Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

Author archive

Chico MacMurtrie, Inflatable Bodie

photo Duke Albada

Chico MacMurtrie, Inflatable Bodie

Chico MacMurtrie’s Inflatable Bodies is the latest in a series of works that explore the possibilities of robotics in art. For the Experiemental Art Foundation’s Adelaide Festival of Arts exhibition, MacMurtrie constructed a series of forms resembling birds in flight. Each ‘bird’ comprises 2 thin cones, symbolising wings, with a total span of about 4 metres, suspended near shoulder height from the gallery ceiling. The birds ‘flap’ slowly, suggesting a flock of pelicans moving in single file following a curving line that is intended, MacMurtie says, to evoke the meandering Murray River. The cones are made of heavy fabric, like sail cloth, joined in pairs at a central pivot. A system of air-pressurised bladders inside the cones actuates the pivoting to induce flapping motions, the inflation and deflation of the bladders mimicking the contraction and relaxation of muscles.

The cones are also mechanically inflated, but at periodic intervals the air supply is reduced so that they slowly collapse and droop towards the floor, whereupon the stationary flock comes to resemble a gigantic, disjointed centipede. A computer program controls the flapping and the 20 minute cycle of collapse and regeneration. The movements of each ‘bird’ are slightly asynchronous, imparting a degree of individuality to each specimen. The gallery lights are dimmed so that the birds are illuminated by 14 small spotlights on the floor beneath them, their shadows cast on the ceiling rather than the ground. I sat on the floor of the otherwise empty gallery watching the slow flapping and the gradual collapse and reinflation of the white forms, accompanied by the susurrations of the air pumps, meditating on the vulnerability of wildlife and on how art might imitate nature given the complexity and genius of biological design.

In the days preceding the exhibition, MacMurtrie held a workshop at the EAF. The participants assisted in the realisation of Inflatable Bodies and also conducted their own experiments with robotic technologies. MacMurtrie is the founder and Artistic Director of Amorphic Robot Works (ARW), a New York-based collective of artists and engineers established in 1992. ARW’s central idea is to develop robotic forms that mimic or reflect human, animal or plant forms and movement. For example, an earlier ARW work, Growing Rain Tree (installed at the Contemporary Arts Center UnMuseum, Cincinnati, 2003) is a robotic tree that moves its limbs and rains water that is drawn up from the pool in which it sits. Like many ARW works, it is interactive in that the approach of viewers triggers action. MacMurtrie has also made robots that not only respond to the viewer presence but also mimic their movement, creating a metaphor for human interaction (www.amorphicrobotworks.org).

But why is this an exhibition of art more than of engineering? MacMurtrie notes that robotics is more commonly associated with high-tech industrial development where the emphasis is on the refinement and control of manufacturing processes. Here, the robotic forms are instead intended for contemplation—he describes them as analogues of observed behaviour, emphasising the desire to understand the movement of the body and the significance of that movement rather than the use of technology for technology’s sake. The work’s engineering and computer programming are not immediately noticeable, perhaps prompting the viewer to think as much about what it symbolises as how it functions.

Inflatable Bodies thus recalls Da Vinci’s drawings of human and avian anatomy and his flying machine designs, Renaissance ideas that preceded a period of intense scientific development in the West. MacMurtrie’s work contrasts with the nightmare of Frankenstein’s monster and the inhuman creations of the 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Terminator and Blade Runner movies. In the Adelaide Festival MacMurtrie’s peaceful work also contrasted with the dramatic use of robotic prostheses in Australian Dance Theatre’s apocalyptic Devolution (see p 32 and RT 71, p 2). We recall Isaac Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics—especially that robots must do what they’re told but never harm a human. Robots can mimic physical action and basic deductive and computational processes, but we may not be far from the mimicry of emotional states and the integration of these with decision-making and action at large. Art’s crucial role in examining the forms and implications of technological change has been central to recent EAF programming. Robotic art has the potential to examine human behaviours, attitudes and desires from an advanced technological perspective.

The cyclic movements and the expanding and collapsing forms in Inflatable Bodies induce a degree of melancholia if viewed for an extended period. I almost wanted to stand and flap my arms in sympathy.

Chico MacMurtie, Robotic Arts, Inflatable Aestheticism; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide Festival, Feb 24-April 8

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006 pg. 27

Super Vision

Experiencing the retrograde nature of human-to-technology interfaces is perhaps the condition of our time. That’s right; forget ‘the postmodern condition’ (so 70s!). We have now arrived at ‘the condition of interface anxiety.’ Hands up those few who can’t relate to this new condition. The frustration that your pronunciation is rejected by the voice recognition software when you ring ‘information’ for a telephone number; the sudden self-doubt when you’re picked at the airport for one of those ‘random explosives trace scans’ (as if suddenly you can’t be sure that you weren’t handling guns/bombs just this morning); the uncertainty when verisign.com fails to process your payment for that journal subscription. Often we never actually find out ‘what was wrong’ but are left to wonder indefinitely: was it my cookie settings, my web browser, my accent, my account balance, or did I just look suspicious? Certainly the time is ripe for creative works which can make these invisible experiences dance before our eyes. This is what Super Vision attempts to do.

Super Vision is the 9th and latest production of The Builders Association, an 11 year old performance and new media production company based in New York. The company integrates stage performances with video, sound and architectural elements. Here a desktop fills the width of the stage with computer screens and chairs spaced along it. About a metre above, another performance level is housed within a rectangular, round-edged frame. Behind is a projection surface with smaller mobile screens around the frame.

The performers sometimes appear as just another layer of the surface, at other times they are revealed to the audience against the background projections. These conjure loungeroom settings, landscapes, moving text and graphic images, depending on the needs of the narrative. At times the audience simultaneously sees a performer interacting with a computer screen on stage and a large-scale projection of the performer’s face captured web-cam style. The stage becomes a space where human presence, data and representation merge. This encapsulates something of my daily reality where those binaries of real/virtual and original/reproduction don’t behave anymore. It seems that the intent of the production shares that age-old artists’ maxim, ‘to make the invisible visible.’

To accommodate 3 narrative threads about identities challenged by computerised data collection the set changes often. The video projections, moving screens and occasional props merge effortlessnessly. Despite occasional problems with the microphones worn by the performers, the technology and performers work well together, creating a pleasing aesthetic: part CNN, part Pixel Chick and part video art shown black-box style.

Prior to the introduction of any new media components into the production, a speech is delivered by a character listed in the program as The Voice of Claritas™ performed superbly by Tanya Selvaratnam. She feeds the audience data gleaned from sales of theatre tickets for the production, outlining the audience demographic. We are told that we have “above average levels of education” and are “knowledge workers”, “professionals” and have “chic connections.” This is then contrasted with the “shall we say, eye-for-a-bargain” demographic of an outer suburbs postcode not represented in the ticket sales at all.

I scan the audience as The Voice of Claritas™ speaks. Rather than feeling constrained by their ‘data selves’, they seem to sense an image that they like and, consequently, are happy to have the data speak for them. Intended to serve as an introduction to and proof of the impact data surveillance has on our daily lives, the spiel has the converse effect. The audience is rendered immune to the full potential of the production. Perhaps the true technology of performance is that which captures an audience’s vulnerability, for it is this that provides us the opportunity to question our ideas and assumptions rather than making us comfortable with the status quo. Super Vision encompasses the paradox of the 21st century Western experience: that incurable mix of privilege and constraint that brings about the condition of interface anxiety.

Super Vision, The Builders Association and dbox; His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, 14-19 Feb 14-19

See also Jonathan Marshall’s response to Super Vision on pag 36

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006 pg. 27

Involving direct participation, community arts and television, Digital Storytelling (DS) is also known as witness-contribution, personal storytelling, user-generated content (UGC), participatory TV, scrapbook TV, viewer TV, citizen TV and so on. DS uses digital equipment for personal storytelling or, as ACMI, hosting the Australian conference, puts it, “auto-biographical mini-movies.” DS does not usually involve sophisticated interactive systems nor does it push digital poetics. However, it is influencing mainstream entertainment more than its complex cousins.

Although events such as the National Storytelling Festival (USA; www.storytellingcenter.com/festival/festival.htm) have been promoting personal storytelling since 1973, there is only the one Digital Storytelling Festival, running since 1995 in San Francisco (www.dstory.com). The first DS conference was hosted by BBC Wales, in association with the Welsh Development Agency, in 2003 (see www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales which features “RealMedia movies made and edited by people at digital storytelling workshops around Wales”).

Such is the interest, the conference at ACMI sold out before it began. According to registration data, the attendees were from a variety of sectors, mostly from schools, community organisations and academia and others: digital storytelling practitioners, new media artists, filmmakers and government personnel. The speakers were similarly representative and addressed broadcast convergence, new forms of storytelling, storytelling and the digital generation, and democratization and documentation of “voice.”

Not surprisingly some of the presentations were styled to combine fact and fiction. Nor was it a surprise, given the liberating nature of storytelling, that the keynote speaker for the conference was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In 1962, John O’Neal thought he’d have Civil Rights sorted out in about 5 years and then he could move onto his other passion, playwriting. Needless to say, he has continued to combine writing, performing and directing with his activism. O’Neal also participated in the first ACMI Youth Summit held parallel to the conference. He took the students and teachers through the renowned “story circle” technique before they set off to create their own digital stories. Guided by the themes of quality, diversity and respect, the students traversed the Melbourne CBD with cameras, enacting what Jean Burgess, a PhD candidate at QUT describes as “vernacular creativity.”

Like all art forms, digital works include a continuum of styles and approaches that is often subsumed in one overarching term. Ana Serrano, Director of Habitat, the new media lab at the Canadian Film Centre, outlined 6 ways audiences participate: they can “build” content, for example on Zed TV (www.zed.cbc.ca); “retell”, as with the highly praised locative arts project [murmur], (http://murmurtoronto.ca); “interpret”, as in educational simulation games such as Pax Warrior where you might find yourself in the position of a UN Commander in Rwanda (www.paxwarrior.com); “confess”, as in Things Left Unsaid (www.thingsleftunsaid.com) where you contribute your ‘secrets’ to a scenario; and “effect change” using eco-art at Seed Collective via your mobile phone (www.seedcollective.ca). The projects at Serrano’s laboratory bypass broadcasting and take to the streets, literally, utilising locative technologies.

Most of the practitioners present at the conference seemed, however, oddly unaware of new media arts. Chris Crawford, a first-breed game designer but now an ardent developer of “interactive storytelling”, patiently tried to explain to the participants that what they were doing was not interactivity. Their confused and sometimes offended reactions were understandable, considering the type of interactive storytelling Crawford is aiming at requires an approach and software that is still embryonic. Beyond the ability to change the interface or contribute content, Crawford’s newly launched software, Storytron (www.storytron.com), permits authors to create a storyworld in which the user then initiates events. Crawford’s system is unlike normal storytelling in that the author does not create a plot but rather a world and relationships between characters, ready for reaction when the user interacts with them as a protagonist.

There were many discussions about the effect of DS on the younger generation. Phillip Crawford, producer of knot at home, an interactive digital storytelling site to be launched in April and coming out of the BIG hART community projects (www.knotathome.com), shared his extensive experience of working with young people. It is not enough, he said, for them to tell their story once. They need to rewrite over time, only then can the “dominant story” be changed. Barbara Ganley from Middlebury College (US), asked what happens after a digital story is done? Interested in the “continuing, evolving, non-ending conversation”, Ganley championed the use of blogs. Discussing pedagogical benefits, she highlighted the need for students to form their own voice and feel “connected to self, peers and outside world.” Adrian Miles, active blog and vlog (video blog) practitioner and researcher at RMIT, described blogs as “the revenge of the word upon a twitch generation.” The critical difference, Miles observed, between DS and blogs is time-based: blogs are present stories and DS past ones. Miles also highlighted the shared paradigms of podcasts and vlogs and public access TV. What Miles didn’t mention, but which is relevant here, is Akimbo, a device that allows viewers to subscribe to vlogs and watch them on TV—anyone’s content, broadcast, indeed “pulled” by you to your TV.

Professor John Hartley, of QUT, reflected on the changes to television over the last 50 years. TV has moved from industrial production—a closed, expert system where ideas are protected, standardised, codified and delivered to passive audiences—to being a part of the “experience economy.” Consumers, indeed “prod-users” or “pro-sumers”, are (à la Charles Leadbeater’s “knowledge economy”) an economic force. Announcing a new UGC site, Freeload (www20.sbs.com.au/freeload), SBS’ Paul Vincent spoke about the potential (if changes to multi-channeling laws are in SBS’ favour) for digital storytelling to move off the gallery wall and onto digital TV. Broadcasting UGC through TV channels is a cost-effective way of producing content (if you mix user-vetted and gatekeeper moderation) and an efficient way of gathering viewers. David Vadiveloo, creator and director of the highly successful TV and web work Us Mob( www.usmob.com.au; see RT66, p20) warned that the move to broadcast UGC is potentially unjust if the storytellers are not remunerated.

As a balance to the technology-oriented approaches, Darren Tofts, media arts academic at Swinburne University of Technology and author of Interzone (RT 71, p22-23), warned against an “over identification with the singular notion of the digital.” Beyond a production and publication device, Tofts mused on symbiotic partnerships with technology and cited the machine-human relationships explored in Zoe Beloff’s interactive work, The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A (2001). In a wonderfully sensible observation, Tofts reassured his audience “you will get over the medium.” In other words, you will see beyond one manner of expression and what you can do with it. Indeed, despite the digital storytelling title, there is an increasing range of media, broadcast channels and art forms available to match the many voices heard throughout the conference.

First Person: International Digital Storytelling Conference, producer Helen Simondson in collaboration with Joe Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA); Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Feb 3-5. Transcripts of the conference will be available online.

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006 pg. 28

Robin Minard, Silent Music

photo Paul Armour

Robin Minard, Silent Music

She churns the contents of her bag around like lottery balls in a cage, looking for the keys to her apartment. Her uncapped lipstick stuck with bag-grit hits the circular staircase winding back down to the foyer, wet with second-hand rain from dripping umbrellas. A small maintenance-bot passes, climbing above her as it polishes the balustrade. Unlocking her front door she is greeted by an intimate composition of insects and trickling water quietly broadcasting from tiny speakers, fashioned within a Nouveau frieze of audio-poppies that adorn the stairwell and reach for the light streaming from a rooftop window.

Project 3 is an ambitious and provocative showcase of contemporary and historic electronic arts presented by the project’s artistic director Michael Yuen and produced by Three Reasons. Building upon an existing repertoire of works and ideas emerging from Projects 1 and 2, Yuen’s program encompasses a series of sound installations, performances, artists’ talks and public projections as part of the 2006 Adelaide Festival of the Arts.

Sonic Space

At the opening night of Sonic Space—Project 3’s concert of contemporary and iconic modernist sound compositions—I was immediately drawn to an installation of delicate matt-black speakers and cabling that climbed the pristine white walls of the ArtSpace gallery. Silent Music has travelled around the world in various guises, developed by the renowned Canadian-born composer and public sound-artist, Robin Minard. Formally the work simulates life on a variety of levels from poppies in tall grass to a cluster of single-cell organisms. Leaning in close to this exquisite installation, you hear a multi-channelled composition of water and insect sounds trickle from the ornate field of speakers. Like the designers and architects swept up by Art Nouveau in the late 19th century, Minard seems to have taken inspiration from the natural world without disdain for the artificial. In the wake of research into Artificial Life, Silent Music is a poetic response to the propositional complexity of inorganic nature.

The concert opened with Black Aspirin, composed by Christian Haines. Soaked and wooden sounds descended from ceiling-mounted speakers, like heavy drops of rain striking eaves, gutters, or instruments left out of doors. It is difficult to resist the temptation to compare these sounds with meteorological events as they affect the listener physically in the same way that elemental forces do. At one point during the piece, a storm cloud of audio above the audience bottomed out and a ferocious downpour of carefully orchestrated white noise ensued. An elderly woman in the front row clamped her hands over her ears, clearly not coping with the assault on her senses. Although the sound grew louder at this point, I don’t think the audience was beleaguered so much by the volume as the deluge of audio layers. Surrendering to a piece like Black Aspirin is an exhilarating, transforming and strangely comforting experience: like listening to a torrential rainstorm from the vantage point of your own lounge room.

The evening proceeded with a selection of historic experimental works pioneered by composers such as Conlon Nancarrow and Alvin Lucier presented by Tristran Louth-Robins. Nancarrow, a contemporary of artists such as John Cage and Elliot Carter, toyed with the inherited traditions of scoring musical events. It may have been his former career as a typesetter that drew him to experiment with the musical machine language of the player-piano, which he did almost exclusively in his later years as a composer. Audiences attending the concert were treated to a rare delivery of Nancarrow’s work on a pianola, or player-piano, specially acquired for the program. Dubbed as “impossible music” due to its polyrhythmic complexity, it is rare to see Nancarrow’s player piano works ‘live’ outside a musical conservatory or museum. Beginning with a style reminiscent of music-hall theatre, a Nancarrow piece may swiftly spiral into contrapuntal orchestrations on the exceptionally free end of the jazz spectrum. Whereas one can imagine a phantom player at the keys in the early stages of Nancarrow’s composition, such a ghost would need to grow extra arms, legs and perhaps even a tentacle or two in order to play the rest.

In homage to Alvin Lucier was a re-enactment of the American composer’s I am sitting in a room, in which a recording of an opening statement is folded back again and again into a series of recordings and re-recordings. After several iterations, the conversational fragments of this statement decay, and the audience is left with the compound feedback of the room’s variant frequencies. Lucier’s piece is intimately site-specific, relying on the nuances of each performance environment. It is possible that his work could also trigger a Zen-like total and utter annihilation of self, if not for the ‘get-up noise’ of scraping chairs, a few foldback yawns and the scratching of a reviewer’s pencil on paper.

Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) is evocative of the train journeys Reich made as a child, travelling between Los Angeles and New York visiting his estranged parents. Reich realised some years later that as a Jew, had he been living in Germany at the time, he would have been travelling on very different trains. The piece was originally performed by the Kronos Quartet. For the Sonic Space program, Reich’s piece was enacted with bittersweet aplomb by the South Australian based string ensemble, Aurora Strings. Different Trains is a minimalist ‘call and reply’ piece combining live performance, pre-recorded arrangements and sampled voice-overs. With great stage presence, the ensemble demonstrated a wonderful maturity of interaction with each other and with the pre-recorded compositions.

As Jon Drummond took to the stage to perform Sonic Construction 2, he had the delightful air of a guest conductor on The Curiosity Show. Coloured ink dropped into a clear vessel of water was relayed—using real time video—to software coded in Max, MSP and Jitter. The software interprets the motion and colour of the ink, triggering a sound event in a process based on the principles of granular synthesis. A sound ‘grain’ is the smallest (and therefore irreducible) particle of sound. The result is a drug-free and neurologically intact synaesthesia. Experiencing the seamless choreography of movement, colour and macro-sound in Drummond’s work lends itself to that phenomenal sensation of universal is-ness or, as a friend of mine once described it, that feeling you get when you sense the “thingy-ness of things.”

Street cinema

After a day of talks given by Drummond, Warren Burt and Robin Minard, Project 3 launched its Street Cinema program, exhibiting a selection of screen-based digital artworks over 9 successive evenings in Adelaide’s West End. The program included innovators such as Somaya Langley, Michael Yuen, Paul Brown, Warren Burt, Gordon Munro, Sonia Wilkie, Luke Harrald and Alex Carpenter, as well as James Geurts who received a commission to develop a work for Project 3. Enigmatically titled Gravitas, Guerts’ abstract video work is a painterly montage of what looks to be interference patterns from a psychic antenna, layered with thermal photographs of obscure figures and objects. The title is perhaps an intentional contrast to the nature of the piece which I read as being playful and conceptually unencumbered.

Perhaps less intentionally, several of the Street Cinema works within Project 3 bring the tenets and aesthetics of late abstract expressionism into the evolving realm of computational theory. Munro’s Evochord is a petri dish of genetic algorithms jostling to grow into something musical. Coloured points of light wriggle and swell to the discordant rise and fall of many singular notes. As if caught in a self-organising matrix, these lights collect briefly into homogenous groups of colour and sound to produce a sublime musical chord, before falling back into organised chaos.

Luke Harrald’s CONflict is a stunning synthesis of abstract sound and vision. On screen, delicate cathedrals of painterly light fade in and out to the bloom of a subtly shifting harmonic. Coded in MAX, the dynamic nature of this work is based upon the Prisoner’s Dilemma: a well-travelled model of logical probabilities used to explain the fundamentals of game theory. The screening of Monro and Harrald’s works feed directly from a computer as an application rather than being captured on DVD. This allows the process behind the development of the work to take effect: meaning that each time a viewer happens upon the piece it is unique, regenerated again and again from dynamic permutations of existing code. The difference between a static DVD recording and the use of a dynamic software application may be lost on the stroller who happens upon the work, watches for 10 seconds and moves on…but maybe not.

Innovation was evident in all the works, contemporary and historical, in Project 3, suggesting the capacity of artists and audiences to continually and mutually redefine relationships between consciousness and perception, art and nature.

Project 3, Contemporary and historical electronic arts, sound, video, installation and artist talks, artistic director Michael Yuen; Adelaide Festival of Arts, March 6-26

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006 pg. 29

The phrase “the NOW now” was coined by English guitarist Derek Bailey, a pioneer of non-idiomatic improvised music. Bailey died in late 2005, and so this year’s festival, the fifth in an annual series, was dedicated to him.
Natasha Anderson & Amanda Stewart

With more than 80 musicians participating, it would be impossible to cover every performance here. Given that I performed on the Friday and Saturday nights, I have chosen to write about the Thursday night, which also happened to be my favourite night of the festival.

The opening act, Robbie Avenaim and Dale Gorfinkel, are a vibraphone duo with a difference. Their instruments are microtonally prepared and activated by machines instead of the usual mallets, resulting in a variety of unusual textures. Their music was like waking up to an alarm clock, only in reverse; the hypnotic quality of the sound pulling the listener into a dream world. Alarm bells gave way to scenes of old children’s toys, followed by distant propellers and, finally, cats purring. By the end, Avenaim and Gorfinkle were literally shaking the sound from their instruments.

The Digits are a young laptop supergroup comprising Ben Byrne, Luke Callaghan, Alex Davies and Ivar Lehtsalu. They only played for 11 minutes but that was enough time to give a demonstration of the sound of systems overloading and crashing, and of faulty networks trying to establish connections. There was plenty of microsonic fetishism to be found here.

Pateras/Baxter/Brown from Melbourne played 3 distinct pieces. Sean Baxter began by dropping various objects on his ‘shit core percussion’, while Anthony Pateras’ busy prepared piano sounded like clattering tin pans in the mid range and collapsing constructions of tiny wooden blocks in the high range. Dave Brown began the next piece by scraping his guitar to produce disturbing moans before moving on to processed high frequencies and occasional boings and twangs like a ruler on a desk. For the final piece Baxter attempted to destroy a plastic plate, then turned his attention to what looked like a hubcap. The band worked itself into a frenzy which eventually broke down into a series of wobbly notes from Brown and a final flourish from Baxter.

Following a short break came an audiovisual performance by Peter Newman, one of the most impressive members of a new generation of media artists currently emerging from Sydney’s tertiary educational institutions. His music is epic, sweeping digital post-rock, like My Bloody Valentine stretched, twisted, filtered and layered into a dreamscape, the crackle of distortion matching the constant flickering of his images, which suggest faces and figures, but which I’m told aren’t actually there. The performance ended with a fade to white video and white noise. Perhaps this is what a near death experience might be like.

Natasha Anderson on electronics and recorders (as in the wind instrument) and vocalist Amanda Stewart allowed silence to be an integral part of their performance. An extroardinary range of sounds sporadically emerged and receded: whistles, breaths, kisses, twittering, chattering. It was often truly startling, with both performers demonstrating extraordinary control over dynamics and timing. They weren’t so much responding to each other as operating as one volatile unit. At times I was reminded of Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian’s electroacoustic composition Visage, but with the operatics replaced by a 21st century microscopic sensibility.

Following another short break came one of those ad hoc assemblages for which improv festivals are renowned. Xavier Charles from France on clarinet, Jeff Henderson from New Zealand on wind instruments, Cor Fuhler from Holland on piano, Dave Symes on electric bass and Tony Buck on drums. After a long, meandering start, out of nowhere came a driving rock rhythm from Buck and Symes that got people’s heads nodding. This pattern was repeated several times, with ponderous passages punctuated by riffs and grooves, augmented by increasingly intense squeals from the woodwinds. Special mention should go to Henderson who cut an eccentric figure, moving between clarinet and sax, pausing occasionally to play with seemingly random objects on the floor.

Next was the most overtly ‘jazz’ set of the festival. Kris Wanders plays tenor sax loud, with a tone like an overdriven amplifier. The other musicians—Slawek Janicki on (often bowed) double bass, Alister Spence on piano and Toby Hall on drums—couldn’t match him for volume but instead created a dense web of notes. Some much needed space was created when Wanders dropped out, allowing us to hear the intricate interplay between Spence’s piano and Hall’s drums. Spence’s playing was a highlight, a multidimensional sound which changed shape depending on the angle from which one approached it.

The final act of the night was Thembi Soddell on sampler and Anthea Caddy on cello. Soddell has attracted much praise for her visionary and dynamic electroacoustic work. Given that some of her sounds are derived from processed cello, there was much interest in how she and Caddy would sound together. The audience was immediately transported to a haunted cavernous space, like some post-apocalyptic bunker. The scraping, screeching, creaking and crackings emanating from Caddy’s cello had me feeling sorry for the instrument. This was the sound of friction, of machinery long abandoned but still attempting to function. The scenes kept changing, but one was left with a distinctly queasy feeling that something was not quite right—an enigmatic note on which to end the night.

With nightly after-parties featuring some of Australia’s hippest underground DJs, installations, film screenings and even acoustic ecology-style soundwalks, the NOW now has reached maturity. There’s not much more that could be included, except perhaps talks and workshops. The festival and in particular its organisers, Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas, have had a profound influence on Sydney’s experimental music scene. Overcoming the city’s tendency to cliquey fragmentation, the NOW now has pulled many people from diverse musical backgrounds into its warm embrace. It is a place where improvisation is an ethical as much as a musical approach; the emphasis on finding ways of engaging as equals. Audiences have responded with equal enthusiasm, with more than 300 people attending each of the 4 nights this year. The NOW now plays a vital role in developing local artists and audiences

the NOW now, curators Clayton Thomas, Clare Cooper; @Newtown, Sydney, Jan 18-2,1 http://www.thenownow.net

Calling for a “tuning of the world”, R Murray Shafer was influenced by Pythagoras’ concept of the music of the spheres—the harmonious hum of the universe. But he wasn’t too fond of the overcrowded audio soup that industrialisation and modern living was making of the acoustic environment. While electricity is a natural phenomenon, its technological taming is the foundation of contemporary living and one of the major ingredients of this soup. So I wonder what Schafer’s thoughts would be on Sound+Electricity at Performance Space featuring performances by Carsten Nicolai (aka alva.noto) and Joyce Hinterding, both of whom use this energy source directly to conjure their sonic worlds.

Hinterding has been summoning the hum for quite a few years now. Using large, hoop antennae, she amplifies the under rumble of the electrical grid. It is a warm, caramel sound tonight reinforced by the projection showing 2 mirrored ovals of a flowing bronze substance. Hinterding’s work is meditative, the shifts of tone minimal and incremental. At some point it becomes a duet as lighting designer Richard Manner subtly brings up dim squares of light, shifting the intensity and pitch of the drone. For those of us who have spent considerable time trying to eliminate interference between lighting and sound systems, this is a perversely pleasurable moment. Patience is rewarded with the development of crackles, pops and fizzes fringing the bass tones marking the climax of the work. At its end, there is both relief and a hint of loss plus some very strange flange effect filtering the foyer voices for the next few minutes.

In contrast to Hinterding’s slow flowing release of electrical energy Carsten Nicolai’s sound consists of tightly controlled punctuations and calculations. Nicolai describes his work as “atomising…Every particle carries the same information as the bigger object it came from…a kind of micro-macro thing” (Wire 238, Dec 2003). In this performance each sound element—spit, spark and sputter—is perfectly crafted, a glistening glitch. When these particles combine, the whole becomes an intense, vibrating composition of intricate syncopations. Accompanying the sound are synaesthesic visuals of blue lines snapped to a grid, directly emulating the intersections of audio. These form strict geometries, like insanely complex architectural drawings in constant states of redesign. The entire effect is as physical as it is mesmeric. The rhythmic entwinings create primal pulses and cool melodies which entice the body to movement. Why are we sitting in concert mode? We should be dancing!

This was perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Sound+Electricity. alva.noto is an artist who manages to bridge the esoteric and the accessible. The audience comprised elements of the local sound crowd but the larger proportion were newcomers to this kind of sound event. Of course alva.noto has international appeal but are many here aware that there is also a vibrant experimental scene happening in nooks and crannies around Australia? Hopefully Sound+Electricity not only tuned us in to our contemporary audio ecology but also to the potential to expand the audience for experimental audio.

Carsten Nicolai (aka alva.noto), Joyce Hinterding, Sound+Electricity; Performance Space, March 12

Carsten Nicolai was presented in association with the Adelaide Festival of the Arts and forma UK.

Upon my initial reading of Nigel Helyer’s “Sound arts and the living dead” (RT 70, p48), I was outraged at his complete lack of understanding of the laptop performances he so confidently criticized and so I casually dismissed his comments as ignorant and self-important, as I imagine many of my fellow laptop performers and improvisers did. However, upon further reading and discussion, I am compelled to reply, feeling that despite its verbose and at times unfounded arguments Helyer’s article does, at its heart, touch on some very interesting and important issues.

“Sound arts and the living dead” opposes what Helyer sees as a historical revisionism of recent years that posits laptop performance as ‘sound art’ at the exclusion of any and all other artistic explorations in sound, be they radiophonics, installation or the sound sculptures he himself produces. Helyer’s own practice has demonstrated an extended, and committed, interest in the sounding of objects, which may go some way to explaining his complaint against laptop performance and what he describes as its “profound level of banality.” Certainly few would argue the banal nature of the laptop and its use in performance—as Helyer points out, “personal computers are now as ubiquitous as the Singer sewing machine in the mid-19th century.” However, is it not equally valid to argue the banality of the guitar as an instrument of modern music?

Laptop performance should indeed be recognised as banal, and purposely so, but this banality cannot be explained as the result of a complete disinterest in performance or commitment to the acousmatic. Laptop performance does not exist entirely in the French acousmatic tradition, as Helyer observes. Instead, it fuses these traditions with those of popular music and more conceptual artistic traditions. Laptop performers exist as workers of ambiguous responsibility who traverse a liminal space between the roles of musician, DJ and artist.

With its banality of instrumentation, coupled with a conscious absence of gestural performance (which itself is contradictory and inevitably incomplete), laptop performance exists as a paradox, presenting an ephemeral space of sounding, grounded neither entirely in existing languages of popular musical performance, musical avant-garde nor more established artistic conventions. As such it sits uneasily between art and music as a discipline, accepted fully by neither, and instead often functioning as an exclusive sub-culture, to its own detriment.

Helyer’s problems with the form arise from what he sees as “an alarming fog of amnesia that obscures the recent archaeology of sound art and sonic performance”, allowing a “hijacking of the term sound art…and its repurposing as a synonym for laptop electronica.” And perhaps this is to some extent due to the exclusivity and isolationism I’ve mentioned as common to laptop performance. However, in constructing his argument Helyer makes the patronising assumption that those involved in cultures of laptop performance are somehow ignorant of histories of exploration in sound, citing examples such the Futurists and Luigi Russolo’s text The Art Of Noises, as well as snidely suggesting younger artists are unaware of William Burroughs, or for that matter that it was Burroughs who initially claimed “language is a virus” and not Laurie Anderson.

Most laptop performers are in fact unusually knowledgeable when it comes to histories of sound and music. And in fact many of the laptop performers in Australia have passed in recent years through the newly established university degrees in electronic and media arts now so popular at institutions such as UTS, UWS, COFA and RMIT, in which they are commonly taught art and music theory side-by-side and emerge well aware of both histories. Prior to this it seems most identified as either sound artists or musicians. However these are boundaries that remain undefined and now seem irrelevant as we acknowledge the work of artists such as Russolo, Burroughs and Cage, in which all sound stands approachable as music, and indeed all music is recognizable as sound.

Far from claiming ‘sound art’ as their own, many laptop performers prefer to consider themselves musicians or, more commonly still, retreat from the argument with mumbled comments that they just work with sound. The use of the terminology ‘sound art’ to describe performative and, frequently, quite musical sound has been championed by publications such as RealTime in an attempt to theorize an inherently elusive art form. Rather than exposing the failures or pretensions of laptop performance, what Helyer’s article highlights is a disjuncture that has emerged in Australian sound culture in recent years in the form of a generational split between older artists who have commonly worked either in the field of ‘sound art’ or music and younger artists who are now emerging in a field where the two seem almost impossible to distinguish.

The North Melbourne Meat Market is a gracious Victorian building with a vaulted timber ceiling, wrought iron ornament and cobbled floor, part of both local heritage and contemporary culture. A huge open room that a century ago was filled with spruiking butchers haggling with buyers beneath laden meat-hooks is now filled with a hundred seats, lighting batons, projection screen, imagery of a silhouetted city and a PA—a site appropriate to performance with a viscerally urban edge.

Most of Concave City’s 7-work program is for composite art forms, including 2 works for musicians and video. Biddy Connor’s Sleep Won’t Help (2006), for clarinet, trombone and bass clarinet accompanies Kirsty Baird’s montage of old black and white footage of women in lavish costumes dancing in a humorous parody of burlesque. The video’s soundtrack of recorded laughter is morphed, serialised and segued into the score, the clarinet emitting a staccato laughter before moving onto a lyrical, narrative line. The trombone’s mournful, evaluating speech, precedes an accelerating march tempo that mocks the dreamy, lighthearted imagery. The nostalgia of Connor’s work contrasts with Arnoud Noordegraf’s Netherlands-produced 15 minute video Pong (2003), a delightfully surreal comedy depicting a man’s descent into insanity, which is quietly accompanied by Linda Kent on harpsichord.

Wally Gunn’s The Hive (2005), for viola, percussion and pre-recorded audio, evokes the 3 complementary identities of drone, queen and worker as a metaphor for industrial society. Less metaphorical but equally potent is Kate Neal’s Dead Horse 1 (2005), which opens with a driving jazz rhythm that alternates with moody rumination, plenty of contrasting colour and drama; a work suggesting the influence of composers David Chesworth and Frank Zappa. Neal’s scoring for a highly amplified ensemble of strings and electric bass and guitar captures the intensity of contemporary life.

Two works for larger ensembles, though contrasting in mood and style, are Anthony Pateras’s Fragments, Splinters and Shards (2006) and Brett Dean’s Etüdentfest (2000). Pateras’s dramatic, textured work, the longest of the evening, is for computer-based audio with viola, trombone, recorder and percussion, including some uniquely original instruments. Brett Dean’s Etüdentfest (2000) is an eloquent and mature piece for a more conventional ensemble of strings and harpsichord, opening with a moto perpetuo motif that recurs throughout. The writing is balanced and measured, building to a climax through high pitches before decaying and rising again.

The evening’s finale, Kate Neal’s Concave City & A Love Story for Two Cars (2006) is the show-stopper. In the open space between the string orchestra and the audience, 2 cars drive in, one gently crashing into the rear of the other. Two traffic-weary drivers emerge to confront each other and begin an intense, agile and at times erotic dance in, on and around the cars. The miked sounds of slamming doors, indicators and windscreen wipers form part of the score. The excellent dancers—Lima Limosani and choreographer Anton—portray frenetic urban life with power and energy, supported by Neal’s evocative composition for strings. This collaboration is the most effective and powerful blending of media in an innovative concert for the 2006 Arts House program.

Dead Horse Productions, Concave City; Arts House, North Melbourne Meat Market, Feb 10-11

One hundred years ago, when Isadora Duncan was envisioning “the dance of the future”, she turned her body towards nature and moved with the rhythm of the wind and the waves. Duncan’s ecological choreography for the new century of liberation fuelled many an unburdened, barefoot dance, all free-flowing limbs and gravitational flow. Yet her cosmic view of nature’s rhythms was an enchanted 19th century romance. The futurists with their militant manifesto for arts violent and mechanic were gathering in the wings.

A century later, dance is a high-tech, futurist affair. Two works at the 2006 Adelaide Festival—Nemesis from Random Dance (UK, 2002) and the Australian Dance Theatre’s new work Devolution—choreographed dancers with machines and moving images on screens to digital audio scores.

The convergence of biological bodies and digital technologies is a frontier for innovation. Live performance has long served up its flesh from within a carapace of stage technology. In these new works, the techno-exoskeleton converges with the performers’ flesh on stage. Yet amidst the biotech convergence of 21st century dance, I sense how Wayne McGregor (Random Dance) and Garry Stewart (ADT) have both retained a fondness for the human body and a fascination with the natural world.

The envisioning of nature in these works trades Duncan’s cosmic vision for the minute and microscopic. The strange ways insects move—with their crisp and crunchy biomechanics, their swiftness, swarm and buzz—are traced across the choreography of both works. At times in Devolution, Stewart’s choreography recalls the movements, stranger still, of plants and protozoa.

The works are elegiac in their evocation of the human body. Gina Czarnecki’s meticulous video work for Devolution manipulates fragments of moving human flesh and flashes of X-ray skeletons. These video images, interspersed throughout the work, invoke prehuman memories of cellular splitting and ghostly after-images of bodily remains. They are haunting representations of emergence and dispersal from the past.

Nemesis

Digital video delivers humanising evocation in Nemesis as well. Ravi Deepres and Luke Unworth have designed a video montage that builds slowly, layer upon time-lapsed layer, with images of the dancers—frozen into poses of exhaustion, anguish and ennui—in the drawing room of an abandoned house. This recovered memory gives retrospective location to preceding segments of choreography accompanied by enigmatic images of other rooms from the house.

McGregor’s choreography for Nemesis is architectural and geometric. Dancers’ limbs extend along the cardinal directions outwards from the torso—back then forward, down then up, left then right. Their shoulders and their hips articulate the destinations of their limbs. Each move is plotted with the precision of a coordinate within a 3-dimensional grid.

Dancers enter, walk and wait. They dance solo and with each other in pairs and trios—lifting, leaning, carrying, placing. Their costumes are neat shorts, singlets and long-sleeved tops in grey and yellow construction colours. Their trajectories are adjacent, though their relations are indifferent. The floor is lit by Lucy Carter with architectural patterns; windows, circles, shafts of light and then a grid give structure to the dancers’ positions and progressions.

Scanner’s audio score for Nemesis builds from rattles, squeaks and breathy winds to ambient chirps and vocal echoes and rises to rhythmic intensities with metallic machine percussion and techno-synth progressions for a fiery ensemble sequence. The house burns, the dancers disperse. And then we are transported—or abducted.

A dancer crawls on stage and then another. Their body-suits are cockroach-black, their arms distorted. Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop designed spikey, flesh-stripped, arm prostheses which flex and flick like insect claws. Orange hexagons tessellate the floor as more dancers enter flicking claws. An insectoid sci-fi combat scene ensues. McGregor’s prosthetic interest in extension recalls ballet’s derivation in fencing.

McGregor dances a final solo scene between 2 see-through screens: a slug-like crawl, a parasite, a worm, while animated centipedes chase each other around the screens. Four years old, the screensaver-like animation shows its age and fades. An online animation records the Nemesis sci-fi game aesthetic (www.randomdance.org). Its robotic insects, honeycomb grids and fine-line text click through to audio loops and low-grade video of the dance.

Devolution

In comparison with Nemesis, Stewart’s choreography for Devolution is fractal and organic. It grows and oozes, unfurls and folds, flips and flows. The dancers are dressed armadillo-like in layered leather skins by Georg Meyer-Wiel and they move as if by feeling, without the aid of sight.

Their heads are often down, their faces turned away. Their arms curl out, a leg folds up. Sometimes they are rooted, fixed like tripods on the spot, supported on 2 knees and an elbow, 2 feet and a hand, 2 hands and a head. At other times, the dancers travel in a pack, with arms and legs entwined and overlapping. Three pairs dance a sequence mouth-to-mouth. A man is left to dance a solo, angular and naked, but not alone.

Waiting in the wings and suspended from the rig are Louis-Philip Demers’ robots which stumble, trundle, scatter in to survey the scene. Unlike the dancers, these mechanical monsters have searching eyes—spotlights that transfix the dancers in their gaze. They intrude upon them and impinge upon their space. The dancers cower and sink beneath the awesome rudeness of the robots’ presence.

The robots’ moves are cumbersome, and sometimes cute. When it’s quiet, we can hear them creak and breathe. But when composer Darrin Verhagen’s clunking, churning industrial score lends aural power to Demers’ machines, we are witness to the mechanical choreography of terror. We hear bones crushing and flesh tearing. The dancers shrink in fear.

A robot drags a dancer across the stage and drops him. Machines attach themselves to dancers, as parasitical appendages that pulse upon the dancers’ bodies with their piston push and shove. As the end approaches, the stage is electrified with action, robots agitated, lights flashing, bodies pulsing. And then a screen descends. The final video is of a clustering of human flesh, shrinking, fading, disappearing. In the curtain call for Devolution, as if to reassure us, only the human performers lined up for the applause.

Australian Dance Theatre, Devolution; Her Majesty’s Theatre. Adelaide, March 3-7; Random Dance, Nemesis; Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, March 15-18

Interviews RT 71, p 2 & 4 for interviews with Garry Stewart and Wayne Macgregor.

The dancers line up along the back of the stage. We quickly become silent. A woman and a man walk forward beneath the low hooded lights, she further than he. She contorts her body (or does she only point at him), and says: “the night my son was arrested.” His body is frozen (maybe an arm is folded over his head, his body screwed away from the audience). She walks off. And the battle begins. This is how I remember it, and I’m sure I’m wrong. And being sure is a poke in the eye about witnessing, about reporting (telling what was), and the impossibility of that, even while feeling the pleasure of telling (tales). Telling is a freedom, a fragment of freedom, and that’s what we were watching—the fragment’s brief and discontinuous circumstance.

The ‘battle’ is an endless round of violent encounters, so finely worked out that while one contemplates the improvisation of street/gang brawls, one is also amazed by the formations of the body as it fights, and the permutations of bodies as they tangle and untangle, and the timing needed to ‘get-the-job-done’ and to keep the job coming, to prolong and inflame the situation. Then a pause, a still image; the eyes rest upon a moment. It is familiar; we’ve recently seen it on the TV from Cronulla for instance, and we’ve seen it in films; we know the moves and the perpetual energy. It can go on and on, and that’s alarming; and as the bodies physically tire they become sound—gasping and grunting floats to our ears, not by dramatized force but by the real-time exhaustion of the dancers. Sound becomes dance; and sound, as much as narrative, sets up the next 2 atmospheres—compositions 2 and 3 of Forysthe’s Three Atmospheric Studies.

Giving evidence while trying to work out what happened is the atmosphere of the second composition, Atmospheric Study 2, which itself has, language-wise, several compositions to deal with (nothing is straightforward). The woman who tells her story—how she saw what happened to her son (the one arrested)—thinks she’s in composition 1, but composition 2 comes to bear upon her story and its recording, and then composition 3 does too. There are fine white threads taut across the stage, sight-lines (of fancy). She tells her story to a translator who repeats it in (is it) Arabic, transposes more like, replaces one word with another. (We know this as another man intent on describing a painting—the atmosphere of a painting, maybe a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, several of which have influenced the work). She asks the translator for the word for ‘bird’, but unfortunately the translator only has one for ‘aeroplane’, and so forth. It’s too late anyway for the woman, who in a hysterical/convulsive ‘state’ twists her body and voice in a horrible display of grief. The trouble is it disturbs nothing/no-one in the scene (life goes on). The translator watches passively, the other man keeps on ‘painting the picture.’ Forsythe has said, about the state of the war-state (world-wide): “Nothing changes. In several hundred years … nothing changes” (The Age, March 10).

And then, after a break, the third composition/atmosphere. A man begins to tell us about a photograph (perhaps it’s a fragment of the same painting in the previous atmosphere) of clouds, but more about the relations between parts, the ‘over-there’ and the ‘over-here.’ The event/bombing unfolds, the whole disaster. Amplified treated voices are wrenched through bodies, flesh slams into the set—a wooden structure wired for sound—and people curl into odd shapes, mutilated. A woman, our woman from atmosphere/composition 1 and 2, is now silent and passive while a sensible man/woman, in charge, at ease with the disaster explains it; it is all necessary and for the greater good, there is no other way, the sense of it is obvious (can’t you see that?), and s/he’s come ‘all this way’ to address just/you, to reassure just/you. Nevertheless, our woman rightly, in his/her presence, quietly dies. Meanwhile, the cloud-man has given us a tour of bits of bodies, buildings, and belongings catapulted (from over-there to over-here) into the scene.

The atmospheres are variations, continuations, escalations of the one atmosphere; glimpses, sections, diagrams, architectures of ruin embedded in live/dead beings. There is no lesson here, that’s the blessing. But there’s also no reluctance to ‘speak’, to make fury in the face of the permanent disaster; to make new problems, not take up those of the ‘authorities’—whoever they are, however they appear. Forsythe’s work is dark (darker and less abstract since I last saw it), his choreography confronts language, it pushes language outward, like the world—making matter that it is. This is difficult to achieve as language at every turn (having a life of its own) can trip itself up (be too readily sweet or bitter). It must be small and tight to keep its nerve, to know what it’s doing (and even then it goes to pieces) with sound and affect in the listening world.

Atmosphere is pervasive, it’s never this or that; rather, it’s this and that and multiple relations of infinite ambiences and densities. And it was so in Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies; you had to choose what to watch and hear; to change focus was to forfeit this thread for that thread. You could not witness it all, you could not tell the whole story afterwards, only what you thought you had seen. One is unreliable like the next person, no amount of effort will ensure the truth. That’s the strange dilemma of telling and re-telling, of having the insolence (taking the uncool Forsythe risk) to ‘speak of it.’

To make a work that functions equally on several performing registers—movement, theatre, sound, voice, design—with edges of humour, intellect and poetry as well as a politic that knows what it hates, requires an ensemble of skilled dancers who are more than dancers. Timing was critical, delicacy was exquisite, and the heavy hand of ‘what it means’ washed throughout yet never erased actual endurance (on the plane of real-life, and on the plane of ‘I love to dance’ in a field of utterance—sensation). Here, more should be said about the company of dancers and about individual dancers (and about William Forsythe), but the work’s power is at the limits of these; it resides in what seems a philosophy of dance, that as time, in time, is a sort of simultaneity of realms.

The Forsythe Company, Three Atmospheric Studies, choreographer, William Forsythe; Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival, March 12-16

From out of the dark, to the anxious sounds of accelerated scribbling, tearing and tense breathing, emerges a quivering Fiona Malone, tightly framed by light, close to but looking through us and anxiously into herself. The torso twitches, the arms hang and jerk. A tunnel of light opens behind her. She backs along it, pieces of torn paper falling from her mouth. She is revealed again, collapsing into herself in a small square of light. Now she appears stretched out, trapped in a coffin of green light, twitching the length of her long body, arms momentarily floating, rigidifying. She reappears, half-stooped, moving towards us, almost confident, but the arms are now defensive, as if brushing something away, her head up, then down amidst oppressive crowd noises and metal raspings. In the sudden dark there are cries and crashes as her body hits the floor. In a rectangle of low light she writes with chalk on the floor, her body sometimes a template, but erasing patterns and words as she drags herself across them. For a while she looks free and fluent (even if the expression of it seems to come to nothing) and then tense as she struggles to write on her skin. Voices fill the space, speaking of loss of control and self-destruction. She erases, she writes again, she falters, she cannot bring the chalk to the floor, her arms flail about her. A spot glares from the distance, silhouetting a half naked Malone moving freely. The light then opens out into a low unbounded wash of colour and as the dancer nears us, patterned symbols form and glow on her flesh.
Fiona Malone, Reticence

This is dance as interior monologue, where thoughts and feelings have to be read from the performer’s body (save for the one cluster of rather literal voice-overs). And what we read is anxiety about self-expression, the struggle to record or to dance it (a deliberately limited vocabulary of taut, small gestures and moves, like a body blocked). In the end, comes the recognition that all this is already written, in and on us. In this measured, nervy work, Fiona Malone displays a consistency of tone and a careful development of theme, sustaining a demanding state of being. There are occasional longueurs where small moves seems to express little (Malone stretched out in the rectangle of green light), frustration for some over the opacity of what is actually written, and a desire for the choreography to be more expansive, a little more shaped. Known for her engagement with digital technology in other works, Malone here choreographs on herself an almost animated persona, building an image from one or 2 parts of the body and small gestures, until we get the whole picture.
Kay Armstrong, a.k.a

In a.k.a. Kay Armstrong appeared as entertainer in various modes across the evening: greeting us in the courtyard with glittering top hat, quips and little magic tricks; chatty dancer loaded up with professional gear like artist-as-bag-lady; dancer recalling flamenco hand moves, deftly delivered in long corridors of light, but stamping only to flatten a beckoning pack of cigarettes; and failed stand-up comic, desparate to please. Coming from the artist who gave us the powerfully performed and constructed Narrow House (RT 61, p48), this was light fare, and not enough of it written by the body.
Liz Lea, DhIVA

Written into Liz Lea’s body are multiple histories and cultures of dance displayed with great precision, furious energy and a strength you can feel through the vibrating floor in DhIVA, choreographed by Canadian Roger Sinha. Like Malone, Lea too suggests hesitancy, intially rocking in a reflective mood on a chair before springing into action, or pausing her vigorous dance to declare, “I’m a…I’m a…” But such inarticulacy is strictly temporary as Lea flies into action. Here it’s dance as essay, informed by observations about contrasts between the Western and Eastern dance languages her body so eloquently speaks, the hybridity of ballet (its absorption of European folk dance presented here with hilariously overwrought gusto), and a commitment to Indian dance in particular.

Onextra, Solo Series #2, Fiona Malone, Reticence, lighting Clytie Smith; Kay Armstrong, a.k.a, lighting Clytie Smith; Liz Lea, DhIVA, choreographer Roger Sinha, lighting Karen Norris; Performance Space, March 16-26

New forms, connections, networks

RealTime 72 is rich in reports of new forms, new ways of engaging with audiences and of making new connections—between media platforms, between performance niches (as the contemporary performance touring network in Australia grows), and between nations at the Inbetween Time festival in Bristol.

John Bailey reports on recent performances in Melbourne that stretch form in new directions, making fascinating, sometimes challenging demands on their audiences (p41). As he outlines the D>Art.06 program, David Cranswick, director of Sydney’s dLux media arts, describes the blurring of media platforms and the flexibility of delivery therefore available to the makers of short films and animations (p26). Gridthiya Gaweewong, co-director of the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival tells David Teh about the festival’s innovative approach to programming and screening (p22). Karen Pearlman reviews the finalists of the 2006 ReelDance Awards for Best Australian & New Zealand Dance Film or Video, looking at the continuing challenge presented by the dance/film dynamic (p23). Jonathan Bollen (p32) and Chris Reid (p27) report from the Adelaide Festival of Arts on the impact of robotics integrated into dance and sculpture. Christy Dena attended the Digital Storytelling Conference at ACMI in Melbourne where the multiplying multimedia means of telling were in evidence, much of it online for you to follow up, with some impressive sites in Wales, Canada and the US (p28).

Contemporary performance in Australia has received a much needed boost from the establishment of the Mobile States touring consortium, Melbourne City Council’s Arts House and its Culture Lab program, Performing Lines’ continued support of innovative work, and the Sydney Opera House’s programs in The Studio and now in Adventures in the Dark. Adventures… offers a year-round international program of performance that will expand the local vision of what can be seen outside the usual arts festival context. There are now an increasing number of venues across Australia ready to take on contemporary performance and dance. Keith Gallasch surveys these developments on p38-39.

The invitation to run a review-writing workshop on hybrid art practices at the Inbetween Time festival allowed RealTime’s editors an excellent opportunity to see and discuss new British work, especially in the areas of Live Art, installation and digital media. Inbetween Time proved an idiosyncratic festival, offering audiences all kinds of access and engagement which they took up with enthusiasm (see full Inbetween Time online covereage), suggesting the direction that arts festivals of the future may well take.

Just as opportunities are slowly opening up for performance to tour Australia, cultural exchange between Britain and Australia looks set to expand. Performance Space and Arnolfini are playing a key role in this development through their Breathing Space program which this year featured Australian artists Monika Tichacek, John Gillies, Martin del Amo, Deborah Pollard in Bristol and at Breathing Space partners, The Green Room in Manchester and Tramway in Glasgow. Other Australian artists Lynette Wallworth, George Khut and Rosie Dennis were also featured in Inbetween Time.

The reciprocity evident in these exchanges is vital to their future. Wendy Blacklock, director of Performing Lines, believes it obligatory for the future of performing arts touring. D>Art.06 includes a focus on experimental film and video from the Middle East and also has invited filmmaker Akram Zaatari to the festival. By coincidence, Zaatari is one of the artists selected by director Charles Merewether for the Biennale of Sydney’s Zones of Contact, a great gathering of artists, many from the developing world.

RealTime 73 will feature more from RealTime’s UK visit, including a report on the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) in Glasgow, FACT in Liverpool and Cornerhouse in Manchester. There’ll be a special focus on East London where we visited Rich Mix, a new centre for British-Asian art with a strong social agenda, and a re-vamped LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre), directed by Angharad Wynne Jones with a vision blending the local with the global. Both ventures reflect needs and conditions in the East End, and both are planning for intensive participation. In the same East End we visited the Live Art Agency and Artsadmin to discuss the unique roles they play in the nurturing and dispersal of contemporary art. RT

Located on the rapidly transforming old docks of Bristol, Arnolfini is a handsomely refurbished and busy contemporary arts centre replete with multiple gallery and studio spaces, theatre-cum-cinema, impressive bookshop, reading room and café. Arnolfini’s Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue proved to be an accessible, adventurous and marvellously eccentric event, prototyping a new kind of festival in which the real and the virtual blur and, above all, audiences enjoy new kinds of engagement with artists and artworks. Not only does interactivity take many shapes, digital and personal, but audiences also witness at close quarters the formation of new works.

Outside the building an old, red double decker bus, the Spaghetti Club, stood by the water, providing an all day gathering point for artists and audiences to gossip and critique, while the café was packed and the reading room in constant use. A short walk away, the L-Shed provided more gallery space. Across town, the University of Bristol’s Wickham Theatre and The Cube hosted a variety of performances.

Interaction

Large numbers of the public streamed into the This Secret Location at Arnolfini and the L-Shed, a free exhibition of works exploring the interplay of the real and the virtual. Here they saw their heartbeats and breathing writ large in George Khut’s Cardiomorphologies (Australia); they stretched out between layers of light and sound in Alex Bradley and Charles Poulet’s Whiteplane_2 (UK); activated the flight of clouds of white cockatoos to their night-time Central Australian roost In Lynette Wallworth’s intensely evocative Still:Waiting 2 (Australia); or went it alone into the light and utter dark in Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra II (Japan). Installations were also busy: multiple screen videos by John Gillies (Divide, Australia) and Monika Tichacek (The Shadowers, Australia) and Deborah Pollard’s Shapes of Sleep (Australia) exhibiting the behaviour of very real sleeping bodies.

In contemporary art, the audience, either alone or in small groups is increasingly becoming an active participant in works of art, triggering events, slipping into immersive sensory experiences, meeting artists one-to-one in structured engagements, or simply following sets of instructions. In Inbetween Time this could range from sharing an elegant lecture-cum-meal of oysters and champagne (later followed by a brief solo visit to see the formerly tuxedoed host, Paul Hurley (Swallow, UK), transformed into a kind of oyster by swathing himself in bacon—an immaculately crafted but slender “angel on horseback” joke); joining in a conversation which is destined not to work (Carolyn Wright, Conversations with Friends, UK); a real kiss which is set in dental plaster (Charley Murphy, Kiss-in-Between, UK); sitting in on a bloody wound fabrication workshop (Uninvited Guests, Aftermath, UK); wandering the streets in headphones alert to the special sounds of Bristol (Duncan Speakman, Sounds from Above the Ground, UK); or finding yourself in a small room with a group of performers who are exploring telephone behaviour for 6 hours (Special Guests, This Much I Know, Part 2, UK).

Performance possibilities

If the public queued for and happily took to This Secret Location and other installations, another audience, often comprising students (in numbers that made us Australians envious) and performance fanciers, packed into the festival’s performance spaces.

Each morning the lecture format would transform as various artists used it for everything from E-Bay Power Selling (AC Dickson, USA), to demonstrations of silent movie slapstick devices (Howard Murphy, A Working History of Slapstick, UK) and robotics (Paul Granjon, The Heart and the Chip, UK-France), and the performance company Gob Squad (Me the Monster, UK) report on their research into fear—seeking out vampires and werewolves in public places.
Grace Surman, Slow Thinking

Other performances manifested themselves more conventionally at first glance. David Weber-Krebs (This Performance, Germany-Netherlands) turned the stage sculptural; Pacitti Company (UK) contracted us before we entered an intimate space saturated with British myth and history and reflections on our dreams and ambitions in the immaculately crafted and performed A Forest; Rosie Dennis (Love Song Dedication, Australia) seamlessly and bracingly hybridised performance poetry, physical performance and the stumblings of love; Miguel Pereira (Portugal) arranged for selected guests to murder his stage persona; Martin del Amo (Under Attack, with Gail Priest, Australia) wrestled with personal demons and Jacob’s angel; and Grace Surman (Slow Thinking, UK) duetted in surreal role reversal with Nic Green (other performers will work with Surman in other cities).

Big picture

What did Inbetween Time add up to? Whether thematised or not festivals sometimes sum up a cultural moment or epitomise a trend. As I’ve already indicated this was certainly the case with the range of ways audiences were engaged and the many hybrid forms in evidence. Tim Atack thought he detected something: “Being left hanging is a familiar motif in Inbetween Time. The themes of being incomplete, unfinished, beyond rescue or beyond recall seem to resonate through a series of otherwise contrasting works” (“Mortality Manifesto”). The fluidity of audience-performer relations and the easy interplay between the virtual and the real, self and other, body and machine certainly underlined the pleasures, in particular, and anxieties of the age with a new and pervasive intensity.

Creative tensions

The contrast between works-in-progress and complete and tested productions also provided Inbetween Time with a curious dynamic, especially given that the Australian works were in the latter category (Del Amo, Tichacek, Gillies, Pollard). Breathing Space UK counterparts will reach fruition at Inbetween Time 2007. As well, this tension extended to some contrasting aesthetic attitudes which we’ll address in the next edition of RealTime when we look at the extensive Live Art phenomenon, of which there is no equivalent in Australia. An enormous range of work is encompassed by the term Live Art, work which appears to hover between performance art and contemporary performance but is open to many more possibilities. In fact, it is most often described in terms of what it is not. Much of it seems solo, low budget and roughly crafted, with a calculated 90s anti-aesthetic or an air of intellectual burlesque and not a little bovva, but there are plenty of exceptions. It certainly has a strong institutional presence in the form of festivals, the Live Art Agency, New Work Network, Live Art Archive (its new incarnation in Bristol after a relocation from Nottingham was celebrated at Inbetween Time), well-established funding patterns, a strong regional presence, some committed venues and producers, and plenty of opportunities to work in Europe.

The Australian works were much admired, though sometimes described in terms of style, control and polish, while British live art and experimental theatre were seen in terms of conceptual power, a process orientation and spontaneity, which the Australians, in turn, sometimes read as under-conceptualised and under-crafted. The debate continued on our travels to Glasgow and Manchester where the Breathing Space Australia artists also toured, and was enriched by the experience of the National Review of Live Art at Tramway in Glasgow and our meeting with the Live Art Agency in London, more of which in RT 72. From my point of view, these differences were welcome, reflecting how different the artistic milieus are in Australia and the UK, thus making the ongoing Breathing Space exchange program between Arnolfini and Performance Space even more vital for what it offers in debate and, above all, ways of working. These creative tensions ran other ways too, even in live art itself, between younger and older generations of artists, not least in the problems of labelling. In a discussion of the issue of definition, writer Tim Atack commented, “This is a form in which the definitions are always being contested and the ground is always shifting, so let’s leave it at that.”

Thanks

Above all our thanks to Helen Cole, artistic director of Inbetween Time, for an adventurous festival of the moment and of the future, and one which brought Australian and British artists together in a much needed and ongoing program created with Performance Space. Our very special thanks go to Helen for inviting the RealTime editors to run a review-writing workshop and securing the funds with which to do it.

The workshop was a wonderfully immersive experience with a fine team of 6 writers who committed themselves to a hard task with vigour and good humour, turning out reviews daily on demand. The writers were Marie-Anne Mancio, Niki Russell, Winnie Love, Osunwunmi, Ruth Holdsworth and Tim Atack. You can read their reviews on the Inbetween Time section of this site.

Our thanks also go to Tanuja Amarasuriya and Tim Harrison for making our 2 weeks at Arnolfini friendly, comfortable and efficient. Thanks also go to the Australia Council’s Community Partnerships & Market Development division for additional funds to extend our visit beyond Bristol to Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and London, as part of the Undergrowth Australian Arts 2006 program.

The workshop has allowed RealTime to meet writers both British and Australian in the UK who will contribute to future editions of the magazine as the cultural exchange between the 2 countries accelerates and intensifies, adding, we hope, a level of documentation, review and debate.

In 2005, Asialink in partnership with the Dance Board of the Australia Council selected 5 Australian choreographers, including Jo Lloyd, to develop new collaborative works in Japan as part of the Asialink Japan Dance Exchange, Neon Rising. In May 2005, Lloyd, Melbourne designer Shio Otani and composer Duane Morrison visited Japan and collaborated with Off Nibroll members Mikuni Yanaihara and Keisuke Takahashi to create Public=Un+Public. Mikuni Yanaihara founded the art collective Nibroll in 1997, a company of 6 directors in the fields of film, dance, music, lighting and fashion producing works seen around the world. Off Nibroll’s work focuses on the relationship between body and image. Public=Un+Public was presented at Yokohama BankART1929 and has now been seen in Melbourne where Lloyd is based and has been building a body of work including Not As Others, seen in the Adelaide Fringe Festival and Next Wave 2006. Eds.
Mikuni Yanaihara, Jo Lloyd, Public=Un+Public

Mikuni Yanaihara, Jo Lloyd, Public=Un+Public

Shown recently in Japan, Public=Un+Public’s Melbourne incarnation was created inside Chunky Move’s Melbourne studio, whose usual box-like dimensions were transformed by Shio Otani into a series of spaces, levels and screens. Two bedrooms at each end were connected by a central sphere, green and grasslike.

