspension.

The board and the bike are prostheses with which their owners are utterly at one, while the vehicles of the dancers’ (Kathryn Puie and Anthony “Lamaroc” Lawang) are their bodies, every walking step fine tuned into subtle moves, precise articulations and sensual ripplings—life is dance. They all intersect and the mood grows playful and then risky as the trickster (Alexandra Harrison) instigates a series of interruptions—leaping onto the moving bike, letting it run her over—and takeovers. Her talent lies in plundering from others the tools of their talent, cruelty delivered with a wry grin as she orchestrates the almost surgical removal of board and then bike from their owners whose deprived bodies, frighteningly limp, slide slowly down ramps, emptied of life and meaning. She likewise removes and wears the clothes of a melancholy singer (Inga Liljestrom) leaving her only her voice and perhaps offering something else as suggested by the langorous mood of the pair’s final moments on the ramp.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/2/290_kg_paradise2.jpg" alt="Inge Liljestrom, Kathryn Puie, Michael Mulhall,
Anthony “Lamaroc” Lawang, Paradise City”>

Inge Liljestrom, Kathryn Puie, Michael Mulhall,
Anthony “Lamaroc” Lawang, Paradise City

Life returns, individuals kick into action, reclaim the tools of their being and their lone, ego-less virtuosities until the street gradually empties in a kind of entropy, the energy of the night wound down in a wave of defeats and little resurgences that mean nothing compared with what has been. Begin again. Branch Nebula’s Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters have created a work of poetic intensity out of everyday play, dance and physical theatre, making the most of oscillations between stillness and action and, above all and magically, of the strange time-space in between. It’s not a big picture work, more a moody, romantic portrayal of a small, intense cosmos. Characterisation is minimal, the bodies do the speaking, though Alexandra Harrison’s devilry benefits from pleasure visibly felt, and Bob Scott’s sound score is satisfyingly enveloping. The ‘paradise’ of the title is at first glance ironic but, despite their occasional falls from grace, this street in this city is mostly heaven for its denizens and for those who espy them. More and more audiences should be invited into this strange paradise.

the whistling man

PACT’s imPACT ensemble production for 2006 bristled with young confidence—strong collective playing, a stark, demanding political vision and a thoroughly integrated design. The effect, economically achieved, was of entering the huge white cube of a conference centre replete with lectern, mike, big screen and mysterious logo, with elaborate media operations boothed to one side. In the squared seating layout came the gradual realisation that people mingled with in the foyer and now sitting next to us were performers, suddenly very edgy citizens not at all happy with, deranged even, by the state corporation merger being sold them in words aptly borrowed from PM Howard. Formalities are constantly interrupted by people who insist on dancing, dropping their trousers, making embarrassing confessions or deviant political commentaries. Audience members are sometimes asked to give up their seats as crowd control swings into action and dissidents are relocated by an apparently benign but increasingly brutal organiser.
PACT, Whistling Man

What played out well in The Whistling Man was a suspenseful sense of impending chaos and the ever increasing vulnerability of those who object to an indiscriminate and irrational application of power, responding with their own apparent madnesses. Bizarre moments of uniformity erupt—sudden line dancing. Abstracted, pixelated faces on the screens gradually form the recognisable shapes of those around us heightening our sense of identification but also the paranoia induced by surveillance, including the spotlight that picks us out from time to time. Where The Whistling Man took us in the end I’m not sure, a climactic rebellion or a collapse into all-dancing dysfunctionality? Had the state’s induced madness destroyed it? Although the overall escalation of intensity was keenly felt, the framing of the corporate gig/conference/rally seemed, its desperately growing oppressiveness aside, to lose its shape and meaning. Perhaps that was the point but it left the performance without the charged political dynamic it initiated. Nonetheless, The Whistling Man had many strengths, not least a much more contemporary multimedia design than usual for PACT, one thoroughly pertinent to the performance’s concerns.

Branch Nebula, Paradise City, co-creator, director Lee Wilson, co-creator, designer Mirabelle Wouters, Sydney Opera House commission, produced by Performing Lines; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Nov 30-Dec 10, 2006, www.branchnebula.com

PACT Youth Theatre, The Whistling Man, performers 2006 imPACT Ensemble, media designers Spat+Loogie, Teik Kim Pok, sound designer James Brown, set designer Kenzie McKenzie, design mentor Imogen Ross, lighting designer Clytie Smith, movement consultant Chris Ryan, director Regina Heilmann, dramaturgy Bryoni Trezise; PACT Theatre, Sydney, Nov 29-Dec 10, 2006

ALTHOUGH MUSICAL IMPROVISATION CONTINUES TO BE A STRONG PRESENCE IN SYDNEY, THE PHYSICAL AND VOCAL WORK THAT HAD ITS HOME IN THE DEPARTED OMEO STUDIOS IN RECENT YEARS IS NOW LESS VISIBLE. THEREFORE THE IMPORTANCE OF IMPRO-LAB, WHICH FUSES MUSICAL, PHYSICAL AND MEDIA IMPROVISATIONS CANNOT BE UNDERRATED, NOT LEAST FOR ITS INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS EMBODIED IN THIS MOST RECENT OUTING WITH THE REMARKABLE VOICE OF VISITING JAPANESE VOCALIST AMI YOSHIDA AND THE SINE WAVE SOUNDS OF SAMPLER ARTIST SACHIKO M.

With these artists, Jim Denley (wind instruments), Chris Abrahams (keyboards) and Amanda Stewart (voice) completed the often dense if subtly realised aural dimension of the second of the Impro-Lab evenings at the Studio. The quiet presence of video artist Samuel James, sitting on the floor of the performance space with cameras, yielded some high impact imagery on two large screens.

Training his camera on small details of the space and slowly manipulating focus and intensity, James created transfixingly radiant abstract images that appeared to have organic lives of their own. They became doubly potent when performers entered their aura: Tess De Quincey locked into a scarily intense quivering, Tony Yap into tight sinuous revolutions, Yumi Umiumare richly expressive against James’ film noirish transformation of the Studio wall slatting into venetian blind-like shadows.
Jim Denley, Yumi Umiumare, Tess de Quincey, Impro-lab

Jim Denley, Yumi Umiumare, Tess de Quincey, Impro-lab

In the bravest flight of the night, Umiumare, like a figure straight out of Magritte, danced at length with a boot placed on her head. Of course, improvisation is by nature a hit and miss affair: the night’s two performances had their fine moments, mostly appreciated in the detail rather than as a large scale collaborative venture, with some occasional turn-taking tentativeness evident. Yoshida aside, whose croakings and squealings emanate alarmingly as if from a body possessed or diseased, the musicians were in danger of appearing to be playing an accompanying role. Jim Denley nonetheless provided a rich and vivid continuo. Although greedy for something more palpable from Abrahams and Stewart, I was nourished by many moments in the performances and was particularlytaken with the successful integration of live video.

live cinema

I asked Sam James to describe his approach to working on Impro-Lab. He wrote that he used three live cameras attached to a vision mixer which could mix between any two found images. He “wanted to keep it all analogue” to be authentic to the environment and to the improvisation: “Because of the difficulty or the vulnerability of using three lenses with different qualities and without effects there was a truthfulness to the space and the performance.” James prefers doing what he calls “live cinema” instead of working with a laptop and pre-recorded imagery, where he sees an “artificial impression of realtime image creation.”

James clearly enjoys the spontaneity of his approach: “With the live camera, as something happens the camera operator’s response is immediate and sometimes impulsive, and often much of the strain of the work is controlling the immensity of the outcome. It’s a very sensitive medium to use for live projection…there’s a visceral response with camera movement, control of focus, exposure and zoom to the immediate sound and physical environment…I see what’s there with each of the cameras and the images begin to feed off each other, creating a kind of transcendence, of the sum of the space.” James is determined to continue working this way after a year of part-time development of the approach and working with experienced improvisors.

Improvisation sometimes seems to come out of nowhere. However, at its best it’s the expression of relationships between artists who have worked together for extended periods and are highly reponsive to each other. Impro-Lab came of out of such contact with an intensive program of laboratories and residencies held in Japan and Australia in 2006 involving Asialink’s Neon Rise program, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and Critical Path in Sydney.

DeQuincey Co and Machine for Making Sense, Impro-Lab: Transparencies, dancers Tess de Quincey, Peter Fraser, Yumi Umiumare, Tony Yap, musicians Chris Abrahams, Sachiko M, Jim Demley, Ami Yoshida, Amanda Stewart, video Samuel James, lighting Clytie Smith; Australia-Japan Year of Exchange; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Nov 25

ON FEBRUARY 25 PERFORMANCE SPACE BEGINS A NEW LIFE, SINGING ITSELF INTO BEING IN ITS NEW HOME AT CARRIAGEWORKS WITH A FREE PROGRAM, “A CHORAL HOUSEWARMING TO CALL IN THE NEXT ERA.” THE WELCOMING WILL MAKE THE MOST OF THE NEW SPACE, INCLUDING THE MASSIVE MAIN FOYER WITH ITS HIGH BALCONIES AND MACHINE RELICS FROM ITS RAILWAY DAYS.

The opening performance season is a strong one featuring William Yang’s latest work, China, acrobat’s Smaller, Poorer, Cheaper (RT 76, p42) and Martin del Amo’s new work, Never Been This Far Away From Home. The visual arts program likewise promises much with new works by installationists par excellence Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy (a site-specific work onsite at CarriageWorks) and media artist Denis Beaubois.

martin del amo

Of German and Spanish heritage and trained in Japanese dancing arts of Butoh and Body Weather, Martin Del Amo has become a key figure in the Sydney dance scene. He was part of the 2006 Breathing Space tour of the UK and recently returned to the UK to perform again at Arnolfini in Bristol. Any del Amo work is bound to impress with its blend of intimate direct address and compulsively expressive dance propelled by an autobiographical impulse. For Amanda Card, writing about the dancer for Performance Space, he summarised his recent works: “My three earlier solo pieces investigated the direct physical and psychological impact of certain forces…In Unsealed (2004) I explored the destructive potential of loneliness. The threat of physical extinction was a theme in Under Attack (2005) and the relationship between trauma and obsession was key in Can’t Hardly Breathe (2006).”

We asked del Amo to reflect on the motivation for his new work. He wrote back, “Early in 2006, when starting to think about ideas for a new solo show, I found myself in the UK. It was very cold while it was very hot here. I was missing out on Sydney summer and I wasn’t happy about that. Feeling rather melancholy and slightly homesick, I went into a Virgin Megastore in Manchester. The song that was playing when I entered was extremely insistent and impossible to ignore as it repeated over and over: “Oh my God, I can’t believe it—I’ve never been this far away from home.” (Later I learned the song was Kaiser Chiefs’ “Oh My God.”) …Somehow the line not only reflected what I was feeling at that moment but also seemed to encapsulate the thematic territory I wanted to explore in my new show. My personal circumstances in the last five years (relocating from Berlin to Sydney, touring nationally and internationally) have heightened my awareness of notions of ‘home’, not only as a geographical location but also as an emotional and psychological state.”

The opposite to home is the unknown. But, what, wonders del Amo, is unknown these days: “All the blank spots that once existed on maps have been filled.” However, “Outer space, the ocean floor and underground are the new frontiers. And then of course there has also been the advent of what might prove to be the ultimate, uncharted territory—cyberspace, an incomprehensibly vast, inexhaustible playground for all intrepid adventurers and tireless explorers.”

Venturing into the unknown, says del Amo, “almost always means …one is soon faced by situations and conditions previously unimagined and unexpected. New rules apply, and formerly trusted survival strategies are no longer valid. What happens then?”

Just what unknowns del Amo and his audience will face in Never Been… remain to be seen, but the artist gives us some clues: “Spoken texts featured in the show include musings on the impenetrability of borders both real and imagined, a story about a mysterious white room in which objects appear according to rules unknown to the storyteller, and advice on how to escape from crocodiles.”

The other dimension to this unknown is, of course, making and showing the work. Del Amo commented to Amanda Card that “The very act of making a solo takes you ‘far away from home’, out of your comfort zone. Each new work and each performance must establish a relationship with a new place or a new audience…A solo work is the most direct and undiluted way of making work. The contract between a solo artist and their audience is very clear. …(You) are asking your audience for their undivided attention, but this attention has to be earned.”

For Never Been This Far Away From Home, Martin del Amo will be joined by regular collaborators Gail Priest (composer and live musician), Clytie Smith (lighting designer) and Virginia Boyle (costume designer) with Branch Nebula’s Mirabelle Wouters joining the team as set designer.

and much more…

Sydney rock oysters are still one of the city’s great pleasures although these days harvested far away. The first settlers found on arrival mountainous middens of shells left from hundreds of years of Aboriginal feasting, the lime from which soon became the mortar that long cemented the growing city’s buildings. Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy will, with helpers at a picnic at CarriageWorks on February 24, begin to shuck into shape a sculpture evoking this history in their new work, Primary Producers. It’s the first in a series of site-specific works curated by Performance Space Associate Director Sally Breen. There’s certainly a lot of site at CarriageWorks to get specific about in the future.

In Denis Beaubois’ The Terminal Vision Project the artist screens images from a small wireless camera dropped from a tall building: “The work explores the links between remote viewing and physical reality (passive consumption and experience).” Beaubois’ previous creations have included witty and insightful takes on surveillance as in his In the Event of Amnesia.

In his latest work China photographer-performer William Yang, born and raised in Australia, visits his cultural homeland, narrating the encounter to a score for erhu played live by Nicholas Ng. Smaller, Poorer, Cheaper offers a rare opportunity for Sydneysiders to see the famed acrobat with their highly skilled, stripped back performativity. The launch of media arts DVD label, demux, plus the first of a series of short works showings, Night Time #1, along with a number of residencies signals a fully functioning Performance Space, home at last.

The first Performance Space program at CarriageWorks provides a brisk, strong start to a new beginning with inventive, accessible works. This will doubtless be a period of adjustment: for artists and PS audiences one of new comforts, the opportunity to really focus on the work and also to reach out to many newcomers. RT

IN THE MANY WARS OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS—FROM WORLD WARS TO COLD WARS TO CULTURE WARS TO WARS ON REFUGEES, ON TERROR AND IRAQ—HOW HAS PERFORMANCE RESPONDED TO INTERNATIONAL AND CIVIL CONFLICTS? WHEN WAR USES THE TERM ‘THEATRE’ TO DESCRIBE ITS AREA OF OPERATIONS AND EFFECT, HOW MIGHT THEATRE EXAMINE THE FALLOUT OF WAR?
Chris Pitman and cast, Maralinga

Fallout, a day-length symposium investigating the intersections of theatre and war, aimed to analyse a range of performance practices operating within this territory, framed by questions of the ethical imperatives, political efficacy, logistical challenges and the aesthetic innovations of these practices.

Originally convened as an opportunity to reflect on Maralinga, a long-term interview-based verbatim theatre project by Paul Brown and collaborators, Fallout was expanded to draw together artists and scholars from Australia and the UK to discuss and debate a number of artistic projects in both countries that take war as their subject. These ranged from Australian works like Ngapartji Ngapartji, Through the Wire and The Wages of Spin, to the work of British companies such as Ice and Fire and The Exodus Project, sound artist Louise Wilson’s atmospheric audio interventions into abandoned military research sites in Scotland and the work of the Manchester University-based research project In Place of War, now in its third year.

“That Maralinga should be classed as a war zone struck me in the face”, said Paul Brown in his introductory remarks, but that it made sense as a “Cold War zone.” Far away, on the fringe of its former Empire and thanks to meek Australian compliance, Britain was able to flex its nuclear muscles, to demonstrate that it too was a force to be reckoned with in the new world order. Maralinga, recently shown as a work-in-progress at the Ettalong Beach War Memorial Club on the NSW Central Coast, confronts official blanket secrecy and denial by seeking unofficial, often anecdotal accounts from ordinary soldiers in extraordinary circumstances. The play distills interviews with a large number of British and Australian servicemen who worked on the tests between 1952 and 1967, most often young men off for the adventure of a lifetime, who had no notion of what they would be exposed to, and whose primary function in many cases seemed to be as guinea pigs—to discover not only the health effects of the tests, but also how soldiers might psychologically cope with and begin to normalise the atomic battlefield of the future. Fallout convenor James Arvanitakis remarked of Maralinga that it was an act of “highlighting broken bodies, and how they broke.” Not being the bearers of stories of glory and triumph, atomic test veterans have faced painfully extended battles with military and government authorities that continue to deny claims for compensation, partly on the basis that the soldiers were not deemed to have served in a war.

James Thompson, Alison Jeffers and Jenny Hughes discussed the work of In Place of War, appearing live from Manchester via video streaming. The project examines performances that occur within war zones, triggered by Thompson’s experience of working in war-torn Sri Lanka, where anthropological literature declared that no performance was occurring, despite this clearly not being the case. Much of the work of In Place of War examines performance being created by and for survivors of civil strife, both within the war zones themselves and in countries of refuge such as the UK. There were obvious links here with the recent explosion of refugee-themed ‘verbatim’ or ‘documentary’ theatre in Australia, explored elegantly by Caroline Wake. While Alison Jeffers’ paper focused on the performances that refugees themselves must produce in order to be recognised by state authorities as legitimate refugees, Wake focused on the ways in which refugee witnessing has been redeployed in recent examples of Australian theatre. As Paul Brown noted cautiously, “truth surrounds verbatim, but it would be a mistake to think that verbatim theatre is any more truthful than any other form of theatre.”

2006 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Maralinga tests. As the United States agrees to provide India with nuclear technology, covers munitions with radioactive ‘depleted uranium’, and begins developing a new range of ‘safe’ battlefield nukes and while Australia scrambles to satisfy China’s appetite for uranium and actively courts nuclear power as a ‘realistic’ and ‘clean’ answer to global warming, it is difficult to ignore the spectre of the Maralinga tests and the death, dislocation, and destruction they produced. As such, forums like Fallout act as both timely reminders of buried histories of injustice and as opportunities to gather critical mass to resist such atrocities recurring.

Fallout: A Symposium of Politics and Performance, convenor James Arvanitakis, School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales, Nov 22 2006; Maralinga. www.nucleartheatre.org; In Place of War, www.inplaceofwar.net

CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER EMIO GRECO AND DIRECTOR/DRAMATURG PIETER C SCHOLTEN HAVE A CREATIVE CHARTER THAT LOOKS TO THE BODY AS THE PRIMARY SOURCE FOR DRAMATURGICAL CONTENT. DOUBLE POINTS: ONE & TWO IN THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE’S ADVENTURES IN THE DARK PROGRAM WAS INDEED AN EXCITING EXAMPLE OF DANCING BODIES TAKING CENTRESTAGE, AND IT WAS SURPRISINGLY NOVEL TO SEE A MAJOR DANCE PERFORMANCE IN SYDNEY THAT CONCENTRATED ITS FOCUS ON CHOREOGRAPHY. MINIMAL DESIGN ELEMENTS, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF STRIKING SCORES AND KNOCK OUT LIGHTING DESIGN, PROVIDED JUST THE RIGHT SUPPORT FOR GRECO’S SOLO AND A DUET BY SUZAN TUNCA AND VINCENT COLOMES.
Emio Greco, Double Points: One

The medium-sized stage space of the Playhouse, with wings open, was modelled by light and finely articulated dance, the direct address of the performance fiercely established by the first solo. Greco appears upstage at the end of a corridor of light, like a straight stretch of highway connecting dancer and audience. The pathway is marked off with white lines so that the dancer’s movement outside this, when it inevitably comes, is somehow shocking as if he is moving into a void. Pools of light travel down the corridor to Greco who plays with the light, thrusting an arm to be seen.

The score, Ravel’s Bolero, doubles the visual thrust of the stage design. Greco’s slow build is hypnotic, the slithering and contained movement centring in the pelvis then with ballet arms and legs that can’t quite find the position, deep and somehow threatening second plies and rushes forward to the audience. I can’t help recalling Sylvie Guillem’s ridiculous performance to the same score at another Sydney festival with choreography by Maurice Bejart and the Australian Ballet male corps circling the ballerina high on a rostrum and thrusting their pelvises to the beat. The sexual intensity of Greco’s performance is both central and undermined; the end of the Bolero score is suspended as silence interrupts the climax and the sound of violent fireworks fills the space.

After the final, delayed notes of Bolero, Greco leaves the light to sit on a chair in a dark corner and Tunca enters at the back, loitering, facing upstage and off-centre. A sumptuous amber swimming pool of light forms, shifting and pulsing in dramatic contrast with the formal and ‘masculine’ lighting of the first state, the hard corridor rippling up and down the stage. The lighting prepares the space for a complete change in choreographic mood. Tunca balances on one leg, shifting the other around in the air. Greco cuts wildly across the stage, ‘upstaging’ her in the most blatant way, then leaves. Another male dancer, Colomes, enters and the duet begins.

The two dancers move together with the precision of birds in flight and this metaphor is cemented by bird-like gestures and calls in the score. The twitching, erratic, intimate movements shift into frenetic phrasing or mad spectacles—arms swinging around like synchronised motors. Then they seem suspended together downstage, as if the air has been sucked up and out of them. But there is constant movement in any of these states and the unison is breathtaking given the general fever pitch of their delivery and the physical differences between the two (Tunca towers over Colomes).

These works are some eight years old and yet seem so incredibly fresh, combining an intensely passionate delivery with wonderfully precise form. It has been a long time since I have seen a dance performance conjure such a rich world of invisible desires, forces and impulses, with so few exterior cues and such genuine physical bravado. Here’s hoping the Adventures in the Dark in dance continue.

Emio Greco | PC, Double Points: One & Two, choreography, direction, lighting, set and sound concept Emio Greco and Pieter C Scholten, dancers Emio Greco, Suzan Tunca, Vincent Colomes; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House Nov 21-Dec 2, 2006 www.emiogrecopc.nl/public

A TREND TOWARDS THE CONCEPTUAL AND THE INFLUENCE OF PRACTICES ASSOCIATED WITH THE VISUAL RATHER THAN THE PERFORMING ARTS WAS EVIDENT THROUGHOUT DANCE ON SCREEN, THE PLACE’S FESTIVAL OF SCREEN-BASED MOVEMENT, MIRRORING A SHIFT WITHIN THE SCREENDANCE WORLD AS A WHOLE.

The festival’s core programme of International Screenings was co-curated by Videoworks manager Gitta Wigro and Sarah Wood, with the latter having moved to screendance from a background in programming moving image works by visual artists.

As the festival last appeared in 2004, the two-year hiatus provided the opportunity for the screendance community in Britain to see how the form has progressed by reflecting on the range of activity on offer at this year’s event.

The six day programme of events opened with a masterclass screening, showcasing work created in a single week under the guidance of director Katrina McPherson, winner of the IMZ Dance Award, Monaco. McPherson emphasised the creative potential inherent within an improvisationally slanted approach and the desirability of placing movement content at the heart of dance work created for the screen. These thematic concerns were particularly well served in the ambitious layering of movement material and dialogue in Jemima Hoadley’s Red/White (2006). McPherson’s own work was also present throughout the week in the form of the ultra high concept Move-Me booth, co-originated with Simon Fildes, and co-produced by Ricochet Dance Productions, where anyone brave enough to venture inside could create their own recorded interpretations of choreography by, among others, Rafael Bonachela; Deborah Hay and Stephen Petronio.

Away from the main screening space, engagement with the conceptual was strongly in evidence as a strand of festival programming with installations in the form of choreographer/director Heather Eddington’s precision editing projected against Nyanda Yekway’s stark white sculptural environment in Curious, and Mark Dean’s Goin’ Back (The Birds/The Byrds x 32 +1, UK, 1997). In this hypnotically minimalist reworking of a close-up from Hitchcock’s The Birds, Tippi Hedren’s horror-stricken face moves continuously forwards then backwards from a barely perceptible rocking breath rhythm to an anguished semaphore of self-protective arm waving. Another striking convergence of the choreographic and the conceptual was evident in 365 Days—Reijo Kela’s video diary of 1999. The eponymous Finnish director/choreographer recorded his physical journey through the frame for (almost) each day of the year, playfully exploring and developing a movement vocabulary of hopping, rolling and running through a variety of locations and settings, involving a range of good-natured, if somewhat bemused, bystanders.

The festival’s Living Room area provided a library facility to view all submitted works, catch up with familiar faces and watch the One Minute Wanders program, with each piece rising to the challenge of time constraint to deliver a series of small marvels. Claudia Kappenberg’s Long Wave (UK, 2006) made use of archival footage projected on to the single female performer’s naked back. The simplicity and economy of the idea allowed access to an intimate world of texturally layered and body-based memory and association, with the undulatory movement of the figure echoing the journey of a giant sphere as it hugged the curve of a hip and rolled along the length of the spine. Mavin Khoo (UK, 2006), directed by Hazuan Hashim and Phil Maxwell and choreographed by Khoo himself, made strong use of a range of compositional elements. With the lone performer in silhouette against a riverscape location, the framing emphasised the verticals of the moving figure and the skyline set against the constant horizontal of the river and interweaving the peal of city bells with the ethereality of a counter tenor’s voice. In Caps (France, 2006), directed by David Olivari and choreographed by Karl Paquemar, a trick of perspective is played on the viewer. A seemingly flat, graffiti-covered surface is revealed as a space housing concealed entrances and exits and a frame-within-a-frame as two men enter, playing out an intense encounter using the movement language of supported fall and recovery with sudden shifts of positioning and dynamics visible against the outer and inner edges of the screen space.

Within the festival’s International Screenings, the trend towards the conceptual was particularly apparent in Miranda Pennell’s You Made Me Love You (UK 2005) in which a group of teenage performers are filmed as a sea of faces, filling the frame, locked on to and following the single take, studio set, stop-start journey of the camera like a shoal of particularly attentive fish. The piece’s minimalist movement vocabulary of walking, stopping, turning and swaying is suggested mainly by the sound of moving feet and sudden silences as the striving to maintain an unbroken relationship of performer gaze to camera/viewer becomes the central focus of the work.

Catherine Maximoff’s interpretation of Russell Maliphant’s choreography in Voyage (France, 2006) demonstrated that the particular skills necessary to translate stage-based dance work to screen require to be categorised as a specific choreographic practice in their own right. The work achieves a balance between the use of wide shots to reveal the whole body, thus recreating the live viewing perspective, interspersed with more intimate closeups, providing a sense of quietude and interiority. Sequences are filmed from alternating perspectives, contrasting front and back views, and music with ambient sound. A contact duet is filmed from above, intercut with extreme closeups of near abstracted torsos and arms, punctuated by the sound of the dancers’ breath.

In Match (Ireland, 2006), directed by Dearbhla Walsh and choreographed by Fearghus O’Conchuir, the camera functions almost as an extra performer, transforming an intensely physical contact duet into a trio by the extent of its choreographic engagement. Location is also used to strong effect, as Ireland’s (deserted) national stadium provides an epic spatial arena and a charged cultural context for a male-to-male encounter exploring combat and competitiveness, with moments of tenderness and physical intimacy ultimately transcended by the will to win. The camera work mixes aerial shots with extreme close-ups, capturing an interlocked grappling of arms from beneath and following the trajectory of a movement arc with as much physical intensity as the performers themselves.

The festival concluded with Next Up, curated by Wigro and IMZ winner Rachel Davies, presenting a new generation of screendance practitioners and where conceptually driven work again left the strongest impression. Maya Deren wrote that reverse motion can be used to convey the impression of “an undoing of time”, and in Jan Steinum’s Highway of Love (Norway, 2006), a patterned tracery of footprints visible on a flat, snow-covered rooftop were gradually and magically erased by the backwards journey of a single male performer wearing red patent thigh boots and little else, carefully cradling a dance partner in the form of a blow-up doll. In Philippa Thomas’ Electric Desert (UK 2006) the superimposition of motion-blurred Las Vegas neon over black and white footage of a young male transvestite created a memorable and otherworldly visual landscape. Manipulating a Loïe Fuller-like outfit of billowing white sheets, the central figure’s face, revealed in extreme close-up, appeared to follow the progress of the coloured lights, and the absence of sound served to place the work outside of a conventional linear timeframe, drawing the viewer into a heightened experience of visuality.

Bill Viola wrote of the shift in popular perception accompanying the realisation that “the twentieth-century artist is not necessarily someone who draws well, but someone who thinks well.” Dance On Screen 2006 provided ample evidence that in the 21st century the screen can function as a site of expression for dance film practitioners who think well too.

Dance on Screen Film Festival, The Place Videoworks, London, Oct 30-Nov 5
www.danceonscreen.org.uk

IN NOVEMBER OF 2006, I FOUND MYSELF IN AN EXTRAORDINARY PLACE. I WAS STANDING ON A DUSTY MOUNTAINSIDE IN NORTH WEST ARGENTINA, AND I WAS PRACTISING LOOKING. THERE WAS A HUGE VIEW AHEAD OF ME: LAYER UPON LAYER OF MOUNTAINS, THE FURTHEST PEAK CAPPED WITH SNOW. I WAS TINY, LIKE A SPECK OF DUST. THE SKY WAS FALLING AND AS I LOOKED, I FELT I WAS RISING AND NOTHING MATTERED. AND EVERYTHING MATTERED.

I could feel the wind on my skin, and hear the silence, and taste the salty tears that were suddenly running down my face. This was one moment in a month-long screen dance research period. I’ll rewind a bit and tell you how I got there.

Exactly one year earlier, I had visited the Festival Internacional de Videodanza de Buenos Aires, to teach a workshop and to present my work. On arriving back in the UK, I was offered the opportunity to return to Argentina on an Arts Council of England international research fellowship. The fellowship was supported by two organizations—South East Dance Agency based in Brighton, England (my home town), and VideoDanza BA in Argentina. They decided to extend the project by offering research time to two Argentinean artists, filmmaker Alejandro Areal Velez and choreographer Sophia Mazza, who both worked on separate research projects. We all came together to share our experiences during the 2006 Videodanza festival in Buenos Aires (Nov 28-Dec 3). These discussions were mentored by Brighton-based screen dance artist Magali Charrier.

At the outset I was asked to write a statement of intent regarding the parameters of the research and it seemed vital that I should engage with something in Argentina that I could not have access to in the UK. Coming from the cluttered and crowded environment of South East England, I proposed going to the huge, open, empty spaces of Argentina. I wanted to explore the possibility that my own creativity could be affected by unfamiliar textures, colours and scale, and that my own sense of real space and time, and recorded space and time, could be influenced by the geographical space that I work in. This was the starting point from which I wanted to explore a sense of the macro and micro, in terms of landscape, body in landscape and movement in relation to distance. This is how I found myself on this incredible mountainside.

Silvina Szperling, director of the Videodanza Festival, found me two perfect travelling companions—photographer Alejo Schatzky and dancer/videomaker Paula Zacharias, and together we travelled through salt fields, across mountains, through forests of giant cacti, over vast plains and past enormous, crumbling glaciers.

Some of the research that I undertook investigated my physicality in relation to the environment, and how awareness of it could affect my camera practice. My interest in combining video and dance practice is informed by a physical curiosity. I had questions regarding vision and habits of looking. How long can I look before I look for something, before I make judgements based on taste and aesthetics? By paying attention to my looking, will I see more? Will I see differently?

Then I found myself searching for the work that was specific to each particular environment. Dance (in its formal and theatrical sense) can seem inappropriate when placed within a non-theatrical setting. Yet in some spaces, we would chance upon happy accidents, when Paula would move and the light and the heat and the dust and the camera settings would combine with that movement to create dances in which the lines between the body and its surrounding environment became porous.

The movement that I requested from Paula was based around quite practical tasks. For example, “Move the dust with your feet and hands”, and Paula would interpret as she saw fit. Now I have this material in an edit suite, I find that the answer to my questions to do with placing the dancing body in a landscape is to remove the body entirely, and just leave the dust mysteriously lifting and falling. I look at footage of Alejo swimming in a roadside pool. I made a choice to shoot it out of focus. It looks smudged and although it is clear that something is disturbing the landscape, it is impossible to identify exactly what landscape and what is disturbing it. Instead we see an abstract dance of colours and flecks of light.

It remains a puzzle to me—the invention and placing of dance in the landscape—yet I am interested in some of the footage that resulted from the attempt to solve the puzzle for myself. I hope that the footage will be showing up in some form at screen dance festivals in 2007.

On returning to Buenos Aires, it became clear that Alejandro, Sophia and I had all approached this question of research in very different ways. Alejandro had set up a video shoot in order to explore questions of “connection and disconnection” in human relationships. He will edit his footage into a 12 minute film. Sophia was working with filmmaker Cayetana Vidal to explore a narrative they had invented that was set in a swimming pool. We found ourselves discussing the nature of research. How do you know when you have stopped researching and started doing something else? When does that ‘something else’ become ‘production’?

Maybe in an ideal world we could all place our work in the context of research, all of the time, in order to give ourselves the safety net of failure. On the occasions that I have not named my work ‘research’ I can find myself disappointed by the outcome. I take fewer risks, because of my perceived need to succeed, and therefore the work can fail to surprise or delight me.

Our conversations spilled out into the public domain of the festival, as all three of us were asked to make presentations on the work that we had undertaken. I realised that it is rare to have showings of work in progress or discussions regarding research or process at screen dance events, although these are common within live dance contexts. In screen dance it can all seem set and final. Done and dusted.

The value of a trip such as this is clear—if art imitates life, then it is essential that artists have a life for their art to imitate.

I just wanted to let you guys know that The Fromagerie will be closed after the end of February, and that The Old Flour Mill Building as it is will be no longer after March 15. We will be running a 3-night extravaganza March 1-3 to celebrate what the space was and mourn its passing. It’s called Past, Present, Future (one for each night).

Rosalind Crisp founded the space as Omeo Dance Studio in 1996, and after her move to Paris, The Fondue Set took over in late 2005 renaming it The Fromagerie. I think the closure will come as a big loss to the Sydney dance scene. The list of people who have worked in the space over those 10 years is massive. It has always served as a place where people can practice or perform works without curation or application forms. I suppose I'm also wondering about how the loss of a space like The Fromagerie impacts on the huge deal of the CarriageWorks.

The Fondue Set are going to attempt to look for another space, but we think it will be difficult to find somewhere so local, big and cheap and with a similarly lovely and supportive landlord. We will try! I was recently in Berlin (through a Goethe Institut Stipendium), where I attended a forum on studio spaces for dance in which people were lucky enough to be able to talk about an ideal. I came back full of enthusiasm for what our space could become, only to be faced with our eviction notice… This is the reality in Sydney! We will send on further information about Past, Present, Future very soon with open invitations for everyone who has ever performed there to be a part of it.

“Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.” Chunky Move

Glow is an intimate, 26-minute virtuosic solo dance work that excited Melbourne critics and audiences with its magical ‘biotech’ evocation of the human body as an evolving creature. The work, created for Chunky Move by artistic director Gideon Obarzanek and German interactive software creator Frieder Weiss with music and sound design by Luke Smiles, offers audiences, looking down on the dancer, the chance to experience the very latest in the perceptual interplay between artist, technology and audience. Glow is part of The Studio’s program for the first half of 2007 which also includes Meow Meow, Unreasonable Adults, Yumi Umiumare and Antje Pfundtner.

AS I SIT IN MY BRIGHT-BOX, DAY-LIT ROOM, LOOKING OUT ON THE GREENERY OF THE GARDEN, I DO WHAT ALL REVIEWERS DO: REFLECT ON THE SPACE BETWEEN THE LIFE WE LIVE AND PERFORMANCES WE SEE. LIKE ALL THINGS OF SIGNIFICANCE, THE PIECE I’VE SEEN ALMOST BY CHANCE, BY A RARE ACT OF GRACE AT THE AUSTRALIAN CHOREOGRAPHIC CENTRE, QUESTIONS AND SEWS STITCHES BETWEEN ONE PLANE AND ANOTHER, BRIGHT-BOX TO BLACK, OUTSIDE TO INSIDE HOURS.
James Cunningham, Mirage

I remember Mirage as an act of bravery, which begins with the challenge of remapping the scope of movement after serious injury. It ends as a gift—a message of potentials and transformations. A deep reflection on human re-creative capacity.

James Cunningham, a dancer who initially trained in Adelaide in the late 1980s, almost totally paralysed his left arm in a motorcycle accident in 1992. In many ways, Mirage is the culmination of his search to restore both self-identity and movement capability, but as a theatrical experience it amounts to much more than this narrative journey.

The company Igneous, formed in 1997 by the partnership of Cunningham and Suzon Fuks, a Belgian multi-disciplinary artist, has produced several major works and showings. Moving from their pivotal productions, Body In Question (1999) to Thanatonauts: Navigators of Death (2003-4) and Liquid Skin (2005), dance video works and international workshop collaborations, Mirage bears witness to an evolution and maturing of their practice, and the transformation of the idea of “the body” as a singular site and subject.

Body In Question housed the emotionally moving narratives of accident and recovery. Cunningham’s personal story was written like a diary on the video-screen. His manouevrings of a life-sized puppet, unfolding from his knapsack, seem now to be preliminary investigations into the way mind and body form and re-form through processes of mirroring, unfolding and re-patterning.