The work begins with Lloyd and Yanaihara at each end, in their respective rooms. The screens flanking each room reflect the activities of the other, thereby connecting the women. If this is private space, it’s pretty sparse and depersonalized at best, an external view upon interiority. Perhaps the term ‘un+public’ suggests this, that the private is simply an inflexion of the public. After a series of activities, the women swap ends to continue their individual musings. They are not the same. Yanaihara’s range of emotional textures highlights the secular nature of Lloyd’s boisterous, bouncerly energies.

Takahashi’s accompanying video images undergo simple but mesmeric transformations—silhouetted doorways, interiors framed and reframed; windows upon social, personal space. A crowd of small black figures explodes into what looks like a flock of birds pouring out of a diminishing human form, repeatedly blotting the screen in flying formation. At one point, the width of the room gives way to a single screen, the women leaving us to pay attention to the images. Some beautiful imagery combines with dancing text. Yanaihara was filmed on her bed in her flat (inspiration for the overall design?), the image contracting into the room’s TV, a frame within a frame. A reminder that the realism of video is never more than virtual?

When they returned, Lloyd and Yanaihara interacted in the central space, back to back, back to front, tossing, lunging, swinging at each other, coming together, coming apart. Elements of domination or competition were suggested but nothing was made explicit. A menagerie of shredded newspaper balls were tossed about. Many qualities were explored in this duet, which canvassed a range of relational possibilities. This was the section of Public=Un+Public that appeared the most experimental, a place where the women could have taken the work into another space, beyond its initial dichotomies. My feeling is that more collaborative time is needed in order to fully develop this section, and to integrate it into the piece as a whole. Lloyd and Yanaihara are each strong performers with their own qualities and differences. They clearly have ideas about the work, along with Takahashi’s video projections and Otani’s design structures. If there is an element of cultural difference in the mix, there is also the question of kinaesthetic difference: how to produce joint movement by way of addressing the themes of the whole. This is about the work as performance, rather than installation. In other respects, Public=Un+Public felt very clear, Lloyd’s aesthetic combining well with Off Nibroll’s input and Duane Morrison’s music to create a distinctive and enticing world.

Public=Un+Public, choreography and performance Jo Lloyd, Mikuni Yanaihara, video Keisuke Takahashi, music Duane Morrison with Yuki Kato+Sound Sleep, design Shio Otani; Chunky Move Studio, Melbourne, February 15-19

The South Pacific has long been a site for European travel fantasy with its geography strategic for colonialist expansion and its languid and intoxicating mix of palm trees and exoticised otherness. Teuila Postcards, the first full length production for Brisbane dance ensemble Polytoxic, is a well-crafted critique of the fantasy, fusing traditional Polynesian and contemporary dance theatre in a very funny and totally engaging take on all things culturally kitsch and colonial.

Following a prologue which sets up the non-linear travelogue narrative with a delightful departure lazzi, we experience Samoa simulacra. Familiar postcard representations of blue sea, blue sky and grass-skirted dancers manufacture desire for escape and excess. And while a long list of cultural protocols and etiquette projected on screen hints at the complexity and nuance of the host island cultures, these are cheerfully undermined with a final Virgin Blue proclamation, “if all else fails, just smile.”

Accompanied by a cheesy pop soundtrack, ensemble members Lisa Fa’alafi, Efeso Fa’anana and Leah Shelton playfully warp the tourist postcards and juxtapose the dream with the reality. A young woman (Fa’alafi) fantasizes her way through her decidedly unglamorous domestic duties with Prince and Whitney on walkman and her short brush broom as karaoke mike and dance companion. Performing a lipsynched show for tourists, a transgender fa’afafine’s (Fa’anana) elephantine eyelashes flutter with mock humility at her admiring audience as momentarily a thought bubble appears, “Oh, I forgot to feed the pigs.” A 19th century missionary’s wife (Shelton) confined in black lace and plastic represents the early Palagi (Europeans) and their erotic obsession with the ‘native night dancers.’ Breathlessly, she takes tea and enquires, “Is immoral behaviour still the fashion?”

In shorter pieces, Polytoxic never fails to entertain through the cheeky playfulness of multicultural choreography and a clear passion for connecting with audiences. And now, a full length production has allowed the ensemble’s natural flair for comedy to develop. This was most evident in the pure vaudeville of the trio of lipsynching divas who banter their way through a pre-show make-up ritual. In this sequence, the company’s finely tuned choreographic timing was effortlessly transferred to spoken word as their glorious gossip and idiosyncratic turns of phrase brought gales of laughter particularly from members of the Samoan community in the audience.

But behind all the laughs is a commitment to communicate the paradox and complexity of contemporary Polynesia not only through the clever narrative through-lines but also the performance’s choreographic range. The energizing high pace vitality of Polytoxic’s signature style is all the more alive silhouetted against the banal Hollywood rock-a-hula and MTV shimmying. While grounded in a contemporary bass beat and a lot of street style, Polytoxic’s choreographic attention to detail is evident in hand movements and here they often take centre stage: from traditionally inspired finger flourishes evolving from the ordinariness of pegging out clothes to erotically charged hand tableaux (those immoral night dancers again) framed by the porthole sized windows of the simple but inspired set.

Polytoxic happily take the piss out of the touristic and exoticising impulse but crucially give something in return—providing insight into the realities beyond the postcard grin. Fa’alafi, Fa’anana and Shelton are, as always, simply great to watch. And while the performance may be a shade too long, their invigorating style makes their “Polytoxic loves you” by-line so apt. It was clear the audience wanted to say, “Right back at you.”

Polytoxic, Teuila Postcards, creator-performers Efeso Fa’anana, Leah Shelton, Lisa Fa’alafi, Polytoxic in association with Strut and Fret Production House for the Afrika Pasifika Festival; Brisbane Powerhouse, March 18-19

Peter Brook loomed large over the 2006 Perth Festival. Brook mastered a ritual, story-telling frame to bind together “a little of this and a little of that”—theatre for “the brunch eating class”, as The Nation put it. He helped establish a ‘fringe on Broadway’ style, mixing elements of dance, mime, opera, physical expressivity and text which distilled elements of avant-garde dramaturgy into rich flavours within more traditionally acceptable narrative or character based formulae. Canadian director Robert Lepage is Brook’s peer and heir here, a revival of Lepage’s La trilogie des dragons (1987) headlined at the festival.

Dragon Trilogy

A sparse, plastic scenography supported Lepage’s epic scope, offering 3 snapshots of interconnected lives in different cities populated by French-Canadians, Canadian-Chinese, Canadian-Japanese and Anglo-Canadians, their families, and star-crossed lovers. The opening established the tone: 2 Francophone girls recreate their neighbourhood using shoeboxes laid out on a rectangle of gravel (Brook’s proverbial “empty space”, pregnant with potential), bounded by a concrete path along which bicycles, scooters, wheelchairs, wheelbarrows and skaters later zoom. Lepage uses this dialectic between centre and periphery in conjunction with that between fast and slow to alternate between scenes of quiet, centrally located contemplation or intensity, and those later encircled and rendered storm-like by multiple figures rushing about the edges.

Lepage’s now venerable show was remarkable for this effortlessly controlled use of space. The director remains however an unreformed Orientalist. Spectators learnt almost nothing about the Asian characters who ‘featured’, only about Canada’s projection of itself and Lepage’s vision of spiritual redemption through interaction with such outsiders. Orientalist clichés ranging from the opium addled, gambling Chinaman to the avaricious white-slaver abounded. Even Madama Butterfly was uncritically (and implausibly) relocated to US occupied Okinawa. Brook himself brushed aside cultural difference as largely irrelevant, and any dramaturg like Lepage who still quotes with approval “Antonin Artaud saw theatre as Eastern” must be viewed with suspicion by those of us critical of Western fantasies about the ‘mysterious East.’ Nevertheless, in reminding one of the scenographically and performatively expansive modes underpinning popularly successful epic works from The Mahabharata (1985) to Angels in America (1991) to Susie Dee’s Tower of Light (Melbourne, 1999), Lepage’s theatrical skills yield deeply moving work.

Chronicles—A lamentation

Although Polish company Teatr Piesn Kozla developed their expressive style from Jerzy Grotowski and other sources, Chronicles—A lamentation recalled Brook’s gently lulling, melancholy rituals more than Grotowski’s intense and abstracted Catholic mysteries. Amidst earthy hues, unpainted wood and brown costuming, 7 performers sat or stood in an otherwise empty space, each word, musical lament and exhaled expression directed at the audience as they rolled their weight from foot to foot like boxers or capoeira dancers. The Albanian and Polish text was sung in the polyphonic style popularised by the Mystère des voix bulgares CDs. In Edinburgh, spectators were given printed translations of the show’s text, but here the narrative was simply vocalised, demonstrating the error of Brook, Grotowski, Herbert Blau and others. Throughout the 1970s, artists claimed to isolate universally embodied forms of human expression. That Chronicles failed to communicate illustrated their mistake. The performative emphasis on actors speaking at the audience meant that Chronicles functioned as an intriguing collection of physical hieroglyphs which, while designed to have dramatic content, remained opaque to most Perth spectators.

The Drover’s Wives

Though far from Brook and Lepage, The Drover’s Wives also sustained a tension between abstraction, history and narrative. In director Sally Richardson’s dance theatre piece, 5 performers depicted the stories of 2 turn-of-the-century women abandoned by their husbands in the bush. The choreography mixed overt mime (hanging washing, etc) with simple, unison dance. The movement truly shone, though, when a dark sense of abstraction took over. In Richardson’s rendering of Barbara Baynton’s story from The Chosen Vessel (1902; Jonathan Mills’ source for his opera The Ghost Wife, 1999), an unseen swagman raped 1 of these women. The others transformed into beastly presences, on all fours with shoes on their hands, their stomping, leather-shod limbs menacing the wife before she was encircled by tree stumps, as though the very bush itself was attacking. Iain Grandage guided the show’s trajectory, his mildly Sondheim-esque score recalling Lennie Niehaus’s for Pale Rider (1985) and Unforgiven (1992) in its rhythmic combinations of folk instrumentation, strings and cut-down orchestral motifs. The Drover’s Wives was another popular work which frayed under intense scrutiny. Ostensibly an exploration of feminine isolation, the ensemble work rather suggested an oscillation between individual loneliness and feminine community, of women coming together to share domesticity and spatial play. It was moreover not clear why, of the 5 dancers, 2 played specific characters. Who were the other 3? Aspects of the first 2? Finally, the radically different sense of cultural space—and that of the stage design itself—as one moved from bright, projected landscapes of the inland plains to dense, dappled ironbark forests, was not explored. Nevertheless, the broad scope of the production and its sense of light engagement made for stimulating viewing.

Super Vision

Compared to the antiquarian neoclassicism of Chronicles, the Builders’ Association’s Super Vision glistened with modernity. Using digital projection, director Marianne Weems offered 3 sketches dealing with the transmutation of identity via computerised data: a New Yorker helping her Indian grandmother to archive and identify photographs from her life; a man using his son’s name to evade mounting debt; and an Indian-Ugandan repeatedly stopped by US Customs. Images of the son and live close-ups of the other performers were projected onto translucent screens effortlessly sliding in front of the main stage. Behind the performers curved a space bearing the projected sets. The intricate digital designs were laid on black in blocks of line, colour and text reminiscent of the London Underground map. Sound and music underscored the performance, the use of bird calls as an abstract, vaguely digital aural signature echoing Stories From the Nerve Bible (1992) by Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. Like much slick, postmodernist performance, the scenography and music gave the piece an oddly dated ambience—very mid 1990s, a production buoyed by the sharp rise in interest in the internet and new technologies which has yet to abate. Super Vision was more impressive in form than content, Weems contrasting the strangely flat sense of glossy ecstasy sustained by the efficiency of her onstage technology with ambivalent, mildly dystopian narratives. Even the father’s attempt to flee beyond technology to the Far North seemed borrowed from Anderson’s tale of setting out for the North Pole. A particularly perspicacious narrative detail though was that the traveller was initially identified as a security or health risk because of his racial and geographic origins, but was eventually given a royal welcome once his prosperity became apparent. In contemporary global capitalism, class can trump race. (See also Kate Vickers review on p27.)

Isabella’s Room

Alongside such supremely proficient, crafted works, it was Needcompany’s Isabella’s Room which provided challenging aesthetic defamiliarisation in its radical objectification of onstage materials. Director Jan Lauwers mixed an easy, off-hand performativity with dense allusions. Twentieth century history and life became a room, a clutter of objects and people. Characters died during the narrative, but did not leave the stage. The past remained.

The conceptual centre was an assemblage of African and Middle Eastern art works and objects which Vivianne De Muynck (Isabella) told spectators were first left to Lauwers by his real father, and then to the fictional Isabella by the paternal liar who raised her. Like everything in this production—actors, musical instruments, voices, words—these materials stayed immutably themselves, objects incapable of transformation yet thick with an opaque past. Unlike Lepage, Lauwers did not offer transcendence through sharing culture or history. Rather he relied on a knowing ignorance and distance. Stripped of their colonial contexts, the stone penis, the slave’s shackles and the Ashanti bronze remained simply that: objects about which one knew a little, but which one could not fully comprehend through a blithe, 90 minute show. As one of Isabella’s lovers said: “You’re a liar Isabella! You told me people were good!” Like theatre itself, Isabella’s Room was a world of lies, some beautiful—that she was raised on a lighthouse, betwixt land and sea—but also ugly—the rape of her mother, the bombing of Hiroshima transformed into an aesthetic image, “as if the sun had exploded and scattered its ash over the earth.”

Delivered as a series of interrupted monologues, the performance effected an easy familiarity, mixing storytelling, verbal poetry and physical interactions on an open, white stage. In sifting through the beauty, banality and ugliness of this century of war and love which Isabella endured, choreography was both invested in and yet discarded as wanting. Lauwers compares his dramaturgy to Jean Baudrillard’s description of postmodern society as “beyond the end”, characterised by “extreme phenomena.” Lauwers’ confusing yet entrancing project expressed the political, social, aesthetic and emotional ambiguity of this condition, in which history seems to have ended, yet, as the cast sang in the finale, suffering, life, love and violence “go on and on.” In the end, Lauwers’ concentrated, festive gobbets proved more weighty than Lepage’s 6-hour-long yet pleasingly digestible menu.

Ex Machina, La trilogie des dragons, director-devisor Robert Lepage, Claremont Showgrounds Feb 11-19; Teatr Piesn Kozla, Chronicles—A lamentation, director-designer Grzegorz Bral Octagon, Feb 14-18; Steamworks & Black Swan, The Drover’s Wives, director-devisor Sally Richardson, performer-choreographers Claudia Alessi, Felicity Bott, Shannon Bott, Jane Diamond, Danielle Micich, composer-performer Iain Grandage, designer Andrew Lake, costumes Zoe Atkinson, projections Ashley de Prazer, Danielle Micich; Playhouse, Feb 3-11; The Builder’s Association & Dbox, Super Vision, director/devisor/text Marianne Weems, His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 14-19; Needcompany, Isabella’s Room, director/script/set/lights Jan Lauwers. His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 14-18; 2006 Perth International Arts Festival, Feb 10-March 5

The hunting and gathering of grants is a tougher task then ever. It seems that there are fewer of them relative to the population of artists, their value in real terms declines annually and the competition increases as training institutions hatch each new generation of artists. As we await the emergence of a new breed of politician who can grasp the consequences of keeping most artists below the poverty line but can also face the futures that artists conjure, there are indications elsewhere of a growing responsiveness. A few signs of this break in the weather include the steady growth of the Theatre Board’s Mobile States touring initiative, operated by a consortium of venues; Melbourne City Council’s Arts House multi-platform program and its Culture Lab; expanded touring opportunities for innovative Australian work overseas and the development of reciprocal programs, like Breathing Space (see our InBetween Time feature in this edition) and Asialink’s Neon Rising Australia-Japan choreographic program; as well as a range of regional arts developments across Australia, strengthening the potential for greater cultural exchange between cities and country centres.

For contemporary performance practitioners these developments bring with them opportunities for finding new niches and new partners within Australia and beyond. A show that might have once enjoyed a brief season can now be kept in repertoire and reach far flung audiences. Of course, it’s not that easy. The old monoculture of arts funding, where finance for individuals, small companies and projects was sought from one or 2 sources is being replaced by a hive of potential partners (venues, programmers, producers, presenters, agents, consortia, festival directors). This has moved well beyond the challenge of writing and acquitting a grant application—and often you’ve still got to get that money in the bank before the other partners come into play. As was revealed in the RealTime-Performance Space forum on the need for Creative Producers (RT69, p40), artists need help to engage with an increasingly complex arts habitat, not only at home, but also as they venture out across borders and oceans. It’s good news then that the Theatre Board has recently announced three 2-year grants for producers at $50,000 per annum, possibly extendable to 3 years, to develop their own models of working with artists. If it works, this strategy could begin to fill a significant gap in the cultural ecology.

Australia’s major arts festivals and venues need to be part of that ecology, embracing innovation, seeding the audiences of the future. The Melbourne International Arts Festival, first under Robyn Archer and now Kristy Edmunds, leads the way, while Sydney Opera House’s The Studio has become a home for cutting-edge popular entertainment distinctly aimed at younger audiences but blended with more demanding material and cultural events that include NYID’s Blowback and dLux Media’s d>Art. Now Sydney Opera House has launched Adventures in the Dark, the kind of program of Australian, Pacific region and international works usually restricted to the arts festival circuit. Such initiatives offer openings for Australian artists and audiences but also provide rare opportunities for inspiration, dialogue and exchange.

Performing Lines

Performing Lines develops, produces and tours innovative new Australian performance nationally and internationally—across genres including physical theatre, circus, dance, indigenous and intercultural arts, contemporary opera, music, puppetry, and text-based theatre. Performing Lines website

Asked about the vision that drives Performing Lines, director Wendy Blacklock, speaks of a desire “to reflect the current trends in contemporary work as broadly as we possibly can.” Works range enormously, says Blacklock of the company’s 2005-06 program, from large scale (Stephen Sewell’s Three Furies: Scenes from the Life of Francis Bacon seen at Sydney, Adelaide and Perth Festivals) to solo works by Performing Lines regular, William Yang (Shadows, Objects for Meditation), and newcomer Rebecca Clarke (Unspoken, directed by Wayne Blair). The company has assisted Kate Champion (Force Majeure’s Already Elsewhere, Sydney Festival 2005) and, as part of the Mobile States consortium, is presenting emerging choreographer Tanja Liedtke (Twelfth Floor). Both choreographers conjure strange worlds out of the everyday. Powerful contemporary performance works are provided by version 1.0 (Wages of Spin), Branch Nebula (Paradise City, seen as a potent work-in-progress in 2005) and Urban Theatre Projects (Back Home, Sydney Festival 2006). Add composer-musicians Linsey Pollak (another Performing Lines stalwart) and Graeme Leak as The Lab and you’ve got a strong selection of touring potential, a good Sydney showing (deservedly after a tough decade for dance and performance in this city) and a wealth of partners—the country’s leading arts festivals, international festivals, Sydney Opera House, Melbourne’s Malthouse and, not least, the Mobile States consortium (see below).

Blacklock emphasises the importance of large-scale works, like the Nigel Jamieson-Paul Grabowsky Australian-Indonesian collaboration The Theft of Sita toured internationally by Performing Lines and generating profits that could be ploughed back into smaller works. However small-scale works, like William Yang’s, that travel extensively also yield income that supports works yet to prove themselves at home before venturing overseas. As well as nurturing new work, Performing Lines supports creative development but also assists Australian companies in the formation of partnerships in, for example says Blacklock, Wales, Argentina and New York.

Wendy Blacklock is particularly approving of Mobile States—Performing Lines is one of the consortium—declaring it an “extremely healthy” operation, supported by several Boards of the Australia Council, focused “on the work those Boards are interested in” and “growing every time it’s programmed.” As for audiences for touring productions, it’s always a challenge, says Blacklock, but the response to Mobile States has been good. As for regional audiences, Blacklock reports that presenters are “more and more curious, wanting to know about Performing Lines’ work.”

Speaking about the international market for Australian work and the kind of obligations that come with it, Blacklock thinks, “reciprocity will rise to the top of the agenda. We can’t keep sending out Australian work if we’re not able to reciprocate. We’d love to be involved in it.”

Mobile States

The consortium of Australia’s major independent contemporary performance presenters that runs Mobile States comprises Arts House (Melbourne), Brisbane Powerhouse, Performance Space (Sydney), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart). Other venues join the touring network for particular productions, eg De Quincey Company’s Nerve 9 included a season in Darwin.

The criteria for selection for Mobile States touring are that works should “employ multiple languages eg physical performance, projection, spoken word and contemporary music/sound; be conceptually and formally ambitious; contribute to current cultural and/or artform developments; be dramaturgically coherent and have attracted positive critique in press and by peers.” The aim is not just to tour innovative works but also “to provide opportunities for audiences across the country to experience contemporary Australian theatrical performance that would otherwise not be seen outside their home towns.” The Australia Council’s Theatre and Dance Boards and Inter-Arts Office have all committed to funding for Mobile States for 2006-2008, and Theatre to 2009. The Australia Council funds go to presenter organisations to subsidise their costs and additional assistance is sought from Playing Australia.

Mobile States represents a major breakthrough for contemporary performance touring (it has included Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela, Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia, De Quincey Company’s Nerve 9, and now version 1.0’s Wages of Spin and Tanja Liedtke’s Twelfth Floor). The number of shows is small, but given the context of much other movement of new work through arts centres and festivals, it is highly significant.
Sascha Budimski & Anton, Twelfth Floor

Tanja Liedtke’s Twelfth Floor

Developed by Adelaide-based artists in-residence at the Canberra Choreographic Centre, Twelfth Floor is the first Mobile States work to come from outside Sydney and Melbourne. Tanja Liedtke is a choreographer with a rapidly growing reputation and a lot of dance experience. She believes that the strength of Twelfth Floor grew from the opportunity to work with “5 performers I’m close to and respect enormously…and they’re 5 very distinctive individuals. For 2 months we ate, worked and lived together and that seemed a great premise for making the work, and in a city without many distractions. It became a work about human interaction and confinement, small people in their own small worlds.” Discussion, improvisation and research informed the creation of the work, including Sartre’s “Hell is other people…” from No Exit. The result: a show about a group of people confined in an unidentified institution, withdrawing, dreaming, surviving.

Liedtke feels that “a lot of Australian dance is very nice, but that’s not enough, I want to get to the underbelly, to see people as complex—affection and hostility are such great physical premises for dance.” She recalls that the process of creating the works was “not always easy; at times it was tense and tough, but everyone was up to it. After 6 weeks, 80% of the work was there and we rehearsed it for a week of performances (at the Choreographic Centre).”

Asked how the performers accommodated the demands of her choreographic language, Liedtke replies that they had been in her earlier, shorter works but were also bringing new things to Twelfth Floor. As for that language, Liedtke says: “I work from a visual sense of my own body and its history… It’s a long body…long-limbed, very clear and articulate. I always play with what my body can do…” Music is a vital component of the work, in this case created by DJ Trip (of Adelaide’s New Pollutants) in the workshop.

As for influences and inspiration, Tanja Liedtke says her considerable experience with Garry Stewart’s ADT (1999-2003) taught her a great deal about physicality and energy; then she turned to Lloyd Newson of the UK’s DV8 Physical Theatre (2003, 2005) for the conceptual development she felt she needed: “They’re 2 fantastic artists and my work is about tying what I learned from them together.”

As well as choreographing for ADT’s formative Ignition series, Liedtke’s recent work includes 2 pieces for Tasdance (Enter Twilight 2004) and, forthcoming, Always Building, 2006); a short work about angels for Brigit Keil’s Akademie des Tanzes in Mannheim, Germany and 2 works for Brazil’s Ballet Contemporaneo. The concept of building (“and collapse and rebuilding and, as always, based in the body”) is central to her newest creation, which will also show at the Purcell Room in London’s Southbank in May 2007. Liedtke, like many Australian artists, is more likely to be seen overseas than at home. However, the Mobile States tour of Twelfth Floor offers her the excitement of getting her collaborators back together again and a rare chance for national exposure on a 5-city tour.
Jacklyn Bassanelli, Pink Denim in Manhattan

Jacklyn Bassanelli, Pink Denim in Manhattan

Arts House, Melbourne

Melbourne City Council in tandem with the Victorian government is focused on developing venues for the arts: Arts House uses North Melbourne Town Hall, Horti Hall and Meat Market. But it’s not just a matter of programming venues, says Steven Richardson, Artistic Director of Arts House (the Team Leader is Sue Beal), but of nurturing works through the Culture Lab program, which will then become the material for those programs. Culture Lab provides “time, money, space, advice, administration and marketing from the very early ideas stage through to final production. But the approach in these early days”, says Richardson, “is minimalist rather than heavily interventionist.” He doesn’t see Arts House yet in the role of creative producer, rather working with artists with existing agendas and helping them broker partnerships. He sees Arts House’s own partnerships as vital, as a consortium member of Mobile States. Media artist Lynette Wallworth spent time with Culture Lab before heading off to Inbetween Time in Bristol.

Richardson describes the Arts House program as involving “a multi-dimensional process”, with “a curatorial role responsive to the sector.” Artists are supported by Arts House’s own grants program, the funds coming from Melbourne City Council as well as Arts Victoria: “We’re really like a department of the Council.”

What Arts House puts together is “a truly multi-platform program”—visual arts exhibitions, theatre, dance, media arts and contemporary performance. Richardson emphasises that this means a program which can be variously focused, for example the dance and physical performance prominent in the first half of 2006 might not be immediately repeated: “the spotlight will then be on other forms, magnifying their significance.” As well, gaps in the program can be filled from elsewhere in the sector, including interstate work: “we’re keen to foster dialogue”, as is evident in the presence of Sydney’s Sidetrack and others in the program for the first half of 2006.

Arts House also represents the many different ways that a venue can engage with practices but also with communities. There’s a desire “to dissolve the boundaries between audiences and other forms of engagement…to examine the role of arts centres and the relationships between arts centres and to include projects where the artist works with the community,” says Richardson.

The wry title for the program for the first half of 2006 is “Art In a Dry Climate”, reflecting the challenges faced by artists in Australia, but facing them with a wealth of new Australian work that includes version 1.0, Jacklyn Bassanelli (see p41), Ming-Zhu Hii and Sidetrack, a multimedia installation by Cicada (see p24), and Body Corporate, new music from Dead Horse (see p30), a featured season of physical performance, Body Corporate, that includes dance (Chunky Move, The Fondue Set, Tanja Liedtke, Sue Healey Company, OX and others) and the ReelDance film festival. Melbourne City Council’s Arts House is an admirable innovation for nurturing artists and audiences locally and with an intelligent, networked national perspective.

Adventures in the Dark

Philip Rolfe’s vision of contemporary performance includes a wide audience. Each of the works in the first Adventures in the Dark program, says Rolfe, can be “crowd pleasers…but with a very different feel from The Studio program.” Rolfe says of Sydney Opera House’s new program, “It’s an artistic statement.” It’s about the kind of international work—theatrically and conceptually adventurous—that Rolfe thinks audiences should be able to see, free of arts festival constraints.

Rolfe is Executive Producer, Performing Arts at the Sydney Opera House. He and co-producer Wendy Martin have come up with Adventures in the Dark, a body of works that if presented all at once would be like a large slice of some classy international arts festival. But here works are spread across the year and instead of an easy-to-miss-or-access 3 or 4 night festival stand they’ll play anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks. The program comprises significant overseas artists either not seen in Sydney—Improbable, Emio Greco/PC, Mikel Rouse—or those warranting more substantial seasons than they’ve had up to now—Ruby Hunter in Ruby’s Story and Brian Lipson in A Large Attendance in the Antechamber.

Rolfe emphasises that Adventures in the Dark is not just wed to the Playhouse (site of most of the 2006 program) but will use other Opera House sites including its outdoors in years to come: “the program is open to what fits thematically and intellectually.” However, the Playhouse has been revamped, its stage size increased 20% to accommodate physical theatre and dance and it’s been technically improved.

Coming up soon on the program is the renowned UK performance company, Improbable. Rolfe relishes their “reliance on old theatre skills you rarely see these days. The work is not multimedia, although technologically supported. You really see what human beings are capable of in a theatrical context.” Rolfe likes artists “who deal with tradition as well as with new ideas”, and this is clearly key to the selection of works for 2006, including Melbournian Brian Lipson and UK companies, Ridiculusmus and Improbable.

Rolfe notes that the first program is missing an Asian connection, which he hopes to remedy soon. However, he’s pleased with the presence of Vula (The Conch), a work from New Zealand with a director, Nina Nawalowalo, well versed in European theatricality but with a South Pacific vision—here oceanic in concept and performed with great volumes of water.

Music theatre also features in the program in Ruby’s Story with Ruby Hunter, Archie Roach and Paul Grabowksy, and 2 works by American multimedia composer-performer Mikel Rouse—Music for Minorities and, as seen at several Australian festivals, but not Sydney’s, Failing Kansas.

Dance comes in the shape of Norway’s Jo Stromgren Kompani in The Hospital about 3 nurses in “sadomasochistic cycle of pain infliction and relief” and, from the Netherlands, Emio Greco/PC’s award-winning Double Points: One &Two focusing on synchronicity and discord in taut dance duets. ADT’s Garry Stewart will join Nigel Jamieson for Honour Bound, the premiere of a work bringing together dance, film, theatre and aerial performance to confront the injustice of the USA incarcerations in Guantanamo Bay.

Philip Rolfe is firmly opposed to the idea that audiences will only take on ‘festival shows’ during an arts festival and not year-round: Adventures in the Dark offers audiences an inviting challenge to expand their vision of the performing arts.

For many a year in the 90s the prospect for a contemporary performance touring network seemed seriously remote, Playing Australia looked limited and the short-lived Made to Move was, tragically, disastrous for dance. While grant levels remain low, the opportunity to disperse, find new niches and new fuel has grown, linking art habitats, promoting mutualism, and providing new species of hybrid performance and installation places in which to grow, maybe even prosper. Mobile States, and those on the Theatre Board who initiated it, and the vision of the likes of Sarah Miller, Fiona Winning and Wendy Blacklock, and those who joined the consortium, have shown that contemporary performance in all its mutating guises can find and generate audiences—surely they’re ready for it.

Mobile States, Tanja Liedtke, Twelfth Floor, Adelaide Festival Centre May 10-13; PICA, Pert, May 17-20; Performance Space, Sydney, May 24-27; Arts House, Melbourne, May 31-June 3; Theatre Royal (with Salamanca Arts Centre), Hobart, June 8-10

Jim Lasko is the Artistic Director of the Chicago based, Redmoon Theater, a company which has developed an enviable reputation for site-specific spectacle theatre. Redmoon’s artistic process is distinctly collaborative. It involves a panoply of audiences, performers, puppet makers, gadgets, objects, sound, stage and technical designers. Central to the company’s aesthetic is the creation of cultural event as spectacle, transforming public spaces that are “decreasingly used and increasingly neglected.” The Redmoon artistic team uses a site to shape the spectacle’s aesthetic, theme and characters. Recently Sue Moss met Jim Lasko, freelance director Jessica Wilson (formerly of Terrapin), and designer of surreal stage machines, Joey Ruigrok van der Werven whose recent collaborations include Stalker, Marrugeku and Urban Theatre Projects.

JW I visited the United States in 2003 to look at non-text based companies. I met Jim and was inspired by how Redmoon worked with actors, the aesthetics of their site-specific work and the size of their workshop [this comprises 18,000 square feet of converted warehouse space that accommodates both the administrative staff and the enormous ‘build shop’ where sets and props are constructed]. The performers work with objects and materials, generating a spontaneous process and exciting results.

Redmoon works with objects and processes of transformation in public spaces. Through their collaborations the company creates work that has a solid dramatic arc and doesn’t depend on a literal writing process. They offer magic, transformation and possibility.

I floated the idea of working together and Jim invited me to work on Redmoon’s 2003 summer production. This enabled us to witness one another working and handling creative and collaborative processes. As a result of this positive creative working relationship, Jim and Joey were invited to Tasmania to explore the possibilities of a collaborative theatre project in Hobart. At the moment we are in conversation about a project with the working title of Dream Masons.

Jim, what was the genesis of Redmoon. How did your background lead you to this place with this company?

JL I grew up a ‘feral’ child and didn’t read a book until 11th grade despite living in a rigorously intellectual house. I was a physical child, passionate about being part of the physical world and interested in making things.

Once I saw an amazing thing where a bird attacked another bird. My impulse was I had to tell my friends. At some level this need to tell defines what I am and always have been.

I left graduate school where I was undertaking a PhD in theatre. I became enamored with the practice of making and devising new theatre shows based on images. I began to make work that was both object and puppet heavy. In the course of doing this work I came to embrace a lot of shelved ancient theatrical forms—pageantry, puppetry, acrobatics, circus, live music and clown. I wanted to revitalise them, as these forms represented vestiges of my college undergraduate experience.

While studying a philosophy major I thought a lot about the civic role that theatre played in ancient Greek society. Theatre is increasingly marginalised by television, film and mass media. How could I make theatre relevant and bring it back into the centre of culture? Redmoon is committed to the creation of massive cultural events that transform public space in the way that ancient theatre used to. Spectacle theatre gathers people together in a public space where they can share, react and engage together in a way that isn’t mediated.

How do you align that public immersion with your philosophical premise of returning theatre to the centre?

The ideal is that the event attracts and gathers people in public space which has become decreasingly used, and increasingly neglected. In the Chicago context, public space feels more dangerous; people stay home and create increasingly more isolated spaces for themselves. Getting together in the same spot live and by itself, that act is of value. The shows always have a celebration of the act of transformation—that something can be other than it appears to be is an inherently hopeful message.

You want people to look at the experience and call into question something of their own notions about public space, their own lives and what’s possible within humanity. Each production tries to use recycled materials, and make objects from the detritus of public culture. For example what appears as a flight of bats transmutes into tattered umbrellas. This leads an audience to reconsider what is garbage and what is art. At its best spectacle theatre involves deep collaborations with a community, deep insights and research into the community where the work is held and formed. This leads to the rubicon experience, where the ideal meets the realities of finance, the attitudes of city council and public officials. The creative solutions that come out of the process are actually the show. We create a collaborative action outline, a one-page document that walks through some of the major spectacle moments that we want to achieve. The issue of aspiring to the impossible is the constant subtext of a spectacle.

Another theme is the seeming impossibility of the world that is being created. The audience is invited to be willing participants, energetically willing this thing to happen through negating a logical part of the brain. When this happens, the audience become co-creators of the event.

The spectacle can only happen through gathering a team that can contribute to the realisation of the event. Joey Ruigrok van der Werven from Sydney works with Redmoon as a technical designer. I first met Joey through his work, designing surreal stage machines, with the Dutch company Dogtrope. For me, the work of Dogtrope crystallised what was possible.

I gather a number of people interested in building contraptions. They experience the fun of collecting materials and ideas without restriction on what is possible. We made one project titled The Botanical Gardens of Contraptions. The spectators were fascinated. Contraptions are machines in themselves, seemingly innocent, but we can imbue them with story and spirit.

Object theatre plus characters involves the emotions of love and conflict. We are more driven by our surroundings than we think. For example the world floods and we work through the object to arrive at the emotional response of the characters. There is a relationship between character and object. As an extension of the character, the object describes the character’s circumstance. The audience can see themselves.

Building contraptions and objects has social value. Increasingly the world becomes more mysterious through objects such as transistors and iPods. Object theatre can demystify something that can look intimidating. People are then able to transform and look at things through new ideas. When you bring this form of theatre into public spaces which people occupy and walk in everyday, then it is given back to them in a completely different way. It’s transformed and can never be the same. “Remember when…?”

How do you assess a potential performance building or site for the first time?

When I approach a building or see a new site, I watch the way people use the site and understand its history. The creative process involves decisions about what you want to intervene with, accent, defy or augment.

I visualise great, grand scale images. For example I lift up a little boat (using structural rigging techniques) and it sails over the audience. This boat also provides opportunity for character and story development. There could for example, be a farmer, a flock of sheep, windows at night, a wife and water.

JL Social idealism and spectacle have to eventually collide with reality. In spectacle theatre we have to figure out the weight of the boat. Our theatre is grounded in things that are so tangibly real and dangerous we have no choice but to meet reality. Our social idealism smashes against reality.

JW In relation to this type of work being made in Australia, and the idea of creating idealism about what’s possible, that has a national resonance. The wonder of transformative theatre is what happens when the bounds of the normal become abnormal.

With the support of the Australia Council, The Dream Masons will be developed in 2006, produced by Salamanca Art Centre in collaboration with Jessica Wilson as Creative Producer.

Melbourne performances took a turn towards the unfamiliar as 2006 commenced, several toying with form to produce exciting new visions of theatricality. Jacklyn Bassanelli’s solo performance Unholy Site elicited sharply contrasting responses from audiences, centred on the curious and unusual choices made in the formal aspects of the work’s presentation. The show’s subject is not one which would prove difficult to most theatre goers, offering a modern reworking of the tale of Antigone. But the setting in which this narrative is articulated proved to be unsettling, confusing or alienating for many.

Unholy Site

The entire monologue was presented for its small audience as a pre-recorded video image shot in a single take. Sound and lighting were operated by the performer herself while on screen, and even the panning and zooming of the camera were under her control. The screened image was played on a smallish monitor with a stereo player attached, and to one side stood the tripod-mounted camera responsible for the taping. It was quickly apparent that the video was shot in the same space it was now being played, and as the narrative unfolded a number of complex themes could be seen to circulate around this tableau.

Foremost for this viewer was the question of presence and absence: if theatre’s “liveness” is what distinguishes it from many other artforms, what are we to make of a performance whose liveness is conspicuously made absent? And what replaces that sense? Can the unfolding of a narrative as enacted onscreen be seen to have a certain live quality of its own? Unholy Site in this manner took on the air of a posthumous epistle, a letter from the dead as well as a bottled message washed up on our shore, origin unknown. Since it was never clear whether Bassanelli would ever turn up as an actual live performer, or if she was even present in the building, this ambiguity created a kind of double consciousness, an awareness of things deliberately made invisible, a ghosting effect.

A second, interrelated issue raised by the mode of presentation was of the importance of temporality and duration to every narrative. With the tools of the video’s recording so prominently displayed (and still switched on), there was a Marie Celeste type atmosphere wherein we felt that we had just missed the live enacting of events onscreen, while the narrative itself seemed to indicate that these events took place a long time ago. This intentional blurring of the chronology of the story again produced a consciousness of the elsewhere, and elsewhen, without providing any certainty to interpretation.

For critics and audiences for whom story is all, I can understand how this mode of presentation could be seen as a failed experiment. Certainly, the small screen, amateur camerawork and coldness of the image didn’t foreground the text, but at times made it secondary to the site of technology. But for me, the power of the performance was only enhanced by this emphasis on the act of display. After opening, however, the show’s creators reworked the piece for subsequent showings, reintroducing live performance to the piece in order to make clearer the focus of the narrative. Certainly, though the effect would be different, I don’t imagine this alternate version would be any the worse for its changes. Bassanelli’s ability as a performer is manifestly of a standard able to carry the work as a live rendition, with a deftness and nuanced delivery apparent from the outset.

One Way Street

Another solo monologue with more than enough to fascinate and intrigue was Theatre @ Risk’s One Way Street. Penned by Scottish playwright David Grieg, One Way Street is a peripatetic walking tour of Berlin as delivered by a very unreliable guide. An English ex-pat, John Flannery, takes us through the history of that historically layered metropolis, but along the way his own history constantly intrudes upon his narration. We gradually discover a character whose personal past is densely woven into the concrete pavements, bullet-pocked walls and skeletal trees of the city, and our experience of the physical space of Berlin becomes inseparable from the experiences of the teller. Added to this is another level of complexity: Flannery’s status as a (somewhat unsuccessful) writer means that the act of composing his narrative becomes one of the focal points of the play; the writing of history is as much of concern as how that history is to be understood. It’s a rare theatrical example of what Canadian theorist Linda Hutcheon has termed “historiographic metafiction”; that is, postmodern stories which seek to find ways of recapturing history while remaining aware of the status of all history as narrative, and thus susceptible to interpretation. As Flannery attempts to find meaning in the history of the post-WWII city, his reconstruction of events also becomes an attempt to realise the sense of his own past, of what has produced the miserable excuse for a life he finds himself living.

If all of this sounds terribly grim, it isn’t. Grieg’s script handles its subject with a laughing seriousness, and is at times very, very funny. The humour is handled in surprisingly capable fashion by performer Simon Kingsley Hall, whose extensive previous work with Theatre @ Risk has never suggested his abilities as a comic actor. The role, in the hands of another, could easily have slipped into caricature and excess. Over the fairly brief duration of the work, Kingsley Hall slips effortlessly into more than a dozen different roles and accents, distinguishing each immediately with carefully chosen physicalities that never bleed into one another. It’s probably his finest performance to date, and suggests an exponential leap in skill for this performer.

One Way Street was presented as the centrepiece for a series of works under the banner of 20th Century Close Up, all devoted to exploring the history of the 20th century through innovative forms. The remainder of the works making up the season were offered as playreadings, and were a mixed bunch. The opener, Futur De Luxe by Swiss playwright Igor Bauersima, for instance, was a confused story that didn’t live up to its writer’s promise. Other works included plays by Juan Mayorga, Antony Sher and an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

The Butterfly Seer

Rushdie seems to have been flavour of the month in Melbourne of late, with Indija Mahjoeddin’s The Butterfly Seer taking as its inspiration a segment of the author’s controversial The Satanic Verses. A beautiful prophet is called in a vision to take the people of her town on a pilgrimage across the ocean, and treks across India towards the promised land. The story reaches its climax when Ayesha arrives at the Arabian Sea and leads her followers beneath the waters, watched by an unbeliever who nonetheless has trailed her journey but finally finds his lack of faith prevents him from taking the literal ‘final plunge.’ The dialectic of the piece is a very relevant one: the drama unfolds as a conflict between belief and scepticism, with the ambiguous resolution suggesting a kind of aporia or incommensurability between absolute faith and modern doubt.

Of great interest, however, was the mode of performance chosen by Mahjoeddin. The Butterfly Seer is presented in the form of traditional Sumatran opera known as Randai. Each section of the work commences with a musical performance accompanied by a sung rendition of the story, and then moves onto a performed drama. The style of this drama is highly coded according to the conventions of Randai: characters circle one another, perform with exaggerated gestures and poses, and the interaction is almost always in the form of conflict, whether a verbal debate or physical melee. The show also incorporates puppetry, poetry and martial arts. The result is disarmingly unfamiliar: highly ritualistic and formalised, yet spellbindingly original. The musical component of the program was impeccably delivered, led by multi-instrumentalist Adrian Sherriff as well as Sumatran guest artist Admiral Datuak Rangkayo and musicians Rendra Freestone and Stephen Grant. The physicality of the percussion-based score was of a visceral intensity, musicians often playing their own clothes or indeed bodies alongside the dozens of instruments utilised. The evening’s second half, in fact, began with one performer guiding his audience through the traditional sequence of shouts, claps and thigh-slapping which marks the transition between scenes, and all in attendance were soon joining in with gusto.

Mahjoeddin’s work was a stimulating experiment in applying a form of performance rarely seen in this country to a tale with strong contemporary resonances, and the outcome was mixed. I was initially wary of the performance styles, until I realised that the exaggerated acting and excessively posed stances were in fact conventions of Randai rather than the result of awkward directing. Mahjoeddin explicitly sought the feedback of her audiences, asking them to consider which of the various conventions of the particular form on offer might profitably be used to further effect within the Australian performance landscape, and this commitment to producing a dialogue between different cultural traditions is a deeply encouraging one.

Unholy Site, writer-performer Jacklyn Bassanelli, additional text by Chris Kohn, John Howard, directors Jacklyn Bassanelli, Cat Wilson, dramaturgy Cat Wilson, Margaret Cameron, production concept Margaret Cameron, composer-performer Brea Acton, sound Tom Dunstan, lighting Luke Hails; The Croft Institute, Jan 20-28

Theatre @ Risk, One Way Street, writer David Grieg, performer Simon Kingsley Hall, director Chris Bendall, producer Kirrilly Brentnall, design Isla Shaw, lighting Nick Merrylees, music Kelly Ryall; fortyfive downstairs, Feb 7-12

The Butterfly Seer, director-librettist Indija Mahjoeddin, composer & musical director Adrian Sherriff, performers Tegan Newman-Howell, Wayne Van Keren, Indija Mahjoeddin, puppetry Carol Chong, music performed by Adrian Sherriff, Admiral Datuak Rangkayo, Rendra Freestone and Stephen Grant; song & storytelling by Elizabeth Sisson, production/sound by Todd Maher, lighting Cassandra J Leigh; La Mama Theatre, Carlton Courthouse, Feb 21-25

Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra is a novel set in the post-lunar landing era of Soviet cosmonautics. It is the aetiological narrative point that we can follow through to the space program’s inevitable decline in the form of the Mir space station saga, which really seems to sum up other post-Cold War Soviet aspirations. This comic book sense of decline provides the tone for Dorney’s adaptation of Pelevin’s novel, and for Kieran Swann’s design of the Restaged Histories project’s production of Omon Ra. The Soviet space academy is a junkyard, strewn with electronic contraptions—vacuum cleaners, tape recorders, flotsam and jetsam from various conked-out machines—hailing from decades already slightly more dated than the 1970s ‘present’ they are representing.

The narrative ostensibly follows Omon (Anthony Standish) and best friend Mitiok (Leon Cain) as they compete to enter the academy’s training programme for a lunar landing. In essence, though, the piece is more of a philosophical reflection on the human soul. Russian sci-fi, if Pelevin can be read as paradigmatic, is a popular forum for theosophical interrogation in the Godless (post) communist state. Omon’s journey, he learns, is to be a suicide mission: futile and humorous. His journey to the dark side of the moon (and yes, there are Pink Floyd gags here) is also a journey to the dark side of the human soul: that black space where, especially in an atheist culture, questions of transubstantiation, reincarnation or the life hereafter cannot be answered…well, not until you’ve been there.

Director Nic Dorward attacks Dorney’s text with characteristic zeal, and the ensemble cast (which also includes Jonathan Brand and Christopher Sommers) is very strong, providing kinetic, intelligent performances that are most impressive when they are engaging with the piece’s droll Russian humour. There is evidence here of meticulous rehearsal room interrogation of the script’s physical potentialities. This has become the company’s trademark, in a sense—the thread of continuity that links the refreshingly disparate histories that the company seeks to restage.

For all the verve and passion inherent in the team’s approach, there is still a confused quality to the work that cannot be put down to frenetic interpretation or adaptation of Pelevin’s original text. I’m the last person ever to advise Dramaturgy 101 to theatre-makers, but there is some forensic dramaturgical microsurgery needed here to help clarify narrative strands and some basic premises of the action. Other sections (like the space flight itself) are too long and ponderous, and impede the narrative flow just as the play—like the Soviet space programme, and Omon himself—should be hurtling toward its conclusion.

Still, it’s reassuring to watch a group of dedicated emerging artists commit themselves to boundary-stretching and eclectic text-based theatre. Hell, I’m just glad to see someone tackle sci-fi on the Brisbane stage! There is a ‘European’ feel to this company’s aesthetic (and repertoire) thus far that reminds me a bit of the sort of theatre that was taking place at the Gasworks and Napier Street theatre spaces in Melbourne in the 90s. The company deserves the support and attention it is currently receiving and, with some astute and unsentimental dramaturgical excision, should hone this piece into the sharp, chaotic piece of sci-fi absurdism it promises to be.

Restaged Histories project, Omon Ra, adapted by Marcel Dorney from the novel by Victor Pelevin, director Nic Dorward, performers Jonathan Brand, Leon Cain, Christopher Sommers, Anthony Standish designer Kieran Swann, lighting designer Carolyn Emerson, composer Robert D Clark, soundscapes Luke Lickfold; VISY Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Jan 24-Feb 4

Think Cambodia and a puzzle box opens: a country called Kampuchea of killing fields, land mines, B52 bombing raids and behind it nom de Cambodge, a French colonial outpost of Indochine; of wide boulevards lined with flaming poinciana trees shading pastel stucco villas with shutters, the world of Marguerite Duras’ memory and the purported and convincing setting for two of Tintin’s adventures. Far, far behind that, the early medieval Kingdom of the Khmer centred on the vast complex of Angkor Wat, and the thwarted attempt to sack much of its best statuary by no less than Andre Malraux to fill the musees of Paris. Then come forward again to the 90s and you find a United Nations controlled country, UNTAC, awash with pale blue berets and overwhelming Amercanisation, which has led inexorably to the creation of a parallel economy conducted in US dollars in the reopened hotels for the internationals—the peacekeepers and the non-government organisations—the other for the shattered locals conducted in riel at the markets.

In Cambodia now, all these nomenclatures exist simultaneously in a country that has been transformed through a violent revolution which saw it regress to the year zero. Today it is full of ghosts but is vibrant, quietly thriving and radiating hope. I can only speak of my impressions of 2 weeks in Phnom Penh and the imperative 3-day pass visit to Angkor Wat. Cambodia is the only country whose national flag features a man made structure, the distinctive silhouette of Angkor Wat, the country’s most dependable treasure which survived the ravages of Pol Pol despite being a Khmer Rouge stronghold. Unlike the Taliban, the KR did not blow up their country’s monuments but instead razed the French hotel built within the park precinct. My tuk tuk driver Mr Chuu, who told me this, agreed it was one of their few better moments.

Angkor is a vast gated manicured park with stone causeways across wide moats or barays leading to surprisingly intact and comprehensive ruins of temples and the fortified city of Angkor Thom which at its peak supported a population of a million people at a time when the population of London was 50,000. Today it supports a similar number of people, paying their admission and respects and listening attentively to the local guides conversing in French, Japanese, German, English and Korean. Amongst the tourists are the Cambodian pilgrims for whom Angkor Wat is a source of pride and national identity. Almost every time you come through yet another Escher like stone doorway there are monks making offerings and burning incense before statues swathed in saffron cloths.

Along the road leading to the park and in the art streets surrounding the National Art School in Phnom Penh are shop after shop selling luridly painted images of Angkor at sunset, sunrise and by moonlight, and masonry workshops awash with copies of Angkorian statuary and bas reliefs. In the city and the countryside there is a rich vernacular naïve tradition of sign art, known as chook tip (viz perfect or realistic painting), a legacy of a preliterate society overlaid with socialist realism, pictures to advertise services and wares and broadcast warnings and the recent weapons amnesty is depicted in gory detail on large painted billboards.

The legacy of UNTAC is the plethora of NGOs—amongst a population of 13 million, there are 2,000. However they have been instrumental in the revival of all forms of art and craft, in particular a completely hand made fine silk industry. The leader in the field is Artisans D’Angkor, based in Siem Reap. In their painting workshop tables of artists sitting in rows copy the great works of ancient Khmer art onto silk with fine brushes in meticulous servitude to tradition. Obviously there is a place for such crafts but, combined with the hegemony of The Royal School of Fine Arts still dominated by teachers who studied in Europe in the 60s (sent by the Communist regime to refine the propaganda) and now locked in a time warp, the space for contemporary art is limited and tenuous. But it does exist and was recently revealed at the Visual Arts Open or VAO.

VAO

Curated by key artists Linda Saphan and Pich Sopheap, VAO ran for 3 weeks in the capital, Phnom Penh. It was the culmination of 7 months work—to bring the artists together, hold a fundraising auction, produce a tri-lingual catalogue (Khmer, French, English) and create an excellent website—to show Cambodians doing it for themselves without an NGO in sight. The VAO began with a group show in a Vernissage Khmer style at the New Art Gallery followed by 2 weekends of openings at 6 other spaces, 2 of which were galleries (Sunrise Gallery and Popil Photo), the others smart restaurants, a bakery, a garden bar and a jewelry store situated in the older up-market area of the central city. The VAO was recognized by the artists and the public as a success—hundreds attended the openings and over US$15,000 worth of work sold, making the artists happy and affirming their trust in the vision of Saphan and Sopheap.

The 19 artists exhibiting represented greatly varied backgrounds, generations and historical experiences. Two are venerated old men, Vann Nath and Svay Ken; to be old is a rarity in itself. Vann Nath is one of only 7 people to survive the notorious Khmer Rouge Tuol Sleng prison. He paints over and over again recurring nightmares of the horrors he witnessed: the instruments and methods of imprisonment, torture and execution obsessively detailed but with an individual expressive quality that has developed over time. Svay Ken is of the same generation, a self taught artist who paints still life of everyday things invested by deep care with an iconic significance: armchairs, oil lamps, rows of rubber thongs, a power box—in soft, buttery pastels—simple things that are in danger of being forgotten in the rush to build the new Cambodia.

Amongst the younger generation of established artists born in the 70s: Leang Seckon, Linda Saphan and Sopheap Pich grew up under the Pol Pot regime. Seckon was educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and has crafted an idiosyncratic mixed media approach: paintings incorporating stitching and padding and collages using documents and old photographs to express his family history and challenge notions of gender and sexuality. Seckon has already established a strong profile in the region and is sought by collectors and afficionados in the local foreign community.

Saphan and Pich became part of the refugee exodus to Canada and America and were educated in Montreal, Masachussetts, Chicago and Paris. They personify one of the most dynamic elements in Cambodia now, the returning diaspora. Saphan’s work is explicitly postmodernist and addresses ethnicity and history. In her series based on Cambodian sign art of the 60s, she has repainted celebrities with black faces to draw attention to the whitening of faces in received imagery, and to return to Cambodians a sense of the beauty within themselves. She also works in other media and her In the beginning is an elegy for a lost time. In a simple wooden box tray filled with rice, flattish round seed pods are arranged to form the numerals 1970, the year the Americans began the carpet bombing of Cambodia. On the face of each pod Saphan has fixed a portrait photograph of an individual surrounded by a frame of white paint, the Buddhist mourning colour. The seed pods are used in a traditional children’s game, Angkun, played at New Year.

It reminded me of a Japanese raked memorial garden. The photographs are all celebrations of the good life in the time before—the Siahanouk era—which, for Saphan’s family, the patrician Khmer Chinese was the Golden Age when Phnom Penh was “the pearl of Asia.”

After working as a painter and sculptor, Pich has found his métier and materials in using bamboo and rattan to create exquisite 3-dimensional abstract forms which recall the living local tradition of weaving baskets, hats and fishtraps. The interest in a sensuous vessel form was evident in some of his earlier paintings and when he began working in collage papier mache over a bamboo armature he reconnected with his own past in the remote rural provinces, and the improvised artisanship learnt from his father who had taught himself metal casting from first principles to make simple cutlery. Pich shares that passion for primary making, testing the limits of these structures in often large scale works that hold their shape, as if they might have grown that way.

Vandy Rattana, a young law student and novice photographer was born after Pol Pot. His series of intimate interiors, shot mostly in a condemned building returned individuality to the marginalised people who have made this building their home. Other photographs are of his family and, in the portrait of his mother, you can just discern one of those paintings of Angkor Wat hanging on the wall behind her. According to Pich Sopheap, the neocolonialists don’t expect to pay more than US$30 for modern Cambodian Art, the going rate for Angkor Wattage and idealised scenes of life in the countryside—watercolours of diligent farmers and busy fishermen in their picturesque boats, faces unidentified, shaded by their reassuringly timeless conical coolie hats. The VAO challenged this and asserted the position of the Cambodian contemporary artist; it eschewed the merely exotique, resisted a nationalist agenda and provided a space for the artists to declare themselves as individuals.

Visual Arts Open, curators Linda Saphan, Pich Sopheap; Phnom Penh, Dec 9-31, 2005

Suzanne Spunner visited Cambodia as the guest of her good friend, Larry Strange, Director of the Cambodian Development Resource Institute.

I grew up in an environment where there was art around. In our street in Elkington, Melbourne, where my family settled after migrating from Scotland, there lived 3 artists, and as a boy I used to go around and visit their studios. The Rubbos were family friends, and my parents collected art. At university, I studied comparative literature, my first great love being Russian modernism from the 1920s. But at the same time I became increasingly involved with the visual arts, curating exhibitions, writing and editing reviews, and sitting on the committee of the George Paton Gallery [a key player in Melbourne’s contemporary art scene from the mid 1970s]. So, although the love of literature has never left me, I found there was more possibility for working in different ways in the visual arts.

Latin America

Over many years, you lived in Latin America, curating several exhibitions and publishing a great deal on the art of that region. How did you develop your interest in Latin American culture?

I had always been interested in other cultures, it’s a familial thing. In relation to Latin America, my interest was instigated by a friend, an anthropologist writing a book on Shamanism in Colombia. He invited me over to Colombia in about 1981. I was teaching European modernism at Sydney University but I went over during the Christmas break, and I came in touch with cultures I knew nothing about. I was struck by how incredibly literate, albeit in a totally different way, the people were. Over 3 visits, Colombia left a profound impression on me. Although I’d travelled through the Pacific, there was no comparison to my immersion in Colombia in terms of challenging Eurocentric ways of thinking. In 1984 I resigned my academic job, and went to live there. After travelling extensively through Latin America I was offered a university teaching job in Mexico. I had thrown in the towel on my original PhD—on relations between the Soviet and German avant garde—but I changed my topic to take in the work I had been doing in Latin America. My love affair with Latin America continued into the 90s, with exhibitions and a great deal of writing. Essentially I see myself as a writer who occasionally curates. I’d like to be remembered more as a writer, because I love the written word. The possibility of translating something visual into the written word is a wonderful challenge.

When I joined the Getty Research Institute as collections curator in 1994, it was partly through my work in Latin America. But because the collection is mainly European, I was increasingly drawn away from Latin America. I think that was partly a good thing—one can be ghettoised. Joining the Getty was a re-acquaintance with Europe, which was all the better for coming through the lens of working intensely on Latin America.
Cao Fei, Cosplayers, courtesy of the artist,

Cao Fei, Cosplayers, courtesy of the artist,

Dialogue between cultures

How do you see your current role as Biennale curator relative to your role at the Getty, a very different form of curatorial responsibility?

The relation would be that I am interested in what is now the outmoded terminology of world history and world culture, that is, the dynamics of relations between cultures. At the Getty, my ambition was not only to bring Latin America into the fold—in a manner that would retain its specificities as well as its common points with Europe—but also I increasingly worked in Japan and China. I’m convinced that these parts of the world have to be spoken about in the same breath, for example, that to understand Eastern Europe we must understand the cultural impact of East Asia. At this level, then, there is a carry over from even before the Getty, namely that interest in dialogue and understanding between cultures. I wrote the Biennale proposal on a small island just south of mainland China, and ‘zones of contact’ seemed to be the right thing. It’s not that the concept is completely new: there have been many books and exhibitions on ideas of border crossing and hybridity [Merewether worked on Tony Bond’s The Boundary Rider Sydney Biennale in 1992]. Yet the idea of the zone of contact takes it to a different point. A zone may be border or it may be something else, it may be something socio-political or it may be something more intimate, personal, or experience-based. Or it can stand for the work of art itself. That’s to be liberal about the term, but I wanted a degree of flexibility.

What a biennale does

Do you think it’s part of the role of the Biennale to capture the zeitgeist?

A biennale can do that, but there is no one model. It’s a take on contemporary art, but it’s not a survey—it shouldn’t be a survey and it shouldn’t be thematic either. A biennale can capture a certain dimension of contemporary cultural history. The best artists do reflect something about the times in which they live. But, do they refect the spirit of the times? Spirit is the question. Artists may have expressed something which is very personal but that also has wider resonance in their culture. Some artists are very conscious of this, adopting a reflexive relation to the world.

The work of Anri Sala (Albanian living in Paris) and Mona Hatoum is very much engaged with what it means to live in a particular culture. Mona has been able to bring to bear in her work her experience of living in the West from within a Middle Eastern family. Within her practice, a very specific and localised experience—of violence, suppression or displacement—is articulated in a manner general enough to find common ground. Sala, who works in film and video, is particularly interested in specific incidents that become metaphors for something much larger in contemporary life. His video features a horse clearly suffering starvation standing at the edge of a freeway, its form lit by passing cars, its back leg rising as if in fear as each car passes. It has great poignancy in terms of the violence, in the opposition between nature and urbanisation. It’s a very beautiful, poetic work, almost like a haiku.

The concept came first, but it was based on certain artists who were key exponents of it. Clearly it’s not a nation-based show like Venice, so I decided to focus on cities and regions. I also wanted to bring South East Asia back into the fold to a greater extent. In recent years, much SE Asian art has been given over to the Asia Pacific Triennial, which takes a particular, focused approach. It seemed to me that there was still a place for another approach, namely putting it in a larger context. Also I wanted to think more about certain regions, such as the Pacific and New Zealand, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I was interested in the post 1989 generation, being of the view that where there has been great change there will probably be great art. In the Middle East, Lebanon was my starting point, with artists like Hatoum, but I built up with artists from Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora, such as Emily Jacir and Raeda Saadeh. Going back to Asia, I felt India also had to have a stronger presence. And from my recent work on the Japanese and Chinese avant garde of the 50s and 60s, I knew there was great work there. These were particular regions that I thought had not yet been well represented.

The nature of embodiment

In your view, what is it about the art object that allows for effective transaction of the difficult realities of cross-cultural contact?

It essentially comes down to art’s ability to synthesise and to present a case, or to embody an idea, made in reflection. There’s really no other form. Other forms are oral history and testimony, but testimony is often unbelievable. The most interesting artists are engaged in re-elaboration, rather than testimony or reliving the moment. They have the ability to create an image that embodies an experience or event, without simply documenting it. For example, a number of artists in the show, such as Marepe [Brazil] and Diango Hernandez [Cuba], work with the idea that objects embed within them cultural histories. Baudelaire and Benjamin discovered cultural histories in the junk shops of Paris and Berlin—many artists are doing the same, except they are creating the objects themselves, objects that speak of the cultural histories of colonialism or ethnic wars, or of personal familial histories.