Mirage takes those ideas into a more abstracted realm that is paradoxically even more immediate for the viewer. This is the extraordinary contradiction of arts practice: the deepest re-patternings, interior to the body are individual yet also profoundly transcendent of personal story.

Alison Ross’s installation design houses a mirror-pool. Cunningham’s body and joints kiss water as his movements recount the journey from paralysis through mirroring back into movement. This is the principle of the mirror-box, a discovery of neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran: through mirroring what still moves, the body can unparalyse. This restorative process both questions the “reality” of permanent injury, as well as the “reality” of the body. If an act of looking can re-move permanent paralysis, is the body’s self-identity thus also an illusion, a mirage? Glimmers in the water multiply the performer, but also catch the lookers looking. The meshed pyramid which Cunningham lifts and manoeuvres is a strange prop—a prophylaxis, rather, serving as screen for projected body-images, sometimes also a hiding-cave, also an MRI machine, but always more than any of these. Critically, the multiplied images reflect on another of Ramachandran’s discoveries: that the capacity to reach across sense-impressions (synaesthesia) is the very element that helps humans to evolve, to move beyond what is. This is where Mirage critically, joyfully perhaps, reflects on the deepest artistic and neurological recognitions.

There is thus a significant transformation of the dualistic self/other, puppet/dancer relationship of Body In Question to a triangular relationship between I/you/the transcendent or in-between. Sound artist Andrew Kettle points to hermetic traditions (specifically, the Tabula Smaragdina: “The Stone is One . . . out of one substance the Sages obtain our remedy”) and the significance of metaphysics to his compositional process. His contribution is “a tonal meditation on anatomical measurements of the dancer’s body transmuted through prayer.” No sound is literal, and yet one senses the bodily form out of which the composition has evolved. Visually, Morgan Randall’s lighting design allows the performer’s body to dissolve and re-solve. Alchemical re-making.

At its heart, this is a work that actually cares for and about the body, for and about the performer, but also the spectator/audience, and in a larger sense, the human condition, allowing for the fact that seeing, listening, witnessing, are themselves alchemical processes. I felt an exhilaration in watching this work.

And that rare experience: what it costs to watch, and think and be in watching, is rewarded by a message much larger than the performance.

Igneous, Mirage, dance performance and installation, directors Suzon Fuks, James Cunningham, performer, choreographer James Cunningham, video artist Suzon Fuks, set design Alison Ross, sound artist Andrew Kettle, lighting Morgan Randle; Australian Choreographic Centre, Canberra, Nov 16-18, 2006. www.igneous.org.au

TWO TERMS EMERGE WITH PARTICULAR PROMINENCE WHEN TALKING TO CHOREOGRAPHER-DIRECTOR LIN HWAI-MIN ABOUT HIS TRILOGY DEALING WITH CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY, CURSIVE, CURSIVE II AND WILD CURSIVE. THESE ARE “BREATH” AND “SPACE.” THE EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION OF THE BODY AND OF SPACE, OF VESSELS FILLED WITH ENERGY AND EMOTION AS THEY SWELL TO THE POWER OF PROPULSIVE RHYTHMS OR MEDITATIVE PAUSES—THESE ARE THE THEMES OF LIN’S THREE-PART WORK WITH TAIWAN’S CLOUD GATE DANCE THEATRE.

Cloud Gate has toured the Australian festival circuit several times (Adelaide 1998, the Olympics 2000, Melbourne 2003 and Brisbane 2006) and is returning in 2007 to present Cursive (Adelaide Festival Centre) and Wild Cursive (Perth International Arts Festival). Lin’s conceptualisation of the trilogy is broadly Expressionistic. Rather than “imitate the shape” of various calligraphic characters using “gestures and movements”, Lin’s approach is based on “the essential thing which the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy and movement share.” This essential, expressive character is to be found in a particular sense of energy and how this energy is channelled and manipulated—as in calligraphy and the physical training method of Tai-Chi Dao-Yin.

Calligraphy and much of Chinese courtly aesthetics developed in conjunction with the religious and philosophic systems of Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, in which calligraphy and landscape painting were designed to complement and encourage a meditative state comparable to that of Tai-Chi itself. Where Lin speaks of energy, he is referring to the Chinese concept of chi, in which the exchange of force between objects, individuals, spaces, and regions of the body must be in a harmonious state of dynamic flux for true beauty and mastery to be realised. Painting, writing and dancing become, in a sense, a form of meditation. The most visible manifestation of chi within the body is breath. As a result, much of Tai-Chi and Lin’s choreography revolves around different forms of embodiment produced through inhalation, exhalation and sustained breath—including the dancers’ vocalisations for the final, freest work in the trilogy, Wild Cursive. Lin notes that this piece is “about calligraphy, but perhaps in the end, it is even more about breathing. The whole stage is breathing.”

This model of the universe in a state of dynamic flux also influenced Western aesthetics. John Cage developed his approach to chance and silence after consulting the Daoist I Ching (The Book of Changes), a text which both Merce Cunningham and Lin drew upon for their dance. Lin’s reference to “the stage breathing” also allies his style to associated trends such as Performance Art and Actionism. In all of these forms, art became increasingly associated with a sense of process—with a form of cosmic evolution or immaterial, temporal development which could only be fully manifest through durational activities—rather than with a more contained concept of art such as that represented in a completed painting.

In language reminiscent of the Happenings of 1960s New York, Lin explains that “The set of Wild Cursive is like an installation. There are 10 reams of white paper. They take turns being lowered in or taken out.” Ink-dispensers are located above each sheet so that “the audience sees how the ink travels down the paper. It took almost 10 months to develop, because with ordinary rice-paper, with gravity, ink will take only 30 seconds to travel through 10 metres of paper. We had to create a special kind of paper which makes it harder for the water and ink to travel, so that it would produce these different kinds of shading. We also use different mixtures of water to make it come out light or black.” Just as the dancers’ sinuous, abstract movements create a dynamic interaction between the empty spaces on stage and those which the bodies occupy, so the falling ink produces a complicated interplay of positive and negative space. It is in this sense that “the whole stage is breathing.”

Lin notes that “in Chinese landscape painting, the blank space is just as important as the spaces occupied by the ink. So there are gaps or empty spaces between the movements, and empty spaces on stage”—just as there are aesthetically significant regions of white on the abstract, inked sheets hanging into the venue. Lin observes that Wild Cursive is particularly concerned with the calligraphic style of Kuang Chao or “what is considered the pinnacle of all forms of calligraphy, in which the writer does not have the mission of conveying a meaning through the characters. Instead, they are distorted into an individual expression. They are abstract, almost like a Jackson Pollock painting.” Like Pollock’s 1950s works, the choreography and the ink mediate between the charged void of the blank canvas, brimming with potential, versus powerful marks of personal expression.

Given Lin’s interest in creating evocative gaps between an affectively resonant stage space and equally emotive moving bodies, it is unsurprising that—like Cunningham—Lin draws on the aesthetics of John Cage. Cursive II is accompanied by Cage’s recordings, while Wild Cursive is performed to various sampled sounds (“ocean waves breaking onto a rocky beach, wind, cicadas, temple bells”) which Lin claims is “even more organic than Cage’s own music.” Many of Cage’s works include lengthy periods of near or total silence, as well as unusual timings and extended pauses. “The reason I chose Cage,” Lin explains, “is because of his energy. His breathing is so long. So we found a very comfortable stream in his music: long breathing. It goes on, and on and on. There is no metric form, as in 1,2,3, 1,2,3, that kind of rhythm. In the wait, you observe and you approach the music, just as you do in calligraphy—which is really an expression of how you feel. So we can draw things out. Cage’s music allowed us that space.”

Some critics have suggested that modern art should be read as reflecting an interplay between the so-called “unformed” and actual form itself, between a chaotic dissolution of art and an attempt to clearly delineate abstract shapes, lines, colours and aesthetic approaches (as proposed by the curators of the 1996 Pompidou exhibition Formless: A user’s guide). Given Lin’s interest in the dynamic relationship between those lines created by bodies and by brushstrokes and those empty spaces between these lines, one must ask if there is in fact a particular aesthetic form at play in these pieces, or if Lin’s choreography also dissolves into a kind of irresolvable haze of ink and paper akin to Pollock’s densest stains. Lin is however adamant that there is a recognisable form governing the trilogy. Viewing Cursive II, it is apparent that, for all of Lin’s interest in calligraphic abstraction and Tai-Chi, he remains committed to those classical forms which he was trained in—notably ballet and various styles of Asian courtly dance. While Lin Hwai-min is reluctant to describe his aesthetic in terms of such bodily shapes and poses as one finds in classical dance, he nevertheless concedes that his choreography is concerned with “the spiral. Even in ballet, while it’s very straightforward and direct, when you are lifting up an arm, the energy starts from a circular movement, and you come out with a spiral inside—just like a bullet comes out from a gun.” It is this sense of spiralling energy that underpins Lin’s aesthetic vision.

Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Wild Cursive, His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth Festival Feb 19-21; Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Cursive, Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Feb 13-14 www.cloudgate.org.tw

ash keating

Melbourne visual artist Ash Keating integrates his commitment to environmental issues with his art strategies. These vary from process-based projects, public art and performance to murals and installations. His stoush with Juliana Engberg early last year over the artist’s aesthetic “interception” of black and white sticker and vinyl text waste from ACCA’s Barbara Kruger exhibition (“an attempt to draw attention to the collusion of artists and art institutions in our environmental crisis”, according to Keating) chalked up some column inches. Grist for the mill for the artist who, as it turns out, recycles newsprint creatively too, finding a use (where no other can possibly exist) for copies of the Murdoch freebie, mX (30,000 of them) in yet another performative installation (250 Hours Work for One Person) in which he cut out the shapes of 6500 Australasian gannets from their pages to later release in a gallery.

The video of the performative removal of the ACCA waste—now officially a work in progress—has been exhibited on a monitor placed within the pile. Adding Commonwealth Games detritus to the mix, Keating later materialised as a performative waste creature within it. Documentation of this incarnation was exhibited in January in the Dark Portraiture exhibition at Perth’s Centre for Contemporary Photography’s curated by Kieran Stewart in an enterprising strategy to show the work of Melbourne artists in the first three years of their practice outside their state of origin.

Ash Keating recently joined 11 other Australian & New Zealand artists in Trans Versa at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago, Chile, as part of The South Project—a Craft Victoria based initiative. As well as releasing his newsprint gannets in the gallery he also collaborated with local artists in creating an installation protesting the proposed relocation of the Pascua Lama gold mine.

In his new work, Parched, Keating has painted a wall of water on the timber panels erected on the site of Melbourne’s Mockridge Fountain, de-activated due to current water restrictions. The artist intends to regularly revisit the site over the three months of its installation (Jan 6-March 31) to record the falling water levels by over-painting with lime paint, “evocative of the mud of drying dams” and reflecting the depletion of Victoria’s precious water reserves over the summer period.

“In a subtle, understated way Parched aims to remind us of our precarious relationship with nature. We may be able to paint water, but we can not conjure up the real thing.”
Rat Woman from Pavmodern is Added Value

mary lou pavlovic

Always interesting to receive a missive from Mary Lou Pavlovic announcing her latest guerilla artwork. Pavlovic has used billboards and skywriting and staged performances outside several of Melbourne’s leading art venues questioning the relationship between art and sport. In 2001 she famously recreated, amongst a series of ironic works, the execution bed of Timothy McVeigh and encased the structure in tiny, hand-painted balls to resemble hundreds and thousands. Having decided to include this work in a segment on the artist, ABCTV then took a swift detour and censored it. In retrospect, says Pavlovic, “I couldn’t believe when I got back to Australia after living ten years abroad what passed for serious political art in the commercial scene here. If it was genuinely confronting it didn’t get a look in (Andre Serrano at the NGV being closed down a good example.) But if it was aestheticised in some way—watered down—then middle-class people seemed to be genuinely moved because they could cope.” Pavlovic also organised the 2004 Jake Chapman Lecture tour after the National Gallery of Australia’s refusal to take the Sensation Exhibition in which Chapman’s work featured.

In January Pavlovic’s Pavmodern Museum launched its brand, taking a full-page advertisement in the January-March edition of Australian Art Collector magazine, the issue, which annually features “Fifty Most Collectable Australian Artists.”

“The work is an artist’s comment about outside systems that place value on artists and their work, on artworld hierarchies … dodgy art world politics…” Pavmodern Museum is an attempt to define a space where these sorts of issues can be raised. A museum without walls.” (Pavmodern press release)

Apparently, there has been an unprecedented demand for the Collector since investors got wind you could pick up a Pavlovic for $18.95. RT

QUÉBEC ARTIST DIANE LANDRY’S WORK INVOLVES EVERYDAY OBJECTS AND GADGETS, BUT SUGGESTS A LONG-HELD INTEREST IN THE ORIGINS AND POWER OF MOVING PICTURES, AND EXPOSES THE WAY CINEMA HAS CHANGED THE NATURE OF PERCEPTION.
Ecole d'aviation (Flying School), Diane Landry

Ecole d'aviation (Flying School), Diane Landry

For her performance, Morse Alphabet Soup, at RMIT University Union, Landry set up two turntables in front of the stage. Each is a large, slowly revolving pizza tray, on which she places a variety of objects in a planned sequence. A single bright light located behind each turntable projects a silhouette of the otherwise innocuous object on the turntable onto the auditorium’s blank cinema screen, creating a shadow puppet theatre. The objects—stencils used for lettering, egg-timers, drinking glasses, toy buses, dolls, a tiny bicycle and toy animals including rats positioned to suggest copulation—are selected for their symbolic power. Placed on the trays for a few seconds to a minute in a series of shifting superimpositions and juxtapositions, they create a darkly symbolic language addressing broader social realities.

Each turntable is equipped with a handmade phono arm and a stylus as large as a sewing needle in contact with the turning tray, sending a scraping sound through a multi-channel mixer to the auditorium’s PA. Landry complements the imagery by varying the sound-mix from screeching to moaning—it’s as if society is grinding itself to death. Parodying a DJ or a VJ, she blends objects, light and sound into a powerful cinematic experience. In her artist’s statement she discusses how projecting a silhouette to enlarge an object amplifies its presence and meaning and prompts a re-evaluation of the material world. She coined the phrase ‘oeuvre mouvelle’ to describe her work, noting that, like a piece of music, the work unfolds over a period of time and cannot be absorbed quickly.
Je ne trouve pas ma montre, elle ne s'est pourtant pas envoiée' (I can't find my watch yet it hasn't flown away)

Je ne trouve pas ma montre, elle ne s’est pourtant pas envoiée’ (I can’t find my watch yet it hasn’t flown away)

Landry’s exhibition at Bus included three works that further attest her passion for robotics but also explore the nature of perception. Ecôle d’aviation (Flying School) comprises 20 umbrellas that open and close, the lights beneath them casting shadows like slow-moving clouds on the white gallery ceiling. Accompanied by a gentle sighing from the little electrically driven air pumps that activate each umbrella, this slow, mechanical unfolding of silhouetted forms projected into the room becomes a metaphor for our programmed, repetitive lives.

Je ne trouve pas ma montre, elle ne s’est pourtant pas envoiée (I can’t find my watch yet it hasn’t flown away) comprises 6 electrically-driven salad spinners mounted chest-high on a wall, each activated by a movement sensor and revealing, through a tiny aperture, glimpses of fragments of photos of someone going about her daily routines. In her notes Landry refers to the early 19th century parlour device, the Zoetrope, which preceded the birth of cinema and which demonstrated persistence of vision, or how the eye is tricked into seeing movement in a rapidly changing sequence of still images. The viewer gleans a ‘story’ from the imagery in the salad spinners that, ironically, is only triggered by the movement sensors. Landry’s use of vernacular found objects such as toys, salad spinners, surveillance devices and umbrellas, reconnects us to the everyday world and also shifts the work away from high art and cinematic traditions.

But perhaps Diane Landry’s most engaging work is Le bouclier perdu (The lost shield), a video of a woman (the artist) apparently tossing and turning in disturbed sleep on a couch. The video is constructed from a series of still photographs shown in a sequence of superimpositions and dissolves that disrupt the normal cinematic illusion of seamless movement. This artificial portrayal of broken, dreamy sleep becomes a metaphor for the inauthenticity of photography and cinema.

By recalling the work of moving picture pioneers such as Muybridge and the Lumière brothers, Landry’s work reveals how the moving image has been used to structure our perceptual awareness and understanding. Her work questions the impact of the persistence of vision to address the nature of visual comprehension and its relationship with emotional memory, highlighting our tendency to imbue the imagery that flashes before our eyes with narrative meaning and intent. By showing us how easily illusions can be created, we are prompted to see through our visual world and to acknowledge that the ‘truth’ we deduce from what we see may be a trompe l’oeil, a projection of our emotional state or a figment of our imagination.

The RMIT evening also included a performance by sound artist Ernie Althoff, a sound/video performance by Snawklor and Dale Nason, and the screening of Pia Borg’s great new video, When Objects Dream, all of which, with Landry’s work, neatly complement each other.

Diane Landry, Morse Alphabet Soup, RMIT University Union Kaleide Theatre, Dec 9; Bus, Melbourne, Dec 12-23 Dec 2006 www.clic.net/~dilandry

THE ADELAIDE-BASED ZEPHYR QUARTET IS CARVING A NAME FOR ITSELF WITH AN AMBITIOUS PROGRAM OF PERFORMANCES THAT INCLUDES A FEW STAPLES OF THE STANDARD REPERTOIRE, A LOT OF NEW MUSIC MORE OR LESS TRADITIONALLY CONCEIVED FOR QUARTET, AND WORKS INVOLVING ELECTRONICS (RANGING FROM TECHNO TO EXPERIMENTAL), IMPROVISATION AND FORAYS INTO VARIOUS ETHNIC AND POPULAR GENRES.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/3/304_whittington_zephyr.jpg" alt=" Belinda Gehlert, Emily Tulloch,
Anna Webb and Hilary Kleinig, Zephyr Quartet”>

In the world of classical music the string quartet has accumulated more intellectual prestige than any other genre. Invented by Haydn and perfected by Mozart, its primal form was the perfect musical embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. Abandoning Baroque rhetoric of public address, the quartet became the intimate conversation of equals in which rational argument and wit were the principal virtues. The equality of the four instruments accorded with the emerging ideals of liberal democracy, representing a condition that all might aspire to, given the appropriate education—that of the cultivated, enlightened individual, engaged in harmonious social intercourse with like-minded equals.

The 19th century hijacked this ideal in the name of Romantic individualism, giving it an altogether more emotional hue. The Romantic cult of Beethoven did much to place the string quartet at the pinnacle of the musical pantheon. Beethoven’s late quartets became a cornerstone of the myth of the heroic, misunderstood artist that Beethoven personified. And the quartet has remained, essentially unchallenged, at that pinnacle ever since. In Australia, the string quartet has flourished under the patronage of Musica Viva, an organisation largely founded by post-War refugees from central Europe, with a subscriber base drawn from the professions, the educated middle classes and a wealthy elite. Most quartets touring the country under the Musica Viva banner are imported; Australia has rarely, if ever, managed to support more than two full-time, professional quartets at any given time. Even now, following the Byzantine intrigues that have led to the former Australian String Quartet becoming the Grainger Quartet and the former Tankstream Quartet becoming the Australian String Quartet, it is by no means certain that both ensembles will survive for the long haul.

Traditional classical ensembles of all kinds from the orchestra down face a struggle for survival, and are trying in many cases desperately to re-invent themselves for a cultural landscape that has radically changed in the past couple of decades. A significant broadening of the repertoire—some would call it dilution—including a rapprochement with popular music, has been the most popular survival strategy. Australia’s newly privatised symphony orchestras provide good examples of this process at work.

Zephyr Quartet consists of Belinda Gehlert and Emily Tulloch (who rotate as first and second violins), Anna Webb (viola) and Hilary Kleinig (cello). At least two of the players (Gehlert and Kleinig) have also composed for the ensemble. In the course of 2006, the Quartet has shown itself to be as inventive with its venues as it has with its programs, appearing at a commercial art gallery, an inner-suburban pub, a city club, a bar in Adelaide’s sin strip and the rehearsal studio of a contemporary dance company.

The biggest challenge facing classical ensembles who want to embark on this sort of path is that nothing in their training has really prepared them for it. The road to becoming a quartet is difficult enough, given that much classical musical education is predicated on the paramount importance of the soloist; a deep understanding of the essence of chamber music is often relegated to a relatively minor part of the curriculum. Beyond that, few institutions would give classical string players any more than token exposure to jazz or popular music, teach them anything more than the most rudimentary techniques of composition, train them in any form of improvisation, or equip them with skills to handle new technologies. Poorly served by an educational ethos inherited from the 19th century, young musicians of the 21st century are compelled to find their own way.

Michael Nyman’s String Quartet No.2 was the major work in Zephyr’s Musica Viva Menage Concert Series outing, From Tango to Techno, in the Leigh Warren and Dancers Studio (Sept 14). It was the only work on the program to involve dancers, and was performed in the round, with the Quartet also changing positions for each movement. The choreography of dancers and musicians formed an intriguing, visually engaging counterpoint to the characteristically frenetic music of Nyman. The quartet playing was rhythmically strong though a little wayward in intonation.

A couple of techno pieces in that program (by Gehlert and Kleinig) set the scene for a more extensive collaboration with electronics when Zephyr appeared at the Rocket Bar in Hindley Street in their Electro-Acoustic Project (Sept 29). The composers this time included Zoë Barry, Cameron Deyell, Fiona Hill, Stefan Panczak, Brendan Woithe, Michael Yuen and Kleinig. The music was stylistically diverse, ranging from a strongly conceptual piece by Yuen through to a techno-influenced work from Stefan Panczak. The use of technology was well short of what is currently possible, particularly in terms of interactivity and real-time processing. The players were also obliged to listen more closely to the electronic tracks they had to play with than to one another. As so often happens (from Kronos Quartet to pop-classical girl group Bond, the story is much the same) the ideal of chamber music as an intimate discourse between individuals was largely lost when amplification, technology and the performance practice of popular music took over.

That ideal made a bit of a comeback at Zephyr’s next appearance, Generation Next, at the Jade Monkey (Oct 19), a rather pleasant little club in a quiet side street in the city centre. A diverse collection of works by Adelaide composers Jamie Messenger, Anne Cawrse, Melisande Wright, Angus Barnacle, Luke Altmann and Tristan Coleman provided an opportunity to ponder different contemporary approaches to the medium. Young composers seem to regard the quartet as a palette of sounds rather than a social microcosm and the dynamic potential of the quartet medium was only superficially explored for the most part. Nonetheless, it was an interesting evening, with solid performances and a few pieces—such as that by Luke Altmann—that sought to probe some emotional depth.

Zephyr Quartet is an adventurous young ensemble, though there are limits to their adventurousness, and I don’t expect to hear them playing some genres of highly demanding and complex contemporary music. They are more at home in the world of minimalism, neo-tonality and crossover genres. They are certainly performing a valuable service for Adelaide composers, and are providing audiences with varied and at times provocative listening experiences as they explore possible directions for classical music’s most venerated ensemble.

Zephyr Quartet’s 2007 program includes: Homegrown—The Music of Annne Cawrse a celebration of music composed by Cawrse for Zephyr, Carclew Arts Centre, March 30; between music, place, memory and emotion: folk songs and new compositions by Hilary Kleinig and Belinda Gehlert inspired by the work of Adelaide-based Iraqi-born poet Yahia Al-Samawy, with percussionist Tim Irrgang, Nexus Cabaret, Lion Arts Centre, July 6; Sight Specific Music: Phillip Glass String Quartet No 2 and new commissions composed by Graham Dudley and James Cuddeford, Greenaway Art Gallery, Oct 26, 28 www.zephyrquartet.com

FORMALLY TRAINED AS A COMPOSER AT ADELAIDE'S FLINDERS STREET SCHOOL OF MUSIC, TRISTAN LOUTH-ROBINS WENT ON TO COMPLETE AN HONOURS DEGREE WITHIN THE ELECTRONIC MUSIC UNIT (EMU) AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE. DURING THIS TIME HE GREW INTERESTED IN PHASE RELATIONSHIPS AND THE IMPACT OF PLAYBACK TECHNOLOGY ON COMPOSITION. HE CITES THE ALBUM ZAIREEKA BY THE FLAMING LIPS AS THE INSPIRATION FOR HIS THESIS RESEARCH.
Tristan Louth-Robins

Created by playing four CDs simultaneously, Zaireeka, he explains, is a generative composition “utilising the technical features and potential of the technology—CD players—in order to create phase relations: either by accident or the inherent characteristics of the technology.”

This fascination with ‘accidental’ music and phase relationships led to a creative partnership with sound-artist Sebastian Tomczak. Together they formed The Glitch Collective, a loose ensemble of sound artists and musicians gathering to produce a series of spontaneous compositions using pre-recorded material: “We wrote the first couple of scores very much in the vein of the early Fluxus scores of the 1960s; very text-based. The first one we did was Glitch: a free-for-all which lasted an hour, where we were each assigned to write one minute of any sound material we wanted.” The result surprised its makers: with contributions variously at high pitch or low frequency ranges and with multi-tracking of all the sounds there was “a wonderful fullness [that] coloured the environment…We found that each of the sounds would fall in and out of synch with each other because the repeat times on the CD players are different. So that’s how you create phase relationships.” He thinks that general listener finds the result pleasing “because it’s made up of these little musical ostinatos.”

The basic principal of phase relationships used in Glitch, he notes, was also the one employed by Brian Eno to produce Music for Airports, composed from phasing loops of pre-recorded material on magnetic tape, cut to different lengths and therefore cycling at different rates. Eno created the piece in order to counter the impersonal nature of airports. Environments, whether built or natural, and their sound qualities and aural ecology, is a growing interest for Louth-Robins.

In a recent collaboration with the SHOOT collective, Louth-Robins produced the sound score for their video installation, Sounds from Level Four, an ominous piece about paranoia and social confinement using the central motif of an elevator to induce the feeling of claustrophobia and controlled movement. The sound moves from complex rhythms of cut-up vocals through to hydraulic elevator sounds, blistering glitches and sweet machine-like harmonics.

“The conceptual process…took quite a long time…probably close to three to four months developing an idea of how we would marry the visual and sound elements. I didn’t produce any sound per se until two months before it was first exhibited. I wasn’t necessarily gathering lots of audio samples and sticking them together and seeing how that sounded. If anything I was just writing down words that I would associate with the video and trying to find some kind of parallel to a sound or particular atmosphere.” On the issue of ‘machine aesthetics’ he was particularly pleased that he had created the score without relying on reverb. “I’d grown to hate an over-reliance of reverb in order to create the impression of space. I think there are other ways that you can evoke space.”

I had always attributed this penchant for reverb to the ‘wall of sound’ introduced by Phil Spector. Louth-Robins claims a later, far more sinister origin: “I think it’s partly to do with Phil Collins inventing the drum reverb in the 1980s. It’s that snare reverb. You listen to anything from the 1980’s and it’s there in some capacity.”

Louth-Robins is currently extending his interest in environmental sound design, using composition as a way of crossing over into ecology, influenced partly by his meeting with environmental musician and sound artist Robin Minard: “I was fortunate enough to meet Robin at the start of 2006 when I was involved with Michael Yuen’s Project 3, and spent some time with him setting up his Silent Music installation. My current interest is in natural phenomena and sound’s relationship to them, which is inextricably tied to the work of Alvin Lucier and Rolf Julius.” It also relates to the ideas of sound theorist and ecologist R Murray Schafer.

“Schafer looks at the particular characteristics of a natural environment, referring to these as sound marks: sounds that characterise the environment in a particular way. If you were to go down to a lake and hear the continuous sound of crickets and the intermittent chirps of birds, the water [lapping], they are always going to be there to a certain extent. What Schafer did was to start mapping these things out over the space of a year, so he could track the migratory patterns of the birds, or if the wildlife was diminishing or moving somewhere else.

“I’m specifically interested in the relationship between natural and industrial sounds. Such investigations involve making field recordings of various environments and assimilating excerpts into a collage, installation or [other] context. They stem from two main sources: the continuum of ambient sound—such as wind sounds and machine drones—and more instantaneous sounds which are characteristic to an environment, such as the croaking or frogs or a passing tram. This creates an interesting juxtaposition of sound sources and evokes a sensation, what writer David Toop [citing Schafer] describes as ‘schizophonia’, essentially sounds displaced from their point of origin. This is nothing new in terms of hearing transmitted or recorded sounds over the radio etc, but the displacement and juxtaposition of environmental sounds can significantly alter a listener’s perception. I am looking to apply this idea in an installation sometime over the course of the year.”

While interested in the objective appreciation of environmental sound, Tristan Louth-Robins says he is “still keen though on the idea of putting some kind of subjective intention into my work. I think maybe I’m just a little too much of a traditionalist. But if you put too much subjectivity into a piece—particularly a site specific installation that articulates a particular environment—then you can cloud the audience response with too much musical information.”

For their latest program of new music Dead Horse Productions have moved from the carparks, warehouses and Meat Market of previous outings to the old Forum cinema (formerly the 1929 State Theatre, more recently a Christian Revival Centre) on Flinders Street with its Moorish Revival exterior (a style resurgence rather than a religious one) and neo-classical interior. Dead Horse Productions, who brought Melbourne audiences the adventurously programmed Concave City and New Works for Music and Film, now present Ground Elastic Sound.

The Dead Horse Ensemble, conducted by the globe-trotting Ben Northey, will play compositions by David Chisholm (from his score for balletlab’s Origami, now out on Move Records), Biddy Connor (vocalist, instrumentalist and accomplished composer for film), Wally Gunn (composer for visual arts, theatre and film and instrumentalist commissions), Peter Knight (composer and trumpet player with his own jazz quartet) and Kate Neal (composer and artistic director of Dead Horse Productions), fresh from her artist-in-residence stint in the US working with acclaimed US composer Syd Hodkinson and writing material for Ground Elastic Sound.

Ground Elastic Sound promises “to appeal to fans of rock, jazz, electronica and classical music.” The ensemble, with elements of laptop and pre-recorded sound, will feature leading players in classical and jazz, including Tristram Williams (trumpet), Miki Tsonuda (violin), Adam Simmons (sax) and Anita Hustas (double bass). RT

MICHAEL RILEY IS PRIMARILY KNOWN AS A PHOTOGRAPHER, SO IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT HIS BEST KNOWN FILM, EMPIRE (1997), IS ALSO THE ONE MOST OBVIOUSLY ALIGNED WITH THE STYLE OF HIS LATE STILL PHOTOGRAPHY. YET IT IS THE LESSER KNOWN HALF-HOUR DOCUMENTARIES RILEY MADE FOR SBS AND THE ABC THAT HAVE HAD THE MOST SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FILM.

The Australian National Gallery retrospective, Michael Riley: sights unseen, provides a rare opportunity to consider Riley’s screen work alongside his stills and brings to light some surprising correlations. Both his films and photographs employ a broad spectrum of styles, but the exhibition reveals no clear cut division between his work in the two mediums. Rather, it creates the impression of two distinct strains that cut right across Riley’s entire artistic output. On the one hand his portraiture and documentaries rely primarily on the camera’s relationship to the physical reality before the lens—the look in a subject’s eyes, the way they hold themselves, and the stories they relate to the camera. On the other hand, Riley’s more overtly abstract work relies heavily on the relationship between deliberately ambiguous images, the symbolic resonances of collected objects and the formations of the natural world.

Empire (1997) epitomises the latter strand of Riley’s oeuvre. Originally commissioned for the Festival of the Dreaming program in the lead up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the film went on to appear in exhibitions and arts festivals around the world. Opening with a giant eye superimposed on a cloud-specked sky, Empire unfolds as a series of images depicting the Australian landscape as a parched country devoid of human presence. Animal skeletons lie stripped and scattered on the ground; an echidna’s corpse is beset by swarming ants; a windmill spins forlornly beside two water tanks, incongruous in a land without moisture. Towards the end of the film remnants of a decaying colonial dream appear: a weather-beaten Union Jack flutters across a blue sky, a mirrored crucifix reflects passing cloud, and a burning cross evokes the dark side of the colonial project. Finally, the camera rests on a tacky ‘noble savage’ figurine of an Aboriginal man. A disembodied voice from a newsreel or ancient radio broadcast crackles in a polite British accent that belies the culturally genocidal implications of the words: “Keeping untouched natives away from white settlements where they would perish like moths in a light, replacing…their ancient beliefs…with a higher faith—the Christian faith. Training them in a benevolent segregation…gradually to make them fit into an Australian community.”

Like the concomitant photographic series, Flyblown, Empire explores the impact of European invasion on the Australian continent and its people, but unlike the photographic series, the film also illustrates the way in which Riley’s more symbolist tendencies could become heavy-handed when rendered on screen. A series of photographs can be viewed, digested and returned to in any order, creating between them a site of floating exchange crucially informed by the viewer. In Empire the images are inevitably fixed; their interpretive potential can feel foreclosed. However, it is the film’s overbearing and self-consciously ethereal music that does most to make Empire’s air of mystery feel laboured, reinforcing the sense that for all the images’ indeterminate nature, our reading is being firmly guided.

For me, Riley was more effective as a filmmaker when exploring his documentary bent in films like Blacktracker (1996), Tent Boxers (1998) and Quest for Country (1993). These typify the rehabilitative historical impulse underlying much of Riley’s documentary work. In different ways, they all seek to unearth the buried threads of Indigenous experience woven into Australia’s social, cultural and political history.

Blacktracker was made for ABC TV and examines the life of Riley’s grandfather, who served in the NSW police force from 1911 to 1950. Rising to the rank of sergeant, Alec Riley became one of the best known trackers in the country. He was instrumental in solving at least seven murders and located many people lost in the bush during his time on the force. Despite relying a little too heavily on re-enactments to make up for an absence of relevant historical footage, Blacktracker succeeds admirably in bringing Alec Riley’s story to life and portraying a warm and sensitive man who “achieved in a time of extreme adversity.” It is a positive story, but one tempered by the times in which Alec Riley lived. According to his descendants, for example, he was never awarded a police pension, despite making contributions to the pension fund throughout his working life.

The prejudices Tracker Riley encountered also adversely affected others, a point tragically illustrated by the case of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy named Desmond Clarke who went missing in the Pilliga scrub in the early 1930s. Riley was summoned to assist in tracking the boy down but his grandfather “didn’t want any blacks on his property.” Consequently the search party was unable to find the missing child. A year later the boy’s grandfather passed away and Riley returned to the area; within 12 hours he had located Desmond’s remains in a chalk pit 500 metres from the family homestead. This story later provided the inspiration for Rachel Perkins’ film One Night the Moon (2000).

Two years after Blacktracker, Michael Riley made Tent Boxers for the ABC, another film looking at Indigenous men working in a time of institutionalised racism. The boxers of the film’s title were amateur fighters who until the early 1970s toured with country fairs, slugging it out with any locals willing to take them on. Inevitably many of the boxers were Indigenous youths looking to make some money and escape highly segregated country towns. They were expected to participate in up to fifteen fights a day in large circus tents strewn with sawdust and jam-packed with onlookers. In return they received some money and the rare opportunity to travel Australia. As one pair of fighters fondly recall, there was also the attraction of ardent female fans. Riley interviews a range of former boxers, intercutting their recollections with archival footage of the fairs and the fights, creating a vivid portrait of a distinct social and historical milieu shot through with humorous tales and memorable characters. The film exemplifies documentary’s ability to bring to light prosaic, small scale stories bypassed in ‘big picture’ social histories, revealing much about the everyday minutiae of a particular period.

Both Tent Boxers and Blacktracker remain within well established television documentary forms, but the earlier Quest for Country (1993) provides a rare example of Riley pursuing a degree of formal experimentation in one of his documentaries. Quest for Country is structured around Riley’s journey to the areas his father and mother are from around Dubbo and Moree. Like Empire, the film explicitly explores an Indigenous way of viewing the land and the stories the land holds. It begins with Riley driving through and observing the streets of Sydney before he passes out of the city, over the Blue Mountains and across the western plains. His gaze is intercut with a jarring visual and aural montage of sirens, screams and photographs of smug colonial settlers staring resolutely from fading 19th century photographs. Paintings of massacres cut across apparently empty tracts of western NSW, short-circuiting whitewashed accounts of our colonial past. Interspersed with his historical ruminations, Riley presciently describes a country facing ecological disaster, explicitly linking environmental ruination with European denial of Indigenous knowledge. Throughout we constantly return to Riley’s gaze reflected in his car’s rear-vision mirror. It’s a gaze that looks both forward and back in time, anchoring the film’s perspective while also turning Riley’s stare back on the viewer. Through this subtly reflexive device, the filmmaker quietly but forcefully asserts his presence, and the presence of the stories he tells, in the country through which he passes.

The late Charles Perkins famously commented, “We know we cannot live in the past, but the past lives with us”, and it is Michael Riley’s pioneering exploration of this theme in documentaries like Quest for Country that is his most lasting influence on the current generation of Australian Indigenous filmmakers. Ivan Sen’s work in particular displays a strong thematic kinship with Riley’s films. It is through the work of artists like Riley and the filmmakers he has inspired that non-Indigenous Australians might begin to understand something of our country’s deeply repressed Indigenous history and what this history means for our contemporary situation. Until these stories are heard and acknowledged, and their implications understood, we’ll forever be like two-year-old Desmond Clarke stumbling around, lost in the Pilliga scrub, unable to make sense of the land in which we live.

Michael Riley: sights unseen, curated by Brenda L Croft, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, July 14-Oct 16; Monash Gallery of Art, Vic, Nov 16 2006-Feb 25 2007; Dubbo Regional Gallery May 12-July 8 2007; Moree Plains Gallery, May 19-July15 2007; Museum of Brisbane, July 27-Nov 19 2007; Art Gallery of NSW, 22 Feb 22-April 27 2008

IN DEATH 24x A SECOND, SEMINAL 1970S FILM THEORIST LAURA MULVEY RE-THINKS THE VIEWER’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE MOVING IMAGE IN THE DIGITAL ERA. SHE DESCRIBES A NEWLY EMPOWERED GAZE THAT NAVIGATES WITH UNPRECEDENTED FACILITY THE DETAILS OF INDIVIDUAL FILMS AMID AN INCREASINGLY AVAILABLE CINEMA HISTORY.

the digital gift of death

As DVD releases continue the vast rollout of the 20th century’s image history, Laura Mulvey begins her new book with the idea that cinema can be seen as increasingly peopled by spectres. Increasingly we watch characters on screen played by deceased stars and see films by seminal directors whose collected works are being re-born into digital life after they are themselves long gone. Celluloid itself is fast facing extinction; hence ‘cinema’ in its century-long incarnation is dead or dying. From these ashes Mulvey describes the ramifications of new ways of watching and conceiving films since the advent of domestic VCRs, a process intensified by DVD. Dead film meets new technology, “bringing, almost incidentally, new life to the cinema and its history.”

More precisely and theoretically, Mulvey is very interested in the way the new technologies enable and even encourage the remote control-wielding viewer to see figurative death in the form of the still or slowed image extricated from narrative movement. Replaying sequences and freeze-framing particular shots, for Mulvey, enable a significant re-making of the film away from its original organisation towards a more malleable, stretched and fragmented form that opens up a new engagement with “the presence of death.”

The new viewer-image relationship in this analysis enhances our perception of cinema’s rendering of the irrational and the pre-modern. This opens the way for Freud to be introduced into the story, a theoretical commitment Mulvey has maintained since the 1970s despite the extensive critiques of psychoanalytic theory in Film Studies over the last two decades. She starts with a telling early 20th century opposition that she suggests comes tellingly unstuck in the 21st: while Freud himself was dubious about cinema for celebrating modernity’s “novelty, speed and glamour”, to present-day eyes “the cinema [now] seems closer to Freud’s uncanny of the old and familiar, and … the archaic.”

back to the archaic

A chapter on Hitchcock’s Pyscho (1960) overcomes the reader’s initial we’ve-been-here-before scepticism serving well Mulvey’s argument that cinema’s predilection for irrationality, the archaic and death is all the more noticeable for the 21st century viewer. Treated as aesthetically ‘modern’ compared to Hitchcock’s previous melodramatic and theatrical presentation of murder, the famous shower scene’s primary importance here is in conceptually killing off the fashionable, sexualised female body, and hence the modernity Freud dismissed, instead enforcing the ‘dead’ body of the mother whose archaic psychic power persists beyond death. Mulvey therefore emphasizes at length the elaborate post-murder camera manoeuvre—from the modern woman’s naked body, accoutrements (and money) in the motel room, up to the old house—as inaugurating a circular movement away from civilisation’s straight lines and linearity seen earlier (notably with the highway sequence), back into primal darkness.

The connection with post-celluloid technology is then addressed via a discussion of Douglas Gordon’s art installation 24-Hour Psycho (in which the original film is ‘stretched’ over 24 hours), illustrating how the trajectory away from movement and towards death is made all the more palpable when the film’s narrative momentum is subverted. The point is fair, and Psycho shows the trajectory as already present in the original; nevertheless, the vast majority of viewers are still likely to first watch feature films at home, not in galleries, in real time and linear form.

Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1953) proves almost equally viable for discussing cinema’s tendency towards death and the archaic. However I think Mulvey (like many leading film scholars) overstresses the generative tension caused here by confused Hollywood actors in a relatively ‘plotless’ European art film. The ancient religious rituals practiced by people of the Pompeii area in which the film is set are presented as having a magical, positive effect on the ennui-ridden bourgeois couple so that the reconciliatory final kiss is justified as Hollywood and the folkloric coming together. The turn to religion and ritual at the heart of what is claimed here as “the first modern film”, suggests a reactionary or escapist strain in the fascination with the archaic, irrespective of the ills of a jaded modernity.

outside the narrative

A chapter on the seminal contemporary art cinema of Abbas Kiarostami develops the idea of film as proffering epistemological doubt and non-narrative interest. This is refreshingly argued without the mystical and ethically affirmational interpretations of the Iranian master’s work favoured by many western critics. A discussion of his ‘Koker trilogy’ (1987-94) emphasises the increasingly reflexive nature of the films through which Mulvey seeks to expound cinema’s tendency towards the labyrinthine . She then sees the reflexivity of the video coda of Taste of Cherry (1996) as providing an elegy for cinema (the rest of the film is 35mm) at its centennial ‘death’ while also offering “a possible resurrection and return, phoenix-like, from the ashes.” Though a familiar reading, her analysis is less romantic and willful than most in concluding with a point apposite for the book’s argument about video re-activating cinema as a death-inscribing form—Kiarostami’s fond backward glance, she suggests, reflexively dramatises a “dead love.”

re-thinking the gaze

Mulvey eventually comes face-to-face with her own hugely influential 1970s thesis of the gaze, encouraged then by classical Hollywood cinema and reconsiders it in the wake of the viewer’s new agency where she says subjectivity, gender and ideology are less prescriptive. The radically reconfigured cinema and viewing relations Mulvey advocated back then (broadly, politically informed avant garde cinema) she now suggests have, in a different sense, come about not through the ‘content’ of the films but as a result of their new carrier medium. Thirty years ago Mulvey was criticized by many for being too deterministic in her denigration of Hollywood cinema’s spectatorial regime; perhaps now she is rather too uncritically invested in the liberating potential of the new technologies.

At its most pragmatic, the book’s argument is based on the idea that the democratizing of control over the image enables and encourages amateur textual analysis, which is thereby returned to “its origins as a work of cinephilia” rather than as an elite academic enterprise. Mulvey elaborates on this by showing how slow motion and freeze-frame allow an unprecedented essaying of every frame and editing correlation in a scene from Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), effectively disabling protagonists, story and movement as central to classical narrative film; for example, extras at the edges of the quickly moving frame previously impossible to see are now thematically telling. This emphasis on stilled and repeated “fragments” and “tableaux” pushes cinema towards an “extra diegetic mode of address”, all encouraged by the technical control enabled by DVD and the medium’s breaking of movies down into ‘chapters.’

a new revolution

Mulvey’s argument asserts a new viewer-film relationship—a technical, hermeneutic and sensual access to films in all their aesthetic minutiae—rather than cinema per se, which has always contained such elements even if shrouded by narrative action and linearity. This allows a newly multi-dimensional understanding of “the internal world of cinema.” Taken as a whole, the book effectively, if idealistically, essays this newly empowered gaze as a revolution in our knowledge of the increasingly important image world she says is equivalent to 19th century photography transforming “the human eye’s perception of the world.”

Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, Reaktion Books, London, 2006, ISBN 10: 1 86819 263 2

IN QUEER SCREEN’S 2007 MARDI GRAS FILM FESTIVAL, GERMAN WRITER AXEL SCHOCK WILL APPEAR AT QUEER KINO: A HISTORY OF QUEER GERMAN CINEMA. IN THAT PROGRAM SCHOCK WILL SHOW OUT IM KINO, A 110 MINUTE DOCUMENTARY HE’S MADE WITH MANUELA KAY TRACING THE PATTERNS OF GAY FILMMAKING FOR OVER 100 YEARS FROM EARLY CLASSICS TO HOLLYWOOD AND THE NEWEST GENERATION OF GAY FILMMAKERS.
Fox and his Friends

A magazine and newspaper writer, Schock has collaborated on fun publications (in German) like The Queer Quiz Book (eg “Who was allowed to shave kd lang for the cover of Vanity Fair?”), Out! 800 Famous Lesbians, Gays & Bisexuals; Out Takes: The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Useless Knowledge, and, more to the point here, Out in the Cinema: the Lesbian & Gay Film Encyclopedia. Doubtless Schock’s film will combine serious study of this history with an apt embrace of both the high and low cultural dimensions central to gay film.

The Queer Kino program of eight films includes one regarded to be the first gay feature, a drama about a concert pianist in love and blackmailed, Different from the Others (director Richard Oswald, 1919, 50 mins). The film was destroyed by the Nazis but a copy was found in 1976. Carl Dreyer’s 1924 classic, Michael (79 mins), also about an artist and lost love, and possibly based on Rodin will also be screened.

There’s epic lesbian campery in the shape of Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1977, 141 mins, Ulrike Ottinger). Possibly a nice antidote to Pirates of the Caribbean male antics, “Madame X, the irresistibly cruel and uncrowned pirate ruler of the China Seas, lures women away from their ordinary lives to gather aboard the ship Orlando for adventures at sea…Yvonne Rainer plays an artist, while underground icon Tabea Blumenschein tackles both the spike-fisted dominatrix queen and the ship’s leather-clad figurehead.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends (1975, 117 mins) makes a rare cinema appearance (the Fassbinder oeuvre is to be released on DVD here) and a rare feature role for the writer-director himself in a tale of spiralling class, financial and sexual betrayal. The film was once called “The Blue Angel done in drag” and has sometimes been regarded as homophobic, but its complexity belies the charge. It’s certainly one of Fassbinder’s classiest looking films with cinematography by Michael Ballhaus (who has since worked extensively with Scorsese) and should be a real treat on the big screen.

Another rarity is Coming Out (Heiner Carow, 1989, 110 mins) regarded to be the first East German gay film, and the last because the Wall came down shortly after the film’s making. A young man represses his attraction to his best friend, finds love with a woman, but a journey into the gay underground…

The Oswald, Dreyer and Fassbinder features and Shock’s documentary history collectively make Queer Kino a seriously attractive proposition. It’ll be interesting to see if Shock’s encyclopaedic vision will put the German films in context. RT

Queer Kino: A History of Queer German Cinema, Chauvel Cinema, Mardi Gras Film Festival and Goethe Institut, Feb 15-March 1, www.queerscreen.com.au

David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton,
The Sound Before You Make It (2005),
kinetic installation with strobe lighting and audio

DEVELOPED FROM THE EXHIBITION HELD AT THE HAYWARD GALLERY, LONDON (2004-5), EYES, LIES & ILLUSIONS AT THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE CONTAINS MORE THAN 500 BOOKS, PRINTS, OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS AND TECHNOLOGICAL WONDERS THAT ARE DRAWN FROM THE WERNER NEKES COLLECTION (MULHEIM-AM-RUHR, GERMANY).

This extraordinary collection began in the mid-1960s when Nekes, a German experimental filmmaker and professor in film studies, started collecting examples of optical phenomena as teaching aids that highlighted pre-cinematic history. The objects, however, developed a mind of their own and grew beyond their pre-cinematic agenda into an encyclopaedic collection that now comprises approximately 25,000 devices devoted to the history of optical technologies.

If the Nekes collection can be understood as a contemporary wunderkammer that encases a micro-history of pre-20th century visual media technologies, then Eyes, Lies & Illusion might be seen as a micro-micro-history. Cameras obscura, magic lanterns, praxinoscopes, peep-boxes, daguerreotypes, kinetoscopes, panoramas and anamorphic lenses populate the appropriately darkened lower bowels of the ACMI building at Federation Square. The most impressive feature of this exhibition is that it represents a pansemiotic logic: each object is endowed with multiple layers of signification that speak of the past, the present and the present’s relationship to the past.

The exhibition is divided into seven thematic sections. Shadowplay, Tricks of the Light, Riddles of Perspective, Enhancing the Eye, Deceiving the Mind, Persistence of Vision and Moving in Time all introduce the audience to a gamut of spectacles, wonders of science and the technologies that create them: puppets, shadow theatres and magic lanterns manipulate light and dark to produce wonders that delight; prisms, lenses, mirrors and kaleidoscopes distort and alter light to reveal its mysterious properties; truly enchanting dioramas, panoramas, perspective boxes and a walk-in, distorting Ames Room all make concrete the mathematical principles of perspective; cameras obscura, scientific studies on anatomy, microscopy and astronomy, and examples of early photography reveal the way optics and technological innovation made visible the previously invisible; anamorphic images, visual cryptograms and optical illusions show how the human eye can succumb to artificially produced tricks of the eye; the wondrous motions of phenakistoscopes, zoetropes and praxinoscopes appear to magically create animated worlds; and pioneering experiments in photography and the cinema capture indexical reality opening the way to a new generation of optical illusions.

Teasing its audience with a rich, engaging and entertaining history of technological inventions that enhance and deceive human vision and perception, Eyes, Lies and Illusions typifies the active relations that many of these technologies command of their viewer-participant. The exhibition demonstrates the continuity of interest that has persisted in using media, in particular entertainment media, to push the boundaries of technology and vision, art and science through centuries. A pair of Florentine works painted on the natural stone known as pietre paesina (1620) depicts battle scenes and crumbling castles. Here, nature and art collide. In places, the natural patterns created by the stone’s surface portray smoke and crumbling castle walls; in other places, the artist’s hand takes over to depict the same subject matter. The eye is deceived. Where does nature end and human artifice take over? Perspective boxes and dioramas invite the participant to peep into their initially concealed spaces in order to discover alternate, virtual landscapes, theatrical performances and seascapes. Transparent pictures and Chinese shadow theatres transform their dark, two dimensional spaces into brightly lit, marvellous three-dimensional worlds. And in one of the 12 contemporary works, The Sound Before you Make It (2005), a kinetic installation with strobe lighting by the Australian artists David Lawrey and Jaki Middleton, the phenakistoscope’s reliance on the phenomenon of persistence of vision is given a new context as amused viewers watch small and static Michael Jackson figurines succumb to motion as the merry-go-round disc they stand on swings around and around to the rhythm of “Thriller.” The arrangement of all these objects serves to build visual (and audio) bridges that emphasize the playfulness of nature through the associative powers of sight.

Significantly, the experience of this exhibition reveals how no media are ever divorced from history. The camera obscura, for example, reveals its connections with the later invention of photography. The eerie 3D stereoscopic image of the filmmaker Lumiere reveals its connections to the spatially layered but illustrated 3D spaces of the dioramas. Marey’s chronoscope experiments expose themselves as predecessors of the digital animations used in current film effects—a fact also stressed in Carsten Höller’s 1998 work, Punkterfilm, which similarly maps a geometric depiction of movement. And perspective instruments, treatises and the objects that reflected its laws—dioramas, panoramas, and perspective boxes—reveal how they have found a new form of expression in the boxed screens that contain the virtual architecture of computer game spaces. But these objects are so much more than examples that highlight the path that eventually led to the diverse media of our own times. Almost every technological apparatus or depiction of wondrous media in action within this show shines independently of the role it serves as predecessor to a later media format.

The magic lantern is a case in point: walking through the show, the captivating properties of the optical devices have the capacity to ensnare the viewer with their mesmerising powers. It’s easy to forget the complex historical and cultural contexts that nurtured the production of these technologies and the modes of perception they evoked. As the concise and informative exhibition labels explain, and as is made even clearer in the excellent exhibition catalogue, the initial popularity of the magic lantern as visual entertainment has its origins in the 17th century. Athanasius Kircher, baroque scholar and scientist of encyclopedic proportions and the individual often (incorrectly) credited with the magic lantern’s invention, discusses its function and outlines his observations and experiments in light and shadow in his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae of 1646 and in Physiologia Kircheriana Experimentalis of 1680, which is represented in the exhibition. Through their entertaining properties, these optical devices expressed the ways in which contemporary ‘science’ had altered perceptions of the universe.

The examples of magic lanterns range from simple, hand carved wooden boxes with lenses, to highly crafted metallic exteriors that depict the Eiffel Tower—all works of art in their own right. The sensory impact of the exterior designs further extends to the capabilities of the interior mechanics: a projection of H McAllister’s magic lantern slide of a dancing skeleton (c.1880), which was filmed by Nekes as part of his Media Magica film series (snippets of which are projected throughout the exhibition and successfully visualise many of the technologies in motion), drives home the fantastic and entertaining nature of the objects. Yet, the magical properties of these boxes are found not only in their well-crafted exteriors and the illusionist possibilities that this technology is capable of, but the micro-historical role they served. The various lithographs, prints and books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries accentuate this by providing snippets from time past: the image of a magic lantern projecting an image of a demon, for example, is from Gulielmo Jacobo ’s Gravesande’s two-volume book, Physices Elementa Mathematica (1748). As one of the earliest and most influential followers of Newtonian philosophy in Europe, ’s Gravesande’s image of the demon projection, and the accompanying image that reveals the interior mechanics of the magic lantern, visualised the theory of optics and light. A fantastic subject matter served a rational and scientific purpose that speaks of the arrival of the era of Enlightenment. Throughout its history, the magic lantern both enchanted and reflexively drew attention to the more rational function that these public spectacles served as scientific explorations of modes of perception, and of how the human eye is capable of being deceived through technological means. The books and prints in the collection play a significant role in highlighting the context of display; the magic lanterns the method and rationale of reception.

One of the most dramatic examples of this is the display of the frontispiece of Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s Mémoires Récréatives Scientifiques (1831), which depicts one of his famous phantasmagoria lantern projections. Better known as Robertson, he was a Belgian inventor, physicist and student of optics who improved the technology of the magic lantern, including its capacity to enlarge and decrease images. Robertson performed his most infamous show in Paris in an abandoned chapel surrounded by tombs. Crowds flocked to the dimly lit graveyard to experience (initially concealed) magic lantern effects of flying skulls and ghoulish apparitions against the backdrop of creepy lighting and sound effects. While it isn’t clear whether the frontispiece depicts this performance, the participants in the event, nevertheless, respond in similar ways by fainting, screaming and running away from the horrors that appear before them. Yet, despite the centrality of illusion and the theatrical emphasis on the fantastic, Robertson’s intentions were also scientifically motivated. His application of the magic lantern reflected Enlightenment concerns with scientific rationalism; reason and a scientific approach to the world could, it was believed, arm the individual with answers to the most fantastic and irrational of problems. Exposing his methods after the ghostly spectacle, Robertson’s aim was to arm the audience with scientific reason by showing them the technological and scientific means by which he conjured his illusions: the fantastic was a deception controlled by technological means.

For these magicians and popular scientists, there was nothing science and technology could not explain or achieve. But as commentators like Octave Mannoni, who contributes one of the chapters in the exhibition catalogue, has explained, and as those who experience this exhibition clearly understand, having insight into the means of the illusion’s production—its trick—exposed and explained through rational means and scientific process doesn’t make that illusion any less astounding. If only to experience this state of bizarre ambivalence, it is well worth visiting this fascinating and, in many respects, ground-breaking, exhibition.

Eyes, Lies & Illusions, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Nov 2, 2006-Feb 11, 2007

THE DIVIDE BETWEEN THE MARKET SECTION OF THE AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY CONFERENCE WHERE PRODUCERS PITCH PROJECTS, AND THE CONFERENCE SECTION THAT FOCUSES ON THE CRAFT OF MAKING THE DOCUMENTARY IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY CONTENTIOUS. THE NEW CONFERENCE DIRECTOR HAS EVEN ENSURED THAT THE TWO STRANDS NOW OCCUR IN SEPARATE SPACES.
The Socialist, The Architect and the Twisted Tower

The Socialist, The Architect and the Twisted Tower

For the last few years the award-winning Adelaide filmmaker Heather Croall (now Festival Director, Sheffield Docfest, UK) ran the event. She brought to AIDC an internationalism, a slickness and an ongoing commitment to maintaining the craft section of the conference. The new director Joost den Hartog comes from the market side of documentary events. He has organised markets at, among others, Amsterdam’s IDFA, Toronto’s Hot Docs and our very own AIDC. His appointment represents a shift in dynamics for AIDC.

English is not den Hartog’s first language and he has the diplomatic considered speech patterns of a person who is not a native speaker. He is fast to assure me that non-market sections of the conference are still important. “The marketplace is an important part of the conference but that is not the flagship or the main focus. The main focus this year, because we are celebrating AIDC’s 20th anniversary, is on motivation and inspiration and trying to find answers for questions like, ‘What is the purpose of documentary for society?’.”

The ‘conference’ sessions from the programme profiled on the AIDC website are almost all market related and aimed at producers. These sessions are the traditional territory of directors, writers, editors and cinematographers. Documentary directors and writers may mutter under their breath about keeping the craft sessions but den Hartog is actually catering to his market by doing this. Documentary filmmakers have voted with their feet at previous conferences, turning out in droves to anything about potential financial resources. In a sense the ‘conference’ sessions for the directors et al had almost become sideshow to keep them entertained whilst their producers ran around like mad chooks cornering funders and TV execs.

The final session is where the large question “Can Documentaries Change the World?” will be posed. Ross Kauffman, one half of the directorial team of Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids (2004), will talk with Variety film critic Richard Kuipers to try to find an answer. The question implies functionality as fundamental for the documentary form. It turns out den Hartog does indeed like documentary to have a function, “Call me a hippy or naive, but I think documentary is a very powerful way to raise awareness and to actually mobilise behavioural change and establish social change in society. I am very convinced of that. And I think that there are plenty of examples of recent films that have been able to do that…The most obviously example is An Inconvenient Truth. Now even John Howard thinks that there is something like global warming going on. It is quite an achievement for a filmmaker to get to John Howard.”

Unfortunately it looks likely that Participant Productions’ Diane Weyermann will be unable to attend the conference, because she’ll be busy glamming up for the Oscars where An Inconvenient Truth (2006) is nominated. However Participant Productions is a company well worth watching. Started by the eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll, it aims to fund films that have a social change agenda and turn them into films that will have broad appeal. The company’s tagline is, ‘Lights, camera…social action!’

One of the interesting side effects of the market people taking over conferences is that they have created a space in which filmmakers might start thinking creatively about the marketplace. Joost says, “On the Monday of the conference there are two sessions designed to explore an alternative marketplace by looking at the example of the internet and starting to look at relationships between various platforms. It will also look at other potential financiers like NGOs. DocAgora is an international initiative which had its first gathering in Amsterdam.” There are DocAgora sessions planned for a number of conferences around the world. (DocAgora describes itself as “a virtual webplex” for documentary: “an open space to consider new forms, new platforms and new ways of financing creative, authored and socially engaged documentary content. www.docagora.org). Joost continues, “A report will be written of all the sessions and eventually it will have to result in an alternative marketplace that can exist next to the traditional broadcast model.”

Whilst on the subject of commissioning editors, an embarrassing moment occurred last conference when the search for a commissioning editor during a pitching session resulted in a speakerphone admission that she was at the beach. It’s a worrying notion that buyers might see AIDC as a beachside break. Joost says, “We screen all buyers on their willingness to work with Australians and Australian content. And the reason why they come is that they are interested in Australian content or have a willingness to work with Australian producers. We do a follow-up every year after the conference to see what kind of deals are made. Most of them go home with two or three presales and a bunch of contracts and projects in development.”

A large contingent from Asia will be attending AIDC this year. Joost says “We have quite a big involvement from Discovery Asia and [they] will announce a scheme which is new. They have given their Australian office a fund to commission Australian content. It will be spread over two years for the Australian independent sector.”

When asked about what he thinks are the current crises in documentary den Hartog mentioned the obvious, not enough funding, but also felt, “the broadcasters are in a more competitive market these days and they want to brand their channels. That has consequences for independent producers and on the type of content that [the broadcasters] acquire.” The issue of branding will be covered at the conference at Rudy Buttignol’s session, called “It’s the Flow Not the Show.” (Buttingol is a leading Canadian network commissioner and programmer). It promises to be an interesting session considering the traditional notion that documentary is about ‘program strands’ and that individual 50 minute works are fast giving way to reality style series in Australia.

Australian International Documentary Conference, Adelaide, Feb 23-26, 2007, www.aidc.com.au

THE IMAGE, FRAMED AND HUNG TO CATCH THE EYE AS ONE FIRST ENTERS THE GALLERY, IS A SUITABLY CHARACTERISTIC ONE: DYNAMIC IN COMPOSITION AND TONE, WITH AN INKY FLUIDITY TO ITS LINE, IT SEEMS AT ONCE BOTH ORGANIC AND FUTURISTIC, NOT TO MENTION KIND OF CUTE. IN IT, ASTRO BOY, THAT ICONIC AND SPRIGHTLY BOY CHILD ROBOT WHO FOR DECADES NOW HAS SERVED AS THE AVATAR OF JAPANESE ANIME AND MANGA IN THE WEST, IS FIGHTING A GOOFY LOOKING HUMAN ADULT, WHOSE EXPRESSION OF BEWILDERED ASTONISHMENT CAN BE GLIMPSED AS HIS SINEWY BODY SOMERSAULTS BACKWARDS THROUGH THE AIR, SOUNDLY PUMMELED AND CLEARLY BEATEN.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/3/374_clayfield_tezuka_black.jpg" alt="Tezuka, Black Jack, cover from Black Jack, 1974,
Weekly Shonen Champion, published by Akita Shoten”>

Tezuka, Black Jack, cover from Black Jack, 1974,
Weekly Shonen Champion, published by Akita Shoten

The exhibition in which this image appears, Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga, is full of such visually striking images. Developed by and for the National Gallery of Victoria in collaboration with guest curator Philip Brophy, and touring to both the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, in 2007, the exhibition marks the first Western retrospective of the work of pioneering manga artist and innovator Osamu Tezuka, creator not only of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion (aka Jungle Emperor), but of over 700 other manga titles. Not all of these are represented in the exhibition, of course, but those that are (about sixteen titles) are not only representative of the remarkable breadth and depth of Tezuka’s oeuvre—not to mention its quasi-philosophical richness and inherent humanistic worldview—but also clearly establish him as one of the finest graphic artists of the post-war period, artist, entertainer or otherwise.

For the Western viewer, the iconic figure of Astro Boy serves as a convenient entry point into the world of both manga and Tezuka. I am no exception. Like many of my generation, my only previous connection to Tezuka was watching Astro Boy on television back when I was a little kid. His spiky black hair and his rocket booster boots are instantly recognisable but my interest in this sucker punch of an image—and in the exhibition waiting beyond it—has less to do with my childhood memories of serialised early morning cartoons than it does with the image’s graphic power, which is like a black-and-white slap in the face.

Tezuka’s work pivots on a series of dichotomies. The most obvious of these is the not-quite-absolute split between his manga for children and his gekiga for adults, embodied in the exhibition space itself by the colour-coded division between green walls (children’s manga) and blue (adults’ gekiga). However, this is by no means the only or the most interesting dichotomy. There is also the divide—a certain graphic tension—between abstraction and figuration, which often manifests as a struggle between page layout and panel content, or, within the panels themselves, between background and foreground (Tezuka’s backgrounds are like Futurist Florence Broadhurst wallpapers, particularly in a manga like Astro Boy).

There’s also a tension between modes—one might even say ‘schools’—of visual representation; a tension which cuts across all the manga and gekiga appearing in the exhibition. At times, Tezuka’s work seems to strive towards a kind of no-nonsense (if certainly heightened) realism; at others, it embraces no-holds-barred abstraction, Impressionism, or my personal favourite, Surrealism.

There are panels (and whole pages) in some of Tezuka’s darker gekiga work, particularly Bomba and Eulogy for Kirihito, which shock with their surrealist imagery. In a page from the latter, to illustrate Kirihito’s mental and physical torment as he transforms into a hybrid creature—half-dog, half-man—Tezuka gives us a series of disparate, terrible images, motivated not by any narrative or diegetic causality, but by a kind of emphatic, affective causality. The image of a primitive, almost totem- or sculpture-like being, lying on its back against a solid black background screaming, is genuinely terrifying (indeed, it was one of a few images that, for its very strangeness and uniqueness within the context of the exhibition, I just had to go back and see for a second time before I left). Other panels on the same page show a solid black form in the shape of an explosion and the turbulent surface of a pond during a downpour.

In another image from Kirihito a doctor, in a hospital somewhere, comes to a shocking realisation about something or other. Presently, his glasses begin to levitate, floating away from his face, which fades away. The floating spectacles instantly recall the floating bowler hats of Hans Richter. Rising against an empty white background, the spectacle lenses suddenly crack. Blood pours out into the air from invisible eye sockets. And then we’re back in the hospital again, in reality, ready to get on with the story.

But this page appears in a frame, behind glass: there’s no story to get on with. The images are abstracted, fragmented, devoid (even robbed) of their narrative context. Continually, we are told—by the wall panels, by the room book, by the small army of tour guides who lurk behind corners waiting to jump out and inform you—that Tezuka’s manga is concerned, first and foremost, with the telling of a story. But in the context of the gallery space, where comic books are hung as opposed to held, fingered, dog-eared and read, manga-stories become—(gasp!)—graphic art and, as such, at least comparatively, storyless.

And so as I leave this visually exhilarating exhibition, feeling genuinely excited about all that I have seen, I am hit all of a sudden by a feeling that I’ve missed something. I begin to wonder if I really know any more about manga than before. I wonder if I know less. I realise I want to turn the page and to find out what happens to Astro. The visual dynamism of his movements seems less important to me now. A gallery wall is not a comic book. I want to know what happens next.

Tezuka, the Marvel of Manga, curator Philip Brophy, National Gallery of Victoria, Nov 3-Jan 28; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Feb 23-April 29; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, June 2-Sept 9

SUPER 8 HAS HAD A RESURGENCE OF LATE WITH SYN CITY AT THE ACP AS WELL AS SUPER 8 SCREENINGS AT THE CHAUVEL CINEMA. BOTH SHOWS WERE PART OF D/LUX/MEDIA/ARTS’ 25TH ANNIVERSARY THAT ALSO SAW THE LAUNCHING OF D/ARCHIVE.
Posters, Sydney Super 8 Film Group

As part of the archive project I interviewed Kate Richards, who set up the first two Super 8 festivals, and Mark Titmarsh, who was instrumental in the formation of the Sydney Super 8 Film Group later to become Sydney Intermedia Network and finally d/Lux/Media/Arts.

Kate, you initiated the first Super 8 film festival with Deb Collins. Your background was a distinctively Sydney 80s mixture of politics, squats and French cultural theory?

KR We both began shooting Super 8 while still in high school, and were very political young people and strong feminists. In 1980, when we established the first Super 8 film festival we were living in the Surrey Street squats…Our imperative was just the politics of getting this stuff up on screen. Deb approached the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op to put the work on. She talked them through their initial response of, ‘Oh Super 8, that is not a valid format.’ They were media makers, content and documentary orientated, and artisanal based. What we represented were the new wave of the tertiary-educated, French theory driven students from UTS. Further down the track I could see that without a strong studio practice the whole thing falls over.

How did the first festival go?

KR It was an unbelievable success. We made a little poster and we photocopied it and just stuck it around in cafés and on posts and people had to mail their work in. We got a huge amount of films and we showed them all. The program was very long and we packed out the Co-op the whole weekend. The Co-op were astounded as they had a lot of trouble getting bums on seats. I think the festivals captured a moment when a whole lot of new forms of aesthetics and signification were starting to bubble away—classic post modernity before the term was being used in Sydney—films such as Stephen Harrop’s Square Bashing, with found footage re-configured, and very well cut.

You then moved to England and connected with the Bristol scene. The festival needed new patronage.

KR Yes, luckily they all appeared in that Brisbane wave. There was a big influx in the late 70s: musicians, artists and social workers. They were really quite smart, sophisticated and articulate, coming out of such a repressive regime as Bjelke Peterson’s. I think it was a natural progression that this new group would take over the next festival.
Posters, Sydney Super 8 Film Group

MT My earliest involvement with Super 8 in Sydney was contributing two films to the second festival in 1981. After that festival Ross Gibson, Lindy Lee, Deirdre Beck, Janet Burchill and myself got together and we called ourselves the Super 8 Collective.

After successfully applying for a grant from the Australian Film Commission we held the 3rd Sydney Super 8 Film Festival in November 1982 at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington. The cinema had a capacity of 300 hundred seats. It was full every night and was like that for every annual festival for most of the 80s. I don’t think there were many sophisticated debates around the selection process. We were a test audience, a colosseum forum that voted thumbs up or down.

There was a scene there that grew in sophistication as long as the technology was viable. Over that period a new core of people began to develop with Gary Warner, Virginia Hilyard, Michael Hutak, Catherine Lowing, Andrew Frost and myself. We also did a whole series of Film Readers as well as the festival catalogues and posters, all of which demonstrated a post-do-it-yourself-new-wave aesthetic.

What were some of the political and aesthetic considerations of the filmmakers involved?

MT Andrew Frost, Michael Hutak, Gary Warner, Stephen Harrop and myself all eventually formed Metaphysical TV. We all made films about our relationship with the television screen. We used Super 8 to shoot directly off the screen, reconstructing the material into some personal or perverse work. It all fell into current discussions of post-modern quotation and appropriation. Catherine Lowing was working with a similar sensibility but without the direct relation to television; she was into subcultures, rockabilly, video clip…and dance cultures. Virginia Hilyard was more into a poetics of cinema; she did experiments with expanded live performances. Her work was close to neo-expressionist painting of the time, very visceral and physical.

MT I remember the event that crystallised the understanding of postmodernism in relationship to visual art practice was the Futur*Fall conference at Sydney University in 1984. Baudrillard was the keynote speaker. Lots of people identified postmodern concerns in literature, film theory, fine arts, architecture and economics.

For most of the Super 8 filmmakers what appeared as postmodern in their work had come about quite spontaneously. Instead of taking up the previous generation’s tendency to critique entertainment culture and reject it out of hand we savoured it for aesthetic and expressive effect, touched it up in a certain way, rebuilt it to make it even more perfect. To even make it articulate where it had been dumb, and thoughtful where it had been ignorant.
Posters, Sydney Super 8 Film Group

KR I think collage and those sorts of ideas were the precursors of postmodernity as a technique and had been around for decades. The beauty with reversal stock was we could cut it and stick it; the medium lends itself to being treated that way. We questioned and broke things down. The thin edge of postmodernist reach, though, is just pastiche.

In the 80s you were seen as a vigorous proponent of Super 8 especially in regard to the concept of the ‘Super 8 phenomenon’ and ‘Super 8 effect.’

MT From very early on there was a feeling that Super 8 was special, that there was more to it than just a cheap mass-produced medium. To me it was more than film, it was a way of life, involving an act of sub-cultural revelation. It was really a kind of formalist analysis of the medium. I argued that Super 8 was invisible to practitioners of other gauges, that a certain repressed consciousness was able to return to the surface through the radical incompetence of untrained but otherwise creative Super 8 filmmakers. There were heated debates and differences of opinion about that. As a critical response Edward Colless put it really well, that ‘Super 8’ really defined nothing, that to call an evening of films simply ‘Super 8’ was as crazy as calling an exhibition of paintings ‘Oil Paint.’ I like to have it both ways, and say yes there is a Super 8 effect, it is liberating and empowered by radical incompetence. But also in Sydney and the city scene something happened that is still to be fully articulated; because of the particular place in time, fuelled by art schools and fringe dwelling film specialists and the nature of Super 8 cameras and instant technology.

KR I think the Super 8 scene was metonymic of people’s need to have time-based media. I think equipment was there waiting to be grabbed. It represented the first of what is a long line of domestic media. There is a political imperative about getting the means of production into the hands of non-experts. I think it’s a little bit facile to say it is the medium.

MT I know that there are still Super 8 film festivals in Melbourne and Super 8 is still being picked up by new generations of filmmakers, usually as a device for symbolically representing the past. So you have to say Super 8 never really went away, it just changed its context and its symbolic presence. The result is that the Super 8 phenomenon of the 1980s is really well documented and sits there as a resource waiting to be activated at any time.

d/Lux/Media/Arts are doing that right now with the launch of their web archive that is a repository of every work shown since the 1980s through the 90s and up to recent d>Art events. The archive includes digital versions of films, lists of all the screenings and works, all the writings and artists details from the last 25 years. Amnesia need no longer be an affliction for the experimental screen community!