Partaking of the world

I welcome the proliferation of biennales. If a city wants to do it and they think it will benefit their community in terms of fostering relations with other countries, well and good. Undoubtedly there is a national project here—the Biennale is a federally funded national institution. The public goes to national institutions: but they can come away with more than they expected. My intention has been to create as close as possible something that partakes of the world. I’m trying to make it an integrated project, to map the breadth of the participation over the breadth of Sydney. There are 15 venues, but there are no satellite shows. All the venues are part of the same event.

There’s no hierarchy in the event, no hierarchy in the work, or among the artists.

One of the wonderful things I discovered when putting the show together was how the national identity of many artists became difficult to pinpoint. How many Americans? Only 2, but 6 of the artists live in America. How many French? Only one, but she’s Iranian. This is the nature of the world today, this is zones of contact. Hopefully Zones of Contact has allowed us to launch a Biennale that reflects the state of the world. It’s not about globalisation but about the movement of people in a positive and negative sense, and about the plight of being seen to be a foreigner. Given the events in Cronulla last year, I’m particularly delighted at the strong Lebanese presence in the show. That many of the artists are from war torn countries reflects the nature of the world today. It’s taking the argument about globalisation further.

How have you responded to the Biennale’s mandate to include Australian artists?

The Biennale has a mandate, but it’s not hard and fast. In my choice, I wanted to reflect different aspects of contemporary practice, such as artists who are working with the heritage of modernism (Rose Nolan); artists engaged with Aboriginal culture and cultural history (Imants Tillers); different approaches amongst Indigenous artists deeply immersed in the land (Julie Gough and Djambawa Marawili): artists working with indigent Asian culture (Savanhdary Vongpoothorn); as well as conceptual approaches (Tom Nicholson and Ruark Lewis).

Don’t know. I don’t plan, never have. I resigned from the Getty, and you don’t go back. I lived at a time in the US which saw ‘the hunting of the President’, the rise of the Republicans and the Christian right, and foreign policy going from one war to another. I can’t say I enjoyed being there at that level. I felt like I was out of place. So I created a choice: there are many other places to be and things to do.

2006, Biennale of Sydney, International festival of Art, Zones of Contact, artistic director and curator Charles Merewether, June 8-Aug 27, www.biennaleofsydney.com.au

“I was looking for a quiet place to die,” says a narrator in Greta Anderson’s digital video as a foamy river appears onscreen. This melancholy vignette—Uncomfortable Conversation—is one of 3 in Anderson’s Walking and Talking (2005), a series of richly coloured film stills with audio and large, brochure-glossy photo tryptichs. Anderson’s work situates humans in magisterial environments—lush rainforests, towering pine groves—to highlight existential questions. These human dramas, played out in picturesque settings have something David Lynch about them, they’re eerie like fairytales and philosophical like a John Sayles film, but not without humour. “She mentioned Camus, Vonnegut…I thought she’d been to Paris,” continues the narrator, “but she’d just read a lot in the bush.” Another voice, in Confidence, reflects on the childhood killing of a sparrow. “I watch them now when I eat my lunch…” he says, then adds after a meaningful pause, “chicken.” Anderson has said, “I like to think of my work as tinkering with the tradition of ‘easy-viewing.’ The photographs are moments shorn from a narrative. I like how a single frame can suggest an on-going story even though it doesn’t contain it, remaining ambiguous.” Anderson’s video montages more successfully conjure her themes than the photos alone, which lack, say, the strangeness of Gregory Crewdson’s abject landscapes, though they’re technically as accomplished.

This theme, of life observed at a slight remove, features in several works at the Australian Centre for Photography. In fact, the exhibition—If you leave me can I come too?—has the more serious subtitle, Melancholy and Dissociation in Australian Photomedia Practice. You’d be forgiven for anticipating a show about dark emotion and defensive psychological manoeuvres, but curator Bec Dean’s attraction to the cool distancing effect of irony ensures plenty of levity.

In focusing on the various slobberies of blokes’ domestic spaces, Lyndal Walker’s portraits eschew any attempts to objectify, even though each man-boy poses in his underwear. Walker’s large, colour photographs (Stay Young, 2005) snap bare-chested boys surrounded by all the ephemera of share-houses and student life. Her subjects’ presumed willingness to be photographed like this is both touching and amusing, because their particularities and frailties are so baldly on show: their pale, unsculpted bodies, their terrible underpants (one pair sports a half-obscured magnet and a logo that probably says “chick magnet”), the way their possessions emphasize the fleeting moment of their youth (the Return of the Jedi poster, a high-school relic?). One man sits in a bedroom with wallpaint that runs out near the ceiling, conveying both youthful energy and lassitude (“Luke, School’s Out”). Who could be bothered finishing the paint-job, there are more urgent things to be done!, like lying on a vinyl couch with an ashtray full of butts and a longneck (“Pat, Smells Like Teen Spirit”). Walker’s titles read like ironic pop cliches: “Gerry, Feast of the Gods”, “Ford, Barely Legal”, “Rob, Easy Tiger” and the boys’ expressions at least suggest they’re in on the joke. (This is somewhat verified by the story accompanying the exhibition at PICA: “…as word spread of the sittings among Melbourne’s bursting network of bony-arsed bohemian boys who were to be [Walker’s] subjects, they were practically lining up to do it.”)

In the ACP foyer are Ian Tippett’s large colour digital prints, The Last Cigarette, forming a neatly realist counterpoint to Natasha Johns Messenger’s Lost in Space series on the opposite wall. Melbourne-based Tippett continues his interest in the rituals and details of the CBD, this time photographing workers having a smoke. Tippett frames his human subjects amid the monumental geometries of city buildings, savouring a drag in a high-rise foyer or reflected in windows on concrete forecourts. The smokers stand mostly alone, modern pariahs, their faces wreathed in toxic plumes. One woman has closed her eyes as she draws back—she might be in pleasure or pain—but these are rare moments of personal time stolen from corporate routines.

Lost in Space also features contemplative figures in urban settings but Johns Messenger photographs plastic figurines in dioramas and further abstracts them by blurring areas of each print. Strangely, this slippage between the real and the stage-managed lends each scene a tender melancholy, and though the specifics are blurry the emotion is heightened: figures seem to communicate, leaning toward each other, standing under plastic trees or sit alone in whimsical contemplation. Because they’re so minimal we’re left to fill in the blanks: their little plastic clothes look 60s—ski jackets, leggings, boots and beanies; it must be cold—they’re rugged up, the colours are rich and cool. Celeste Olalquiaga calls the diorama a voyeuristic spectacle which gives us “that uncanny feeling of secretly watching what is forbidden or impossible” (The Artificial Kingdom, Bloomsbury, London, 1999). By using this form, Johns Messenger anoints very simple, banal scenes with the enticing promise and pleasure of glimpsing ‘another world.’

Yet another world is offered up in Elvis Richardson’s Slide Show Land (2004-6), a dual projection of family slides taken by American Dorothy E Elsberry between 1951 and 1976. Like French artist Christian Boltanski who famously exhibited found photographs of “dead Swiss” (taken from obituary pages) or school photos of children who died in the Holocaust, Richardson is a recycler, gathering her materials from thrift shops and, in this case, e-Bay auctions. Slide Show Land commemorates what Boltanski calls “small memory”, moments that might otherwise go unnoted because they’re not recorded in history books, or publicly commemorated. By exhibiting some of Elsberry’s extensive family pictures (1600 slides in all), Richardson commemorates an otherwise forgotten ‘ordinary’ life and the poignant particularity of its rituals. Elsberry’s favourite subjects appear to be her horseriding husband, Jack, and celebratory feasts, sometimes both—here’s Jack eating a roast chook at a carefully decorated table. Her photos are raw, direct and amateurish; the 1960 and 70s film stock gives everything a familiar dullish tinge and there’s something particularly American about these table spreads: the superfluousness, the food itself—two ice cream sundaes with Oreo cookies, the gingham table cloths, a cherry pie. Elsberry’s prints testify to the importance of ritual and relationships, and the care and pride with which she attended to occasions. In representing them Richardson, like Boltanksi, seems “not concerned with questions into the aesthetic quality of artistic excellence, but with the banal reproducibility and multiplicity of photography and importantly of the multiplicity (and regeneration) of human life and death” (Paul McNally, review on www.source.ie).

Bec Dean says she was inspired to bring together photomedia that often produced a melancholy effect, even if this was not necessarily intended by the artist, and the other works in this thoughtfully arranged show bear this out in more or less obvious ways.

If you leave me can I come too?, curator Bec Dean; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, March 3-April 9

There’s only so much enlightenment and entertainment a person can take at any one time, and very early on in the Inbetween Time Festival I realised I was going to have to ration my viewing. Besides, we had reviews to write, which made reflection time a hard-won priority. So my experience of the festival was fragmented.

I’ve reclined in a large upholstered egg and wondered why I wasn’t experiencing those intense booming reverberations you get when a boy racer drives past you—only to discover I was listening to sounds generated by my own body (a certain) SILENCE). I’ve been drawn, as through a kinky looking glass, into a sinister dream world of constraint, adaptation and refiguring: a wonderful video work which looked as though Maya Deren had had a wild night out with a chimerical composite of Angela Carter, Peter Carey, and Sarah Waters, resulting in a beautiful lovechild (The Shadowers). Reading the reviews of my fellow workshoppers and engaging in intense discussions of practice with them, I’ve come to speculate that art you’ll never see can still leave a haunting presence in the mind—nah, I’m lying. Nothing beats experiencing the real thing. Being in the work, being provoked, soothed, manipulated, disappointed, made to re-adjust, turned around; I’m exhausted.

Elasticity

I’ve also had time to realise that Live Art is an elastic term that willingly stretches to accommodate interesting work, and that a disruption of traditional audience expectations of closure, narrative or intent is one way of achieving new meaning.

Body work—another elastic term—questions our sensory, emotive and cognitive experiences, our constant embodied interactions between physical and imaginative spaces. Digital technology is among the tools artists use to amplify these interactions, bringing our ordinary processes of living to self-consciousness, facilitating a process of examination, reflection and perhaps, re-configuring.

In between phenomena

In the This Secret Location symposium a panel of scholars and practitioners discussed the intersection of body-based practice with the machine, with reference to the work on show at Inbetween Time. As cultural theorist/performance practitioner Sally Jane Norman explained, the idea of prosthesis, of enhancement, of masking, disguise, alternate selves—an amplified body—is as old as humanity itself. Is the use of digital technology as a sensory and cognitive extension of this activity normatively different from the use of older tools?

Simon Jones, experimenting with performance text (Secrecy of Saints), locates his digitally mediated work within a notion of virtual space as a place unbounded by cultural sensibilities. Within both virtual and real life performance spaces he places 2 or more discursive practices in parallel, seeing their juxtaposition as complementary, not translatable. Jones uses spoken text in an abstract way to establish mood. He places the bodies of both the performer and the audience in a different physical relationship to the theatrical norm: “words move, flesh utters.” This becomes an exercise in disrupting the boundaries around modes of perception, which he intends to trigger a suspension of judgement in the audience, causing them to become open to new experiences.

Musicologist and composer David Toop began with a reading from Moby Dick in which sailors attempt to interpret mysterious sounds heard at sea. He described his fascination with sounds that evade explanation. He reflected on the beautiful ambiguity of the act of making sound with an instrument, where breathing turns to music.

Digitally created sound becomes “less prosthetic, less embedded in personal history, less expressive of the hidden body” and listening becomes a different sort of action, abstracted, flattened and disembodied in that the sound cannot be connected to a memory of physical sensation. This may lead to a new image of the body and a new perception of space, because it creates a new type of space where the corporeal (ie the ears) meets the virtual. Toop mentioned sacro-acoustic research in the context of the utopian aspiration towards purity often expressed in digital practice.

Toop’s fascinating paper touched on the influence of recording technology on a new understanding of the construction of sound. He mentioned that the disembodying technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries (the telegraph, radio, TV etc) which effected a possible spatial and temporal displacement of experience have given rise to a contemporary obsession with fragmentation. This leads to an interest in collecting, rearranging and disrupting sound and in different logics of ordering. He talked about the ability of recording technology to “frame” the capture of sound by using focus to create meaning, making an analogy with the visual practice of taking a snapshot. Both he and media artist Lynette Wallworth expressed a fascination with the ability of digital technology to capture and play back phenomena that are beyond the usual range of human senses—Toop described these as “in-between phenomena.”

Expanded experience

Sally Jane Norman described digital technology as a tool which assists the human tendency to transform and extend the body in performance and communication. Digital technology also allows us to share locations: local input can achieve a simultaneous global audience. The range of our experience has been stretched, from the nano to the cosmic. One new phenomenon within virtual space is the emergence of an anonymous distributed community: our ears, eyes and social sense are tuned into this new form. (David Toop noted that group improvisation with traditional musical instruments could be a form of distributed consciousness.)

Norman insisted that although technology has extended the human impulse to play with versions of embodiment and variations of reality, this has not changed our fundamental nature. “The post-carbon, hairy monkey Stelarc body” refutes the idea that we are somehow less physical than we once were.

Collective evolution

What is evolving is the notion of collectivity. Art adds to this envisioning, creating new states of being: part of the social action of art is to create shared audience experience which proves a socially binding force, leading to new developments in the dynamic of community. The show This Secret Location (in “wilfully public, even if named secret, locations”) is a collective play with, and meditation on, boundaries. The delicate borderline between art and non-art is also being explored here.

Lynette Wallworth works with scientists looking at how natural systems change in response to environmental factors. She uses interactivity to explore audience response and notions of responsibility. She creates an interactivity that can be shared, using simple interfaces that reflect the fragility of natural systems.

Through her collaborations she has become aware that scientific enquiry entails a similar state of mind to artistic enquiry, a state of heightened awareness: “Technology helps us see what has always been there…but without prior imagining you cannot begin to see what questions might be asked.”

Wallworth stressed the importance of the audience being able to “negotiate a contract” with her work, and explained how she needs to observe audience reaction in order to fine-tune the interactive element. Still: Waiting2 would be adapted as a result of her observations.

The panellists discussed how interactivity is conceived by practitioners in different ways, contrasting the model of the ‘heroic artist’ with that of ‘celebratory communion.’ Toop noted how much he was moved by the idea of pure abstract sound as conveyed by the work of Ryoji Ikeda (Spectra II); but he is just as moved by a sincere representation of messy, spontaneous human communication. To both Norman and Wallworth these examples are part of the continuum of human experience and sensation; as Norman put it, “technology cannot be divorced from its social bases and uses.”

The audience was left to reflect on new technology’s potential to extend the field of play, stretching the physical/not physical boundary to be more and more permeable, ambiguous and extended.

This Secret Location Symposium, chaired by Johannes Birringer. Panellists: Dr Simon Jones, Dr Sally Jane Norman, David Toop, Lynette Wallworth. Chemistry Lecture Theatre, Bristol University, Feb 3

A big red Routemaster bus–the double-decker type recently rendered obsolete in London—sits incongruously outside the Arnolfini throughout the Inbetween Time festival. On one side, its advertising banner reads “DR ROBERTS AND THE SPAGHETTI CLUB” in large bold lettering, referring to bus owner Anthony Roberts (programmer/curator/general layabout at Colchester Arts Centre) and his collaborators on this vehicular installation, the Bristol artists Elaine Kordys, Tom Marshman and Alex Bradley. On the other side of the bus, facing out across Bristol harbourside towards the opulent, almost Speerian offices of a major financial institution and the trendy wine bars alongside, the typeface is similarly bright and brash, but it says something different. It says “KILL YOURSELF.”

Over the 5 key days of the Inbetween Time festival of “Live Art And Intrigue” we’re treated to a great many deaths. One performer alone, Miguel Pereira, gives us 10 of them (some would say 11, as it doesn’t seem to have been a very popular outing for the Portuguese artist). Uninvited Guests wound each other with plasticine scars. (nobleandsilver) self-destruct their own performance, met by what seems like a grand chorus of shrugs from festival-goers. Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment gives us—amongst other delights—the text image of Arnold Schwarzenegger trapped in a room slowly filling with human excrement. Gob Squad make monsters of us all, turning quotidian mall shoppers into vampires, zombies and ghosts, creating a world where security guards calmly detail in lilting Bristol accents how exactly they will capture you, imprison you and drink your blood. Animals die too: oysters meeting their maker in the stomach acid of IBT audience members in Swallow, an intimate piece by Paul Hurley. But perhaps this fascination with mortality is to be expected: by attending a festival of Live Art we are subjecting ourselves to numerous examples of a discipline which holds close to its heart the importance of failure, of regularly barking up the wrong tree, of seriously getting it wrong, watching the artwork die before your very eyes. “KILL YOURSELF”, says the bus, and maybe you could look at it as a manifesto rather than a misanthropic exhortation.

Although misanthropy is probably exactly what Anthony Roberts and artist/writer Richard Dedomenici intended to transmit when they erected the banner. Refreshingly unconcerned with theoretical rigours, Dedomenici and his unlikely Colchester muse have, for several years, been poking fun at political/cultural institutions and the art world in equal measure. “So”, Roberts says to me, “You’re reviewing all this, are you? I hope you give it the severe fucking panning it deserves.” Fair enough, Dr Roberts. Check this out: your bus is a disgrace. It’s a redundant novelty item in a festival which eschews purely cosmetic novelty, it’s a boring, depthless cultural symbol, placed randomly alongside an otherwise finely tuned programme in order to function as some sort of lazy, easy filler, and what’s more it doesn’t even go to Marble Arch. What use is that? I hope you’re happy now.

Actually, I really like the bus. And (yeah, wussing out here, sorry) I don’t at all think it functions solely as novelty filler: there’s a precedent for this big colourful extravagance, and it weaves directly into Inbetween Time’s curatorial history. At the last festival in 2003, a work called 32,000 Points Of Light was placed in a similar position by the water’s edge. It took the form of a bulky fairground-style motion simulator adapted to contain a complex multimedia experience by Alex Bradley, Andy Gracie, Duncan Speakman, Jessica Marlowe and Matt Mawford. Despite its abstract nature 32,000 Points Of Light drew large audiences from beyond the usual IBT demographic, and it was not unknown for Disneyland scale queues to form up to its entrance as viewers clambered into the vehicle over and over again. Two years later, this type of multimedia investigation is a central strand of IBT in the shape of This Secret Location, presenting further work by Bradley and Charles Poulet alongside that of Ryoji Ikeda, George Poonkhin Khut and Lynette Wallworth. So in 2006, the Routemaster Bus fulfils the function that the motion simulator did in 2003: it announces the festival to the outside world, ‘nurturing intrigue’, drawing in passing groups of people who otherwise wouldn’t touch Arnolfini content with a bargepole. Combined with the arts centre’s recent renovation, these tactics have one particularly positive effect: the Arnolfini is full of children. Kids clamber all over the place, wide-eyed at the bus, swimming like fishes in Bradley and Poulet’s Whiteplane_2, giggling uncontrollably at Charlie Murphy’s snog collection Kiss-In.

On the opening day a forum is held where artist Robert Pacitti stresses the risks Live Art faces in terms of fading funding and folding support schemes, saying that if this surfeit isn’t regularly addressed then “we are all lost.” But at least on the issue of potential audiences, if multimedia work of abstract forms continues to captivate children—simultaneously its most fickle and receptive targets—in the manner seen during This Secret Location, then the future is bright.

I have a confession to make. I don’t actually see the children playing ‘fish’ in Whiteplane_2. Of course, nobody can paint a totally comprehensive picture of a festival as diverse and multi-formatted as Inbetween Time from their personal experiences alone and whilst I skedaddle about the place, trying to catch as many works as possible, I still manage to miss some favourite artists and, by all accounts, some incredible experiences. This is where the bus comes into its own: I catch it so as to catch up. Audience and artists alike hang out in the dodgy armchairs, drinking tea and gossiping in a way they might not do in the slightly more formal Arnolfini bar. In here I’m told the story of the children in Whiteplane_2. In here I pick up the overall sense that (nobleandsilver) divided punters on a love/hate axis, that everyone liked Grace Surman’s Slow Thinking much more than I did, that Monika Tichacek’s The Shadowers with its David Lynch-style framing and beautifully presented sadism has left a shiver running down the spine of the weekend. The bus also houses a series of informal meetings for bodies such as New Work Network, and there are regular ‘Siberian Boxercise’ sessions which feature the unlikely spectacle of various artists and administrators punching at the cold afternoon air in unison. My band, angel tech, plays an acoustic set in one of the more cramped concert conditions I’ve experienced. Then, Dr Roberts announces a performance later on Saturday by the group Extreme Noise Terror. When the hour arrives and the band doesn’t show, it emerges that Roberts simply made it all up, and we’re left hanging.

Being left hanging is a familiar motif at Inbetween Time. The themes of being incomplete, unfinished, beyond rescue or beyond recall seem to resonate through a series of otherwise contrasting works. The Special Guests’ durational performance This Much I Know [Part Two] sees them waiting for an imaginary ‘special guest’ (who may or may not turn up at all), taking phone calls, arranging meetings, enacting potential future encounters and generally never getting it right, slowly, constantly shooting themselves in the foot. The audience who sit around and about them in Arnolfini’s compact, bijou Gallery 5 are discernibly part of the show and are recognised, named if possible, looked in the eye, flirted with. Then, at 11am each morning we have the Lecturama series, most of which are performance lectures on the theme of the artist’s ongoing or unfinished work and its contexts. This includes Howard Mathew’s dry appraisal of sugar glass and exploding beds in A Working History Of Slapstick and Paul Granjon’s oddly affecting Heath Robinson robotics. After each of these lectures the audience are invited down onto the stage floor for informal questions and answers, becoming part of the discourse, part of the research.

On Sunday, Eve Dent places herself, unfinished, ongoing, amongst the audience in a very different way, by performing an interventionist piece in the Arnolfini bookshop. Shoeless, in a loose white dress, she peruses the books and posters with a slow, semi-autistic air before insinuating herself into the makeup of the environment through calm, considered movements. One moment she’ll be flicking through a poster rack, and the next she’ll be reclining inside it, angling her body in a V and remaining completely still. Dent’s work normally finds her fusing physically with solid structures, her head vanishing into the floorboards or a solitary hand protruding unapologetically from the panel of a wooden door. Here, she achieves the same ends by careful pace of performance so that she’s not quite a bookshop customer, not quite the architecture, moving ever so quietly and carefully so that you won’t notice she’s on top of a bookshelf until you reach for the authors beginning with ‘A.’ In my case, I’m at the cash register buying a book when people start to giggle. Dent has somehow crawled between me and the desk, and is hunched in the tiny space next to my legs. It’s perfectly conceivable, I reflect, that there are people currently browsing the shop who know nothing of the festival, and simply think Dent is totally insane.

The book I’m buying contains photography by Manuel Vason. Vason is part of the festival programme (look, there he is, page 10) but is a significant representative of its unfinished/interactive qualities in that his work is in progress, undisplayed, and in fact completely invisible to festival-goers unless you happen to chat to him. On Thursday he sneaks up into the woods around Bristol with Monika Tichacek, taking digital snaps and stalking deer. Friday will find him suspending Alex Bradley and Charles Poulet within the framework of their own Whiteplane_2 installation. On Saturday, Miguel Pereira is covered in honey and feathers before throwing himself around the white walls of an empty studio. And in the days immediately prior to the festival, Vason has dragged a wrecked car over a beach and into the sea with Paul Hurley, wrapping the artist in clingfilm and attaching him mollusc-like to the rusty metal. The images are quietly astounding, painterly in composition, devoid of digital manipulation; allowing these strange new bodies to sing with their surroundings. Vason’s working method makes interlocked, turning cogs of the usual shooting relationship that sees artist performing in front of the camera and photographer industrious and unobtrusive behind it. He talks at length to potential collaborators, kicks ideas around, and then he and his subjects create entirely new environments in which everyone involved can generate fresh expressions of their practice.

He tells me about the role he adopts during a shoot, the camera static and clicking away every 2 seconds on a timer-release mechanism, leaving Vason free to move around the space taking polaroids which are then scattered about on the floor, scanned and appraised by the collaborators as the shoot progresses, searching, reaching for that critical moment. It almost sounds like a staged performance in its own right; but these are very private events. Ironically the same contradictions, fusions and innovations that make this work so exhilarating can be the ones that make exhibiting it difficult. The organisers of Inbetween Time have, try as they might, been unable to find a method of display that does justice to Vason’s depth of field. So instead, the project is ongoing, new collaborations in the pipeline, future exhibitions planned. And for now Manuel Vason is truly in-between.

So you see, it’s not just artists who are allowed to fail. Curators and programmers have to have a free reign too, regular access to enough rope, plenty of support structures upon which to hang themselves… Just like artists. For the last few years, The Spaghetti Club have been curating an event called Three Minute Warning (or 3MW) a platform for emerging and established artists alike where the only rule is that your presented work must not exceed 3 minutes duration. It’s a loose sort of curation in that the Spaghetti Club generally haven’t a clue as to what will find its way onto the stage, and 3MW tends to feature a shambolic scramble for stage time accompanied by frantic technical tinkering, pieces that blatantly exceed the 180 second limit and no small amount of confusion on the part of Tom Marshman, its regular master of ceremonies.

And so it is that on Friday night 3MW at the Cube Cinema takes the IBT reins for an hour, and we are treated to a consummate display of every quality listed above. It’s possible in any festival to pick at the bones of thematic strands, to mull over how and why work has been collated. But in 3MW you have no such comfort. This stuff is rough and ready, often extremely basic in concept, sometimes just a vague sketch for an idea that the artist is considering possibly having at some unscheduled point in the future. There’s the unspoken understanding that this is a forum where failure is allowed, encouraged even. We see a short film from Charlie Murphy involving glass, squeezed plastic and dribbling white liquid. We endure a horrible, pretentiously subtitled home movie which dwells obsessively on a young girl. We are told how to “forget all the horror in the world” via the medium of making a cup of tea, including a Proustian class in dunking biscuits. And some bloke with big hair stands on top of a table with a disconcerting expression on his face whilst a young girl breaks glow-sticks in the dark. This is where ideas live or die, the stumbling block, the laboratory. Those who complain that it’s work of a student quality forget that not all artists are or were students, and not all have the facilities or testing ground afforded by a university community. Sure, generally speaking, it’s a mess. But at least it’s a vital mess: the dabblers of 3MW today could well become the exhibitors of Inbetween Time 2008 or 2009, and I imagine what they might do with the outward facing sign on that big red bus. Instead of “KILL YOURSELF,” it might read “HAVE A CUP OF TEA” or “I DON’T DO TRICKS.”

What would alternative artists at the current festival print on that banner? What would sum it up? Perhaps the best option would be to take a cue from David Weber-Krebs long litany of blank assertions in This Performance, wherein a pleasant disembodied female voice informs us that “This performance is about to begin”, “This performance is about to challenge expectations”, “This performance is about to create a context”, “This performance is about to fall from grace…” and on, and on. What would Weber-Krebs put on the side of the bus? Perhaps it would say “THIS BUS IS ABOUT TO GO SOMEWHERE.” Characteristically of Inbetween Time, that would be both gospel truth, and outright lie.

It was risky. Risky for us, risky for them… Five days at Inbetween Time proved that this is one festival where artists and audience are prepared to meet one another half-way. Alongside completed works, I participated in experiments, witnessed works-in-progress, and accepted that artists have permission to fail. Helen Cole articulated her concept in the Nurturing Risk forum that opened the event. She talked of creating a context in which artists could share their work with audiences to see how they might progress or transform it. This is certainly an admirable curatorial approach and for the most part the risk paid off as audiences seemed delighted with the festival’s offerings. The few works that suffered were those shown without contextualisation and interpreted as representative of an artist’s output when in fact they were often radical departures.

Miguel Pereira, considered a serious choreographer in his native Portugal, gave us a camp pastiche where he allowed 10 participants from his Inbetween Time residency to orchestrate his pop star persona’s deaths. Top 10 (Bristol) divided viewers (I loved it). At least Pereira was on hand to discuss the work informally in the Spaghetti Club bus or the Arnolfini Bar. This wasn’t the case with Yara El-Sherbini. She couldn’t attend Inbetween Time and Avoiding dark Ali’s video documentation of the artist as a stand-up comedian was exhibited without the benefit of further illumination. Placing other El-Sherbini works alongside this one might have given a better sense of her practice. In contrast, the lecture format served Gob Squad well. Me, The Monster laid bare the process of their current residency for Inbetween Time, documenting their enquiries into fear by interviewing people in a local shopping mall. Their footage of the re-filming (shot by shot) of the opening scenes of the horror flick Halloween, gave us a tantalising taste of things to come. Similarly, Paul Granjon (in The Heart and The Chip), using the lecture-demonstration format, gave a comprehensive overview of the development of his ideas which added a human touch to his sex robots.

Official Spaces

Some artistic risks would have gone unnoticed by audiences unless they were part of the festival grapevine that revealed, for instance, that Uninvited Guests decided to cut all text from their durational installation Aftermath at the last minute. This piece was placed in the climate-controlled Gallery 5—not usually utilised for the festival. The heat added to the discomfort of viewing wounds and fake blood and it felt almost subversive to replace the precious paintings usually shown here with this kind of mark-making. This subtle exploitation of space was typical of Inbetween Time. In the Dark Studio, images from Monika Tichacek’s stunning video The Shadowers glowed like jewels in the blackness: and we focused on every frame of John Gillies’ extraordinary Divide. ( I do think these works deserved screening times because interruptions caused by viewers entering and leaving were irritating.) Even Deborah Pollard’s Shapes of Sleep, conceived for a white room, was imbued with a new theatricality by being placed in the Dark Studio.

The theatre was where most of us started our day with the 11am Lecturama. This was a clever way of easing viewers into events, though I wonder if AC Dickson: eBay Powerseller—a great show—suffered from some arguably British early-morning reserve. I think it might have worked even better after one of the alcohol-fuelled evening launch events.

Alternative spaces

Alex Bradley’s In [a certain] SILENCE (made in collaboration with product designer Lee McCormack) looked like a pod from science fiction and its siting next to the elevator seemed to imply it too might fly upward. Even the bookshop was utilised when performer Eve Dent hid various parts of her body, then her whole self, on the shelves. And when Duckie was cancelled, festival-goers transformed the bar into an impromptu party venue. Parked just outside the Arnolfini, The Spaghetti Club’s bus was an ingenious inclusion, offering a ‘chill-out’ zone where alcohol was served, fingernails were painted and muffins toasted. This converted London double-decker bus became the alternative meeting point, with its own timetabled events. The use of The Cube (an artist-run venue in another part of Bristol) was another great idea, ensuring that links were maintained between the institution and smaller artist-led initiatives. Its theatre space had the slightly shabby quality of an amateur dramatics hall and suited Miguel Pereira perfectly. Bristol University’s Wickham Theatre was also well-served by David Weber-Krebs Beckettian This Performance. The walk/ taxi ride there (uphill) added to the sense of anticipation which Weber-Krebs so expertly frustrated.

Odd Boxes

The use of thematic in Inbetween Time (This Secret Location, Twisted Showbiz, Lecturama, Breathing Space and We Live Here) felt superimposed. The notion that these categories were “easily navigable” for those who hadn’t seen Live Art (performances and digital installations) before is also questionable because focusing on one strand could give a skewed picture of the nature of the work.

Breathing Space involves an ongoing programme of curatorial exchange between Arnolfini and Australia’s Performance Space in a mix of established Australian works and British ones in development. We Live Here showed artists local to Bristol. Amongst them, This Much I Know [Part Two] saw The Special Guests attempting for the first time a durational performance of such length—6 hours. This was conceived by Helen Cole suggesting that her curatorial input is as much about facilitating artistic development as programming it.

This Secret Location looked at work in a specific medium (digital), yet This Secret Location (Live) was about smaller live work. Lecturama comprised demonstrations using the lecture format and Twisted Showbiz claimed to feature artists who deconstruct “theatre.” Tim Etchells/Forced Entertainment short film Starfucker sat uneasily in the latter category. Whilst the Forced Entertainment collective enact a dismantling of theatre, this work clearly deconstructs film! I also wondered about Starfucker’s placement in the wider scope of the festival. It was produced in 2001 and without knowing the context in which it was made (was this its premiere, a transitional period for Etchells or the collective in any way?) it seems oddly out of place here. I was glad to see it and admit that it’s difficult to conceive of a Live Art festival that doesn’t include Forced Entertainment, but suspect it was a cheaper option than programming something new by the company. Equally, Lone Twin were reviving their first work, On Everest (which could as easily have been placed in the Lecturama strand), and it was not clear why. Was it part of their artistic practice, a stock-taking of sorts, to facilitate their moving forward?

The uneasy conceptual relationship between strands does not reflect the coherence of the festival’s content overall. Common to the work was a play with form and a joy in hybridity. There were some curious parallels: both Martin del Amo (Under Attack) and Miguel Pereira stripping themselves down to the flesh as if wanting to be rid of the clothes and roles that constrain them; I was reviewing performances as part of the RealTime writing workshop team, but FrenchMottershead (Reviewing Inbetween Time) were writing about us all as audiences. In Inbetween Time the audience really did matter. Whether our physical presence was required to complete the work (as in Lynette Wallworth’s Still:Waiting2, where sitting down altered the digital image) or we were psychologically toyed with, we became part of the art, not merely viewers.

Taking Risks with Audiences

In the opening forum, the question of how to curate a taste for risky work amongst audiences was touched upon and I believe Cole really addressed this in her curation. Her use of residencies has ensured that the local or potential audience is involved in the work’s conception. Gob Squad admitted they weren’t sure how to proceed and asked us for comments. Paul Granjon finished his lecture by offering us wine and an invitation to ride his robots. AC Dickson invited us to bid on his eBay offer of a night out with him in Bristol.

Interactivity felt like a key element of the festival. From seeing a visualisation of your heart beat in George Poonkhin Khut’s Cardiomorphologies to filling in a questionnaire that determines whether you are an alien, a werewolf, a vampire, a ghost or Frankenstein’s monster in Gob Squad’s Me, The Monster, to having your kiss sculpted with dental casting material by Charlie Murphy, you were engaged and sometimes implicated in the action. The programme was cleverly organised so that there was sufficient in between time for audiences too, time to absorb what we saw. This was aided by the decision to offer a RealTime writing workshop, producing daily reviews which were distributed to festival-goers, giving them the opportunity to reflect on what they had seen or to read about what they had missed.

Works that addressed lone viewers were also included, emphasising the intensity of the physiological and psychological experience. Paul Hurley’s Swallow invited you for champagne and oysters; Caroline Wright’s Conversations with Friends gave you a set of walking directions before engaging you in a personal exchange. These tiny private moments seemed magnified in the context of a busy festival and allowed individuals to disengage temporarily from the audience as collective.

This is the third festival Helen Cole has curated. I wonder what we will do in between time as we anticipate the next.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. With reassuring regularity we take our daily dose of Lecturama. Every morning at eleven we stand in line to be eased into the packed Inbetween Time schedule. Playfully self-reflective, Lecturama reveals in multitudinous dimensions the way in which life infects the performative character.

Maybe we're not always in the mood for a lecture, or perhaps in the morning some of us are more delicate than others. So at this sensitive moment within Inbetween Time we have been carefully and appropriately provided with: eBay PowerSelling; fear; sexed robots and the exaggerated physical violence of slapstick. Not everyone's cup of tea, but it seemed to go down a treat.

The series started with AC Dickson's eBay PowerSeller, this edification in the ways off the online marketplace transformed me from eBay novice to eBay buyer in the space of 24 hours. What a difference a day makes. That makeover would continue as the days passed. The following morning my steak preference, inability to multi-task and answers to a batch of other multiple choice questions would lead to me becoming a monster, a vampire to be precise. My contribution to Gob Squad's research, intended to reveal the fear-personification inside of each of us, and delivered as Me, The Monster.

Two down, two to go, and already the differences were glaring. The eBay PowerSeller was AC Dickson, not simply Andrew Dickson, although the difference between the two was not as clear-cut as I had expected. This clarification would have to wait until I met the 'real' Dickson. In contrast Gob Squad's laidback demeanour was certainly intended to convey that Johanna Freiburg, Bastian Trost and Simon Will were being 'themselves.' Excepting that the whole concept of being yourself in any situation is a murky one, a problem further polluted when stood in front of a crowd of people expectant of provision. Scrutinising the various personas, AC Dickson was the most performative character in the Lecturama series, a self-help guru in the world of e-commerce. Perhaps it is this very mimicry, this confusion of form (corporate seminar as performance lecture), that necessitates this blown-up character rather than any infidelity to Dickson's self. In contrast within Gob Squad's approach it was appropriate to make a point of simply talking to the audience, a method mirrored to varying degrees by both Paul Granjon and Howard Matthew's contributions to the programme.

These shared tactics were embedded in a real research ethic. For Granjon and Matthew this was entrenched over considerable time, long-term interests in robotics and slapstick respectively. Granjon took us on a journey of discovery, from BBC micros in skips to the development of increasingly complex robots with whom he interacts. Curiously along the way he also tried to light a fire, Neanderthal-style (if you excuse the glass jar); and sang us a love song on his homemade electric sitar. Diversions, but we were not lost, as we begin to understand what he might mean by “reflections and experiments on the co-evolution of human and machine.” Matthew explores a whole other world through his alphabet of silent slapstick. We enter a hyperbola of violence as he invites people to strike him with a champagne bottle and then a chair, but with “cheap gags all the way.'

Uncertainty and an undermining of expectations were rife within the Lecturama. The stage set-up for Matthew's show included a lone-standing doorframe; perched on top of the door was a familiar sight, a carefully balanced bucket. We all wait for the 'inevitable', as Matthew progresses through his alphabet until he reaches W is for water. He explains that this has been left until the end so he doesn't have to complete the presentation soaked through. As he elaborates on X for eXit, we begin to see a carefully constructed grand finale in sight. He confidently emerges from the doorframe; the schoolboy prank has purposefully backfired, the bucket remains fixed to the top of the door. In a similar way AC Dickson retains his position at the top of the eBay pile, despite earlier assumptions that it was purely a satire with little reality in his PowerSeller status. I might not have got what I expected but this did not mean that I didn't get what I wanted.

That this strand of Inbetween Time was truly entertaining is irrefragable; myriad sources of humour were to be found. In fact wit was quite prominent across the festival. So Lecturama and the festival could well be seen as elixirs, both for their amusing preoccupation with 'meaning', or for positing meaning and entertainment as mutually exclusive. However, at times this humour was disconcerting, as with Granjon's Sexed Robot threesome, a presence that caused an acute perturbation in sexual relations; at others it was wonderfully educational.

The performance lecture has become ubiquitous in Live Art in recent years, and despite what could seem like formal limitations within the approach, it continued to highlight possibilities. At one point Gob Squad offered up the potential for a mass public action, a protest against fear, where all are encouraged to kit out as zombies and take to the streets. This was a passing comment, but at the same time it managed to take me somewhere else far beyond the confines of the lecture theatre, in fact far beyond the confines of Inbetween Time. A space where the 'audience' is stolen from the everyday, the 'event' spills out in all directions and the opportunity to remove a passive mentality is within our grasp.

It was in these, as well as numerous other ways, that Lecturama was a welcome panacea for the night before. I enjoyed each morning session at eleven, but never understood the suggestion that it functioned as a the publicised way “to ease your recovery.” Thinking about my “hectic night before”, where on different days I attended Miguel Pereira's Top 10 [Bristol], Part 9 [nobleandsilver] and grieved the cancelled Duckie show, I can only see these as anti-climactic and (to varying degrees) disappointing endings to the day. Rather than Lecturama being a way “to ease your recovery from the hectic night before”, I began to wonder if the rest of the festival ever recovered from the Lecturama morning before.

Starfucker: someone who fucks stars, fucks up stars, or has an obsequious relationship with them? Tim Etchells’ short digital film comprises only white text on a black screen to the soundtrack of John Avery’s music. Titles appear and fade. There are lines that could describe scenes from existing movies (“Gene Hackman holding a gun”); and others that sound like mischievous wishful thinking (“Mel Gibson in excruciating pain”). Many could be magazine headlines (“Woody Allen fucking twins” belongs on the cover of the National Enquirer, surely.) The scenarios are often absurd and irreverent. Common to them all, is the use of famous performers’ names.

Etchells is a member of Forced Entertainment and celebrity has featured in their work before. Their durational installation Twelve a.m. and Looking Down made use of cardboard signs which said things like “Telly Savalas down from the cross”; Etchells’ book Endland Stories introduced us to fictitious movie star Natalie Gorgeous. And it could be argued that Etchells is a celebrity of sorts himself on the Live Art scene. Actors can become interchangeable with their roles, as can popstars with their personae. Etchells’s film highlights the confusion of real and represented. For example in one of the text scenarios Morgan Freeman plays the computer game Doom at Level 5 and, coming to the realistion that the figure he’s been chasing all night bears his own face, fires at it anyway until the screen turns black. Equally, Etchells references the sometimes intrusive extra-textual information that informs our viewing of films: “Christopher Reeves in a wheelchair.”

In Starfucker, the conventions of the classic realist text are nominally followed. We have film titles and credits; names (like Marlon Brando) that re-appear in the context of different scenarios (are these the main characters?); and music that mimics that of Hollywood epics (harp crescendos, drum rolls, the clash of cymbals). Yet unlike the passive viewing experience common to the majority of cinema, Etchells’ work is closer to interactivity. We are given a setting, performers, action, but no visuals. So, like directors, set designers, costume designers, make-up artists etc, we invent our own visuals. “Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone sharing a shower”: what kind, I wonder? Is it a needlepoint shower in a room with glass walls and a view of the black desert sky? Or a dribble of water behind the mouldy curtain of a suburban bathroom? The more explicit and unlikely the images become, the more they seem to reflect our obsession with fame and with the visual. We are seduced by both in our thirst to always know more, see more. Was Etchells teasing us when he chose Hugo Glendinning (known for his beautiful photo-documentation) to video record the text? The work piles up celebrity upon celebrity (in a sexual sense in some cases) in an almost pornographic excess. But, like porn, it leaves us unfulfilled.

Representations of sleep in Western culture tend to emphasise its proximity to death (consider Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty or the “sleeping sickness” investigated by Oliver Sacks and dramatised by Harold Pinter in A Kind of Alaska). Deborah Pollard focuses instead on sleep as an activity. Over a period of 8 hours—the length of a typical night’s sleep—5 performers in nightwear lie on individual beds listening to recorded voices: “Put both hands on your neck…. Turn to the right…..Sit bolt upright…” There is a nice comic moment when the performers are directed to mutter: “No, it doesn’t matter. None of it matters anymore.” These simple instructions relate to video documentation of sleepers (the original footage appears on a miniature bed in the space). The movements appear to derive from a restless night in a hot climate. We can make out individual voices and sounds of birdsong, a cockerel’s faint crow, playing on a loop. On the far wall is a row of little embroidered pillows decorated with video stills.

Other artists have explored the process of filming themselves in certain states then recreating their actions in performance (the Wooster Group did it with drugs, Forced Entertainment with alcohol). The fascination is the same: what do we look like when we lose control? Some viewers are drawn to the back of the space, walking between the beds, looking down on the sleepers. A man stands too close to the dark-haired girl’s bed; I suddenly realise how vulnerable she is (not surprising that Cornelia Parker’s 1995 The Maybe installation placed sleeping Tilda Swinton in a glass case). Other viewers relax into the work, noticing how each performer interprets the same instructions slightly differently. I look for signs of tiredness or cunning (someone anticipating a command in order to gain as much time as possible in one position). If Shapes of Sleep were an hour long, it might appear choreographed, but as a durational installation over 8 hours the performers are no longer just performing sleep, they are physically exhausted by it. It’s a witty reversal of the notion of sleep as something that revives. Since the performers have their eyes closed throughout, it’s not surprising that one of them drifts off for a few minutes. I become infected by the hypnotic repetition, start to yawn, not out of boredom but tiredness.

Shapes of Sleep was conceived for a white space like the airy mezzanine of Glasgow’s Tramway where I first saw it. I agree with Deborah Pollard that in the Dark Studio at Arnolfini the work looks “more theatrical” (the connection between sleep and darkness is too obvious; the minute white pillows more blatant.) Nevertheless, the peculiar beauty of this work is undiminished. The soft light throws shadows on silk pyjamas; arms and legs shift languidly. By the final hour, there is a haze to the space; it even smells of people sleeping. At the end of a hectic festival, I cannot imagine a more effective oasis of tranquillity.

Deborah Pollard trained in the Suzuki Actor Training Method, has collaborated with Indonesian performance and installation artists, and was Artistic Director of Salamanca Theatre Company in Hobart, Tasmania, 1997-2000.

In grey caretakers’ overalls, 4 performers call one another on touch tone phones and make mock calls to unseen “characters.” When I come in to the 6-hour durational installation This Much I Know (Part Two), Suzie is curled into the wall, sobbing on the receiver. At intervals, we’re played tape recordings of messages the artists have invited people to leave on the Special Guests’ answer phone between 12 noon January 28 and midnight January 29 about: “What’s missing?” “What are they looking for?” “What are they hoping to find?” Replies range from a philosophical enquiry about the nature of loss to the mundane misplacing of objects—like the man who’s always losing his glasses and his car keys and says it’s hard to find the latter without the former. There are also recordings made by one of the performers in the Arnolfini foyer at various intervals throughout the show (the sound quality of these isn’t great).

As the work progresses, it becomes clear that each performer has a signature. Suzie calls her mother: “Just phoning to see if everything’s okay and you’re not missing me too much”; Matthew is always expecting someone; Lucy rings ‘Sandra’ obsessively, with an update on her progress through the day. The behaviours and codes around telephoning are acutely observed (the lovers, neither of whom wants to put the phone down first; the family catch-up that goes on forever…). The importance of the telephone in our lives is also explored. It can be a lifeline; a source of irritation, an interruption, an accomplice to deception.

The experience of this performance is cumulative, becoming more rewarding. For instance, Suzie tells her mother on the phone that a man has come into the room and he may be “The One.” It becomes clear that she’s talking about an audience member. He blushes. She asks his name. At her mother’s prompting, she asks what he does for a living. Much later, she references this moment so it becomes an in-joke for those of us who were there at the time.

Gallery 5 is packed for much of the day and there is a real sense of camaraderie in the room. The work is wonderfully manipulated without feeling manipulative. The performers get us all to cheer when the next person walks in; they offer us cups of tea and throw us chocolate biscuits. Performers Matthew Austin, Lucy Gibbs, Nina Wyllie and Suzie Zara make for compulsive viewing. Even after hearing the same elements over and again I am convinced by their veracity, impressed by their concentration and impeccable comic timing. People spend a long time here; I am in Gallery 5 for 40 minutes the first time. I need to see something else, otherwise I could stay all day. “No-one seems to want to leave”, one of them says. I feel like a guest who doesn’t want to accept that the party is over.

Bristol-based Special Guests have been making experimental theatre since 2000 and touring to festivals and venues across the UK. They also curate The Flaw Set, a DIY cross-artform event which takes over social clubs and other spaces for nights of music and performance. www.thespecialguests.co.ok

Aboard the female Sexed Robot, lights flashing in my eyes, I come to the end of the third of Inbetween Time’s performance lecture series (Lecturama). Paul Granjon has led us through a brief history of his work, attempted to make fire, demonstrated his Sexed Robots and sung us a love song, all without losing the thread somewhere along the way. This thread, spun from a collection of bits, not only pulled out of the skip but also bought through online specialists, has led me to this point: stood upright on this motorised scooter with gendered personality, as she seaches for another with a “complementary genital mode.” It’s a shame that “he” doesn’t seem to be turned on.

Sat amongst the ubiquitous laptop, assorted electronic equipment and full complement of corresponding wires, Granjon begins his lecture in his characteristically affable and droll manner. Describing his journey from rescued BBC Micros to homemade robots, we get a sense of what is meant by “reflections and experiments on the co-evolution of human and machine.” Yet somewhere squashed in between the human and machine is a whole range of other animals, some ‘real’ and others fictional or dreamt: Fluffy Tamagochi which apparently produces its own ‘shit’; Little Tutu, a robot ‘dog’ that moves and barks in time with Granjon’s singing; and a whole array of performing animals.

There is something about these ‘animals’ that brings to mind Disney, Mickey’s red shorts and white gloves, the reversal of roles that allows him to own a pet dog. Yet I am not overcome with the same sense of repulsion I feel when confronted with this walking rodent, or for that matter, with the film featuring narrator Morgan Freeman’s patronising humanisation of ‘marching’ penguins. Perhaps it is the two-way infection that makes it more appealing, as we are shown an image of Granjon donning a robotic tail and ears combo. This image is only glimpsed but we see enough to understand that it’s coming from a decidedly other angle than Stelarc’s desire for a third ear.

Granjon was at the last Inbetween Time with his Furman, a man-sized kicking robot that knocked him to the floor. We are told that he has “recovered fully” from this attack, although people hearing for the first time about his selflessly ineffectual attempt to create 2 robots capable of penetrative intercourse, might be forgiven for thinking that the attack had far-reaching consequences.

We are vulnerable to the glitch in technology that Paul Granjon is worried about: he can make robots but the switches he uses everyday are a mystery. The solution? Get back to basics, try to light a fire using basic equipment; oh, and of course, use a video camera to relay this attempt back to a projector so everyone can watch. He takes us through the process step-by-step, filling us in on his success rate—“I make life easy for myself and still I’m not able to light the fire.” No fear, this time he has handpicked the best material, his lucky board, a bow, drumstick, jar, glove and knife—“this time it’s for real!” The audience sits expectantly as the minutes pass by and Granjon with his seesaw bow action explains his technical devices (the “air-flow corridor”, a channel cut out of the bottom of the board). His amplified breath distorts as he tries to fan the ‘flames’. One more attempt; his ‘lucky’ board breaks. We have spent 20 minutes willing the act of fire creation, when we were supposedly here to explore the “co-evolution of man and machine.” Never mind, there’s always next time.

Onto the Sexed Robots, one male and one female in their chipboard arena (like animals in a zoo enclosure). These robots have a number of states: normal, singing, in heat, sleeping, and battery alert. Granjon puts them straight to ‘in heat’, anticipating a successful act of penetration. Not content to allow the robots to get on with it, Granjon wants to get in on the action, hence the modifications to the female robot that allow him to climb aboard. Goggles transfer the “cognition system of the female robot to a human operator” allowing us to see what she sees, to feel what she feels. “Unfortunately” says Granjon, “being a female sex robot is a bit limited on the sensory level.” And after my own experience, I know how that feels.

Part 1

Isn’t it strange how we’re sanctioned to eat oysters, an intimately brutal procedure, in the name of both metaphoric awareness and sensory gratification? Control, surrender, a dirty great shucking tool, salty sea-tinged juices, a series of little deaths…even the self-confessed vegetarian amongst us was necking them down.

For a number of years Paul Hurley has worked on performances in which he “becomes” an invertebrate. For Inbetween Time, he “becomes” an oyster. And, as apparently “it’s nice to eat them, as well as become [them]”, we, future witnesses to his transformation, in the interest of our general enlightenment, have been invited to a feast. The artist has set up quite an occasion, an educational dinner event—not quite a party, though the company was both civilised and convivial.

The table was set with 10 covers, the ambient light was dim, coming from a string of feathered white fairy-lights arranged on the table. Silver service waitress, fashionable photographer, silver and china and each plate holding a napkin folded in an oyster shape. We had bread rolls and fresh butter, there were white roses on the table, and we were offered champagne as Mr Hurley held forth at the head of the table on a subject obviously close to his heart.

I can truly say I’ve been enlightened, because it was quite a lecture. In order to explicate the oyster which he would spend 6 hours the next day becoming, Mr Hurley (and I have to call him that, as the relaxed formality of the event has rubbed off on me) touched on palaeontology, zoology, cultural studies and gastronomy. He stood at the head of our table, in dinner jacket and loosened bow tie. A kitchen console stood to one side of him and a flipchart to the other. He lectured us, consulting his notes from time to time: “Two hundred million years!” he would confirm, going through the taxonomy of the creature and waxing lyrical about the pleasures of eating it. He explained that this morning’s supply had to be specially flown in from Wexford. He drew explicit analogies between oyster eating and various acts of love.

Hurley took a sturdy metal tool—we could hear the champagne corks popping—forced it between the lips of the hapless bivalve sliced through its abductor muscle to force it wide open—we knew exactly what he was doing because he talked us through it – worked the knife all the way around the shell under the little creature’s body, and tipped the excised morsel into his mouth. He’d written a poem about this:

Bite the tongue from the mouth
And suck it from the shell
And chew, never swallow…

He took sips of champagne. There was an acid tang in the air. “This is not sex,” he quoted, “remember you’re drinking from the sea.”

Well, they served us the oysters and I was going as far as I could with this thing; I held my gnarly goblet of mollusc in both hands and discovered it smelt of rock pools. To the left and right of me, people were gulping and enjoying themselves. Mr H was explaining more about his process, and we diners were asking polite questions. Some guests asked how long the creature takes to die after the shell is opened. You’re worrying about this after you’ve eaten it? We were served angels on horseback (grilled oysters wrapped in bacon) with a different, fruitier champagne. I asked my neighbour what the difference was. “When they are cooked, they become more texture than taste”, he replied.

The lecture concluded with a disquisition on the in-betweeness of the being of oysters: hermaphroditic; rocky on the outside, pearly on the inside; flesh and liquid; two hundred million years old and ephemeral, fading once they are out of water. Mr H told us more about oysters as aphrodisiacs and the incredibly erotic experience of eating them. I wanted to ask Paul Hurley if he’s ever considered becoming a sausage, but I just didn’t have the nerve…

Part 2

I ain’t saying nothing. Just that the crack about the sausage wasn’t as off as I’d thought it would be.

Oh, and, maybe I will say a little something about how well conventions of social ritual do camouflage a kitsch aesthetic, which body art may foreground rather vividly.

Mine was a memorable introduction to an iconic sensual experience. I’ll try to recall the details, I’ll tell how it was for me.

Framed by the artist Paul Hurley, the event occurred away from the public gaze. In a darkened room an elegant dinner table was laid with a simple, formal setting for each of us: a linen napkin, silver fish knife and fork, lemons, Tabasco, some flowers. We were offered a glass of champagne and introduced to the subject in question.

Oysters, Hurley tells us, have been around for 200 million years. The species he has obtained is Crassostra Gigas from Wexford in Ireland. Information is delivered, like the amount of water to pass through an oyster in a day—an Olympic swimming pool full—and an explanation of the craft of opening the shell. A practical demonstration was accompanied by a poem by Robin Robertson.

Bandage your hand against the bladed shell
Work your blade well into the slot
(imagine a paint scraper at a rusted rim)
and prise the lid off keeping the juices in

We were nearly at the crucial point, the moment where I needed to trust that I would swallow and not gag. The artist, himself a recent initiate, said he liked to chew a couple of times before swallowing.

Before the abductor muscle that holds the oyster to its shell was severed, we studied the anatomy closely. I pondered the dualities that had stimulated the artist to undertake this investigation. The hard, solid permanence of the shell—piles of them, some 200 years old are still to be found—contrasts with the short-lived liquid flesh. I thought also of the immediate association oysters have with sex and of what Paul Hurley told us of their curious transsexual behaviour.

The flesh released from the shell was mine and it was, as promised, like eating the sea, and then I had another, this time spiked with tabasco, and then another wrapped in bacon, an Angel on Horseback. I wanted the experience but didn’t really want it witnessed; I covered my head as I’ve seen diners do in Europe when eating songbirds. Was this abjection, this giving up of my previous state of oyster virginity in such a formal, solemn manner?

The tone of the occasion was relaxed, almost informal. We were inhabiting the appropriate space, a special dinner with all the sensory requirements: the immaculately dressed maître d’, the best champagne, quality of linen. We inhabited it as curious sightseers or anthropologists, slightly outside the experience.

I intend to repeat the experience one day and, when I do, I’ll be relaxed and enjoy it, and I’ll thank Paul Hurley and his subtle, gentle artistry for showing me how.

The Inbetween Time brochure copy tells us “Pacitti Company are well known for their uncompromising approach to image making.” We were definitely offered a rich profusion of images, and perhaps one too many.

Just before the performance we were asked to sign a contract stipulating that we would not look over our shoulder on entering or turn to look behind once seated, nor share with “any other living creature the contents of a wish you will shortly be asked to make.” Raffle ticket numbers were sellotaped to our lapels (I was number 15), we were each given a two-penny piece, and had a white ribbon tied around our right wrist.

Entering the space one by one, we move along a path formed of large dressing room mirror lights, passing a man too large for his chair, hunched over a Rumpelstiltskin spinning wheel by a mound of straw, spindle in hand.

The path is dark, but a clearing is ahead. We enter the circle created by a curtain of suspended straw strips and numbered chairs (corresponding to our tickets). As we move to our seats we circumnavigate a low, golden mound of pennies and two-pences, to find ritualistic offerings of cloth dolls placed on each seat. It was as if we had happened upon a magical place and were lost in A Forest, as complicit as figures in a carousel kinetoscope of Italo Calvino tales.

Numerous images and texts are spun together by merging elements of one fairy tale with another, and layered further by symbolical allusions to the social, religious and political history of Britain—director and performer Robert Pacitti had ‘lion’ written on one hand and ‘heart’ on the other. The company created a performance that drew on the old to make sense of the contemporary, simultaneously investigating the morphology of the folktale (recalling for me the 1928 account by Russian theorist Vladimir Propp), but with too many tales.

A Forest is performed in intimate proximity to its audience. The performers sat amongst us passing a black ribbon with a hand-sewn story that began “Once upon a time…”; methodically wrapping a ceramic-like model of a man with hessian rope; biting into an apple; and animating confetti-letters like tiny black bats that moved above an upturned metal fan. Just before the performance approached its conclusion small glasses of sherry were distributed and sipped as a collective act, followed by the removal of our ribbons and the gently whispered suggestion that we make a wish as the ribbons were tied to a branch that sheltered a naked Christ-like figure. As we left, again one by one, each performer softly took our hands and thanked us for coming.

The Pacitti Company obviously spent a lot of time researching A Forest, but in their excitement at what they had created—the powerful beauty of the many images and the analogies suggested with the materialism of contemporary Britain—they used too many potions in casting their spell.

It’s a puzzling curatorial decision that puts a 12-minute life-sized video of a stand-up comic to be viewed in a dark room, the sacred viewing space of high video art. I wonder if there is some sort of explanation Inbetween Time could have provided for this apart from the programme notes’ rather cursory: “Playing with language and culture using personally written jokes” (other comics use a source book?), “the work highlights tensions around religious and racial identity. Jokes and puns are used to explore stereotype within the context of personal experience.”

I’m still puzzled, because that could be a description of Billy Conolly. I consult the leaflet: “Jokes temporarily change the rules of engagement with art through the viewers’ subjective experience; their relation, connection and disconnection as sexed, raced and classed people.”

Fair play, I’m impressed by the canny deployment of language here. There’s also mention of an artist’s book, which is for sale in the bookshop downstairs. I go to check it out.

Yara El-Sherbini is a good comic, funny and acute. I listened to her set with a wry recognition that flared into a belly laugh a couple of times. The question of what might nudge a performance into Live Art territory remains. Is “Jokes and puns explore stereotype” the clincher? If she had wanted to develop an ‘Angry Landlord’ persona, or a ‘Stavros the Greek’, or if she had gone the colluding-with-audience-prejudice route, as poor old Charlie Drake had to through most of his working life, would that boost the irony/reflexivity quota of her performance (or document of her performance as it’s presented here)? Or would that subtract from it, by, I don’t know, entertaining her audience without sufficiently busting their prejudices? It’s odd, because unless she’s playing the Bernard Manning circuit, the audience isn’t going to be that shocked by her material. Tickled, of course.

There’s an edginess to stand-up that can be used to support an argument for its inclusion under the umbrella of experimental performance. The set recorded here, though, requires context. El-Sherbini is not alone among comics in playing with the evolving realities of British identity: what, besides her stated intention, separates her from others using similar material? It would be good to know, because with the rather casual, bring-your-own-context approach taken to showing the piece here, a suspicion remains that the “sexed, raced and classed” portion of her spiel may be delighting programmers all over Europe by allowing them to visibly demonstrate inclusive practice while at the same time showing work that is questionable enough, in the 'edgy' sense of the word, to be current. It’s possible Inbetween Time has enough confidence in its audience to feel such a suspicion is unlikely; but that presupposes that if the audience—or audient—were to misunderstand the intention behind showing this work, that would be their own fault for being ignorant and not recognising Art when they see it.

Conversely maybe it’s the case that reflections on the “sexed, raced and classed” nature of our being are an urgent contemporary concern, fuelled by historical processes which have been amplified by postmodern experience of hybridity. It’s curious then that this the only example of overt—let me try to remember the current catchword—“cultural diversity” in the whole festival? Then the need to place this piece within an explanatory context becomes even more crucial in order to avert any impression of tokenism.

Unhappily, the context I’m bringing to viewing this piece is 20 years observing the ham-fisted application of various exclusionary, sorry, “inclusive” policies. As far as seeing this particular work in the gallery is concerned, I wish I could come at it from a less cynical place.

At the festival opening conference a letter was read out from Daniel Belasco Rogers, who unfortunately couldn’t attend. In it, he said that he would run a mile from curators who tell you all about their newest project, and ask “Have you any new work about oranges because that’s the theme I’m dealing with this time?”

Well, for too many British Black and British Asian artists for too much of the time the opportunities are all about oranges. (I'm told it's different once you have 'made it', though looking around, I'm not so sure.) Sincere congratulations to Yara El-Sherbini for making orangeade, and sharing it with us; and I hope to have a taste of any other refreshing sparkly beverage she makes.

Droppin’ Shoppin’

Hey! Remember the real world? Yes, that’s right, the one with supermarkets in it, TV shopping channels, radio friendly music and stand-up comedy, the one with fistfights outside pubs. Two pieces are here presented combining theatre/live art and the everyday commercial arts: Until Thursday’s Droppin’ Shoppin’ and Avoiding dark Ali’s by Yara El-Sherbini. Both also share an interesting complication, in that they feature performers who might be considered to be working outside of their usual field of competence.