SynCity, curator Mark Titmarsh, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, Oct 19-Nov 26, 2006; dlux.org.au/syncity

LIKE AN AUSTRALIAN VERSION OF TIM BURTON’S ED WOOD (1995), HUNT ANGELS (ALEC MORGAN, 2006) IS A BIOPIC ABOUT A NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL, BUT VERY PASSIONATE, PAIR OF FILMMAKERS STRUGGLING OUTSIDE THE HOLLYWOOD RUN SYSTEM IN THE EARLY YEARS OF CINEMA. STARRING BEN MENDELSOHN AS THE FAST-TALKING RUPERT KATHNER AND VICTORIA HILL AS ALMA BROOKS, HIS ALLURING YOUNG CAMERAWOMAN, THIS SAD TALE OF THE DUO’S PERSISTENT BUT DOOMED STRUGGLE TO TELL AUTHENTIC AUSTRALIAN STORIES IS PORTRAYED IN SUMPTUOUS BLACK AND WHITE ART DECO STYLE.

Seamless computer manipulation embeds the two actors into stills and newsreel footage from the 1930s and 40s and intercuts them with interviews of still living contemporaries. Hyper-stylised mise-en-scène is reminiscent of film noir. Costuming and makeup is authentic to the period and immaculate. Even the transitional wipes from re-enacted footage to present-day interviews have the feel of the 30s. The use of matting and green-screen recording of the two actors playing the forgotten filmmakers integrated into hundreds of archival images has resulted in a documentary film consisting of 281 special effects shots, which “deploy…contemporary electronic means to fuse together the story of two filmmakers ‘lost’ from our written history with ‘lost’ images of Sydney of the era in which they lived” (Alec Morgan, “Re-telling history in the digital age: The scripting of Hunt Angels”, Scan: Journal of Media, Arts, Culture).

With more chutzpah than talent, Kathner and Brooks made nineteen films before ‘Rupe’ died of a brain hemorrhage in 1954 at the age of 50. Unfortunately, none of these bear scrutiny today, especially when stacked against the better funded works of their contemporary cinemateurs such as Charles Chauvel, whose Rats of Tobruk (1944) scuttled Kathner and Brook’s own plans of a desert war saga. Despite being pioneers in Australian cinema, their contributions don’t even rate a mention in the Australian Film Institute’s A Century of Australian Cinema (1995). The short-lived screenings of their films took place only in the so-called ‘flea-pits’ of Sydney, because, as David Stratton points out, “the two main cinema chains were majority owned by foreign companies (Hoyts by 20th Century Fox and Greater Union by Rank Organization)“, (“A true Aussie gem”, The Weekend Australian, December 2-3, 2006), and these cinemas could only play films sanctioned by the Hollywood owners.

Distribution was monopolized by Hollywood companies, too. Rarely were Australian-made features screened and Kathner and Brooks were under constant financial strain, with many of their filmmaking ventures being little more than scams to milk money from gullible investors, or ‘angels’. Morgan explains their appeal: “They were partners in moviemaking, love, and (as it turned out) crime” (“Lost city of the senses”, Scan: Journal of Media, Arts, Culture). For their Pyjama Girl Murder Case (1939), Australia’s first ‘true crime’ movie, Alma stripped and lay in a bathtub, pretending to be a corpse that had been steeped in formalin for five years, because access to the real thing was denied by the NSW Police Commissioner, “Big Bill” Mackay. The pair’s earlier break-in to the Sydney University Medical Faculty to film the body failed due to lack of a replacement bulb when their only lighting rig blew. Finally, to get permission to continue with the film, Kathner manufactured death threats against himself and ‘leaked’ them to the media: “Big Bill” relented and the film was completed.
Hunt Angels

After a state ban on bushrangers in film was overturned in 1946, the pair’s Ned Kelly film, The Glenrowan Affair (1951) employed numerous different leads according to whomever they could con. The movie’s ‘stars’ came from grazing properties around Victoria’s ‘Kelly country’ and contributed financially in return for the leading role. As a result Kathner and Brook’s ‘Ned’ was variously short, tall, fat and thin. Although the feature films with which they unsuccessfully took on the Hollywood stranglehold have all but sunk without a trace, with none ever turning a profit, Kathner and Brooks did contribute significantly to the newsreel genre, by depicting the actual misery and squalor of the Depression era in their Australia Today pieces of 1938-40, which were in stark contrast to the artificially optimistic Fox-Movietone News and Cinesound Review newsreels. Morgan laments the habit of historical surveys of Australian film to overlook the newsreel at the expense of features:

Because of the exclusion policies of Fox and Cinesound, moving images of the poorer, noir world of Sydney that Kathner and Brooks inhabited and filmed are missing from our popular memory. Generations have grown up seeing a Depression-era Sydney depicted as a sunny, prosperous place with beaches full of happy bathers and bronzed lifesavers. Even today, because of their easy access, the Fox-Movietone and Cinesound News collections are the most extensively used sources of factual footage of that era. (“Re-designing the past imperfect: The making of Hunt Angels”, Senses of Cinema, 2006).

By depicting Depression-era Australia as it really was, Kathner and Brooks should have earned a place in Australia’s cinematic history, but their fringe existence has meant they have been under-screened and overlooked…until now, that is.

Biopics of filmmakers have not been common in Hollywood: apart from Burton’s Ed Wood, Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998) about horror film director James Whale also springs to mind. Morgan’s work is the first biopic of an Australian filmmaker: biopics here have included a sports star, Dawn Fraser in Dawn! (Ken Hannam, 1979); criminals, Mark ‘Chopper’ Reid (Chopper, Andrew Dominik, 2000) and Brendan Abbott (The Postcard Bandit, Tony Tilse, 2003); a writer, Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career, Gillian Armstrong, 1979); a pianist (David Helfgott in Shine, 1996); and Ned Kelly in a plethora of films. One commonality in Australian biopics is the recurring theme of a unique individual’s struggle against the establishment. But the underdog need not win: Albert Moran and Errol Vieth note in Film in Australia in their chapter on the Australian biopic: “there is no obligation on the genre to trace an ever-upward path on the part of its central figure. Triumph and affirmation may only be incidental moments in the biographical film” (Film in Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006). Kathner and Brooks were certainly underdogs.

Nevertheless, Hunt Angels serves as an instructional piece for contemporary Australian filmmakers, who have it comparatively easy. Since the 1970s Australian filmmaking has been greatly assisted by the state film development organisations in what has been called The Revival. Before this financial revitalisation, cinema in Australia was a mostly US lead affair: 95% of films screened were US productions distributed by US firms and shown only in cinemas they approved. This was the hostile environment in which Kathner and Brooks operated. Paul Kathner says in the film: “My father wanted to tell Australian stories—he was fed up with the Americanization of films.”

It is this passion to break away from Hollywood controlled production, distribution and screening and to tell Australian stories that drove Kathner and Brooks. It is this same intention to do things in an anti-Hollywood way that seems to have driven Morgan to choose two movie-making failures to be the subject of a film. Moran and Vieth write of the Australian biopic, “What matters is not the historical importance of the life but rather that the life actually happened. Beyond that, generic form and style intervene to ensure that the biographical subject becomes a screen subject.” Morgan creatively uses Art Deco style and form to turn a forgotten biographical subject into a captivating screen subject, something that would never have seen the light of day were it a story about two unknown filmmakers in Hollywood. Instead of choosing a successful Australian cinematic legend like Charles Chauvel, the subject of numerous historiographies, Morgan has disclosed the quondam reality of our lesser-known Australian movie-making background. As David Stratton has said of Hunt Angels, “if you care anything about local cinema, the result is essential viewing.” Hunt Angels has filled in a small blank in our cinematic and cultural history, re-coloured an effective whitewash of the Depression-era wretchedness of Sydney by Hollywood sanctioned sanitised newsreels, restored a nation’s previously censored memory, and done so with an unmistakable anti-Hollywood sneer.

Hunt Angels won the 2006 Film Critics Circle Australia Award for Best Feature Documentary and the Atom Award for Best General Documentary.

Hunt Angels, writer-director Alec Morgan, cinematography Jackie Farkas, lead compositor and visual Fx supervisor Rose Draper, visual effects consultant and post-production supervisor Mike Seymour, production designer Tony Campbell, costumes Margot Wilson, editor Tony Stevens, composer Jen Anderson, producer Sue Maslin; Palace Films with Film Art Doco and Blusteal Films, 2006 www.huntangels.com.au

KRIV STENDERS’ BOXING DAY IS A DOMESTIC DRAMA FOCUSING ON A MAN ON HOME DETENTION WHO UNCOVERS A DISTURBING TRUTH WHILE ATTEMPTING TO RECONCILE HIS ESTRANGED FAMILY. SOLELY FUNDED BY THE ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL AND UNFOLDING IN REAL TIME IN ESSENTIALLY ONE CONTINUOUS TAKE, THE FILM IS A FOLLOW UP, NOT JUST CHRONOLOGICALLY BUT METHODOLOGICALLY, TO STENDERS’ MICRO-BUDGET BLACKTOWN, WHICH WAS A HIT AT THE 2006 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL (WHERE IT TOOK OUT THE AUDIENCE AWARD), MELBOURNE, BRISBANE, PERTH AND CANBERRA FILM FESTIVALS.

Blacktown is shortly to be released on DVD by Madman Entertainment. Ahead of Boxing Day’s world premiere at AFF, I spoke to Kriv Stenders about his working methods, casting strategies and stylistic formalism.

“The seed for the film happened ten years ago when I made a short film called Two/Out,” says Stenders of his first collaboration with Boxing Day co-writer and star, indigenous poet, musician and sometime actor, Richard Green. “I met both Tony Ryan [star of Blacktown, RT67, p22] and Richard through making Two/Out. Richard and I stayed in loose contact, and when I made Blacktown with Tony I touched base with Richard. Then, because of the experience I had with Blacktown, I thought it would be great to make a film with Richard in a lead role. Basically having that experience under my belt I decided to do Boxing Day.”

The film’s scenario involves Green’s character, Chris Sykes, a recovering alcoholic and criminal, preparing Christmas lunch when an old friend turns up uninvited at his doorstep and reveals a secret regarding his family. When Chris’ daughter, his wife and her new boyfriend finally arrive, the situation inevitability escalates in tension towards revelation and conflict. Dark and relentless when compared to some of the relatively lighter and romantic moments of Blacktown, the film’s tone was dictated by Green’s presence: “ Tony [in Blacktown], who’s very gregarious, with a lot of light inside him, he was ideal for that type of film, while Richard is a lot more conflicted. I knew that he’d be able to play intensity really convincingly, absolutely perfect for some kind of heavily dramatic role. And it just kind of fed from there. Well, we thought, what about a siege situation? He’d be really good in that. How about that? What about a domestic situation, the ones you read about in the papers at Christmas when families go off the rails? Perfect. That’s where it started. Richard can do this sort of character. What kind of story would that character inhabit? Work with that, and the story kind of wrote itself from that point. And it became this kind of confronting, quite unrelenting piece. Hopefully with some kind of light in it as well.”

The writing process for Boxing Day never advanced to a full draft screenplay, but what Stenders calls a “scriptment”, which had precisely laid out story beats and sample dialogue, but with enormous scope for flexibility and improvisation. A limited cast of six and one location was suited to this form of organic evolution of narrative and character. “Basically we had a three week period to produce the film. So for the first two weeks we rehearsed the film chronologically, and shot it. At the end of the first week we had a version of the film, which we could sit back and watch. Every night I’d pick the best bits and cut it together. So at any point of the day we had the film, and we just added on the next dramatic layer. By the second week we had a second version of the film and we really knew what the weak points were, what the twists and turns were, and were really able to refine the story and address a lot of dramatic issues and character issues.” This was a more structured approach than the guerrilla approach to the making of Blacktown. “Blacktown was shot over about eight months. And it wasn’t as concentrated or disciplined as this. Boxing Day is a much more contained enterprise. It was more finite. But because we had finite resources and finite time, I think it worked really well, because it really helped focus everything.”

Stenders is a passionate advocate of backing the abilities of non-actors, as long as they bring an intrinsic talent and legitimacy to the role, and he encourages them in certain scenarios to construct their own dialogue and action. “Because you’re not bound by script or hitting lines, it can help alleviate stilted performances, and it’s important to get actors who are more like jazz musicians, who are able to improvise, riff off a melody, and come back to the basic rhythm again.” A non-actor, Stuart Clark, plays Chris’s drug-dealing colleague in Boxing Day, his services attained through contact with the Offenders Aid and Rehabilitation Services of SA. A similar process was used to cast Stenders’ short film Two/Out, “and it’s a risky thing to do because some of these guys are struggling with internal issues. But Stuart brought something inherent, he brought some authenticity and a lot of credibility to Boxing Day.” The end result of Clark’s natural performance is compelling, full of implied menace and idiosyncratic phrasing.

While most of the cast were taking their first roles, they were also offset by the presence of two professional actors in Syd Brisbane and Tammy Anderson. This blending of experience and rawness was very deliberate: “In a funny kind of way they feed off each other. Non-actors can be more tangential and unpredictable but the actors can always bring them into line, and vice versa…it’s all about casting. From my point of view directing is 99% casting.”

Trained as a cinematographer, Stenders himself shot Boxing Day with a hand held, intimately observational approach of one extended take in a digital format. Aware that this brand of cinematic experiment has been attempted before, he acknowledges predecessors like Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sukorov, 2002) and Time Code (Mike Figgis, 2000): “So it’s not that groundbreaking, but I think what’s different about Boxing Day is that we’re telling a linear story. It’s all about the story, really.” His ambition for Boxing Day is to balance an aesthetic style, a narrative structure, and the technology of the medium, into something cohesive:

I really love digital as a medium and I really like to find new ways of telling stories to make films. In a funny kind of way, I think digital has been the best thing to happen to cinema in the last twenty years, because the freedom it gives you to work outside of normal systems, styles, formats or traditions is great. So I wanted to do something where the form and content were the one thing and kind of inform each other. And I just really like the idea of doing long takes, and never cutting and always being in the moment.

Having made Illustrated Family Doctor, a traditional feature on 35mm—although that was a lot of fun—the thing I learn as I make more and more films is that if I frighten myself, if I put myself in compromising positions I find that the payoff is more rewarding than by being safe.

ONE OF THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF THE PROGRAM FOR THE 2007 ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL (AFF) IS ITS EMPHASIS ON SILENT FILM WITH THREE STRONG ATTRACTIONS: PAOLO CHERCHI USAI’S PASSIO, ROLF DE HEER’S DR PLONK AND A SCREENING OF D.W. GRIFFITH’S INTOLERANCE WITH LIVE ACCOMPANIMENT BY LOCAL BAND, THE DEADBEATS. GIVEN THE GRAND CLAIMS FOR NEW MEDIA IN THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE, IT SEEMS SIGNIFICANT THAT OLD MEDIA ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY RETURNING TO PROMINENCE.

One common thread linking AFF events is the relationship with live music which has sustained the renaissance of interest in silent film. Film theorists, for many decades, have noted that the diffusion of synchronised sound in the later 1920s and the rise of a dialogue driven cinema added to the realism of the image. These three projects, while with very different geneses, employing divergent aesthetic strategies and addressing different publics, all circle around the idea of returning the image to a space where it can interact as an equal with the more abstract structures of music.

Paolo Cherchi Usai is the Director of Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive, as well as one of the world’s most respected film archivists and historians. Passio, his feature compilation of found footage and calligraphy, accompanies Arvo Pärt’s musical adaptation of the Passion from The Gospel of St John. Pärt’s music will be performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra with organist Christopher Bowers Broadbent and the Theatre of Voices directed by Paul Hillier.

Cherchi Usai has spoken of his interest in producing a dialogue between image and sound. To the extent that the film has a subject, he sees it as dealing with our society’s history of image production. He sees the sum total of our images as a kind of repressed collective memory, and in interviews he has invoked writers such as Mircea Eliade who emphasise the symbolic role of imagery.

He is also interested in the image as image in a very concrete sense. In an attempt to restore what Walter Benjamin called the aura of the individual artwork, lost in the age of mechanical (and now digital) reproduction, only seven prints of the film were struck before the negative was destroyed. Each print is hand-coloured in a different hue, with four cool prints (ruby, violet, indigo and magenta) and three warm prints (vermilion, gold and minimum colouring). No one print of the film is like another, just as no one performance of the work will be like another.
Dr Plonk

From the sublime to the ridiculous. In an industry where the hardest thing is to make your second film, Rolf de Heer was travelling with his tenth feature, the AFI-winning Ten Canoes, while cutting his eleventh, Dr Plonk, which is the AFF’s closing night film. By Australian standards, de Heer comes up with some pretty daring ideas. Having made a subtitled film in an indigenous language with a group of non-actors, he has backed up with a silent, slapstick comedy. To de Heer, these aspects of his career are related. “The more radical I get, the easier these things are to finance,” he said at a Media Resource Centre talk in Adelaide recently.

His last two films are linked in more pragmatic ways as well. The overrun in making Ten Canoes meant that de Heer needed to make another film relatively quickly. He tells of going to the fridge to get some insect repellent in preparation for a trip north and finding instead 20,000 feet of film stock past its expiry date. At that moment, he knew he had his next project: a film which would invoke the look of silent cinema, where any deterioration in the stock would be immaterial as it would be printed in black and white, and in a genre where we expect films to be far from pristine in condition.

Though the inspiration for Plonk stemmed from these humble beginnings, this was to be no simple project. De Heer says that many of his films “begin first as a contrivance and only after that become a great passion.” He decided that his silent film would have to be shot in the style of silent films—the slapstick comedies which he had seen on television in his childhood—but also employing as much of the technology as was feasible. He and cinematographer Judd Overton set about finding a hand-cranked camera to give the image a pulse in the inevitable variations in winding speed.

On first glance the project suggests comparison to Borges’ story about Pierre Menard who re-writes Don Quixote word for word in the present day—and in the process creates a completely different work. De Heer insists that the film “has to be its own thing. You can’t replicate silent film,” he explains, “but it’s in the tradition of silent film.” Some early attempts at technological authenticity were abandoned. The 1920s camera bought on eBay was jettisoned for a Mitchell modified for hand-cranking; black and white processing and cutting on film were replaced by digitising the negative for editing and then outputting back to film. An early plan to record a soundtrack on a theatre Wurlitzer was also abandoned in favour of an accompaniment by a Melbourne group, the Stiletto Sisters, which will be performed live at the Adelaide premiere (de Heer’s The Tracker was presented at the 2002 Melbourne Film Festival with Archie Roach performing live). The experimentation with sound that has characterised de Heer’s filmmaking has often taken the form of separating picture and sound as elements in their own right. The multiple strands of sound in Ten Canoes with David Gulpilil’s voiceover existing in a separate space to the narrative diegeses is another case in point.

Perhaps the most interesting concession de Heer had to make to an earlier style of filmmaking was the substitution of editing with complex staging. Rather than shooting standard coverage for an editor, the camera is held back in full shot, and like great filmmakers such as Feuillade, Bauer or Keaton, de Heer has to re-discover the craft of the early silent period—learning how to direct and quickly re-direct the audience’s attention to the salient dramatic business.

In a film so outlandishly different from Ten Canoes, de Heer has paradoxically come back to the same ground in Dr Plonk, with the need to find the formal means in picture, sound and drama to imagine a radically different time and place. Here is another attempt to regain the past, just as the protagonist of Ten Canoes has to recover the past of his ancestral cosmology before he can die, just as de Heer the image-maker tries to recover the past of anthropologist Donald Thomson’s photographs.

De Heer’s experiment in re-discovering cinema through anachronism is not an isolated one. In Wisconsin for instance, the university’s filmmaking department runs a course in silent filmmaking which tries to replicate as closely as possible the film stock, camera equipment, lighting conditions and processing technology available to filmmakers at the birth of the medium (mywebspace.wisc.edu/dhfuller/web). For film historians, the benefits are a closer understanding of the conditions and constraints faced by the filmmakers, while for those interested in becoming filmmakers, silent film offers a tangible encounter with the material basis of the medium in ways which have been lost by the “point and shoot, click and drag” methods of digital video.

The third silent program at AFF has its origin in the Media Resource Centre’s Silent Re-masters series, which has given rise to The Deadbeats’ accompaniment to DW Griffith’s 1916 classic Intolerance. Re-scores of silent films by rock groups or electronic musicians commonly polarise opinion. Some view it as a refusal to see history in any terms other than contemporary ones. For others, it acknowledges that these films were intensely modern and popular in their historical moment, and that as electronic and rock music occupy an analogous cultural space today, they can help translate the films into contemporary idiom.

Rather than play over the film, The Deadbeats (bass, drums, guitar, keyboard and spoken word picking out key intertitles) provide a spare accompaniment which accentuates the rising patterns of action within scenes. Intolerance, with its four interwoven narratives, stands up well to this treatment which refreshes the audience’s respect for the essentially abstract nature of Griffith’s achievement instead of facilely deriding it for its lack of realism.

Adelaide is not alone in foregrounding silent cinema within a festival context. The recent Berlin Film Festival programmed restorations of Giovanni Pastrone’s 1913 Italian epic Cabiria and Asta Nielson’s 1920 version of Hamlet. This rediscovery of silent film is undoubtedly a by-product of Pordenone’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, an annual festival begun 25 years ago by a group including Cherchi Usai, and which has included strands on 21st century silents, including filmmakers such as Guy Maddin. The lesson here might be that, as much as artists envision the future, there is something both perverse and prudent about turning in the other direction and absorbing the lessons that history has to offer on the production and consumption of screen images.

RUSSIANS SEE THINGS A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY FROM WESTERNERS. TO THEM, LIFE IS BLEAKER, STUPIDER, DEEPER, FUNNIER AND ALWAYS MORE ‘HUMAN.’ THEIR FILMS REFLECT THIS PERSPECTIVE. THERE IS ALWAYS AN AUDACITY IN RUSSIAN CINEMA. EVERYTHING SEEMS TO BE HANGING, TENUOUSLY ABOVE AN OCEAN OF CHAOS. IN AUSTRALIA, WHERE LIFE IS TOO SAFE AND EASY, IT’S LIBERATING TO OBSERVE SUCH ARTISTIC RECKLESSNESS. RUSSIAN FILMS CAN SHAKE OUR BENEVOLENT PLATITUDES, REAWAKENING OUR SENSE OF COLD, INVIGORATING REALITY. FORTUNATELY, THE 2007 ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL WILL BE SHOWCASING SIX DIVERSE EXAMPLES OF NEW RUSSIAN FILMMAKING TO REMIND US OF THE POWER OF THIS INIMITABLE NATIONAL CINEMA.

At the top of the list in this year’s season is Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun (2004). For the uninitiated, Sokurov is the most accomplished filmmaker working in Russia today, largely known in Australia for his single-shot historical panorama Russian Ark (2002). The Sun presents the third instalment in his Men of Power series. Following depictions of Hitler in Moloch (1999) and Lenin in Taurus (2001), The Sun focuses on the life of Japanese Emperor Hirohito in the days leading up to his capitulation to the US led invasion in 1945. A biography of sorts, it follows Hirohito (Issei Ogata) through the twisted layers of his character, through its defects and peculiarities, towards the moment when he will renounce his sanctified divinity as a sun god for the sake of international peace and personal happiness.

A controversial work, Sokurov’s film has generated considerable hostility in many countries, particularly in China where its sympathetic depiction of Hirohito has been received as an insult to the victims of Japanese atrocities. Indeed, as historical record, The Sun is at best problematic. But history is not the film’s real interest. What Sokurov captures is not the life of a man as normally understood, but rather the bare emotional imprint of a life, of a human animal clothed in an illusion of ritualised power and sickness. The style reflects this concern. Green-brown sepia images and warped, fluctuating proportions conjure disease or hallucination. Hirohito himself notes an ever-present “bad smell and bad taste”, sensations exacerbated by the score’s remarkable arrangement of music and noise into a low intestinal drone. Like the best of 19th century Russian literature, Sokurov reveals the aura or tone of each scene, isolating the human experiences within it. Perhaps the film’s greatest asset is the actor Ogata. His performance as Hirohito is quite unlike any I have ever witnessed, not so much that of a psychology as of a soul: anguished, silent and invisible. These qualities give The Sun an artistic value rarely matched in contemporary filmmaking.

Pavel Lunguin’s The Island (2006) belongs to the same school of Russian filmmaking (one traceable to the influence of celebrated director Andrei Tarkovsky). A less complex film than The Sun, The Island is a character centred study of sin and redemption. Having washed up on the shores of a remote monastery, Father Anatoly (Petr Mamonov) spends his life segregated from the rest of the order as an eccentric prankster and mystic. He administers to the sick, plays tricks on other priests and makes a general mockery of Orthodox ritual, all to encapsulate a genuine example of Christian faith: devotion to God and nothing else. But the pain of his past sins will not go away. Impressively shot on a lavish budget, The Island is propelled by a wonderful performance from Mamonov, whose Anatoly humanises the script’s religious concerns with compassion and warmth. It’s a serious film, but accessible.

In a totally different realm is Kirill Serebrennikov’s black and dry comedy, Playing the Victim (2006), recently voted Best Film at the Rome Film Festival. Previously anonymous as a filmmaker, Serebrennikov has experienced considerable success over the past ten years as a theatre director of contemporary and usually scandalous Russian plays. His new film sees him bringing one such work to the screen, Playing the Victim by brothers Vladimir and Oleg Presnyakov. It begins unabashedly: “Russian cinema is in big shit. Only Fedya Bondarchuk is a cool guy. Fedya is cool. His father got an Oscar. And he’ll get one. He’ll get stronger and get one for sure.”

To those in the know the message is clear. This is anti-Tarkovsky, a film concerned only with this life. It is the story of Valya, a near thirty-year-old boy, university graduate and emblem of a new way. Valya works for the police. His job is to stand in for the dead during re-enactments of homicides. It’s cushy work and pays enough for his new toys and clothes. But Valya’s real interest is in revenge: on his mother and uncle who now share his dead father’s bed, and on an entire generation of Russians busy reacquainting themselves with national arrogance. He endorses something else entirely, the cultural ambivalence of anything and everything. Valya practices his gangsta moves, eats blackberries with chopsticks and embraces suicide chic with the best of them. To generations X and Y his stance will be a familiar one. “Ideals don’t exist”, the film’s director has claimed, “and it would be good to have a great deal more common sense…I don’t think we have our own special path or destiny” (The Moscow Times, June 9, 2006). The Russian cultural elite will be rolling in their graves.

Everyone knows that Slavs are the best at being seriously idiotic and First on the Moon (2005) proves it in spades. A mockumentary by Alexei Fedorchencko, it lets us in on a big secret. While many of us are aware that Neil Armstrong’s famous giant leap was filmed in a television studio, few of us have known the whole truth until now. The real, bona fide Moon landing was an unadulterated Stalinist invention. Encased within a prototype interstellar projectile, a small handpicked elite of heroic workers, athletic beauties and limber midgets shot to the Moon on March 16th 1938, returning to Earth one week later as a meteor that landed in a remote alpine region of Chile. The crew survived, its superhuman leader Ivan Kharamalov evading Soviet authorities by assuming multiple identities. He eventually became star of a popular regional circus troupe in a vibrant retelling of Alexander Nevsky. If you don’t believe me go and see First on the Moon yourself. This is a brilliant and hilarious film with fantastic black & white imagery. It won best documentary at the 2005 Venice Film Festival.

At the other end of the truth spectrum is Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Blockade (2005). Winner of 6 international prizes, Blockade comprises newsreel footage from the 900-day siege of Leningrad (1941-44) during which up to 800,000 Russians died. Choosing to let the footage speak for itself, Loznitsa couples the images only with a minimal soundtrack of effects. For 52 minutes we watch silently on the domestic consequences of war. It is a harrowing and starkly pertinent experience for anyone still unsure about the viability of military invasions.

Finally, Andrei Kravchuk’s The Italian (2005) fulfils an all too often neglected role in festival programs. It’s a children’s film, most suitable for 12-15 year olds. It tells the story of Vanya, a five-year-old living in a dilapidated Russian orphanage. Vanya is lucky. From the dozens of boys surrounding him he has been chosen for adoption by a childless Italian couple. In only a month it’ll be beaches and gelato. But Vanya doesn’t feel lucky. He wants what is his. With a gritty resolve and a knack for language he escapes the orphanage and embarks on a journey to find his real mother. Like the best children’s films, The Italian layers its adventure story with a sophisticated social analysis, presenting a cross-section of Russia’s past and present through the lens of Vanya’s unclouded eyes. It won Best Children’s Film at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival.

IN A LARGE STUDIO ADJOINING THE NEW STATE LIBRARY OF QUEENSLAND, MAAP 2006 OFFERS VISITORS INTIMATE, INTENSIVE BROWSING OF MEDIA ART IT HAS COMMISSIONED AND COLLECTED. THE LIBRARY, A PARTNER IN MAAP'S OUT OF THE INTERNET, IS IMPRESSIVE ARCHITECTURALLY, IN SCALE AND IN THE ARRAY OF SCREEN AND COMPUTER FACILITIES AVAILABLE TO USERS. IT'S WELL PLACED AS PART OF THE SOUTHBANK CULTURAL PRECINCT BETWEEN THE QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY AND THE SPECTACULAR NEW GALLERY OF MODERN ART. MAAP FITS WELL IN THIS SCHEME OF THINGS, EMBRACING AND INTERROGATING NEW MEDIA WORK AS ART AND SIMULTANEOUSLY AS PART OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION NETWORKS.

In titling MAAP 2006 Out of the Internet, artistic director Kim Machan was hoping to give internet art a palpable exhibition presence as well as an online life: “I am shepherding the work back into taking a material form in the museum context, to achieve authority, blending the different fields in which they operate, and joining another official art history context. Making a representation of all the works in the State Library of Queensland adds another dimension—or escape route—out of the closed museum context” (RT 75, p2).

This physicality manifests itself for visitors too. Near the entrance to the exhibition, on Singapore based artists Charles Lim and defence scientist Melvin Phua’s exercise rowing machine, alpha 4 (GENERATOR), you work hard until the point at which you’ve powered up the battery which kickstarts a computer that is set up as a server for its own website and which sends the image of you rowing out around the world. As Machan observes in her catalogue notes, there’s something dryly funny about an “overly earnest scientific approach coupled with the absurdly circular demonstration.” This is interactivity that not only makes you work but triggers ideas of bizarre potential applications.
(Out of the Internet and) Into the Night, Young Hae Change Heavy Indsutries

(Out of the Internet and) Into the Night, Young Hae Change Heavy Indsutries

In the relaxed MAAP exhibition space, scaffolding creates a second level to which you climb to view YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ flash animation, Into the Night, on a big screen, or look left to another featuring G’day, G’day by Japan’s Candy Factory. Beneath the floor are rows of video monitors on which, with headphones, you can choose to view a host of DVD-based works from the Move on Asia Clash & Network Exhibition originally shown in Seoul and Tokyo and, once sifted through, featuring some strong work. A seat per screen makes the experience a serious as well as comfortable one (galleries take note). In Zhong Shuo (People say…; Australian artist Iain Mott with Chinese collaborators li Chuan Group, Ding Jie) you can set yourself down on cushions in a small house to hear Chinese people speak of their experience of cities as they change (www.reverberant.com; RT 71, p26).

As promised by Machan, YOUNG-HAE CHANG INDUSTRIES’ Into the Night offers a cinematic version of what is usually an internet experience. The Korean pair have created a wickedly witty text rendition of a film-noirish road movie replete with the artists’ own fine jazz score backing a hilarious argument in aptly dead-pan computer-generated speech. The only concessions to imagery (the scale, distribution and lyrical movement of the words make the art here) come in the form of road markings flickering into the distance and a happy face sun on the horizon. There’s a shocking crash (the word falls off the screen) and fitting closure after droll renditions of Talk About It and Funky Town: “You kill me.” Go to www.yhchang.com to see Into the Night, and many more inventive works, on the small screen, but it must be said: BIG is good.

Feng Mengbo, The Invisible Words: A GPS Calligraphy Project, 2006,<BR /> Moreton Bay, November 2006″></p>
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Feng Mengbo, The Invisible Words: A GPS Calligraphy Project, 2006,
Moreton Bay, November 2006

As with Candy Factory and Young Hae Chang, Feng Mengbo (China) has a longstanding relationship with MAAP. GPS technology is employed quite laterally in his appealing Invisible Words installation. He uses it to ‘write’ Chinese characters across city maps (www.maap.fengmengbo – expired) and oceanographic charts. The artist travels the route (in “kilometres’ long brush strokes”) determined for him by the shape of a an ideogram and records the result as he goes. For MAAP he worked off the coast of Queensland. The finished exhibits, where the techno-calligraphy hovers beautifully between the impressionistic and precise, are accompanied by images of the artist ‘writing’ at sea. RT

MAAP: Out of the internet, artistic director Kim Machan, State Library of Queensland and international partner venues, Nov 30, 2006-Jan 25, 2007; www.maap.org.au. For the full extent of MAAP Out of the Internet activities see Danni Zuvela’s interview with the curators in RealTime 75.

IN CHARLES STROSS’ SCI-FI NOVEL THE SINGULARITY SKY, CULTURAL COLONISERS INVADE A PLANET WITH CORNUCOPIA MACHINES WHICH CHURN OUT EVERY KIND OF OBJECT AND TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICE ON THE INHABITANTS’ WISH LIST IN RETURN FOR THEIR IDEAS, HISTORIES AND BELIEFS. THE ALIENS, WHO ARE NEVER SEEN, LEAVE THE PLANET AND ITS CULTURE IN A RIGHT MESS, RUINING THE ALREADY DODGY DISTRIBUTION OF POWER. THE AUSTRALIAN NETWORK FOR ART AND TECHNOLOGY (ANAT) IS A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF CORNUCOPIA MACHINE, A BENIGN ONE HELPING US MAKE THE MOST, ETHICALLY AND AESTHETICALLY, OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS WE ARE FLOODED WITH BY OUR OWN ALIENS, THE TECHNO-CORPORATIONS.
Finger Dress, Joanna Berzowska

When I comment on the apparent fecundity of ANAT’s 2007 program, director Melinda Rackham informs me that, of course, Anat is the ancient Egyptian goddess of fertility and crops, and of war. Even so, the program is not quite the horn of plenty Rackham envisaged given limits on funding, consequently “there was some cutting back. So we’re really looking for partners and sponsors outside grant funding in order to employ additional staff to make what we’re doing sustainable.”

in the loop

One of Rackham’s passions is keeping media artists informed, in touch, in the loop. A highly developed mailing list is vital and she’ll look to the model she employed when she instigated the empyre list with its moderated discussions and papers in 2002 (www.subtle.net/empyre). ANAT will also revitalise the lapsed Synapse Database, “an online resource promoting the nexus of art and science”, by bringing writers and curators as well as artists and scientists into its fold (www.synapse.net.au). Because media arts have difficulty connecting with the wider community, says Rackham, it’s vital to attract a diverse audience, “like the scientific community or Cosmos readers [www.cosmosmagazine.com], people who enjoy reading about science. We have to make media arts more visible.” As well, ANAT’s new website, Artport, will play a major role in identifying and promoting artist and organisation members, integrating a diverse field and, as well, reaching out to artists in other fields and a wider audience, “working like a rhizome.”

everyday potentials

A sizeable part of ANAT’s current focus is on the technological innovations pertaining to everyday life. While attending festivals in recent years Rackham noticed developments in techno-wearables. She was alert to how “textile manufacturing and computing shared the same root—think the Jacquard loom and the difference machine. Why not take a different tack and reunite them. It’s aesthetic, it’s fun, technologically advanced and pushing at the edges.” Some wearables are eminently useful, many of them playful and some surreal: Rackham cites the “really practical handbag you can scream into in public places and let the cry out later.” But she also mentions Aphrodite shoes; designed initially for the safety of prostitutes, they are fitted with GPS receiver, alarm and back-to-base signal. (www.theaphroditeproject.tv/saftey). Meanwhile major fashion companies, especially in Italy, are alreading marketing ‘techno-couture’: “Zegna’s parka with pores that open and close, Valetino’s waterproof cashmeres and Alexander McQueen’s papier-mache leather” (“Made in Milan”, Australian Financial Review, Jan 25-28).

The upshot of Rackham’s interest is Reskin, a two-week intensive workshop for Australian media, visual arts and craft practitioners led by prominent overseas makers in the field and related practices: Joanna Berzowska (a Montreal expert in responsive textiles and clothing), Susan Cohn (a Melbourne goldsmith and designer), Stephen Barrass (Canberra-based interaction designer and artist), Elise Co (Los Angeles-based multimedia designer and programmer), Alistair Riddell (Canberra-based interaction design artist and researcher) and Cinammon Lee (Canberra-based metalsmith). Berzowska’s many imaginative and often amusing creations include “memory rich clothing” pictured on this page in the form of a “finger dress”: it’s “an intimacy map of the body, recording and displaying where a person has been touched” (www.berzowska.com).

Rackham is impressed with the high calibre of the Australian artists involved in the workshop (including Keith Armstrong, Somaya Langley, Catherine Truman, Michael Yuen, Robin Petterd) and notes that ANAT, a media arts organisation adopted as a client of the Visual Arts Board in the wake of the recent Australia Council restructure, is leading the way for the board’s traditional clientele in engaging with technological innovation and in an international context. In RealTime 78 Dan Mackinlay will report on the Reskin exhibition and forum.

pixel.play & portable walls

ANAT staff member Sasha Grbich, was one of the EPIC (Emerging Producers in Community) team (RT73, p9), focussing on mobile phone art in regional areas in South Australia with ANAT in the pixel.play program. The next stage of pixel.play is Portable Walls which, says Rackham, “is an outgrowth of the EPIC program and has really grown on its own”. Portable Walls will exhibit on phones and accessible, small DVD player screens the work of young makers and, depending on sponsorship, could tour to over 20 suburban and regional centres around Australia. Rackham says that if she’d seen this kind of art in a gallery when she was growing up in Tamworth: “I would have become an artist much earlier. Exposure of work that we take for granted in the cities is vital in the regions.” Pixel.play will show as part of the 2007 Come Out Youth Festival in Adelaide, May 7-19, featuring work on mobiles from 24 schools in the Mercury Cinema foyer (www.comeout.on.net).

opensourcing

The Annual ANAT Media Lab is titled Still Open, comprising two-day workshops in Perth, Melbourne Brisbane in conjunction with the Biennial of Electronic Art (BEAP07) and SymbioticA, Perth, Open Channel in Melbourne and Creative Commons at QUT, Brisbane. The focus is on opensource, the collective authoring of software, specifically the Linux operating system as a model of democratic and low cost cooperation. The workshops aim “to provide hands on experience; and to initiate local networks and projects.” The emphasis will be on the application of opensource practice and theory to “networked art and software development, print and online publishing, and in the scientific arena where the open science movement encourages a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.”

The Lab facilitators are publisher and media artist Alessandro Ludovico (Italy) producer of the online and print publication neural (www.neural.it); free software hacker and new media activist Andy Nicholson (Australia); and interdisciplinary artist and researcher Beatriz da Costa (USA), a former collaborator with the Critical Art Ensemble who works in open science.

The title Still Open was designed to match BEAP07’s stillness theme, but is also an apt reminder, says Rackham, that opensource is still a key media factor and “that there’s more to life than Microsoft and iPods.” Asked about the relatively brief duration of the workshops, Rackham points out that the cost of the lab is considerable and that after their two-day workshop experience, participants will stay in the loop, online with interstate workshoppers. She comments that in a climate where too many things are done on the cheap, ANAT’s big investment has been in Reskin and that she has effectively put one and half years of ANAT workshop funding resources into the event to ensure that it is of a scale to make it truly worthwhile, to influence artists and to push the work out into the community, “to really build on what we have started.”

new niches

ANAT is continuing its vital Professional Development Travel Grant program: the organisation’s membership magazine, Filter, documents artists’ reports on their travels. The grants take many artists overseas to research and develop their art and provide the potential for exhibition and collaboration. The Synapse Art and Science Residency Program is particularly targeted at developing “dynamic creative and collaborative partnerships between scientists and artists, science institutions and arts organisations.” The program is managed by ANAT as part of the Australia Council InterArts Office’s Synapse Art and Science Initiative. With two local residencies already completed in the second program, an international residency will occur at Rothamstead Research, Hertfordshire, UK assisted by Arts Catalyst, the UK equivalent to Synapse. Lynnette Walworth will take up this residency early in 2007 for eight weeks. Synapse Art and Science Residency Program 3 will extend the program into the Asia Pacific region. For Arts Victoria ANAT is now managing the AIR (Arts Innovation Residency) Art and Science Residency Program with three residencies to enable Victorian scientists and artists to develop collaborative research and projects during 2007. ANAT is also a member of Arts Active, a currently office-less international gathering making the most of the residencies boom, says Rackham, not just in universities but in commercial laboratories.

through the portal

ArtPort, ANAT’s radically refurbished website will be launched in 2007, shrinking distances nationally and internationally to connect Australian artists with each other and the world, making them, says Rackham, more visible and approachable. Artport will detail the careers and achievements of member artists and organisations; it will stream works; house the Synapse Database site; provide a media arts portal; and archive ANAT’s history as it approaches its 21st birthday.

soundings

Also in the pipeline for 2007 is Synthesia, a DVD with sound, images and critical writing by some of Australia’s leading experimental sound artists. Rackham is committed to ANAT “exploring sound culture in as many ways as possible.”

the ANAT role

I ask Rackham about ANAT’s role. It’s not quite like the politically active National Association of Visual Arts (NAVA): perhaps that will be the role of the Australian Media Arts Organisation (AMAO) if it gets past the incipient stage. Rackham says that ANAT’s role is to educate the public, make media arts more accessible and push for more funding by showing that the media arts are indispensable. To this end, as well as ANAT running a strong program, Rackham sits on a wide range of committees.

I ask about the mood of Australia’s new media artists. “Pretty depressed”, replies Rackham, as indicated by the lack of funding applications to the Australia Council and a general lack of exposure. However, she feels that “confidence is returning and that the Australia Council is really trying to reach out to artists.” She herself, as an award-winning net artist, finds the failure of Australian institutions to support the form exasperating; overseas it is thriving. Similarly she feels that while work on locative media is strong it should be taken up extensively in the community arts area because of its accessibility and artistic potential. The commitment to developing locative media art is, she says, much stronger in the US. Overall, Melinda Rackham feels that emerging practices, like work in techno-wearables, need to be rewarded so they can develop to their full potential and give hope to the young artists engaging with them.

THE SMALL, HIDDEN-AWAY ROOM IN MELBOURNE’S CBD HAS SOMETHING OF THE AIR OF A FORENSICS LAB. FACES, LIKE RETRO-FUTURISTIC MUG-SHOTS, ADORN THE MAIN WALL. AT FIRST THIS IS SUGGESTIVE OF THE REPLICATION OF THE SAME IMAGE—UNTIL THE INDIVIDUAL PATHOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT’S PHYSIOLOGY BECOMES UNNERVINGLY APPARENT.

Murray McKeich has been using computer technology for many years to create his macabre imagery. But it has none of the high-gloss or hi-tech aesthetics that so often characterises such work. Indeed, McKeich’s approach suggests the opposite; it is in his abuse of technology that the potency emerges.

For all of the cool, medical-examination style of installation, what creates the grit in these works is McKeich’s materials. He uses rubbish as his source material; all sorts of rotting, stinking, putrid crap oozing all over his state-of-the-art technology. When he scans his detritus it may clear away the smell, but not the hint of malevolent, maggot-ridden rot.

McKeich titled this body of work pzombie. Does this make his zombies postmodern zombies, psychotic zombies (aren’t they all?). Is he investigating the psychology of zombies or, as Kirsten Rann suggests in her accompanying essay, perhaps McKeich is investigating the philosophical “discourse in the field of cognitive science, specifically in relation to human consciousness.”
Murray McKeich, pzombie

The zombie seems to be rampant in popular culture. There are the literal, obvious references in such recent films as 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead. There are hints of zombification in Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel The Road. And I would not be the first to watch news footage of White House press conferences and wonder about a certain individual. The zombie is, in popular culture, the embodiment of evil, a flesh eating and mindless ogre. A pzombie, as Kirsten Rann points out in her catalogue essay, is in fact a real term in discussion of the mind and taking this further into the realm of artificial intelligence—what in fact it means to be conscious.

But McKeich’s pzombies may also be the stunned and stunted results of information overload. They are most certainly, if not brought back from the dead, then constructed from death, decay and detritus—doll’s heads, chicken bones, rotting lettuce leaves—a suppurating morass constructed in a hyper-drive voodoo ritual of McKeich’s own devising. And of course voodoo spirituality runs like a thick succor through such epics as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix series. And, although it has by now become a cliché, McKeich is most definitely enacting Gibson’s now-famous catch phrase: “The street finds its own use for things.”

McKeich’s pzombies are deeply creepy. They are mug shots from hi-tech hell and one wonders if these ‘portraits’ aren’t the result of what we now witness not just via the news, as gory as that can be, but what we dub ‘entertainment.’ Writing on the television series CSI in The Guardian newspaper last year, the author JG Ballard articulated this succinctly:

Lurid computer graphics provided flashbacks to the actual homicides, a stomach-churning revelation of what actually happens when an axe strikes the back of the skull, or a corrosive gas gets to work on the lungs…Light and safety are found only in the crime lab, among its high-tech scanners and its ruthless deconstruction of human trauma.

I suspect that the cadavers waiting their turn on the tables are surrogates for ourselves, the viewers…I fear that we watch, entranced, because we feel an almost holy pity for ourselves and the oblivion patiently waiting for us.

McKeich has dabbled in this strange realm of portraiture before, notably for 21•C in 1996 when he rendered an impressionistic and grotesque portrait of The Unabomber for the magazine’s cover. Indeed, before becoming known as an artist in his own right, McKeich was renowned as a powerful illustrator. The crossover moment, at least in terms of published material, was arguably his collaborative work with the writer Darren Tofts on their 1997 book, Memory Trade. Since then he has exhibited his digital maelstroms regularly.

McKeich has continued to develop his bizarre language in multiple forms. Accompanying his pzombies are hypnotic moving images, one of which was projected on an outside wall above the entranceway. This projection reveals McKeich’s other side, a more ambient, almost poetic shift in which his use of detritus becomes a floating, hallucinatory opus. Perhaps this is the womb of the pzombie floating in a toxic amniotic fluid.

Murray McKeich, along with such younger artists as Irene Hanenbergh and Brie Trenerry, are finding fresh directions in the world of the digital. By allowing their work to embrace a darker aesthetic they seem very much of their time. McKeich is leading the way into a decidedly challenging world.

Murray McKeich, pzombie, curator Kirsten Rann, Counterpoint, Melbourne, Nov 29-Dec 14

HOW DO WE DEFINE THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM? TO WHAT DEGREE CAN COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES AND THE EFFECTS OF GLOBALISATION MEDIATE NATIONAL BOUNDARIES? ARE JAPANESE CITIES COOKIE CUTTER REPLICAS OF ONE ANOTHER? THE RE:SEARCH EXHIBITION, AN ART COLLABORATION BETWEEN AUSTRALIA AND JAPAN, SETS OUT TO ADDRESS QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE EFFECTS OF GLOBALISATION ON CULTURAL IDENTITIES AND THE POTENTIAL FOR CONNECTION BETWEEN PEOPLE AND SPACES.
Norimichi Hirakawa, Global Bearing

In 2006 Experimenta Media Arts collaborated with the Sendai Mediatheque to offer Australian and Japanese artists a two-month residency at Sendai, in the Miyagi Prefecture. Curated by Kent Shimizu, the resulting exhibition reveals a diverse range of dynamic new media art that imagines Sendai at the centre of a matrix of local, national and global networks.

The Re:search exhibition is a hybrid of the traditionally lit and hung ‘white cube’ gallery with the darkened environment of the participatory ‘black box’ experience conventionally used to exhibit innovations in science. Re:search displays art created from materials including moving and still images, digital and analogue sound, maps, global positioning devices, satellite images and black and white, low definition footage seemingly from closed circuit television cameras. Themes that emerge include: the fracturing of identity, the escalation of paranoia and alienation within surveillance cultures and the potential for deception within commodity driven societies. Such themes are explored in relation to Sendai, Japan, Australia, the planet and some even extend into the universe.

Re:search opens with Norimichi Hirakawa’s Global Bearing, a large concave screen, upon which is projected a satellite map of the globe, complete with meridian lines. Global Bearing prioritises the Sendai Mediatheque by placing it at the centre of the map and measuring the distance between it and the rest of the world. The curved screen extends beyond the limits of peripheral vision, and the participant is invited to navigate the globe using what seems to be an oversized joystick. Travel is initially deceptively simple, but it becomes more difficult as the map begins to spin and flip. The participant is challenged to control the direction, speed and stability of the virtual map. Whilst this might suggest the difficulty of travel, or possibly the dislocation between virtual and physical spaces, more likely Global Bearing is a reminder of the inability of humans to control their environments.

In Conversations, Intimate moments with random strangers, Alex Davies explores the dual impulse of connection and alienation in an environment of dislocation and surveillance. Communication is at the centre of this exhibit, but Conversations is less about verbal discourse and more focused on investigating the possibility of connection through the eyes of anonymous people. Individuals are singled out from a crowd as they glance towards the camera/viewer. In elongating the duration of the moments of visual connection, Conversations seems to promise imminent contact. But because these intimate moments are fleeting and finally fail, ultimately this exhibit emphasizes unrequited desire. A similar illusion of proximity and imminence through the manipulation of spatial and temporal elements continues in Davies’ second exhibit, Swarm. Here he includes the visitor within the exhibit as a horizontal screen extends to reveal composite footage of visitors to the gallery, past and present.

Craig Walsh’s Big in Japan exhibits the artist himself inflated to a huge scale, towering over the city on a billboard. Big in Japan constructs levels of deception, obviously in the reversal of the dynamics of scale between the human and the metropolis, but also by employing a model to portray the image of the artist. The work questions the position of art within commodity-driven cultures, engaging the eccentricities of advertising. On opening night, Walsh employed female models to hand out tissue packets emblazoned with the billboard image. Across two adjacent screens, Walsh produces what appears to be closed circuit imagery (complete with time codes) as hidden cameras record locations within Sendai. Initially disquieting in its invitation to voyeurism, closer examination reveals that the low definition footage is carefully constructed.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/3/385_haslem_experimenta.jpg" alt="David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Electromagnetique Composition for Building,
Plants & Stars (2006)”>

David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Electromagnetique Composition for Building,
Plants & Stars (2006)

Another outstanding exhibit is the David Haines and Joyce Hinterding collaboration in the production of Electromagnetique Composition for Building, Plants & Stars. Haines-Hinterding’s imagery of vivid green, lush, overgrown foliage slightly swaying in the breeze is juxtaposed with a soundscape comprising low frequency noise from within the Mediatheque, extending to an 18 kilometre radius of Sendai and including sounds emanating from the Milky Way. The soundscape is picked up on the copper wire antenna that spirals around the vertical rods of Mediatheque’s architecture. Image and sound combine to produce compelling links between the immediate space, the local city and the universe. The incredible beauty and simplicity of the imagery and the surprising range of the soundscape results in a sublime imagining of nature and science.

Also using soundwaves to great effect, The Sine Wave Orchestra’s contribution, Compath, a participatory sound project, relies on the user to create their own sine wave as a form of communication, each wave merging with others to create a collective soundscape. Employing fader levels, Compath appears to use old technologies to create distinctive effects. The emerging sounds are unique due to the range of options available to the participant.

The magic of Lieko Shiga’s photographs is created using manual techniques in re-photographing and printing. The Golden Mirage series was produced during her residency in Brisbane earlier in 2006 and it reveals a fascination with the impact of the elements on Australian landscapes and inhabitants. Iconic images of backyard bonfires and weathered faces of Australian men stand out in a range of dreamlike portraits of humans situated within surreal landscapes. Space is crucial to Shiga’s photographs and some locations work to suggest alienated inhabitants. In one of the untitled photographs from this series, the emptiness of a restaurant represents little help for a woman who sits at a large table, the blur of her head suggesting that she is suffering a seizure. Bizarre, paranoia-fuelled nightmarish compositions combine with a luminescent aesthetic to create images that are compelling and beautiful.

The Veil series of haunting and evocative photographs was produced during Shiga’s residency at Sendai. It constructs eccentric images of Sendai at night. A fluorescent pink shed in a backyard appears disconcerting not only in the vivacity of its colour but the darkness beneath the building also offers an impression of levitation. In another evocative landscape, Shiga attached cotton buds to a dead tree producing a stunning, luminescent image of revitalization within an arid landscape. In an eerie domestic scene, a light hanging above a ransacked lounge room seems to have sucked up any sign of life, only the whirlwind fragments of detritus remain. One of the most poetic images of desire and dislocation is the visualisation of the dream as an incarnation of a woman floating above a sleeping man, suspended by invisible forces.

The Sendai Mediatheque is an appropriate site for the Re:search exhibition. Designed by Toyo Ito, the mediatheque’s glass façade (or skin) acts simultaneously as an invitation to enter and as a reflection of its surroundings. Each level is linked by shafts of light that connect and illuminate the spaces. These shafts also house 13 vertical steel lattice tubular columns that appear like tree trunks rising from the ground floor to the rooftop. The mediatheque features archives, reading spaces, as well as a permanent display of the work of local artists. Intertwining the local with the global, nature with science, the Sendai Mediatheque is the perfect host for such an exhibition of visionary and creative new media art.

Re:search: an art collaboration between Australia and Japan, Sendai Mediatheque, curator Kent Shimizu, in collaboration with Experimenta, 2006 Australia-Japan Year of Exchange; Tokyo, Nov 25-Dec 25, 2006

FEMINISTS HAVE LONG BEEN CONSUMED BY THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GENDER AND TECHNOLOGY. WITH THE BIRTH AND RISE OF SUCH GIBSONESQUE “CONSENSUAL HALLUCINATIONS” AS CYBERSPACE, IT WAS FEMINISTS SUCH AS DONNA HARAWAY, SADIE PLANT, LISA NAKAMURA AND ALLUCQUÉRE ROSANNA STONE WHO SOUGHT TO ARTICULATE THE REPLICATION OF OFFLINE INEQUALITIES ONLINE. IN AUSTRALIA, THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW MEDIA WERE STRONGLY TIED TO ADDRESSING THESE CONCERNS AS EPITOMISED BY THE WORK OF VNS MATRIX.
Tobias Berstrup, Polygon Lover

Extending the feminist agenda, new media theorists and practitioners began to consider how language and ethnicity shape the experience of technology and their impact on offline relations. In the ‘global’ world of the internet we can see that the dominance of English is quickly being contested by the increasing appearance of Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean sites. The ‘local’ is contesting an homogenised ideal of globalisation. Negotiating the local—establishing co-presences, virtual and actual—is particularly prevalent in online gaming communities in what TL Taylor dubs “play between worlds” (Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture, MIT Press, 2006).

So how can we think of gendered ideas of technology in a period where gender is but one of many complex and competing factors influencing our relationship to technology? With this question in mind I ventured along to Teknikunst. Curated by dynamic duo Kristen Condon and Lynsey Hagen, this year’s exhibition took as its title Condon’s neologism, “GenderTopia.”

The impressive line up of artists included Josephine Starrs (co-founder of VNS Matrix), Melinda Rackham, Linda Dement, Cynthia Verspaget (in collaboration with Adam Fiannaca), Rosie X, Michelle Siciliano, Oliver Ressler (Vienna), Jose Carlos Casado (New York) and Tobias Bernstrup (Sweden). Whilst some of the individual works were compelling, others sat together uncomfortably, like two people shouting (in different languages) over each other. Moreover, some of the works were not great examples of the artist’s oeuvre. In Josephine Starrs’ video, Pocket Calculator, the artist innanely sings a karaoke-style version of a Kraftwerk song accompanied by stereotypical images of Tokyo. Any lo-tech vs hi-tech irony in the work was overshadowed by a suggestion of techno-orientalism (the Asian city exoticised as techno-centre) highlighting a notable lack of Asian new media artists in the exhibition.

In Armour, Rosie X (with Técha Noble, Laura Jordan and Wade Marynowsky) presents us with a series of scenarios navigated by a protagonist geekgirl. The intentionally naff flash animation explores the paranoia around the Y2K millennium hype (remember that?). But as one visitor proclaimed, “wow, that’s sooooo last century”, the problem was that this work—made in 2000—was not aptly contextualised as a comment on an historical moment. It just looked dated. The effect was exaggerated by its being placed next to a sociological, documentary style video work, Die Rote Zora, by Oliver Ressler. Made in 1998, this work documented the militant women’s group, Rote Zora’s 20 attacks against “patriarchical orders” such as the companies of Bayer, Schering and Siemens. The disparate themes and styles of the two works made their conjunction beneath the gender and technology banner unrevealing.
Jose Carlos Casado, Inside V.O4

Other exhibits added weight and currency to each other. Two 3D animations, Polygon Lover by Tobias Berstrup and Inside V.04 by Jose Carlos Casado, worked well together in their exploration of and play with body politics. Berstrup has the SiN game female character Elexis masturbating. Evocative of the style of game artist Brody Condon, Berstrup’s work suggests that gaming is still very much in need of feminist interrogation. Neighbouring this explicit work we find its inverse in Casado’s sublime metamorphosis of androgynous heads as they fuse, blur and transform into abstract forms. This poetic account of the ambiguities of identity and indivisibility is kin to the work of Chris Cunningham (particularly his music videos for Bjork’s All Is Full Of Love).

Morphing is also used in Claudia Hart’s beautiful Machinia. Based loosely on Titian’s Venus this beautiful nude isn’t a still life. She moves and she looks, slowly inverting the tradition of the male gaze. The title is a play on the growing genre of “machimina” (a neology encompassing machine and cinema) whereby game artists make self-reflexive and hyper-conscious mini-films of games that question ideas of interactivity, digital storytelling, game play and the politics of simulation. Machinia succinctly demonstrates how such disciplines as gaming owe much to cinema and the visual arts, but in other ways are emerging as media with their own specificities. In this way, Hart’s work is not only in dialogue with Casado’s fusion of the real and the reel, realism and abstraction, but also elaborates on Berstrup’s deconstruction of gender gaming stereotypes.

GenderTopia was an undulating ride, from wonderfully poetic and compelling works to questionable selections of exhibits without contextualisation. Works exploring issues around gaming and online-offline co-presence were the most compelling in respect of the theme. But why were there no artists from Asia given the plentitude in the region exploring Teknikunst’s theme? Beyond this oversight, GenderTopia highlighted gender and technology issues as ever pervasive, and reminded us that realms such as gaming are still in need of critique. Game on, feminist? Wii, Wii (Nintendo).

Teknikunst 06, GenderTopia group exhibition, Meat Market Main Hall, Melbourne, Dec 9-17, 2006; www.teknikunst.com

“IN THE FUTURE, SALLOW YOUTH WAIT LISTLESSLY FOR TRAMS THAT NEVER COME. THEIR SKIN GLOWS GREY DESPITE DARKENED SKIES AND BILLOWING RAINLESS CLOUDS…SCARRED, RAVAGED, TRAUMATIZED—YET STRANGELY INNOCENT—THESE YOUTHS APPEAR TO HAVE STEPPED STRAIGHT OUT OF A BOMBED HOSPITAL WARD. IN THE POST-FUTURE, THEY LINGER STILL—SHIMMERING GHOSTS OF THE AUSTRALIA THAT NEVER CAME” [NORTHERN VOID PRESS RELEASE].
Thembi Soddell, Northern Void

The genesis of Northern Void has been a haphazard series of events. Ph2 (Philip Samartzis and myself) were developing a piece for the Podewil Centre in Berlin some years back. Following changes in administration there, the funding for the project was then to be secured through a different body—one that was seeking projects which addressed site-specific and culturally dependent issues concerning the city of Berlin.
Nigel Brown, Northern Void

Initially I was quite deflated by this change. I have no connection to the idea that artists should be responsible to anything—their setting, their audience, their past, their new zones of activity. The idea that artists can somehow magically enter a new cultural domain and—purely through the suggestive power of curatorial legislation—be deemed not merely responsible but also capable of addressing anything is simplistic. I view the prime value of artists being their disconnection from society, through which energy lines and points of impact can eventuate, but not solely through an artist claiming he or she is ‘addressing/exploring/investigating’ some topical issue of the world. Like, that’s so Ben Elton meets the Venice Biennale.

But then I thought, okay, if Berlin wants me to ‘address the city’, then I’ll do just that. So I devised a story set across both World Wars, involving gas, prosthetics, skin, celluloid, dolls, corpses, music, bombs and movie theatres. I was going to film all the locations there, then get actors in a green-screen studio back in Melbourne to act out the narrative, then I’d composite it all together.
Gus Franklin, Northern Void

The Podewil project fell through, but actually I was liberated by this in two ways. Firstly, I felt enabled to devise any narrative/visual situation to which Ph2 could then work a live score. Secondly, I realized that I could address topical issues—but purely on my own terms, even if it be to my own detriment. My work generally deals with the ideological but always via submerged and what I contend are more opaquely politicised strategies buffed to gleam with Pop-ist surfaces.

So, shortly after, Phil Samartzis secured for Ph2 a showing of a new audiovisual work in Moscow. The idea of travelling and somehow ‘representing Australia’ again was repellent—yet now exciting. I thought, okay, I’ll show what Australia is like from my view. Not only that, I’ll predict what it will become.

Specifically, the idea of utilising science fiction for this purpose excited me. Science fiction is now exciting because it is the most bankrupt mythological narrative vehicle imaginable. When everyone from Hollywood to my mum can devise a dystopian scenario that champions rebels, critiques corporations, celebrates the hero’s journey and believes in humanity, then the form isn’t even worth subverting. My view of the future is a simple one: you’re soaking in it. In an era that commodifies the very notion of evolution as a sales strategy for iPods, then you know that humankind has reached a dead end that can only progress through complete decimation. But hey, that’s just my opinion. I’m sure breeders have great things in mind for the future of their children.

In this sense, Northern Void wonders what the future might be like in ways devoid of both grand narrative and social critique mythologies (both of which are equally suspect in their murky muddling of humanism and universalism). So I picked not some towering metropolis, but simply a three kilometre strip of shops and factories in Plenty Road, Preston—an outer northern Melbourne suburb.
Madeline Hodge, Northern Void

I hadn’t visited this area for many years (it’s near where I grew up) and I was shocked by how desolate it had become. Not an ‘aesthetic’ kind of Ed Ruscha desolate, just a real ‘present-tense’ banality that is old but locked in a frozen time period. Plenty Road is a mix of cheap 1970s brickwork and shrubbery with cheap 80s facades with cheap 90s computer-lettered signage. Failed small businesses delivering basic services in a saturated domain where nothing grows. Most importantly, this isn’t just Preston: this is a perfect snapshot of Australia. I’m very curious to see what the Russian response will be.

The video is a series of portraits of young people who have been made up to look ill—not spooky, just fucked-up and off-medication. I don’t drive, so I’m on public transport all the time, and really this is how I see most people. Things have developed this way as health services (especially mental health services) have been withering away over the last few decades. Plus the Plenty Road strip is a tram route, and public transport is another key service that has been utterly bankrupted in Melbourne. Like most of Australia, more work is now put into logo design and signage than an actual service.

A lateral inspiration for Northern Void comes from being in San Francisco in the early 80s and (long story for another time) spending a few nights in casualty at SF General Hospital. I was also struck by how many people were on crutches in the street—the more I realised this the more I saw. I remember thinking at the time that ultimately America is a vision of a future Australia. Some decades down the track now, I still relate to that perspective—not that Australia is somehow colonised by the US, but that Australia’s own de-evolving mechanisms have generated the state we’re now in.

Suffice to say that through the Northern Void project I’m optioning another way to consider things as they are, and working through another projection of this thing called Australia. Ultimately, it’s neither dystopian (because I think all utopias are deluded so there’s no point in opposing them) nor apocalyptic (because such a Judeo-Christian embrace of ‘finality’ is not part of my world view). Put simply, Northern Void is a suite of pastoral portraits which evidence the future as a slow drain. No eventfulness; no catharsis; no resolution. Just lots of young people getting sick too quickly, waiting for public transport that will never come. If change is required to forestall this, it will not come from obvious strategic measures. These symptoms need to be read devoid of the possibility of cure in order to perceive their status with clarity. Such is the audiovisual aim of Northern Void.

The video is divided into 3 sections: The Present (2013), The Future (2085) and The Post-Future (3079).

Spatial Drift presents Northern Void, director Philip Brophy, score performed by Ph2 (Philip Brophy, Philip Samartzis); Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Feb 17, 18, www.acmi.net.au, www.philipbrophy.com

IN A SANDSTONE BUILDING OVERLOOKING A PARK IN FREMANTLE, ATTENDEES TO AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE SAT STARING, GIGGLING AND FROWNING AT PROJECTIONS OF VIRTUAL LANDSCAPES, PHOTOS, QUOTES AND STATISTICS. THE EVENT WAS A SPECIAL JOINT CONFERENCE BETWEEN CYBERGAMES: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION ON GAMES RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, AND INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT 2006: THE THIRD AUSTRALASIAN CONFERENCE ON INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT.
Model in wearable computer, Human Pacman (2005) Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore

Model in wearable computer, Human Pacman (2005) Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore

Rest assured, participants did go outside and feel the sun on their cheeks, but the chuckling of children playing in the park was no subsitute for the serious study of how people of all ages play in the digital realm. Yusuf Pisan, Technical Chair and Founder of Interactive Entertainment (IE) outlined in the proceedings the motivation behind the conferences:

The interactive entertainment industry continues to grow at a rapid pace worldwide. This expansion needs to be examined not just in dollar amounts they contribute to the economy or the number of people playing computer games, but also in how our everyday interaction is changed and shaped by this new medium. We are defining not just a new field, but a new way of being.

The champions of our evolution are a mix of Australian and international practitioners and researchers from the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Media Studies, Human Computer Interaction, Design, Graphics, Cultural Studies and Psychology. We’ll start with industry. Elina MI Koivisto of Nokia Research gave one of the two keynotes on the “Vision of the Future of Mobile Games.” Nokia is attempting to move mobile gaming beyond the current approach of remediating familiar games like Pacman and Tetris. The company is exploring how the mobile, a device that is always with you and always connected, can facilitate the persistence of game worlds. For instance, they’ve published a cross-platform, massively multiplayer online role-playing game that you can play through your PC and phone: HinterWars: Aterian Invasion (Activate, 2005). Nokia are also looking at the way we interact with these game worlds by exploring applications that allow different input and feedback systems like game pads and motion bands.

Likewise looking at game world persistence and how to produce different ways of interacting is the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore (www.mixedrealitylab.org). Adrian David Cheok provided lots of photos and descriptions of projects in his talk on “Social and Physical Interactive Paradigms for Mixed Reality Entertainment.” Mixed Reality Lab has created many games that are set in the real world but your actions impact on a virtual world. For example, Human Pacman (2006) involves a person donning a wearable computer and walking down the street. As you walk you devour cookies in the virtual world. Cheok also outlined a few projects that involve playing with your pet. For example, you can play chasey in a virtual world with your real life pet hamster in Metazoa Ludens (2006) or you can pat your hen remotely with Poultry Internet (2004). The lab is also interested in bringing elderly people and children together: Age Invaders (2006) has grandparent and grandchild shooting each other on a dance-floor-like setting with virtual ramifications.

Concerned with how elders (or teachers) can guide young people, Scot Osterweil, Project Manager for MIT’s Education Arcade (www.educationarcade.org), gave a passionate and canny talk on what he terms “learning games.” Games can be used for teaching but many extant ones, he explained, fail because of poor design. Many are created, for instance, with a “content stuffer” approach: they use an existing game platform and inject it with education related content. The result, he jokes, is “Grand Theft Calculus.” Osterweil makes the point that “without playfulness, a game is just going through the motions.’ As a guide, he juxtaposes four freedoms that he believes are the same for play and learning (outside of school): freedom to experiment, freedom to fail, freedom to try on identities and freedom of effort. Arguing that all game play is about learning, Craig A Lindley of Gotland University, Sweden, in “Game Play Schemas: From Player Analysis to Adaptive Game Mechanics”, divides what is learnt into three forms: interaction mechanics (how to interact with the machine), interaction semantics (associative mappings of that interaction) and game play competence (how to progress through the game).

There were five special sessions, the standout of those that I attended was “Experiential Spatiality in Games: Knowing Your Place.” Chaired by Nicola J Bidwell of James Cook University, it included a holistic selection of speakers exploring place, immersion and self. Ulf Wihelmsson of the University of Skövde, Sweden spoke about what he terms the “game ego”: “a bodily based function that enacts a point of being with the game environment through a tactile motor/kinesthetic link.” Wihelmsson argued that the game environment affects a person’s game ego through constraints on what they can do. Andrew Hutchison of Perths’ Curtin University explored how game graphics remove parts of our avatars. He entertained us with examples from games like Half-Life 2 (Valve Software, 2004) where your hand disappears when picking up objects, but is always present when holding weapons; and Doom 3 (id Software, 2004), a game with an extreme graphics engine that performs an array of blood-splatter and shooting effects, but doesn’t give us legs.

Although some games do give us legs, David Browning of James Cook University argued they don’t give us realistic interaction with the terrain. You cannot, for instance, get your feet stuck in mud. Games that are designed for proprioceptivity (using many senses to experience the weather etc) will engage players in the game world more. Georgia Leigh McGregor of the University of New South Wales, focused on the architecture of game worlds comparing World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) and Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II (Electronic Arts, 2006) and finding that architecture in the former is designed as a spatial experience. The latter, however, treats architecture as an object that cannot be entered and explored. Truna (aka Jane Turner) gave a demonstration of a virtual world that was created to explore archives of the real world. The Australasian CRC for Interaction Design’s Digital Songlines (2005) project (songlines.interactiondesign. com.au) is a virtual landscape of Australia that you can traverse. Your presence in an area triggers local stories, providing a spatial navigation analogous to the manner the stories are recorded traditionally in Indigenous cultures. In her paper, “Digital Songlines Environment”, Truna expands on the culturally-aware design:

The design goal of this project is to reconstruct the Indigenous experience from an Indigenous perspective rather than the usual cultural archiving which tends to prioritise the needs of the database structure and meta-data tags and fields.

Two post-conference workshops, run by Scot Osterweil and myself, provided a more intensive insight into how to design experiences that address audiences rather than system architecture. Overall this first joint conference, chaired by Kevin Wong, Lance Fung and Peter Cole, was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It was good to have such a cross-fertilisation of topics (only some of them covered here) and to have the chance to debate at length with delegates from around the globe. We didn’t solve what “new being” interactivity is birthing, but had fun in the kindergarten of its evolution.

CyberGames: International Conference and Exhibition on Games Research and Development, and Interactive Entertainment 2006: The Third Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, Fremantle, Dec 4-6, 2006

TECHNOLOGIES OF MAGIC BEGINS WITH A SIMPLE YET INTRIGUING QUESTION: “WHY IS IT THAT MANY TECHNOLOGIES, PARTICULARLY MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES, CONTINUE TO BE SHROUDED IN A MYSTIQUE, PRESERVING FORMS OF MAGICAL BELIEF WITHIN RATIONALLY ORDERED SOCIETIES?”

Lantern of Fear, Gulielmo Jacobo ’s Gravesande,<BR />Physices Elementa Mathematica, Geneva, 1748, from Eyes, Lies & Illusions, ACMI”></p>
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Lantern of Fear, Gulielmo Jacobo ’s Gravesande,
Physices Elementa Mathematica, Geneva, 1748, from Eyes, Lies & Illusions, ACMI

Advertising has long been a site for such expressions represented in, for example, Bell’s 1915 “weavers of speech” advertisement depicting an operator working “upon the magic looms of the Bell System” to weave “millions of messages into a marvellous fabric.” Or consider the 1950s “Spellbound” campaign from American company Ampex, promising users of its new audio system “an exquisite pleasure and a dangerous revelation.” More recently, figures of enchantment appear throughout the advertising of Motorola, Sony and Nokia (Sony’s 1990s “Magic Link” PDA, as just one example; advertisements cited are available at: www.adflip.com). And for its unfettered celebration of technology’s sublime power, it’s hard to ignore how Time magazine announced its front cover 2006 Person of the Year through that uber media of illusion and fantasy: the mirror.

This edited collection is a valuable addition to research examining the material and symbolic interconnections between magic and technology or what John Potts calls “media mysticism.” Although the contributors deal with practices of magic in diverse ways, the editors outline a common definition: “the key notion is the kind of performativity which arises from an agent of transformation whose effects are evident but whose operations are not apparent.” For Andrew Murphie, in his elegant chapter, “‘Brain-magic’: figures of the brain, technology and magic”, transformation and performance are crucial for understanding how power links the cultural fields of magic and technology: “magic has always been about power—over life and death and illness, over transformation, over appearance and disappearance…this is what technology is increasingly about as well.” Rather than viewing the cultural logic of magic as antithetical to science, Murphie explores the “indissoluble binding between magic and technology.”

The paradoxical yet symbiotic relation between magic and technology is a central preoccupation of the book. In her chapter on “the modest witness”, Anne Cranny-Francis revisits Donna Haraway’s work on the disinterested observer within scientific discovery. Cranny-Francis recounts a compelling ‘urban-legendesque’ story of two women who, while driving at night, encounter a threatening ghostly vision manifesting as a tailgating motor bike audible within their car and clearly visible through their rear vision mirror. However, when the passenger rolls down her window to remonstrate with the motorcyclist the vehicle ‘disappears’ to return only when the two glance back through their mirror. What’s interesting for Cranny-Francis is the subsequent discussion in which the passenger, a science PhD candidate, denies having had the experience. As a scientist, the woman refuses to believe in anything that is not explicable through logical and rational means. The driver then suggests that “perhaps science simply does not know yet how to describe such a phenomenon” to which the scientist replies “no, I simply do not accept what I saw; I did not see it.” This story illustrates the inherent ideological tensions of the objective observer. The scientist, argues Cranny-Francis, “could not afford to be known as someone who believes in things that are outside mainstream scientific thought. If she is positioned outside that mainstream, she will not be acceptable as a modest witness and so will be unacceptable as a scientist.”