There’s always a certain tension when you’re aware that an artist is employing a brand new set of skills acquired for the sole purpose of performing a work. Elsewhere at the Inbetween Time festival, Uninvited Guests have trained themselves to create realistic body wounds using stage makeup, and it’s possible to spend much of the performance appraising the qualities of their efforts; Paul Granjon in his Lecturama presentation attempts unsuccessfully to make fire using primitive tools, and the audience are rooting for him throughout. This tension is also palpable in Droppin’ Shoppin’, which is a work built upon that great horror: middle class English boys rapping. As it happens, Oliver Bray of Until Thursday handles himself commendably in the MC stakes. The show, devised by Bray and partner Robin Sidwell—who plays a drum kit live on stage—combines the aesthetics of Shopping Channel television with stripped down recreations of hip hop tracks. The tones and abilities of Bray’s rapping voice are reminiscent of D.A.I.S.Y. age MC techniques, and that era’s definitive hip hop group, De La Soul. So, for instance, a Public Enemy-style righteous bark would not suit him, and the duo steer well clear of this type of material. Public Enemy’s polemic and political vitriol might be considered a little too ‘on the nose’ for a show which also deals with extreme representations of capitalism. Instead, Until Thursday address issues of creative ethics by performing 8 Point Agenda from UK act The Herbaliser. The original lyric is structured as a manifesto, which is then distorted in Droppin’ Shoppin’ by having Bray announce it wearing a cheap suit and a cheap smile, sat smugly in a red armchair, as if delivering quality guarantees and price promises on QVC.

There’s nothing new in this type of distortion, especially in hip hop, where most commercial albums are built around ‘skits’ presented between songs. It wouldn’t be at all out of place to hear an LP which featured Afroman’s line “I ate that pussy like shrimp fried rice” delivered with chummy English bonhomie, as happens in Droppin’ Shoppin’.

The show moves into different territory altogether when Oliver Bray addresses his audience directly using the anodyne style of a Shopping Channel presenter, and then begins to perform as if the videotape has wrapped itself around its own playhead, repeating words randomly, mixing them up, caught in a loop. These spliced up repetitions of dull media drivel resemble the work of Negativland or Chris Morris at his most abstract and whilst, as a technique, this might be seen as a perverted MCing of sorts, it didn’t seem to link in any way to the larger part of the show; except perhaps, tenuously, in the verbatim recreation of Afroman’s The American Dream which closes proceedings, delivered directly to us like a sermonising sales patter with queasy echoes of Martin Luther King. But the audience enjoyed it no end, and I’m probably in the minority in suggesting that Droppin’ Shoppin’ needed a good solid re-mix to unify its disparate elements.

Avoiding dark Ali’s

Yara El-Sherbini, on the other hand, has created a piece of dense conceptual layers through the most simple of focussed acts: filming herself performing stand-up comedy in a pub. In strange contrast to the work of Until Thursday, Avoiding dark Ali’s generates questions and provocations precisely because El-Sherbini is not a very good stand-up comic at all. She uses poor inflection on punchlines, flaps her hands about, laughs at her own jokes, and misses a fundamental trick of stand-up in failing to employ the microphone as a ‘weapon of presence.’ Her short routine is filmed at a smallish comedy club using a cheap DV camera, and is then projected in a darkened room, replaying in a constant loop. Sure, the audience within the film are laughing—with one woman’s voice loud and brash above all others—but in the entire hour I spend watching the projected film, the best El-Sherbini gets from her Inbetween Time punters is a couple of giggles. Unlike her pub crowd the Arnolfini audience knows that El-Sherbini is an artist using stand-up as an investigative medium. She’s telling those jokes for a reason.

The jokes in question share a common thread. All operate around the subject of Muslim culture and its place in the UK. It ought to be stressed that for the large part these are not political gags. Most are appalling puns and riffs upon pronunciation where, for instance “A right to be heard” is turned into “A right to beard” and “A Mosque? In Dorset?” becomes “A Mosque? Endorse it?” all made possible thanks to El-Sherbini’s Yorkshire drawl. But after a certain amount of repeated viewing the political begins to seep from the cracks in her act. Those annoying hand movements become an abstract dance, the crowd’s laughter an onrushing tide, and these deconstructions isolate El-Sherbini’s central concern: a cavalcade of stereotypes and terrorist associations is being made ‘safe’ and politically correct simply because it is being reeled off by a lass from Pontefract who just so happens to have a Muslim background.

The stand-up act itself asks no political questions, unlike the routines of other Muslim comics such as Shazia Mirza or Omid Djalli. It’s just a bright patter of Sheiks ensconced in cupboards with vacuum cleaners, Muslim women morphing into hookahs, and girls from Yorkshire pretending to come from Afghanistan, “fresh off t’boat.” But here, on the wall of an art gallery, it’s framed differently and the focus shifts accordingly. It’s made all the more relevant by the fact that outside, out in the real world (remember that?) there are currently a great many Muslims demanding blood over an unfunny, badly drawn cartoon.

Three members of the German-UK collaboration, Gob Squad (Johanna Freiburg, Bastian Trost and Simon Will), are reporting back to us on Me, The Monster, the first of their research residencies conducted for Inbetween Time.

The audience is seated according to their monster type. Are you a werewolf, ghost, alien or vampire? This subtle categorization is determined for you by the Squad from your answers to their questionnaire. I miss this process and find myself sitting with self-identified Frankenstein’s monsters. Two tables are angled on the stage, the speakers opposite taking in each other as well as the audience; we are all in on this collaborative process.

We are told the characteristics of each monster group and measure ourselves against the descriptions. I discover that Frankenstein’s monsters are understandably fond of hybridity. It’s like identifying or not with your astrological sign. Gob Squad use humour in their approach to questioning the public about what makes them fearful, their public interface is fun, with large endearing childlike monster graphics and the tag “Scare in the community”on their display boards.

The questionnaire was developed as a tool to engage the public in a research exercise in Bristol’s central shopping mall. On video we see the set up, a stall amongst other outlets. We see the monster masks and the graphics display boards (they dress the stage for the lecture). Three members of the company explain how they fine-tuned the research methodology – apparently people are more likely to talk to a person who’s not wearing a monster mask.

The video zooms in on a woman shopper who was prepared to take on Gob Squad’s invitation to be taped while inhabiting her monster self. We hear how she has met the challenge to extrapolate on the idea, developing her monster profile into a storyline. Our willing public collaborator is a young mum who admits to being a vampire, describing the occasion of her conversion – romance was her undoing – and explaining how as a nursing mum she needs regular nourishment. She reveals that she hangs around on the ceiling of changing rooms waiting for her next meal.

The central concern of Me, The Monster is FEAR!!! Apparently, there are thousands of phobias listed on the Internet including a fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. The company elaborates on the contention that in a time of relative safety, free from political oppression and in the absence of real threats, fear may be manufactured to control people. They are suggesting that fear may be self-generated or perpetrated by governments for political motives. The recent upsurge in the production of zombie thrillers is cited as a further indication of a current need to generate anxiety.

We see some early developments in the research: explorative video works by Robert Shaw (with sound design by Jeff McGrory) initially morphing shoppers and security guards with their monster persona. We then observe the application of another process; the re-making of a scene from Halloween, home-movie style to be played alongside the original on a split-screen.

I found it unsettling to see a house I know as a site for what appeared to be a copycat murder. It could almost have been a satirical TV news report – THE DAY TODAY!!! Inquiry-into-danger-of-movies-influencing-vulnerable-minds SHOCK!!! I felt it was creepily close to the Happy Slapping* phenomenon. Could Gob Squad be seeding the next hideous new youth craze? On the contrary, the company thought paralleling the 2 films potentially “emptied” them of fearful content and were intending testing the effect by remaking yet more horror scenes from Hollywood films using the same formula.

I think Gob Squad have defined a rich area for development and look forward, with appropriate trepidation, to seeing more of their take on horror, fear and monsters in our postmodern climate.

*Note for the Australians and other out of town folk: Happy Slapping: an unprovoked physical (occasionally fatal) attack on Joe Public, the purpose of which is to provide a spectacle to be recorded by videophone and distributed to mates.

Charlie Murphy has been collecting kisses since Valentine’s Day 2000. Installing herself at various festivals, concerts and galleries throughout the UK and Europe, she seduces passers-by into taking part in her grand scheme to immortalise those transient moments when lips meet lips, when arms lock and breathing synchronises. It’s not just a case of filming these brief encounters (although a comprehensive digital archive can be found at www.charliemurphy.co.uk/kiss). The core of the exercise is to produce a dental/oral mould, a physical object born of every amorous clinch. It’s difficult to make a viable connection between eros and dental practice, given that the lexicon of dentistry doesn’t exactly lend itself to erotic potential… awkward double entendres about the ‘filling of cavities’ aside… Nevertheless, this is exactly what Murphy does: she fills your cavity. Plus that of your partner. With a quick setting dental alginate, to be precise.

Murphy and her assistant Giuseppe Frusteri explain the process to each couple with a sense of playful, confident industry verging on the flirtatious. 1) The casting material will be spooned into your mouth immediately prior to kissing. 2) In order for the material to ‘fuse’ between partners, one must push it forward with one’s tongue (by extension, this is going to be a French kiss–albeit one mediated by putty—whether you like it or not—3) You have about 15 seconds in which to settle your hungry mouths into a fixed position, because after that the alginate will begin to harden and you should—to use a technical term—stop messin’ about. 4) The pose is held for roughly a minute and a half. This is the moment highlighted by a series of video documents looping away opposite Murphy’s workstation, a film of past smooches around the world, boy/girl, girl/girl, boy/boy, group kisses, dancing kisses, shy kisses, kisses so passionate Murphy has to step into frame and remind the participants that they’re supposed to stop moving those mouths. 5) Once the alginate has hardened sufficiently, you unlock your jaws and Murphy rushes in to midwife your kiss. As this little product of your union slips from between you it’s still relatively jelly-like, quivering in Murphy’s hands. For a moment it looks uncomfortably alien, until you regain your composure and look closely at your offspring. One thing’s for certain: this child will inherit your dental problems. Disconcertingly enough, when my partner and I contribute to Murphy’s collection of kisses, there is a professional dentist present. He examines the results before levelling his gaze at me and saying, “Don’t worry. I won’t give you my card,” deadpan, with the air of a man who thinks he should do just that. “Actually, you’re quite well matched”, he says, pointing to the meeting of teeth, “Look at that. That’s a nice intersection.” Yeah yeah yeah, I think. I bet you say that to all the kissers.

This is a truly durational work, a long-term project on Murphy’s part with a series of defined acts. The collection of moulds, the digital documentation and the paraphernalia surrounding it, the dental appointment cards, the surgical outfits Murphy and Frusteri wear: these are all preliminary stages in what will ultimately be a huge shiny kunstkammer of kisses. Each cast will be turned into a glass sculpture and exhibited—it is anticipated—in 2007. When you see your kiss ‘made flesh’ after the casting it adds depth to imagine that, somewhere along the line, it will form part of a massive display of erotic/comic/alien moments rendered transparent, with your moment, ‘your song’ lost somewhere in its midst, the light refracting through your loved one’s mouth and into your own. Who knows how many participants will attend to see a kiss from a relationship long gone, how many will see profound shapes beyond and within the glass? There will be fleeting kisses, flaunting kisses, angry kisses, Judas kisses, chaste kisses, fun kisses…and, of course, forgotten ones.

Though conceived as a single screen work, John Gillies’ black and white digital film Divide is here re-configured as a diptych and an installation. Two screens face one another, the viewer invited to sit between them. One shows the film; the other footage of heavily pregnant sheep, panting.

In the wilderness of the Australian landscape with its wide open spaces and its woodland, an epic journey of 4 men across the country is taking place. Alongside them, a herd of sheep (animals outside their natural habitat). The film’s emphasis on texture renders it visually seductive. Gillies focuses on an anthill; the corrugated wool on a sheep’s flank; waves in a bubbling stream; crisp paper coasting the air; a grizzly beard. The work sounds incredible too: the pounding of hooves; sheep on ground; rushing water; crickets. It gives the film its rhythm, pulses through it. As the journey progresses, the group thins. A tree collapses, crushing one man under its weight; another rider is thrown from his horse. There is a sense almost of nature overwhelming them.

As well as being metaphors for the collective, the sheep also have obvious religious significance. At a later sheep-counting, the only lamb has disappeared. Eventually, one of the men returns holding it in his arms. He shakes his head. Is this Abraham’s sacrificial ram? This possibility is echoed in the use of biblical text. A disembodied voice reads from the Old Testament, emphasising its intractable focus on the blessed versus the cursed. Herein lies the heart of the film. The politics of exclusion fostered by the Old Testament relates to the men’s desire to conquer the land, to find their place in it. If then these men look slightly incongruous, there is the additional surprise of coming across a Chinese opera singer in the middle of the forest. His music represents another difference, a cultural tradition not associated with that landscape. The imagery changes too: now we see the delicacy of a lantern glowing in the forest; a diamante headress; a mirror. At one point, texts, both handwritten and printed, are discarded, the pages torn from a volume as a man trots through a forest of paper bark trees. Here Gillies seems to be referring to written narratives and discarding them, reminding us that the (his)stories that have been told are always inscribed with the ghosts of the ones omitted.

A sense of longing and not belonging suffuses the work. Eventually the uncultivated land is literally cracked, fissures in dry earth. At the film’s close, the sheep are running so fast across the screen that their bodies are abstracted, their movement fluid as waves. Is this Moses’ sea? I turn to face the other screen. A solitary inquisitive sheep is watching over my shoulder.

We join 4 men traversing land and water, their journey a visual retelling of the Old Testament. The historical and religious text is played out by 2 men who in turn hold open a bible, ripping out its pages as they roam the Australian landscape. Once a page is read it is gifted to nature…strewn across the bush and washed downstream…dust to dust, ashes to ashes. We see a burning tree reminiscent of the bush Moses encounters in exile from his land.

Divide is immensely poetic and it feels very much like a quixotic picaresque tale, a narrative rooted in journeying. Although filmed in black and white, every image is reminiscent of a sepia photograph, capturing eras far removed from our own. These are strangely interrupted by a mirage-like hallucination of a Chinese opera singer, “found” moth-like in the forest staying close to his lantern flame.

The pace of the film speeds up and slows down to draw our attention to minute details (the feather veins of a leaf, ants magnified and marching over a sun-baked earth), whilst the sheep on the screen opposite steadfastly fix their gaze on us and the men. They seem to occupy one side of a riverbank between them and their shepherds; they have been separated from the herded flock which thinks and moves as one. The viewer is situated in the space of this imagined river, attuning us to the sounds of nature (flowing water, birds and utter silence) which Gillies so exquisitely attends to.

One of the strongest moments comes when the oldest man of the group is thrown from his saddle. It is unclear whether he dies. The horse just stands there, inert. Its master no longer there it cannot act of its own volition (as we understand the term). We later see the same man holding a lamb, the only one of the flock, symbolising a transition from Old Testament to New.

Gillies points to the fragility of man and his subservience to the forces of nature: a man is suddenly crushed when a tree sheds a limb. Man may try and make a ‘picture of the world’, as Heidegger discusses in relation to an Enlightenment notion of our way of being, but some things are beyond our control. The men in this film seem to understand this, as do the sheep who observe them, their sides heaving like bellows with comforting regularity. The sheep are metaphorically the flock of Moses. They are counted, but the whispering narrator never gets beyond 34 at the second tally; one has been lost, but finally will be found—a hint of redemption.

I’ve set up this sort of helpline for people confused and/or perplexed by the (nobleandsilver) show, Part 9. It’s a freephone helpline manned around the clock by a team of trained volunteers. Whenever the phone rings, they’ve got this spiel they go through with the caller first, along the lines of “Don’t be scared, I was scared at first, I know, calm down, no, shut up, stop crying, it’s only a show,” that sort of thing, then they proceed to tell the caller: “Consider this. See those parentheses around the name (nobleandsilver)? It’s very simple. That’s because Kim Noble and Stuart Silver are a contained set. They exist in and of themselves. OK? Let’s use that as a foundation for your future understanding of the work of (nobleandsilver).” I think this approach is quite clever, and not at all pretentious.

Why did I set up this helpline? I think it was to do with the way Part 9 ended. After a hissy fit of Jennifer Lopez proportions brought on by mounting frustrations with the performance, Kim Noble stormed from the stage (pausing only to destroy some technical equipment and pick up a half-finished cigarette) then never returned, leaving the space empty. Do you understand the sheer terror of being stuck in a room with 215 people who don’t know whether to applaud or not? Do you know what happens when you don’t get a really nice round of applause? I’ll tell you what happens. THE SHOW DOESN’T END. You don’t get closure. The show walks with you, out to the bar, into the world at large, snapping at your heels. This is not what you want from a performance which is the equivalent of the synapses in your brain misfiring constantly for a week, a performance which finds Noble free associating electrical appliances and sexual relationships, getting obsessive about street leafleting, representing a world “full of beauty” with a 2-second clip of Abba’s Dancing Queen dubbed over an image of Bruce Springsteen in concert, Silver talking about donkey sanctuaries and suicides, Noble interviewing his baffled parents about the moment of his conception, delivering monologues on the duo’s working relationship from fitness equipment stationed in front of moving traffic at a busy junction somewhere in London, Silver asking random members of the audience out on dinner dates, or to make cheese sandwiches, or to join him in a singalong version of Respect by Erasure performed on a small guitar he can’t play.

Like I said, it’s a 24-hour freephone helpline, so do call, most of the staff are quite pleasant. They’ll point out the parentheses around (nobleandsilver)—which will help to deal with the closure thingy—and following that, they’ll point out that Part 9 is not about you, it’s all about (nobleandsilver). Amidst the jamming, the noise, the dual, triple and quadruple streams of information spewed forth by video projections, soundtracks and games with the audience, there’s actually quite a sad little tale unfolding of how people get bored with each other. I suppose it could also be argued that the show is about how people get bored with themselves, but I’m not going to say that on my helpline; what do you think I am, stupid? That would be disastrous. I’m not going to mention the sequence in which Noble subjects an audience member to a timeline of their life which he’s “just constructed”, consisting of “YOU WERE BORN…YOU WENT TO NURSERY…(extremely long pause)…YOU CAME TO THE ARNOLFINI INBETWEEN TIME FESTIVAL AND SAW THIS SHOW, YOU NOB”, obviously intended to spark off unpleasant mortal reflections within everyone present. I’m also not going to mention the uneasy reminders of fading memory represented by (nobleandsilver) constantly re-enacting their first encounter as students in halls, replayed and retold over and over again, in unison, by voices onstage and onscreen, differing each time, unreasonably concerned with who borrowed what type of electrical extension from whom, and in what precise order. It’s the stuff of life, yes, I grant you… but not necessarily in a good way.

I suppose there’s much to get confused or upset about in Part 9, from the bursts of politically incorrect abuse to the uncertainties produced by exactly how authentic some of (nobelandsilver)’s video pranks are. I had one call to my phoneline, in the darkest hour of the night: “You know Kim Noble’s little onstage multimedia centre?” the caller asked, “where he’s running on a treadmill throughout the show? There’s a little scrolling LED by him that says ‘WELCOME TO THE FUCKING ARNOLFINI INBETWEENTIME FESTIVAL… THIS IS MY SHOW.’ What does that signify?” I replied that I thought it was a handy summing up of Noble’s onstage persona: a stream of constant, vaguely belligerent information. “But isn’t the whole world a bit like that?” my caller asked. “Nah,” I replied, “I think you’re probably reading too much into it.”

(nobleandsilver) is a multimedia collaboration between Kim Noble, Stuart Silver and assorted others. They won the Perrier Newcomers Award at the Edinburgh Festival 2000 and create performance for theatres, galleries, television, radio and public spaces.

What kind of monster am I? A crowd of eager creatures gathers around Simon Will (one member of performance company Gob Squad), questionnaires in hand. “I am just putting the results through the computer now”, he says, as one of the other little monsters provides the corresponding bleeps and computer sound effects. ‘Zombie: warm character, with a love of laughter and an interest in durational work.’

“Monster Profiling: There are no right or wrong answers. Use your instincts and make speedy choices.” Grabbing a sheet, I blitz through the multiple choice character determination. Question 4. “Choose one of the following nights out”; definitely “dinner, fine wine and good conversation.” Even at my lightning pace, I note the category system that runs down the side. “V is for Vampire: devious, interested in modern dance, and filled with a desire to scrutinize and be seduced by beauty.” This we are told is the reason we vampires should sit at the front of the auditorium, to more easily gaze upon the beauty of the Gob Squad panellists on stage.

The other categories are explained (Ghost, Werewolf, Frankenstein’s Monster, Alien) and their positioning in the auditorium elaborated on—we look around to see who has been kept at the back to stop them asking awkward questions, or who is located near the exits, to accommodate their tendency to “fly off the handle” and leave. The only ones we can’t pin down are the Ghosts. We are warned to beware, they can sit anywhere. I suspect that one of them is next to me.

With an enticingly laid-back demeanour, members of Gob Squad explain the beginnings of their journey into the economy of fear. In 3 residencies, of which Inbetween Time is the first, they will be looking at fear and its numerous manifestations within society, exploring our safety zones in our homes, cars and shopping centres. This research will contemplate our illogical mindset, our tendency to pull up the duvet to combat fear of the dark.

Setting up their stall at the local shopping centre (with the somewhat unusual permission to do so and also to film), Gob Squad tried with varying degrees of success to entice people in with their questionnaire icebreaker. This was a means to an end, in the hope that people might buy in, making them more open to step into the unknown, and begin to construct one of the infinite scenarios for their own inner monster. Enacted in a series of short video portraits, people recount their fears and delve deeper into their monster fantasies—a security guard referring to the receptionist in the background, matter of factly states, “I will kill her.”

A variety of approaches to these ‘portraits’ is employed, often using filmic devices such as slow zoom to a static figure as the voice over begins and cross fades between human and monster—features of Gob Squad’s attempt to collide Hollywood with the everyday. This approach was seen again at the end of the presentation in a split-screen video work, displaying on one side their remake of a section of Halloween, on the other, the corresponding scene from the original. A game of ‘spot the difference’ ensues, the attention to detail enticing—seeing the Squad buying a watermelon (that would play the role of the pumpkin) earlier in the week now makes sense. On another level the implied awkwardness kicks in, the multiple takes required to superimpose the single original shot onto a completely other building and the misplacement of props to achieve continuity.

I struggled to engage visually with the ‘video portraits’, unclear about what was added by rounding them up within this structure. I was more intrigued by what was being said and delighted by the potential for these scenarios to be enacted, to intervene with the real. In a summary of where the work might go, Simon Will described, in a playfully flippant manner, the potential for a community action—a protest against fear, where everyone goes shopping dressed as Zombies. This clearly resonates with recent Gob Squad work such as King Kong Club, but is far more exhilarating in its potential to exist outside of a contained environment and to take to the street. This collective deed could allow those participating to contribute proactively and decisively to an uprising. I often find those flippant remarks to be the ones I most wholeheartedly want to go with, and despite my Vampire classification I am eager and willing to join this new Zombie community.

Gob Squad are a British-German group working collectively, without a director, on the devising, design and performing of their productions. Permanent members of the group are Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost and Simon Will. For Me, The Monster, Gob Squad are joined by video artist Robert Shaw and sound designers Sebastian Bark and Jeff McGrory. www.gobsquad.com.

An archaic metal hospital bed, syringes, cotton buds, bottles of cleansing liquid and stage blood. Three performers (Neil Callaghan, Richard Dufty and Simone Kenyon) devise wounds for themselves and for one another whilst a fourth (Duncan Speakman) moves between them with a contact microphone (like a kind of stethoscope), sampling sounds from the performers’ bodies.

Instead of the typical doctor-patient ritual (patient points to where the pain is; doctor makes a stab at a diagnosis), one performer indicates where he would like his wound and another creates it. The marks are produced with skill. Flesh-coloured putty is rolled between the fingers, then painstakingly applied to the hand with a spatula; a needle draws a thin line in the raised skin before fake blood is added, often drop by drop with a pipette. The care and precision with which the performers slowly create these fake injuries is at odds with expectations that constellate around violence. I start to invent scenarios to explain the gashes: the woman tripped on a cracked paving stone; the man in the suit punched in a lunchtime brawl. The performers contemplate their own wounds with detachment; sometimes they smile at one another as though congratulating themselves.

There is something satisfying about this work appearing in a Live Art context. It references the kind of body art of pain made iconic by Gina Pane, Marina Abramovic, Orlan and others. These marks are not real. Yet despite being so close to the wounds, indeed despite seeing them being made, it’s hard not to be taken in. The room is hot. I start to feel squeamish. A hand is dangling in my face, dripping with fake blood. There are already bloodied footprints on the floor. As the work progresses, the narratives I am creating have to alter. The accidents must become more serious. Now we are in the world of car smashes, train collisions; passengers too damaged to recover. Cuts multiply like some contagious disease, a cruel science fiction scenario where wounds are growing on the walls. Hours later, the room looks like a murder scene; later still, something out of a horror movie. By the end, even the audience is feeling ‘wounded,’ our participation made explicit.

The effect of this disturbing and visceral experience is to confront us with our own vulnerability, our fears. The performance also plays on our reluctance to look and our inability to look away, something recognised in the documented accident photography of Enrique Metenides. We are caught in this dilemma but the durational nature of Aftermath allows us to leave and re-enter at will, coming back to gawp at the objects of our fascination until we can bear it no longer. And just as real patients might take home anything from their hospital wristband to their gallstones (bottled) as a testament to their survival, so Uninvited Guests provide us with an open sore of our own.

Bristol-based Uninvited Guests formed in 1998 and have toured widely with provocative performances that try to make sense of a media-saturated culture in which virtual interactions and memories of TV or movies are as much part of our experience as intimate dialogues with lovers. Uninvited Guests focus mainly on performance, but also work in installation and digital media. Uninvited Guests are Arnolfini Associate Artists.

Standing in a spotlight at the front of the stage wearing a green summer dress, Rosie Dennis uses her arms to pull into herself the recollection of past lovers. Recounting in a numerical sequence elements of relationships, she plays her breath like a musician, making staccato, stilted, percussive sounds. Modulating phrases to replay and explore all the possible angles on a past event, she holds in repeated gestures a lost lover’s body. As a soundtrack to these memories there are sweet, quirky songs.

If asked (outside this inside space) “How are you?” Dennis might say, “Oh okay you know” while whirring away inside is a jarring mechanism replaying regrets. In Love Song Dedication we see the inside, the unstoppable recollections. We are, for an intense 20 minutes, completely with her, breathing in with her the compulsive loop of recall. The performance is electric, its tautness sustaining our focus; there is no time or space to detach. Although not manic the performer endures attacks of panic like those dark episodes that appear in the cold sleepless hours. Some of the movements recalled for me a forgotten mechanism playing out a hapless sequence, like a damaged forsaken mechanical monkey. I saw raw representations of scattered recall, inducing states of near hyperventilation.

In spite of all this angst Dennis is funny, the audience appreciating the ridiculous fragments spilling forth—“I’m sorry I left you at the airport, on purpose”—bright evocative one-line pictures keep coming at breathtaking speed. Forlorn images express the failure to maintain a state of love.

It all happens right up on the front of the stage. Dennis is a very open performer without distracting attitude, sentiment or theories. The work was palpably female in its multitudinous attempts to explain what went wrong, and in the recognition that often saying sorry can be and can sound so feeble.

Sounds from Above the Ground is a truly site-specific work in that the more familiarity you have with the landscape in which it plays out, the more you will bring to the encounter. To experience it, you have to walk over from Arnolfini to L-Shed, a big industrial building, temporarily set up installation-style with gaffer tape and blackout curtains; you are given the kit, a backpack and headphones, and you will stand there at the desk while the people in charge make sure that it’s working.

Walking there, speaking with the attendants, getting fitted up with the gear, frames the experience of the work. It’s a way of getting over the initial encounter with bulky technology, like a reader’s up-front encounter with a chunk of exposition at the start of a novel. Though in this instance it’s not exactly fair to the spirit of the work that part of this framing turns out to be an argument over whether gallery staff have the right to hold on to my credit cards. “Well, haven’t you ever hired a car?” It’s the principle of the thing! There should have been a warning, and I could have brought my driving licence instead.

Argument over. The headphones activate. I go outside with a guide; I hear the artist’s voice through my headset saying, “Follow me.”

Bloody hell, the guide is haring ahead sharpish, was I meant to lose sight of him? But the headphones are no longer intrusive and the sound coming from them has inserted itself into my general low-level consciousness. There is a girl’s voice on the soundtrack; occasionally she asks a question.

The artist is murmuring in my ear like a friend, telling me where to go. My inner monologue rises to tangle with him. “What do you mean, Duncan? Shall I stay over here? Do you mean this door? Can’t I stop and look around for a bit?” Spaces of silence on the sound track give me tacit permission to do so.

I’ve walked over the bridge, I’ve followed instructions, I’ve had space to look around, to be puzzled, to disagree, to feel stubborn. I’ve stared into the river, I’ve felt the cobbles through my shoes, I’ve heard traffic, actual and processed with delay, and I’ve heard the artist’s virtual companion nudge into our ‘conversation’ with gentle queries. I’m led back to L-Shed. There’s a definite sense of termination as the ambient track fades. Another female voice enters, her tone both dispassionate and firm. “Please take off your headphones and make your way back into the building.” It’s over.

I have been teased with a sense of looking for something and not quite finding it. I think that’s what tipped me over into the invisible city: because just for a moment I slipped into the city of my memories, with my internal cohort drifting about me, my inner citadel of friends and absent friends and friends to come. Their ghostly promises brush against me. I am in tears.

Duncan Speakman is a sound and video artist working in live and mediated spaces using emergent technologies. His work has been exhibited internationally at festivals including ISEA, Futuresonic, ArteAlmeda and Navigate. He is currently a visiting lecturer in technology and performance at Dartington College of Arts, UK.

An image of a ‘matador’ Smurf figurine on the big screen over the performance space is accompanied by text claiming it was sold through eBay for £75 pounds. More items, more sales. Shortly eBay PowerSeller AC Dickson emerges to the power riff of the Survivors’ early 80s hit, Eye of the Tiger. He’s not sporting a red cape, but shows the right exuberance as he punches the air, almost in time; he is here to take on something much bigger than a bull—the world, or so he claims.

The first of the 4 presentations that comprise Inbetween Time’s Lecturama series was corporate seminar, self-help meeting and edu-tainment all rolled into one. This was educational, particularly for the eBay ‘virgins’ (including myself) that surprisingly made up the majority of the audience. Doubt was already heavy in the air as increasingly high figures appeared; £250,000 for a round of golf with Tiger Woods—“I don’t believe that” exclaimed the person next to me. These doubts were central to the intrigue and confusion surrounding ‘AC.’

A female assistant, Susan Beal, checks the computer before introducing AC, assuring us that we are in for a “real treat.” AC appears on the screen for a preamble-cum-pep talk, using every bad transition in the film editing book in images of walking down the street, ‘emerging’ from a swim, or at home, tennis racket in hand.

“Let’s get this party started!” The espresso on the way in starts to make sense as AC arrives, pumping up the crowd, heading straight into a show of hands. “Do you want to have more money? Do you want to have more free time? Do you want to make the world a better place?” Arms hesitantly, but fairly unanimously go up. He pre-empts the sniggers, explaining how eBay is “paving the way to world peace.” Whilst this may seem vaguely ludicrous, AC has a fair stab at explaining the thinking behind this belief, discussing the global marketplace and eBay’s potential to escape the corporation. “Nation building” may be stretching it, but I can see how it could be deemed a type of “personal empowerment.”

AC takes us through the basics of using the eBay site, eBay etiquette and eBay slang; I certainly felt like I was learning. The patter of his speech, with its Mr Garrison “m’kay”, hypnotically encourages us to go straight home and sign up to the eBay community: if you are already a seller then aim to be a PowerSeller; if you’ve only bought then now is the time to sell; and for people like me, this is your chance to join up.

The climax involves the final countdown on a selection of AC’s photographs of moon-landing astronauts selling live on eBay. As the clock ticks by AC introduces his usual celebratory ritual, the “dancing shoes”, a collection of dance moves. Daft Punk plays over the PA and AC circles the space casually mimicking the Michel Gondry video for the same track. As each item ‘pops off’ (the eBay slang for a last minute flurry of bids to increase the selling price), he grows increasingly excited and encourages others to join him on the ‘dance floor.’

It would have been so easy to satirise the whole eBay world, and this was definitely in the mix, but fortunately it wasn’t that clear cut. AC Dickson’s eBay Powerseller left me doubting a number of assumptions. I would expect that most came not believing that Andrew Dickson was actually a PowerSeller moving more than $1000 of goods in a month, but any doubts I had made me more willing to go with it. I am now registered with eBay, having just received my first email telling me that I have “won” my first purchase, the prize that went online as part of the presentation, an evening out with AC himself. I am certainly not fully converted, but maybe, just maybe, tonight is the night that I will be convinced of the power of the PowerSeller.

Andrew Dickson is a West Coast artist using video, PowerPoint, music and audience interaction to create satirical character-based performances. He is also a screenwriter, actor, and antique dealer. For more on Andrew and AC see www.andrewdickson.com and www.urbanhonking.com/powerseller. AC Dickson: eBay Powerseller continues to tour the US and UK.

Fragile, dark, devastatingly disturbing. Vegetation alternates with green sequins and red forest-berry jewels encroach upon skin; colours jump virus-like, bleeding from nature to the soft cream hues of a marionette, a controlled daughter or perhaps an entrapped heroine in the Grimm-est of fairytales.

Monika Tichacek’s The Shadowers, a video triptych, recalls childhood nightmares after reading a fable with a not so happy ending, or the skewed pleasure of watching a scary film late at night when your parents were in bed and you really were far too young. The pitch black of the gallery meant there was no turning the light on. And, if what played out across the screens was a reflection of your family history, you wouldn’t be calling out for the comforting embrace of your mother.

Three women, 2 beautiful and one grotesque, inhabit alternate environments—all complicit in a harrowing tale. A lush jade forest dappled with light and shadow offers a flip-side setting to a suffocating cavern-like space where it’s too dark to see the walls, and only antagonist and protagonists are lit. Neither is a safe place to be, the open one as much a psychological and physical prison as the one that’s closed.

Contrasting emotions are juxtaposed with only a sliver of distance between, vulnerability in a master-slave relationship with control. One of the strongest motifs repeated throughout involves webs: taut threads and elastic strands that shift, stretch, expand, that choreograph movement and control. The opening image of the loop presents us with a woman standing sternly over a beautiful girl in a dancer’s dress of green sequins—mother and daughter in a forest? The edges of the flesh-coloured material are barely disguised: it’s too easy to see through the beauty painted over this virgin. She has been made up, the dress is lifted to reveal threads which stitch her legs tightly together, enforcing a kind of chastity. The skin beneath the costume pulls until it ever so slightly bleeds…the blood on the sheets of a freshly broken hymen.

Insights into the violent tendencies of mind and body are invited in this kaleidoscopic work with its wordless narrative. Tension is heightened by sound and the pitches, chords and tones produced by slack and taut strings…again the metaphor of entrapment. The action escalates and becomes hyperbolic, allowing no space for the tension to be broken. The woman lets out occasional screams as if being raped in the most horrible of circumstances…until only a rasping breath is audible. The sound gets inside you and reverberates through your organs, like bats, not butterflies, rising to the throat, making you feel sick.

It is hard to tell whether anything is resolved; we are left with 2 women, the grotesque mother figure has gone. As tight threads conjoin the two mouth to mouth, saliva slides from the standing to the prone one—re-energising her? Now the loop recurs—an eternal nightmare. Like mother, like daughter, princess to wicked witch. The Shadowers is chilling, wedged in my throat, like heartburn.

Monika Tichacek has lived in Australia since 1994, studied sculpture at the College of Fine Arts, New South Wales, and creates works using endurance performance and video. In 2001 she was awarded the Helen Lempriere Travelling Arts Fellowship.

I am told at the meeting place to come back in 10 minutes. At exactly 3pm, I will be given a Walkman with instructions for a walk. I don’t have a watch and I’ve left my mobile at home so I have to keep asking people the time. Having established I don’t need the wheelchair/lift version, I don the headphones. “Hello, how are you?” says a decidedly friendly female voice. Any reply would be pointless. The voice suggests we take a walk.

Out of the building, past the tactile carved stone letters in the entrance and outside. “Oh it’s a bit breezy”, says the voice. “No it isn’t”, I reply (to myself), mildly annoyed. So, off we go, me and the voice, out to the docks to look at … “the ripples, aren’t they lovely … and the boats.” I’m now muttering, and thinking I’ve got stuff to say. This is my patch, these docks. I want to add my take, give my part “… past the sculpture.” Listen Ms Whoever-you-are, that sculpture means something to me! Don’t just pass it and sit down. Oh, we’re off again. Rather too slowly, lamely. I’m huffing in a huffy way now. More jolly conversation, lame comments as we pass through the bar COMPLETELY IGNORING the filming and the artworks going on. I’m thinking, she’s pre-recorded this soundtrack. This so-called ‘conversation’ doesn’t involve me or my experience of this time and space. Okay, well maybe it’s leading me somewhere. Up the stairs we go, falteringly, in order for ‘us’ to look at what Ms Voice wants to point out as interesting. I’m reacting petulantly to this mildly ingratiating primary school teacher persona. I’m nearly at the door. She, Ms Selfish, has been expressing her anticipation: “Soon we’re going to meet. Will we recognise each other?” I’m being directed to the door ahead. I have a sinking feeling, like going to see an unfavourite aunt. Through the door, I’m to take off the headphones and knock 3 times on another door. Now it feels more like an interview with my first headmaster who will not listen to my side of the story.

“Hello, nice to meet you.” “Yes,” I say. It’s dark in the long room. We walk to the far side, to 2 easy chairs. There is a dim, red glow. She’s acting friendly, saying she feels like we already know each other, asking me how I’m feeling. Now’s my chance. My hackles are raised. I tell her, “I know something about you, but you know nothing about me.” I feel there is an imbalance, a slippage (I notice she is mirroring my movements.) “Yes,” she says, “this happens when the rules of conversation are shifted, or broken…One of the work’s aims is to explore what happens when the accepted pattern of conversation is momentarily suspended.” I ask if she is noting the encounters, the outcomes. I say something about analysing the data to help improve her practice; I’m still riled, implying she might need some feedback. I have allowed myself to be provoked, I’m emotional, irritated.

There is the opportunity to record this encounter in a different way, she says, and asks if I would like to? I agree to sit completely still. Wearing cotton gloves, a small black packet is opened in the red darkness and she slips the contents into her mouth, switches on a bright lamp and sits back grinning strangely.

Caroline Wright studied Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and Design. Her practice is interdisciplinary, combining performance, sound, video, photography and installation with a focus on human communication.

David Weber-Krebs is a sculptor of theatre space. This Performance begins as a kind of performance installation. He takes the well-worn interior of the University of Bristol’s Wickham Theatre and fills it with suggestion until, by the end, we feel the room’s breadth, depth and volume, its age. We begin in the semi-dark with 2 lone speakers centre stage transmitting the series of measured statements that frame this performance. In performance work we’ve grown used to the list masquerading as meaningful text but, as lists go, this one is intriguing enough.

This Performance will activate a process.
This Performance will explain a situation.
This Performance will catch attention.
This Performance will establish a code.
This performance will provoke animosity.
This Performance will claim originality.
This Performance will try something out.

We riff on possibilities, until the list is so long, the claims so extravagant, we begin to lose hope. Maybe what we hear is all we’ll get in This Performance? The body sinks a little lower in its seat, prepares for the worst.

Instead, the word gives way to slowly encroaching light and with it a new sense of expectation before slipping back into stasis. I insert my own violent little scenario. Any minute now, a door will open at the back of the stage and a very bright white light will momentarily blind us. As I’m making a mental note to discuss this idea with David Weber-Krebs in the bar if I see him, I notice the small grey puddle on the stage, then its source in the, till now, imperceptible drip from above. Small gestures ripple through the audience. Do you see what I see? Another leak springs from stage left. Again, I begin to enlarge on the director’s vision: a Bristol tributary of the Thames! The Weeping Theatre of Wickham! Meanwhile, in the airspace of one corner of the stage, the light catches a wondrous shower of dust particles.

Then when we least expect it—could almost do without it—the performer Jennifer Minetti enters. She looks like one of us, dressed ordinarily. Her performance is uneventful. She simply stands, looking out. We take in her full face, her pleasingly solid figure, her curly grey hair. The theatre contracts as we concentrate on the forestage. Like a small figure in a Jeffrey Smart or Caspar David Freidrich painting, the woman reconfigures the space around her; in this case, the stage, the light, the water on the floor. Having exhausted the possibilities of mere presence, she ‘performs’ for us a funny, chaotic kind of tap-dance followed by face slapping and finally, a fall to the floor, a useless, fake death. Then she exits as discreetly as she arrived, disguising herself in the lining of her sweater, concealed by the architecture, melting into the wall.

We’re left with silence and sharp memories of this place and time and all that has transpired. What more could we ask of a performance?

As well as showcasing the latest in Live Art, the Inbetween Time festival highlights the work of a host of interconnecting support structures that hold this movement together. At the opening forum, Nurturing Risk, Mark Timmer, Artistic Director of Gasthuis in Amsterdam described his project, which sounds almost too good to be true. Gasthuis is a flexible venue with a multi-disciplinary focus, no fixed form and substantial resources to assist artists in their development, particularly when they’re starting out. Some time ago, David Weber-Krebs came to Timmer with a proposal to try something out. He wanted to create a work involving 30 members of the public performing a simple task on a stage. In terms of audience response, his first attempt was a dismal failure but the artist-centred focus of Gasthuis ensured that the support continued. In no small part, we have that process to thank for This Performance.

Educated in Germany, David Weber-Krebs went on to study mime in Amsterdam. He is the co-founder of the company LISA. This Performance and Fade Out are currently touring European arts festivals.

David Weber-Krebs, This Performance; Wickham Theatre, Feb 2; Nurturing Risk Forum, co-ordinator Ruth Holdsworth; University of Bristol, Feb 1

A woodland scene: birdsong and azure sky; pools of sunlight on dappled green. A girl—ebony-haired, crimson-lipped, sitting at the foot of a tree. An older woman (is this the girl’s mother?) lifting the skirt of her dress to reveal thighs stitched together like a grotesque doll. There is no text, no speech. This is a video work in which 3 performers enact macabre rituals in the dark. This is the world of The Shadowers.

The dystopian fairytale is the territory of writers like Angela Carter, artists Paula Rego and Matthew Barney (particularly his Cremaster series), and film-maker David Lynch. Monika Tichacek’s video is reminiscent of each of these in its dark blend of the Gothic and the surreal. The work has the feel of a bad dream. It’s as if we drift in and out of consciousness, our sense of continuity fragmented by the work’s distribution across 3 large screens. An image appears on one, then disappears. A girl standing with her legs apart, blindfolded, dress hitched up; the same girl seated on another screen.

Slowly, the video explores the sublime and the simultaneous relationship of the (female) body to nature. The natural and the artificial are deliberately confused, ambiguous. Are those translucent pomegranate seeds or rubies that sit like bubbles of blood on the woman’s face? Butterflies and insects are embroidered and sequined in forest hues. There is the ominous, reverberating drone of bees. Sometimes the body is reduced to its animal impulses. One performer feeds off another’s face. There is violence: hair is grabbed to drag the body; a hair pin slowly pierces a woman’s tongue, securing her to a tree stump, elongated fingernails nailed to the bark. Later her tongue is blue, her face bruised purple like battered fruit. The zip on a dress looks like a wounded spine as a woman crawls through foliage. Despite their explicitness, there is an incredible beauty in the framing of the images. We are made to focus on minutiae: a globule of saliva travelling down cat-gut strings; the movement of a hair; the quiver of lights like fireflies on a branch; the blur and sparkle of a jacket. We are not always sure what we are looking at. At times, images glow like jewels in the pitch black night.

An accordion plays tango and 2 women dance together. This dance—said to have originated in the brothels of South America—is typically associated with sexual passion. We see the performers’ legs criss-cross against the screen until they have woven a spider’s web of threads, a metaphor for desire and how we become trapped within it.

My mistaken arrival at the Arnolfini Meeting Room was the first confusion of the “physical meeting point” within Caroline Wright’s Conversation with Friends; I was quickly redirected towards the reception desk where I was due to begin. The work would not be a simple exchange of news or ideas, but would involve a three-stage encounter: guided walk, physical meeting and video document.

I am instructed to press play on a CD player at 16:20. Not wearing a watch and sensing that timing might have significance for my experience, I lean across the counter to watch the remaining minutes pass by on the time display of the PDQ machine.

“Let’s walk together.” The voice explains my route, but also reflects on the more tactile qualities of our shared meanderings in and around the Arnolfini. The doors open in front of me Aladdin-like in response to the audio only I can hear. The cold air immediately hits me and my decision to come out in a thin shirt concerns me as Wright comments, “There is quite a breeze, hope you wrapped up.”

In tandem with the focal voice, a second voice is heard, hushed and intermittent. Despite its restraint it is still a subtle intrusion—“Will I recognise you when we meet?”—often coming at the end of another more instructional statement, distracting you as you strain to hear. When later asked if I had enjoyed the conversation, I answered that I had not thought of it as one, not feeling the need to reply in any way. I am trying to listen, follow and to note discrepancies. I try to match Wright’s steps across the cobbles and am surprisingly pleased by the synchronicities; as I raise my foot to step on the pavement edge I am warned, “Be careful of the step.” I am just as delighted by my inability to keep up, or when I get ahead of myself; looking over the balcony I realise I am on the ‘wrong’ one, and later I watch as another person moves just too quickly at the same stage.

The guided walk completed, I leave the CD player behind and enter a darkened room, the soft red lights allowing me to make out Wright, who guides me to a seat. The ensuing “face-to-face exchange”, our second ‘meeting’ in multiple ways, felt like pleasantries prior to the request to visually document our encounter. I remain as still as possible as Wright places a piece of photographic paper in her mouth. The intense white light replaces the photographic safe red, directed specifically at me as I sit motionless, staring forwards. Lips pursed, slightly open, the stare is returned. On reflection this position takes on the character of a freeze-framed dialogue, but the pose removes any sense of intimacy.

My detachment is increased as I am guided to sit alone in a space designed as a refuge point (for those who cannot evacuate in fire situations). A video document makes up this third and final phase, left open with no clear start or finish, a conversation between a man and a woman across a table. With the video slowed and silent, I focus on other forms of communication, body language accentuated and yet problematised by its display. Each fiddles with their hands or face, gestures not openly hostile but displaying outbursts of emotion, followed by shared laughter. A further stifled conversation.

An exchange later in the day queried if this experience would affect my conversations over the rest of the festival. I also began to note that other participants were ruffled by the intended subversion of conversational etiquette, angered by an inability to contribute to a two-way exchange or the opportunity to know each other. In the early stages I felt none of these emotions, immediately accepting the ‘one-way’ flow, as I would in response to the green man or the train station tannoy. My behavioural response was clearly relational, and I was content to focus on my behaviour, but in a manner more responsive than conversational. The conduit I had created meant that when the potential for two-way exchange occurred, I was running alongside rather than within this exchange.

Spoken in a professional, perfectly modulated female voice, in the dark of an empty stage, again and again: “This performance is about to….” And so it goes on announcing, raising our expectations. There are so many things This performance is about to do. The endlessness of possibilities is made apparent. Our audience expectations begin to fade. This performance will not, as announced so authoritatively, begin to get faster. As each possibility is stated, we inhabit the expectation. The stage is an arena within which slowly illuminated emptiness appears as a metaphysical, metaphorical focus. Collectively and as individuals, we have a stage on which to place possibilities from the personal to the limitless—a meta-everyman future fable.

The most minimal of interventions: a drip from above, then a second, becoming puddles, creeping shapes for us to follow. After a long time and many more announcements the light has visibly faded. I become aware of a building sound, interfering with the reverie induced by those infinite repetitive phases. My body absorbs frequencies, like anxiety affecting me physiologically. There is a smell of burning, a light appearing off to the right, in its beam smoke that looks like mist.

Amazingly, after all that expectation and emptiness, a woman (Jennifer Minetti) walks onto our space, adopts a stance, facing us, staring into the light. Her presence embodies a state beyond any expectations of that phrase: “This performance is about to be.” Held in her watery eyes, her full figure, the very phenomenon of this mature woman, is the actual, the real, for all it’s worth.

She moves to the front of the stage and turns to stare, along with us, back at the empty stage. Returning centrestage, she throws herself to the floor, her body juddering.

This performance ends with an existential image of the woman walking into the shadow pulling her black-lined top (an infinite misery jumper?) over her head.

This performance is crafted, minimal, complex and simple. Is David Weber-Krebs a reincarnation of Beckett, come back to make us wait some more?

This Performance says it is about to do a lot of things. At first you think these are empty promises. Nothing more than the voice announcing supposed action is projected towards the theatre’s back wall from 2 small speakers lit by a spotlight suspended from the rigging. The theatre is otherwise exposed, naked beneath its own stage lights. We see every scuff mark and the pile of old props stacked high in the open wings.

This performance says it is about to create many things—including “pretensions”—which it very nearly does. David Weber-Krebs has enjoyed toying with this fine line between academic masturbation and true insight. His work is a parody of parody. This Performance, in which he doesn’t appear, is a highly self-reflective being—its own director, performer, dramaturg, technical crew and theorist.

It evolves, and starts its life cycle as an optimist; it is young and full of the excitement of possibility of what it can deliver as a performance. It promises to “recalculate risk” even, but then later realises that this is a fait d’accompli and that what it offers is laced with the wisdom that it might “develop a language of failure…increase boredom drastically…get weaker.” It fleetingly thinks it can seduce death, but then accepts and celebrates its own inevitable mortality.

This Performance reaches out to its audience, and seems to know that it can test them. We are, after all, at a festival of Live Art, ‘hybrid’ performance and “intrigue” which, (in the words of Inbetween Time’s Artistic Director, Helen Cole), might reject “conventional art spaces or places” and remain “playfully anarchic.”

After a time, I started feeling that these may not be empty statements of intent. I began to read into this performance all the things that it said it was about. I was “affected gradually”, just like the water dripping slowly from the rig, forming a small pool of water that turned to a rivulet and made its way across the empty floor. Simultaneously, water trickled like piss down the theatre’s pillars.

This Performance reminded me of so many companies, most obviously Forced Entertainment’s stripping down and deconstruction of theatre but, in particular, the Italian group Societas Raffaello Sanzio who frequently use light and sound to replace material presences on stage.

Light switched from spot to spot, falling on water in the far corner of the stage. A chink appeared to open in “the stage curtain”, letting a shaft of light fall, illuminating a sliver of dust-like water particles that came to rest on the theatre’s walls. Realism exposed theatrical illusion when a final ‘prop’, a female actor (older and perhaps therefore wiser), entered through a door at the back of the stage. She purposively declined to meet our expectant gaze. Our relief at the appearance of an actor whose utterances could emanate from a real voicebox was short-lived. She moved centre, stopped and started to ‘fit’ wildly, ending up lying face up in the water—a fake, iconic representation of the “actor.”

After a performance initially empty of theatrical conventions (props, actors, set), a performer, light and sound gave us, the audience, a more readily distinguishable performance, yet it is hard to discern which is the more authentic for David Weber-Krebs.

We file into the auditorium, grave, expectant; we settle into our seats, conscientiously switch off our phones, and wait to be impressed. The setting alone informs us that we are about to receive that revelation which art alone, particularly at its cutting edge, is suited to deliver.

A female voice intrudes into the solemn silence, informing us that this performance is about to begin. The voice is pitched low, enunciating slowly and with clarity. There is a pause to allow us to absorb the information.

The voice has the mechanical quality of an answerphone message. It continues: announcement after announcement falls deliberately into the space around us, the space between our ears. How lucky we are to receive guidance as to the nature of what we will experience. The stage is dark, empty, stark.

Each statement falls deliberately into the space as the stage gradually brightens. It’s possible to understand a progression—or not. From the bureaucrat-speak of arts funding applications, the statements move into wilder territory:

“This statement is about to eliminate toxins/have a master/create a legend.”

A low, throbbing beat rises in intensity as the statements become messianic and bellicose. A grinding noise supplements the background rhythm. There is talk of borders and defence, evolving into statements of conciliation. The urgent sound desists, leaving a throbbing hum. The light is fading as the statements begin to concern themselves with apocalyptic desperation.

The voice quietens, and the stage is dark. A spotlight briefly illuminates one empty corner before we’re delivered back into darkness.

When the lights come on again, we see shallow puddles on the floor of the stage. A woman enters from the back. She looks to be in her 60s, dressed in casual clothing with a mop of grey hair. She walks to the front of the stage and stares ahead, her eyes fixed slightly above us. She is completely still, staring, frowning slightly. Is she our audience?

Minutes later, she paces the stage with deliberate precision. She turns a corner sharply and stands still. Her back is turned towards us—perhaps she is still staring into the distance? We can see the rise and fall of her breathing. Minutes pass.

Do we need a performance? She will perform for us. She makes her way centrestage and jigs about on the spot, dancing, wobbling and flailing. Like a vaudeville caricature, she seems excruciatingly exposed. She falls flat on her back in the puddle, twitching. She gets up again to continue her dance, slapping herself, moving erratically. Her face slackens, she stares at us again, and stalks off to the back of the stage. As the light fades, she is inching along the back wall, insinuating herself into its structural features. She creeps behind a pillar, and now the only illumination is a spotlight in another empty corner. The woman pulls her sweater inside out and over her head in the dark; the fabric is black, so she melts into the background. This Performance ends as the light finally fades.

Secrets of the Saints is a free interpretation of the encounter between Mary and the Angel Gabriel. The audience is invited to sit on the floor within a rectangle in a darkened room. A large square of light projected on the wall to one side is fuzzy with video snow. A naked young man (Neil Johnson) hides behind a pillar which glows with a blown-up image of his face, transmitted from the camcorder in his hand.

A young woman (Polly Frame) strides into the space. Fashionably mysterious in dark glasses, her face is partly concealed by a white muffler. The audience now see themselves, green and strange, cast on the wall by her webcam.

She flings herself to the floor delivering a monologue, although it is not clear if it is recorded or spoken live. She has a regional accent, and her voice is harsh, as though filtered; she speaks in long strings of words, frequently stopping on a stutter, often on the brink of expressing something. Syllables are pouring out of her and somehow it is hypnotic: she repeats and fluidly rearranges phrases, playing with puns, ellipses and dislocations. “One’s and what’s, one’s and knots, bons mots.”

The webcam is now focused on the inside of her jacket as she scrabbles about on the floor on her side, crawling and grovelling up and down the rectangle of audience. Whatever she is saying is hard to make out, but the mood is intense and desperate. Her agile string of words pleases in its complexity. There’s an almost mathematical pleasure in hearing it, as if it were a string of randomised equations. She interjects shouted comments in a harsher tone. “Quote!” she snaps, drawing herself up tensely.

She stops on a sentence, “Utterly being unable…” and the pause is unbearable. She sits up, impatient. “To what?” she shouts at herself. “To discerner [sic].” She relaxes, relieved. She’s lost her frantic motion. Meanwhile, the naked man has put on a pair of underpants.

The work continues in sections differentiated by tone and degrees of intelligibility. The man emerges from his corner in stages, but is often startled back into it by a harsh movement on the part of the woman. In one section, her voice becomes warm and rich, with a burr to it, and her movements correspondingly softer; the talk is about air, skin, warmth and summer. She lies back and removes her disguises, her form cast in freeze frame on the wall. By now the young man has trousers on. He pushes the small monitor from his camcorder towards her.

The mood changes again and the man runs back behind his pillar. The woman’s monologue is low, intense and bitter—she crouches around the audience, making us feel uncomfortable, sometimes making eye contact, mostly not. She is hunched up, speaking into the gadget, mooning over the monitor. There is talk of insufficiency and falling. Apparently she is reflecting on “the full horror of the absence of love.”

Another mood change; she lies down and speaks in her natural voice; she’s happier. The ecstasy picks up, and suddenly she is in full Lawrence mode: “Oh joyful body of the man that comes to me! Oh wonderful flesh and exotic mind!” She steps out of the guarding rectangle; everything is expansive. The man plays a guitar with golden sunflowers on its strap. The large projection is disconcertingly cheesy—trees and fields, flowers and sea. The girl sings a hymn to phallic energy and the power of sex: suturing lips, osmotic minds, loving oneself in the other: “We have fucked love into this void.”

Polly Frame gives a fantastic performance. It’s blazing, open, vivid, and not a little scary. She is staring out of windows (she drew up the blinds), pacing the walls and emoting bliss. If she were making eye contact at this stage, it would be totally unnerving.

Interactivity was not so much required from the audience as flexible joints and certain passivity. The language was dizzying, the progression of ideas baffling in its intensity. It’s a journey of strange segues, wallowing in one self-absorbed state of mind after another.

To Gail Priest’s computer-generated and violin scores, Martin del Amo’s Under Attack alternates between movement and narrative. No element is interpretive of another but orbits the performance as an abstract and self-generating entity. The performers seem to share a deep and intuitive understanding of each other, allowing for some improvisation.

In Under Attack it’s as if, unbeknownst to the audience, there’s a director in the wings blasting out “CUT!” through a huge megaphone to the performer, and “Do it again!” Schizophrenically, del Amo plays to full pitch, putting everything he’s got into the roles of storyteller and dancer.

He’s like a Buster Keaton imitating the motions of an old-fashioned typewriter carriage and using some of the techniques of movie slapstick (jump cuts and undercranking—the speeding up of movement) which Howard Matthew referred to in his lecture, A Working History of Slapstick. Were these involuntary actions, the drunk’s body thrusting into space and erasing its own hard pencil lines? Both the limbs and the Biblical narrative del Amo offered to the audience ran away from him.

Behind this chaos and the frenzied occupation of multiple personalities and states lies a coherent structure. Narrative and movement motifs are repeated—constitutive elements dispersed like spores which then alight on others throughout. Body (choreographic) and mind (narrative) memories multiply, divide and form new sequences that jerkily refer forward and back throughout the performance. A movement we have encountered is repeated but then cut short…a story we have heard playfully messes with its morphological structure.

The work opens with del Amo in the sharpest, most tailored of white suits, the perfect–fitting garments then removed item by item. It didn’t seem right that at the end of the performance that this sweating body should be re-clothed…the shoe no longer fitted and the pure white silk sock refused to adorn the foot that had worn it so perfectly before.

The corporeality of the performer’s body is challenged by the sound artist’s virtual compositions, but is not disconnected from it. Physicality and technique forge a fresh relationship with sound, featuring both violin and computer played live. Under Attack recovers our embodied relation to the things we have produced, teasing out the flaws in postmodern theories, such as Baudrillard’s vision of humankind’s alienated relation to the technological era, and the machines we have created.

At first glance there are few similarities or points of connection between Martin del Amo and Gail Priest’s Under Attack and Miguel Pereira’s Top Ten [Bristol]. Each work focuses on its principal performer, and both are by artists working primarily in the field of movement. Superficially, the differences in construction could not be more marked: del Amo and Priest’s presentation is largely controlled, contained, rigorously choreographed and executed; Pereira’s, on the other hand, is a splurge of messy entrances, furious costume changes and technical glitches. But beneath the contrasting approaches, both works are concerned with the limits of the body, the distortions imposed upon it, and the stories you can tell about both.

Under Attack is a show of half-finished explanations and associated demonstrations. Del Amo traverses the stage in a white suit, occasionally breaking out into sudden cartoonish bursts of movement before hesitantly addressing the audience. Each time he speaks to the auditorium it’s to tell an unfinished story of a body somehow incomplete: Jacob’s biblical wrestling match with an angel (which del Amo later links to Paul Virilio’s theory that Jacob was wrestling himself); a forensic report on a post-mortem; the tale of a dancer employed to provide the movements for an animated dragon via a motion-capture session. These are incomplete bodies either in the literal sense (delivering the forensic report, del Amo intones a list of body parts that were “not identified”) or because they exist tethered to some other consideration…as in the case of the dancer who—we are told—“couldn’t get a job” because her movements too closely resembled that of the cartoon dragon she’d created.

Del Amo illustrates each of these tales, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. He interacts with Priest’s sound score of loops and screeches which at first mirrors the broader, animation-like aspects of his movement and dress, with heartbeat organic tones and swooping snatches of treated violin; before shifting into electronic distortions as del Amo sheds his clothes and becomes more human in dimension, less reflective and angular. The looped nature of the soundscape also helps to emphasise another important aspect of Under Attack in that the samples’ fixed parameters strengthen the perception that del Amo is always performing within a ‘box.’ In one sense this is the literal box of the theatre (where he paces back and forth like a worried, frazzled tiger in a cage) but more importantly, it is the box of human dimensions, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Del Amo’s body is constantly pushing at the edges of this frame, slapping and prodding at its limits, jumping into the air repeatedly and obsessively in an attempt to defeat gravity. At one point he performs what can only be described as the dance of a man trying to escape his own hips.
Miguel Pereira, Top 10 Bristol

The distortions of Under Attack are those of compression, of a body pushed in from all sides, manipulated and squashed like putty, reduced to simple mass. Miguel Pereira’s Top Ten [Bristol] is also distorted, but in the way that distorted guitars operate within pop music: to give the impression that the content is simply far too big for the envelope. Pereira’s world is one where egos are all encompassing, but trousers tend to fall down. It’s a world where guns are deadly but have a habit of not working, where follow spots are blinding but…well…tend not to follow with much aplomb. It’s a universe held together with safety pins and gaffer tape, at constant risk of falling apart or falling offstage. The performance is chaotic, slapdash, even amateurish—but exactly how intentional this might be is largely a moot point. A central concern of the work is that Pereira wishes to address the notions of authorship: to a degree, he doesn’t want to be in complete control.

The structure of the Top Ten [Bristol] is focussed on a nameless pop star created by Pereira over the course of performances dating from 2000. It seems this persona has come to a natural conclusion and tonight he’s killing the character off, enlisting the aid of 10 collaborators from Portugal and the UK. Each has choreographed an ‘exit’ for the protagonist, most of which are in keeping with the overblown, karaoke milieu the pop star has so far inhabited. A contrast to this tatty bombast is provided by the collaborators themselves, appearing as talking heads on projections displayed between ‘deaths.’ These are personal, semi-confessional reflections upon mortality and make a strange emotional see-saw of the evening.

Sometimes the enactment of a pantomime death following these vignettes sits uncomfortably alongside the sensitive issues upon which the speakers ruminate.

And so the star dies, over and over again: shot by his father like Marvin Gaye; suffering a heart attack during a bad stand-up comedy set; stabbed with a poisoned umbrella by an anthropomorphic street lamp (yes, really.) But it’s the final, 10th death which reveals most about Pereira’s intentions. In a fit of bodily desire and ineptitude resembling del Amo’s ‘wrestling with himself’ sequence in Under Attack, Pereira rips the rock star apparel from his body to reveal everyday clothing which he then tears apart in a series of unlikely angry twists and spasms about the stage floor. Not content with disposing just of his clothes, he then pulls at his skin uselessly before collapsing in a gasping mess centrestage, the lights fading to black. It’s an obvious reflection by the artist upon his own practice, his own creative impulses in creating and destroying this character. Whilst Under Attack seeks to describe how far a given body can be pushed, Top Ten asks the same questions of a body of work.