Also exploring the unacknowledged ‘bridging’ of mysticism and science, are John Potts’ contribution on the contemporary ghost and Chris Chesher’s piece about the function of invocation within technological practice. For Potts, ghost discourse—including “academic parasychological research initiatives”, anecdotal reports from ghost hunters, and web sites selling ‘ghost detectors’—demonstrates the persistence “of mystical belief in societies founded on rationalist principles.” Modernity, he suggests, has never been fully “disenchanted” since “enchantment”, understood as a form of “belief in the supernatural”, continues to flourish “even in highly technologised cultures.” Arguing for the enchantment of Western modernity, Potts joins writers such as Simon During (Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Cambridge, Harvard, 2002) and Alex Owen (The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004). In his chapter on “The Muse and the Electronic Invocator”, Chesher develops his theory of the invocation. This “cultural form” he explains is “a call to a power outside ordinary fields of perception and action for immediate assistance, guidance or support.” The invocation operates through a diverse range of institutional and technological settings: “magicians invoke spirits; priests invoke the name of Christ; artists invoke a Muse”; and “a computer program invokes a subroutine.” Although careful to distinguish between these divergent socio-technical fields, Chesher argues that the “remarkable regularity” with which the invocation appears “undermines the myth” that there exist “complete revolutions in human affairs.”

For some contributors, the “strange borderland” between rationality and mysticism is underpinned by “the technological uncanny”: those voices, histories and practices that are rendered unfamiliar by powers articulated through specific economic and political registers. Scott McQuire, for example, traces elements of Freud’s theory of the uncanny, where “inanimate objects seem to come to life” within the development of spectacular electrical illumination. In particular, McQuire explains how “the fundamental spatial ambivalence of electrification” enables new architectural forms and urban configurations in which “architecture seems to come alive.” Similarly, Annette Hamilton discovers uncanny relations operating between “humans and their things.” While “our discarded objects mock us in the garbage dumps of the world”, new technologies promise the opportunity to develop a “more care-full and respectful” structure of ethics. And in Stephen Muecke’s astute critique of the ethnographic ahistorical address, situated voices of the ethnographic subject are repressed. In response, Muecke calls for a “new ethnographic practice” that rejects “the positivism of an anthropological practice which constructs another society as unified ‘over there’… in which ‘they’ remain superstitious, about, say, an eclipse of the sun while ‘I’ am necessarily beyond that historical stage.”

Technologies of Magic is both timely and historical: cogent in its contemporary observations and historically enchanting.

John Potts and Edward Scheer eds, Technologies of Magic: A cultural study of ghosts, machines and the uncanny Sydney: Power Publications, 2006. Available through Power Publications (www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/arthistory/power) or Gleebooks (www.gleebooks.com.au).

WHILE INTERACTION IS PERHAPS THE MOST BASIC THING THAT CAN OCCUR WITHIN ANY CONTEXT, FORMING THE RAW BASIS FOR ALL COMMUNICATION IN BIOLOGY AND SOCIALITY, INTERACTIVE ART IS FAST BECOMING SOPHISTICATED AND REFLECTIVE.
Time’s Up, Graviton

Artists whose practice includes works that are interactive have begun exploring the audience experience by investigating the extent to which their works engage an audience in an interesting and satisfying ‘conversation’ with the work’s content through the details of its sensing and responsive character. This notion of engagement is similar to the notion of immersion, though without the connotation of floating in some private pool of virtual space or information.

The Engage symposium at University of Technology Sydney provided a venue for artists whose works incorporate interactivity, to focus their attention on questions of how well interactive works achieve their aims and how that can be measured. The symposium followed two interwoven lines: the discussion of works that are engaging in their interactive behaviour and the discussion of methods for discovering what it is about these works and the audience’s experience that makes them engaging. Thus interactive art has developed two contexts: one as art in which the nature of the experience, the content, the intentions and discussion that the artist wants to bring to attention become the issue; and the other as science, where the study of the interactive mechanisms and their capacity to entice involvement or engagement lead toward a theory of effective design. This scientific interest in the character of engagement itself involves two further stages: the mapping of gestural and other audience behaviours into the processing systems that lie behind interactive art installations, and measuring the success with which that mapping is handled so that the person participating in the installation becomes engaged with the work.

Overall the question becomes: how do artists make interactive works that people enjoy engaging with, given that, as Mike Stubbs (media artist and Exhibitions Program Manager, ACMI) argued, engagement is more interesting when it is not simply a function of some technical characteristic of the particular devices being used, but is primarily content oriented.

Participation implies a relinquishing of curatorial and artistic control. British curator Beryl Graham illustrated this with Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s installation Body Movies: Relational Architecture 6 (Rotterdam, 2001). This was a large-scale public light-projection work in which people interact through differences in the scale of their shadows on the walls of a building. It is the spontaneous interaction of the audience that makes the work effective. Tim Boykett, of the Austrian group Time’s Up, spoke about how they approached this problem in their installation, Hyperfitness Studio, in which they present the audience with intuitive interfaces utilising the metaphor of the fitness and sporting facility. The audience are put in the position of “proto-scientist” and have to make sense of what they find and, Boykett observed, they appear to enjoy having to experiment in order to make the connections.

Our engagement with the work also comes through being represented within it, and the more so when in intriguing and mysterious ways. As Kathy Cleland (writer, curator, lecturer, University of Sydney) noted in referring to several early video installation works (fortuitously available in the Centre Pompidou collection currently at the MCA and soon at ACMI), we do enjoy seeing ourselves in the artwork, especially when one’s image appears to be acting in ways that are quite contrary to one’s current behaviour. This is something that also arises in more recent work such as Alex Davies’ Dislocations, where virtual characters irrupt into the viewing space causing a curious dissonance within the audience’s experience. Davies’ paper subsequently revealed some of the technicalities of these illusions.

Mari Velonaki looked at another aspect of the projected personality within the installation. In her work, including her Fish-Bird’s roboticised wheelchairs we enter a “conversation” with characters who respond, often quite obliquely, to our presence thus drawing us in as participants. In Velonaki’s installations the technology is hidden, producing an illusionistic space similar to the cinema, allowing the suspension of disbelief and easing identification, but this illusion and the potential engagement can be easily broken if the projected personality responds in baffling ways.

Other problems that disrupt the illusion are more technical. For example, Nick Mariette has been exploring the Audio Nomad system (based on work by Nigel Helyer). Sound is superimposed on objects in the gallery or public space and the question becomes how well the received sound relate to the visual sites upon which it is superimposed; ie how good is the tracking and the sound rendering for source position fidelity. Here the science enters; Mariette is involved in experimental work in psychoacoustics within virtual sound environments.

With the many ways in which the audience’s presence within an installation and their responses to it can modulate its behaviour, a new kind of aura becomes attached to interactive art, of behavioural presence which, if there is going to be any kind of engagement, asks that the installation be able to actually sense aspects of the audience’s behaviour. Conversation being two-way, not only does the installation need information about its interlocutor but also that person needs to be having an experience that makes it clear that the installation has some knowledge of their presence. This leads to the investigation and evaluation of the user’s experience.

Ultimately the question must be: is the experience effective, interesting, stimulating, exciting, provocative and thus engaging? This is largely a qualitative inquiry using the methods of cognitive science. These mostly comprise various forms of post-experience interviews, often videotaped for subsequent analysis, building up categories of behaviours and personal impressions that bring out the audience’s actions, perceptions, circumstances and reflections on the experience. Some work on analysing recordings of the audience’s actual behaviour is also done.

One of the more interesting situations in which the investigation of interactive art is occurring is Beta_space, a dedicated interactive venue jointly established by the Creativity and Cognition Studios (CCS) group at the museum. Beta_space is an environment where artists can evaluate new interactive artworks using these observational and interview procedures with audience members who are willing to describe their experiences in the artwork. It also provides a context in which researchers can test and evaluate protocols for exploring user experience for use in the refinement of design processes (RT76).

There is an underlying question of what it is exactly that new media art sees itself as doing. Obviously this varies from artist to artist. Is it making new subjectivities, increasing curiosity by providing questions or conundrums for people to investigate, exploring and critiquing new technologies, offering mysteries and moments of wonder that can come from spending time with a work and engaging with it? Is it exploringour relationship to technology with a view to developing new interactive technologies for media use in general? Or are the interactive arts to be reduced to some sort of bread and circuses entertainment? We must remain aware of this potential and lift ourselves out of it into a more politically and socially cognisant activity where the exploration is of ideas and the stimulus is more than just momentary. As Lyndal Jones pointed out, it is not “interactivity per se that is important but [the] generation of meaning through the work…Furthermore…the resulting work needs to have creative and/or social impact.” This is the sort of engagement that I seek.

Engage: Interaction, Art & Audience Experience, a symposium presented by the UTS Creativity and Cognition Studios (CCS), ACID ( Australasian CRC for Interaction Design) and ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology); University of Technology Sydney, Nov 27-29, 2006

THIS SCREEN SHOT IS OF A SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE HELD IN THE ONLINE VIRTUAL WORLD SECOND LIFE (SL).

The event was the opening of an installation by SL resident JC Fremont, an artist and academic who goes by the name John Craig Freeman in real life. In Imaging Place SL: US/Mexico Border, Fremont explores the notion of political and artistic borders with a two-part installation that includes a large border fence. Second Front (www.slfront.blogspot.com), apparently the first dedicated performance art group in SL, were commissioned by Ars Virtua Gallery (www.arsvirtua.com) curator Rubaiyat Shatner to create a performance for the opening held January 5, 2007. Second Front actors, attired as virtual helicopters and inspectors, cast all the guests at the opening as illegal immigrants and proceeded to interrogate and harass them. The drama escalated when Second Front showered the border with barricades and set the place on fire—some people in power think the only solution to dealing with border crossers is to blow them up. CD

KURT VONNEGUT ONCE HYPOTHESIZED A HOLOCAUST IN WHICH THE CHEMICAL BONDS OF THE WORLD’S WATER SUPPLY PERMANENTLY FUSED FOLLOWING THE ACCIDENTAL RELEASE OF A LETHAL CHEMICAL REFERRED TO AS ICE-9. THE WRITER USED THE CATALYTIC PROPERTIES OF THE CHEMICAL AND THE FLUID DYNAMICS OF WATER TO CONVEY A SENSE OF THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF SYSTEMS.
Tracey Cornish, Glitch

An ostensibly discrete puddle becomes infected with the chemical and connects with the muck and ooze of the surrounding swamp, breaking out into deltas, rivers, oceans and clouds, and permeating the cell walls of almost every living thing on the planet.

This notion of complex interactions has been adroitly summarised by American sociologist and philosopher Theodore Nelson:

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged; people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Intertwingularity at the EAF is an exhibition of computer-generated moving images created by Tracy Cornish, emerging from her doctoral research into generative photography and the non-linearity of complex systems. She refers to these works as found objects, artefacts that have arisen from computer translation errors and source glitches whilst encoding prior works.

Emission Glitches is a shifting mosaic of colour-soaked pixels, the result of a coding error whilst the artitst was putting together a moving image called Glowing Emissions. Glitches perforate the vacuum seal separating different kinds of media reality. There is a place between the gestalt of recognising a familiar pattern or code and relating it to the next in which the mind freefalls before finding something to hold onto, measure, record and customise. Watching the shuffling patterns in this work, it is tempting to want to lock down its content into something recognisable: as if this elusive pattern is simply the poor transmission of a known television program. Buddhist philosophy has for centuries recognised the benefit of placing the logical part of the mind into suspended animation. Zen koans such as the well travelled ‘sound of one hand clapping’ pose questions that are unanswerable and often circular in nature, generating experiences that would remain inaccessible via logical or sequential thinking. Cornish refers to complexity in her thesis as information containing more than one form of representation simultaneously, citing the ambiguous rabbit-duck illustration (first noted by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow) as an example of how perception is a result of cognition, not simply an index of external stimulus.

The slip of gears between recorded stimulus and awareness is present in another of Cornish’s glitch pieces, Encoding Patterns. This sequence is the result of a slightly more complicated process involving the transposition of a photograph into sound using synthetic software. Accessible as an open-source application, this “visual prosthesis” software is used by the visually impaired as a means of accessing web content. Fundamentally, it operates by converting images into frequencies. The ensuing artefact is a waterfall of graphic striations with the odd hint of something familiar, such as road or a mirage of elongated people. This warp and weft of glitchy abstractions emits an aura of compression and absence simultaneously. Watching the cascade of information on screen is like watching the back of a scrolling tapestry, or a machine dreaming from the vantage point of its root directory.

The same software used to generate Encoding Patterns was also used to produce the exhibition’s soundscape, Sound Glitching. Cornish used the vision software to sample images from this sequence at a rate of one frame per second, converting these captured stills into sound files and arranging them into an accompanying score. It is uncanny how such procedures always seem to emulate a kind of neurological synesthesia.

Machine translation—whether as an interlocution between human languages, or software packages—exposes the difference between computational complexity and true Artificial Intelligence, which computer science is a long way from achieving. A toaster may be programmed with enough complexity to accommodate different tastes, but it will be a long time before machines understand that burnt toast tastes bad.

The works in Intertwingularity succeed collectively as an entry point into generative artforms and emerging media theory. However they are still at an experimental stage and not quite ready to support their own weight without an adjoining thesis. Technology sophisticates are much more likely to enjoy a richer aesthetic response to this work than viewers who know nothing about machine complexity. Of course as machine interfaces evolve to increasingly mirror human complexity, research into the cognitive and aesthetic experience of such interfaces becomes progressively more relevant.

Tracy Cornish, Interwingularity Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Oct 6-Nov 4, 2006

IN A MEDIA CULTURE SATURATED WITH VISUAL SORCERY, IT IS NO MEAN FEAT THAT THE TIME SLICE PRACTICE OF DANIEL CROOKS CONTINUES TO ASTOUND. COMMISSIONED FOR THE BIENNIAL ANNE LANDA AWARD, ON PERSPECTIVE AND MOTION (PART 2) IS NO EXCEPTION, PUSHING THIS EXPLORATION TO A NEW LEVEL OF LYRICISM.

Distributed across seven screens Crooks has captured (with seven cameras) a series of continuous 180 degree pans in Sydney’s Martin Place on a weekday. He has then disrupted the time line, oscillating between moments before and after themselves, morphing and stuttering between them. This humble description doesn’t begin to convey the intricacy of the work. The mesmerising result is a city folding, reversing, expanding and contracting on itself with perfect fluidity; a city in which pedestrians slip, slide and undulate in a sensuous dance of the everyday.

Over 23 minutes there are four sequences in which different qualities of movement and space are explored. In one sequence the pedestrians glide through the city: a woman floats across the road, the interlude between strides lengthened so that for brief moments she defies gravity, bringing to mind Laurie Anderson’s “walking and falling”; a businessman’s legs taper and elongate out behind him so that he becomes half man, half skateboard. In another sequence, pedestrian movements ripple: a woman with a strident arm-swing appears to moonwalk across the space, while other figures’ legs precede and follow them, like Balla’s dog. People appear from nowhere, emerging from invisible seams, splitting in two and scuttling off, while others walk towards themselves, disappearing on contact. Another section concentrates on the place itself, the buildings mirrored, extending beyond their limits to form liquid architecture; accelarating, the phenomenon spreads virally across the seven screens yielding a vast smear of stone and glass. In yet another sequence that seems slower than the rest, the figures are stationary, snap frozen like elongated cut-outs, as slices of the city bustle around them.

In his exploration of a form he has developed for almost a decade, Daniel Crooks has constantly impressed with his meticulousness. As there is never a uniform ‘apply all’ approach, it seems the artist has personally touched and manipulated each figure, each object, each background. This provides endless perplexing anomalies—why is the flower stall now over there? How is that man walking away on screen one, towards me on screen three, while staring at me from the distance on screen seven? Are those feet pointing forwards and backwards simultaneously?

Like many of Crooks’ works On perspective and motion is accompanied by a subtle yet effective score. The soundtrack of a modern city is emulated by tuned drones peppered with shuffles, squeaks, train noises and sirens. Understated, the half-heard familiar sound sources and insistent hum seep into consciousness, heightening the meditative and melancholy tone of the work.

People-watching in Martin Place is fascinating at the best of times. Here Crooks creates an environment of infinite curiosity and urban poetry. The manipulation of physical rhythms creates an elaborate choreography, revealing relationships within the crowds. The multiplication of individuals, splitting, meeting, deleting themselves, playing out past, present and future simultaneously creates powerful resonances. Amongst the dancing figures are delicate portraits suspended in time: a girl, still as death amidst the mêlée, staring straight at the camera; a family of four holding hands on the curb waiting to cross the road; a shoeshine man whose sign reads “helping myself, not begging.”

Crooks’ manipulation of time and spatial orientation within the fast-paced landscape opens a space for contemplation, and reveals the fragility of the anonymous individuals who make up a crowd. Playing with immutable laws of time and space in almost god-like fashion, Daniel Crooks offers us the opportunity to see ourselves from not just a different angle, but from another dimension.

Along with Daniel Crooks, the Anne Landa finalists were Philip Brophy, James Lynch, Monika Tichacek, Tony Schwensen, Grant Stevens and Daniel von Sturmer. Tichacek’s The Shadowers won the award.

Daniel Crooks, On perspective and motion (part 2), Anne Landa Award, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Nov 16, 2006 – Feb 11, 2007

Anthony Gross, From Here to Eternity II, Computer animation installation, UK, 2002 – present

-+-(negative plus negative), is a contemplative, sometimes gently disorienting experience, a tautly curated exhibition (Gridthiya Gaweewong), modest in scale but richly suggestive, comprising works by Thai and Thailand-based British artists. It quietly embraces the domestic–a trio of large Bangkok family portraits vibrate in “the 'in-between' space of photography and animation”; the urban–a 3-screen “healing space [offers] refuge from the pressures of everyday life”; the political–roped monitors loop tense border crossing images; the cosmic–3D animated meteorites tumble and disintegrate; and the metaphysical–a projected, rotating mandala critiques the foolishness that brings on economic crises.

The sense of in-betweenness is pervasive in -+-(negative plus negative), sometimes triggering the curious dialectic suggested by the title, sometimes evoking suspension (and MAAP's gravity theme) both literally and metaphorically, and generating a reflective unease, a reminder that borders are not just lines to be crossed but states where being is denied or can evaporate.

In Wit Pinkanchanapan's Family Portrait (2002; see Virginia Baxter, “The pause that refreshes”) the father hoses his hand in the garden. It's a still-life video with a little movement, a kind of involuntary vibration of body and globules of suspended water. There's an odd sense of vulnerability. In the next portrait, in a moment of control and anticipation, the mother in traditional dress holds up a treat for 3 large, eager dogs as high as her waist. The third portrait is of a young woman in a domestic storeroom holding a large blue plastic box labelled “PA Supply.” The only subject to look at the camera, she smiles, moving the box ever so slightly up and down, suggesting both the weight of the task and her strength. Apparently she is not 'family.' The son is the portraitist. This woman is a maid, presumably with all the connotations of that role in South-East Asia in terms of labour, migration and exploitation, and the status of the servant as part of the family, or not. The vibration of minimal and repeated action in this trio of images reads like a capture for a time capsule, a quivering trace of middle class Thai life in the early 21st century.
Kamol Phaosavasdi, Techno Temple, Video Installation, Thailand, 2004

Kamol Phaosavasdi, Techno Temple, Video Installation, Thailand, 2004

Kamol Phaosavasdi's Techno Temple is also an experience of stasis and movement, but here the dynamic is of sustained stillness and sweeping flow rather than the minutiae of vibration. The image on the central screen is grey and white, flaring, still. The gallery text says it's a real time image of a room. The image to the left is of a busy intersection in the passage between light and dark, traffic moving in stop-start flows, the predictability of the rhythm exaggerated by running the camera slow so that the patterning is accelerated. Rather than the image inducing infamous Bangkok traffic anxiety, its effect is painterly and calming. The vehicles gather before the stoplights, neat and still before rushing away, merging and dissolving into long brush-like streaks of colour, a river of abstracted traffic, and from the other direction comes a transcendent flood of headlights. The accompanying sound score, among other things, is of the flow of water, a chorus of birds and perhaps temple chanting and bells in an otherworldly sonic constellation. Techno Temple is just like the refuge offered by real temples in the midst of busy Asian cities, where noise seems to be backgrounded or banished. The third screen displays a sandy surface over which screen-deep layers of words scroll left to right, rippling in and out of view as they pass over slight ridges. No explanation of their meaning is at hand, but their constant, gentle flow suggests again meditative reflection as part of a cumulative, 3-screen image of urban life, language and domestic space viewed from an easeful distance and transformed into ethereal forms.

In a long, darkened space, 2 meteorites in From Here to Eternity II, by British artist Anthony Gross, appear one at a time on separate screens angled slightly towards each other. As one meteorite forms suddenly from a small cluster of tiny stars and rolls through space, the other on the second screen becomes transparent, flares with colour and explodes, and the cycle starts up again. In each appearance the shape of the large meteorite is the same, but it is the colour and texture of the surface which fascinates as it changes cycle to cycle, from a crusty white, to grey, to orange flecked with reds, looking sometimes precious, sometimes hot, snakeskin-like, sometimes stark, icy and threatening. The 'Eternity' evoked here is of endless creation and destruction, a sameness relieved by the beauties of the transformations allowed by colour and form. From Here to Eternity is a novel (and subsequently a famous film) by James Jones about tensions of race, class and sex within the American forces in World War II. Gross' vision offers no narrative and no such specificity, just a series of not big but small beautiful bangs. The overarching rhythm of the turning meteorites punctuated by explosions and the dance of stars prior to re-creation places us again in the in-between, in a visual mantra of the acceptance of cycle and change.

In the 16-minute video loop installation A Song for No Man, Jim Prevett & McArthur (the aggregate name of just one artist) hangs one video monitor from the ceiling with thick rope, tying it to another placed facing it on a chair. On the hung monitor a man hangs in space, we see him from the waist down, jerking about, the result of editing but uncomfortably like watching a hanging. He is suspended over a road that leads to a border control station. People cross the border on a sunny day, officers go about their tasks, while the hanged man is ignored, stuck in-between, between nation states, between life and death. On the second monitor, people wait in transit in what looks like an airport customs control section. A veiled woman stands by her luggage trolleys interminably waiting, but suddenly 2 men wheel them away for her. The soundtrack grumbles with slowed down voices, the dark murmur of authority. Here people seem to pass through the in-between of borders, but slowly. The light of one image, the darkness of the other, the tortuous fixity of the first and the underworld gloom but fluidity of the second play out a grim dynamic.
Sakarin Krue-on, Circle of Hope, Single-screen video, 5-min loop, Thailand, 2003

Sakarin Krue-on, Circle of Hope, Single-screen video, 5-min loop, Thailand, 2003

Sakarin Krue-on's Circle of Hope is a 5 minute video loop in which the image of Nang Gwag, the goddess of prosperity (whose image graces the entrances of many a Thai shopfront) is multiplied many times over in low definition, forming a large rotating circle within which concentric circles multiply, expand and contract, pushing the largest circle out, the whole pulsing with ever-changing lurid colours–pinks, blues, greens, yellows in many permutations against a black background. This mobile mandala is like a giant transparent jellyfish, rippling with colour, swelling and compacting as it moves through deep dark waters. And perhaps it's as toxic as a jellyfish: the gallery text says that the artist's target is the lure of prosperity that creates national economic crises. Seductively beautiful in itself, Circle of Hope is an ironic, mesmeric meditation on prosperity, portraying desire as a living thing. The in-between suggested by this work resides in the disjunction between the beauty of the image and the false hope it conjures.

-+-(negative plus negative) is a satisfying and well deployed gathering of works in which border states are experienced not just as content, whether political, moral or psychological, but in vibrations, pulsing and flows, a visual musicality that links all the works in their very different evocations of in-between states.

-+-(negative plus negative), curator Gridthiya Gaweewong, Project 304, Chiangmai, Thailand; organised by Earl Lu Gallery, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts and MAAP; MAAP in Singapore-GRAVITY, Oct 7-31

The CarriageWorks, built in the 1880s in Sydney’s Redfern and now with radically redesigned interiors, is Performance Space’s magnificent new home. This new contemporary performing arts centre has two wonderful performing spaces (800 and 300 seats), one of them huge, with flexible seating and rigging and accoustically excellent, roomy high-ceilinged rehearsal studios, offices and a vast naturally lit balconied foyer ideal too for performance. In our hard hats with architect Tim Greer of Tonkin Zulaikha Greer, journalists and NSW Arts Minister Bob Debus, we heard the centre’s Director/CEO Sue Hunt describe Performance Space as “an anchor tenant”, “a key partner” and as “providing a backbone” for The CarriageWorks. Asked about the new home, Performance Space Director Fiona Winning is “very excited about the move, by the new environment for some of the things we’ve always done and the opportunity it offers us to do things we’ve never been able to do. Collaborating with artists, audiences and some new partners in the local area, we’ll be opening in March with a program that places radical experiment alongside meditative community events and politically charged physical performance next to place-based installation. We’re up for the challenge of the change and can’t wait to get in there.” Resident with Performance Space at The Carriage Works will be physical and outdoor theatre companies Stalker and Erth. The first outside hirer will be the Sydney Festival opening the centre in January 2007 with the Australian Dance Theatre, Akram Khan & Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Israel’s Bathsheva Dance Company, a fitting prelude to this long-awaited adventure.

LYON’S 2006 IMMERSIVE BIENNALE DE LA DANSE IS its TWELFTH. THEMED AROUND THE EXPERIENCE OF LIVING IN CITIES IT IS STAGED in an AMIABLE CITY IN LOVE WITH DANCE. WE WITNESSED ONE WEEK OF A THREE WEEK DANCE PROGRAM THAT EMBRACED THE WHOLE OF LYON, FROM THE CENTRE TO THE SUBURBS AND SURROUNDING REGIONAL TOWNS AND A COMPLEMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION, DES CORPS DANS LA VILLE (THE BODY IN THE CITY), INVOLVing 32 GALLERIES, FROM IMPROMPTU SPACES TO THE MAGNIFICENT LYON MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART.

In turn the dance biennale was embraced by large audiences from the city to its the periphery, for example at Le Toboggan, an impressive arts centre where we saw Australia’s Force Majeure play to a receptive full house on the last of its three packed performances. The Sydney-based company, directed by Kate Champion, was the first Australian company to be invited to the Biennale.

The intensity of this festival of dance and its public involvement was more extensively revealed in the Défilé—a 3 hour pageant in which some 24 groups of citizens from the suburbs and surrounding towns displayed a range of dance styles on and around floats often incorporating musical performance involving DJ-ing, contemporary brass bands playing fine progressive compositions, and found object ensembles (favouring large plastic water bottles). Each group works with a choreographer and designer, is funded by the city and draws on additional resources according to its ambitions. The makeup of the groups ranges across age, ethnicity and ability and all made good use of the metres of material supplied by local manufacturer sponsors in a region famous for its textiles. Each group presented a commentary on the idea of the city—utopia, distopia, fantasia—employing diverse devices, forms and images—cycling, recycling, modern dance, hip hop, art history (the Bauhaus body as city) and the history of city clothing, from elegant medieval to 20th century Chaplin, to hip hop armies and sci-fi glitter and transparency. Public fancy dress inventiveness was also on rich display at Bal Bollywood, an evening of Bollywood dancing DJ-ed, performed and taught from the stages of a massive suburban nightclub.

Lyon’s Biennale de la Danse emerged in the early 80s from the vision of the director of the city’s Maison de la Danse, Guy Darmet. Darmet’s energy, charisma and the biennale itself are said to have convinced the citizens of Lyon once and for all that they are not the dour cultural inferiors of Paris but the Latins of France. This was in evidence as this easy-going city threw itself into Défilé and Bal Bollywood and packed theatres and studios for the wide-ranging dance experience programmed by Darmet and Assistant Programmer Sylvaine Van den Esch.

We arrived in Lyon when the festival had been underway for a week, and after our departure there were companies like Les Ballet C de la B we regretted having to miss. Even so we had a packed program, sometimes seeing several shows a day but even then finding by word-of-mouth that we’d missed something significant, for example architecture-trained Julie Desprairies’ (Compagnie desprairies) site-specific performances, Là commence le ciel. In Desprairies’ work people are incorporated into nature, buildings, freeways; bodies become part of their environment. The word was good also on Tokyo choreographer Kim Itoh’s take on a butoh classic, Kin-Jiki, and Nacho Duato’s Multiplicite: Formes de silence et de vide for his Madrid-based National Dance Company. There was a lot of excitement about the eight-strong local Pockemon Crew who’d been “taken from the portico of the Lyon Opera House to the Maison de la Danse.” The portico has become a permanent public venue for hip hoppers and break-dancers as audiences weave their way to performances in the house.

The Lyon Opera House is a 1756 building in the heart of the city strikingly renovated in 1993 by Jean Nouvel who also designed the Musee du Quai Branley in Paris. Here he added a new arched steel and glass upper level housing, amongst other facilities, rehearsal studios looking out over the city. Nouvel’s interiors have a rich, dark, immersive quality: black marble; escalators; metal walkways; an ominously bulging fibreglass sculpture like a black cloud; and the whole place suffused with soft orange light. Oddly, the same orange stares at you from a bulb in the back of the seat of the person in front of you in a theatre with a huge stage but an intimate auditorium with six levels of shallow balconies, the whole mostly in black and with a gun-metal sheen.

ballet de l’opéra de lyon: rachid ouramdane

We’d heard that Yourgos Loukos, Director of Dance at Ballet de l’opéra de Lyon, runs a strong program, consistently inviting, progressive choreographers work with his dancers. Loukos writes, “although a classical formation, (the company) is oriented towards contemporary dance; given the wide range of dance styles proposed, the artists acquire many different techniques”. In a typical year, guests include Trisha Brown, Mats Ek, De Keersmaeker, Russell Maliphant, Sasha Waltz.

But the choice of young French choreographer, Rachid Ouramdane, for the Opera’s contribution to the Biennale was seen as particularly bold. Ouramdane’s Superstars shared the bill with New Yorker Tere O’Connor’s Creation.

In Superstars, a massive white box fills the huge stage littered with six Macintosh computer screens of different sizes and two white loud speakers. Guitarist Alexandre Meyer, also dressed in white, mixes his own sound from the side of the stage and traverses it as he plays. The work is a series of solos in which the dancers from the Opera Ballet express aspects of their lives. The challenge for us was that most of the speech was French without surtitles. A subtle force slowly flows through the poised body of the first dancer, vertically and then horizontally. Suddenly she speaks, in French, then briefly in English about the challenge of growing up white in South Africa, her words punctuated by great chiming guitar chords. Rapid upper body movements parallel her account of living with an albino sister in a culture distinctly black and white; hearing the everyday sound of rifle shots; sensing the power of an otherwise disenfranchised black culture when you’re the only white family in the district; and attending a Whites Only school. And learning what fear is. The dancer conveys a strange kind of stability as she vibrates with remembered trepidation. This dynamic sculpting of the standing body seems the foundation for most of the solos that follow and it’s matched by the architectural feel of the design, of a space slowly transformed by bodies and soft waves of coloured light (Jean-Michel Hugo) emerging from unexpected points of the space. Instead of elaborate dance we witness states of being. Overall, Superstars didn’t appear to head in any particular direction, each piece seeming complete in itself even where overlapping.

These solos by members of the resident company were based on childhood recollections and ranged through a variety of images including sport and cross-dressing. One of the more striking was of an angular, statuesque dancer in red holding her body in difficult poses for long periods, then lying on the floor, arching her back high to an organ-like guitar composition, the light narrowing into a pool around her. The show stood magically still. Superstars was a provocative work; despite the language challenge, it remains strong in the memory.

Tere O’Connor’s Creation also started out with a strong architectural feel, a large mass of bodies forming a block beneath a suspended row of dense curtains, another block of the same proportion. Small variations in group patterning and individual moves evolved in the crowd in various permutations of placement and displacement against the mutating design. But, disappointingly, Creation dissipated into something more waftily generic replete with literal game-playing, robotic moments ending with some very formal dancing against uninteresting flown-in wallpaper panels.

force majeure

We travelled to Force Majeure’s Already Elsewhere in the free bus to the theatre provided by the festival. On our way to Le Toboggan (Centre Culturel Ville de Décines) the landscape changed from old inner city to high-rise to two-storey suburban buildings till we were on the rural outskirts of the city. Force Majeure were programmed as part of the Centre’s 06/07 Saison Eclectique. Le Toboggan was but one of the performing arts spaces we encountered on our visit to Lyon that program boldly. The venue was spatially ideal for the work. Audience members and reviewers we spoke to were responsive to the concept, the design, the stylish realisation of the work and the skill of the dancers. For us it was good to see the work for a second time and with a very different audience and to admire its most sustained sequences, like the dynamic but nonetheless lyrical race of performers across the rooftop in pursuit of Kirstie McCracken, teacup and saucer in hand. The decision to translate substantial amounts of the spoken text (delivered by Veronica Neave) into French paid off. Already Elsewhere perfectly fitted the biennale’s theme of the body in the city, bringing a distinctly strong element to it, the sense of the suburban and the fragility and everyday fears of urban life.

cie l’explose

Cie L’Explose from Colombia, performed Frenesi, choreographed by Spanish born Tino Fernández. Although inspired by bull fighting, the corida, this doesn’t become literal until the very end when a male dancer finally dons the costume of the matador and even then it’s symbolic. The work begins abstractly in the ritualised dressing and undressing and preparing of male bodies for an unspecified event. Four women lift and turn four naked men on gurneys and dump them unceremoniously on the floor. The first to come to life is a man of short stature whom the women dress in leather belt and buckles while the other men gradually dance to the sound of flamenco clapping. The short man topples the others and is subsequently involved in a cleverly sustained duet of pursuit and entwinement with one woman and a frustrated attempt to engage with another who stamps a raw, vibrating flamenco. He collapses, defeated. The women oil the men, their limbs hanging limply from the gurneys like scenes from some Francis Bacon butchery. Finally one emerges, slips into matador pants and dances triumphantly over a naked woman rolling downstage to us, raw meat tied to her body. Despite or maybe because of its curious sexual politics, but moreso because of its dramaturgy, Frenesi is an intriguing experience, offering a version of men, or rather one man, raised from the abject to the triumphant, overcoming women (and men of short stature). The bull no longer represents the horns of the male’s ambiguous relationship with the forces of nature—there are other more urban and domestic forces to contend with. The choreography was idiosyncratic, the manipulation of bodies almost always interesting.

Seeing this performance primed us for our first foray into cuisine Lyonnaise—mysterious meats preceded by very good oysters and washed down with a genteel Cote du Rhône.

atelia de coreografia

A less engrossing dance experience was to be had from Rio de Janeiro’s Atelier de Coreografia in ExtraCorpo, choreographed by João Saldanha. In the intimate Le Rectangle, we sat stiffly around the edges of a white space to experience an extremely formal set of variations with accompanying abstract gestures. Initially bodies appeared almost statue-like with limited fluidity, small spins and falls until, gradually, an increasingly flexible geometry emerged. This was a work of high modernism inspired by the choreographer’s association with Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brazilia. In comparison with Frédéric Flamand’s Metapolis 2, seen later, the relationship between architecture and choreography seemed vague at best. Occasionally there was welcome additional detail from two of the younger female dancers whose textured, rippling movements suggested something more than stark abstraction. The accompanying recorded music was suggestive of a dense primordial soup as the work moved towards its more complex, agitated conclusion.

selenographica

A cluster of smaller shows included Kyoto’s Selenographica in What Follows the Act in which the choreographer Maho Smiji appears in a chamber work of domestic surrealism, performing with Shuichi Abiru and an accompanying musician on flute and recorders in the western manner. This awkwardly staged work was eerie and quaint by turns with some resonances with the Noh play and Japanese ghost stories.

noland

Death also figured thematically in Noland’s Paper Ship. The young company from Istanbul fused an elegy for a dying patriach with a celebration of an emerging romance framed by city life. Dancers Esra Yurtlut and Alper Marangoz and video artist Burak Kolcu have created a work of modest scale, indistinct choreography and loosely integrated video images of Istanbul. Although the storytelling was at times overly literal there were some strong moments when bodies became entangled or toppled into each other, the characters struggling simultaneously with loving and grieving.

ballet national de marseille

Metapolis 2 is a fresh interpretation of an earlier work, Metapolis 1 by Frédéric Flamand, first performed in 2000. Flamand was formerly the director of Belgium’s Charleroi/Danse-Plan K but has taken over the Ballet National de Marseille.

For Metapolis, the internationally renowned Iraqui-British architect Zaha Hadid designed two mobile, asymmetrical bridges to be moved about by the dancers, to provide platforms but also spaces in which to insert performing bodies, as well as for the bridges to intersect, one riding over the over. The sheer scale of work is impressive: a large ballet company with seemingly unlimited means using architectural creations in conjunction with new screen technologies. The entire back wall forms a screen amplifying massively the movement of a foot straining against the slope of a bridge, or displaying the rush of filmed city streets against a running phalanx of onstage dancers matching the speed of vehicles. Images (some recorded, some live) are also projected onto the bodies of the dancers absorbing the city into their green-screen costumes. A male dancer lies on a green sheet on the floor, his movements projected onto the screen image of a traffic tunnel so that he appears to fly effortlessly through it. Dancers appear to fall into holes in the city.