Martin del Amo is a Sydney-based dance artist and movement trainer, originally from Germany. He mainly works solo but has also collaborated with numerous artists of various genres and styles both in Europe and Australia.

Miguel Pereria trained in Portugal and has worked with leading choreographers including Francisco Camicho, Vera Mantero and Jerome Bel, has won prizes for his own choreography and teaches in Portugal and London.

{$455}For a show with so much death, Miguel Pereira’s Top 10 [Bristol] is hilarious. Its central character is a pop star with eyes painted on his eyelids. This image is one of many contradictions (Pereira’s eyes are closed, yet he looks as if he can see) and an indication that this is going to be a work that confronts us with our own voyeurism.

Video clips of an interviewee’s thoughts on death (the decorator who wants a Viking send-off; the 12 year old girl struggling to articulate what it means; the economist who tells us he might already be dead by the time we watch this; an architect who suggests dying could be our most important experience, so we shouldn’t miss it) are followed by enactments of Pereira’s demise. The structure of the show could render the work predictable, but its content is thought-provoking and the performances excellent. My personal favourite is the parody of Singing in the Rain with tin foil for puddles. A very annoyed lamp post, sick of being a backing singer, as it were, pulls out an umbrella of its own. The lamp post (in the person of Tom Marshman) murders Pereira, James Bond-style, and takes over his persona. The show’s concept—where the audience is invited to vote on the best death—is a logical extension of the current fascination with reality shows, celebrities and celebrity reality shows.

There is a tiny museum in Paris devoted to counterfeit goods, displayed next to their authentic counterparts. Some are obvious fakes (a strange-coloured Lego called Daluland); others are so real that certain manufacturers (like Levi’s) stopped making the originals because the market was flooded. This notion of the fake killing the authentic is another object of cultural fascination (a non-celebrity won UK Big Brother this year, pretending to be a pop star).

Throughout, the show highlights its own artifice. There are boots that don’t fit; a fake gun that fails to fire after we have been warned that there will be a loud bang; a visible costume rail, prompt sheets, stage-hands. The announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, for the last time, Miguel Pereira” is heard repeatedly. Curtains are drawn across the stage for a one-minute silence but the audience giggles at Pereira’s feet, the only part of his body visible. Pereira himself is re-invented from coke-head to comic (where dying on stage isn’t about his act falling flat so much as his bodily collapse, Tommy Cooper-style, mid-routine. “He was a funny man. Not a man who’s funny. There’s a difference”, intones his obituary.) Given this skill for transformation, it’s appropriate that Pereira also assumes the guise of Madonna, postmodernist icon and mistress of re-invention. This fake pop star as real pop star recalls Gavin Turk’s Pop (1993): a waxwork, the artist as Sid Vicious as Elvis. When Pereira’s Madonna is killed by the “real” Madonna (but obviously another fake), the 2 pose side by side (one bleeding from the mouth). The impossibility of knowing Pereira beyond a set of signifiers—black feather boa, velvet jacket, lamé trousers, curly wig, shades—becomes apparent when an audience member dons the costume and sings the show’s hit song.

High art does not escape Pereira’s scrutiny either. To the strains of opera, he destroys the stage set, rips off his costume till he is naked, tries to pull away at his very skin as if seeking to reduce himself to an essence. Like a true star, Miguel Pereira’s legacy continues beyond his deaths. At 4.30pm the next day the results of the audience vote will be announced. I’ll be there. I hope they play the show’s theme song, “I have green eyes, because I eat a lot of vegetables.”

If you work in an office packed full of computers there’s a chance that the subtle high frequency noise of multiple disc drives whirring around, day in day out, is actually chipping away at the fundamentals of your audio range, tiring them into submission. So alongside having our brains fried by mobile phones, we’ve now identified desktops and laptops as the new enemy. Technology: it’s out to get you.
Ryoji Ikeda, Spectra II

Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra II is definitely out to get you. The artist’s intention is to have the audience interact with a geographically defined soundscape, an all-encompassing sensory experience, and in Spectra II he does it using the subtle scream of low volume high frequency sine waves, amplified in such a way as to be altered by your very movements within the space. That space is a tight corridor, taking one victim at a time, its precise dimensions at first rendered uncertain by disorienting lighting effects and the unnatural omnipresence of electronic noise. From the entrance point of this channel, it’s not clear if and how the installation ends: an all-pervasive red glow emanates from a long, horizontal laser marker far in the distance, and every now and then white strobes burst to life along the length of the walkway.

Certain of Ikeda’s previous compositions on CD can be said to resemble nothing so much as a ‘concerto for electric cattle-prod’, and the surges that accompany every burst of light in Spectra II are highly reminiscent of these angry crackling stabs. It has the emotional effect of urging you on up the corridor, into the unknown. At the same time, the prospect of what lies at the end of the walkway is not exactly comforting; everything has the air of an horrific science fiction landscape, the laser lines in the distance forming the crosshairs for some terrible inhuman device.

As you move tentatively forward, the clashing sine waves about you form peaks and troughs in your geographic perception where peaks and troughs have no right to be. If you clap your hands, it doesn’t reflect back off the walls in the normal fashion and is instead swallowed up by some sort of ambient compression. In short, ladies and gentlemen, this is hell. Everything is consumed by the insatiable space, and it’s never, ever going to stop.

So, yeah, it’s a bit of a disappointment when you get to the far end of the corridor and it’s just a straightforward wall. A laser marker is slapped across it just above eye level, and the red glow renders wood grain within the construct highly visible, removing any mystery about its provenance. For a while you feel like knocking on the wood just to see if it will open up, continuing beyond, a further corridor, onward into infinity. But no such luck.

The fact that this is a finite corridor necessarily makes Spectra II a game of 2 halves, and the last trick up Ikeda’s sleeve is revealed when you turn to retrace your steps. In returning back down the passageway, you are blocking the principle light source, the laser. In addition to this, your exit far off in the distance is only vaguely lit by the half-light spilling from the outside world. As each strobe explosion occurs, it’s now far more apparent that the walls of this corridor are painted bright white, which means your funny little brain does a funny little thing: in the sudden absence of light (an effect you can mimic anytime by quickly shutting your eyes) the brain converts any after-image held by the retina into a negative of itself. This means, that in the final part of Spectra II, you are traversing a space that seems to be repeatedly vanishing into complete nothingness in controlled bursts. Hell isn’t going to let you go easy.
Alex Bradley & Charles Poulet, White Plane_2

Alex Bradley & Charles Poulet, White Plane_2

At Inbetween Time heaven is well represented by Alex Bradley and Charles Poulet’s Whiteplane_2, an immersive audiovisual landscape that differs from Ikeda’s work in several ways. Firstly—and perhaps most importantly—it is not an experience that defines a strict journey for its participants. Audiences come and go within the space as they please, spending as much or as little time as they deem fit, and they do so in a communal fashion, as Whiteplane_2 is a broad rectangular platform upon which many people can stand, sit or lie down. The opaque floor and ceiling glow with changing colours, sometimes in parallel reflection of each other and sometimes in a riot of shifting tones, whilst sounds envelop you, circling, zipping and swooping from an array of speakers hidden in the darkness that surrounds the stage. The noises tend towards the abstractly pleasant; a cynic might detect a touch of Harold Budd/Wyndham Hill new-ageness about some of the more fluid tones. But the cumulative effect of hearing these motifs ebb and flow repeatedly—combined with the occasional random attack of white noise and lightning not dissimilar to Spectra II—is to give the impression of natural phenomena, the ocean or the sunset, storm fronts or swarms, represented consummately by a marvellous benevolent technology. It’s as if, somehow, an orchestra of fast-processing computers has developed a set of musical themes and is improvising away, happily, to the Aurora Borealis.

There are further associations: having to remove your shoes gives the experience a sepulchral edge, alongside the deep, reassuring roar of a gong that drops in and out of the ambient noise… Some of the colours bleach the environment so as to suddenly turn everyone upon the platform to monochrome.

Whilst a crowd of primary school children is in residence, the space turns into a wash of blue and without prompting, the kids all begin to swim like fish. Whilst Bradley and Poulet must in some sense have programmed a limited combination of instructions into Whiteplane_2’s software, the foreground presence of an audience extends the aesthetic possibilities into almost infinite territories. Some people chatter, some lie prone, some throw paper aeroplanes, some stare at their feet throughout. If you’re willing to be in the space for long enough, you can play a strange little game of crowd control, so that if you sit on the ground for long enough eventually everyone will be sitting; if you lie staring at the ceiling, you rise some time later to see that the platform looks like a bed-in, bodies prone, blissed-out. So unlike Spectra II, which after the fact one recalls as a ‘ride’, a sort of futuristic ghost train, Whiteplane_2 can be so many other things all at once: a toy, an escape, an artwork, a moment. And it’s all thanks to the audience. Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong. Hell is a solitary pursuit. Heaven is other people.

The opening forum at the Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue is a discussion centring upon the concept of ‘risk’ within live art, with special attention paid to the curator/artist axis. Six sets of producers and artists speak about their experiences of operating together, and how ‘strategies of risk’—rightly identified as a difficult, almost oxymoronic concept—have been nurtured between them, around and within the work. As Nina Wyllie (The Special Guests) flags up early on, any discussion of risk is almost always accompanied by its “somewhat less sexy counterpart, safety.” Certainly the pattern of discussion today is similar no matter where we turn (including dissections of work based in Australia, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands) in that the producers will often talk about the support structures in place around artists, and then the artists take the ball and run, describing how these ‘safety nets’ allow them to bundle all over the place performing acrobatic feats of the imagination and generally engaging in lovely risky stuff (including, in the instance of David Weber-Krebs, flooding part of his host’s venue).

Ironically enough, one of the forum participants is present in written form only, Dan Belasco Rogers having done himself a disservice in the ankle department, resulting in immobility and a cancelled flight from Berlin. (The last IBT festival saw Rogers presenting a seminar on cuts, bruises and injuries he sustained in various international locations over the years—shown in the very same lecture theatre we’re sitting in today—in which, memorably, he asked the city of Bristol “not to hurt” him. In the end it was Berlin that ‘got’ him.) On top of this, dramaturg Thomas Frank of Sophiensaele in Berlin is late because of clogged-up air traffic above Brussels, and at one point in proceedings the fire alarm goes off and we’re forced to evacuate the building. Obviously in real life risk nurtures itself, and this is a point raised within open discussion at the tail end of the forum when artist Paul Hurley ruminates on the fact that risk is present in every art form, and not simply a prerogative of live art. It’s subsequently made clear by many of the participants that they aren’t laying claims to the unique ability of the discipline to engender risk-taking, simply that the often extremely open, trusting relationships between curators and artists are vital to the development of curve-ball concepts and risky creative processes.

In this respect, Thomas Frank’s working practice with UK performers Lone Twin is a wonderful example of commissioners and artists adapting new models in the light of increasing international collaboration. As a company without a ‘rehearsal’ ethic as such, and where the work is sometimes presented simply as documentation, Lone Twin have found a regular foil in Frank, who explains that as a dramaturg under the German model he would normally expect to sit in on preparations and generally have more immediate creative input into an artist’s practice. Gregg Whelan then paints the picture of vague conversations and occasional lunches that characterise Lone Twin’s recent experiences with Frank, and uses this to illustrate how, for this company, the ability to take risk is founded upon ‘belief’: the belief of their collaborators in Lone Twin’s work; the belief of producers like Frank, who will sometimes find themselves sitting in front of a final work completely different from anything previously discussed; and last but not least, the belief of audiences in their endeavours, an audience who are—as Rogers points out—risking a great deal by investing in work where the generic parameters are nebulous and outcomes frequently uncertain

Arriving a few minutes late having taken a gamble (or should I say risk) on my knowledge of Bristol geography, my first take of the Nurturing Risk forum was hearing the query “Why do we nurture risk?”, followed quickly by the answer that it was quite simple. But hang on a minute. What about the nurture/risk dyad, the antithetical relation between these terms that the introductory text for the forum highlighted?

The forum paired artists and producers, yielding examples from the array of possible couplings. Each focused on the nature of their relationship, the development of a bond coming across strongly throughout. Each was also asked to consider their relationship in light of the forum title, taking us back to adversarial terms: nurture—to encourage somebody to grow, develop, thrive, and be successful; and risk—the danger that injury, damage, or loss will occur. On the surface these definitions are glaringly contrary; and yet the introductory text suggests (and no one on the panel opposed the idea) that these terms “reflect the lifeblood of Live Art and experimental practice.” One would hope that any successful relationship has the potential to disrupt these limiting classifications.

The first 2 pairings concentrated on artist-to-artist relations facilitated by a producer. Nina Wyllie and Sophie Cameron discussed a mentoring process developed as part of eXpo 2003, while Fiona Winning and Robert Pacitti revealed a more laboratory style approach as part of Time_Place_Space initiated by Performance Space in Sydney. Wyllie termed eXpo as a safe space, of hand-holding and guidance. These are double-edged terms, both comforting and intrusively paternalistic, but Wyllie thought that her company, The Special Guests, “needed it” at the time, they “needed a leg up.”

A discussion of the inevitable limits that risk creates highlights our existence in an environment where it’s not the case that ‘anything goes.’ Risk is limited by what Wyllie described as its “less sexy partner, safety”, a point backed up by Gregg Whelan later when he asked of Live Art, “Is it dangerous?”, and answered himself, “No, because it is in a building that complies with health and safety [regulations].”

Wyllie described a creative situation with a certain level of openness that allowed her company to tinker with the world they are entering, but with the caveat that they knew they were fitting into an existing model. This was was like moving across stepping-stones, one step at a time, each with a validating function allowing entry into the world of promoters, organisations and funders in their role as ‘guardians’ (a term repeatedly used by numerous speakers). Can this model facilitate risk, or does each validation simply reduce the possibility of taking it? The role of the producer, as one who convinces others to promote or believe in work, certainly develops the artist’s career, but I would not wish to assume that this inherently fosters risk (without clarification of how or why it does). Clearly such relationships will at times do so, and at others not—and such belief will always be open to debate. In Robert Pacitti’s terms “risk is relative.”

We heard of various relationships: in Australia the Time_Place_Space laboratory process where participating artists sometimes decide to drop what they came to do and go for something else instead; David Weber-Kreb’s continued dialogue with Gasthuis (Netherlands) despite winning bronze in the Golden Tomato award for worst performance in a season; and Gregg Whelan informing his dramaturg that he would have to see the work when they did it, due to zero rehearsal. These examples display relative levels of belief and risk; the trouble however with a relative position is that it can continually defer actually pinning down what is happening. Fiona Winning applauded the opportunity for Martin del Amo to show his work again, to test it until the “the artist knows what works.” In terms of risk this appears contrary: if you continue once you know something works, where is the risk?

Risk has to exist in the work, in its content: Mark Timmer (Gasthuis) states that he can only understand “taking risks inside the work, otherwise it is not clear what is meant by the phrase in this sense.” In light of this, a late question asking if “risk was really being taken” seemed pertinent. Whelan responded, claiming that this approach to framing Live Art is spin, and that the “heart of practice is not trying to fetishize [it]…” This made me hope that the rhetoric of risk might not be necessary. When we take an act of what Whelan termed “professional bravery”, we don’t necessarily see it as a question of risk, simply that it would be a complete waste of time to not do so.

Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) will premiere a new work, Devolution, at the 2006 Adelaide Festival. For his seventh full-length work for the company and following his collaboration with acclaimed photographer Lois Greenfield on Held (RT59,p30), Artistic Director Garry Stewart is working with Canadian lighting and machine designer Louis-Philippe Demers and UK filmmaker Gina Czarnecki. Demers has worked with artists as diverse as Robert Lepage, Stelarc and Cirque du Soleil and has undertaken residencies with ZKM and EMAF in Germany and VIA, EXIT and Lille2004 in France. Czarnecki has been creating screen work that challenges the parameters of representing the human form since 1998, her most recent film being the award-winning Nascent in collaboration with Stewart and ADT.

Devolution places dancers and robots together onstage and will realise another chapter in Stewart’s pursuit of extreme parameters for choreographic invention.

You have gathered an impressive group of collaborators together for Devolution and have developed a real skill for this during your time at ADT. How did you meet your key collaborator on this project, robotics artist Louis-Philippe Demers?

I met Louis-Philippe through Julieanne Pearce who was the Director of ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) at the time. I had asked her if she could recommend any artists working in new media that she thought I might be interested in, so she forwarded me some videos of his work along with the work of some other international artists. Louis-Philippe’s work immediately grabbed me. That was about 3 years ago. I contacted him via email around that time and suggested that we might look at the idea of working together. It wasn’t until around 18 months later that I contacted him again with a serious proposal. I didn’t want to rush into working with him but wanted to wait until I had gestated exactly the right idea to put forward to him.

What is it about dance—and your dance in particular—that attracted Demers to this work?

I know Louis-Philippe is very interested in dance and very aware of the work of the major choreographers, but I don’t think I can adequately answer this question for him. This is the first time he has collaborated with a dance company in his capacity as a roboticist. Over the past year or so we have met up a number of times overseas while ADT has been on tour. He saw the company perform Held in Monaco, Birdbrain in London and The Age of Unbeauty in Belgium. I remember he was particularly taken with …Unbeauty. I think the expressionistic darkness of the work appealed to his sensibilities. Louis-Philippe is also a lighting and set designer and was teaching design at the Hoschule attached to ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. He is doing the lighting design for Devolution as well.

The question of the ‘anthropomorphic potential of robotic machines’ is at least as old as science fiction—what does dance bring to this theme in Devolution?

I don’t think that this is the only thing that we are exploring in Devolution, however anthropomorphism is an obvious parameter in working with robotics, particularly when robots are operating in communion with humans. It’s unavoidable really. In Devolution we are acknowledging the robots as machines and in doing so we are also exploring the mechanical, machine-like function of the human body. This, as well as the zoomorphic potential of bodies. By distorting the body away from an upright pedestrian orientation and challenging the Cartesian view of the body, I’ve been trying to posit humans as animals, which of course we are.

There is also something very creature-like about Louis-Philippe’s previous robotic work, so it really provided the cue for me to head in this direction. I’ve been working with the dancers on exploring choreographic relationships that respond to ecosystem processes: territoriality, parasitism, predation, symbiosis, senescence, birth, death and growth, which has included a series of discussions with a local biologist, Steve Griffiths.

As performing entities, the robots are given equal status to the human bodies in the work, albeit with some major operational differences. I haven’t tried to conceptually separate robots and humans as different ‘species’ but have been interested in the collision and confluence of the two. Let’s see what happens when we collide these operating systems—that sort of thing. It’s as much an experiment in morphology and function as anything else.

I’ve also been working with dramaturg Anne Thompson and she has drawn my attention to the writings of Paul Virilio on speed and technology. Given the insistence of velocity in my work this has been interesting in terms of understanding this element in choreography.

You have an interest in technology and the body which extends to training technologies for your dancers and their super-human quality in performance. Where does this come from? And was robotic prosthetics a logical next step?

The interest in technology is, in part, a by-product of my need to reappraise my choreography on an ongoing basis. I suppose it’s not really about the ‘technology’ per se which seems to have become common parlance in the arts for anything new and innovative. It could be macramé really. The collision of my working method with that of another artist forces me to renegotiate the assumptions upon which I habitually operate. I’m not someone who can do the same thing year in year out, so it’s important for me to regularly veer onto the edge of something mysterious and slightly unknown. As an artist I’m quite self-critical and I never feel that I’ve fully ‘arrived’ anywhere. However, I think this is a necessary state for me.

Also, collaborations offer the opportunity to work with some really fantastic people. I’ve been really very lucky with both Lois Greenfield and Louis-Philippe and have learnt so much from both of them, each in very different ways. For Devolution I am also working with Gina Czarnecki. Already, Gina’s work for Devolution is extraordinary. It continues along the same trajectory as the film we did together last year, Nascent.

Czarnecki’s work provides the key to the representation of the biological body. In a powerful oscillation between micro and macro worlds, she painstakingly treats the raw footage of dancers frame by frame in post-production so that it begins to resemble a DNA strand, or the spinal column or cell division, yet at the same time reads as bodies. Her work takes months to achieve and is as detailed as fine tapestry.

In regard to working with prosthetics, I’m not sure if it was a ‘logical’ step for me but—and I’ll be a bit Jungian here—I think there was some fundamental necessity for my work to move into this new arena at this point, and the project synchronistically provided the appropriate means. For me, Held was the most extreme example in a cycle of works that I had made for ADT up to that point. They were primarily occupied with manufacturing a vocabulary constituted from the assemblage of a number of extreme physical forms. Devolution eschews this to a large degree, and although there is a pursuit of the ‘extreme’ it is not simply through ‘heroic’, aerial virtuosity. If anything, the prosthetics have forced my work to remain planted on the ground. The forceful dynamism that characterizes my previous work is still there, but delivered through an energetic body that is often rooted to the spot.

Australian Dance Theatre, Devolution, concept & direction Garry Stewart, choreography Garry Stewart & ADT dancers, robots & lighting design Louis-Philippe Demers, video Gina Czarnecki, costume design Georg Meyer-Wiel, composer Darrin Verhagen; Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide Festival, March 1-8

Wayne McGregor is the Artistic Director of Random Dance, resident company at Sadler’s Wells in London, a middle scale touring contemporary dance company with a big reputation for innovation. Random was founded by McGregor in 1992 and has since played a leading role in the British and international development of the dialogue between dance and technology. Random is coming to Australia in March 2006 at the invitation of Arts Projects Australia to perform at the 2006 Adelaide Festival and the Cultural Festival of the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. I spoke to Wayne McGregor in London as he prepared for another busy year.

No, I was in Melbourne in 1999 for Chunky Move’s Choreolab, but Random has never visited. We are presenting Nemesis especially for Australia, as this piece has left the repertoire now and it may be the last time it is performed.

Ian Scobie [Arts Projects Australia] saw Nemesis and feels that the piece fits the aesthetic of the Commonwealth Games cultural program perfectly. We are performing in the huge outdoor amphitheatre [Sydney Myer Music Bowl] and there is a muscular, athletic quality to the way the dancers manipulate their prosthetic limbs. It’s almost gladiatorial.

It has changed a lot. We have reworked the animatronics and the film elements and added an 8 minute solo which I perform at the end in a sort of 3-dimensional environment where I am interacting with virtual figures. This makes the journey of the piece more coherent. We move from live bodies, to ‘extended’ bodies with animatronics, to the solo dancer with the virtual dancers and finally back to the unmediated live body.

That journey in some way sums up your engagement with technology throughout your career. In Nemesis there is a visible technological intervention in the animatronics, but in recent work, you seem to be shifting away from such a direct engagement with technologies.
Throughout all my work I have been reaching the conclusion that the most sophisticated technology is the body. In the last few years, the focus has not been on external equipment but rather how to use scientific knowledge to access the technology of the body. In AtaXia (2004), I was fascinated by the pathways created between the brain and the body. In Amu (2005), we worked with a heart imaging specialist to explore the complicated interaction between emotion and other biological factors, and their relationship to body and brain. In 2008, I will be making a new piece, Entity, which will further explore these ideas by building an artificially intelligent ‘body’ which can think and develop on its own. This ‘body’ will be built from the notebooks from the creation of recent productions. We will bring in a new team of American artificial intelligence experts to map all this plus the intelligences of the neuroscientists and heart specialists onto the artificial body. We’ll be building something altogether new.

I have always found technologists to be fascinated by the access I, as a choreographer, working with dancers, have to the internal technology of the body. With the neuroscientists and heart specialists we are dissecting the dialogue between body and brain and adding layers of complex understanding about biodirectional communication. The creation of this new artificially intelligent body with both interior and exterior perceptions visibly at play will give us all so much to work with.

But you wouldn’t have got to this sophisticated point of enquiry without the earlier work.

No. In Nemesis I am still exploring the exterior possibilities for the body, as I was in the trilogy [The Millenarium, 1997, Sulphur16, 1998 and Aeon, 2000]. In those productions we were pitching the body against the technologies, assaulting it from the outside world, and in Nemesis, with our extended animatronic limbs, we are grafting technology onto the body. The lack of control the dancers experienced with those limbs and the discoveries we made about a misbehaving body, refusing to comply with the instructions of the brain, aroused the curiosity which led to AtaXia, a piece inspired by disconnected brains and bodies.

Did you struggle to communicate with the scientists at any point in your collaborations?

Of course it was tricky initially, but we soon realised we had a lot to contribute to each other’s work. The scientists were used to dealing with people with brain deficits, in that the traumas they had suffered left them less able in certain areas than the ‘normal’ person. As a choreographer, I deal with the opposite ‘problem.’ Dancers have an excess of proprioception compared to the norm. So we had a common yardstick against which we could measure our curiosities and inform each others’ ideas. Also, in choreographing, I realised that I work very similarly to a scientist testing an idea. I gather information and create an output which is simply a stage in an ongoing experiment. Scientists are by necessity incredibly creative. They work with abstraction, constantly redefining their own terms in order to define their future. I learnt a great deal during my research at Cambridge [McGregor was appointed Research Fellow at the Experimental Psychology department of Cambridge University]. I even ended up doing some teaching there, thanks to the Head of Anthropology, who observed my research and extracted some incredible insights regarding collaboration between interdisciplinary groups. We all did a lot of writing, with our own emphases. For example, one of the stroke specialists published some important discoveries regarding the rehabilitation of stroke victims extracted from our collaborations with the dancers.

Has this enthusiastic response by the scientific community been echoed in the dance world’s responses to the work?
We have always struggled with the expectations of the dance sector when viewing our experiments with technology. And yet I am determined to continue to challenge the intelligence of the debate around such things and hopefully build the understanding that the work communicates beyond what is grasped immediately on stage. With AtaXia we had some fantastic debate but there are still those skeptics who believe that this engagement with science is inappropriate and opportunistic.

Certainly with the workshop I am doing with you at Critical Path, we will be talking a great deal as well as experimenting with some of the choreographic tools I have developed over the course of these productions. I am always very excited about new perspectives and throwing open the work to new minds and I very much look forward to the perspectives of the Australian choreographers, critics, audiences and perhaps even scientists and technologists.

Wayne McGregor will hold a 2-day masterclass for choreographers in New South Wales at The Drill in Sydney, March 11-12, as part of the Critical Path program of choreographic research. For more information on this contact Sophie Travers at criticalpath@dance.net.au. For further details of Random performances in Melbourne and in Adelaide visit Arts Projects Australia, www.artsprojects.com.au.

Critical Path, the New South Wales choreographic research and development centre, is located in the old drill hall—now called The Drill—on beautiful Rushcutters Bay. Early in the 20th century the building was used for the training of submariners and subsequently for other naval activities. Refurbished when Rushcutters Bay became the yachting base for the 2000 Olympic Games, the building is now the home of Critical Path thanks to the farsighted support of the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts and Woollhara City Council. The director of Critical Path is Sophie Travers who wrote for RealTime on dance and arts politics from the UK before moving here with her Australian partner. Travers is an ideal director for Critical Path, bringing to it an alertness to the needs of local dance ecology and the experience of working through partnerships and networks at local, national and international levels. Critical Path cannot solve the funding challenges faced by NSW dance artists, but it makes a very generous and serious offer, to support choreographers in developing their understanding and undertaking of research, to find partners and consolidate their sense of community. By focussing strictly on research through artist-directed projects, guest choreographer workshops, specialist shared-interest workshops and mentoring, Critical Path keeps a healthy distance from the demands of production, creating a new niche in the dance ecology where artists can think, reflect, learn and connect. I spoke with Travers as she commenced her 2006 program.

What attracted was the sense that there was a real necessity behind the project. It wasn’t one of these things that had just happened through the momentum of a funding scheme. It had actually been initiated through real need. And that was to do with the sense that there was a lack of cohesion in the New South Wales dance community. There was an abundance of talent but a lack of community. Being very close to artists was another thing that attracted me. It was less pinned to structures and more linked to individuals. And as a result, it sounded, and has proved to be, very flexible.

There was a steering committee, a very artistic committee. They’d come up with the need for research and with a role for the director. And they’d actually defined what that was and what it wasn’t. But in terms of the program and what would actually happen from the day I rolled up, there was nothing there. So from the word go, I was very involved in interrogating the steering group and asking them to really expand on the small document that was the starting point. Mostly I did an awful lot of talking to artists. Sometimes I was having up to 5 meetings a day. I was literally “at home” with people coming into Sydney Dance Café one after another. It was incredibly useful. I thought people were quite straight; I think they were great with me.
Workshop, Hans Van den Broek second from left

Workshop, Hans Van den Broek second from left

They obviously took to the idea that this was an R & D set up to fuel and nurture them, but not provide grants.

Critical Path is a bit of an anomaly in the ecology in that it is well resourced to meet its needs. We’re not scrabbling around like other parts of the sector are. We’re actually doing something quite solid. What I did find was people wanting to see if they could stretch Critical Path into some of the leaner bits of the ecology. When people come to Critical Path and they have a great idea and, to some extent, they hit paydirt within their research project and realise they have somewhere to go, that’s where we struggle to help them move on. That’s where there’s very little money around. [I have to say] no, you actually have to go away and complete that project and come back when you have another idea.

Are there different levels of expectation of involvement with Critical Path?

Depending on the maturity of the artist, absolutely. That’s what we’re trying to maintain—that kind of responsiveness. So we set up the 3 strands of the program [responsive to] distinct differences in people’s capabilities or how far they’ve established their own research practice. Some are completely au fait with research. That’s exactly what they do constantly, even in the making of work: it’s all ongoing research. For others, it’s a new way of thinking, the idea of making work as research.

So what do you think people get from each of these 3 strands, beginning with say the workshops and masterclasses?

The people we’ve chosen to run the workshops have a porousness about their practice. They’re not Socratic. They’re interested in group dynamics. They’re interested in winkling out the indiosyncrasies of the individuals and playing with them within the group. That’s exactly what (ex-Les Ballet C de la B artist) Hans Van den Broek is doing at the moment. A lot of the people on that workshop didn’t know each other before. And from the last one with Antje Pfundtner (RT 69 p 12) last year, a couple of little projects have rolled out…because the artists found each other in the workshop.

There are 2 parts to the workshop strand; the shorter ones [just discussed] and then the more closely curated ones like the Japanese one coming up with Asialink or the big one on film. They’re addressing a theme. So the people selected are much more carefully chosen. The idea is that it moves a whole sub-genre on a step. So with the film workshop for example, in partnership with ReelDance, we’re looking at what ReelDance can’t do in terms of research and development. We ask what do all the ReelDance artists want to do and then devise something that moves that on.

The sense of network and partnership is a big part of Critical Path, and it extends your activities across state borders although primarily focused in NSW.

I’m from the UK where partnership is just in your blood. If you want to work in the arts, you’ve got to work in several partnerships with everything you do. Of course, it comes with its own difficulties but with Critical Path, it’s crucial because it helps us bridge what happens outside of it. In each case a partner is chosen because they have a research agenda of their own but then they’ve also got the other side of the equation—the producing, the presentation, the distribution. An organization like ReelDance doesn’t really get to do much research but they understand it. So we can work with them nice and tidily on our shared goals and then, hopefully, hand over the bits that work for them to take on. It’s a little bit the same with the Asialink project.

Similarly inserting research into a project that was going to happen anyway. The projects [as part of Asialink’s Australia-Japan dance program] in other states are much more about performance whereas because Critical Path exists in NSW, Asialink decided to do a research project. It’s about the exchange that will take place between the Japanese and Australian choreographers talking to each other for 2 weeks at The Drill [after working in pairs in Japan].

My feeling was there should be a responsive strand where the artists made their own suggestions; a curated strand where we made the suggestions; and then there was the need for something in the middle that was a bit more fluid, that could be a bit more of a discussion—a mentoring strand. In the responsive strand, the artists make their proposals and we don’t interfere.

It can be up to 4 weeks. It’s actually the budget that ends up determining it. The budget limit is $10,000 so the larger the team, the longer the time, the more…you know. So the bigger projects are usually 3 weeks and the smaller ones can be up to 4. This year we have 11 projects. We had 33 applications. Last year we did 17, including more of the shorter ones. This year we were determined to try and spend the full $10,000 on each one if we could.

As for mentoring, there was a feeling there was a need for something in the middle that was a bit more of a learning experience, a dialogue where other people’s skills could feed into our programming. That’s how the film project came about. Erin Brannigan did a mentorship last year and through that discovered what was at the root of ReelDance’s research needs and of choreographers who are making film. There it’s the idea of addressing distribution. But we couldn’t have got there in one jump. We needed to take that mentoring step.

This year is quite different from last year. We have a project with dancer-choreographer Wendy Morrow called Research Tools. Last year Wendy mentored 2 mature artists and, getting to see what we were doing at Critical Path, she expressed a real interest in articulating research. She’d come to some of the sharing sessions and realised that there was a blockage in articulating and distinguishing research from other parts of practice. When we did the responsive strand and had to reject 22 people we got a lot of feedback, as we had in the first year, about what constitutes research. Wendy was very interested in working with a group of those people who were struggling with that.

Not exactly the same. I know of others who do what we do but then do all the other bits. The classic model is Dancehouse in Melbourne. The Place in London has its Artist Development Services which does all this sort of stuff. They have Choreodrome and workshops…but then they also have a season, festivals and a school. I don’t think I’ve come across anything that’s quite like this.

Tell me about the choreographers you select to run workshops. I assume they reflect on your background.

It’s very opportunistic, the selection. It’s absolutely pragmatic in terms of the budget. Almost everybody who’s coming is coming on somebody else’s dollar. What I was careful not to do was to spend the Critical Path budget on airfares. You could jet in any number of glamorous international artists quite easily. But most or all of those people are coming to Sydney and then going on somewhere else. So all I’m doing is using my contacts to persuade these people to linger a little longer.

We should tell readers a little bit about your career how it fits with Critical Path.

I studied languages. Then I worked in business and then in dance administration, company management mainly, although I did do one of those 3 jobs in one situations—fundraising officer, press officer and company manager.

That was for 3 years, 1997-2000. That was through the whole period when they really got their foot on the ladder. So it was great training for me, going from projects to a triennially funded company, and they’re an amazing company for partnerships and producing. That really turned me into a producer, I guess, just by the sheer momentum of the artistic director [Wayne McGregor, interviewed by Travers on p4].

I had an interim period at the Roundhouse in London where I worked on arts education. The British Council experience was where all the European contacts came from. I was responsible for Theatre and Dance in the Performing Arts Department. I looked after Western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand. I did a lot of travelling, saw a lot of work, a lot of international and British work. I travelled and went to a lot of festivals. And that’s where a lot of the contacts I have now are coming from that period, people I met over a beer, like Wim Vandekybus. I tripped Emilio Greco [another of Critical Path’s 2006 workshop leaders] on my handbag in a very dark bar. That’s how I met him.

In Dance and Dance + Music Rosalind Crisp elaborates on her current field of movement study. As the titles suggest, there’s something about both works which seems self-evident and easy to watch, so that you might wonder why no-one else has thought of it before. Or maybe they have, but have missed the skill and lambent flow with which Crisp’s ideas unfold here.

Dance starts in a small way, before the audience enters. As people walk in, stand around, beginning to orient themselves to the dimly composed space, Lizzie Thomson is the first dancer to be seen, in a spotlight, surprisingly quite close to the door. She is engaged in something like a private conversation with herself, almost secret, but very determined. Her gestures unfold like a monologue, abstracted and then dimly reminiscent, bits and pieces arriving from all sorts of places—a child’s game or a sophisticated dance. Distantly, another dancer begins her private mutterings; later there’s a third, and then there are 4, each isolated in their own spot and involved in their own flow of thought. Gestures sometimes drop suddenly away, abruptly incomplete, or they change their minds in a nanosecond. It’s comic in a perverse sort of way—nothing arrives anywhere, repeatedly.

We watch the dancers’ faces for clues; relaxed, but with gaze inward in fierce concentration. Such heightened intent attached to such apparent lack of purpose creates a kind of gormlessness which makes me smile—a perfect antidote to the polished perfection of many dance performances. With towels and water bottles stashed at the sides, the dancers become progressively hotter and sweatier—in a curious sense, this physical response to their mental work provides a kind of narrative for the piece and measures the passage of time.

Each is at first quite alone in the space, dealing with what appears to be a gauche and unwieldy task, but over a longer period, their physical mutterings gently transform into a truncated beauty, expressing a kind of deferred completion. The structure of Dance seems simple, each dancer moving through her spot and then out of it, with spatial relationships imperceptibly becoming more and more complex according to where and how many dancers there are. On occasions all 4 dancers are working at the same time, but it’s impossible to watch them all as they are often too widely spaced, and sometimes disappear behind the mobile audience who shift around looking for the optimal view. This changes all the time, depending on where the dance focus is, so there is a continuous murmur, a tidal eddying of the crowd throughout the work, which adds a further layer—one of conscious looking—which becomes an integral part of the work.

About halfway through, a momentous shift in lighting suddenly creates escape routes from spot to spot and opens out the space for the dancers to change places, or dance in the same space together. Duets, trios and quartets manifest themselves and, without fundamentally changing the structure of the movement, the four begin to move like a colony of something not human, not touching—like bees or ants.

And the movement is infectious. Now and then you catch a glimpse of someone in the audience almost unconsciously mimicking the dancers, trying to get inside their skin—wondering visibly how the whole thing works. This infectiousness too is a kind of theme running through both Dance and Dance + Music. People relate strongly to the apparent ease with which the dancers continually dissect the duration of a gesture, its rhythm, which body part might be leading, and the effort each move requires. But the result is far from simple; it is often extreme, gauche, almost anti-organic, as if a camera has caught each action in mid-flight, and then joined all the shots together.

Because the quality of incompleteness is quite purposeful, the sketch that begins to emerge is of a state of mind—an individual striving in isolation at what seems a futile epic struggle, as if without common consciousness, although laying bare a very particular way of thinking, each dancer finally carving out a space for herself by sheer doggedness. They move complexly, ceaselessly—composing, rearranging, fitting together, finding places for things that one would never imagine could appear in one’s compendium of dance. In short, it is quite visible thinking, trying to be inclusive, trying to make room for a much larger world of events and ideas than one might suspect can exist together.

As the dancers make micro-decisions about how the interruptions occur, a dynamic becomes discernible, a “style” in itself bordering on the codified. It is not alien enough to be inaccessible, nor familiar enough to make you think you’ve seen it all before. Comic, disconnected, Chaplin-esque, but not garbled; it is clean and elegant.

Our focus shifts from circle to circle of light, as if recreating the micro-shifts in which the dancers are engaged. While the material is technically derived from the same set of parameters, it is mediated by each individual’s physicality (including ways of thinking), and so highlights individuality rather than sameness.

Looking at the dancers’ faces, it seems they stand outside of their own actions, a higher organising principle in operation—both a collection and a dissipation of visible thought; expressions both of rapt attention, so that they surprise even themselves, but also as if their minds are empty, merely along for the ride.

Suddenly there’s a shocking, brief burst of heavy rock. It stops just as abruptly as it begins, but at that moment, you become suddenly all the more aware of the breathing and sweating, and of a long time having passed. For a moment the bodies of the dancers are silhouetted like the bodies of the audience, in attitudes of contemplation, attention, inertia, brushing hair with small fidgets; twisting, waiting, sitting, plunging, walking from space to space, not thinking. Shadows lengthen, and time passes, and it seems like time to leave the stage. One by one they finally stop, pick up their water bottles and cross the space to the exit door.

The following week, Nigel Kellaway adds a further touch to the Dance material in Dance + Music, where his rendition of a piano only version of Schumann’s Dichterliebe makes an amusingly strange bedfellow for Rosalind Crisp’s solo dance performance. Essentially working with the same physical material as in Dance, the structure is more game-like, and Crisp and Kellaway play off each other in congenially competitive spirit. It is a longish recital—at one point, Kellaway leaving the stage for a cigarette. He can be seen through the back door discreetly ‘practising’ a few of Crisp’s moves. Similarly, Crisp makes her presence felt with 3 perfect notes on the keyboard. Together they provide a simple, beautiful and unassumingly funny evening of dance and music.

Dance, Rosalind Crisp, Olivia Millard, Joanna Pollitt, Lizzie Thomson, lighting Simon Wise, Nov 23-26; Dance + Music, Rosalind Crisp, Nigel Kellaway, lighting Simon Wise; Performance Space, Sydney, Dec 1, 2005

Butoh and cabaret would upon first glance appear to offer twin poles of performance: the former a mode of ritual and refusal, the latter of audience engagement and excess. In the performances of Yumi Umiumare, however, they are fused to produce a fascinating amalgam which draws its power from the dissonance of our expectations. Butoh’s difficult, non-naturalistic exploration of extremely physical emotionality is put into relief through the inventive and playful ironies of the cabaret tradition, and in the instance of DasSHOKU Hora!, the result is both frightening and energising.

Umiumare’s most recent work extends the themes of previous pieces, Tokyo DasSHOKU Girl and DasSHOKU Cultivation. The first work saw the performer teaming with fellow artists Ben Rogan and Matt Crosby to unearth features of Japanese culture which appear curious or exotic to an Australian audience—from the relative innocence of karaoke to the bizarre eroticism of vending machines stocking schoolgirls’ underwear. Cultivation again featured Crosby along with Japanese performance ensemble Theatre Gumbo (themselves regular visitors to Melbourne), expanding upon the previous work’s intentions and delivering a new assortment of characters to unsettle preconceptions. DasSHOKU Hora! acts as a concentrated summation of the trilogy’s overall focus, specifically taking us on a rapid tour of the monstrous feminine, Japanese-style.

If the first 2 works in this series employed the cabaret form to allow a necessary diversity in characterisation, Hora! produces a more compelling way of connecting its various subjects. The central figure, Umiumare herself, metamorphoses incessantly through a garish array of forms. Each incarnation draws from the stock of Japanese stereotypes, be they figures of myth or reality. Indeed, Umiumare seems to consciously blur the boundary between folkloric trope and contemporary history, suggesting that the image of the giggling Japanese schoolgirl has as much (or as little) grounding in fact as the ancient cave-dwelling witch.

The set itself is amorphous, consisting of a raised walkway which snakes around the theatre, audiences seated at tables scattered along its flanks. In one corner of the space sits a jumble of boulders, and it is atop one of these that we first spy Umiumare. She emerges as the yamanba, the white-haired crone of the mountains, long wig falling over a shapeless shift dress as she descends, all jerky limbs and electric tension. Soon enough she gives birth to 2 primal males clad in oversized fluffy nappies and the knotted black hair of wildmen. It is in this extended sequence that we find the first instance of the sort of unsettling incongruities Umiumare is toying with—here a withered hag who also embodies a kind of perverse maternity. But despite the pun of the show’s title, there is as much glee in this bending of gender as there is horror (the traditional yamanba is often depicted with a grin that stretches from ear to ear).

The chaotic birth of this first sequence shifts to a more current setting as Umiumare becomes a ganguro girl, one of the teenagers who dress in outrageously high boots and short skirts and adorn themselves with wild accoutrements and gaudy makeup (white lips and eyeshadow offset by excessively deep tans). This is not a fanciful leap, as an extreme form of the ganguro style is itself sometimes termed yamanba, wherein young women imitate the ogress of the mountain. But in drawing this link, Umiumare offers us a way of reconsidering these feminine figures as instances of deliberate excess and grotesque identity, a masquerade which parodies expected notions of femaleness by taking them to the limit. The final character of Hora! is a PVC-clad Hello Kitty who lures a sleazy businessman into a pleasure chamber before forcing onto him a very messy and violent transformation.

Hora! received dramaturgical assistance from Moira Finucane, whose previous collaborations with Umiumare include the hugely successful The Burlesque Hour, and in some ways this work acts as an elegant dance partner to Finucane’s most recent solo outing, Gotharama (RT68, p46). Beyond the shock-horror settings each shares, there is a common sensibility which sees the artists producing a kind of inverted teratology, a study of the monstrous from within that category. Crosby and Rogan play mad scientists and sex-obsessed salarymen and we are never expected to identify with them, instead taking sides with the characters Umiumare presents who would conventionally occupy the space of the Other.

DasSHOKU Hora! never adds up to a coherent narrative and, at times, the sheer hysteria of the performers threatens to overwhelm its audience, but the cumulative effect is potent and exciting, allowing contradictory interpretations to collide and enhance one another. The mayhem may in fact be the meaning here, but in any case it is a frighteningly entertaining madness.

DasSHOKU Hora!, created and performed by Yumi Umiumare in collaboration with Matt Crosby and Ben Rogan, set design Mary Moore, dramaturgy Moira Finucane, costume design ESS.HOSHIKA LABORATORY, sound Tatsuyoshi Kawabata, lighting Dori Bicchierai; Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, Nov 2-13, 2005

Having attended a good number of Manila’s performance art marathons, I was all geared up for what I thought would be another free-for-all, another ride-with-the-wind event that would take me through turns from angsty to flippant. As it turned out, there was that and much more, though most of the top-up value sank in months after I’d found the time to make some reasonable sense of what had happened amidst the chatter and visual overload.

This latest Asiatopia was, surprisingly, not so amorphous discourse-wise. Perhaps it was riding on unquestionably good intentions—this being the first time that a full-blown symposium program was woven into the performance component of this virtually institutional art event begun by Thai artist-organizer Chumpon Apisuk in 1998. Even the physical layout (an elevated loungey ensemble) signaled that organizers were serious about getting people (who generally prefer to do than tell) to talk. Unlike much of the intellectual posturing that was abundant in previous performance pow-wows like PSi #10 in Singapore (2004) some very genuine cross-cultural gabbing went on—much of it still lost in translation, but uttered and laid out there just the same.

This latest Asiatopia kicked off fittingly enough with a Southeast Asia-inflected political situationer that touched on such charged ideas as art, state and public life. The opening salvo, a pointed yet amiable conversation between Singapore-based theorist Lee Weng Choy and Thai Senator Kraisak Choonhavan, helped set the mood for what would be a packed though congenial 4 days of action and dialogue. Arguably, this is no mean feat given the often bumpy routes taken through organizational histories of regional initiatives of a sympathetic bent. Asiatopia, of course, is right up there with PAPA (Platform of Asian Performance Art) and NIPAF (Nippon International Performance Art Festival) which have their own colourful stories to tell. Asiatopia itself has always taken place in Thailand, either in Bangkok or Chang Mai or both, with performances done in public spaces to force artists to deal with issues of language and reception. And there is indeed much to reckon with since Asiatopia’s participants have come from all over the world and translation needs to occur not just across cultures but also across class, gender, race, and creed. With Asiatopia’s coming of age, organizers find this as good a time as any to consider the various production and reception contexts that range from countries clamping down on performance (Myanmar and Singapore) to a country (Thailand) with at least one local government agreeing to play major co-sponsor.

In keeping with the themes of performance and the consequent privileging of process, none of the invited panelists was asked to turn in papers or outlines and could basically wing their way through discussions conducted at a pace reminiscent of your run-of-the-mill television morning or late night show. Refreshingly stripped of the jargon that pervades more academe-driven enterprises, Asiatopia still had its share of tangential talk on de rigueur performance studies fare—mediation of the body, the gaze, performance as ultimate commodification of the body, et al. Notwithstanding some wariness about theory, there was a much too obvious earnestness in questions to do with the body as cultural capital, radicality, intentionality etc. In the end, this Asiatopia still had people leaving much left unsaid, primarily because time was short and bridging cognitive gaps just couldn’t be rushed.

What cannot be said of this effort is that it was a stuffy affair. There were indeed some tense moments when obvious language problems became overwhelming, raising blood pressure particularly when it came to talk on gender and ethics. On the other hand, there was also some apparently good-natured ribbing when Chinese artist He Chengyao called on volunteers to partake of her homemade, spiced, fellatio-inducing popsicles, and Singaporean artist Lynn Charlotte Lu initiated a rigodon of clothes-swapping among artists and onlookers. And so despite the marked problems in levelling-off and translation (Filipino artist Jeho Bitancor’s parody of the capitalist corporate suit apparently came across as a Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra cameo to quite a few folks) the 40 or so artists, writers, scholars, curators and organizers still made a spirited effort.

Indeed, as in a considerable number of performance actions there and elsewhere, incidentals such as the wayward prop, timid audiences, or simply mixed signals made for a layering, a flavour enhancer upon creative work. This would certainly have been obvious to people who diligently attended all 3 of the string of evening Asiatopia performances. And it was on the very first evening that one intense performance by Thai artist Witchukorn Tangpaiboon had to contend with overpowering and unabashedly tourist-directed audio harping on royal greatness and Thai hospitality that was part of a nightly lightshow projected upon the Rama VIII bridge on the Chao Phraya river right next to Santi Chaiprakarn Park. This has been a favoured site for Asiatopia’s public performances that generally play on sombre themes to audiences made up of a mix of local students, gangs, strolling couples, and the backpacker overspill from nearby Khao San Road.

As it came to a close, the tenor of the 7th Asiatopia seemed to be of studied optimism—a looking forward to things that would get done. One particularly prickly and extended symposium session had to do with churning out a manifesto of sorts which didn’t quite materialize despite impassioned efforts to wrestle with the critical language imposed upon current South-East Asian performance practice. Indonesian artist Iwan Wijono was particularly emphatic in pointing out that the Asian impetus to perform prefigures Western academic acts of naming/discourse on performance. Not surprisingly, his recommended tract was an overt flouting, pitting traditional and ritual performance vis-à-vis performance art (more specifically, traditional performance in relation to western-inflected action art). Other points raised had to do with artists having to reckon with the ‘burden’ of criticality, of being pushed to dish out politicized work owing to reigning genealogies that trace performance back to Dada. This in turn gave rise to questions of historicisation and the consequent putting forth of narratives demonstrating parallel routes taken across continents, and that this simultaneity in effect privileges the ‘primitive’ and ‘animist.’ It was at this point that Cambodian academic Ly Daravuth raised the spectre of sanitized integration, citing an ongoing Issan retrospective at Bangkok’s Emporium Mall as a classic case of tradition being folded into modernizing discourse.

In hindsight, this Asiatopia clearly bore witness to a palpable frustration with Western dogma even as its protagonists continue to opt toward engagement with the global artworld by recognizing the power relationships governing tradition, modernism, and contemporaneity and ultimately developing an indigenous discourse rooted in lingua francas and local contexts. Indonesian writer-curator Heru Hikayat for instance cited jeprut—which invokes a break with, a conscious disruption—an Indonesian term already in currency and associated with provocative action. Still other Hikayat citations touched on art’s overly privileged status, this hinted at in the works of fellow Indonesians Handy Hermansyah and Tisna Sanjaya—with the latter giving out pungent jengko seeds as a stinging critique of development-driven deforestation. Arguing for the critical edginess of the simple action as constituting valid resistance, dovetailed with Thai critic-academic Thanom Chapakdee’s cautioning against critical recognition morphing into institutionalization—a watering down of political impact in art that he says, “underachieves at an ideology level.”

This emphasis on the dynamism incumbent on those hoping to keep their art practice edgy seemed to be uppermost in the minds of a number of Asiatopia’s participants as they pointed to the need to break with tradition even while exploiting its positionality. Related to this was the need to define what constitutes acts of resistance even as creative tension continues to be lost to liberalism or a seemingly democratic opening up in some sites. This resonates with Chumpon Apisuk’s call to reckon with Asiatopia’s gains, cautioning against the danger of becoming mere appendages to state-sponsored culture. As is the case for several other artists working out of countries represented in Asiatopia, the Thais seemed to be astutely aware of the crisis within their ranks and not just vis-à-vis the state. All this was talked about with an openness that cut across national borders—a continually evolving discourse on the nature of performance itself, and the conjuring of a range of frames paired with the interpretation of current art practice.

Asiatopia continues to create a space that allows for the co-existence of persuasions at variance—where artists like Thai Kosit Juntaratip doesn’t consider what he does as performance and Wijono openly resists labels, wary of being subsumed in mainstream discourse. Here is the classic wanting to be on the map but also aiming to have a say in how one gets there syndrome—not wanting to have work blend into a nebulous murk that global performance seems to be turning into, yet being at home with attendant ambiguity and open-endedness. The long-term challenge partly has to do with dealing with diversity without flattening out differences in practice.

While nothing may have been carved in stone at this Asiatopia (and that of course has arguably been the essence of performance), this event feeds into the collective project among artists, critics, curators and allied cultural workers in this part of the planet to flex their own muscles rather than having western scholars do the theorizing and provide the nomenclature. Asiatopia was a strategic move to beef up the ranks. It also ministered to a need to pool together documentation in a yet to be decided form. Whether physical or online but definitely multi-lingual/multi-format this archive would be used for networking and would further interaction begun at this first symposium-festival.

7th Asiatopia and 1st Southeast Asia Performance Art Symposium, director Chumpon Apisuk, Queen’s Gallery and Santi Chaiprakarn Park, Bangkok, Thailand, Nov 24-27, 2005

Stein in Edinburgh

Paedophilia. That’ll get you on edge. I’m at the Edinburgh Festival in the foyer of the premiere production of David Harrower’s new play, Blackbird. Somebody is scared.

The program doesn’t convey much about the play we are about to see but it does tell us what it is not. This play is not Mamet’s Oleanna; Peter Stein may be the grand master of European theatre but definitely not a proponent of the dreaded ‘director’s theatre.’ And of course: This play does not condone paedophilia. Is it because of or despite this reassurance that we reappraise the old panto posters above the box office window? Dick Whittington portrayed as a fetching adolescent girl…Babes in the Wood… this old Edinburgh theatre has been rendered downright seedy and we haven’t even taken our seats, such is the power of the subject matter.

The plot is simple. Una confronts Ray in the canteen of his workplace. Fifteen years previously he had left her in a hotel room after sex, alone and scared. She was 12, he was 40. Now she forces this confrontation. She breaks him down and they fall again; we squirm at every turn, unable to escape the moral transgression, needing forgiveness and hating the possibility that it will be granted.

Harrower has a sharp knife and he wields it without blinking. Blackbird will be recognised as one of the greatest of modern dramas. Like most new writing it is economical. Two actors, one set. Unlike most contemporary plays, it goes to places most theatre only dreams of going: taboo and the holy grail of catharsis. Take us through the shit and we will be purified. Harrower does it with skill and an horrific, implacable humanity. Seems to me that these reassurances surrounding the production, the frame of the festival, the frame of the director, all serve to hide from our gaze what Harrower has looked at so squarely.

Stein in Berlin

Back in Berlin, Peter Stein is front and centre giving an interview in which he slags off almost all of his contemporaries. Brilliant. The week’s amusement is opening up the morning newspaper to see which famous theatre director has responded to his lambast.

Here is he attacking his old sparring partner Claus Peymann at the Berliner Ensemble, condescending to Christa Wolf for reducing Medea from myth to domesticity, defending his ‘monster’ theatre, those marathon productions, Faust, The Oresteia. Stein is the grand impresario and makes theatre that the festival cogniscenti adore. Camped in Italy with another brilliant actress for his second wife, he raises the money himself for these grand visions. I like his style, the old bombast that typifies the generation. He is a handsome version of Robert Hughes, complaining of betrayal by his homeland.

Coincidentally, it is at the Berlin theatre that Stein created, the Schaubühne, that an Australian, Benedict Andrews, has responsibility for the German language premiere of Blackbird 2 months later. Robert Hughes and the great expat generation of the 70s comes again to mind but we, the new wanderers, are an altogether different breed.
Roger Allam, Jodhi May, Blackbird (Edinburgh)

Roger Allam, Jodhi May, Blackbird (Edinburgh)

Stein vs Andrews

Stein is the master craftsman, Andrews only now breaking into the European theatre scene. There is a generation gap, a culture gap and a stylistic gap but interestingly, a comparison is possible because both directors play a straight bat. In both productions the text is complete, a naturalistic form is dominant, the stage directions are observed and as a result the productions are surprisingly similar. If this is a game, then it has gone down to a penalty shoot out.

There is something unnerving when you realise what a director is up to, like self-consciously good writing. Stein uses music programmatically, we hear it every time the characters recall past events and it fades tastefully when they finish their recollection. It is a recognisable device, it calls attention to itself and yes, it helps us follow the emotional journey.

Andrews’ use of music is infinitely less polished and lacks the same logical rigour but by avoiding the programmatic story-telling technique of film (reinforcing emotional moments with sound) and embracing instead the power of sound in the theatre to reinforce silence, he allows us to experience the key emotional moments of the text unadorned and frightening. This is just the beginning of the thread of comparison.

The play is set in the drab canteen of a factory, the set-designs are similar and create highly theatrical spaces. The differences are in the authenticity of the detritus and more seriously, whether the actors commit to it physically. In Edinburgh, Una illustrates her psychological state by emptying the rubbish bin; it is self-conscious and the cups are conveniently clean. In Berlin, 2 people play amidst the half-eaten hamburgers and coffee dregs like emotionally crippled kids in a sandpit, they are yearning for the rituals of childhood, stuck in the rituals that made them special, that have made their lives special. Soon this childish game will be replaced by the sex games of adults. Harrower’s great discovery (and one that Andrews honours) is that they partner each other, they are unique only because of their transgression and so are doomed to recreate the ritual that changed their lives, made them human. This is a messy idea; dirty even, a state that is almost inconceivable on the stage in Edinburgh, in a festival show.

Words vs bodies

In Edinburgh, the actors are brilliant: Jodhi May is perfectly cast and handles the necessary shifts from victim to tyrant with verve. Roger Allam is all middle-aged uncertainty and repressed anger. These actors create an impressive sustenato, 2 hours of struggle conveyed primarily through language. It seems that Stein has stripped back the naturalistic form, cleared space for this language with a firm but subtle choreography. Although this approach suits its audience perfectly, and will be lauded when it arrives on the West End, I can’t help feeling that it is a limiting use of naturalism. German actors will never rival this use of the spoken word; but creating metaphors, making physical meaning, is their bread and butter—they are theatre animals, and this visceral quality has to be present to match the material. Here in Berlin is Jule Böwe pouring water onto a table top and obsessively mopping it up with an inadequate Kleenex, an absurd yet concrete gesture that captures perfectly the mess that an adult made of her childhood. Under the canteen bench Thomas Bading as Ray leans his head against a steel support and is suddenly back in gaol, doing time for his crime, paying over and over again, permanently gaoled, behind his assumed name, behind his ridiculous job, behind his cowardice. These expressionistic (or simply visual) moments leap out of the prevailing ‘dirty realism’ that Andrews has established, and serve to tug us back into the present, into the theatre, to face this dilemma.

When Stein gets to the blackout, a wonderful bit of writing, it is perfectly rendered. You never doubt that in the fictional world, there has been a power failure, but again, his mastery makes you conscious, you leap for meaning: “she is now left in the dark”, “like she was as a child.” It is an effective moment; in Stein’s version, an effective intellectual moment. Andrews uses the blackout as a scare tactic. For perhaps 10 seconds the audience is in the dark, literally, wondering if there has been a power failure in the theatre, sharing, for a brief moment, Una’s disorientation and powerlessness.

Morality and complexity

The intensity of Harrower’s play reaches its penultimate height when Ray and Una try to have sex again. Ray stops it with “I can’t.” What follows is the killer line of the play: Una, this 28-year-old girl, responds with “What’s wrong? Am I too old?” Thump. You can’t muck that up; it’s Harrower’s rabbit punch. Stein’s Ray suffers from a moment of impotence. The old man is too confused, too full of shame to get it up. It’s seedy, fumbled, uncertain and partially obscured by an upstage table. By making it an issue of potency, Stein punishes Ray and introduces an element of morality play. It would be nice, easier for us, if these rules did exist. Andrews’ Ray dealt with this idea within the first 10 minutes of the production. When he says “I can’t” he is further down the path, much further. The game of blame was over long ago and this is revealed through the deliberate, agonisingly slow gestures performed in a sustained, brutal silence. Maybe she feels like a Helmut Newton model, maybe he sees her like one. Half naked, on her knees amidst the rubbish, dead centre-stage and closer to us than we want her to be, Una forces him to face the truth of his desire. His shame is not the issue in this moment. His “I can’t” is a horrible choice: he chooses facelessness, and mediocrity over desire and the completion of a ritual that defines them both. He is now an empty man, a shadow. This might sound the same as impotence but is in fact the dark opposite. Harrower/Andrews put us in the infinitely more uncomfortable position of wishing, for his humanity’s sake, and her dignity, that he could fuck her: we are at a genuine, theatrical dilemma. Having destroyed a child has finally destroyed him, but in the opposite way that we demand as moralists.

Managing the mess

The real controversy of Stein’s evening is the end. Not written in the text, the entire set is flown out, large rubbish sweepers clear the stage and we are suddenly in a realistically rendered underground car-park. Ray drives a car on stage and is dragged out by Una in what would be an epic struggle, if it wasn’t for the incongruous ‘adult contemporary’ ballad. For the length of the song they roll around in the glare of the cars headlights. I’ll take Stein literally. He cleans up the mess. He takes us out of the hell that was such an effective metaphor for 2 hours and into a more symbolic hell, a mythical realm, a place fit for a Faust or an Orestes: even the most flawed, the most corrupted of us are fallen angels and this theatre ritual has carried us over the slime to the safety of the opposite shore. But we don’t need to be reassured, we are adults not children.

Benedict Andrews knows how deep, how dirty, pathetic and beautiful the rituals we create for ourselves really are. We have loved Ray and Una for a brief moment, the way they avoid the truth, the way that they cover their pain, these are the rituals that support us, and we will survive the theatre, even without being reassured that our miserable bodies might resemble some gilded statues in a marble hall.

Andrews leaves us in the dark with the plaintive moan from Una, “Ray!”. We don’t know if she follows him but we do know that this doesn’t end, this nightmare never ends. Stein spelled it out for us, made us, we think, “ahh, it never ends.” Andrews connected with the stomach, with despair. After Stein I am talking about a brilliant production of a brilliant new play. After Andrews I am devouring the company of friends, the warmth of alcohol and, in the Schaubühne foyer, the DJ is playing Garry Glitter. Supremely bad taste? Yes. Provocation as instinct. Yes. Andrews could not exist without Stein, but in 2006, with this extraordinary play as material, it is Andrews who didn’t blink and provided us with a unique, redemptive evening of theatre.

Blackbird, writer David Harrower, director Peter Stein, premiere production 2005 Edinburgh Festival, Aug 15-24; London’s West End February 2006. German language version, director Benedict Andrews, translator Angelika Kingsford Röhl, premiered November 2005, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, and will continue to play in the company repetoire.

Auckland’s Trans-Acoustic festival describes itself as an experimental platform for the fusing of sensory impressions. A brainchild of Zoe Drayton, founder of Audio Foundation, a resource hub for experimental audio culture in NZ, Trans-Acoustic featured 3 nights of performance by Australian and New Zealand artists who explore the range of possible meanings produced by simultaneous projection of sounds and light/images.

Auckland-based artist and writer Andrew Clifford opens proceedings with The Electric Biorama Spectacular, a meditative performance structured around shifting patterns of radio static subjected to signal interference from flickering neon lights. The piece hinges on the mechanics of transmission and Clifford expands the sonic dimension by placing tuned receivers throughout the audience and beaming them his distressed signal, causing a lovely flood of soft high and low frequencies to circulate throughout the room. In common with ‘trans-missionary’ organisations like Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC), Clifford considers his performance a kind of “séance, trying to materialise manifestations of invisible forces in the room”, and although tonight the ghostly murmurs are barely audible, a certain presence is definitely felt.

An exception to the sound/light bloc is an Auckland group, A Presentation of Bees and Spandex, whose chemically treated, melting 16mm films emit a discernibly noxious scent which hangs in the air during their set. A collaboration of Eve Gordon’s projections and Sam Hamilton’s sound, Bees and Spandex recall the multi-projector experiments of Expanded Cinema pioneers at the London Filmmakers Co-op, especially Malcolm Le Grice’s explorations of structural indeterminacy and chemical/material investigations. Hamilton introduces the performance as the “rejuvenation loops”, referencing artist William Basinski’s “disintegration loops”, in which fragments of looping audiotape are gradually degraded; a blurry sonic meditation on the fragility of materials. Bees and Spandex reverse the process, cleaning their crudely spliced filmstrips of chemical residue as they’re hand cranked through the projectors. Despite predicable technical difficulties, the celluloid does slowly ‘rejuvenate’, revealing a bizarre montage of zoo animals on parade, accompanied by a crackly, whistling circus-like soundtrack.

Botborg, a Brisbane cracked video duo who claim to research the ‘occult’ science, “Photosonicneurokineasthography (psnky)”, established by Dr Arkady Botborger (1923-1981) close the night. Whether Dr. Botborger has actual scientific legitimacy is doubtful, though on this evidence, his contribution to the ‘visual music’ tradition might be worth reconsidering. Botborg’s work is aggressively complex and occasionally frightening. On first impression they come off like a nasty update of legendary animator Norman Mclaren’s handmade synaesthetic masterpiece Synchromy (1971), all collapsing blocks of digital colour and glitched synthetic sound. However, Mclaren treated his materials with an artisan’s care, whereas Botborg subject theirs to a kind of audio-visual bludgeoning. At the intense climax Botborg’s images seem to erupt and spasm viciously, as if attempting in confusion to exit the screen and drench or absorb the audience. The experience is in a way profoundly televisual rather than cinematic, like a hidden station that suddenly targets vulnerable 4am minds when everyone else is sleeping. We all know that too much idiot box is bad for us, and we remember from Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) how easily a fuzzy collapsed signal transforms into deadly transmission. In all their abstraction, Botborg manage to distill some of that creepy fear.

Trans-Acoustic day 2 begins with improvising ensemble, Plains, the supergroup of Auckland’s post-digital music scene, comprising Tim Coster, Richard Francis, Rosy Parlane, Mark Sadgrove, Clinton Watkins and Paul Winstanley. In spite of their monstrous sonic potential Plains plot a restrained and careful path, cultivating a buzzing, humming group-sound full of gentle spikes and fluctuations in tension and volume, all controlled by an array of light-sensitive transducers exposed to various flashing trinkets. Winstanley brings the cleverly structured set to its finale, activating a set of twinkling Christmas lights spread across the performance area. The lights blink festively, their signal bleeding into the sound as rhythm fused across senses.

A History of Mapmaking is Auckland programmer/composer Rebecca Wilson’s work for amplified cello, light-controller, video sensing software and digital audio processing. Formerly “director of leaves and petals” at the experimental Dutch institute STEIM, Wilson possesses high level computing knowledge that would leave most lost and dizzy, but even she seems perplexed, when shortly into her set, things begin to seriously malfunction. So A History of Mapmaking becomes a series of tantalising previews, punctuated by breaks for emergency rewiring. In full flight, Wilson’s project combines beautifully abstracted cello with austere, line-based graphics; a striking synthesis. Tonight, with admirable composure and humour, she adds impromptu problem solving to her live repertoire.

Melbourne artist Robin Fox’s astounding work with the Cathode Ray Oscilloscope has developed to a point of almost incomprehensible complexity and beauty. For those familiar with Fox’s project, the great pleasure has been seeing it evolve over 2 years. However, at this late stage of development it’s hard not to envy the Auckland audience experiencing the work for the first time. The technical basis is relatively simple: computer generated audio flows directly into an oscilloscope and the electricity excites a single light photon (a bright green dot) which moves frantically around a phosphorous screen. American abstract filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute tried something similar in Abstronic (1954) (featured in ACMI’s recent White Noise exhibition), but where she played on her oscilloscope a charming number called Ranch House Party, Fox blasts his machine full of scorching electronic frequencies and shards of fractured noise. He might also have dipped the oscilloscope in pure LSD, because on this occasion the “single light photon” embarks on an ‘innerspace’ trip so ecstatic it makes the climax of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey feel like an uneventful stroll to the corner store. Trying to describe Fox’s images is difficult, but one has the sensation of moving exceptionally rapidly through enclosed twisting passages, bursting momentarily through logically impossible space, and being constantly smacked back into cosmic freefall. Perhaps this is what it’s like to be a pinball?

Auckland artist Adam Willetts opens night 3 with his unusual setup; a desktop lamp and a bunch of bubble-enclosed solar powered robots placed on the strings of a distorted electric guitar. Once energised, the pink robot-bubbles, each the size of a clenched fist, proceed to twitch, bounce and jerk all over the highly amplified instrument. Robot music was once supposed to sound clean and precise like Kraftwerk, but Willett’s robots are punkish and temperamental, hacking out epileptic staccato rhythms interspersed by waves of feedback. Their creator is happy mostly to observe, tweaking sonic parameters here and there and, most vitally, ensuring the intoxicating solar energy supply doesn’t run dry.

The Professionals (Nick Cunningham and Helga Fassonaki) follow with their beguiling mix of the arcane (vintage oscillators triggered by flashlights) and the cheap (homemade sound-generators in polystyrene containers), all of it hooked up to an old monitor which throws faint green flashes across the theatre walls. Cunningham’s droning electric guitar accompanies, nicely offsetting the squiggly electronics. Once again, a literal sound/image connection has been constructed; ie, a sound signal is output directly into a visual input or vice versa. This kind of signal synaesthesia is undoubtedly a major theme of the festival.

The evening’s finale was Abject Leader featuring this writer’s improvised soundtrack, and the multi-projector 16mm films of Sally Golding. Our collaboration is almost traditionally ‘cinematic’ in that the sensory point of contact isn’t technical, but essentially thematic; a shared exploration of memory, duration and dream consciousness. My own sounds are largely ‘Made in NZ’: the inside of a beehive, a recording made with the assistance of a friendly South Island beekeeper a few days earlier, and the resonant frequencies of a gong scavenged from Auckland’s premier authentic Chinese import warehouse, Wah Lee.

Trans-Acoustic is one of many new festivals specifically exploring audio-visuality; the relationship of sounds to images. This curatorial tendency is a positive for both artists and audiences, bringing into sharper focus a vast area of research and practice, informed equally by avant-garde traditions in film, music and visual art, and grounded in the creative engagement with both old and new technologies.

Twentieth century composition has increasingly raised questions to do with the sounds of things and objects themselves. What is the sound of a space, of a wall, of a paving stone, or a gleaming piece of industrial metal? What is the sound of their history, their identity, and what echoes are left when such things disappear? As I travelled between Philadelphia, Paris and Fremantle, these issues followed me, inviting my ears into spaces between objects and sounds.

Prison, Philadelphia

In Philadelphia, I visited the Eastern State Penitentiary whose influential 1820s design of buildings radiating from a central watchtower ensured each prisoner could be constantly observed. This crumbling structure has however since become a veritable Dadaist art installation with dejected cells irregularly filled with aggressive weeds and wooden desks covered in a layered patina of millions of tiny fragments of paint and dust. The effect is of an otherworldly sense of age, beauty and melancholy, all the more unsettling because this aestheticised experience occurs within a space of former incarceration.

Amongst the new artworks nestled within the Penitentiary is Pandemonium by Janet Cardiff and Georges Burres Miller. Cardiff’s 2001 transposition of individual recorded voices from a choral work into a circle of speakers—40 Part Motet—featured in the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival. In Pandemonium she collaborated with Miller to create a fabulous, comic yet complex work in which mechanisms located in cells off a long, dusty corridor struck metal bed-frames, prison bars, hollowed out desks and other relics. Near my vantage point, for example, a lazy clunk emerged, its tardy reply scattered further down the hall. Then another came from behind, gradually producing a leisurely, disordered clanging flitting about the cells. Density arose, then a regular beat, before chaos took over. Sounds became localised yet lost in the space as thunks leapt rapidly about. This smirking invocation of a prison riot was endlessly appealing from different positions as I hastened from cell to cell to catch the tempo, or strolled, assaulted and ignored by mechanical actors, sometimes proximate, sometimes distant. IRCAM, Paris

This sense of the ghost in the machine was also evoked in a Juan Cristobal Cerrillo work from the concert I attended at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Paris. IRCAM was established by Pierre Boulez, partly in opposition to Pierre Henry’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Following Boulez’s principles, IRCAM is devoted to compositional research centred upon the live performance of traditional instruments (piano, saxophone, orchestra, etc) in harmonic combination or dissonance with electronic forms (digital, laptop, electroacoustics). Within an impressive program of international students (including Australian Christopher Tonkin), Cerrillo’s piece was unique for the absence of a performer.

Cerrillo placed 4 spotlit drums onstage and another 3 among the audience. Each had a modified speaker cone beneath it, which, when triggered, turned the drums into both resonating boxes for a glitchie, sine-wave soundscape, as well as striking the drums themselves. Bass drums allowed for particularly deep, resonating effects. The mixed frequencies of the clink and clank of the instruments’ vibrating metal frames and screws provided a more present sense of haunting than Cardiff and Miller. Rather than evoking and reinterpreting the sounds of times and places past, Cerrillo’s piece was overtly and self-consciously self-activating, reminding audiences that digital and recording technologies not only document the work of humans, but also replace and liberate objects and sounds from the traces of human agency.

Fremantle Prison

While Cerrillo, Cardiff and Miller staged installations in which objects were actors, I found upon my return to Western Australia that the Nova Ensemble was attempting to play the Fremantle Prison itself. This penitentiary was recently decommissioned, and unlike Philadelphia, ghosts seemed very present here. The performance moved through 2 galleries of cells and into the kitchens. Nova’s semi-improvised score included overt historic references, such as the opening flute passage evoking the Irish origins of those incarcerated in this former colonial institution, as well as a performer locked in a cell describing the rituals he endured within. The show was most effective however when the 3 performers ceased using the setting as an evocative echo chamber for their mix of romantic, modernist and jazzy percussion, cello and saxophone and instead transformed the prison itself into an instrument. The materials included the historically resonant clicking of keys in the locks above us, accompanied by languid footsteps on a metal grill, which suggested (without actually reproducing) the sound of a jailer’s rounds. More dissociated sonic materials included the cacophonous emptying of cutlery into the kitchen’s steel sinks and a section performed in a row of massive water boilers. The striking of tuned wooden bowls floating inside these provided a moment of reverie within the harsh surrounds. The interest of the piece overall lay in its status as neither simply a narrative of prison life, nor, however, as a work entirely separate from the affects and sounds of this past. It was rather something in between, an historically resonant performance in which the acoustic ghosts and forms nevertheless were able to exert their own imperious force.

Fremantle streets

Also in Fremantle, curator/artist Perdita Phillips invited listeners to stroll the streets while listening to specially commissioned scores on a Walkman. Although sometimes I felt like a performing dog as I struggled to follow artists’ road directions, the exhibition offered an impressive mix of WA and international contributors. Dissonant field recordings were the most common format. Viv Corringham recorded her own stroll through an analogous route in London and, after I got lost, I felt as if I was chasing a ghost. Would she be around the next corner? Would I come back into synchronisation with her pathway if I reached Market Street before she told me to turn off again? Lawrence English’s piece was my favourite though, one of several ‘free walks’ in which each listener was invited to choose their own trail. English tells his audience to compare the score emanating from the headphones with the sound coming from the streets. Introducing Fremantle’s history of white exploration, he then presents electronic cricket squeals rising into a wonderful choral spaciousness with a background bed of sound over which proximate materials like a blowfly or hiss ebb and flow. This structure explicitly opens the listening space to material from beyond the headphones, ironically producing a relaxing peacefulness under the Fremantle bustle. Other standout works included Walter van Rijn’s acoustically gorgeous montage of European radio broadcasts and other materials. Early on, Rijn invited me to find a window and peer into the space behind it, implying that the subsequent score represented the accumulated sonic history of the urban dwellings I moved amongst. Fine though such works were, I remain unconvinced by headphone presentation, preferring to take them off and hear the things around me play themselves, in all their new, shiny, metallic spininess; urban mobility, rumbling historicism and flaking, aesthetic materialisation.

Pandemonium, Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, May 2005-present, Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller; Juan Cristobal Cerrillo, …the stillness and the turbulent sprays…, Cursus 1 + 2, Oct 13-14, IRCAM, Paris; Nova Ensemble, Ultrasound, David Pye, Lee Buddle, Mel Robinson; Fremantle Prison, Nov 27; Strange Strolls, curator, Perdita Phillips, Moore Building Contemporary Art Gallery, Fremantle, Western Australia, Nov 18-Dec 18, 2005

Nigel Butterley is one of those archetypal composers whom everyone knows and whose influence is far-reaching, and yet most of his music remains rarely performed. There are works which are well-known, such as Spell of Creation, Laudes, The White-throated Warbler and The Owl, but rarely is Butterley the centre around which a festival is constructed. In celebration of his 70th birthday such an event occurred in the form of 3 concerts, 2 of which are reviewed here.

The Song Company presented the a capella concert Nigel and Hildegard in which pieces by Butterley were performed alongside those of Hildegard von Bingen and Sofia Gubaidulina, the great Russian composer of Tartar origins, born in 1931. For a number of reasons one has to be careful in devising this type of concert: will the programme feel balanced? How well will the early works sit alongside the recent? And, most importantly, do the pieces complement each other, helping the audience to gain a greater understanding of both? The Song Company is to be commended on all counts. As is Elliot Gyger who acted as the weekend’s curator, and whose programme notes were filled with informative observations.

In fact, the combination of repertoire and the order in which they were presented could not have been more enlightening. The programme opened with Butterly’s Flower in the crannied wall, which pairs 2 texts, one by Tennyson, the other from the antiphon for Lauds, Trinity Sunday. The first focuses on a little flower plucked from a wall and so contemplates the relative positions of ‘Man’ and ‘God.’ In this poem, the flower is a single object through which a series of binaries is held: the sacred and the secular, understanding and confusion, clarity and ambiguity, nature and human construction. These ideas, which have occupied Butterly’s mind throughout his career, were present in each piece. Butterley’s setting of this text is profound and the work’s length just right. Soft and gentle, yet detailed and intense, the voices singing Tennyson’s words were active and descriptive in contrast to the static lower lines of the antiphon, the 2 threads contrapuntally woven together. In any other part of the programme this piece would have been overwhelmed, but it was given the space it needed at the very start.

The second piece, Hildegard’s O Virtus Sapientiae, consisted of 2 voices: Jenny Duck-Chong who droned with perfect intonation and clarity, and Ruth Kilpatrick who carried the agile melody. The same binaries from the first piece were present here, albeit in simplified form. Duck-Chong returned later in the concert for Gubaidulina’s Aus den Visionen der Hildegard von Bingen, another of the evening’s highlights. This difficult piece stretches the singer’s range as it moves without rest from highest to lowest registers. If this isn’t difficult enough, there are large dynamic contrasts and changes of timbre. The counterpoint created is like that found in Bach’s works for solo violin which imply contemporaneous lines through registral disjuncture.

Butterley’s Paradise Unseen made much of different configurations of register. Written in 2001 for The Song Company, it exploited the virtuosic versatility of the performers. One rarely encounters an ensemble which can vary its sound so much. Each word was loaded with meaning through Butterley’s extravagant use of intertwining lines. He has an ability to construct long phrases, each of which, like the flower in the first piece, is formed from multiple perspectives of a single evocative image. And like the other piece written for the Company (and which closed the concert), There Came a Wind like a Bugle, the amount of information with which the audience is presented is immense, though the music remains luminous.

The second concert of the day was given by The Seymour Group. The nature/human construction theme from the previous concert continued with Butterley’s Of Wood and The Owl, circumjacent to the Australian première of Gyger’s Polishing Firewood.

Adrian Wallis was excellent in the cello solo Of Wood. His performance was dramatic, detailed and clear (and very different to last year’s wonderfully noisy performance of the Berio ‘cello sequenza’). This piece alternates between soft, ethereal, flickering sounds and loud outbursts. The 2 are always in tension, with strident gestures reclaimed by profound introspective passages—the latter ultimately prevailing.

Gyger’s new work also featured the cello within a mixed ensemble (flutes, clarinets, violin, viola, piano and percussion). Following Butterley’s lead, Gyger ventures into the “paradoxical combination of delicacy and violence” through 4 movements—“Burnt”, “Polishing”, “Burning” and “Polished.” His sound world explores the images of which the movement titles are evocative. For example, “Burnt” is characterised by small, soft, sparse, fragmented notes scattered around the ensemble and which, in “Polishing”, take on longer, more legato lines as the interconnection between instruments grow and gestures cohere. Register is important for this piece too, though more for the way that it alters the colours created in the combining sonorities. This is a difficult piece precisely performed (with Geoffrey Gartner on cello and Timothy Constable on percussion deserving special acclaim). Like everything else in the programme, Polishing Firewood was carefully positioned and its confident exhuberance prepared for The Owl with its defined central character.

Whilst The Owl is an impressive, considered and crafted piece, it is Butterley’s smaller works for which I have renewed appreciation. There is a distinctiveness about the way that he writes (his meaningful use of register and of counterpoint, the careful way he sets texts, his creative and thoughtful approach to all his music) which is infrequently found in others and which was well highlighted in these 2 concerts. Hopefully these birthday celebrations will prompt a renewed appreciation of Nigel Butterley’s music.

Nigel Butterley 70th Birthday Festival, The Song Company, Nigel and Hildegard, conductor Roland Peelman, singers Clive Birch, Richard Black, Mark Donnelly, Jenny Duck-Chong, Ruth Kilpatrick, Nicole Smeulders, Nicole Thomson, Dan Walker; The Seymour Group, conductor Marshall McGuire, performers Jennifer Barnes, Christine Draeger, Margery Smith, Jemima Littlemore, Thomas Talmacs, Geoffery Gartner, Adrian Wallis, Bernadette Balkus, Timothy Constable; Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sept 4, 2005

Seeing films at the Mardi Gras film festival requires a different mentality to forking out for, Brokeback Mountain. It’s a chance to map out some queer nodal points which you won’t necessarily be able to duplicate on mainstream screens. Having had quite a fill in 2005 of independent queer cinema—it felt like the halcyon days of the 90s again there for a while with new films from Todd Solandz (Palindromes), Greg Araki (Mysterious Skin) and Gus Van Sant (Last Days)—I approached previewing some of the films from this year’s Mardi Gras Film Festival hoping to find out what is percolating beyond the US-art household names.

Another good thing about queer film festivals is that there isn’t all that hoo-ha that goes on in the press when subcultural films are released into the mainstream (eg Heath’s disclaimers about Brokeback Mountain NOT being a GAY film). I wouldn’t go quite as far as the festival programmer, David Pearce, who sees the festival as an opportunity for a queer audience to be in the company of “people who share similar thoughts and feelings as you, and laugh at the same jokes as you.” Assuming that level of homogeneity seems doubtful no matter what. Watching many of the films I tried to double-guess what their up-coming audience’s response might be, especially when I was left cringing at atrocious scripts, or not laughing at outright farce that made me wonder if I hadn’t been to the right camp school. Though once the algorithms of sheer diversity start amassing after watching so many different films with some form of queer content, even the rare duds seem to have their place. And it is important to stick films out to the end. Watching the slap-stick hi-jinks of 2 gay samurai in Yaji and Kita (director Kankuro Kudo, 2005)—a film which suggested a Japanese Monty Python (meets Monkey Magic)—I hoped the crowd interested in cult and the bizarre will find their way to the cinema. Festivals are all about translation, and not just language which can be subtitled, but the cultural memes that such films release internationally. Some of the ‘magic realist’ scenes, for want of a better description, near the end of this film (the inconsolably sobbing figure at the source of the River Styx and the mushrooms growing out of Yaji’s neck in the butterfly forest) made me pine for a mythic psychedelic 1970s, and wonder excitedly whether someone might film a Murakami novel one day.

Another gem in the selection I previewed was an independent American film Loggerheads (2005) written and directed by Tim Kirkman. This one has the style of a Raymond Carver story, building detail upon detail to the point of spiritual catharsis. Three inter-related narratives, all set in distinctive small town locales and staggered between 1999 and 2001, are spliced together around an ultimately elegiac adoption story (based on real events). The ambience of the film never falters, the ensemble cast perform with subtlety and depth and the plot is on perfect slow-release. Loggerheads refers to a breed of turtles (the females always mysteriously return to the same beach to lay their eggs) and contains echoes of the broader conflict between liberal and conservative American social politics. You hear George Bush’s speech after his first 100 days in office on a radio in the home of the minister and his wife, though the film eschews direct polemic. It’s great to see such strong and pivotal female roles, and an equally sensitive and mature gay ‘seachange’ character. I like this film as much as Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm which used a family story as a filter for the crisis of middle American social mores in the 70s, and all the more because it takes on contemporary ‘turn of the century’ lives with attenuated grace and gravitas.

After Loggerheads, the Finnish reproductive comedy/drama Producing Adults (2004), directed by Aleksi Salmenpera, seemed trite, prolonging an unconvincing and laborious bisexual miasma, and the Dogme95 style UK film, Gypo (Jan Dunn, 2005) got bogged down with all the best intentions in telling a refugee story with a seemingly incongruous lesbian twist. Blood, Sasha Aicken’s Sweat and Glitter (2005) might interest the Sydney performance community, as it is about San Francisco’s Miss Trannyshack competition which positions itself as an alternative to traditional drag. However with its predominantly white American contestants it is not as culturally interesting as Paris Is Burning. In the swimsuit competition, ever-the-egoist Diva Dan wears a bulging Budweiser one piece, and aborts a foetus on stage with a coat-hanger, while Kiddie comes out in a cossie made of safety pin chain mail. Kiddie is the only real artiste (he brands himself on stage in a move reminiscent of the piercing performances once seen at cLUB bENT) while the rest of the contestants are more Mardi Gras.

New Zealander Stewart Main’s Fifty Ways of Saying Fabulous (2005) is part of the youth program of the festival and is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Sydney writer Graham Aitken. Impeccably styled to reproduce 1970s rural New Zealand, the film starts promisingly in terms of style and cinematography (offering a nostalgic portal into a certain generation’s collective memory). However, the plot and script (on an admittedly low budget) soon transpire to be more like a telemovie. The film doesn’t resonate as strongly as Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures in terms of the lengths children can go to make an imaginative escape from small town life and obsessive same-sex fantasy. That said, it does treat early adolescent sexuality in an explicit and yet sensitive way more often found in novels, perhaps due to the moral panic involved in working with young actors.

In Fifty Ways of Saying Fabulous, chubby girlie-boy Billy and his tomboy cuz Lou negotiate a provincial rugby-mad town during a drought (making the barren landscape look like something from the kids’ favourite schlocky sci-fi TV show). It’s the element of farce which disrupts things for me; Billy wearing a blonde pigtail attached to his hat and his constant refrain ‘fabulous’ get a bit grating. His compulsion/repulsion response to Roy, a much maligned misfit with whom he has his first masturbatory encounters remains unnerving though and provides the film with a dark underside.

Brillante Mendoza’s Masahista (The Masseur, 2005) is a Philippine feature. Its low budget yields a neo-realist style (especially in a mortuary scene where a corpse is dressed) and a compelling focus on locale. It tells the story of Iliac, a young boy working in a massage parlour. Long intimate scenes in the cubicles capture the coquetry of the boys with their clients, while also positioning the viewer voyeuristically, allowing them the vicarious sensuality of the cinematic eye. However any sexploitation is underwritten by the dual awareness of the commercial contract at play and Iliac’s emotional ambivalence during the funeral rites for his recently deceased father (who had abandoned his family).

Gael Morel’s Le Clan (3 Dancing Slaves, 2005) is the story of 3 French-Algerian brothers. It is a kind of uber homoerotic Faster and Furious meets Rumblefish. Highly amped up to satisfy every rough trade fantasy, including a real Last Exit to Brooklyn scene where the middle, kind of Anthony Mundine-like brother, Marc, fucks a transexual, I was happy to lie on the couch and watch as the TV screen shimmered with testosterone. There are also moments of exquisite sentiment in this film though, especially in the disavowed relationship between the youngest brother and his Arab lover, Habib.

Queer Screen premiered Brokeback Mountain on Australia Day and it will be showing during the Mardi Gras Film Festival. But using your own hand-drawn compass, make sure that you map out your own program of some of the smaller, more obscure films in the festival.

Making Black Harvest
Robert Connolly
ABC Books, 2005
ISBN

Making Black Harvest is filmmaker Bob Connolly’s compelling but ultimately unresolved account of an Australian documentary classic. It is also a moving testament to Connolly’s personal and collaborative relationship with Robin Anderson who died from cancer at age 52 in 2002. Connolly and Anderson were co-producers, co-directors and, along with Ray Thomas, co-editors of Black Harvest. While Connolly was director of photography, Anderson was sound recordist.

The film is the final instalment in a trilogy which begins with First Contact. Their breakthrough observational film is so good that most Australian documentary filmmakers wish they had directed it themselves. If the trilogy were to be understood as a 3-act structure, Joe Leahy’s Neighbours would be the dramatic centre. Of course then, the question must be asked, why a book about Black Harvest and not Joe Leahy’s Neighbours? The answer is straightforward. It was only during the production of Black Harvest that Connolly and Anderson decided to keep a diary and from this account Connolly wrote this book.

Despite a certain degree of disingenuousness on Connolly’s part, I would view Connolly and Anderson’s filmmaking project in the 1980s and after as part of the observational filmmaking tradition. While Connolly mentions Gary Kildea’s Celso and Cora, there are some curious omissions. (I assume this is partly due to the book’s intended audience—generalist rather than film specific). Besides Kildea, Dennis O’Rourke spent over 15 years filming in PNG and the Pacific. While not overtly character driven, O’Rourke’s earlier films Yumi Yet and Ileksen reveal a forceful and systematic attempt to participate in an ordeal of contact without a previous generation’s sense of passive anthropological detachment.

The late documentary filmmaker Mark Worth once wrote that this generation of filmmakers thrived in a climate of isolation. They looked outwards to our region—simply because nobody else would. The DIY band of filmmakers, including Connolly and Anderson, were perhaps the most stylish, cinematic—they were still shooting on film in those days—and gung-ho exponents. But they still stood on the shoulders of others, most notably the American cinema direct movement of DA Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers and Australia’s own Mark Rubbo.

Connolly’s enthusiasm for the observational form never diminishes. He sees it neither as a second poor cousin nor as a convenient stepping stone to the drama feature. Watching reality unfold on a day-to-day basis was far more powerful for Connolly and Anderson than anything which could have been scripted. “Uncertainty is the defining characteristic of observational documentaries”, Connolly writes, “treatments were for us nothing but convenient artifices.” They “embraced” the uncertainty knowing this would involve courage, tenacity, intelligence—and luck! But above all they were dependent on the full and unreserved cooperation of their characters, the highland Ganiga—and Joe Leahy.

Joe Leahy is the middle-aged son of Australian gold explorer and adventurer Mick Leahy and Jiga Amp Marpa, a Highlander mother. First Contact tells the remarkable story of the Leahy brothers who were the first white men to travel to the remote PNG Highlands. When the story begins 50 years later Joe Leahy is a coffee buyer, businessman and planter.

He is a great, complex and intriguing character. Even when he is silent and looking into the distance he is never dull. What a gift to any filmmaker, but especially to Connolly and Anderson: “Joe Leahy was like no-one we had ever met in New Guinea”, Connolly writes. “He travelled first class, drove a Range Rover, owned real estate in PNG and Australia and lived on his own coffee plantation. ‘My mother,’ Joe proudly announced, ‘was a stone-age woman.’”

Dan Leahy, Joe Leahy’s uncle and only surviving member of the family, provides a metaphor for an ailing and dying Australian presence in PNG. He’s deaf, blind and paralysed by a stroke. He can only communicate with Joe by listening through headphones and talking into a microphone. But crucially for Joe, he is the only Leahy left who shows no shame in acknowledging that his brother, Mick, was Joe’s father. It’s an extremely moving scene in Black Harvest, heightened by the fact that Mick can neither hear nor see Joe’s tears.

Ten years after PNG’s independence in 1975, Connolly and Anderson began filming Joe Leahy’s Neighbours. “Almost every area of government activity—health, education, law enforcement—had gone backwards”, Connolly observes. “Kilima plantation was an island of prosperity surrounded by thousands of people with nothing to sustain them but the sweet potato they grew in their gardens, a few 100 kina annually from their own scraggly coffee trees, and the spiritual and psychological rewards to be gained from a vibrant traditional culture.”

Enter Joe Leahy and his relationship to the Ganiga—his neighbours and usually unequal business partners. He is a capitalist, they are communal. But was it ever so simple? The audience is constantly frustrated by the poor man-rich man, upstairs-downstairs dynamic. And this, of course, is the brilliant dynamic behind Joe Leahy’s Neighbours and Black Harvest. In one of the crucial scenes in Joe Leahy’s Neighbours, Maui, an old man dying from cancer, is taken home from the hospital to his village. Joe Leahy’s commitment, obligation and sense of responsibility is never doubted as he hands over a substantial amount of money to Maui. “If we kicked you out of here, who would help us in times like these?”, a villager asks Leahy.

The films can be seen as an extended mediation on first and third world relations. In Black Harvest the coffee prices crash—5 years of cultivation will yield an extremely limited financial return and this all takes place before the tribal fighting begins, a virulent type of warfare which will last another 7 years.

The police are helpless; indeed they are invisible. There are no NGOs, church or civil society leaders anywhere. (Why? It’s a question which Connolly doesn’t deal with—but maybe even asking shows extreme naivety on my part.) The old colonial Australian presence is far, far away in Port Moresby, represented by an Australian diplomat who arranges for Leahy’s business migration out of the mess to Brisbane, which becomes a bizarre Antipodean eden.

It’s an extreme situation—about 100,000 kina of coffee lies ruined with nobody around to pick it. The casualties are high—about 150-200 mainly young men have died from gunshot wounds. It is a real black harvest.

Connolly’s book explores the filmmakers’ reaction to the tribal society’s disintegration. Towards the end of their stay and after one of their oldest and closest friends Madang is shot dead, they film the grieving elder Popina. “As we rose up above the town on the road to Kunguma”, Connolly writes, “heading for our comfortable refuge in the clouds, I fought back a mounting sense of guilt, as though we were somehow abandoning Popina. Robin read my mind: ‘Nothing we can do for him now. We’re not part of things out there any more’.”

“Nothing we can do for him.” It’s a depressing and not too unrealistic conclusion that this type of filmmaking only preserves the status quo. Connolly and Anderson were after all, only very human filmmakers—neither the United Nations nor the Australian Federal Police. But somehow Connolly doesn’t deal strongly enough with this conundrum. After the filming ends, the reality of life in the Highlands of PNG continues.

It appears that in the twilight of his career, Bob Dylan is shoring up his place in history with an ongoing wave of autobiography, other books, CDs and DVDs. What’s fascinating about the mid-60s focus of many of these is the extent to which Dylan’s recordings and performances of that era refuse cozy reminiscing and continue to confound some 40 years after their creation. With Greil Marcus’ new book Like a Rolling Stone and Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home, we have works aimed at reigniting one of the most incendiary moments in Dylan’s career.

Unravelling a transformation

Like a Rolling Stone is Greil Marcus’ second book on Dylan, following on from 1997’s Invisible Republic—Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. The difficult pleasure of Marcus’ work lies in his methodology, informed as it is by a relentless determination to dissect an object until it has yielded every possible resonance. It’s a critical flight of imagination underpinned by an awesome storehouse of anecdotes and historical scholarship that generates a sometimes exhausting cross-referential density. A single word, or even a single sung intonation, represents a loose thread that Marcus pulls until the word lies in tatters, having yielded every social, political, historical and mythological connection that affected its making. The more Marcus tries to pin down the cultural objects he writes about, the more ‘meaning’ slips away, dispersed across the countless strands he unravels. This is precisely the beauty of his best criticism; he invokes the endless swirl of factors that constitute a work of art without ever pinning the work down in anything as prosaic as ‘interpretation.’ Rather, he offers a creative reading that demands the reader’s active participation.

Marcus’ books on Dylan represent, respectively, one of the most rewarding examples of his method and one of the most formlessly excessive. The acclaimed Invisible Republic focuses on the set of recordings made by Dylan and The Band in Woodstock during 1967 while Dylan was a recluse following his motorcycle accident of late 1966 (either a near-death experience or a pretext to escape the pressures he was under, depending on who you believe). The 1967 recordings have been endlessly bootlegged and a selection was officially released in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. Through these recordings Marcus traces the musicians’ investment in what he calls “the old, weird America”, a mythical republic of the mind inscribed in the folk, blues and country traditions of the United States.

Marcus traces how Dylan and other performers of the ‘folk revival’ extensively mined and extended this musical heritage, while certain revival figures such as Pete Seeger fashioned the country blues legacy into a kind of socialist realist orthodoxy at the service of their political agenda. Many liberal northern whites embraced folk music in the belief that it was a ‘pure’ product of ‘the people’, an expression of spontaneous collectivism and a rejection of the values on which they had been raised. America’s multifarious musical traditions were reduced to a look, sound and attitude that folk singers were expected to embody, posited in opposition to the country’s materialist and individualistic post-war lifestyle.

In sketching the emotional investments underpinning the politics of the folk revival, Marcus offers one of the most convincing explanations as to why Dylan’s turn to a more introspective lyrical approach and entry into the pop charts in 1965 provoked such violent hostility and even hatred amongst sections of the folk crowd. As Marcus notes, from Dylan’s 1964 Bringing It All Back Home album onwards, “events and philosophies with which one could identify had been replaced by allegories that could dissolve received identities.” For many in the folk scene, this meant Dylan was dissolving their identities, and opening up a world of individualised imaginative possibilities that many found offensive or deeply threatening. Marcus goes on to argue that The Basement Tapes were a continuation of the project Dylan embarked upon with his mid-60s ‘electric’ albums: an embracing of those paradoxes, moral ambiguities and bizarre myths informing American music that had been largely written out of the black and white world of the folk revival.

The thread under the microscope

With his new book, Like a Rolling Stone, Marcus takes a temporal step back and homes in on the recording that most brazenly announced Dylan’s break with the folk purists. Early on, Marcus sets forth his basic thesis regarding Dylan’s top 10 hit with a quotation from composer Michael Pisaro: “In some ways [Like a Rolling Stone is] a difficult song to hear now, because it is a vision of a time that never came to pass…[T]hat time (or is it the time created by the song?) seems to have been the last moment in American history when the country might have changed, in a fundamental way, for the better. The song, even now, registers this possibility…”

Revisiting the premise of Invisible Republic, Marcus contends that Like a Rolling Stone’s sense of promise lies partly in its exhilarating negation of any form of stable identity, which was precisely what offended many folk fans. But where each chapter of Invisible Republic uses one or 2 tracks as the starting point of a labyrinthine journey through the musical lineages informing Dylan’s work, Like a Rolling Stone focuses entirely on one song. As the book progresses Marcus’ gaze becomes ever more microscopic and his thoughts increasingly dispersed, until the text becomes a series of disconnected threads that undermine, rather than enhance, the power of the song itself. In parts, Marcus’ musings become so fanciful they read like a parody of his own style:

There may not be another pop song or a folk song that begins with ‘Once upon a time…‘—that in a stroke takes the listener into a fairy tale…But the entry into the realm of fairy tale, of dragons and sorcerers, knights and maidens, of princes travelling the kingdom disguised as peasants and girls banished from their homes roaming the land disguised as boys, would mean nothing if the singer’s feet were on the ground.

Between such overblown passages there is an interesting account of the recording session for Like a Rolling Stone and the personnel involved; the section on guitarist Mike Bloomfield’s prolonged demise after 1965 is quite moving. Mostly, however, the book says little that isn’t conveyed by the experience of the song itself. In this sense Marcus never moves beyond Pisaro. The song still conveys an extraordinary sense of immanent power, but achieves in 6 minutes what Marcus takes over 200 pages to convey only partly.

Scorsese’s weaving

In contrast to Marcus’ book, Martin Scorsese’s new documentary, No Direction Home, is invaluable for the way in opens up the experience of Dylan’s musical journey. The film begins with a gruff but articulate present-day Dylan describing his career as one long journey back to a place where he was supposed to have been born. From here we cut to Dylan standing on an English stage in 1966, surrounded by the rock and roll musicians who would become The Band. They launch into a slowed down, amped-up Like a Rolling Stone. After the first verse and the heartfelt cry of “How does it feel?”, there is an abrupt cut to silence and a still image of snow-covered trees. The quiet comes as a shock after the aural intensity of the live performance. After a few seconds, Dylan’s raspy tone comes forward as if from a distance: “Time…you can do a lot of things that seem to make time stand still, but of course no-one can do that.” The opening signals that No Direction Home is anything but a slapped-together nostalgia package. The film deals with an era some 40 years past, but through a skillful interweaving of interviews, archival footage and live performances, Scorsese manages to evoke the emotional reactions engendered by Dylan’s music in the early to mid-60s, and we are made to feel someing of what was at stake in the sounds Dylan created during that era.

The film’s touchstone is Dylan’s 1966 tour of the UK, captured in colour by D A Pennebaker for a never-released concert film. This was the final leg of a world tour that was Dylan’s first with electric backing, provided by Canadian group The Hawks (minus their usual drummer). The following year The Hawks became The Band and recorded The Basement Tapes with Dylan, followed by their debut album, Music From the Big Pink. But in 1966, the rock’n’roll sounds they created with Dylan provoked boos, heckles, threats of assassination, and in one infamous incident in Manchester (for years bootlegged as the ‘Royal Albert Hall concert’) a public denunciation of the singer as ‘Judas’ by an audience member.

Scorsese carefully splices sudden transitions to the 1966 tour footage into the story of Dylan’s rise to fame, re-creating the visceral shock of Dylan’s change in style for many who had followed his pre-electric career. The transitions also underscore the tensions and jealousies that plagued Dylan’s career from the outset. At one point, for example, fellow Greenwich Village singer Dave Van Ronk discusses the resentment among the folk crowd when Dylan first signed to Columbia in 1961, and the manner in which the recording contract was turned into a moral issue by those who badly wanted what Dylan had attained. Following Van Ronk’s comments, the film cuts to Dylan being heckled as a “traitor” on an English stage in 1966 as he launches into an electrified rewrite of the folk standard Baby Let Me Follow You Down, recorded in more traditional form on his first album. Edits such as these illustrate the continuities underlying Dylan’s career, while simultaneously demonstrating the radical contrast between his work with The Hawks and his earlier sound.

The film also illustrates the immense pressures that amassed around Dylan as his fame grew, which came to a head on the 1966 tour. At a photo call captured by Pennebaker, a middle-aged photographer orders the incredulous singer to “suck on your glasses”, as if he is a performing circus animal. In a hotel room interview Dylan almost breaks down, rocking back and forth like a wounded animal, intoning “I just wanna go home.” At every press conference he is cross-examined about his ‘message’ and the ‘meaning’ of his work. On stage he appears like a twitching marionette, so wired on amphetamines he barely seems aware of his surroundings. These scenes illustrate the extreme conditions under which Dylan’s mid-60s work was created and the messiah-like veneration he endured. Curiously, despite the visual evidence in Pennebaker’s footage, Scorsese’s film barely mentions Dylan’s drug use. But then in every way, No Direction Home shows so much more than it tells.

A new world with every listen

So what do all these words, images and sounds add up to? Although Marcus’ new book is disappointing, its predecessor Invisible Republic is an invaluable piece of scholarship that traces the mythical and emotional roots of Dylan’s music, as well as his work’s social and historical context. Together the Marcus books and the Scorsese film illustrate the broad musical context from which Bob Dylan’s work emerged, a context rarely appreciated by contemporary audiences. One of the great tragedies of today’s corporate controlled music world is the rigorous segregation of styles, which serves to erase the rich cross-racial mix of folk, rock, country and blues that constituted the musical ground from which the young Dylan sprang. This terrain is sketched particularly effectively in Scorsese’s film through rarely seen archival footage of performers such as Hank Williams, Odetta, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly.

Most importantly, however, No Direction Home blasts the events of Dylan’s early career out of the past and makes them part of the living present, confronting us with the people and events as they were then, loaded with the potential of a contingent, unpredictable future. The film allows us to experience Dylan’s performances throughout the early to mid-60s, and to see something of the life-threatening extremes he endured in 1965-66 in pursuit of his vision. It’s one thing to read about these events, it’s another to witness their power. And as No Direction Home demonstrates, the albums tell only part of the story.

Whatever the questionable nature of the corporate deals Dylan now indulges in, the lingerie advertisement in which he appeared, and the variable quality of his contemporary output, nothing can destroy the capacity of Dylan’s greatest performances to dissolve not only all received identities, but all pre-conceived understandings of our world. The strength of Scorsese’s film and Marcus’ best work is their refusal to indulge in comforting nostalgia, and their embrace of the open, often disquieting possibilities of Bob Dylan’s music. With every reading, every viewing, and every listening, a new world of imaginative potential is ours for the taking.

Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic—Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Picador, UK, 1997; Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone-Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Faber and Faber, UK, 2005

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, director Martin Scorsese, producers Jeff Rosen, Susan Lacy, Nigel Sinclair, Anthony Wall, Martin Scorsese, Apple, 2005

For better or worse, Resfest comes through town like the dinosaur chase scene in King Kong, and we stumble out at the end of it, exhilarated, overwhelmed by the feast of technical delight, and yet somehow wondering why we are covered in cheese. That said, the Resfest condensed program of “short films, music videos, features, motion design, live music and speakers” inevitably contains breathtaking moments—where the obsessive pursuit of novelty actually leads somewhere, where the technical wizardry transcends the sum of its intricate parts, where bedroom creatives kept chipping away on a piece that no-one could ever elevator pitch, where brats with a handicam nailed the perfect moment, or simply while holding your hand, where the film-maker-animator-designer gradually takes you outside of yourself, and what you thought possible.

‘Tis a given that Resfest’ll unearth a few sparklers, and ‘twas definitely true again in 2005. Resfest’s reputation, however, in an increasingly crowded market of international media festivals also rides on the quality and style of its overall curation and ability to deliver material that actually lives up to its mantra of ‘innovative’, ‘out of the ordinary’ and ‘inventive’ (replacing their ‘digital film festival’ tagline), without ending up some sort of Resfest Kong in a gelled faux-hawk, walking around in the world’s largest sneaker advertisements.

Australiana

Travelling to over 30 cities worldwide, the sheer reach and global flavour of Resfest provides an illuminating context for the compilation screening of Australian short films, Digital Projections. Shove the spotlight on our own backyard (thanks to ACMI curators Clare Stewart and Kristy Matheson), and it mostly serves to show how soaked in global pop culture we are. The epitome of that would be the excellent pixel art animation by Paul Robertson, The Magic Touch, which splices retro game aesthetics, rollerskating turntablists, manga scientists, oversized ghetto blasters and hip hop sea monsters into a short but satisfying whole. Also managing cute pop-cultural points is Nicholas Randall’s All He Needs, a gay rollerblader love story set to the title track by French synth popsters, Air, whilst parodying the work of Mike Mills. Music video Heaps Good finds Aussie hip hop in fine form (Muph & Platonic), and well represented by Anto Skeene’s stylishly effective post-it note flip-book animations (a technique mirrored in another session by Olivier Gondry). A few too many saccharine coated, technically clever clips cluttered the rest of the line-up, but Vincent Taylor’s The Cypriot and Van Sowerwine’s eerily enchanting Clara transcended those, offering layered, compelling viewing with the respective help of radically transformational make-up and exceptional stop-motion animation in a doll-house.

Surface Layers

Resfest at best pioneers thrilling new aesthetics, at worst propositions clever gimmickry looking for its own tail as ‘innovative.’ Case in point: Francis Vogel, where was your editor or art director to restrain your considerable technical achievements from becoming so torturously, mind-numbingly self-defeating? True, some amazing visual manipulation was on exhibit, but what is innovative about implying narrative and not knowing what to do with it, then repeating your already revealed visual punchlines ad nauseam? Nowadays, there are shopping malls of available techniques unfolding in all directions, aisles filled with artists drifting by with trolleys. But what to do with them? Edouard Salier was a stand-out of the many visually gifted directors at least trying to harness visual ideas for the service of greater provocation. With Flesh, Salier gave us a breathtaking NY skyline rendered in 3D, each and every building (including the 2 towers) textured using animated and vectorised porn models. The inevitable was rendered as giant blood red shards spiking out of the towers and followed by more planes crashing into the seductively coated buildings all over the city. Salier’s Empire clip resonated deeper though, subtly morphing American Dream scenarios by allowing 3D military shapes to shift the contours of the screen from behind, haunting the on-screen pleasantries with the lurking machines underneath.

Juke boxing

Despite all the best music videos of Resfest having already been seen long before, and a growing army of music video blogs making genuine ‘premieres’ harder each year, audiences still seem to lap them up on the big screen. This is a reminder that there’s an opportunity for Resfest to extend itself and reach beyond their choice of films and to represent changing audiovisual forms in ways artists are reshaping them, including with DVD mixers, with laptops, with installations, computer games, live video and theatre. There’s a growing list of media festivals worldwide which not only screen short films, but seek to exhibit and provoke with new forms. And there’s an even longer list of online ‘curators’ who already provide a much wider range of music video clips every day. At Resfest my favourite music video was a repeat, a fantastic work by Johnnie Ross, his Blood of Abraham—dangerous diseases, humourously urbanizing and updating Zbig Rybczynski’s famous Fourth Dimension people-twisting clip.

Pixel juicy

Imagination, narration and black and white photographs (a la Chris Marker’s La Jetee) were all that was needed to keep a theatre acackle during Le Grand Sommeil (The Big Sleep) by John Harden, the story of a scientist who formulates a serum that transforms him into a dog. Also more than a bit funny: Nagi Noda’s poodle fitness video. Miranda July won affection with her unlikely survey offered to passersby: “Are You The Favourite Person of Anybody?” The Southern Ladies Animation Group’s animated documentary It’s Like That, deployed techniques that beautifully accentuated rather than dominated the story of asylum seeking children in an Australia detention centre. And favourite techniques employed to achieve artfulness beyond efficiency? Software, hardware and imagination danced nowhere better at Resfest 2005 than with City Paradise by Gaelle Denis, an utterly enchanting exploration of a secret underground city, filled with the lateral nimbleness animated compositing can bring, a luscious tale of pixels offset with a Joanna Newsom soundtrack.

So often in film and and on television, colonial and post-colonial empathy for Indigenous cultures has been framed in terms of the experience of a white outsider whose subjectivity inevitably tyrannises ours, leaving the majority white audience wondering what those others, Indigenous people, are really like. In Australia, SBS TV has allowed glimpses, although with less and less frequency, of lives in other cultures. ABC TV has restricted us to mostly British fare and less and less of what comprises the Australian present and past. Much of the world speaks English, not just the British, so where are their films and television series? Where is Canada on our screens, New Zealand (beyond a peek), the other USA (bizarrely the ABC has now taken on The West Wing), Ireland or beyond? We occasionally experience on cable another English speaking culture. The Comedy Channel, for instance, started out with some unique and very dark Canadian comedy (featuring faces from the Atom Egoyan ensemble). The Newsroom can still be seen; a more sardonic, less ‘funny’ precursor to Australia’s own Frontline. But the pickings are thin.

In a breakthrough series, RAN (Remote Area Nurse), producer Jan Chapman and SBS have walked the sometimes barbed line between white and Indigenous subjectivities, dextrously deploying collaborators on both sides and in between, and creating a rich 6-part series which I devoured in 2 sittings. RAN is spoken in Australian English and Torres Strait Islander Creole, the subtitles unobtrusively amplifying what we can already half understand. For the engaged viewer, RAN is a cross-cultural adventure, but one which clearly expresses the limits of the journey.

The old dilemma appears to persist. The narrative is framed by Helen (Susie Porter), a white, mainland regional area nurse. It’s her voice-over (if rarely used) and it’s largely her experience of the people and events that we witness, sharing her outsider’s view. However, the condition of being the outsider is driven home with force: as much as Helen would like to be part of the community she has to acknowledge that she is not only just another nurse, but that the locals will eventually take over the services she has managed. She is not indispensable.

What RAN manages to convey through its large cast is a sense of the complexities of community life on a small Torres Strait island, one in which there is joy and celebration, beauty and serenity (each episode has its quota of lingering views, calms between emotional storms) but also the pain wrought by supersitition, alcoholism, domestic violence (inflicted by both husbands and wives), male loss of traditional status and, at the centre of the series, the limits of the local medical centre. While Helen is central to the narrative, she shares the screen with mostly Indigenous performers whose characters’ lives are carefully delineated. Some are well-known professionals (Margaret Harvey, Luke Carroll), many are first-time actors from the region including Charles Passi as Russ Gaibui, the pragmatic, charismatic chairman of the island community and father of a troubled and contested dynasty. The almost romantic encounter between Helen and Russ provides an overarching if distanced framework for the series’ narrative but is quite secondary to the counterpointing of the nurse’s view of things with the focus in each episode on Russ, his wife and 4 adult children whose dramas unfold and overlap in turn. There are many scenes which Helen does not witness, or only fleetingly and does not understand. Her white friend, and later lover, Robert (a kind of RAN Diver Dan, played by Billy Mitchell), suggests, with his cruel mix of insight and cynicism, that all Helen knows of the community is what she glimpses through windows on her evening walks.

If you only read a precis of the series, you’d suspect RAN was inclined to soap opera as the gossip, misunderstandings, superstition, jealousies and outbreaks of violence, dengue fever and struggles for power rapidly accumulate. But moment by moment, RAN is often reflective, its rhythms carefully paced so that we never forget that we’re in a small community on a remote island. Each episode offers aerial shots of the island, a coral cay, wide shots of the palm-lined streets, views through windows, and closeups in the congested interior of the medical centre. The attractiveness of beach walks and swimming find their opposites in a ‘walk against diabetes’ or the drowning of the policeman’s son as he smuggles alcohol onto the island, or the poaching of local lobster by white fishermen.

The pleasures of the island have their limits, and so do the characters in RAN and those limitations are central to its thematic thrust. Chairman Russ Guibai is a clan leader, but living in a democracy he is subject to an election, and his pragmatism will lose his office to his sons. Solomon (JIm Gela), one of those sons, is a ranger who, although married to a white woman, is otherwise intolerant of whites and limits his wife’s sense of herself. He viciously spears a pirate fisherman. Paul (Luke Carroll), the youngest brother, has been the acting head of the medical centre until Helen’s return. He has barely coped with the job but is ambitious to take it over. Paul is inadequate to the demands of his partner, Bernadette (Merwez Whaleboat) who finds the island culture stifling, the living conditions appalling and has just overcome a bout of alcoholism. The tension between the 2 results in terrible domestic violence. Later, counselled and married, Paul looks set to take over the medical centre, but RAN leaves that tale unfinished. The eldest son, Eddie (Aaron Fa’aoso), gone from the island for a decade, returns to win power through faith (he offers a kind of fundamentalist alternative to the local church run by the policeman) and the vote, appealing to a sense of self-sufficiency and idealism, taking Solomon with him as electoral partner. Unlike Solomon and Paul, Eddie is not inclined to violence. He is a dancer and an eloquent speaker and, unlike his brothers, no longer in awe of his father, no longer destructively bitter, but simply determined to supplant him. Their sister Nancy (Margaret Harvey) has reached her own limits, dropping out of medical training because of the stress, but she has an eye on the outside world and the capacity to confront her father and to challenge Helen. Nonetheless, the father’s quiet strength and his grip on power in the family and the community seems to have yielded a grim heritage compounded by the complexities of postcolonialism. The passing of his power and the departure of the nurse could signal new challenges to the limitations inherited from a colonial and Indigenous past.

RAN is in part based on the experiences of Jan Chapman’s sister as a regional nurse working on Masig (Yorke Island) where the series was filmed. The white writers, John Alsop and Sue Smith, visited Masig and Iama islands to research the series, drawing on local lives. Alice Addison joined the writing team. Torres Strait elder statesman George Mye was cultural consultant, nurse Robyn White consulted on remote area health management, actor Charles Passi gave additional advice on culture and language, and casting director Greg Apps spent 3 months in Queensland and the Torres Strait auditioning by videotaping conversations rather than by screen testing. The series was shot over 4 months on high definition tape and in terms required by the community, including no alcohol. The episode directors were David Caesar and Catriona Mackenzie (a young Indigenous filmmaker with impressive short film credits) who, with the help of a fine script, have secured excellent, intimate performances (with harrowing, explosive moments) from a uniformly strong cast. Ian Jones’ cinematography is immersive and David Bridie’s bringing together of music from the Melanesian region frames the action without resorting to melodramatic underscoring. RAN is a wonderfully sustained series that sets a new benchmark for cross-cultural collaboration and for Australian television series.

RAN (Remote Area Nurse), directors David Caesar, Catriona Mackenzie, producer Jan Chapman, co-producer Helen Panckhurst, writers John Alsop, Sue Smith, Alison Addison; A Chapman Pictures Production. Shown on SBS TV, Jan-Feb

Otherfilm Festival (OFF) is a 4-day festival of expanded cinema, installation, sound ecology and Super8 workshops, and music/moving image performances. OnScreen asked the festival’s planners how and why the festival came into being.

JS We think it’s crucially important that avant-garde/experimental film be presented in a way that doesn’t alienate audiences. That can mean good contextualization, explanation of how the work fits historically, but it also means creating a comfortable, social atmosphere, avoiding the high-church seriousness and reverence that can make films seem ‘dead.’ People get scared off by the ‘difficult’ reputation of experimental film; they hear about all these exercises in duration or endurance, that they’re going to be drilled relentlessly. Okay, some films are challenging, but they can also be extraordinarily enjoyable and stimulating and sensual experiences, so we really want to bring that out in the festival. Coming from our different backgrounds, we’re also interested in all the areas of overlap between film art, sound art and the other visual arts, and want to exploit all the connections between those communities and cultures in the one event.

DZ We start from a point of view that sees ‘cinema’ differently, as something that’s open to re-imagining and crying out to be liberated from predetermined structures and experiences. I guess there is a lot of this kind of wonderfully breathless liberation rhetoric around expanded cinema; expanding the possibilities of film, liberating it from its industrially induced coma (where it has ‘contracted’), breaking the projector out of the bio box and freeing the audience’s minds…but it’s also more than that.

For me, a big part of the rationale for the festival is the current intense interest in new media art, which, in the case of new media installations, seems to occur in a kind of historical vacuum. Expanded cinema goes back at least as far as multiscreen experiments in the 1920s, if not further, yet there is still a prevailing impression, especially here in Australia, that video art has invented multiple screens/channels and immersive settings. Imagine the amazing art that people could produce if they had a better understanding of this history—particularly here in Australia where there was parallel development with the international avant-garde cinema! So much video art (it seems to me) has little interest in craft, in form, visual beauty and texture and the projected beam—expanded cinema is all about that.

SG For me, film needs special treatment now because it’s been so marginalised and dominated by industrial practices, and because it is such a beautiful and fragile medium. Since we began talking about the first OFF in August 2004, I’ve seen it as the perfect opportunity to create an environment which nourishes the production and exhibition of ‘other’ films, films that reject conventional forms in favour of investigating the relationships between film and art, film and music, film and photography etc.

This year we’ve been lucky enough to have the funds to invite more artists to participate and have some wonderful sound/image performances planned. We’re particularly thrilled to be able to invite Arthur and Corinne Cantrill to present some of their pioneering expanded cinema work and feel honoured that they will be performing and speaking to a lifetime’s achievement in the art of the film medium.

I have a particular admiration for the Cantrill’s work. Having taught photography, and now working in motion picture conservation, I have equipped myself with a direct focus on the tangibility of the film medium, as opposed to digital and analogue video processes. My own practice draws on the investigation of the mechanics of cinema, in this case the 16mm cinema camera (a Bolex subjected to relentless stop-frame shooting, double exposures and constant repair) to capture images that I am then free to experiment with at the processing stages, the production of negative and reversal images, and home devised contact printing (fumbling around in the dark with a splicer, a piece of glass, a torch). The film is edited with a massive amount of splicing tape and dust on a Steenbeck (16mm flat bed editing table which operates as a frame by frame magnifier). The films are then subjected to physical trauma through projection on multiple 16mm projectors with the help of manipulations and distortions of an array of lenses and prisms.

This approach opens up a dialogue with film in the tradition of a materialist investigation, and as a form of personal research into the vast tradition of expanded cinema (particularly the work of groups such as the London Filmmakers Co-op of the 60s and 70s). In this mode, the idea of physicality and technical processes dominates the approach to image production, taking precedence over the more conventional concerns to do with the function of cinema.

JS My own broad interests in music and film have developed simultaneously. But in terms of participation, I have been much more a part of experimental music culture, the DIY culture of obscure and artist-run record labels, free-improvisation gigs, half-broken electronic musical instruments, shoestring touring, and, eventually, hearing damage. I’ve enjoyed both the music and the social aspects of this scene, the way the ideas and the work circulate, first through networks of friends and organizers and then word of mouth. I didn’t realise that film art could circulate in that way. However, when I started to look more deeply at avant-garde film, I saw so many examples of dynamic, chaotic, and radical experimental film culture—in other times and places.

Showing avant-garde film to audiences from a noise or experimental sound background is an interesting part of it—people who aren’t from academic backgrounds, who haven’t necessarily studied experimental film or radical art, but who have an instinctive understanding of it because they have been making electronic feedback or guitar noise for years. They already have a framework, via sound, for this kind of radical aesthetic and they can appreciate it, because the textual and textural problems posed by music and films overlap. To these audiences, experimental music culture is a living thing, even in small towns, maybe because of the way it circulates online, whereas experimental film is a more historical thing mostly buried in archives or institutions.

SG The festival investigates and researches the history of film and photographic processes, finding the points of contact between this and current hybrid media. The workshops on Super 8, 16mm and film sound are part of recognizing the rich history of film art, providing a unique opportunity for the audience to become participants rather than passive observers. Last festival we had about 25 participants producing Wednesday Audience Film and it was a pretty special moment when it was projected.

DZ We focused on the participatory element and the benefit to the community in our pitch for funding for this festival, and it worked—there’s really nothing else like this around, certainly not in Australia (though in the UK, Europe and the US there is a massive project underway to recover film history before it’s lost for good). But it was difficult to get, because we’re not the right ‘sort’ of film for the AFC, being largely non-narrative (and including electronic forms), and as far as the Australia Council is concerned, it’s a film event and therefore under the AFC’s purview.

This is the ‘pointy end’ of the ontological or phenomenological problem for artists’ film, being hard to categorise neatly. I used to describe it as falling between the 2 stools of the art market and the film world. Then a good friend and fellow experimental film researcher reminded me that ‘stool’ is the technical term for ‘shit’…

Adrian Martin recently described avant-garde film as a “timebomb waiting to go off” so it’s not just a lunatic fringe of people who believe in this. At least, I think we’re not a lunatic fringe…

The progam includes guests Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (Melbourne); installation art by Natasha Anderson (Melbourne), Louise Curham (Sydney), Velvet Pesu (Brisbane); workshops and screenings involving Anthony Magen (Melbourne), Louise Curham (Sydney), Mark Williams (Wellington), Sally Golding (Brisbane); performance art by Pia Borg (Melbourne), Mark Harwood (Melbourne), Eve Gordon (Auckland), Sam Hamilton (Auckland) and, from Brisbane, dada-meinhof and Danni Zuvela, Sarah-Jane Woulahan, Abject Leader, Camilla Hannan & Van Sowerwine, Botborg, The Lost Domain, and Lloyd Barrett.

Otherfilm Festival, The Globe Theatre, Fortitude Valley, The Cube Galleria, Southbank, Brisbane, March 23-26, www.otherfilm.org

Interzone-media arts in Australia
Darren Tofts
New Art Series Editor:
Ashley Crawford
Craftsman House, Sydney
An imprint of Thames & Hudson
ISBN 0-9757303-8-X

Interactivity and media arts is at the core of Darren Tofts’ timely survey of the last 15 years of media arts creativity in Australia. As the institutions that have shaped the ebullient surge of activity during this period pass through cyclical change—tertiary institutions, the funding bodies—as the practitioners who have driven it forward reflect upon where they have been and what follows next, as the affordances of technology to artists and audiences change by the year, now is a good time to document in one volume a history of the present now past.

Introducing the computer and its various applications to the arts scene was bootstrapped with the hosting of TISEA (Third International Symposium of Electronic Art) in Sydney in 1992—listed in the essential contextual information provided in a timeline section of the book—and Tofts picks up creative developments from around then until 2005. The plethora of full colour images that spill from the superbly designed square format pages are matched in intensity by the vivacity of his commentary.