Although Metapolis II reproduces much of what we know of the city experience—speed, congestion, mutability, vulnerability—and evokes its imprint on our lives as image and as states of being—alienation, romance, adventure—the sheer scope of the work, the number of scenes and devices threatens to make for a rather generalised response. What city? Any city. Likewise the ever graceful, fluent dancing within a framework that is often geometrically formal threatens sameness. Flamand has yet to invent a language as idiosyncratic and contemporary as Forsythe has for his ballet-trained dancers. However there are solos and duets and small moments of drama that break the mould, as do the sudden images that offer unexpected and privileged views of the city. A slice of city is projected on a dancer’s huge skirt while he is in turn projected, slowly turning 360 degrees, onto the big screen in a vertiginous dance of actual body, virtual body and camera eye.

In Metapolis II’s climactic scenes, black and white footage of street riots and demolition are screened, the dancers mounting Hadid’s bridges and watching—Flammand drawing, he says, on a Tiepolo painting of people looking into a world that frightens them. The work ends energetically and optimistically, maybe ironically, with energetic ensemble dancing against a fast trip through a huge digital city.

farruquito y familia

Our surprise festival experience was Farruquito y Familia. Although not usually enamoured of flamenco dance, we found ourselves swept along by this pared back Gypsy version of the form with its dressed down, raw power, precision, humour and informality. Juan Manuel Fernandez Montoya ‘Faurruquito’, still a young man, leads the family ensemble he inherited from the great Farruco (1935-1997), dances exquisitely, sharing the stage with brother and cousins and not least with his aunt and his mother, who arrives on stage late in the show with all the presence and power of the matriarch. Young local gypsies from the audience joined in the encore, a young girl in their number stamping in sneakers, dancing with complete confidence to riotous applause.

isabella’s room

Belgium’s Jan Lauwers sees himself as “a man without a city”, so it’s not surprising that Isabella’s Room appears not as rooted in the biennale’s city theme as other works, and starts out, at least in its storytelling, in a lighthouse, “an inbetween place; somewhere between land and sea”, where Isabella is born. Lauwers and Needcompany’s show is a very lateral take on 20th century history and the very long life of one woman, Isabella. Two cities do aptly figure, Paris where Isabella finds some respite from personal trauma among the cultural objects brought back from colonised Africa, and Hiroshima where a lover witnesses the appalling pain and devastation of the H-bombing.

Isabella’s Room is a marvel of the undoing, hybridising and remaking of theatre. In a press conference Lauwers, who appears in the production in a white suit, playing guitar and joining in the dialogue and the dancing (and what dancing, joyful and mad), confessed surprise at having created a musical. Not a bad thing, he thought, reflecting on the dark Needcompany works of the 90s and sensing a need for an antidote, albeit a critical one, to the current grimness of the world. So, Isabella’s Room is full of singing and dancing along with dialogue played directly and intimately to the audience amidst Lauwers’ collection of anthropological objects inherited from his recently deceased father. (In what curious ways is Lauwers himself Isabella?) The company’s self-choreographing dancers (Julien Faure, Ludde Hagberg, Tijen Lawton, Louise Peterhoff) spring into idiosyncratic action either on their own or draw in the whole company, or provide upstage counterpoint to downstage dialogue, offering some of the most distinctive and satisfying dance we witnessed in the biennale.
Compagnie desprairies, site-specific performance, Là commence le ciel

Compagnie desprairies, site-specific performance, Là commence le ciel

Lyon’s dance biennale was our first visit to a festival dedicated entirely to dance; such an event is a true rarity in Australia. It was an enlightening and enriching experience and it was wonderful that Australia’s Force Majeure could be part of it.

IN 2006 LYON’S BIENNALE DE LA DANSE PARTNERED LYON SEPTEMBRE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE, AN EXHIBITION SPREAD THROUGH 32 GALLERIES AND OTHER VENUES ACROSS CITY AND SUBURBS. WE MANAGED TO EXPERIENCE ABOUT A QUARTER OF IT, ENGROSSED WITH PHOTOGRAPHERS EXPLOITING THE PAINTERLY POTENTIALS OF THE DIGITAL, CAPTURING EVERYDAY HUMAN MOVEMENT IN UNEXPECTED, SOMETIMES DANCERLY MOVES IN PUBLIC SPACES AND RECORDING THE GROWING CROSS-CULTURAL COMPLEXITY OF CITY LIFE.

At the Maison de la Danse, Didier Grappe seems to shoot from the waist so that the weight of the image leans toward the legs and feet of his Hamburg street subjects as they set off in different directions, or form lines, advancing on the photographer with a bounce in their step. Sébastien Camboulive’s images capture pedestrians mid-movement, clustered at the centre or the edge of intersections and all moving in different directions. One or two of them have stopped as the others dance on. Camboulive’s large format series offers a strong aesthetic take on the social kinetics of crossing the street. His recurrent choice of the same kinds of moment and space suggests a loose visual choreography, the thin line between artifice and the everyday.
Laure Bertin, Sans titre, 2004-2005

Laure Bertin’s small images recall, without being imitative, the paintings of Edward Hopper. They have the same sense of bodies caught in moments of stillness amidst distinctive colours and in unremarkable contemporary city settings—a girl at a table against a blue wall that perhaps suits her mood; a man framed in a doorway; a girl standing in front of a shop window in which we see the street, a tree, power poles and the girl herself reflected, framed by yellow columns and red walls.

In the same show, Aurélie Haberey offers a mysterious series called Les Secrets in which people disappear or crawl into foliage with hints of evasion or illicit behaviour, but mostly of merging. Pauline Rühl-Saur’s ghost figures are captured moving while seated on highly coloured furniture in public spaces—shades of the works of Australian photo media artists, Darren Siwes and Merilyn Fairskye.
Mona Breede, Distance 1, 2005

Painterly digital realism reaches its apotheosis in the work of Mona Breede, L’Arriere-Plan de L’Existence, at the Lyon Goethe Institut. She too does street scenes but they have an epic, wide screen quality portraying contemporary street life, a multicultural populace, the overpowering presence of advertising and the geometries of public and architectural space.

In Distance 1, two businessmen are caught in mid-step, behind them a man in a shirt, head down moves in the opposite direction. The red street sign between them translates as “The most important distance in the world is the distance between people. Law Department.” People appear etched, like animated still lives moving on a background of solid colour and sharply defined shadow. Can any reality be this sharp? In Distance 2, on the same street, the subjects are Asian. The works have the peculiar power of photography and painting hybridised—and not kin to photorealism.

Breede’s New York series of people walking against a low, less than familiar New York skyline are very narrow, long photographs with an even more painterly intensity. The work runs around 3 walls in long strips. These also have a slightly Hopperish feel, hard edged but soft, with a luminosity that might almost be regarded as nostalgic if its subjects are utterly contemporary. A similar approach is applied to a rich ethnic mix of pedestrians captured in a German street against a graffitied wall and a blue sky, with an even more pronounced flattening of distance.

Efrat Shvily’s black and white photographs at Espace Arts Plastiques de Venissieux are of almost completed Israeli settlements set up on Palestinian land during the first Intifada and awaiting their new inhabitants. They evoke a terrible feeling of artificiality and imposition accentuated by their monochromatic suggestion of other just as problematic times. The new settlements already look like ghost towns.

Centre Sociale Bonnefoi is a community centre in an area of Lyon where descendants of Algerian immigrants live. We met the photographer Ghislaine Hamid whose work was on display, large transparencies attached to the internal windows of the building so that they could be seen or not, as people wished. Image-making in Islamic culture was at issue here. Hamid had decided to document the all male Algerian gathering place in a nearby public space—a large circular road with open meeting space in the middle and shops and offices around the edge. She said she took the photographs so that local women could see what the men got up to in a mix of long shots, portaits and clusters of movement, like the one we’ve reproduced here outside a wedding dress shop.
Ghislaine Hamid, Les hommes debout, 2006

Ghislaine Hamid, Les hommes debout, 2006

The project took Hamid a year. Because she was a woman with a camera she had to gain the trust of the men; she had to understand that this public place was a community space and how it worked—the young men gathering in the centre, others further out. The women told Hamid that they liked the photos for the unthreatening ease revealed in their male friends and relatives, but commented, “We don’t have time to sit around like the men.”

Our final stop is at the magnificent Musée d’Art Contemporain, part of a Renzo Piano creation using his favourite terracotta tile that houses a cinema, shops, restaurants and a conference centre as well as the infinitely flexible gallery—every wall can move.
Sébastien Camboulive, Extrait de la limite pluie-neige, 2005

Sébastien Camboulive, Extrait de la limite pluie-neige, 2005

By way of monumental Robert Morris installations and through a wonderful exhibition by young Japanese artists—Aya Takano, Cho Ao Shima, Aosha—working exquisitely out of manga, anime and the Japanese print tradition, we are guided to the works of too many photographers to absorb before we fly out of Lyon. We witness an incredible range of responses to people in the built environment from vivid scenes of a street bazaar in India to Florian Ebner’s enigmatic studies of young European men caught in casual movement, and David Moziconacci’s Asian workers in New York at work and asleep on factory floors, to Valerie Jouve’s immaculately detailed but nonetheless spontaneous images of people she’s approached in the street. Occasionally we sight surreal images, but there is a larger sense that the everyday is strange enough or, as in Breede and others, that the everyday can be heightened just enough to bring home its otherness. Elsewhere (Geraldine Lay and Christian Buffa) it’s to be found in works that drop background into near black making their subjects luminous, or disappear depth of field.

We relucantly drag ourselves away from a captivating exhibition to enter our own little still lives in the demanding if sometimes dance of airport queuing and airline travel.

Our thanks to artist and curator Nicolas Garait for guiding us through aspects of Lyon Septembre de la Photographie.

Lyon Septembre de la Photographie, la region humaine, des corps dans la ville, Sept 15-Nov 4, www.lebleuduciel.net

What is Parcel? A design team? writers? editors? One of Parcel’s attractions for the people who work in and around it is that the positioning statement seems to change every few months.

Parcel was formed in Sydney in 2004 by writer and editor Heidi Dokulil and communications designer Graeme Smith. The idea was to make a satisfying and intelligent living out of what they like doing: designing and writing, talking to people about design and visual culture and setting up interesting scenarios for dialogues between designers and manufacturers, artists, educators, children, the public and any groups interested in a more complete view of the world as a designed place.

A recent project informed by these interests was the exhibition, Conversations of Things New, which Parcel curated and designed for the Italian Trade Commission at Federation Square, Melbourne and St Margarets, Sydney. The exhibition explored collaborations—through interviews, talks, a film, a magazine and design process artefacts—between Australian product designers and Italy’s heritage-rich manufacturers.

CHRISTOPH MARTHALER’S THEATRE SLOWS TIME TO A STANDSTILL. HE STAGES PASSAGES OF WOUND-DOWN TIME, OF EMPTY TIME AND OF MEMORY TIME. HIS DRAMATURG STEPHANIE CARP CALLS HIM A DIRECTOR OF THE ‘MEANTIME’—WHEN SOMETHING HAS CONCLUDED AND SOMETHING NEW HAS NOT YET BEGUN. A TIME BETWEEN. A TIME OF WAITING, OF REMAINDERED THOUGHTS, LEFTOVER PEOPLE AND ONCE FORGOTTEN SONGS. Seemanslieder, created with ZT Hollandia/NT Gent in a Dutch-Belgian co-production, is the first Marthaler production to come to Australia. It’s in the 2007 Sydney Festival program.

Born, in Erlenbach near Zurich, in 1951, Marthaler is a classically trained musician. He began to develop his distinctive theatre language working in Basel between 1980 and 1988 with a series of music theatre compositions and song recitals. These included collages of various folk songs and evenings after Erik Satie, John Cage and Kurt Schwitters. The title of his song project on the Swiss military, Wenn das Alpenhirin sich rötet, tötet, freie Schweizer, tötet… [When the Alpine mind reddens, Kill free Swiss, Kill], mocked the Swiss national anthem and nearly caused the sacking of the theatre’s artistic director.

Since the early 1990s, Marthaler has created theatre works for Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and Schauspielhaus Zurich where he was artistic director 2000-2004. He has directed many operas including Pelléas et Mélisande, Fidelio, Katja Kabanowa, Pierrot Lunaire and, most recently, Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth. His award-winning theatre productions are regularly invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen and to festivals worldwide.

All Marthaler’s work must be considered music theatre. As a composer, he develops a score of gesture, speech, music and behaviour. Text and narrative are subordinated to rhythmic compositions, self-repeating segments and enactments of ‘dead’ time. His use of live music is always extremely playful and choral arrangements of songs are present throughout all his works. This is equally true of his versions of plays—including Chekhov’s Drei Schwestern [Three Sisters]; Horvath’s Kasimir und Karoline; Zur Schönen Aussicht [To the Beautiful Prospect]; Dantons Tod [Danton’s Death] by Buchner—as of his found text assemblages—including Die Stunde Null [The Zero Hour] devised from speeches by post-war German politicians; Groundings, concerning the decline of the Swiss airline industry; or Die Fruchtfliege about the life cycle of the fruitfly. It is also true of his song-collage projects—such as Murx den Europäer! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn ab! [Kill the European! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him off!] composed of nostalgic German Volkslied; Die Zehn Geboten [The Ten Commandments] after the songs of Rafaelle Viviani; or his staging of Schubert’s Die Schöne Mullerin. Other composers present in Marthaler’s theatre include Charles Ives, Noël Coward, Lloyd Webber, Monteverdi, Berg, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Offenbach, Puccini and Verdi, to name a few.

Singing in Marthaler’s theatre occasions acts of collective memory. Mostly sung very quietly, songs grow out of silence bringing individuals from solitude into chorus. They are sung as if half-remembered, very fragile, harmonious and beautiful. Sometimes, they’re like a prayer repeated. Sometimes, a long lost refrain. Every now and then, an aria turns inward. Here and there, a daggy vaudeville turn. They express impossible longings for a lost past and a longed for present.

In Murx! singing constitutes an historical haunting and scouring of national identity. Subtitled Ein patriotischer Abend [A Patriotic Evening], the piece, created in 1992, has been called a requiem for the former East Germany. It takes place in a vast empty hall: some run-down public institution with wood-panelled walls, fluoro lights, an empty elevator moving up and down without passengers, and several huge furnaces which require regular stoking. The clock on the wall has stopped, but a bell repeatedly rings, causing the inhabitants of the room to queue to wash their hands in a washroom upstage. Otherwise, they sit at their respective tables and engage in banal, repetitive rituals, petty spats and obsessive acts. Only when they sing are they united. The Volkslieder sung in Murx! carry repressed memories of Germany’s fascist past and connotations of the still open wound of reunification. Songs of glorified nationalism lose all innocence and even the very act of singing recalls the use of such songs in Third Reich rallies. At one stage, two of the actors play klezmer music, at first very softly, then others take it up, and for a while, it fills the hall. It hangs in the air like a beautiful memory. The furnaces on the side of the stage are stoked. The song seems to escape from within. In the memory time of the song, voice becomes an act of ghosting, a prayer in a room where clock time has stalled.

A few years before, in 1992, with a version of Labiche’s Die Affäre Rue de Lourcine, Marthaler commenced his collaboration with set and costume designer Anna Viebrock. For over 15 years across opera and theatre, they have staged variations of the same banal room peopled by fragile communities of melancholic, washed up figures. Their body of work is a continuing articulation of recurring ideas and states. Uninterested in novelty or reinvention, Marthaler patiently elaborates his alternate temporal order in Viebrock’s empty rooms.

Every set which Viebrock designs is a waiting room of some kind. Like the spaces photographed by Candida Höfer, the rooms which Viebrock places onstage posit an architecture of absence. Belonging to a recent past, often institutional, her rooms contain an air of slowness, of deliberation, of space remembered—an old sound recording studio, a disused factory, a wood panelled ballroom, an emptied library, the stairwell of an apartment block, the stage of a community hall, a foyer. Often, Viebrock’s stages begin as copies or translations of found spaces, old photographs or abandoned buildings. Her rooms, though concrete in detail and autonomous in presence, are often ambiguous. They contain traces of multiple uses, or overlap heterogeneous spaces, as in the room of Die Zehn Geboten which crossbreeds the nave of a cathedral with a dusty old stage. All Viebrock’s rooms bear the marks of their use and the wear of time. Their furnishings are dilapidated. The people too have a sense of being left behind. Their clothes place them in another era, yet they never belong to ‘period pieces.’ According to theatre writer Stephanie Carp, they are “remembered and dreamed people”, necessarily familiar. So, Chekhov’s Prozorov sisters might be recognised “crossing Alexanderplatz holding plastic bags at the close of a workday.”

Marthaler always places a community on stage. His people are alone together. Found in Viebrock’s rooms they are subject to the same laws of entropy. In this sense, as in his stagings of Horvath, all Marthaler’s pieces are folk plays concerned with forgotten people, language collapsing into silence, a persistence of song and a poetry of the everyday. An affinity with Chekhov resounds in shared concepts of organic communities and the cyclic nature of time. Marthaler extends the powerlessness of his onstage figures resulting in a deepened abnegation of climax and suspense in favour of a draining of drama. When the figures in his Three Sisters wish for a glorious future, it is already a memory, a function of lapsed ideology and actions long faded into routine.

This theatre of quiet, slow life enacts a withdrawal of drama from the stage. The figures onstage are withdrawn too. Unable to play heroes, they wait their entire lives for something that never comes. It even seems as if they would rather not be on stage. They stare into corners, face the wall, perform exercises, quietly recite old texts. Every now and then someone trips, or a glass breaks, or a sudden fit disturbs compulsive patterns.

The Marthaler family of actors (including André Jung, Ueli Jäggi, Olivia Grigolli, Matthias Matschke, Judith Engel, Jean-Pierre Cornu, and Graham F Valentine) are all great, gentle clowns. Onstage they are unforced, light, always playful and often very funny. Through little quirks, obsessive routines and their shared songs, they form Marthaler’s island of stranded people. People who are unable to belong in the shiny world of advertising. People whom the rush of capitalism leaves behind. From their silence, Christoph Marthaler extracts frailty, neurosis and longing. He finds the beauty of the powerless.

Speaking at the start of rehearsals for a new work, Winch Only (premiered in Brussels in May 2006), Marthaler said, “We still don’t know what we’re going to do. The prerequisite first of all is to create a real group of actors capable of understanding each other and what everyone’s feeling. And the best way to do that is to sing and eat together! We sing a lot and improvise. We always do that when we’re not dealing with specific work on a play or opera. We have to get to know each other and our voices first.”

Marthaler’s music theatre shares Italo Calvino’s favourite motto, ‘festina lente’, hurry slowly. Against capitalism’s perpetual novelty and urge to speed, he allows theatre to maintain a distinct tempo. He slows the heartbeat and stops life’s flow to observe and reflect. Duration is staged as a musical melody, a multiplicity and a dynamic continuation of past into present time into a future. Marthaler’s humanist theatre is a refusal to speed up or catch up.

ZT Hollandia/NTGent, Seemannslieder, director Christoph Marthaler, designer Anna Viebrock, Sydney Theatre, Jan 10-13,

On October 19 2001, a small fishing vessel commonly referred to as SIEV X sank in Australian waters, drowning 353 of the people onboard who were seeking refuge from war-torn countries in the Middle East.

For four years, led by project founder Steve Biddulph, a growing number of people from many streams of belief and activism have been working together to construct a permanent memorial. Landscape architect Dr Sue Anne Ware from RMIT has been collaborating with the group to help develop the idea.

Beginning with a national invitation to school students and an initial idea from Queensland schoolboy, Mitchell Donaldson, for 353 bars in the shape of a boat, the project evolved into a collaboration with students, community groups and activists all over Australia who inscribed a series of decorated white wooden poles with the names of the refugees in Arabic and sent them to Canberra.

At 2pm on October 15 in Weston Park on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin, “to our amazement and gratitude, 300 poles arrived,” reports the organisers’ website (www.sievexmemorial.com), “along with 1400 people including Sir William and Lady Deane, ACT Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, MPs and leaders of various churches, ambassadors… The line of poles was awesome to see laid out on the ground. It stretched for over 300 metres.

“Eventually it took 600 volunteers to stand up during the ceremony. We still don’t know where they all came from,” says project co-ordinator Beth Gibbings. “A drumbeat accompanied the procession down the hill. Then the poles were raised, amid tears and joy in the audience, the students and three men whose families who had died on the boat five years ago. The Kippax Uniting Church Tongan Choir sang a gospel song. Then the poles were gently laid on the grass.”

The idea was for the memorial to remain for three weeks but a late intervention by the National Capital Authority meant that the event was restricted to a single action on the day—a powerful action nevertheless, that stands strongly, as the organisers assert, as “a national symbol of conscience and caring, that every human life is precious, and a message of human unity that we won’t be divided by fear.” RT

IN A STRONGER THAN USUAL SYDNEY FESTIVAL PROGRAM, DANCE PLAYS A PIVOTAL ROLE, NOT ONLY FEATURING LEADING AUSTRALIAN AND VISITING COMPANIES BUT ALSO OPENING SYDNEY’S NEW REDFERN-BASED CONTEMPORARY PERFORMING ARTS SPACE, THE CARRIAGEWORKS, WITH AKRAM KHAN & SIDI LARBI CHERKAOUI (UK-BELGIUM), AUSTRALIAN DANCE THEATRE AND BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY (ISRAEL).

At the Sydney Opera House there’s Lucy Guerin Inc, Meryl Tankard & Taikoz, and The Holy Body Tattoo (Canada). The theatre program is more modest but boasts the wonderful Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg in Uncle Vanya along with Gate Theatre (Ireland) with a trio of Beckett adaptations for the stage, Company B’s new take on Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and South Korea’s Yahangza’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But it’s the hybrid works that have some of the festival’s strongest appeal, above all in the Christoph Marthaler Seemannslieder in collaboration with the Dutch-Belgian companies ZT Hollandia and NTGENT, merging musical performance and theatre in unexpected ways. Likewise there’s Lou Reed’s Berlin, a live performance of his 1973 cult album realised here with Reed and band as staged by visual artist Julian Schnabel; dancer-choreographers Akram Kahn and Sidfi Larbi Cherkaoui collaborate with sculptor Anthony Gormley; ADT’s Garry Stewart with Montreal roboticist Louis-Philippe Demers; Lucy Guerin with dancers media artist Michaela French and designers Bluebottle; and, not least, Geelong’s Back to Back Theatre join a host of collaborators to work a public site into an intimate theatrical/media space. Here’s my ticket wish list, in welcoming artists whose work I’ve seen and admired, but also with quite a bit of guesswork and reliance on reputations—the risk-taking that comes with arts festivals. By the way, let me add this wish, for a greater commitment from the festival to Sydney artists who appear in such small numbers relative to their counterparts in festivals in other Australian cities.

Christoph Marthaler/ZT Hollandia/NTGent: Seemanslieder

The great European director (p8) evokes the pull of the ocean on body (sober, dreaming & drunken) and voice in sailor songs, pop and lieder.

Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg: Uncle Vanya

Superbly theatrical and wonderfully lateral in the 1996 Adelaide Festival, this company’s Vanya will doubtless yield great emotion and unexpected insight.

Akram Khan & Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: Zero Degrees

In the premiere CarriageWorks’ performance, superb dancer-choreographers British-Bangladeshi Akram Khan and Flemish-Moroccan Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Les Ballets C de la B) dance to a meeting point, the zero degree, with music by Nitin Sawhney and design by sculptor Anthony Gormley.

Australian Dance Theatre: Devolution

Choreographer Garry Stewart, robotocist Philippe Demers, filmmaker Gina Czarnecki and the powerful ADT dancers create a frightening world in which humans and machines uneasily coexist. Interview with Garry Stewart: RT 71, p2; review: RT72, p32.

Lucy Guerin Inc, Structure and Sadness

Choreographer Lucy Guerin’s reverie on the 1970 collapse of the West Gate Bridge as felt in analogous tensions of the body. Review: p31; Interview: RT75, p4

Back to Back Theatre: Small Metal Objects

Outside Customs House Square by Circular Quay at peak hour, the audience watch a very real passing crowd amidst which a disturbing drama unfolds. A hit at last year’s Melbourne International Arts Festival. Review: RT70, p4; interview RT69, p6

Meryl Tankard and TaikOz: Kaidan, A Ghost Story

Choreographer Meryl Tankard in a collaboration with Sydney taiko drum ensemble TaikOz and visual artist Régis Lansac create their version of a classic Japanese ghost story.

Batsheva Dance Company

Three works: the intimate Mamootot with nine dancers and audience on four sides at the CarriageWorks; Kamuyot for groups of young people over 6 without experience of dance; and the epic Telophaza for over 40 performers and screens, choreography by Ohad Naharin, staged in the Capitol Theatre.

The Holy Body Tattoo: Our Brief Eternity

The Holy Body Tattoo “explores the nature of human endurance through ideas of surrender, fragility and broken elegance” From Canada, three dancers, an electro-industrial score, images by William Morrison and texts by William Gibson and Chris Halcrow tackle the forces of progress. www.holybodytattoo.org

Gate Theatre: Beckett Season

Michael Gambon in Eh Joe, directed by Atom Egoyan, is a staged version of the TV original; Barry McGovern in I’ll Go On, a dramatised selection from the Beckett novels; and Ralph Fiennes in First Love, from the novella.

CIRCA: The Space Between

A rare Sydney outing for Brisbane’s globe-trotting physical theatre, CIRCA, with a work about the desperate need for togetherness and its attendant tensions.

Company B: The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and Little Ragged Blossom

With John Clarke at the writing helm expect both a faithful realisation but also a satirical re-write of a white Australian children’s classic.

MCA: Centre Pompidou: Video art 1965-2005

Curated by the Pompidou’s curator of New Media, Christine Van Assche, this large scale exhibition includes over 25 renowned video artists from across the globe including Isaac Julien, Nam June Paik, Garry Hill, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Beckett, Bill Viola, Valie Export, Pierre Huyghe and Tony Oursler.

Lou Reed’s Berlin

A grim paean to life on the edge, the cult 1973 LP Berlin is now performed live for the first time, featuring Reed himself, a fine band and Antony of Antony and The Johnsons, with musical direction by Bob Ezrin, who produced the original album and Hal Willner, creator of the 2005 Sydney Festival Leonard Cohen tribute, Came So Far for Beauty. The concert will be directed and designed by New York painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls).

The Famous Spiegeltent

The ubiquitous tent features an unusually adventurous musical program with Australia’s The Necks, Clogs (a classy electro-acoustic US-Australian combo), New York virtuoso guitarist Kaki King (echoes of the late great John Fahey), another fine guitarist and singer-songwriter M Ward (US), eclectic harpist-singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom (US) of the weird child voice, and Brazil’s Bossa Nova Hot Club.

Roseanne Cash: Black Cadillac

US progressive country great Cash sings from her latest CD, Black Cadillac, about parents Johnny Cash and June Carter, in a concert with song, spoken word and film.

The World Famous: Crackers?

Audiences over the age of 12 stand for an hour surrounded and awed by the fireworks of pyrotechnicians The World Famous at Sydney’s Olympic Park. Also features The Human Sparkler.

Sky Orchestra

In a work about listening while asleep, at sunrise hot air balloons will fly over western Sydney broadcasting the creations of sound artists Luke Jerram and composer Dan Jones.

Have a go…

Arts festivals always involve risk-taking and some of the following look intriguing: Akhe Russian Engineering Theatre’s multimedia performance, White Cabin; the hip hop theatre of Will Power’s Flow (US); Compagnie Au Cul Du Loup (France) at play with found sounds in a show titled Mousson; and even the Domain series. Jazz in the Domain’s Noite Brasil is the two and a half hour creation of composer-guitarist and bossa nova boss Oscar Castro-Neves with a percussion section led by no less than Airto Moreira; and Symphony in the Domain features not only Barber, Bernstein and Copland but also works by Frank Zappa and John Zorn. KG

IF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD, THE HOTTEST ACCESSORY FOR THE YOUNG AND EMERGING ARTS EVENT IN 2006 IS SPAT+LOOGIE’S NEW!SHOP.

After an initial Performance Space residency in 2005, new!shop premiered at Next Wave (RT73, p2), toured to Canberra Contemporary Art Space (RT73, p48) and inevitably landed in Newcastle for Electrofringe.

new!shop, we are told, is our retail future. Installed in an actual shopfront, the spat+loogie team stock shelves with bemusing objects marked only with barcodes, which when scanned reveal their life affirming purpose (eg Bright Future Sun Glasses, Fear Mask, DIY Botox Kit) through stills, text and video snippets. The shop has efficient, friendly staff who offer you samples, direct you to specials and occasionally lock all the doors and undertake security checks of the not-so innocent looking shoppers. Although no money is exchanged and no items actually acquired (some lucky shoppers in Newcastle did get badges), new!shop is a satisfying experience for the art shopper with its no-fuss integration of performance, installation, technology and social commentary.

I caught up with the new!shop creators spat+loogie (Kat Barron and Lara Thoms) as they ran between rehearsals for the three projects they are currently working on. They only had time for one beer.

Kat: I think what stopped me was that on the night I finished the HSC I went to have dinner with Lara’s family and her grandmother got out a future predicting pendulum and told me that I needed to be an artist.

Lara: That’s true! I tossed and turned and never really knew…In high school I was really pissed off a lot of the time and a bit of a socialist and never wanted to work for the system. My dad is a filmmaker so I got quite interested in image making and artmaking. I think at some point I thought I wanted to do acting, but didn’t really have any dreams of a particular career.

Lara: Yeah but we weren’t really friends at high school (laughs)…We went away after school and became really close friends. We moved in together and started making art in a little studio in a tiny terrace in Surry Hills.

Lara: We’ve both got Media Arts Production Degrees in Communications from the University of Technology (UTS). Aside from that I’ve done imPACT ensemble (PACT Youth Theatre’s training workshop) and lots of little bits and pieces. We did a little short course at VCA a couple of years ago.

Kat: We used to just make a lot of little collages and paintings together…passed things between each other.

Lara: We also travelled together and did a travel zine. We’ve got this pretty amazing trust in each other. We can leave something half finished and be happy for the other to finish it without even checking up on it…We do have slightly different skills but we have the exact same aesthetic, so we never really have problems with bickering.

Kat: Lara is more interested in performance…I guess I do more new media stuff. But we do both as well.

Lara: It’s quite equal but Kat is actually a lot better at getting things done and I’m a lot better at talking about things. So I can sit down with performers or anyone and go on for a while, while Kat’s behind the computer. She’s a can do-er. She’s more technically proficient than I am…

Lara: I think the past 12-15 months have been such a steep learning curve—trying to work out the art world and festival lands. So many people have put work into new!shop that it’s been really worthwhile being able to give it a bit of a life.

Lara: We were really inspired from seeing the previous Next Wave festival. There were so many multiform works and things in non-traditional spaces, young people doing really experimental stuff. After the festival we sat in a café and said we have to do something like that right now!

Kat: Gathering Ground [a large scale site-specific project by PACT Youth Theatre and Redfern Community Centre taking audiences on a performance tour of the Block in Redfern, for which spat+loogie are the designers. Ed.]; The Whistling Man [PACT Youth Theatre’s imPACT ensemble performance for which they are creating media design and video]…

Lara: And then we’re going to MAAP [Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific Festival] to do a karaoke installation for Karaoke Bedlam [RT75, p32]. Then next year we’re doing a site-specific vending machine in Bankstown through Terminus Projects and the Western Front. [We will] create objects that represent the Bankstown community that they can take home, after visiting a website and receiving a token through the mail. That’s accompanied by a very slow process of stocking the machine in the beginning. So it’s called Unstance—it’s not an instant vending machine, it’s about process.

Kat: We’re both careworkers at The House With No Steps for adults with mental illness. And we also do graphic design work… I think next year I’m going to get a job working at the AV department at UTS!

Lara: I guess the fact that we don’t spend a lot of money on anything is a bonus. I mean I live in a squat; we avoid consuming heaps of new things all the time.

Gail: Thus the impetus for new!shop. Do you have any grand plans for the future?

Lara: I guess in the short term, we feel that new!shop’s been really successful and we believe in it because it attracts unexpected audiences. We really like the idea of non-art crowds interacting with the work and it would be nice if that could have more of a life and go overseas. That is something that we’ll try to do in the near future…and in the long term… I can’t even think about it!

Lara: It would be great to have a practice that’s really sustainable… a few days a week, paid [to work] on your own projects but I don’t think the world works like that at the moment. I think even if there was some really great job that secured us in one place for a long amount of time we’d get really fidgety and want to put our feelers out and do lots of different things.

IT’S MID-MORNING AND THE NEWLY IF NOT QUITE COMPLETELY RE-FURBISHED BELVOIR STREET THEATRE IS BUZZING WITH WORKMEN AND THEIR DRILLS, THE FLOOR IS GRITTY, THERE’S LOTS OF COMING AND GOING. AND THERE’S A SIGNIFICANT IMMINENT DEPARTURE.

After more than a decade, General Manager Rachel Healey is leaving Belvoir St Theatre and Company B for the Sydney Opera House where she’ll take up the position of Director, Performing Arts vacated by Sue Hunt, now CEO of the CarriageWorks.

Healey describes her time at Belvoir St as “a fantastic partnership for over a decade”, one of “great intimacy and personal commitment.” Above all she is describing her working relationship with artistic director Neil Armfield. She anticipates that her new job will be of a very different kind: even though, when we meet, she’s moving to the Opera House the following week. She quips, “It’s not like I’m getting divorced and then getting married the next day!”

As in any good relationship, Healey says, she and Armfield developed shorthand communication, shared a similar intuitiveness and were in constant exchange: “You have to have this and you have to believe in it.” Healey was on the Company B artistic sub-committee and was involved in casting, commissioning and the operations of the B-Sharp program in the downstairs theatre. Despite the scale of her involvement in the life of the company, Healey says “I had no desire to be called executive producer. I was the general manager and I was responsible for keeping the company in the black, building reserves, not letting the company collapse.” Her aim always was to firm up the foundations of a “left of centre and challenging” company and make it flexible—not least if its artistic director ever chose to move on.

When Healey arrived at Belvoir St, the company’s reserves were a mere $100,000, now they’re around $1.4m (although, she remarks, a sizeable chunk has had to go on Seymour Centre theatre rental during the rebuilding). The reserves not only offer security, says Healey, they also “look after the artists of the future.” When Colombia’s renowned Bogota Festival wanted Benedict Andrews’ 2003 production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, Healey knew the company had the reserves to help the trip happen. Other tours included taking The Small Poppies to Dublin and Cloudstreet to New York and beyond.

Healey says her departure from Belvoir St feels sudden: there’s still work to be done on the $11.5m building. As we talk, I’m conscious of her eagle eye on the foyer activity around us. She describes her former office as an incredibly crowded and uncomfortable “cocoon” behind the box office and with a view of the customers coming into the foyer—“perfect for keeping touch with everything that was going on—I heard some fantastic things!” Management, she feels, has to be integral to the life of the company. She was adamant that the new offices be kept in the theatre building, but when the company was refused the right to add two storeys to the building, an alternative site had to be found for offices and rehearsal space. Luckily a warehouse building almost immediately across the street from the theatre became available, “one floor for offices, and another, an ex-judo studio with a lovely old pressed metal ceiling, for a brilliant rehearsal space.”

Sudden or not, Healey feels that her departure comes after reaching “major milestones”: radically improving conditions for performers and patrons in the rebuilding of the theatre, developing international touring and building financial reserves.

Given the key roles played by Healey until now and Armfield (with three shows to direct in 2007) it’s promising to see that with the support of Arts NSW Wesley Enoch will be the company’s inaugural Associate Director for the next three years. Enoch will direct Alana Valentine’s Paramatta Girls and Howard Brenton’s Paul. Healey says that Enoch, who directed his own Black Medea for Company B, will “develop a relationship with the company that goes beyond show-to-show.” As well as being on the artistic sub-committee, he will be involved with the education program, with B-Sharp and work with the literary manager, all of which Healey sums up as “a dialogue with the company.”

company b 2007

Neil Armfield sums up the 2007 Company B program in his introduction to the subscription brochure as looking “at faith and obsession and religion, childhood and fantasy, theatrical song and dance, [and] a couple of the most extraordinary classics of 20th century theatre…” And he proposes these as necessary antidotes to Australian money culture, reduced civil freedoms, anti-sedition legislation, the engineered weakening of public education and the new government-given power of media monopolies. In a co-production with Adelaide-based Windmill Performing Arts of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and Little Ragged Blossom, writer John Clarke and director Armfield will doubtless meld homage to the May Gibb’s children’s classic with satirical infidelity: “The stinky old Banksia Men want the bush for themselves, gumnuts are being thrown overboard”, says the subscription blurb, and cheekily suggests, “Adults, why not see it twice? Once with the kids, once with your local MP.” Music is by Alan John and design by Stephen Curtis. Elsewhere in the program the life-art nexus undergoes even more scrutiny, whether in Ionseco’s Exit the King (in partnership with Melbourne’s Malthouse) with Geoffrey Rush as king of the clowns (a stellar lineup of Bille Brown, Julie Forsyth, Gillian Jones), or in Michael Gow’s Toy Symphony where writer’s block (Richard Roxbrough as the writer) unleashes reflections on the origins of creativity. All three plays are to be directed by Armfield.