In an opening section the ground is debated—what are the terms we use so blithely? How do they lead us into an area about which practitioners and the audiences who have followed them are familiar, but about which others are mostly ignorant? In recuperating the recent past the opportunities presented by the convergence of the computer and media are sharpened. Dispensing with many of the working terms accumulated by artists and the discourses of the production process, we are focused upon the artefacts of Interactive Media Arts with clear and weighted prose, without jargon or glib references to fashionable writers. The tiny Endnotes/bibliography indicates intent—this is not for the well-read academic or well-traveled curator, who can hone their needs from other tomes. This is for the audiences, the visitors to interactive media spaces, the practitioners new to the scene who seek some guidance and analysis, some clear and stimulating perspectives on outcomes. If appetites are whetted, then there is no shortage of bibliographies elsewhere from which to proceed, including Tofts’ earlier books.

Spectatorship is redefined by the three ‘i’s—interaction, interface and immersion. It leads into other chapters which cover: precursors and visionaries; “abstraction of the virtual”; artificial nature; and story spaces. Each commences with a cogent summary of the central issues and questions, filled out and developed through the work of artists in the field. Accounts are offered in one or 2 paragraphs of each of the highlighted works. We track the author’s responses and thought processes as he, as we, play co-respondent to the artwork, the initiating respondent in the dance of making the work, each distinctive in form, different by contention.

The direction taken through the book is unswerving—we see stills, have the work described and placed, insights and perspectives proffered to tease and provoke. But are we simply being presented with leftovers from a feast to which we are lately arrived? Was not the real energy present as individuals came together to nut out some of the complexities and possibilities of new mediums as they emerged? Not only how to do it, but what is it? Where does it fit, where does it go next? Little distinction is made between places of reception here: it may be a gallery installation, a website, or CD-ROM (though as the term implies distribution, this was often difficult to achieve). Site is less important than accounting for what occurred in the meeting space between human and machine.

Work in the performance area and the biological receives brief mention. Inevitably too, of the practitioners selected, there will be in the mind of each already informed reader, those few omitted. This reflects the complexity of compilation and the difficulty for the author, though committed engagement is clear, to attend all the exhibitions mounted throughout the period.

The overview also reveals a distinct pre-occupation with issues of stylistic representation, the appearances of content rather than concept. This is not to do with the antipodal distance from the larger audiences in Europe and North America as much of the work has been seen internationally. But it indicates that most practitioners, as overseas, have either migrated from the visual and media arts or been trained into the interactive media arts by earlier migrants. (Most of the artists have close involvement with teaching.) In the current climate of cross-disciplinary collaboration, Interzone critically examines the artefacts and reveals some of the processes that have emerged from these traditional structures.

Whilst aiding and enlivening seminar and lounge room discussion, Interzone could undeniably become the final visible repository of many of the works it features. The ephemerality of chip and operating systems mutating annually frustrates the interactive media artwork from becoming preserved by the active collector or museum, engineering by default ‘the ephemeral artwork.’ As a milestone, Interzone is placed to anticipate fresh directions for computer-mediated art activity.

Investment of funding and its management by the state that has encouraged, if not supported, practitioner-based activity receives scant mention, though the specialised development of vital exhibition opportunities is discussed more fully. This affects outcomes for audiences as surely as the medium with which the artist is working. We are reminded of the role played by the writers who helped develop dialogue. For instance, Mackenzie Wark once memorably described the whole apparatus of cultural production across myriad artforms by tying in practitioners, curators, theorists, teachers, managers etc with studios, venues, marketing, distribution, government funding etc, which together produce one big distinctively Australian art work. A commentary indeed on the complexity of our culture.

With some official encouragement artists have begun to seek the scientists and technologists wishing to collaborate committedly on projects of mutual benefit. The arena of audience involvement with art will likewise shift and mutate into an interzone that creates human computer interaction of a different order, between respondent and correspondent. The role of initiator and auteur is becoming less dominant, less in charge of how an interactive encounter may proceed. Bundling and linking a variety of electronic and microprocessor devices moves the art activity decidedly from the geographically installed and hard-wired artefact towards systems and processes that are more mobile and harder to classify within the taxonomies of art and social behaviour.

Tofts is well placed as an observer and commentator on the national and international scene, having consistently written about the emergent artwork and its issues in the local press, as a long time RealTime contributing editor, and also as joint editor of Pre-figuring Cyberculture—an intellectual history (MIT Press & Power Publications, 2002). Having authored a pre-history of cyberculture, Memory Trade (21.C Book, Interface, 1997), his conclusion to Interzone looks to the future: “..the challenge is to amplify the visible and sonic presence of media art in the ambience otherwise known as culture.

Melinda Rackham, Empyrean, 200,<BR /> Art Centre Nabi, Seoul, South Korea Art Centre Nabi”></p>
<p class=

Melinda Rackham, Empyrean, 200,
Art Centre Nabi, Seoul, South Korea Art Centre Nabi

Art made with computers is coming of age. No longer a fresh faced newcomer, it has 30 years of history and, like any 30-year old, must begin to deliver on its potential. The sense that the phase of emergence is over has been expressed internationally in numerous initiatives to historicise the form, but also by a kind of identity crisis, for what is this art if it is not “new”? In the words of curators Sarah Cook and Steve Dietz it is “the art formerly known as new media.”

In Australia this crisis has been compounded by the dissolution of the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board-—a political move that threatens both the recognition of past achievement and the support for future work. Into this perilous situation comes Interzone: Media Arts in Australia, keenly anticipated by many practitioners in the field. The importance of the timing of publication is strongly felt by its author, Darren Tofts, for whom the book represents “a culmination…of a decade’s occasional writing solidifying into something more timely and historical.”

The book was timely in the sense that it had to be written (whether I wrote it or someone else)…I have been concerned for some years now that the media arts scene in Australia is losing sway. After the initial novelty, then the genuine curiosity of the 1990s, there seems to have been an indifference to media arts, or at least a de-prioritizing of it in terms of funding and curatorial bodies (specifically the dismantling of the New Media Arts Board and the consolidation of ACMI as a film institution with its obvious shift away from “new media” and digital culture generally). I felt that we needed to urgently get media arts culture in Australia defined and critiqued to ensure its longevity as a vital and important contemporary art form with, and this is absolutely crucial, a history (the initial title of the book was Media Arts in Australia: An Unfinished History).”

Tofts also wanted to “address some of the big questions that have been hotly debated for over 10 years.” Particularly in his sights was the description of this kind of art, being himself “an advocate of doing away with terms such as new media art” (which he does early on in the book, along with the term ‘digital art’—both of which he considers “reductive”).

For Tofts the importance of what has happened in Australia in terms of media arts (to use his denomination of choice) is perhaps least recognised at home. He argues that “some of the most innovative and significant work and ideas to do with media arts culture generally had been initiated here, yet many if not most of these figures were better known overseas than in their own country.” The chapter “Precursors and Visionaries” attempts to establish a canon of Australian practitioners whose work set the coordinates for media arts as it emerged.

Tofts’ concern with history and the forgetfulness of the present is evident. It not only extends to the artworks of the past but also the critical writing that has accompanied them:

There is considerable writing on media arts in Australia by some very fine and important writers…[P]art of the point of writing Interzone was to highlight this fact, to evidence that it was written within an emerging critical practice. There is a lot of ignorance around, particularly among younger, aspiring writers on media arts, that we have no critical tradition, or at least emerging tradition. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Whilst the period covered by the book is described as early 1990s to the present, the text leans heavily on the 90s. For Tofts we are clearly now in a different phase from the one he mainly surveys and the character of this new phase is not something he set out to look at:

The book does not offer projections for media art aesthetically or thematically, and there is a noticeable absence of younger artists represented in the detailed critical appraisals. Tofts is reluctant to be pushed on the question of where future developments in media arts and technologies might take the themes of space, nature and narrative with which he has chosen to structure the book.

Of course sins of omission are inevitable for any book with such a general and comprehensive mission. Most Australians won’t be surprised to learn that in Sydney one can hear the opinion that the book is too Melburnian in focus. Tofts responds that such a criticism was inevitable, due to the “long-standing grudge between Melbourne and Sydney…a kind of healthy stouch that’s been going on for years. It stimulates creativity and healthy competition”, but the book, he thinks, is a pretty fair account.

I doubt a non-Australian reader would pick up on any Melbourne bias, but they may well be surprised by the wealth of groundbreaking Australian work so thoroughly documented in the book. Though Tofts may be right that some key Australian figures have been more appreciated abroad, the extent and diversity of Australian artists’ engagement in computer based practice will be revelatory to many readers both within and outside Australia. As such the book will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of any teacher, student or critic of media art when they want to reach for an Australian example.

But it is going to be one of the less academic books on such a shelf, for while Tofts aimed to “write from a perspective that would appeal to the cognoscenti of media arts”, he has deliberately kept his list of references almost non-existent to help the book live happily on coffee tables as well. He sees it being read by “people who might have seen a show at ACMI or the MCA, are piqued by the work they have seen, but have no guidelines on how to go about thinking about it; a kind of critical coffee table book that offers bearings on an emerging and potentially perplexing art form.”

Looking at the book from this perspective I realise that Darren Tofts has produced a guidebook to media art for those who aren’t really locals in this terrain. And perhaps like all guidebooks, it describes the land not quite as it is, but as it was a few years ago. His book is an invitation to the people and policy makers of Australia to visit this world and take it to their heart, or as Tofts puts it: “Interzone was designed to be a kind of policy speech to the Australian body politic to embrace media art as part of its national culture and not have it fade ignominiously into a minor footnote in the history of art in this country”. Welcome to Interzone.

Human communication science is rarely claimed to be a precise science, but during a few days in December a SummerFest of kindred researchers delivered some memorable experiences. Stelarc as a keynote speaker effortlessly set the pace, describing a remarkable installation recently seen in Melbourne during August, Blender, made with fellow artist (and prosector) Nina Sellars. Internal body samples were surgically obtained from each to be merged in an industrial scaled blender, thus combining the material and conceptual substance of their 2 practices.

As part of a Workshop on Interactive Systems in Performance (WISP), they pre-figured the event’s symbolic if not material purpose. The creative minds and imaginations present brought together a majority of full-time researchers and practitioners (evenly academic and professional), confronting over 2 days and 6 sessions the spectre of efficacious technologies, of applications both rich and confounding. In the words of Garth Paine, the Workshop convener, they provided: “…a springboard for the development of new knowledge, better systems and refined approaches to technology as an integral part of the performance space of the 21st century.”

“Choreographed Technology”, the opening session, raised much of what we would be dealing with for the period: MAX/Jitter tools, predictive algorithms, spontaneity, movement and sonic output, reverse engineering, mapping and granularity, kinesthesia, embodied cognition, audience building, spatialisation, nuancing etc. Michael Montanaro described Canadian research in contemporary dance at UQAM and Concordia Universities that involves 10 full-time researchers experimenting with interdisciplinary vision and image systems, and choreography both physical and virtual. Sharing methods and results with another 40 researchers in the far-reaching program at the Hexigram Institute for Research and Creation in the Media Arts and Technology, was a vision to which, in the current Australian funding climate, practitioners like Chrissie Parrott, Kim Vincs and Garth Paine could only aspire. Cognitive scientist Kate Stevens indicated the gap between methodologies and evaluative techniques on the common ground of the performance space. Her carefully planned and funded experiments produce research outcomes including approaches for developing, training and building the audience.

Leigh Lindy from the UK recognised the relation between the performer and technology within performance as “composed technology.” The Arts, Media and Engineering Program at Arizona State University stitches together on-site experts for social outcomes effected by 60 full-funded graduate places. Alan Tanaka, currently working with Sony in Paris as an “artistic ambassador”, focused most vividly on a series of post electro-acoustic instruments and various ensembles (Sensorband, Sensors_Sonics_Sights). His work has re-defined notions of presence for the sound instrument using sensors and proximity to effect interaction, often as pre-prepared pieces for concert performance. Durations defined by network latency (Global String, Network Music) produce ‘idiomatic composition’ for gallery and internet. Likewise the post digital laptop aesthetic of ‘contingency’ was similarly demonstrated on Robin Fox’s recent Backscatter DVD, as a “virtuoso solo performance tool.”

Roger Dean illustrated larger scale improvised compositions using readily adaptable tools for interactive interfaces. He is seeking to “move from defining musicality in traditional instruments to defining musicality in the computer.” Dean’s was one of several contributions from the Sonic Communications Research Group in Canberra, and envisaged technology both defining and adapted to creative needs (later, Simon Bigg’s 20-year experience offered many examples of this). Margie Medlin’s current Quartet project has the aim of tuning various technologies as components translatable to individual performance—a complex collaboration between dancers and musicians in Australia and Britain that explores the mechanical, virtual and real body.

Whilst we were reminded by Stelarc of his prescient embodied performances, Yuji Sone described the work of Japanese group Dumb Type, a collective engaging the ketai mobile electronics culture and its tendency toward being “stuffed with information but devoid of understanding.” This mobilizes performance form in works like the recent Memorandum and presents global perspectives within a contemporary rather than the traditional context. Kata is another word (meaning literally ‘casting mould’) to describe enabling devices to help adapt the body for creative activity by the consumer. Dissolving the border between performer and audience is also central to the work of David Pledger and the Not Yet It’s Difficult company in Melbourne where multi-cam set-ups in live shows of “layered, lasagne performance” and interactive installations incorporate the active, often physical involvement of the captive audience.

Telepresence performance arrived as a video link (not without hiccups) with Sarah Rubidge and Hellen Sky and their “multi-modal, portable and affordable” collaborative practice-based research, where “data generated output from levels of human activity across a network of performers and audiences” will be choreographed simultaneously and internationally during July 2006. (In a later session, Keith Armstrong similarly described ‘affect across a network’ emerging in the on-going Intimate Transactions project.) Marcelo Wanderley and Joel Chadabe, also on live link from North America (more hiccups—when will it become like making a phonecall?) were eventually able to add to earlier discussions about making music (with the Dimensional Spaces instrument) and defining musicality emerging from novel acoustic formations.

Performance making was a constant touchstone throughout the more formal business of predictive and critical discourse. Dramaturgy and the delivery of meaning to audiences through technological augmentation of live performance was the focus for the final 3 speakers, myself, Roman Danylak and Mark Seton. Semiotics of gesture and the interweaving of image, sequence and word as text utilising ready-to-hand affordances appropriately completed the 3-day event.

The responses to presentations and discussions frequently questioned motivations for experimenting with systems and their various combinations of devices, software and applications. Is it a given for visitors to a gallery to discover the limits of interactive presence? Is human movement best adapted to the machine’s capabilities or is the technology to be disciplined from the ground up? Far from a celebratory engagement with the new tools, there was a distinct wariness, a nervousness of being labeled, in Garth Paine’s words, the “ravens of the new technology, picking up all the shiny bits and putting them all together.” Wish lists of larger research projects needing to link with industry presented problems for Simon Biggs, an ex-pat Australian with an enviable list in Europe of public commissions: “Focused funding models do not produce good art outcomes; for instance, those that insist on collaboration between partners where individual direction would be appropriate.” This opinion was echoed by Professor Elim Papadakis when giving a keynote about the Australian Research Council (ARC) Grants Program. As a significant player in developing domestic creative practice, the ARC expects outcomes now rather than the traditional notion of research output adding to the archive of knowledge.

The tangibility of outcomes described by the practitioners and researchers in the performance area were in evidence at the WISP workshop. The event should prove a prelude to a plethora of research proposals for new directions in performance and interactive systems in Australia. Critical to their success will be the prompt and effective matching of interests and expertises and the development of collaborative methods not hindered by distance or delay, following the stimulating effect of this event.

Workshop on Interactive Systems in Performance (WISP) jointly hosted by the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Sciences (HSCNet) and the University of Western Sydney and held at Macquarie University, Sydney, Dec 15-16, 2005.

Nicholas Hansen’s Rash premiered at the 2005 Melbourne International Film Festival 2005 and is now being featured in the 2006 Adelaide Festival. A fascinating film in itself it opens our eyes to a range of unimagined graffiti (including stencils, posters and performance), the idiosyncratic artists of the night and some rarely seen parts of Melbourne transformed by a vigorous and committed subculture.

The 73 minute Rash deals with art in public space as both a political and an aesthetic endeavour, challenging the public, local councils and the law with work that transcends the banal wall scribblings too often encounted. Rash looks set for an airing on ABC TV and has been picked up by UK distributor Journeyman for TV rights world wide. Just how the graffit itself fares as Melbourne cleans its streets of human and other visual detritus will be interesting to see, but Rash makes a serious case for it as art, doggedly subversive and not always unhappily ephemeral.

If you’ve not been impressed by contemporary graffiti art, Rash just might convert you. RT

Rash, director, producer, Nicholas Hansen, Adelaide Festival, Film Program, March 4, 5pm, followed by a Q&A with graffiti artists KAB101 and Kano.

If nothing else, the coming of age of science could perhaps be measured by the level of popularised or folk science. This cultural maturation might be currently observable in the airing of spurious documentaries on commercial TV such as The Human Brain and the children’s program Backyard Science on the ABC. The translation of science into publicly accessible imagery has a cultural function. Towards this end an organization such as SymbioticA gains public relevancy. Certainly the credentials and funding bodies behind the project MEART—The Semi Living Artist are testament to this.

A small but interested crowd gathered at the ARTRAGE Bakery complex in Northbridge to see the last exhibition of MEART. The project was created by SymbioticA, The Art & Science Collaborative Research Lab, University of Western Australia in collaboration with the Dr Steve Potter Lab, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; and the Ultrafutura Group.

In the gallery a platform supports a robotic arm holding a coloured pen. A collaborator from SymbioticA asks for an audience volunteer to have their portrait drawn by MEART. The subject’s image is recorded on a video camera in the gallery. The image, converted to a ‘stimulation map’ of 64 pixels (8×8), is sent via internet to Potter’s lab in Atlanta where, nestled in an incubator, a group of rat neurons are fed the electrical stimulus.

The audience in Northbridge WA watches a projection of alternating images: live feed images of the Atlanta lab, complete with bored looking lab technician; photos of the incubator; micro images of said rat neurons; and a graph figuring their activity. The robotic arm, now connected via the internet to the activity of the biological material begins to move the pen across a piece of paper affixed to the platform beneath it.

At one minute intervals an image of the drawing in progress is captured. This data is used to create a feedback loop whereby the frequency of the electrical stimulation sent to the neurons is determined by a pixel grid of error values. These figures are determined by comparing the current drawing to the first image captured. A computer program analyses the signals received from the stimulated neurons, feeding the data to the robotic arm.

The Northbridge audience witnesses the production of a crosshatch-like pattern similar to the records of earlier exhibitions of MEART. Over the last 5 years MEART has been shown at ARS Electronica, Biennale of Electronic Art Perth (BEAP), Artbots in New York, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and at the 1st Moscow Biennale for Contemporary ARTS. In the Moscow exhibition Malevich’s “Black Square” was used to initiate MEART’s activity.

‘MEART’ derives from the type of incubator used (multielectrode array) and the word ‘art’.’ This research and development project is centred on questions of creativity and biological technologies. The researchers are interested in the possibility of emergent behaviour, of creating an ‘artist’ rather than an ‘artwork.’ At the Northbridge event, collaborator Guy Ben-Ary comments that the project is a ‘cultural experiment.’ It is highly significant that MEART is a durational work: existing only while the audience is present. Perhaps it is through the audience that behaviour emerges that is linked to and yet independent of the project collaborators’ intentions.

Another of the project’s aims is to raise ethical questions related to biological technologies. While artists within academic institutions, particularly in postgraduate programs, have had to consider ethical issues prior to project commencement, the public involvement in these concerns seems to be limited to issues of political currency—such as abortion or human stem cell research. Perhaps the contemporary question of ‘folk Zen’ might be: if an ethical question is raised and nobody sees it and nobody hears it, was it really raised? Certainly potential studies of the metaphors MEART creates may be fruitful in this regard.

Two of MEART’s collaborators, Philip Gamblen and Guy Ben-Ary, have been invited to reside as research fellows in the Steve Potter Lab. The Lab is involved in neuro-engineering, developing neuroscience technologies for studying learning and memory in vitro. We await the ‘next generation’ of MEART. The question is: will the rats and the gallery audience be ready for it?

MEART—The Semi Living Artist, SymbioticA, The Art & Science Collaborative Research Lab, The Bakery, ARTRAGE Complex, Northbridge, Dec 20, 2005

Last year, I worked on a sound installation project in China with local artists Ding Jie, Li Chuan, Ren Qian and Li Yong. The work was part of an Australia China Council Arts Fellowship, brokered by Asialink and with additional support from the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council and Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP). My host in China was the Long March Foundation in Beijing (www.longmarchspce.com). I had met the director Lu Jie when exhibiting at the Dashanzi International Art Festival the year before. With an emphasis on re-evaluating Chinese history through contemporary art and with national scope, his organisation presented a perfect fit for my plans to create a series of networked installations across the country.

Project

The project’s title, Zhong Shuo, means “People say…”. The idea involves the automated recording, collation and dissemination of stories. I wanted to make a project that would engage with Chinese culture, but at the same time felt it was a subject I knew very little about. So the project was devised as a shell into which content could be poured. It would ask questions of participants at a series of installations and prompt individuals to give a personal account of their experience of change. The recordings would be collected and edited on computer to produce a soundscape of interwoven narratives. This would be played back at each installation and streamed to the internet. Networking would also be used to transfer audio between sites allowing visitors to listen to a variety of site specific perspectives. Before beginning work, I gave a talk on the concept at a conference. A Chinese curator smiled at me and asked, “So are you sure Chinese people will be willing to tell personal stories at your installations?” No, I wasn’t.

Setting: Beijing

In Beijing I worked with the visual artist Ding Jie. We considered a number of installation strategies before settling on a kiosk arrangement that would afford participants some privacy as they told their story. Created in the form of a Chinese garden, the kiosk housed a modified telephone (by Jim Sosnin) and an adjoining pond played host to a small school of goldfish and water-plants. Ding Jie’s design offered a peaceful setting and, most importantly, was welcoming of the public. Hidden away in the rocks and shrubs was a loudspeaker. Its sound, in addition to voices, included ambient recordings collected locally: the sound of traffic, newspaper vendors, radio advertisements and pop songs.
Instructions
Banners at the installation described the project and how to participate:
Use the phone in the kiosk to tell a story about Beijing.
How do you experience the changes around you?
How does change affect your hopes for the future?
How is your life different from that of your parents’ generation?
Pick up the phone and listen for directions.

As visitors approached the courtyard of the Long March Space, they would hear voices coming from the kiosk: talk about Beijing, opinions on change and experiences. Some visitors would choose to listen by the pond while looking at the goldfish. They read the banners and peered into the kiosk through the multicoloured blind. Inside were clean silver walls. The interior was lit from above and on a shelf was the telephone and a small instruction plaque. The telephone would ring periodically to encourage people to pick up the receiver, although it could be used at any time. When people lifted the receiver they heard questions spoken in Chinese and were told they could speak for 10 minutes after a beep. Once a visitor had told their story they would hang up and walk outside. As they did, a chime and prerecorded announcement would acknowledge their contribution stating it would be scheduled for playback after 15 minutes. Almost invariably people would laugh at this. Most would then look around the gallery and return later to listen.

Setting: Chongqing

After the opening, time was spent with the Long March to organise a second installation to link to and contrast with Beijing. We wanted to work in a rural area, but luck was against us and ultimately I travelled to the city of Chongqing. Once part of Sichuan Province, the city and province of the same name are also booming, yet are very different in character to Beijing. I began working with a team of artists called the Li Chuan Group comprising Li Chuan, Ren Qian and Li Yong. The 3 have been working together for a number of years. Chongqing is know as ‘Mountain City’ and also ‘Fog City’ due to the entrapment of fog and smog by the surrounding mountains. Until recently the hillsides were dotted with traditional stilt houses clinging to sharp inclines. The group quickly struck upon these houses as a design model in answer to Ding Jie’s kiosk. We were very lucky when it came to organising a venue. Li Chuan had a friend working at the new Chongqing Planning Exhibition Gallery which was to open in 3 weeks. On the the day of my arrival in Chongqing, we formulated the core design plans, telephoned the administration of the gallery and travelled across town to the space on Chongqing’s new monorail. Before we knew it, we had met the director who agreed to our verbal proposal on the spot. If you know the right people, things can move very quickly in China.

For an installation exploring the impact of change, the venue was perfect, if a little ironic. In the heart of the city, the new building has 3 levels dedicated to publicising infrastructure, development and planning; the centrepiece, an enormous maquette of the city almost the size of an Olympic pool.

Due to low ceiling heights in the spaces available to us, we reconsidered building a stilt house. Instead a bungalow was fabricated from local bamboo and in traditional Chongqing style. Calligraphy was included using carefully chosen words to depict bamboo as a symbol of wellbeing. A rock-garden next to the kiosk was created with stones from the Yangzi River which flows past the gallery. The Chongqing installation had a near identical technical set up to that in Beijing.

And yes, people did contribute stories and in good numbers. Real estate will always pull a bigger crowd than any art gallery, and the Chongqing show quickly outstripped the number of recorded stories at the Long March Space. Over a thousand stories and 10 hours of recordings were collected and the entire database is now available online, as well as photos, multimedia and texts at: www.reverberant.com/cw.

Tales told

What did ‘people say’? A good question and as a non-Chinese speaker I was keen to find out! From what was recounted to me and from the expression of the voices, people usually took their role seriously. In one long recording, a middle-aged Beijing man contrasted some of the complaints of other speakers about the cost and stress of living, congestion and pollution with the opportunities now open to him after a youth spent in poverty. Mid-way through his story he breaks into a rousing revolutionary song. He could certainly hold a tune and it is worth a listen: see 41.mp3 in the Beijing database. A few stories were told in English, particularly in Beijing. Most of these were from the limited perspective of tourists, but some expatriate speakers offer an interesting glimpse into life in China: 115.mp3 (Beijing) is one of my favourites and perhaps the most eccentric.

Found in translation

Zhong Shuo will have an ongoing life and has been selected for MAAP 2006 late in the year. A third installation will be created in China, potentially in Shanghai, and a fourth more documentary-style installation at the State Library of Queensland. This Brisbane show will feature projected translations synchronised to the spoken Chinese and facilitated by an online database made available to translators via the web. The MAAP exhibitions offer wonderful opportunities to present stories from all 3 Chinese sites, as well as the work of the artists involved, to an Australian audience.Iain Mott is a sound artist from Melbourne whose work focuses on interactive installation. He has exhibited nationally in Australia and at Ars Electronica in Austria, Dashanzi International Art Festival, MAAP in China and Emocao Art.ficial in Brazil.

Artspaces run by artists are notoriously recrudescent. Unlike their entrenched institutional cousins, artist-run initiatives are often as ephemeral as the art they show. Over the past few decades Brisbane has played host to a number of notable ARI’s from THAT space in the 1980s to Space Plenitude, Omniscient, Kiss My Art, The Butterfactory, Bartleme Galleries, Boulder Lodge Concepts and Gallery Brutal/ISN’T in the 1990s. Though not widely known they represent a significant series of moments in Brisbane’s art history, showing exciting contemporary art and holding innovative performances and events. The Joh Bjelke-Peterson years fertilised radical, dissenting art across media, and as that dictator’s grip waned, artist-run spaces dwindled.

Happily, in the last few years, the post-Joh drought has been broken, and a number of healthy artist-run spaces have sprouted. As with their predecessors, these spaces focus on the sharpest edge of contemporary art—new media art (particularly moving image), ephemeral installations and performance. They tend to operate with exhibition policies that favour process-based works, events, and radical critique, and as ARIs perhaps always do, operate financially in a straitened, sometimes hand-to-mouth way. Queensland’s continuing resources boom doesn’t seem to have translated into piles of state lucre for the smaller artspaces; while both RawSpace and The White House, 2 recent artist-run spaces that rose to prominence in 2005, have received minor subsidy, they both subsist mainly by other means.

RawSpace

Robb Kelly, his sister Judith Kelly and Joe Slade began RawSpace with their life savings, taking out a prime piece of real estate in Brisbane’s South Bank and turning it into a café and contemporary art gallery space. RawSpace’s daytime café operations finance the riskier art activities which are held mostly at night. In 2005 they focused on residencies and exhibitions. Robb says that they were pleasantly surprised at the way so many of the artists “stayed on well past their residency, kept making art and mixing with other artists…it creates a real sense of community around the gallery.”

For 2006, RawSpace is restructuring to combine with other partners for a projected regional outreach residency project and extending the gallery space into the outdoor area at the front of the building. With its long, glass-fronted corridor shape, concrete-roofed entrance and key location in a main thoroughfare in Brisbane’s inner city, the space “comes alive at night”, and so RawSpace is planning to become a night-time bar with an ever-changing variety of video and web art on display. “Most gallery spaces are only open 12-5pm, Wednesday to Saturday,” Robb explains, “which makes it really hard for working people. Night-time is more available to more people, and lends a different atmosphere to the art. We think that by showing the work in a bar or club type of setting, we could build a community of regulars who will come to socialise in the presence of art…We can reach people who might be put off by that more stiff or regimented gallery context—and we’d be a place for artists and people who are aesthetically inclined to come, have a few drinks and check out some new media art.” This focus not only situates RawSpace as a very urban artspace, but also uses the space’s unusual architecture to overcome one of the main technical difficulties with staging new media art—projection conditions requiring blackout and the defeat of glare.

The White House

Like RawSpace, The WhiteHouse has received some grants, but its “benevolent dictators” Jesse Sullivan, Madeleine King and Madeleine Allen-Cawte have devised other means for funding their artistic enterprise. The WhiteHouse, Jesse explains, “is kept afloat primarily by our own financial contributions and hard work” which has involved “sourcing assistance from local businesses, artists and cultural workers, holding gigs and fundraising events within the space, and most recently, by opening our own in-site shop, the Cell.”

The advantage of not being tied to either state subsidy or art sales “means that the WhiteHouse is flexible in its structure…its use is not limited to gallery-based exhibitions, but incorporates a wide range of creative activities and events (such as screenings, gigs, workshops, swap-meets).” Architecturally, the WhiteHouse is a more traditional white cube space, but that’s where any sense of the conventional ends.

The free-form, anarchic The White House collective embraces Brisbane’s unique geography and attendant psychology, and according to Jesse, exhorts other artists to do the same:

Brisbane artists are off their heads. The heat and isolation drives people mad. The stuff that has walked through the door of The White House would make National Geographic shit their pants. It’s weird, it’s sometimes really ugly and sometimes really beautiful…we think that Brisbane is unique and people here make art unlike anywhere else. Yes, there is a tendency to look southward to our Melbournite and Sydney-siding cousins and copy them—but that exists everywhere, and we can just forget about all that stuff. What Brisbane artists do worst is copy their big city counterparts, looking for legitimacy. What they do best is thrive in the backwater territories, licking cane toads and spewing forth sometimes bizarre, but often poignant and very individualistic art.

In taking over the space formerly known as The Farm, which was partly managed by video art luminary Grant Stevens, The White House is continuing the tradition of ex-QUT students banding together to operate spaces to show contemporary art. Aware of what Jesse calls “the problematics of new technology”, they buck contemporary trends and frequently show old media, like film, and take a critical attitude towards video, computer, internet and other new media art. Jesse says that “a lot of new media art is very clean and I think stale in terms of what it deals with and the concepts it struggles with, whereas a lot of the work that we’re presenting takes on a whole gamut of problems and sticky ideas. What we do is a bit more gritty.” In the 6 months of operation to date, The White House has shown a number of innovative programs engaging specifically with ideas of new and old technology, including VIRUS in August, exploring the aesthetic history of computer viruses, and Hoarders of the Absolute, a 3-day multimedia environment involving digital and film projectors, found object installations, music and performance.

Infozone

Though not an artist-run initiative, an innovative approach to new media art is also on display in the Infozone project at the Queensland State Library. With the new State Library premises currently under construction, temporary space has been set up in which several programs of recent video artworks, compiled by guest curators from the Queensland Artworkers Alliance, have been shown. Under the watchful eye of Kath Kerswell, the dynamic Exhibitions Project Officer, Infozone has shown a number of programs of contemporary video art on its 2 large plasma screens on the main floor, and on a smaller monitor on the mezzanine level. These shows have highlighted the creative uses of space using a variety of multimedia works, including Jemima Wyman’s brightly coloured floral video art and Seline Braine’s thought provoking performance video, I WANT TO BE WHITE, referencing both the tradition of body art and the artist’s Sri Lankan heritage.The works are all shown silent (many of them were originally so), turning the requirements of their location into a positive, forcing a kind of visual contemplation undistracted by ‘the grand opera’ of moving image sound. In the quiet, high-ceilinged library setting, suffused with the strong light reflecting off the river, streaming in through huge windows on one side, it feels surprisingly appropriate to be contemplating quality video art. The Infozone screens are a bold and clever big institution response to the question of public art. Meeting the demands of staging it in a large, brightly-sunlit space, the library should be applauded for its recognition of the contemplative possibilities of the viewing context.

Filling gaps, completing loops

Both RawSpace and The White House have a strong awareness of their place in the overall picture of art in Brisbane, which they identify partly by the gaps or limitations of the big institutions. Robb Kelly explains that RawSpace, for its residencies, focuses on those emerging artists who are “left out of the loop” of normal modes of support: those artists who have left art school but are not yet established, or who have become established in one medium but want to explore another mode. Robb says “if you’re over 25 and you want to explore a different sort of practice, what are you supposed to do?” RawSpace offers as a category ‘over 25 and emerging’, and has worked with a number of ‘older’ artists and artists established in other media wanting to branch into new media. An example is the charcoal artist Tanya Mason, who, through a RawSpace initiative “was able to work with a computer in 3D to create moving image works, and then exhibit them.

The WhiteHouse sees itself providing a place for experimental art that is so new it has yet to be institutionally approved (especially video and new media art by artists not yet artworld celebrities), or so ‘archaic’ it has no ‘market value’ in audience terms (as in their screenings of experimental film). Major institutions like QAG, Jesse says, “will have to stop somewhere at that cutting edge, or at least nullify the more radical aspects of it to open the work to large audiences and not alienate them. To an extent this is also true of the IMA, which tends to demand a level of professionalism that may not actually be present in what may be considered ‘radical’ art.” This is not necessarily a bad thing, he says:

…radical artforms do tend to get swallowed and gentrified by institutions: the fact that they are not represented by them only helps to further radicalize these submerged cultures. The WhiteHouse thrives in its place to support this work, and we’d be very upset if it was all ‘okay’ by institutional standards. Radical work should offend, challenge and make you question what the fuck it’s doing, and why it’s doing it. If you get it within 3 seconds of walking in the door, then it’s already been laid out somewhere before—it’s not exactly pushing the boundaries or cutting the edges of the hedges.

RawSpace, 99 Melbourne Street South Brisbane. http://rawspace.org/; The WhiteHouse, 358 George Street Brisbane City

The Cerini vision

Angus Cerini has long cut a distinctive figure in Melbourne’s theatrical landscape. For the past decade he has produced a series of riveting solo shows consistently characterised by a furious energy which is only done when exhausted. This is often a cathartic process, with audiences leaving as drained as the performer himself. Cerini’s theatre is a volcanic one, and after several years away from the stage while collaborating with others, This Thousand Years I Shall Not Weep is a long-awaited return to form. Along with its precursor Puppy Love (which won Cerini a Best Performance award at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival), This Thousand Years… reminds us why the physicality of live theatre can provide a vital experience in an age of telecommunications.

A very palpable sense of outrage gives Cerini’s performances the visceral ferocity which lingers long after the house lights come up; though their subjects may differ, an undeniable anger borne of bewilderment has long been a connecting thread between his disparate writings. This feeling reaches its apex in This Thousand Years… where the specific institutions on which Cerini sets his sights (the military, medicine and politicians) are in some ways straw men; rather than offering concrete targets whom we may blame, they are merely contingent vehicles providing another reason to question the very world in which we live. And this is perhaps the key poser which gives rise to each of Cerini’s works: how can I live in this world? How can I bear the insanity presented by everyday existence when society, even humanity is predicated on a fundamental madness?

This Thousand Years… sees Cerini playing out 2 disconnected but intercut monologues: one the narrative of an Australian ‘peacekeeper’ in the Middle East who carries out a vicious and senseless act of torture on a child as a kind of practical joke; the other the tale of an ordinary citizen who becomes a victim of a hospital blunder and suffers an unimaginable yet utterly believable fate. These dominant threads are bookended by the empty rhetoric of a generic politician whose platitudes ring hollow in such juxtaposition. The performance is accompanied by a crackling electronic score by the prolific and estimable Kelly Ryall, and Cerini’s monologues are often interrupted by the hair-raising clash of white noise or a teeth-rattling buzz.

These are not elegies of pure despair, however, and Angus Cerini’s works have always been riddled with cracks through which an uncertain light of possibility shines. He recently wrote the text for a collaborative theatre work produced by Platform Youth Theatre, and in this his oddly skeptical idealism was at its most apparent. Test Pattern brought together young people new to performance under the direction of Nadja Kostich and, by workshopping dialogue and story with Cerini, a series of overlapping vignettes resulted. The final work was problematic; uneven pacing and an early lack of apparent intention meant that the piece failed to flow coherently. The interesting but non-professional performances also meant that the complexities of the work had difficulty finding solid footing, and occasionally came across as amateurish rather than experimental and abstracted. The sense of hopefulness was strong, however, as was the unflinching willingness to face the reality of social isolation, oppression and violence in trying to find some way of surmounting these pressures.

This Thousand Years I Shall Not Weep, like Test Pattern, offers a highly charged plea for social justice in a way which avoids clear polemicising or overt scapegoating. It is a work emphasising the importance of compassion and serious thought, while retaining an electricity that gestures towards the sublime.

Political arousal

Another piece of theatre which sublimates but ultimately succeeds for its political intentions is commonplace’s Billy Maloney. Sue Gore and Bill Garner dredge up a dazzling array of lost or neglected performance modes. Pantomime, historical lecture, parliamentary debate, union speech and, yes, music hall sing-along are all invoked at one point or another, and the interplay between these forms is deftly handled. The play begins with a pair of amateur historians setting up a hall for a discussion of Maloney before the historical figure himself interrupts and takes over the show. As he recreates for them the crucial events in his past, they shift between playing the bit parts who figured in his story and acting as self-aware commentators on the significance of these people.

This is an unashamedly didactic work, and its central figure is painted in broad and often comically exaggerated strokes. The very real Maloney holds a clear place in Melbourne’s history as a distinguished and successful politician and campaigner for the rights of women and workers. There is always the danger that his successes may be lost beneath his flamboyance; that he will become merely another ‘colourful’ character of Australia’s past. Garner and Gore handle this dilemma by overplaying it: Don Bridges’ Maloney is a ridiculously ham-fisted clown. This pantomime element perhaps prevents us from indulging in a sort of nostalgic hero-worship as we are never given much of a sense of Maloney as an actual personality, instead admiring the effects of his deeds rather than their cause. This methodology also helps to explain the frequently interactive nature of the play: audience members are lightheartedly given roles as members of parliament, and all are called upon to stand and join in several songs from the era (and on the night I attended, several spectators did not require recourse to the program for the lyrics). In this way, the intentions of Billy are unmistakable: it does not seek to provoke dialectical debate or discussion, but, like its subject, aims to rouse.

Billy may, in some senses, be a particularly unfashionable kind of theatre. It appeals to the heart and its audience’s sense of justice in a way which might appear at home in the archaic settings the play recreates, but once we leave the carnivalesque music hall, what are we to do with these feelings? Like Angus Cerini’s work, we are not offered easy solutions or promises of utopia, but instead leave with an intuition, dogged but difficult to pin down, that something has to change.

This Thousand Years I Shall Not Weep, writer-performer Angus Cerini, sound Kelly Ryall, design Emily Barrie, Gina Gascoigne; The Store Room, Nov 24-Dec 11, 2005

Billy Maloney, writers Bill Garner, Sue Gore, director Denis Moore, performers Don Bridges, Jim Daly, Ruth Schoenheimer, design Shaun Gurton, lighting Nick Merrylees, commonplace productions, North Melbourne Town Hall, Dec 5-10, 2005

It is a slow and gentle drive through Darug land as the bus makes its turns in evening summer. This is the country of the Burra-matta-gal Clan, the Eel Creek People. To our left is the site of a great corroboree ground where the men of neighbouring clans used to meet and hold ceremony. Further ahead is the Parramatta Eels Leagues Club, a different kind of ceremonial meeting ground.

This suburban meander is the entry into Back Home, Urban Theatre Projects’ Sydney Festival production directed by Alicia Talbot and co-devised by its outstanding male performers Aaron Fa’Aoso, NOMISe, Leo Tanoi and Shannon Williams. We begin by coursing from Parramatta to Blacktown with Uncle Wes Marne as tour guide. This is hunter country, we are told. Pemulwuy, a great resistance fighter of the Bidigal clan would burn crops and lead raids in these parts. I look through the window to see stretches of highway now blotted with chain store fluorescence. On the bus monitor inside, Sam James’ video plays a spool of gathered aspects of this place: lilies bobbing in marshland, the high sandstone leanings of Parramatta Gaol.

Back Home explores experiences of manhood, ethnicity and oppression deeply tied to cultural territories of race and place in Australia. Cast along the liminal tracks of past and present, the bus ride pulls ancient custom into the gritty realities of this time so that we arrive prepared for a newer scene: a contemporary centre on the outskirts, a suburban backyard. Here is the occasion of a 28th birthday party and a night of wild and courageous unravelling. Back Home is taking me into territory that I have never visited.

Aaron, NOMISe, Leo and Shannon are old friends reuniting over beer and a barbecue after years apart. The mood is light: NOMISe, king of hip-hop, dances and raps at his radio DJ turntable. He gives a lovesong dedication to Belinda “who I love—not!”. A hint of despair undercuts his sarcasm. The men ruck and rumble, play air basketball, crack jokes about each other’s sisters and their “bootie” (women). They sing and joke until they start to hit sore points, start to get rough with their teasing: “You’re not slapping [your new woman] around like you used to slap Sharon around?” The neighbour’s dog barks, the barbecue sizzles to burning and the drinking continues.

There is the sense that hardness sits beneath all this sweaty, bullish machismo. NOMISe’s partner has left him; Leo is an alcoholic whose brothers were killed in an accident of their own making; Shannon works hard to have any access to his kids; and Aaron, back from success in the US, is trying to put his past of domestic abuse behind him. These are difficult lives. The precision in the direction of Back Home is in its rhythm of mounting tension and release, a repetitive cycle that builds and builds to create a sense of growing unease without any promise of escape. The men bounce off each other’s chests, fists, racial slurs. What begins as taunt or biff grows to exploding point: Leo jams Aaron against a tree, holding his throat to suffocation point. This moment is deeply disturbing not only for its very real violence, but in the way it erupts out of nowhere. Its aftermath is a stunned suspension: Aaron vomits against a wall while Leo screams in a silencing white rage.

The questions that drive this auspicious reunion are microcosms of macrocosmic stories in Australia. Whose culture has had it worse? Whose is more oppressed? How does oppression feed more oppression, how does it feed anger, cultural isolation and violence? “Your people have been getting fucked with for the last 300 years,” yells NOMISe, “My people have been getting fucked with since the beginning of time.” The grimness of the stakes in this argument makes enemies out of ‘brothers’ and shows how colonial violence can also beget ethnic violence, interracial violence and media violence. This intricate web of wrong upon wrong feels so insurmountable by the close of the performance that the characters leave stunned, as we do, by the weight of what has unravelled and the thickness of this mess.

The performers make an impressive foursome who find a common dynamism through their individuality, striking a delicate balance of stillness, frenetic energy, quiet, story and song. Shannon and Aaron share a soulful interpretation of a traditional Indigenous dance, stamping its rhythms out to country rock. NOMISe raps: “Fight, fight, fight for your rights”, and together the men chorus No Woman, No Cry around acoustic guitar and fire. The yearning for connection, love and fulfilment felt by these men and their expressions of grief and rage offer a powerful and provocative statement about the interconnectedness of male relationships, racial interrelationships and the embedded, cultural silences of this country. I left Blacktown to drive home to Clovelly understanding that I’d never really gone to a place like that before.

Urban Theatre Projects, Back Home: A Backyard in Blacktown, director Alicia Talbot, performer-devisors Aaron Fa’Aoso, NOMISe, Leo Tanoi, Shannon Williams, set design and video: Sam James, sound artist Liberty Kerr, bus tour director and community liaison advisor Lily Shearer, bus tour performers Uncles Wes Marne, Greg Simms, Teddy Hart, Pesa Taualai, Western Sydney, Jan 19-28

Daddy, a 60-strong female cast dressed in drag, impersonating their fathers, is the most recent work from the Women’s Circus, 14 years after its inception as a project of Footscray Community Arts Centre.
Daddy

The performance opened with the band (elevated high above the performance space throughout) breaking into Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life while a shadow puppet backdrop of wriggling sperm gave way to a swarm of performers dressed in white performing tumbles, somersaults and cartwheels. True to the Circus’ reputation, a lively and cheeky performance looked set to unfold. After some hesitant moments the performers regained their energy for what would be the crux of the show—the impersonation of key daddy archetypes from “Matty, the young skater dad from Croydon”, to “Stevie Boy the worker”, “Frank from Toowoomba” and “Father David the Vicar” among others. All in good fun, the array of drag daddies seemed jolly enough, and there was an atmosphere of warm-hearted nostalgia both from audience and performers, as each recognised the personal somewhere within the array of dads who, it must be said were caricatured more than “played” by the women—I never got the feeling I was watching a man, just a woman sending up a man.

But while the claim that the performance was a light-hearted take on the characteristics of men we’ve each known in some way as ‘father’ would have held up at this point, it was unfortunately intercepted by something entirely different—images of a series of famous male personalities. For me, what was emerging as very personal, with some bittersweet meanings, dissolved into a confused and unresolved statement about men generally.

Of course, it would be simplistic to imagine a female performance group— indeed a group that has celebrated its ability to engage women who have survived sexual abuse and assists them to reclaim their bodies—might create a work dedicated to impersonating the male without getting into some complexities. But for me, the insertion of a montage of male personalities including Ned Kelly, John Howard, Elvis, Buddah, the Pope, Osama Bin Laden, Darth Vader and George Bush, took what could have been a strong and poignant statement about the personal and gave the piece a rather generic and blurry slant.

Still, the performance displayed another important feature of the Women’s Circus—its ability to create shows that are lively, funny and spectacular. While not a circus in the traditional sense (not a trapeze, clown or animal in sight), a fabulously energetic band and the clever use of some fairly simple acrobatic movements kept the show in the realm of spectacle.

Energy aside, it was in fact 2 slower paced scenes depicting moments from the dads’ lives which worked extremely well in the use of space, costuming and movement. The first saw the women intertwine their bodies to imitate a variety of insects in a re-enactment of “scout leader dad” encouraging his boys to chase and capture bugs. The all-white costuming, smooth and synchronised movement and lighting produced an exquisite moment.

The second involved the women in pairs, recreating a 1950s dance scene. Using sheets draped in loops from the ceiling, the performers were able to emulate the twists and turns of rock’n’roll and swing dance moves in a gymnastic way that heightened and lengthened the moments of suspension, all executed to the reading of a lovely piece of prose about the moment “mum meets dad.”

Indeed much of the performance was presented with prose read by members of the group as the movement unfolded on stage. Once again, it was a method that drew the audience into the personal and gave the performance a sense of a nostalgia that worked very well except where undermined by the iconic images.

The work reached a climax with the women lining up, holding hand-written messages to their fathers including “My mum is my dad”, “I love you dad” and “I don’t have a dad.” Daddy finally hit the personal note that might have been strengthened and celebrated throughout the performance.

The Women’s Circus, Daddy, director Donna Jackson, musical director Kim Bastan, shadow puppetry Lynne Kent, lighting Jenny Hector, sound Dawn Holland, production manager Jo Leishman; Kindred Rehearsal Studios, Melbourne,Nov 16-Dec 3, 2005

Punctum is a new company (with, however, very experienced personnel) based in Castlemaine in regional Victoria. The company’s first production, Shed, billed as “an installation and a performance that celebrates the shed as a haven where objects carry stories that reveal clues about their keepers” (program notes). The installation consists of a series of shelving units holding myriad objects, as if we are inside a ‘typical’ Australian shed. Of course this shed is rather larger, more organised and aesthetically evocative than most; a number of the objects act as starting points and/or props for the 7 performed stories and one film that comprise the performance that also includes the installation.

The dramaturgy is based in the notion of sheds as “borderline dwellings … [which] sit on the frontier between daily reality and timeless possibility” (program notes). Each of the “collected” vignettes was written, performed and staged in such a way that I felt I was continually straddling the mundane and mysterious, desolation and community. Ian Scott’s beautifully performed opening monologue contained many of the strengths evident in the rest of the show: a writing style merging the realistic, humorous and ‘bush’ poetic, a simple acting style in which the fictional veneer of the story is thinly painted over the present moment of its telling, and in which simple shifts in voice and posture indicate the 2 characters just enough to tell the story. The sparse, sharp and localised lighting and the superb soundscape—generating experiences of isolation (the silence of the shed), the natural environment, threat and sometimes the release of dream—help to translate the ‘realness’ of the story into the territory of the mysterious and the resonant.

Each of the ensuing vignette/monologues draws on similar dramaturgical elements. Paul Lum plays an earnest and enthusiastic young filmmaker (at least in his own mind) who describes a storyboard in which the humorously melodramatic material of the film mirrors the mode of its telling, and vice versa. The short movie (by Paul Fletcher) takes elements of the Australian landscape (a shed, a fence, a tractor, a sunset) and abstracts them into a shifting collage of light and colour underscored by a soundscape that I can only describe as like the recording of electrical and chemical reactions in the brain. Tammy McCarthy tells a story with great skill and timing from within the persona of a woman whose brother was found dead in a shed; the mute unresponsiveness of a man sitting by himself (I took it to be at a train station) causes another man to imbue him with the existential nausea that he himself is experiencing; a man speaks a letter from a country in which it is his job to collect body parts after they have been blown apart; a woman sits on a step ladder like the oracle at Delphi and tells a mythical narrative about ‘the great man’; and finally a short poem called ‘Pop’ by Eddie Paterson tells of the fragility (and humour) of our return to ashes.

I have noted a trend in recent years, at least in Melbourne, for the sound, lighting and set/space designers to have a stronger, more imaginative grasp of their work than the performers and directors they are working with, an interesting phenomenon (if it is true) that merits examination. However this was not the case in Shed. While the sound by Jacques Soddell and lighting design and installation by Chris Harris were especially strong, the director, writers and performers were equally so. Jude Anderson’s subtle and skilled direction of the moments, performances, transitions and trajectory of Shed revealed a deep understanding of the material as well as the means of presenting it to avoid sinking it in vernacular realism. The 3 performers were highly skilled, engaging and connected to us, and beautifully attuned to their place within the dramaturgy of the installation. Only in one of the pieces, the ‘train station’, did I feel that Scott and Anderson had not yet quite found the way for

the actor to ‘be’ in the story. The writing, largely by Emilie Collyer with Jude Anderson, took us from the mundane to the metaphysical (to the metaphysical in the mundane and vice versa) and back again.

There are many who will find Shed enriching, as I did, and I hope it will soon return to Melbourne and tour elsewhere. It is a most promising beginning for this interesting company.

Punctum, Shed — The Morris Shed Collection, concept & artistic direction Jude Anderson, co-writers Emilie Collyer, Jude Anderson, performers Ian Scott, Paul Lum, Tammy McCarthy, Michael Jewell, installation & lighting design Chris Harris with Grant Davis, sound design Jacques Soddell, film design Paul Fletcher, photography Julie Millowick, costume design Mila Faranov; Studio 45, National Gallery of Victoria, October 18, 2005

Brisbane’s new clown ensemble, Chaplin’s Eye, fittingly made its debut as the first production in the recently dedicated Sue Benner Theatre, a well-deserved homage to Benner’s advocacy and support for independent theatre as CEO of Metro Arts since 1998. This was ‘pure’ clown, joyful, energetic, and wise. Brokered by Red Spoon’s Andrew Cory, it arrived fully fledged due to the sophisticated, mythopoeic vision of veteran clown and director, Ira Seidenstein, who beautifully choreographed the work in terms of colour and line. Seidenstein is passionate about communicating clown craft, and it showed. Traditionally, to study a craft is to study one’s own nature. Amongst his own “obscure complexity of influences”, Seidenstein alludes to working with Frank Theatre and, unusually, to his spiritual mentor, local Rabbi Levi Jaffe. Given the ‘centres of excellence’ or ‘centres of innovation’ set up for limited, short term goals, it was salutary to be reminded by the overarching metaphor of the piece that the stages through which a work must pass to achieve completion parallel human development where ‘ripeness is all’, and so sheds light on our own needs and possibilities. In this regard, Seidenstein’s program notes state that “Chaplin’s Eye in an ultra naïve guise is a parable about sharing existential and material space and personal objects.”

Beamingly clutching a small brown suitcase, Femmla (Kristen Duffus) innocently enters the bright sunlight of the sensual world and ingenuously invites the audience to participate in her attempts at positioning this sole prop on a bare stage. The action resembles changing household furniture, but Duffus finely indicates that, beneath Femmla’s emulation of the questionable ‘good taste’ of a home-decorator, an effervescent re-assembly and adjustment of self is in constant motion in relation to the changing sites of the object of desire. Femmla’s tentative coquettishness is the first flowering of a genuinely tender heart. After she departs, leaving the suitcase, the ultra feminine is troped by the attention-grabbing, determinedly lumpen and kleptomaniacal Zophtie (Jane Barber in thrall to a toe-tapping, banjo-plucking version of The Hills of Connemara). More crony than Crone, Barber wickedly succeeds in convulsively embodying uncontrollable natural forces, and celebrating wild desire. Zophtie is no softy either—or is she? She has no qualms about stealing the suitcase.

Femmla returns with a bigger green suitcase denoting different, burgeoning qualities. From this Zophtie appropriates stockings and stole by sleight of hand, and, in a scene reminiscent of a classic confrontation between Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance, Femmla joyously discovers her aggression and bumps Zophtie off the case. Zophtie cries and cries. Innocence and Experience converge when Femmla consoles Zophtie with a rainbow umbrella. Cue for the entrance of Lanky (Andrew Cory). If Femmla is heart and Zophtie libido, Lanky crankily depicts the vagaries of the mind by adopting the Commedia fly lazzi as his stock in trade (the fly does not exist). In fact, he is a walking compendium of traditional Commedia character traits: Pantalone’s paranoia; Dottore’s illusions about himself; and Harlequin’s imagining objects that aren’t there. Cory blends these elements of his performance masterfully. By contrast to the women, Lanky is always suspicious and controlling in relationship to objects, but is easily controlled in turn by Zophtie who literally mesmerises him with her umbrella.

Clever lighting design, recalling the opening sequence of Les Enfants du Paradis, signals the appearance of Pirouette (Kayt Douglas). The shift is from the quotidian sensual realm to the sensuous, sublunar regions ruled by Dionysus and the imagination. As if blown about in high atmospherics, Douglas introduces a delectably light tone which helps reconfigure the overall spatial composition and brightens the pace. Everything becomes possible, and the descent of Charlie Chaplin (Ira Seidenstein) from the gods is just such an epiphany. This advent is a bitter-sweet return of the proletarian Everyman that Chaplin once represented in the iconography of the arts. In Seidenstein’s hands, it is uncanny. After a life time of clowning, he provides a meticulous metronome to the ensuing slapstick choreography which becomes more intricate and labyrinthine, more democratic than antagonistic, as the clown characters (who somehow maintain their individual poise and rhythm) dissolve into shamanic ‘bags of bones’ and reconstitute themselves in a continuous recycling of the death and resurrection game. Charlie presents Femmla with a flower, and the mechanism begins to wind down. There is a moment of psychic (or social) integration when the rest of the cast proffer flowers from offstage, then a series of dissolving group snapshots with the double photographic message: ‘I am/was here.’

Chaplin’s Eye, producer/performer Andrew Cory, devisor/director/performer Ira Seidenstein, performers Jane Barber, Kayt Douglas, Kristen Duffus, lighting David Lee, costume design Tiffany Beckwith Skinner; Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, Nov 24-Dec 3, 2005
*Chaplin’s Eye will appear in the 2006 Adelaide Fringe Festival

Between the atomic and the cosmic lies the molecular world, a turbulent, porous sphere, fluid and osmotic. According to scientists, this dance of particles has been much neglected in the wake of a 20th century preoccupation with the inner workings of the atom and the Big Bang narrative. Studies of Brownian Motion (after Brown, a 19th century botanist who observed the independent movement of pollen) suggest the potential for new material hybrids formed from the interplay of molecular structures. Having just heard this I found myself serendipitously alert to the motion, thematic and actual, in Victoria Spence’s engaging and disturbing solo performance, communication/failure.

The world Spence evokes is both atomic (the everyday in words and video images) and cosmic (metaphysical encounters with birth and death). In between, a slow, cumulative swirl of motifs gradually and hauntingly take shape as Spence attempts to grasp a moment, a point of transition in her life when substance (rooms, bodies, images) dissolves, rearranges, merges. She will convey this to us but will, at the same time, necessarily fail to do so—such is the difficulty of the task.

Spence’s persona is a still presence, addressing us directly, deliberately stringing words together in a slow staccato, initially suggesting someone remembering how to speak or a determination to utter the unspeakable. The half smile that frames the words is only half welcoming, masking, we begin to suspect, a deep anxiety. Spence tells us that the room we see now was not like that afterwards (after ‘what’, we wonder) and that she’s not sure what was beginning and what was ending. In the words, movements and images that ensue in a dream-like space enveloped in deep red velvet curtains and scattered with video monitors and microphones, the material and emotional worlds of birth (Spence’s daughter) and death (of her mother) move inexorably into one that is new and unstable, suggestive of transformation and the eternal reworking of matter, along with, perhaps, something more metaphysical.

This reverie is framed with a journey, an everyday suburban train trip viewed subjectively through a carriage window but suggestive (in the way it is eerily shot and later transformed from small images to a massive one) of constant motion, an inevitable mobility from which there is little reprieve. Video artist Sam James keeps the images relentlessy moving and Jason Sweeney’s sound conjures real world rattlings and creakings that become cumulatively and magnificently orchestral as worlds of motion merge.

Initially Spence simply sets things in motion with a welcome, with slowly acclerating sentences and the swinging of suspended monitors and microphones. Images roll by of Christmas gatherings, birthing, swimming and gawky adolescence, and the fullness of pregnancy. Later Spence’s body takes over in a kind of dance, a stiff signalling to the self, or someone somewhere, that grows furious, a helpless swimming. Soon, her body, all heightened perception, will find the dead mother’s room too full to enter, but also too empty. She takes a camera with her, but it is still too much. The countdown to the end of a life climaxes in the tearing down of the red curtain and the draping of the monitors in gauze, creating a stark world inhabited by ghosts.

Except for the moments of palpable panic, Spence conveys contained bewilderment, quiet suffering and measured awe. She neither acts out the past nor supplies us with intricate biographical material; any depths are only glimpsed, only deduced from the surfaces to which we become increasingly attentive, making what we can of the images of Spence and her family like the strangers we surely are. But what we do witness above all is a state of being in motion beneath 2 clock faces that hover over the space suggesting parallel universes where death and birth are one, where there will inevitably be ghosts (those who do not rest), and where the countdown to death will sooner or later yield its opposite with a haunting synchronicity.

It’s been a long time between shows for Spence. The wonderful voice is not quite on top of the demanding material, the movement doesn’t quite exploit the opportunities conjured, but communication/failure is nonetheless memorable, beautiful and disorienting, sparely and lucidly scripted, finely constructed and graced with a rare seriousness. Always a commanding presence, Victoria Spence sets herself a demanding task, mostly met and, like the life that seems to dance from dead grandmother to new child, the work is worthy of another incarnation.

communication/failure, writer-performer Victoria Spence, dramaturg Mark Seton, video artist Sam James, sound design Jason Sweeney, design Jade Kemety, lighting Clytie Smith; Performance Space, Sydney, Nov 9-20

The clock is stuck at midnight. Clouds float past the moon. It’s a dangerous and unsettled night. At a microphone in the centre of the space, a woman continually brushes her teeth while closely watching the entering audience, the amplified sound of her brushing overlaid with the sound of a stuck record needle. Everything in the mise en scène, like the clock, is unable to move forward.

It’s an ominous and potent opening image, one of a number in PACT Youth Theatre’s Before the lights go out. At its best, this performance demonstrates an elegant blend of sophisticated direction, evocative sound design and atmospheric video coupled with detailed movement scores executed by a veritable army of 19 highly disciplined and well-trained young performers. However, while technically impressive and enthusiastically performed, this is not PACT at its best. After some truly memorable recent productions (including the Trojan war epic Song of Ghosts and the wonderfully realised ambition of Crime Sites), this latest work was disappointing. Despite the quality of individual elements, the performance felt to me to be less than the sum of its parts.

In Armageddon (1998), Michael Bay’s trashy mega budget sci-fi disaster movie, the Earth is doomed to imminent destruction due to a rogue asteroid “bigger than Texas” locked into a collision course. The only thing that can save us all is a scruffy team of oil drillers and a big old nuclear bomb. Capitalism at its most aggressive and self-righteous carries the day.

An asteroid looms large over Before the lights go out as well, blazing a fiery trail repeatedly across the multiple projection screens high above the platforms and alphabet blocks of the set. The asteroid sets a tone of impending doom, but this time it seems that capitalism is somehow the culprit. At least contemporary capitalism gets much of the blame from the parade of outsiders who appear in the performance. The performers declare in various guises that over-consumption, environmental degradation and the dehumanising of the less fortunate are all ‘bad’, but these declarations never go beyond this, neither reaching a critical mass nor building tension by being impossible to resolve. They’re simply there, like the asteroid, ready to strike, but never arriving.

The program notes state that the work is driven by the belief that “over-consumption is a fundamental global problem” and that “something has to change fast before it’s too late.” So despite the asteroid painted clearly on the video screens, the crisis the show wants the audience to contemplate is one of our own making. And yet it never remains firm in its convictions on this point, seeming to want to have it both ways. Sometimes the frame of the show is of a doomed world in which any action is futile since nothing can stop the asteroid. At other times the asteroid becomes a metaphor for the destructive impulses of capitalist over-consumption.

Both frames set the performers wallowing in the detritus of culture-op-shop costuming, a supermarket shopping trolley and the cultural trash of a game show that spontaneously begins midway through the show. The game show format, while a performance cliché, has potential here, and occasions some witty one-liners, but like everything else in the production, it slips away. “I feel like shit” one of the performers cheerfully sings, and lists a series of things he feels badly about, but never seems to do anything about. It’s a fun idea, but like everything else, it subsides into the general sense of apathy. A digital countdown reaches zero, and then starts counting down again as if nothing has happened. It seems that the end is always nigh, but the show keeps rolling on.