Belief is most directly explored in Howard Brenton’s Paul, directed by Wesley Enoch with Ewen Leslie in the title role. It’s a provocative account of the life of a saint that drew street protests from Christian fundamentalists in London. Brenton’s work is rarely seen here, but in the company of David Hare, David Edgar and Howard Barker, he has been one of the great forces in British theatre since the 1970s. Stephen Sewell, in many ways a kindred spirit of these writers, tests the beliefs of a middle-aged woman (Lynette Curran) who ventures into the Middle-East, against the wishes of her family, in The Gates of Egypt, to be directed by Kate Gaul.
Mike McLeish, Terry Serio, Keating!

Sydney past and present provides material for the 2007 season. Wesley Enoch directs Alana Valentine’s Paramatta Girls with a cast that includes Leah Purcell and newcomer Roxanne MacDonald, from Queensland, who Rachel Healey tells me is an impressive performer. Valentine’s cultural archaeology of recent but forgotten history focuses on eight inmates of the Girls Training School (1908-80) using documented recollections in a reunion setting. The success of Casey Bennetto’s Keating! has landed him another Company B opportunity, Real Estate. Keating! is reviewed on page 47 and is touring Canberra, Wollongong and WA for the Perth International Arts Festival.

Last but not least, theres’ a fascinating choice in Benedict Andrews as director for Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Catherine McClements as Martha. As always with Andrews we can expect a distinctive and revealing approach to the play. (There’s no mention who is to play George. The most recent George of Broadway and the West End has been the wonderful American clown Bill Irwin, working with Kathleen Turner.) Albee’s acerbic account of a ruthless playing with truth is domestically self-contained but resonates nonetheless with the wider world of political spin and historical distortion, of secrets true and false. In an age hostile to nuance and the demands of compassion the play delivers, above all, painful complexities.

Company B’s 2007 program admirably sets out to dissolve distances—between us and our local history, the Middle East, the political and religious roots of our culture, and our creativity and capacity for compassion.
Company B, Belvoir St Theatre, <a

EACH YEAR THE PUSAN AND TOKYO FILM FESTIVALS PRESENT THE OPPORTUNITY TO SIZE UP NEW DIRECTIONS IN ASIAN CINEMA. IT WAS SIGNIFICANT THIS YEAR THAT BOTH FESTIVALS DEVOTED SO MUCH SCREEN TIME TO MALAYSIA WHICH IS STARTING TO LOOK LIKE THE NEW REGIONAL CINEMA OF NOTE—FOR LOCAL FILMMAKERS AND AS LOCATION OF CHOICE FOR CHINESE FILMMAKERS.

Malaysia had a studio-based entertainment cinema in the 1950s and 60s which withered as Hong Kong, Bollywood and Hollywood took its place. Its problem—and perhaps now its opportunity—came from the way that Malaysia comprises a range of races and ethnicities: Malay, Chinese, Indian and the lingering influence of colonialist Britain. With the reduction in costs associated with digital technologies, the ability to work around the government’s Malay-based ‘bumiputera’ (sons of the soil) policy, and the decline in Hong Kong production, Malaysia is starting to look like a good bet as a cheaper centre for films which can appeal to a mix of people across Asia.

Local Malaysian filmmaking over the past few years has been deeply collaborative with James Lee (My Beautiful Washing Machine) and Amir Muhammad (The Big Durian) heading a group who work in different roles on each other’s films in order to maximise the amount of material they can get made cheaply. This approach is now starting to bear fruit. Not only did Lee and Muhammad have new films this year, but there was a range of work by their collaborators.

Tan Chui-mui’s Love Conquers All, which was produced by Muhammad and shot by Lee, came away from Pusan as the major prizewinner. A young woman moves to Kuala Lumpur and falls in love with a man who pursues her relentlessly. He warns of the exploitation and degradation that lies down this path, but to no avail. The title is both ambiguous and ironic in the sense of a Fassbinder melodrama. Love conquers not adversity, but those who love.

The stylistic influence of filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke (see p22) and Hou Hsiao-hsien is central, as it is to so much Asian cinema at the moment. Tan works hard against melodrama in setting forth the harshness of her observations. Moments of stillness are more telling than actions. Silence is preferred over dialogue or the emotional manipulations of music. The cruelty of the world should first be faced in a clear-eyed way, and only then should emotional engagements come forward.
Rain Dogs

Another spare, de-dramatised film is Rain Dogs, directed by another Lee-Muhammad collaborator, Ho Yuhang. This is the story of a young man who doesn’t have the viciousness in him to make a success of the transition from the kampong to urban life. “Don’t think so much while you eat”, his mother tells him, and the line makes sense in the context of the film. Ho has worked out how to employ the minimalist style in a remarkably controlled fashion. There is some small element of camera movement in just about every shot. Often it is a slow track in or back, enough to suggest a contemplative storytelling presence without being ostentatious. Scenes are generally done in single takes, and crucially dramatic moments are either elided, played out in long shot or with characters turned away from the camera. In every way, this is a reversal of the Australian cinema’s prioritisation of dialogue-driven scenes which set the stage for actorly performance. The triumph of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life at Venice this year means that we can expect to see a big increase in this severely restrained and distanced form of storytelling.

If its rise as a production centre in the 1960s contributed to the decline of Malaysian production, Hong Kong’s cyclical decline has had a direct effect on the revival of Malaysian production. Rain Dogs is part of the First Cuts series of low budget digital films funded—and more significantly, distributed—by Hong Kong star Andy Lau’s company Focus Films.

Focus is also distributing the new film by Yasmin Ahmad, another of Lee-Muhammad’s collaborative group who acts in Rain Dogs. Her own films were the subject of a retrospective in Tokyo. Ahmad’s four features are all autobiographical, linked by the character Orkid. Her most recent film, Mukhsin deals with the tomboy, Orkid and the boy who develops a crush on her during school vacation. Ahmad (who works in advertising) is a little more mainstream than many of her colleagues and she prominently rejects the art cinema convention of silent, interiorised characters. She sees families bound together by playfulness. Her parents’ love is measured by their ability to joke, sing and play with each other as they age. Seriousness of demeanour is one of the unfortunate consequences of the fall into adulthood with its fraught sexual entanglements.

Ahmad also stresses that her characters are Muslims, and that this is in no way incompatible with a deep human warmth and cosmopolitan tolerance. In Mukhsin it is the family’s more strictly moralistic neighbour who has the tables turned on her when her husband decides to take a second wife. Ahmad sees no contradiction between her faith and the embrace of Western culture. Mozart accompanies kite-flying just as Nina Simone’s version of “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is used playfully on the soundtrack as Orkid races for a final glimpse of a first love that she never recognised as such.

The way that Hong Kong is becoming important less as a place than as a point of productive relationships is also brought out by Patrick Tam’s return to directing, After This Our Exile. Tam was one of the leading figures of the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s, and was the mentor of Wong Kar-wai, whose 2046 he edited. Tam has taught for years in Malaysia and hence shot his comeback film there. HK heartthrob Aaron Kwok stars as a violent loser who drives away his wife (Charlie Young from Seven Swords) and then leads his son into petty crime.

The English title (in Chinese, it is simply called Father and Son) encourages a more abstract reading, and while there are a few moments of stylistic flourish and the film is shot by Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinematographer Lee Ping-bin, there isn’t much to sustain this approach. Maybe the son is paradoxically the villain? In his childish innocence he refuses to countenance any kind of long-term solution to his dysfunctional family situation.

Perhaps the most important thing is that the use of stars such as Kwok and Young signifies an increasing willingness on the part of Chinese cinema to draw Malaysia more prominently into its range. Tam’s film, taken together with Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang’s decision to return to the country of his birth to shoot I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone in Kuala Lumpur indicates that something interesting is happening in another of our near-northern neighbours.

So finally, why Malaysia and what might we in Australia learn from this? Australian filmmakers have shown a desire to work cheaply on digital video over the past couple of years, but the key thing that is missing is the ability to tap into international styles that will generate interest in regional festivals and markets. Australia’s adherence to theatrical models of filmmaking looks increasingly conservative in the context of what is going on in Asia now. Not only does Australia need to absorb international styles, our filmmakers and institutions need to expend more energy on international marketing and co-production, finding ways into the distribution pipelines that are emerging within the region.

Pusan International Film Festival, Pusan, South Korea, Oct 12-20; Tokyo International Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan, October 21-29

I look at the creek. I’m right in it, eyes open, face down, staring at the moss on the bottom, dead.

WHEN CLAIRE, THE NARRATOR OF RAYMOND CARVER’S QUIETLY POWERFUL SHORT STORY, IMAGINES HERSELF TO BE THE DEAD WOMAN THAT HER HUSBAND HAS FOUND IN A RIVER, IT’S A MOMENT OF CONDEMNATION AND EMPATHY.

In Carver’s “So Much Water So Close To Home”, and in the recent film adaptation, Jindabyne (by Australian director Ray Lawrence) Claire’s husband chooses to continue fishing with his mates, despite having discovered the murdered woman floating downstream.

It’s this choice—to keep fishing—that provides the central ethical conundrum and terrific moral ambiguity in both story and film. But in Jindabyne the murdered girl is not just some young woman from out of town, she’s also Aboriginal. Lawrence, and screenwriter Beatrix Christian’s decision to include issues of race in this considerably extrapolated version of Carver’s story shifts the focus considerably. Several reviews have admired Jindabyne’s engagement with the theme of reconciliation, but few have examined precisely how this actually functions in the film.

Christian explores the fallout from the choice by the four men to “fish over a dead girl’s body” as the Jindabyne newspapers put it. For most of the film we closely follow the emotional and ethical struggles of our protagonists. Claire (Laura Linney) cannot come to terms with what her husband Stuart (Gabriel Byrne) has done. Much of this material—Claire’s secret, unwanted pregnancy; her past postnatal depression; Stuart’s midlife crisis (he dyes his greying hair, leers at young women, sympathises with some nearby blokes who call his wife “bitch”)—seems hackneyed (male sexual power and mateship versus female sensitivity). Yet, as many reviews have noted, Jindabyne skilfully avoids histrionics by sharply cauterising painful conversations at crucial points. But when the film broaches the huge and complicated matter of reconciliation, it falters, drawing a precarious bow from the collusion of the men (who lie to cover their negligence) to comment on Australia’s failure to confront and make amends for the suffering of its Indigenous people.

In Jindabyne we learn little about the murdered woman, Susan, or her family: the scenes dealing with their “sorry business” and their pain remain sketches. As the tensions build, the film seems at first to resist trite conclusions. Jude (Deborah Lee Furness) seethes with angry grief over her daughter’s death, withdrawing her love for the surviving grandchild (whose misbehaviour presumably stems from her own sorrow). Yet paradoxically, Jude is the least troubled by the fishing incident, despite (or because of) her husband’s involvement. “Move on”, she exhorts Claire; “let it heal over”, though her own brittle anger reveals she hasn’t managed this herself. This complexity is welcome, and true, for grief isn’t something we “get over.” Claire, the moral centre of this film, copes with her disquiet by frantically trying to make amends for her husband’s negligence. But the authenticity of her attempts at reparation are muddied by her own deception.

However this promise of complexity, confronting moral ambiguity and lack of closure is undermined by a hollow resolution. Once all the signposts about the conclusion begin to appear, the film loses its power. Having so far resisted neat homilies on personal conflict, the film invites the audience to contemplate the various human responses to an act that resists easy moral judgement. But this central conundrum is never fully realised, and when Claire and her friends gatecrash Susan’s memorial, all this good work goes to waste.

Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has contemplated the appropriate aesthetic response to events that overturn and tax our moral universe. She identifies, in some artistic responses to the Second World War and the Holocaust, “an aesthetics of awkwardness” and a “noncathartic representation” (Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia). Without comparing Aboriginal deaths and displacement with these events, it does seem that certain traumatic histories resist redemptive closure, and do not conform to Western (and Christian) notions of catharsis as resolution. Jindabyne suffers from trying to iron out all its awkwardness, from introducing a catharsis that doesn’t emerge organically from the central concerns of the film. What Jindabyne suggests in its penultimate scene—an Aboriginal funeral ritual—is that white people’s engagement with Indigenous culture might be a form of reconciliation. But let’s examine what really happens in this episode.

Undoubtedly, Aboriginal “sorry business”, like any community’s grieving, is an intensely private affair. But American Claire is undaunted, or ignorant of this. Impelled to make amends for her husband’s act, she arrives at the bushland memorial of the murdered girl and stands on its periphery. If Claire can just bear witness, it seems she might somehow right some of the wrong. The four men who went fishing have become town pariahs, accused of “white hate crimes”—graffiti that calls up a complex history of race relations barely touched on in the film. Three of these men have sudden, inexplicable changes of heart and also appear at the ceremony. (Given their previous reluctance to admit their wrongdoing we expect to be shown how they reached this decision, but we’re not.) Now all our central characters have invited themselves into what is presumably sacred space. Stuart is slapped and spat on by an insulted elder, but eventually stands by his wife and whispers, “I want you to come home Claire.” Her longing look suggests much is forgiven, but why? What has happened, apart from this Aboriginal ritual at which Claire and her friends are merely spectators? While the smoking ceremony proceeds, Jude arrives with her granddaughter. (Again we’re not shown why or how this came about.) They have their first moment of harmony, banishing their own “bad spirits”, saying, “be gone”.

There is something badly wrong with this scene: both as a resolution to Jindabyne’s many strands of considerable conflict and, as several reviewers see it, as a metaphor for reconciliation. As the white onlookers observe the ceremony, we sense their longing for a meaningful communal ritual of their own. Unable to gain solace from their previous attempts (a barbecue that descends into a fight, an Irish Catholic rite), these suffering characters hijack the Aboriginal ritual, which conveniently functions as the required ‘profound’ event to propel their catharses. At no point are we invited to understand the particular significance and meaning of this ritual for its black participants because we’re given little insight into the texture of their lives, or the particularity of their suffering. A syrupy English song, sung by the murdered girl’s relative is intentionally moving, but seems included for a (white) audience to better interpret the emotion of this scene. As viewers we are always positioned with the film’s central characters—as outsiders looking at a generalised scene of Aboriginality.

Because she was Aboriginal, Susan’s death has far greater symbolic meaning than the unknown victim does in Carver’s story. Her memorial offers us no genuine insight into how the film’s central characters have mysteriously resolved their considerable conflict. Consequently it seems a superficial display of Indigenous mysticism for the purpose of driving a formulaic white catharsis. If reconciliation is about adopting “colourful”, “mystical” or “deep” Aboriginal practices to provide meaning, profundity and healing for a spiritually bankrupt white culture then we have a long way to go. Unlike Carver’s narrator, who imagines herself in the murdered woman’s place, dead in the water, the characters in Jindabyne remain tourists on the edge of Aboriginal culture, too focused on their own concerns to get “right in it. Eyes open”, to wade in deep. In the most telling two lines, the film sums up its lost opportunities. Claire offers the grieving family money for the funeral, assuring them, “It’s not charity.” And they respond, “You buying something then?”

Jindabyne, director Ray Lawrence, screenplay Beatrix Christian, April Films; DVD launch date to be annnounced

APPROACHING ITS THIRD INSTALMENT IN FEBRUARY 2007, THE BIENNIAL ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL HAS ALREADY ESTABLISHED ITSELF AS A SIGNIFICANT SCREEN CULTURAL EVENT, BUT ALSO ONE THAT APPROACHES AN IMPORTANT PERIOD OF CONSOLIDATION.

Festival Director Katrina Sedgwick is tightening and refocusing her program: “We felt that we were too big [in the second festival], we perhaps grew too quickly.” The program has been trimmed from 13 days to 11 and will ultimately have about 90 titles to screen, the vast majority of them now to play twice to foster greater flexibility for cinema-goers’ schedules. While AFF will perform its core function of bringing art cinema to a quality starved audience, ultimately the distinguishing features of the festival remain its collaboration with its sister events and its slate of projects in which it is an equity investor. These, along with the summer setting, differentiate AFF on the national festival landscape.

Amongst the announced program highlights include the experimental silent feature Passio from Paolo Cherchi Usai (the Director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia), which combines a plethora of confronting imagery from the twentieth century with a live accompaniment from the internationally acclaimed vocal ensemble Paul Hiller and the Theatre of Voices. Also on the AFF agenda are all the commissioned films from Peter Sellars’ New Crowned Hope Festival (Vienna), which includes works from Bahman Ghobadi and Mahmet-Saleh Haroun, Garin Nugroho’s Opera Jawa and Tsai Ming Liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (p22). These works have been financed with the stipulation that they each use a theme from Mozart’s final operas as a springboard, and have already been attracting the attention of festivals such as Vancouver and Pusan. The AFF recognises that Sellars’ commissioning of films (starting in 2002 with his involvement with the Adelaide Festival of Arts contributing to, among others, Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker) has served as an inspiration for its own investment fund (Look Both Ways, Ten Canoes).

While the investment fund has been AFF’s most idiosyncratic attribute, a recent announcement of a similar equity pool at the Melbourne International Film Festival suggests that the fund is considered a success on a national level. AFF contributes to the budget of features and shorts, generally as a co-investor in a traditional Australian financing model. However, the 2007 program will premiere a feature with the festival as the sole investor: Kriv Stenders’ Boxing Day. A follow up to his film Blacktown (2005) with the same spartan production methodology, gritty social realism, and modest budget ($100,000), the film unfolds in real time over a single afternoon as a father battles to reunite his estranged family. Part of the project’s evolution occurred at the last AFF as Sedgwick revealed: “Kriv and I chatted after the screening of [Kriv’s] Illustrated Family Doctor in 2005. At that point I didn’t know about Blacktown, but was intrigued by his ideas. I asked him if he had anything else on his slate.” Stenders took the opportunity to pitch his collaboration with actor-writer Richard Green. Admitting that she is “particularly interested in the creative opportunities that digital technology provides”, Sedgwick was attracted to the idea of taking the risk on a low budget digital feature. After it picked up a South Australian producer in Kristian Moliere, the AFF board decided to back the project despite having no marketplace attachments in place and without a full script, the project being heavily improvised in rehearsals from an existing outline. For the Boxing Day team, the advantage of an investor with primarily culturally driven concerns and an interest in securing its own premieres shone through in a scenario when other funding avenues weighted towards commercial outcomes were closed. Hopefully Boxing Day’s festival exposure will lead to wider distribution.

The AFF is also a minority investor in Rolf de Heer’s latest venture, the silent, black and white slapstick socio-political satire Dr Plonk, and has not limited its slate to features, through including the short dramas Crocodile Dreaming (director Darlene Johnson), Spike Up (Anthony Maras), Swing (Chris Houghton) and the joint Australian-Chinese animation Sweet and Sour (Adelaide’s The People’s Republic of Animation and Shanghai Animation Film Studio).

The big news from the AFF is the announcement of a $25,000 prize funded by Natuzzi, the Italian furniture designer and manufacturer (also a Venice Film Festival sponsor) for best international feature. This jury-awarded prize will raise the profile of the festival considerably and doubtless increase the number of international filmmakers seeking to screen in future festivals.

AFF ties in neatly with several other screen cultural events. Commencing at the beginning of AFF and running for four days, the twentieth anniversary of the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) provides a forum for 600 delegates and guests to discuss factual film and television as well as participate in a busy dedicated marketplace. Also on the schedule is Crossover Australia, (co-presented by the AFF and the South Australian Film Corporation and kicking off before the festival and AIDC), a residential think tank for experienced content producers to brainstorm crossplatform and interactive projects under the guidance of mentors such as British TV producers Marc Goodchild and Robert Thirkell.

The AFF cleverly carved its own niche in its first two editions and now looks set to consolidate with idiosyncratic programming, creative investment, a substantial prize and its continued collaboration with other significant screen events.

AFTER A 20 YEAR BREAK FROM DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING, THE VISUAL ARTIST GEORGE GITTOES RETURNED TO THE FORM IN 2004 WHEN HE RELEASED THE SELF-FUNDED SOUNDTRACK TO WAR—A FILM IN WHICH WE ALL LEARNT THAT TANKS AREN’T JUST KILLING MACHINES, THEY’RE DEADLY STEREO SYSTEMS. NOW, IN RAMPAGE, HE’S VENTURED INTO A TOUGH MIAMI ‘HOOD IN A HIP HOP DOCUMENTARY WITH APPEARANCES BY SWIZZ BEATZ, FAT JOE AND DJ KALEB.

Gittoes returned to documentary because of the digital camera. The price of shooting dropped dramatically and the amount of equipment to be carried diminished. Gittoes says, “Now I can shoot a film and it can be in a cinema, but it is not unlike doing a painting or a drawing. I can do it pretty well by myself.” Gittoes is a real life example of the technological revolution many anticipated in the mid 90s. He’s also a fervent promoter of the notion of the ‘superdoc’—“a doc that has pushed up the values so it can work for people going out to the cinema—like a feature film does.” Gittoes described the job of a superdoc director as the same as the job of a feature film director: “you have to get the best performances out of people. You haven’t got actors so you’ve got to create situations where people transcend and actually lose their inhibitedness and they’re caught up in a moment. They are absolutely real, they’re not doing some pre-thought out speech.”

Gittoes gave an example of this from Rampage: “I went and interviewed Joe Byrne in his office. Most documentary filmmakers would be happy with that because he is an expert in terrorism as well as having been a cop in Brown Sub [a Miama ghetto, home of the film’s main subjects, Elliot and Marcus.] As someone making a superdoc I knew that that was boring. Basically you can’t be boring.

“So, Byrne had not been back to Brown Sub for years. I was aware that he wouldn’t know how dangerous it was. So I organised for him to meet me there, he had an inkling of it because he brought his gun. And Elliot didn’t want to go back there because his brother had been killed there. The gang was threatening to kill Elliot and me and all of us. So we get this very very tense dramatic scene where the people who killed Marcus are actually circling us. And in the back of my mind the clock’s ticking and I’m thinking how many more minutes have I got to shoot before we get shot. That is superdoc making.
Rampage

“Because of that tension, Elliot doesn’t talk to the camera as a talking head, he is angry with me and he talks right through the camera. He virtually abuses me, he says, ‘How would you feel coming back to the place where your brother was killed? What if someone close to you was killed?’ Joe Byrne, the tough old cop who has seen a lot of homicides, says, ‘Yeah we’d better get out of here.’

“That’s the difference between your ABC commissioning editor-type documentary, where the talking head expert does their boring thing across a desk, and a film that’s actually got the values of drama.”

Gittoes thinks that television commissioning has a detrimental effect on the art of documentary filmmaking: “I’m a ‘fine artist.’ Soundtrack to War [2004] is being shown in the Museum of Modern Art, in ACMI here in Melbourne as art. It is art. Documentary up until the superdoc was applied art and it will always remain applied art if insecure documentary makers have to go and get presales and work through the guardians of the gate, the, what’s his name, Stuart Menzies and Dasha Rosses and Jennifer Crones—these people who play Medici with public money, who want to take control. Documentary film is a collaborative thing but ultimately it has to be a single vision, like a work of art—like a Kubrick or Scorsese film. And yet it is being turned into an applied art.”

Gittoes had investment from the FFC for post production on Rampage and spoke about the effect that this had on him and the film: “One of the suggestions of the FFC was that we cut out South Beach, and lose the Australian section of the film. And I disagreed with that and I had sleepless nights over what they were going to do to me. Without [Australia’s] South Beach I don’t think that there is any comparison [with the poverty of Brown Sub]. Ultimately it’s all on the director and the buck stops with the director even though these bureaucrats want to control documentaries. They can just refuse to give us money next time if the film bombs at the box office.”

When Gittoes talked about other films he considered to be superdocs he mentioned Bowling for Columbine: “One of the big elements was the fact that Michael Moore acts as a bridge between being the viewer and the subject of the film. Now with Rampage, frankly, there might be politically correct people who would say that if it was a pure documentary that I should not be in it. I don’t know where they get that from. They’d be happy for Attenborough to be walking around with the elephants. Those people would probably find that there are dozens of rap films that they’d never watch, which I have watched, which are inaccessible because they don’t have a character like me. There’s a tremendous precedent for Rampage which is Nick Broomfield’s film Biggie and Tupac, where Nick’s getting around with his little bum bag and his microphone and he’s from another culture, like I am. Of all the films I’ve seen on Tupac, that’s the one that works the best.”

In the end though, Gittoes says, “Really, the only rule with a superdoc is that it has to work. And you only know if it works if some cinema chain is prepared to put it on against dramas. Rampage is getting more exposure in more cinemas than any drama recently made in Australia. It’s getting more cinemas than a film like Candy which has got all the big actors and producers.”

Rampage, director-producer George Gittoes; playing in Australian and London cinemas and in festivals in Copenhagen, Stockholm and New York. www.rampagethemovie.com. Distribution: Madman, www.madman.com.au

JOHN PILGER IS A PARTICULARLY DISSONANT FIGURE IN PRESENT DAY AUSTRALIA. THE DVD RELEASE OF HIS DOCUMENTARIES ABOUT THIS COUNTRY CREATES AN OPPORTUNITY TO LOOK AFRESH AT THIS CONTROVERSIAL EXPAT JOURNALIST AND FILMMAKER.

Based in London, though returning to Sydney regularly, Pilger provokes criticism not only from the right but also some on the liberal left for his work’s morally loaded political rhetoric and selective use of factual information. This has gradually resulted in his disappearance from the Australian media, a situation in stark contrast to the prominence of his work in the UK.

This discrepancy, Pilger argued in a 2004 lecture at the University of Western Australia, is revealing. “Of all the western democracies,” he argued, “Australia is the most derivative and the most silent. Those who hold up a mirror are not welcome in the media. My work is syndicated and read widely around the world, but not in Australia, where I come from.” When he is mentioned here, it is via conservative columnists’ attacks on his UK Guardian or New Statesman articles. It might, then, come as a surprise that this locally marginalised figure is probably our most internationally celebrated journalist, winning at least 20 major international awards including two BAFTAs, an Emmy and the UN Media Peace Price (twice). Yet here he is mainly treated as a dangerous extremist. (After a rare local interview on Lateline two years ago, Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald lambasted the ABC for even allowing Pilger a public hearing; the critique Pilger was making of the US presence in Iraq now seems rather less radical.)

The particularly effective conservative belittling of his work in Australia notwithstanding, philosophically at least Pilger is in fact a ‘conservative.’ He is the quintessential old-school crusading journalist, confidently claiming to report the ‘truth’ denied by the mainstream political discourse of the day—however, one committed to working within what is now perjoratively called the ‘tabloid’ press. This determination to work at the very heart of the accessible, non-elitist (and commercial) media is, I believe, a key reason for his being misunderstood by skeptical consumers of the ‘quality’ broadsheet press: “I believe in popular journalism”, he has said. Likewise, most of his films have emerged through involvement with ITV in the UK, a commercial broadcaster which has supported Pilger since his first film in 1970. Interestingly, he says the sustained attacks on his work really got going with the films, perhaps in response to their garnering consistently large TV audiences in Britain.

The 3-DVD selection of Pilger’s films about Australia is not without its problems: there is a lot of repeated material, phrases and footage throughout, and his delivery can sound pompous. Yet the films contain details, interviews, archival images and provocative analyses that make up a sustained critique of Australia’s historical and political heritage in a sometimes incendiary counter-narrative of nation. Made just prior to the Sydney Olympics, the film Welcome to Australia tells a very different tale from the nationalist PR blitz that happily co-opted Indigenous dance, art and Cathy Freeman while effectively hiding the real conditions of Aboriginal Australia.

Yet while decrying successive governments’ denial and recalcitrance in this area, Pilger also offers a hopeful note of progress when it comes to activism and community-generated moves towards change and reconciliation. However, like Michael Riley’s early photography (p20), this cautious hopefulness today comes across as elegiac indeed. Five years into the ‘War on Terror’, at no point in my 36-years have the issues relating to reconciliation and Aboriginal human rights been less substantively discussed. The Iraq War, asylum seekers, terrorism for conservatives and progressives alike, these are the zeitgeist issues of debate. Pilger ends by arguing that no genuine, meaningful Australian nationhood can be claimed until that of the ‘original Australians’ is fully recognised and accounted for.

One of the most powerful ideas argued in the films is that Australia has, with momentary exceptions (notably that of late 1940s and early 70s Labor Governments), never really been a sovereign nation. Other People’s Wars addresses the way in which we happily send our young off to fight for (British, then US) empire; and while the World Wars are recalled all over the country by ‘Lest We Forget’ plaques, we continue to deny the war at the dawn of our own history—let alone tending to reparations. (How many residents or tourists enjoying Sculpture by the Sea know Bondi Beach was used for Indigenous weapons manufacture for many years in the fight against the British invaders, as Pilger recounts?) He argues that the largely unknown Aboriginal battles for land (after the initial offer to share it with the whites was rejected) surely exemplifies qualities supposed to characterise Australian values—typically used to describe white ‘Diggers’—of the underdog, fighting against all odds, freedom from tyrannical rule and invasion. Yet, Pilger soberly points out, not one plaque is to be found heralding such bravery and heroism.

Of course his work isn’t beyond criticism. The tone of the films at times seems patronising; the apparently straight claims of offering the truth do sometimes rankle. And formally, his filmmaking—virtually unchanged throughout the years—is stilted and conservative. Yet too often engagement with Pilger’s work stops at these distracting elements. Filmmaking and methodological artistry aside, these films boldly articulate the shameful big picture elements of Australian nationhood, giving no quarter to the government line under cover of ambiguity or ‘balance.’ The cumulative impact is both rare and startling in its provocation.

Pilger’s work has always been controversial, perennially ‘untimely’ in a Nietzschean sense. Yet renewed global condemnation of US foreign policy in the wake of Bush’s adventurism, and the first-world’s historical and ongoing behaviour towards non-Western nations more generally, should make his analysis increasingly difficult to marginalise. Nevertheless, in present-day Australia the (new) political correctness seeping through our media institutions over ten years has meant Pilger’s work is commonly seen as morally repugnant. That his tone is sometimes sanctimonious in its own moral and historical surety (all the more startling today in being so at odds with the equal ‘certainty’ of right-wing polemicists) shouldn’t distract us from the real power of these films. They act as untimely meditations upon our problematic nation—the sting of which has never been more needed.

Documentaries That Changed The World: John Pilger's Australia, 3 DVDs, 240mins, distributed by DV1, www.dv1.com.au

IT’S DIFFICULT TO CONVEY THE EXPANSIVE FEELING WHEN CONFRONTED BY MICHAEL RILEY’S CLOUD (2000) SERIES. THERE’S A SENSE OF SUDDENLY BEING SHIFTED TO ANOTHER PLANE—A WORLD OF DELICATE, EPHEMERAL VISIONS AND STARTLING TAXIDERMIC ARREST.

The background of each image is the deep blue Australian sky, flecked with patches of white cloud. A different object or creature appears in every picture, suspended mid-air and sharply delineated from the soft blues and whites of the background. A locust is seen in extreme close-up, as if mounted in a scientific display case. A cow grazes in the sky. An open bible floats earthward, face down. Most iconic of all, a feather blown up to enormous size is captured with such fidelity that every strand appears rendered in loving detail. The Cloud series stands as Riley’s final photographic statement, created shortly before he passed away in 2004, claimed like so many Indigenous Australians by disease brought on by the effects of childhood poverty. But the National Gallery of Australia retrospective, Michael Riley: sights unseen (touring the eastern states into 2008), provides audiences with a chance to place Riley’s best-known work in the context of his broader photographic and filmic career.

In rough chronological order, the exhibition begins in Sydney in the early 1980s, not long after Riley moved to the city from Dubbo. Having revived his teenage interest in photography and studying under Bruce Hart at the Tin Sheds Gallery, Riley began photographing Indigenous rallies and events in Sydney and Melbourne. These first pictures are somewhat rudimentary, but provide a fascinating glimpse into the energy and anger fuelling Aboriginal activism at the time. As well as passion, there is a sense of optimism and empowerment, generated by the mobilisation of people and ideas. From a contemporary perspective Riley’s images speak of a history that has been systematically concealed by the whitewash of the Howard era.

The shift between the photojournalistic style of these early colour works and Riley’s studio-based portraits of the mid-1980s is startling. The marches and everyday activities are replaced by highly stylised fashion-influenced images of Koori women in luminous high-contrast black and white. These represent an obvious but important intervention in the politics of representation, reworking images of beauty and ‘cool’ in the mass media to celebrate the spirit, sassiness and diversity of Indigenous women.

It’s not just the Indigenous subjects—all members of Riley’s social circle—that mark these early portraits as a break with the conventions of fashion photography. Photographs like Kristina (no glasses) (1984) see Riley’s friends coolly returning the camera’s stare, meeting the eye of the viewer with a steadfastness that is the opposite of fashion photography’s objectifying gaze. Even when these women don’t look directly out from the image, as in Tracey (head down) (1986), there is a feeling of mutual complicity and trust, a strong impression that the subjects are participating in their own representation rather than being rendered as fetishised objects of display. It is perhaps indicative of how little has changed that these photographs still seem a radical intervention in the order of images today.

As Riley pursued his interest in portraiture throughout the 1990s, the high contrast black and white of the mid-1980s was replaced by more graduated tones and simple backdrops. His skill became more subtle and less stylised, but the shared exchange between camera and subject was only enhanced by the apparent simplicity and casual air of series such as A common place: Portraits of Moree Murries (1991) or Yarns from the Talbragar Reserve (1998). The Moree series depicts Indigenous people from Riley’s mother’s country, while Riley himself spent his early years at Talbragar Reserve outside Dubbo. Just as his first studio-based portraits evoke and rupture the objectifying gaze of fashion photography, these images of Indigenous people are an understated riposte to the tradition of Western ethnographic studies. Riley’s documentary films Quest for Country (1993), Blacktracker (1996) and Tent Boxers (1998) can be read as companion pieces to these series, giving voice to some of the tales etched into their subjects’ faces.

Riley’s 1990 series Portraits by a Window is for me the most moving of his work in this genre. Comprising friends and their families lit by diffuse light from windows in the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative building in Chippendale, Sydney, the series forms a fascinating record of prominent Sydney Indigenous figures of the time, including Tracey Moffatt, Djon Mundine, Brenda Croft and the Perkins family. A photograph of Charles Perkins, posing with his son Adam, is rendered poignant by his death a decade later from renal failure—the same disease that was to claim Riley. Perkins’ daughter Hetti is captured in one of Riley’s most tender frames, casting her eyes downward in an image of grace that feels both fleeting and timeless. My favourite is of the young dancers Tracey Gray and Alice Haines. All the elements of Riley’s portraiture seem to coalesce in this image: the steady gaze into the lens, the pose that is both casual and highly composed, and a beauty that emanates from the women rather than being constructed by the camera.

In the late 1990s, Riley’s colour photography took on a more abstract tone, as he began to photograph landscapes, skies and bodies of water. As in his portraits, these images of the physical world never present a distanced, objective view. Works like Spirit clouds (1997) picture Australia’s environment as a living, breathing space of constantly changing patterns, spirits and emotions—a natural world infused with an Indigenous Australian perspective. Djon Mundine writes in the Sights Unseen catalogue that Riley’s work “is not a surface recording but an allusion to the spiritual within the land and his attachment to it.” Again, there is a clear link here with Riley’s films, which in different ways explore the Indigenous histories and perspectives inscribed into the Australian landscape and its scarring by European presence.

The Flyblown series (1998) embodies Riley’s “spiritual vision of landscape from within” (to quote Mundine again) and illustrates several key motifs running throughout his later work. The painterly sky-scape Untitled [blue sky with cloud] continues Riley’s interest in the ephemeral formations of the Australian environment. The grim still life Untitled (galah) depicts a bird’s corpse spreadeagled on a patch of baked mud, testament to a harsh environment made harsher by mismanagement and abuse. And Untitled (bible) shows a crucifix-embossed book lying face down in water, part of Riley’s ongoing reflection on the ambivalent relationship between Indigenous Australians and the Christian church. Especially when viewed alongside Riley’s film Empire (which was shot at the same time and shares several common images), Flyblown constitutes a sensitive but unsettling portrait of the Australian environment and the alien presence of Europeans within it.

Riley’s final series, Cloud, combines his exploration of transient cloud formations with the astonishing presence of decontextualised objects rendered with such exactitude they seem totally unreal. There’s a sense of hope and liberated possibility in this series, and its placement at the end of the retrospective marks it as the culmination of Riley’s achievements. But there’s also an air of sadness around these images, borne of the knowledge that Riley himself is no longer here to explore the imaginative vistas opened by his final work. Riley was only 44 when he died—instead of an ending, Cloud should have marked the beginning of a mature vision.

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