In its desire to be everything at once (the curse of so many productions with large casts, where each performer deserves a ‘moment’), the piece lacks a solid dramaturgical anchor that might have transformed the flow of happenings in Before the lights go out into a rich and satisfying performance work.

PACT Youth Theatre, Before the lights go out, director Regina Heilmann, assistant director Chris Murphy, performers 2005 imPACT Ensemble, creative input & movement consultant Chris Ryan, set & costume designer Kate Shanahan, video & multimedia designer Rolando Ramos, additional video Teik Kim Pok, sound designer Liberty Kerr, lighting designer Richard Montgomery, production manager Chris Axelsen, dramaturgical input Bryoni Tresize; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Dec 7-11, 2005

The Kransky Sisters

The appearance of 2 local productions from uniquely idiosyncratic female-driven performance ensembles in the same month says something about the eclectic nature of independent performance in Brisbane. The Kransky Sisters and The Brides of Frank have been making their presence felt around Brisbane for a couple of years now. The 3 Kranskys and the 5 Brides have multiple careers as solo performers in theatre, dance and music; as groups they began as one-off performances that have now evolved into focused ensembles. Each is the unique sum of its eclectic parts. With iconic female roles (sister, spinster and bride) as their starting point, both ensembles have pushed these archetypes into extreme satire, with more than a touch of the gothic.

Baggage is the product of The Kransky Sisters’ artists-in-residency at QPAC (Queensland Performing Arts Centre) and their third show since 2004. Since their formation in 2000 they have carved out a national profile with their performances on SBS TV’s In Siberia Tonight and at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, where they were recently awarded the Melbourne Theatre Critics Green Room Award for Best Comedy Ensemble. Introducing themselves as sisters from the small Queensland country town of Esk, Mourne (Annie Lee), Eve (Christine Johnston) and Arva Kransky (Michele Watt) arrive onstage in the family Morris loaded down with baggage (of both the literal and metaphoric kind). Dressed identically in black pleated skirts and black and white polka-dot blouses, their very presence evokes compelling other-worldliness.

Notwithstanding that the only physicality at their disposal is their gothically expressive faces (strikingly framed by severe black pageboy wigs) and what could almost be described as an absence of body, the Kranskys are actually very physical performers. The characters are perfectly constrained and contained: Mourne, the domineering eldest sister is haughty, frozen and brittle, positively arthritic; Eve painfully trapped in the middle, is cautious and hesitant, drowned in her smothered sensuality; and Arva, jammed in the reciprocal embrace of her tuba (the only cuddle she’s likely to get in this family), is the Harpo of the act. Her face acts as a barometer for what’s not said and, without ever saying a word she wins the audience over as the outsider in a family of extreme outsiders. The dynamic between them, the edgy Mourne, the superbly naïve Eve and the put-upon but knowing Arva, creates great comic exchanges which set the scene for the songs sprinkled throughout the performance.

These songs (played on guitar, keyboard, saw, tambourine, kitchen pot, toilet brush, tuba and more) are the heart of this act. From the extremes of ridiculousness (their take on the Jimi Hendrix classic Foxy Lady) to the really quite poignant (their gorgeous rendition of Jim Croce’s Time in A Bottle), their earnest delivery and spot-on arrangements mean that the Kranskys never descend into cheap parody; they play for laughs but never at their characters’ expense. Full of memorable moments (Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer, complete with yodeling and some wild Salvation Army tambourine moves, tops my list) Baggage unfolds as a series of stories gathered during the Kransky’s recent tour of regional Queensland. Continuing that great Australian tradition of the misfit hero, the sisters unload their baggage onto a very willing audience, appealing to everyone’s inner dag along the way.

The Brides of Frank

‘Til death do us part, “an exclusive live theatre cocktail of parody, schmooze, glamour and dysfunction” showcases The Brides of Frank, 5 Brisbane actresses who have trained extensively in the Japanese Suzuki Actor Training Method with the Brisbane-based Frank Theatre ensemble, the “husband” of the title. Their marriage to this movement training is very much apparent in their work; the extreme stylisation of their choreography creates a compelling visual aesthetic. For a work divided into six acts and interspersed with music from Paul Hankinson and Tyrone Noonan, the Visy Space did its best to operate as a cabaret-type venue. The opening act, ‘Til death do us part—The Resurrection (with original live narration by Lucinda Shaw), introduces the Brides stepping out of a coffin in full bridal regalia. What follows is a series of very unfortunate events as each Bride dies a grisly and hilariously ridiculous death. Turning the virgin-bride-death tragedy on its head 5 times in quick succession is the beginning of a night spent subverting all the usual suspects of female representation.

Of the 5 acts that follow, each one is built around a different fancy, from sugary pop song notions about love all the way to Billy Idol’s White Wedding. In addition to the physical choreography the Brides often mime their way along to the medley of contemporary pop tunes that make up the soundtrack. The effect is reminiscent of Suzuki’s penchant for placing contemporary song as backdrop to a montage of action (think Shakespeare meets Roy Orbison). This idea is also employed by Frank (a good example is Cher’s Turn Back Time in their memorable re-imagining of Ray Lawler’s The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll). In this and many other ways the Brides’ 2 husbands (Frank and Suzuki) are very much in evidence.

And yet their own spin on this idea is also part rock eisteddfod, albeit a seriously drug-fucked one. This combination of the best and worst of pop culture (ie where what’s worst is also best) and a serious intention to spoof what is often misread as the joyless earnestness of Suzuki-based performance is at the core of what works about the Brides. It might help if you’re in on the joke, but the engaging choreography, strong performances, fabulous costumes and the fact that everyone’s having so much fun keeps the audience entertained. All of the acts, The Squalid Gold Dancers (spoofing the 80s’ phenomenon the Solid Gold Dancers), Smash Up the 50s (a kind of psychedelic rendering of The Stepford Wives) and The Apartment (a brilliant take on what your furniture gets up to when you’re not home) are fully self-contained parts that make up a diverse, funny and peculiar night’s entertainment.

The Kransky Sisters, Baggage, performers Annie Lee, Christine Johnston, Michele Watt, executive producer Deborah Murphy, directorial consultant Jean-Marc Russ, creative consultant Robyn Kershaw, slide show & foyer installation Kylie Burke, lighting designer Ben Hughes, costume construction Frances Pyper, producer QPAC; Playhouse, QPAC; November 15-19, 2005

The Brides of Frank, ‘Til death do us part, performers Caroline Dunphy, Lisa O’Neill, Emma Pursey, Leah Shelton, Neridah Waters; with Tyrone Noonan, Lucinda Shaw, Mr Hanky; music arrangers Paul Hankinson, Tyrone Noonan, lighting designer Derek Griffin, sound design Leah Shelton & The Brides of Frank, Costume Design: Leah Shelton, Emma Pursey, Tiffany Beckwith-Skinner (Flossies); Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Nov23, 2005

Performa 05, a dynamic multidisciplinary program of live performances, exhibitions, film screenings, lectures and symposia, marked the first biennial initiative of veteran performance art curator and historian RoseLee Goldberg under the auspices of the organisation Performa, which she founded in 2004. The scope and ambition of the program were undoubtedly impressive, with a total of 98 artists and 26 organisations involved in the presentation of more than 60 events. Produced on a shoestring budget with a tiny staff, and without major corporate or institutional sponsorship, the result was nothing short of revelatory. Performa 05 invigorated both the city and the dialogue around the ongoing significance of “new visual art performance” in the 21st century.

Framework

Under the artistic direction of Goldberg, the program evolved in collaboration with a consortium of independent organisers and curators at leading New York arts venues. Proposals were invited for specially designed exhibitions and events that responded to Performa’s objectives, which were then reviewed by Goldberg and a stellar Curatorial Advisory Council including the likes of curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann, Chrissie Iles and Massimiliano Gioni, as well as artists William Kentridge and Joan Jonas. The program that materialised was dispersed across venues as varied as the Museum for African Art, Anthology Film Archives, The Kitchen, Bowery Ballroom, and a significant contingent of commercial galleries and alternative spaces.

With all events either free or affordably cheap (US$5-$15 or free with admission at museums), and with a palpable profile across the city throughout November, Performa 05 established itself as a truly accessible venture with the capacity to attract audiences outside of dedicated contemporary arts circles. One of the triumphs was that work by emerging artists was contextualised in relation to that of mid-career practitioners and performance art royalty, such as Marina Ambramovic and Yoko Ono. The result was a fertile exchange that highlighted the history and evolution of performance alongside currents and concerns now dominating this scene, drawing attention to the resurgence of performance in art over the past decade. Diversity was key. In addition to ‘live art’, the program explored performance as an integral element in video and film, installation, sound art, music, theatre and photography. Comprehensive as it was, Goldberg emphasised that the inaugural biennial focused specifically on performance in the context of the visual arts, and has vowed Performa 07 will expand to present a different perspective entirely.

New/Now

An important aspect of Performa’s mission is to initiate and support the creation of new performances. Performa Radio presented works designed by artists for broadcast, investigating radio as a performance space in relation to issues of intimacy, placelessness, dispersion, and the ‘disappearance’ of actual experience. Francis Alys premiered his first indoor performance Rehearsal II the Slipper Room, selling out long before the once-only 6-hour performance featuring a striptease artist, pianist and singer (but unusually not the artist himself) took place.

Most impressive was Danish artist Jesper Just’s production True Love Is Yet To Come, presented on an intimately scaled stage in the Stephan Weiss Studio as the biennial’s opening affair. Renowned for his video practice, this was Jest’s first foray into live performance. The 22-minute opera continued the artist’s poetic investigation of gender and relationship dynamics, particularly aspects of masculinity, affection and loneliness. Utilising the effects of a newly patented computer program, the production was highly complex and layered: the lone ‘real’ performer—well-known Norwegian actor Baard Owe—interacted with holographic figures and landscapes, occasionally taking on an intangible presence himself by dissolving into the animated set projections, at which point the performance became cinematic. Cover versions of familiar love songs framed fraught exchanges between Owe and the silent transparent figure of a younger man whose identity remained ambiguous, and could have been either a son or lover. Huutajat, the Finnish Men’s Screaming Choir, also made a holographic appearance shouting “You Always Hurt the One You Love” in one of several intense climaxes of visual spectacle, tempo and emotion. A pioneering and stunningly complex work, True Love… made clear from the beginning Performa 05’s intention to challenge conventional notions of performance.

Not for sale

As part of an ongoing series titled “Not for Sale”, a one-day symposium held at New York University aimed to investigate different facets of “Writing on New Media and Performance”, from the integration of ephemeral works into ‘official’ contexts, to the multidisciplinary language required to engage with the research, development and presentation of visual art performance. The event covered familiar and fairly superficial territory, offering the audience descriptive accounts of professional encounters but stopping short of thrashing out new possibilities for instigating paradigm shifts. In the first of two sessions, curators Anthony Huberman (Sculpture Centre, Queens), Bennett Simpson (ICA, Boston), and Catherine Wood (Tate Modern, London) ruminated on the increasing presence of performance in museums and galleries and its incoherence with the strictures of institutionalised curating and collecting; nothing new. Wood’s presentation ironically dealt with the Tate Modern’s recent venture into collecting live performance in an event supposedly premised on the resistance of this medium to the market, while Huberman spoke of the way in which ephemeral works challenge the ‘exhibition logic.’ Bennett offered by far the most interesting paper, examining how the resurgence of performance art over the past decade has intersected with the new media ‘boom’ and its impact on ideas of interactivity, temporality and performativity. The most important effect of this conflation of performance and performativity, he argued, is not the demand that art take into account broader frames of reference—such as fashion, music and technology—but rather “the emphasis it now places on who the artist is, as opposed to what the artist does.” In view of the notion that “all artists are performers (if artists are people who perform art), what is the relationship between the inherent performativity of being an artist, and performance art as a medium?”

Retrieving history

In what was arguably Performa 05’s most ambitious and extravagant co-presentation, seminal performance artist Marina Ambramovic performed a series of 7 works on a circular platform in the grand rotunda of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum. Wryly titled Seven Easy Pieces, the performance schedule was spread over 7 consecutive evenings and involved Ambramovic re-enacting influential works by her peers from the 1960s and 70s. Each of the unrehearsed performances ran from 5pm until midnight, extending and distorting the duration of the original pieces, and continuing Ambramovic’s career-long exploration of the mental and physical limitations of the body. Re-enactments of works by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, VALIE EXPORT, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and Ambramovic’s own Lips of Thomas (1975) were concluded by a new performance created by Ambramovic specifically for the series, Entering the Other Side, which functioned as a contemporary point of reference from which to investigate the temporal dichotomy at the crux of the project. Seven Easy Pieces conflated past and present, commanding consideration, yet again, of fundamental issues that relate to ephemeral art.

Alternative network

Complementary to the scale and polish of the commissions, a host of modest projects were staged in New York’s premier alternative arts venues clustered around Soho and the Lower East Side. Much of the vitality of the program was derived from these events, which took a finger to the pulse of post-millennium performance practice with an emphasis on young and emerging artists. Art in General, Apexart, Participant Inc and the Swiss Institute contributed. As did Artists Space, one of New York’s oldest not-for-profit organisations, which staged a 5-week exhibition, Empty Space With Exciting Events, in which the empty main gallery became “a stage for daily action, performances, concerts and lectures”, while the Project Spaces hosted individual works with performative affinities.

At The Kitchen in Chelsea, Listen Up! Lectures as Performance offered a double bill contrasting a reworking of French conceptual artist Bernar Venet’s 1966 performance-lecture Neutron Emission with a new work by Coco Fusco, A Room of One’s Own. A product of the artist’s recent experience in a women’s interrogation training camp it highlighted the malleability and power of language as a tool for propaganda.

Co-presented by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at Gigantic Art Space, Pablo Helguera’s one-act opera, The Foreign Legion likewise took on the politics of interpretive discussion as its theme. Merging scripted fiction, documentary narrative, hermetic thought, the lecture format and music, Helguera’s work aimed to “embrace the contemporary ambiguous threshold between reality and fiction” by confusing the audience’s perception of what was ‘objective’ fact and subjective intervention, creating a space for dialogue on how art might function at the interstice between the two.

Performing the city

Performa 05 cast a wide net both in terms of its interdisciplinary fervour and geographical manifestation. Stretching from Harlem all the way Downtown, and encompassing a vast array of venues in between, the program itself incorporated a performative sensibility in its distribution across the city. The decentralised format forged a rich conversation between diverse entities, from museum stalwarts, to commercial gallery heavyweights, and various constituents in the not-for-profit sector. Audience participation became a process of enacting a ritual of transit and mapping in the spaces of everyday life as people moved between venues and events. New York Times reporter Roberta Smith pointed out that although the difficult choices to be made often left one feeling as though great opportunities had been missed, and on occasions events did not quite meet expectations, there was ample room to structure a unique performance program of one’s own, fuelled by adrenalin, followed by fatigue, and underscored by the satisfaction of participating in a remarkable event.

From the beginning, it’s clear we’re on ‘Yuji-time.’ There was no misprint in the conference program, registration really did open at 0800 on the dot, and the sessions waited for no latecomers. At e-performance and Plug-ins, billed as a “mediatised performance conference”, it’s clear that the primary mediatising force was the coordinator, performance artist Yuji Sone. And his mediatisation was impressive, bringing together a wide variety of hybrid artists and theorists, with the practice/theory line being continually and productively blurred by the presence of so many artist/theorists (including Victoria Spence and Mark Seton discussing the breakdown of technological and biological systems in Spence’s communication/failure (see page 32), and Out-of-Sync’s (Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark) blend of digital networking technology and 19th century mysticism in their ouija board performance Séance: a networked glossalalia on the ISEA2004 ferry. Many of the presentations from PhD candidates were also of ‘practice as research’, meaning that e-performance could be seen as a sign of new media, performance and live art’s growing significance within the academy, especially in Australia and the UK.

The brief of the conference was wide, ranging from “the ontology of liveness to the very technical and logistical questions of performance in a mediatised environment under diverse conditions of actualisation.” These technical and logistical questions were well demonstrated within the conference form itself, with keynote addresses (Philip Auslander on robotics, US curator and critic Michael Rush tracing histories of performance in video art, and Nottingham-based Johannes Birringer’s barely intelligible presentation on performing the intersections of wearable technology and fashion) delivered via different forms of video or audio streaming. While impressively executed by a dedicated technical support team (supervised by Mark Mitchell), each had its own unique and inevitable glitches. Despite Edward Scheer’s quip in the closing remarks (“couldn’t we have watched it on TV?”), this ever-present sense of potential disaster kept all the mediatisation firmly in the realm of the live.

Stelarc

As the only keynote speaker physically present at the conference, performance artist Stelarc’s imaginative and ever-excessive rethinking of the human body was well demonstrated in his discussion of recent practice, including Stomach Sculpture (described as “a site-specific performance for private physiological space”), Blender (a collaboration with Nina Sellars involving the literal removal of subcutaneous tissue from their 2 bodies and blending it repeatedly, reanimating the biomaterial to create ‘new life’), and a range of other performances with networked prosthetics.

In these networked experiments, Stelarc has attempted to remake the body into “an inverse motion-capture system.” Rather than create a template for the movements of an avatar in a virtual world, he makes a surrogate to enable an avatar to perform in the real world. To make this possible, Stelarc aims for an emptying out of the body, allowing it to become a better host. Strangely he refers to his body as if it is not his own, rhetorically performing this ‘emptying out.’

Speaking enthusiastically about his difficulties in obtaining a plastic surgeon to attach a replica of his ear to his arm, his current body modification project, Stelarc clearly demonstrates that there are implications legal and ethical as much as aesthetic to this practice. It seems that here the impersonal is political too, pointing to a post-human artistic politics.

Philip Auslander

This fascination with the ends of the human in live art and performance reached its peak early on with US performance theorist Philip Auslander asking “can robots make performance art?” He cites the example of Max Dean and Rafaello D’Andrea’s The table: childhood (1984-2001) in which a robotic performer (a computer-controlled dining table on wheels) chooses a viewer to attempt to “form a relationship with” by closely approaching them. This semblance of intimacy from a large heavy table can be threatening, its unpredictable and lifelike behaviour uncanny. The artists anthropomorphically frame their performing table, subtitling the piece “childhood” because the table’s programming has it perform actions similar to those of a child trying to relate to adults.

Can it be live art if the performer is an artificial life form? And what is the place of these artistic robots? A metaphor for the human? A substitute for the human? A parody of a human? If the actions of these robot performers are designed to be read as futile does it mean that humans programmed these robots to undertake meaningless tasks? How is this different from instructing humans to perform such pointless tasks? Auslander pointed to the example of Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov’s A Life (Black and White, 1999-2000) in which 2 human painters repeatedly repaint the gallery space black then white for the duration of the exhibition. These painters might as well have been machines.

‘live’

The performance program ‘live’ provided exhilarating live image mixing from John Gillies in Shiver (VJ mix version), UK-based Michaela Reiser’s biofeedback performance Excitations, and Company in Space’s Hellen Sky’s eloquently playful live web stream from Nottingham, Liquid Paper 11. There were no performing robots on the night, and therefore no way to test Auslander’s provocations. The ‘live’ here was strictly ‘alive’, wrapping up with welcome low-tech absurdity from Unreasonable Adults’ The End of Romance. Their deadpan mock competitiveness in obsessively detailed descriptions of technical apparatus (various redundant laptops and a mini-cassette recorder) was a refreshing reminder that the technological is most productively linked to the social context of its use, and there’s no reason to take it all so seriously.

As Sydney video and new media artist Anna Davis pointed out in discussing the social proxemics in her installation In the house of shouters, “audiences respond socially to almost anything, with a minimum of social cues.” No matter what the material and form of the art practice, a common thread demonstrated in the work discussed over the conference was the desire to produce engagement with viewers. As Hellen Sky put it: “We’re trying to make a connection and we make endless phone calls in the foyer.”
Surprising connections were made. And endless phone calls were indeed made in foyers. All the liveness, the networking, and the mediatised presentations conspired to create what Andrew Murphie aptly described as a “complex dynamic system”— the conference itself as an emergent lifeform. What as-yet unimagined ‘new life’ will emerge from this important initiative is much anticipated.

e-performance and Plug-ins: A Mediatised Performance Conference. Coordinated by Yuji Sone. School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales, Dec 1-2, 2005

In Derek Kreckler’s new 6-channel DVD installation Antidote, the walls of the Performance Space gallery are doused in large projections of falling water. In some cases the idyllic waterfall scenes are reminiscent of the kind of kitsch imagery you might find as the backdrop to a deodorant commercial or in the foyer of a health retreat. Other video sources survey the water spray in close-up, revealing patterns that cut across the projected screens like the streaky grain of scratched celluloid.

Possibly it sounds like work you’ve seen before; an immersive video installation of the nature-is-so-beautiful variety. But the experience it produces is something quite different, subtly disordering your everyday modes of perception in ways that are difficult to shake off.

As groups of viewers flow into Antidote, interesting things begin to happen. It is as if the installation has unseen zones of intense gravitational pull, causing viewers to cluster like barnacles in certain pockets of the room. This curious migration pattern seems to be motivated by the audience’s desire to keep their shadow clear of the projected footage. Kreckler, however, appears to anticipate this attempt and deliberately sets out to frustrate it.

Instead of minimising interference by suspending the projectors from the ceiling, the projectors are installed at ground level. This has the effect of entrapping large areas of floor space within their throw. Although some visitors delighted in the opportunity to guide their silhouette through the water-walls, most viewers pooled at the vantage points where they produced the least interference.

What this installation scenario pulls into focus is the tendency for viewers to treat the moving image as a window onto the world. In other words, we’d rather peer into the intact image than have to reflect on the messy existential issue of how we’re positioned in relation to it.

With Antidote, however, Kreckler allows no such reprieve. The waterfall scenery may be sourced from the natural world, but he unhinges the familiarity of the footage by setting it at different speeds. The rhythms of the various channels clash, creating a shared audio track where dilated and compressed timeframes wash up against one another. These jarring shifts in velocity also occur within each channel, preventing viewers from getting swept up in the hypnotic flow of a single image stream.

The shifts in the scale of the imagery also effect a gentle disorientation. In particular, the longer you stare into the closeups of water, the more they take on the properties of abstract patterns. The very images of waterfalls that had initially seemed banal, ultimately turn out to be strangely compelling and charged.

In the catalogue, Kreckler says of this installation, “After a while I hear dogs barking, horses running, people screaming and gun shots; sounds not included; it is then I know that I am home.” Home for Kreckler would seem to be that place where perception throws off its passivity and reality becomes a site of potential transformation.

It is not surprising that he turns to sound for this dynamic, considering that hearing is a far more malleable sense than sight. We often become aware of the way we cut our own mix of the sounds we hear, tuning into familiar frequencies and disregarding others. What is fascinating about Antidote is the degree to which the installation introduces this uncertainty into viewing. It is packed with perceptual booby-traps ready to wrong-foot your usual modes of interaction with the world.

Antidote is the standout work of the exhibition Derek Kreckler: Downstairs: recent and new work in photography and video. The show is the latest instalment in an impressive series of exhibitions curated by Blair French (now Director, Artspace), concentrating on the work of significant contemporary Australian artists. Also in this exhibition is the not-so-recent video Blind Ned (1998). In this silent single-channel work, bushranger Ned Kelly blindly navigates his way through the Australian landscape, stuck in an uneasy, unending loop.

Kreckler’s stunning photographic installation Holey #4 (2005) also sports its own type of blind spots. Here, a photograph of a beach landscape is partially blocked out by a number of large circles planted across the image. Corresponding with these “holes” are four vinyl balls lying on the floor beneath the photograph. The balls are wrapped in the missing areas of the beach, as if the 3-dimensionality of the landscape has literally popped out of the image.

Derek Kreckler: Downstairs: recent and new work in photography and video, curator Blair French, Performance Space, Sydney, Nov 4-Dec3, 2005

It’s not a clear day. It’s overcast, hot and humid. You can tell because of the flies, buzzing, sticking to clothes. Assuming a fatherly pose, a suited man holds a small girl in his arms. Their backs to the bay, they face inland. We assume they are Australians, and this is all we can suppose from the photograph.

For their new series of works shown at Casula Powerhouse’s Artists Against Sedition Laws Exhibition, boat-people.org created Magritte-like images in their photographs by using the Australian flag to mask the faces of their subjects. Sensorially challenged—neither seeing, nor hearing, nor speaking—men, women and children are arranged in traditional studio-portrait groupings at Botany Bay, the site of arrival for the First Fleet. Like blindfolded criminals in front of a firing squad they were shot (on film). Their images build a picture of a nationalism that all but stifles identity and erases difference.

Seeing these works on Monday December 12, only 2 days after the racially demarcated gang violence at Cronulla—where youths on one side wore the Australian flag like superhero capes and, on the other side, burned them—I was struck by the paradox of the sedition legislation (amendments to the Crimes Act of 1914 and the Criminal Code Act of 1995) in the way that it has actually fostered opposition and protest. The group boat-people.org, as an example, formed in the wake of the Tampa impasse, the ‘Pacific Solution’, the ‘Children Overboard’ scandal, increased border protection and mandatory detention for ‘illegal immigrants.’ These humanitarian crises of the Government’s making have served to alienate all Australians with the vaguest sense of decency, compassion or social justice.

That the Howard Coalition government’s policies and scandals have successfully caused a great deal of group and community disaffection was something that many artists in Protest chose to focus upon. Mischievously positioned in the exhibition entrance, none was so self-effacing as Simon Barney’s A-frame painting with text that reads “Blame John Howard for Bad Political Art”, and another, a swarthy self-portrait, titled Of Middle Eastern Appearance. The Artists and Writers Alliance showed a series of 12 large works on paper including silkscreen prints, photocopies and transfers manipulating found photographs, classified advertising and reworkings of socialist propaganda poster art. One of these stencils features the image of Howard on a “Wanted” bill “for inciting terror” and reminds us that “if caught [you] can be detained for 14 days without charge.”

I was fortunate to have arrived at opening time when video artist Tony Schwensen promptly commenced a reading of the United Nations Bill of Human Rights while an assistant encased his feet in a quick-setting concrete. Despite Schwensen’s dead-pan countenance, the bill read rather like a humanist poem—in stark contrast to the vague and defensive little amendments that comprise the sedition laws. Watching with the small crowd were a group of children, huddled close to the action and taking the same kind of delight in the artist’s self-sabotage as they would watching a classic cartoon of Wiley Coyote dropping an anvil on his own head. It didn’t take much to follow through the logic of Schwensen’s symbolic intent, imagining his body and all that the Human Rights Bill stands to protect sinking to the bottom of a lake, or a harbour somewhere.

While Schwensen’s performance was in progress, the general buzz of crowds arriving and latecomer artists hurriedly hanging their work gathered momentum. Over 230 artists participated in the Artists Against Sedition Laws Exhibition with many Sydney galleries listed as supporting the project. Steven Mori was there, installing the work of Melbourne-based artist Danielle Freakley including her graphic Cum Rags, pieces of white, fleecy fabric overlocked at the edges with a photo-transfer of bodies blown-apart during the war in Iraq—a blunt and unflinching statement on the testosterone-fuelled appetites of the coalition-led attack. In another bloody work, Peacekeeper, photographer Belinda Mason Lovering produced an arresting portrait of anti-war activist Dave Burgess. Daubed in fake blood and shot from a steep angle, his body dominates the sails of the Opera House that he and Will Saunders bravely defaced in 2003, while the words “No War” are tracked though the red paint on his belly.

Satirical entries addressed the extent of the threat to freedom of speech and the right to criticise government posed by the new laws. The Seditious Artists Society’s (SAS) Suspicious White Van…stone, was is a hilarious assemblage of transcript from the SA branch of the Rotary Club quoting Amanda Vanstone as saying, “I don’t know if any of you travel that much…but we have this (no knives policy), of course, because we’re worried about terrorists getting on planes and grabbing knives and doing bad things with them. But has it ever occurred to you that you just smash your wine glass and jump at someone, grab the top of their head and put it to their carotid artery and ask anything?” This quotation from the Minister for Immigration was fixed to the back of a box frame as instructional information complete with a terrorist kit of smashed wine glass, plastic knife and HB pencil. Nobody and Maxine Foxxx’s short video Shitty Rail, turned its attention to Sydney’s inadequate public transport system. The artists, uniformed to impersonate Cityrail guards are documented hassling young people for tickets and handing out inflated fines for non-existent offences (amid raucous laughter from the carriage). In a minimal and symbolic video work, White Australia, Hayden Fowler captures the movement of a white lab rat endlessly entering and exiting the same, institutional, green-tiled room through 2 holes. The space holds the promise of 2 distinct choices, but they both lead the rat back to the beginning.

In the current conservative and fearful climate where Opposition leaders are increasingly failing to oppose anything, prominent creative Australians and Australian arts organisations are strongly voicing their objections to the new laws. The National Association of Visual Arts (NAVA) has proved a formidable and tenacious force in seeking amendments to the Anti-Terrorism Bill and the sedition legislation that was rushed through parliament in early December. NAVA director, Tamara Winikoff opened the exhibition by urging the audience to continue pressuring the Government for change. At such a moment it is not difficult to imagine the potential, particularly for regional galleries run by local government bureaucracies, to shy away from political or contentious work. For the Artists Against Sedition Laws Exhibition, Casula Powerhouse staff took advantage of the building being empty [prior to its reopening in 2006 after extensive refurbishment] in order to send a clear voice of dissent out into the community. Conceived as a gathering of multifarious and uncurated art objects and performances, asserting artists’ (and everyone’s) rights to freedom of speech, the exhibition demonstrated the capacity for contemporary art spaces to respond quickly and decisively to the shifting political landscape.

Artists Against Sedition Laws Exhibition, Casula Powerhouse, Western Sydney, Dec 12-17, 2005

Mark Brown’s recent exhibition Exeunt_Site Manoeuvres, shown at the Melbourne artist-run initiative Conical Inc, was an analytical and elegant installation of 3 intensely sculptural works that created an allusive viewing experience. In a manner that initially felt counter to Brown and Conical Inc’s shared commitment to work of a site-specific nature, Brown deployed strategies that resulted in an intriguing exhibition that seemed sparse and introspective. His strategies could be summarised as focusing the viewer on the space outside the gallery rather than inside, barring the viewer from one gallery completely, and siting a minaturised object in the most expansive space. This is not to say that there was a sense of loss or absence in the exhibition. Rather, Brown’s ingenuity produced objects that seemed to have an autonomy from the viewer. The show was not immersive or interactive in the way that many new media exhibitions are described. We approached the objects rather than the objects claiming our attention, and viewing was a durational rather than instantaneous experience.

The title Exeunt_Site Manoeuvres could not be more apt as exeunt is archaic Elizabethan theatre Latin for exiting the space of the stage. Brown’s choice of terminology—site manoeuvres rather than site-specificity—was also deliberate. The term site-specific, which is now so pervasive that it operates as a kind of shorthand signifying progressive leanings and aesthetic innovation, has become increasingly restrictive for Brown. With beginnings in the late 60s, site-specific art was a catalyst for a widespread desire to incorporate the physical conditions of a particular location into art production and reception as a form of social and institutional critique. Site-specificity has now been mobilised to incorporate practices that can be defined as community-specific or issue-specific and embraces nomadic, virtual and ephemeral forms such as billboards, street demonstrations or mobile phones. Earliest debates saw artists jostle for position as the most authentic by being the most thoroughly site-specific.

While Brown’s practice is not exclusively gallery-based, he is an artist who continues to work within and against the modernist paradigm of the exhibition. Brown characterises his practice as a critique of commonly held views about site-specificity. The aspects of site-specificity which particularly inform Brown’s sensibility are those associated with Minimalism and its emphasis on a phenomenological understanding of context. Brown’s early installations were a response to the textures and accretions of rundown industrial and military sites through the amplification of the molecular and the fragmentary. In relation to his early works, Brown invented the term detritical, derived from ‘detritus’, to denote his investigation of the affect of built spaces charged with an atmosphere of decay.

Writing about his recent show, the artist argued, “I have attempted to evolve my methodology of making site-specific works beyond a direct, formal architectural response to site archaeology and past and present contextual function in a bid to develop strategies to transcend what I perceive to be the potential end game of hermetic site works.” It is Browns passion for sound and other technologically mediated approaches to site which set his work apart. He is striving for an engagement with questions of locality and place that is highly speculative and founded on a stylish, personal language which is simultaneously neighbourly and other-worldly.

Throughout his exhibition history, Brown’s finely honed objects have all shared a design vocabulary which can be traced to mid 20th century military instrumentation relating to navigation, measurement and surveillance. According to Brown his affinity with military interfaces of all kinds owes something to his father’s service in the New Zealand Territorial Air Force Reserve. He has also volunteered a previous obsession with computer games. This exhibition continued his research as Brown’s retro eye also took in the well-proportioned bones of the Conical building and the earlier technologies evoked by the domestic fireplace, the density of the glass and the weight of the iron mullions of its window.

At the window, Brown positioned Noise Gate, a viewfinder fabricated out of metal through which a video image of Fitzroy’s gritty streetscape could be viewed. An eerie, unearthly light was emitted by the adjacent factory rooftop exhaust vents. Moving between the periscope-style viewfinder and the window panes, the scene was reminiscent of paintings by Antipodeans Albert Tucker and Danila Vassilieff as well as early depictions in science fiction of the teleporter. The disjunction generated a ghostly effect which heightened our apprehension of unseen atmospheric forces. The visible and audible energy field extending between the 2 vents also signaled an expanded notion of navigation through time and space rather than one bound to a particular place.
Mark Brown, Waypoint

A red flash glimpsed from the corner of the eye, alerted viewers to the presence of an anthropomorphic form revolving in a darkened, smoke-filled gallery, viewable only through a slot in the dividing wall. Pressed against the slot, it was possible to detect a laser pointer spinning on an electric motor mounted on a tripod. While the narrowness of the viewfinder concealed the viewer’s identity to the creature within, Demarcation’s menace lay in the fact that viewers felt compelled to maximise their exposure to the laser beam as it passed across their eyes by getting as close to the viewfinder as they could.

Low, rumbling vibrations across the gallery floor, led us to Way-point, another finely calibrated viewing experience, in the main body of the gallery. Looking down rather than out or through, we enjoyed the brief deception that the compass face projected onto a speaker on the floor was solid. Brown was projecting a video recording of the face of a compass held on a walk around the block on which the gallery is situated. At this moment our visual sense was foremost but as we gazed into the speaker the habitual ordering of our senses was challenged by the sound recordings made during the walk emanating from the speaker. The illusion of solidity was accentuated by the shape of the speaker mirroring the shape of the compass dial but this visual doubling was undercut by the contrast between the smallness of the seen object and the volume of the invisible soundtrack reverberating beneath our feet.

Despite Mark Brown’s dexterity with his materials, the exhibition was not about high production values. His pleasure in economical technology and the adaptive re-use of widely available materials further underpinned our feeling that his objects didn’t need anyone to look at them. We were drawn to them because of their craftsmanship and their manner of standing apart from viewer expectations. It was their self sufficiency which ultimately destabilised the personal and cultural locative devices at work in the space. By using conventions, templates and codes which are widely identified with warfare in his practice, Mark Brown raised our awareness of his orchestration of our vision while at the same time undercutting their certainties with manoeuvres which are often uncanny, poetic and unexpected. Strangely, we were inspired to reflect on the many meanings of location through an exhibition in which the objects potentially displaced the site.

Mark Brown, Exeunt_Site Manoeuvres, Conical Inc, Melbourne, 16 Sept 16-Oct 2, 2005; http://untitledbrown.zina.org/

Jasmin Stephens is Senior Manager, Education and Access, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Along with one of the fastest urban growth rates in Australia, Cairns has developed a cultural sophistication that is fuelled by a creative mix of colliding and colluding cultures. This continues to change the face of far north Queensland’s cultural, business and civic hub. Strong influences from traditional and urban Aboriginals along with Torres Strait Islanders, Melanesians and Pacific people mix with the remnants of local pioneering dynasties and droves of young families migrating from southern states. With over 2 million tourist visitors each year, Cairns holds a place as one of Australia’s top 5 gateways. All this generates activities that tessellate into a rich social and cultural mosaic.

A significant contemporary visual arts culture has emerged with professional players—KickArts operating impressive galleries at the new Centre of Contemporary Arts, the Tanks Art Centre’s wonderfully robust and atmospheric interiors, The Cairns Regional Gallery’s converted neo-Georgian spaces and the grandeur of the Cairns Convention Centre. The latter has acquired a remarkable collection of large-scale contemporary art through the Queensland State Government’s Art Built-in policy which has run for the last decade or so.

In this political climate, artists are either borne along with the sweeping tides of change, or are activists speaking out about indiscriminate and inappropriate development. There are many artists working with a localised culture and lifestyle, a few with sustainable careers. National and international interest is bestowed upon those artists whose work has some resonance with current issues, and who’ve developed networks with industry peers. Three such artists are Arone Meeks, Zane Saunders and Samuel Tupou. Meeks and Saunders are urban Aboriginal artists and Tupou has Pacific Islander heritage.

Arone Meeks

Arone Meeks was born in Sydney in 1957, but grew up in Cairns before attending art school in Sydney. He was a founding artist with the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Coorporation in Sydney and initiated the annual NAIDOC exhibition at the Tanks Art Centre in Cairns, creating dialogue between communities and showcasing the work of Indigenous artists. Meeks has been awarded significant fellowships including the first Indigenous Australian residency at Cite des Arts in Paris.

Meeks grew up with his initiated grandfather and spent time with one of the North’s most celebrated Indigenous artists, Thancoupie, whom he describes as “Athoy”—spiritual mother. He has lived with the Mornington Island community, finding strength in its social foundation.

He produces paintings, sculpture and prints that express a passion for country, spirituality, sexuality and politics. Meeks’ path is one that redefines his connections through art mediums. The spiritual is actualised through art and his response is one of “working it through” an intuitive process. He is able to express a unique spiritual response to country that has a harmony in connecting disparate worlds. His subjects are sourced from nature and are represented with both cultural responsibility and the expressiveness of contemporary art. Arone’s Indigenous links are with the Kokomidiji of Cape York, around Laura, the site of renowned rock art galleries filled with graceful drawings of quinkans (spirits). Laura is known as a place of Aboriginal magic and sorcery; it is also the location for the biannual Angnarra Aboriginal Dance Festival. Walking through this country has a palpable effect on the artist. He feels a physical reaction to sacred country that helps forge kinship relationships, a sense of self and “renewing the dreaming.”

Meeks’ practice is based intuitively on the shifting definition of cultural identity. It has a connection to dreams and experiences that have touched his soul. Sexuality also has an influence and is conceptualised as part of the human matrix. As an urban Aboriginal who inhabits a world in proximity to traditional tribal lands and communities, he describes his practice by saying, “I am hunting for lost pieces of myself.” It is a process where imagination comes from within and is possibly an inexhaustible source for his art. For Arone Meeks the process of painting is great therapy for defining self and existence. He finds humanity in the gesture of the mark and this is evident in much of his work. His art objects are like his children, sent off into the world, and like children the finished objects take their time to reveal their full consequences to him.

Zane Saunders

Zane Saunders was born in Cairns in 1971. He identifies with the Butchulla (Bajala) of Fraser Island some 1500km to the south. He grew up in Kuranda and went to school in Townsville. His mother encouraged a return to Cairns so that he could attend art school at Cairns TAFE. Saunders has a Gungu Yimithir language name given by a Hopevale elder. The name—Ngamu Mangal Bungal—means “clever hands.” As a community ranger for Angnarra at Laura, he was a delegate to the International Rock Art Symposium in Alice Springs. Although he has found it challenging to survive as an artist, he has works in the collections of the Australian National Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria and an impressive string of state, corporate and private collections.

Saunders’ strength in drawing is evident in much of his painting and printmaking. His practice of developing surfaces and colour, while composing forms with layers of symbolism is informed by visions and ideas. In the last year he has begun to present short performances in conjunction with exhibition openings or mixed bill dance events. These have incorporated shamanistic characters informed by traditional Aboriginal dance and stories. His interest in performance is to find ways to include the audience directly in the experience. This investigation has been fuelled by the desire to learn more skills and have a range of possible responses to particular situations. This is indicative of the way he seeks challenges as an artist. For Saunders the process of creating new work is to engage with new mediums. This keeps the act of art-making fresh and challenges him to develop different skills.

Zane Saunders’ concerns are about the collision of cultures and beliefs. This includes politics in the community and the effects of colonisation. He interrogates social barriers around belief, and the shifting notion of religion and spirituality. His current work has progressed to referencing human form, identity, social values and a sense of spirit and religion. Performance brings his practice closer to the physical body in an investigation of what makes us the same or different. His ultimate responsibility is to carry a message about spiritual connection, for he believes art is an educational process that offers us spiritual strength.

Samuel Tupou

Samuel Tupou was born in New Zealand in 1976. He arrived in Australia in 1982, living in the Northern Territory. After completing visual art studies in Townsville and Lismore, he moved to Cairns in 1998. He has Tongan heritage.

Tupou came to sell T-shirts in the tourism frenzy of Cairns. In stark contrast to the other graduates from art school who ‘moved to Melbourne’, he was attracted by the tropical climate that reminded him of the area around Gove, NT where he grew up.

His artworks are generally silk-screen prints on perspex. Derived from an 80s retro style, they are influenced by street advertising. The work fits into commercial environments and has a functionality ideally suited to the often dank, humid conditions of the tropics. Tupou’s works are immediately accessible; employing the familiar ‘found’ imagery and symbols, as well as simple materials used as substrate. Perspex and vinyl foam are less susceptible to mould and do not require framing—making them the perfect art materials for rainforest homes. Works from his 2005 KickArts exhibition New Tapa were acquired for the collections of the Australian National Gallery and Cairns Regional Gallery.

Influences on Tupou are everyday encounters with symbols and patterns. Many are appropriated from the internet, from magazines or CD covers, removed from their original context and layered in varying degrees of complexity through his screen-printing process. He works from an idea, which starts to take form through digital ‘sketches’ using Photoshop. The idea can sometimes start as a title that then requires searching for images, or fragments from his bank of images come together to create a new work.

Using traditional Tongan tapa patterns found in books brought to Australia by his grandmother, a background is developed over which figurative symbols and clichéd imagery in high key colour is added. This creates enough tension and interest to take the work to other reference points. There is ambiguity in his work around cultural identity and ‘bi-culturalism.’ For Tupou a work can start quite innocently as a collection of self-reflective mementos and reminders of youthful experiences. He is quite happy for the work to be open to interpretation. Finding new contexts for appropriated advertising imagery can also extend the universal mythologies associated with them. Like the ever-popular Pop Art style, Sam Tupou believes tapa patterns give his work currency well into the future.

Zane Saunders’ exhibition Lone Guinea Fowl opens April 14, KickArts lower gallery; Arone Meeks’ solo exhibition opens May 5 in KickArts upper gallery, Centre of Contemporary Arts, 96 Abbott St, Cairns. www.kickarts.org.au; Samuel Tupou’s New Tapa-Summer Collection, showed at IMA, Brisbane, Dec 13, 2005-Jan 28, 2006.

George Poonkhin Khut’s Cardiomorphologies is a multimedia work wherein the vital medium is the participant’s body. A pressure-sensitive strap is placed around your upper ribs to measure your breathing; your heart rate is converted into electronic pulses using sensors held in both hands. You sit in a comfortable chair and watch your personal bodysong writ large in throbbing circular pulses, projected before you. It’s described by the artist as a “quietly immersive” experience, and whilst that’s certainly true the act is also quietly invasive in the way that any vaguely medical procedure tends to be. A whole gallery wall is occupied by huge, unflinching multicoloured representations of your vital organs for all to view, unstoppable only in the sense that you can let go of the electrodes at any time. Simultaneously, sounds are generated from the rhythmic beat of your body data, and these are audible on headphones: a pair around your own head, and wireless sets for use by any interested parties around the gallery space. As a participant, it’s possible to use the experience several ways. One is to sit back and watch your body mechanism rendered as artwork in as passive or meditative a manner as possible—given the situation. Another is to play Cardiomorphologies like a musical instrument. The metabolic musician can use hyperventilation or deep breathing to form wider, more vibrant circular pulses on the screen, the thump of the heart increasing in volume, size and frequency, before perhaps making attempts to slow the tempo back down into a natural resting state.

Whatever approach you decide upon, Cardiomorphologies creates a very honest creative symbiosis between yourself and a cold, hard computer. There are many pieces at the Inbetween Time festival concerned with relationships—both real and imagined—between humans and technology, but Khut’s biological mimic is the only example where the machine can literally be said to have taken on human characteristics. However, the key facet of Cardiomorphologies’ ingenuity is the manner in which bodily data is transformed into highly abstract representations. True, it’s possible to imagine the piece presented with life-like or even photorealistic video images of heart and lungs up on that screen, but the effect would be to slam out a constant reminder to any participant of their own mortality, their entropic, finite qualities, the ones that make humans most resemble machines… and let’s face it, a huge undulating mass of meat projected in this fashion would probably make people lose their lunch on a regular basis. With the far subtler approach chosen by Khut, a partnership develops between device and devisor. Given enough time in that chair, it’s almost possible to forget the mechanical-biological feed into the image, and to consider your cyborg interactions a sort of dance, a duet, a partnership of necessity. It’s hypnotic—almost literally—and reflecting upon the experience afterwards there’s enough interdependence in Cardiomorphologies to make you ponder the implications of Khut’s hardware freezing, or his software crashing. If you were sufficiently immersed in the process and the screen suddenly went blank, what sort of shock might that provoke and would your metabolism follow suit?

George Khut is a Sydney-based artist working in the area of sound and immersive installation environments.

What is the relationship between risk and artistic practice? For some, the notion of risk is necessarily embedded in the process of making work; for others it is relative. Within the context of Inbetween Time, festival director Helen Cole has embraced risk as a means of moving practices forward. The notion of Breathing Space is literally that: a pause in the working life of an artist allowing them to explore, to share it with an audience, to change work, and even allow it to fail.

Nurturing Risk was important then as the festival’s opening forum, pairing 12 panelists—artists, curators, project managers and coordinators. Ironically, Daniel Belasco Rogers was stranded in Berlin with a broken ankle sustained during a workshop, so Cole delivered his written response complete with performance directions. Speakers were “asked to consider how their relationship took risks, how it nurtured, and also how it nurtured risk.”

One of the dominant themes to emerge early on was trust. Mark Timmer of Gasthuis (Netherlands) still finds it amusing that David Weber-Krebs flooded a wooden floor when he was entrusted with the gallery keys; Sydney dance-artist Martin del Amo spoke of his panic after accepting a commission to create a 40-minute piece. Gregg Whelan of Lone Twin expanded on the space between a proposal and the resultant work. He gave as an example Lone Twin’s ambitious idea for a narrative-based piece that would occasionally break into song, an idea that Thomas Frank (Sophiensaele, Berlin) liked well enough to program. When Whelan realised Lone Twin didn’t actually have the musical skills required, they created something altogether different (a work about Morris Dancing). When asked how this mutual trust was attained, Frank and Whelan looked almost perplexed. “Over a series of lunches,” they replied. I was reminded of Adam Phillips’ notion that “a couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime.”

This type of collaboration (or collusion) reflects Fiona Winning’s (Director of Sydney’s Performance Space) opinion that artists are very good at constructing temporary communities. She spoke eloquently about Time_Place_Space, a laboratory in its 5th year that enables new collaborations between artists, expanding their networks and practices. For Winning, it is exciting when artists arrive with one set of ideas only to replace them with others arising from connections made with their peers. Equally, speakers were honest enough to flag up some of the difficulties around blueprints for nurturing risk. Nina Wyllie (founder-member of The Special Guests) described participating in eXpo Mentors 2003. Even as artists straight out of academia and with “little to lose”, they experienced “a sense of submitting”, of fitting into a model. Sophie Cameron (New Work Network), who facilitated that scheme, spoke of the risk of losing control—how there was always the possibility that the mentor-artist combination would fail—and the necessity of managing expectations. Robert Pacitti (Pacitti Company) highlighted the importance of funding to keep these developmental spaces open, praising the Live Art Development Agency’s bursary scheme (now in its final year). He also reminded us of the dangers of complacency. Such schemes need to be championed.

All the speakers were engaging and the pairings well chosen with an emphasis on practice over theory. Daniel Brine ably summed up the proceedings, though the ensuing question and answer session never really ignited. This felt like a lost opportunity. Perhaps everyone was playing it too safe.

Nurturing Risk Forum, coordinator Ruth Holdsworth; Chemistry Lecture Theatre, University of Bristol, Feb 1

Into the interzone

RealTime 71 celebrates the publication of Darren Tofts’ long-awaited Interzone—media arts in Australia with a review and author interview (p22–23). An opponent of the label ‘new media arts’, Darren proposed ‘intermedia art’ as a more apt term on these pages long ago. Now he argues for ‘media arts’ (right in some ways, perhaps too broad in others) and by bringing out what looks like it could be the definitive book, for some time to come, on Australian media arts (from inception to the near present) he just might make the term stick. But I’m pleased to see the ‘inter’ in Interzone given the extensive hybridising of forms and practices that keeps on emerging from the evolution of media arts. Congratulations to Darren on writing a wonderful book.

Robotics

The approaching singularity where humans and machines merge is anticipated and queried in dance works in the 2006 Adelaide Festival: ADT’s Devolution (p2) and Random’s Nemesis (p4). Choreographers Garry Stewart and Wayne McGregor discuss their respective works, the issues and the science that informs them. We also have a disturbing report from Perth on MEART (p25) in which robotic arms driven by rat neurons create artworks that do away with the need for the human artist. Reports on conferences and workshops on performance and interactivity are also to be found on pages 24 and 35. The world grows stranger, the body something else altogether.

Live art: UK, New York, Bangkok

This edition also features coverage of live art/performance art/visual art performance (the choice of label is yours) in the first and very big biennale of such work in New York in the form of Performa 05 directed by RoseLee Goldberg (p34), a long time champion of contemporary performance. A report from Bangkok describes a substantial and ongoing gathering of South-East Asian artists performing and debating their practice (p8). In February the RealTime editors will be experiencing plenty of live art at the InBetween Time Festival in Bristol, the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow and elsewhere.

Live Art is enjoying growing prominence in the UK, Europe, Asia and in the USA (and outside of New York). After seeing the work in the UK and talking with practitioners, curators and agencies, in coming editions we’ll be looking closely at how live art has developed and what it means in the Australian context.

It’s rare to see anything but an occasional film from Latin America in Australia’s international film festivals. In fact it’s a long time since South America loomed brutally and magically at us from the screen with its new wave of the 70s. So a first ever Latin-American Film Festival looks a very attractive proposition. Features, shorts and documentaries will screen over 2 weekends, opening at the impressive new Campbelltown Arts Centre, February 17-19, and continuing the following weekend, February 24-26, at the Tom Mann Theatre in Surry Hills.

Cuban director Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti is represented by 2 films. Viva Cuba , his latest, looks at emigration, a challenging issue for Cubans, from a child’s point of view. Made for both children and adults, Malberti’s Nada + (Nothing More) won the Cannes 2005 Grand Prix Ecrans Juniors award for children’s cinema. For the festival’s organisers, “this film’s message of hope sets the tone of the festival and captures the mood sweeping Latin America at the moment where newly elected democratic governments are promising a better future.” Cremata Malberti will be attending the festival.

Australian activist filmmaker, David Bradbury, travelled to Latin America in the 1980s establishing a long-term relationship with the region and making documentaries covering conflicts in Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile and now Argentina with Raul the Terrible. Over 4 months, Bradbury followed Raul Castells, the “dynamic and often confrontationalist leader of the piqueteros (picketers), a national movement of the poor and unemployed in Argentina”. David Bradbury will be present at the Tom Mann Theatre screening of Raul the Terrible on Saturday 25 February at 6.30pm for a Q&A session.

From the producer of City of God and Central Station, Walter Salles, comes Cidade Baixa (Lower City) “a tale of a woman’s intrusion on the close, almost intimate relationship between 2 men”. The film’s director is Sergio Machado who also made Madame Sata (2002).

Machuca is the first film to be made about Chile’s 1973 coup and was the country’s official entry to the 2004 Academy Awards. Set in Santiago, this coming-of-age story “traces the friendship of 2 boys from opposing ends of the social spectrum and how the events of September 1973 affect their relationship”. Director Andres Wood had another box office hit throughout Latin America in 1997 with his first feature film Football Stories. Machuca is his third feature film, “a testament to that past and a reminder of why it must not happen again.”

The festival will also screen a series of films focussing on the Amazon region. The Shaman’s Apprentice is set amongst the Suriname communities of the Amazon and concerns the ethnobotanist Dr Mark Plotkin’s mission to find a cure for diabetes. In Between Midnight and the Roosters Crow a Canadian oil company commences its operation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. An intriguing part of the festival program comes in the form of 15 minutes of short films made by locals in the Brazilian Amazon basin: the project is titled One Amazonas.

Among the festival’s documentaries, Tina in Mexico recreates the life of photographer and revolutionary, Tina Modotti, who adopted Mexico as her home. Archival footage and images from the photographer’s work convey a sense of life in 1920s Mexico. Argentinian director Sergio Morkin’s Oscar documents the resistance to advertising’s invasion of public space: “By transforming billboards with his own collages and paintings, a Buenos Aires taxi driver takes his revenge.”

This looks like a great little festival, modest in scale but no less impressive in its scope and offering rare insight into a region rarely glimpsed on this side of the world. In all, 14 features and documentaries will be screened plus 4 shorts and some animation. And as you’d expect of a Latin American gig, hospitality will also be generous. At the big launch, the screening of Viva Cuba will be followed by a fiesta of traditional food, salsa dancing and “a good dose of rum.” RT

Sydney Latin-American Film Festival, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Feb 17-19; Tom Mann Theatre, Surry Hills, Feb 24-26. www.sydneylatinofilmfestival.org

What kind of future do the arts have in Australia? For a long time the focus has been on survival, and still is, but a new spirit is emerging which not only asks what kind of future but posits possible models, let alone new ways of looking at the arts. Important speeches in recent months from John Doyle (Andrew Olle Memorial Lecture), David Marr (Philip Parsons Lecture) and Lyndon Terracini (Rex Cramphorn Lecture) along with the Currency House Platform Papers and David Williamson’s published concern for the dumbing down of Australians’ cultural aspirations, have coincided with the Leading Voices program. That series of talks, presented by the Australian Council’s Community Partnerships and Market Development division includes speakers from the USA, UK and the Netherlands who ask us to look at audience engagement afresh and to reconsider funding models that inhibit arts participation.

John Doyle

Drama, whether on TV or in the theatre, is addressed by Doyle, Marr and Terracini. Doyle offers a grim account of the fate of television drama as part of a greater cultural degradation: “the ABC has been cut to the marrow and can no longer afford to do much drama, and commercial networks have decided drama is too flakey and expensive. Meanwhile our very fine drama schools are pumping out scores of new young actors each year and there is nothing for them to do…So our local content is reduced to game shows, dancing shows, lifestyle shows and talent quests all creaking under the weight of diminishing returns. Think of something mindless, rope in a couple of celebrities and there’s your show.”

In an inspired Roy Slaven moment, Doyle offered a brilliant alternative: “Big Brother is such a waste of an opportunity. The housemates live in a state of perpetual boredom, unless they’re pissed. Why not engage a house of really smart, gifted young people from various fields: scientists, engineers, mathematicians, builders, a Latin scholar, a poet etc and they have a problem to solve. With a shared incentive of a few million dollars they have to find a solution to Australia’s water problems in 10 weeks—there’s a show!”

More comprehensively, like some of us who look to Canada for models for sustainable and marketable innovation in the media, Doyle suggests a way forward: “Because historically the ABC has been the powerhouse for new ideas that are often taken up by the commercial networks, perhaps the time has come for those networks to subsidize the ABC. After all, the ABC has been the training and testing ground for the commercial networks for 50 years—it’s about time the situation was redressed. What I would propose is a tax deductible levy on pre-tax network profit of around 25% to 30% that is pooled exclusively for ABC Drama. In return, the networks get second viewing rights and the right to franchise any series, on a rotating basis that is deemed commercially viable. The fact is, it is only the ABC, by virtue of being unencumbered by what is popular, that is capable of taking risks. Why is there such a paucity of great locally made drama? Because the ABC isn’t doing it. The Americans would hate such a plan and see it as not being in the spirit of the Free Trade Agreement, but so what? This isn’t cheese or rice we’re talking about. It actually is Culture. A fully funded ABC Drama unit would be to the advantage of the commercial networks. The ABC could become Australia’s HBO.”

David Marr

David Marr focuses on the plight of theatre in Australia outside the mainstream, reinforcing the sad picture delivered by the Theatre Board commissioned Roberts’ report on triennially funded theatre companies who comprise, arguably, the engine room of Australian theatre. The speech is a must-read. Marr’s portrayal, like Doyle’s, is set in an oppressive political regime that impinges on our cultural life, guaranteeing money for the major arts institutions while neglecting the rest. As Marr sees it, “In John Howard’s Australia, libraries, museums, theatres and orchestras are on the same list as ports and roads and hospitals—traditional institutions, and necessary parts of the civic fabric. To understand what’s happened under Howard to the arts in general and theatre in particular—the odd mix of generosity and meanness, celebration and indifference, abuse and support—it’s best to keep in mind the lessons learnt in the kerfuffle over the [James Strong report on the symphony] orchestras: that the bedrock arts policy of the Howard Government is not support for the arts—it’s support for arts institutions. Big, traditional institutions.”

The result is that “Canberra has left the fate of the little theatre companies to the states. And those Labor governments are not responding. In John Howard’s Australia, the little companies have no political friends. The fate of these companies presents intractable difficulties for the theatre industry and for the Australia Council. The Roberts report predicting catastrophe is already 2 years old. Later this year when all the cultural ministers of the States, territories and Commonwealth meet again, it will be discussed again. No one is holding out much hope.”

Nor is everything well with the major companies—more and more plays are programmed with small casts and conservative choices are aimed to guarantee audiences, risk is occasional, and most actors survive on little. Marr also reports that the major companies also suffer the impact of “an ideological obsession [which] has seen the Howard government claw back millions from its arts grants. Again, the rot began with Keating. He introduced the idea that to make the bureaucracy leaner and meaner, its funding should be shaved by a percent or so every year. This strategy comes with the Orwellian name of the ‘efficiency dividend’. Howard made the situation much worse about the time the Nugent money started pouring through, by applying the ‘efficiency dividend’ not just to the administrative budget of the Australia Council but to all its grants—including grants to theatre companies, big and little. Over 4 years it clawed back $10 million from the major arts companies.” Marr reports that the Australia Council and the performing arts industry have consistently argued against the efficiency dividend and its mockery of CPI adjusted grants with the result that “in the May budget Canberra effectively exempted the major companies from the ‘efficiency dividend’—though only the major companies and only for the next 3 years.”

As in health, education and research in all sectors, the failure to develop policy and long-term strategies for development means, says Marr, that “Successful as Nugent has been politically, there’s now a danger of the arts drifting back into the old cycle that was supposed to be broken forever: crisis, report, rescue, flat lining, then back to crisis again.”

Equally problematic is Labor’s failure to develop a coherent long-term arts policy. MP Peter Garrett has requested submissions so that Labor will have some 8 months to formulate policy instead of in the rush up to an election. Unfortunately we had to rush in our submissions by November 30 this year. Much will depend on Garrett’s capacity to consult and whether or not he’ll have any clout: as Marr reminds us, “he’s not even part of the Shadow Cabinet.” We live in hope, although it’s no secret Garrett is in search of “budget neutral” recommendations!

David Marr believes, that those in power “want the arts to reflect well on the government. The ground rules are that they don’t want the arts getting up their noses; they don’t want to be embarrassed; and they want the arts minister to look good.” That means looking after the highly visible mainstream companies, and it also means censorship, direct or oblique, with Marr citing the cases of the Playing Australia rejection of funding applications for the tours of Ros Horin’s much sought-after Through the Wire about incarcerated refugees (22 regional centres wanted it), and Version 1.0’s Wages of Spin, a damning account of the political and media management of the war in Iraq. The Australia Council funded the Escape from Woomera computer game and Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers really did get up those political noses, a condition doubtless exacerbated by predictable right wing media outrage. The political response, as Marr reports, was alarming in its extremity. So much for the “trust us” promise concerning the sedition laws of the Anti-Terrorism Bill with politicians so easily offended by art.

Marr concludes with a simple request for more money: “Expensive as they are, the arts need more money—not for the sake of the companies, certainly not for the bureaucrats, and not only for the sake of the artists. For our sake. To release this country’s imagination by mining the creativity that’s there, waiting to be discovered. In its private soul searching late last year, the Australia Council gave a figure that would transform the arts in this country: another $40 million a year. It’s peanuts. It’s a few miles of freeway. But there’s no limit to where it could take us all.”

But Marr’s speech deals with much more than money: it’s about who gets the money, how it is delivered and with what constraints. Each of these issues needs to be addressed otherwise new money, if ever gained, will go the way it usually does.

Lyndon Terracini

Lyndon Terracini’s Rex Cramphorn lecture concurs with growing sentiment in the western world concerning the way that art is thought about and acted on in bureaucracies as not only inappropriate but effectively keeping art at a distance from the lives of most people. Terracini doesn’t have the space to detail how this might be reversed, but John Holden does in Capturing Cultural Capital: How culture has become a tool of government policy, an essay published by Demos, an independent UK thinktank (“a greenhouse for new ideas which can improve the quality of our lives) and which can be downloaded from www.demos.co.uk. Holden is speaking in Australia as part of the Leading Voices program and we will be looking at how his proposals relate to the arts in Australia in a forthcoming edition of RealTime. Jerry Yoshitomi, another speaker in the program, recently addressed the ways in which people engage with and actually experience the arts, but in a much more mainstream context (see p40). John Holden wants us to move beyond the restrictive business models that limit government evaluation of the arts to audience numbers and other statistics. He thinks we must focus on “the affective element of the cultural experience” and issues of public value, including addressing the arts in terms of support in the long-term. Holden argues for inclusiveness: “rather than being an add-on, existing in its own space, culture is seen as an integral and essential part of civil society.”

Given his experience of developing art in regional communities through engaging town councils culturally and financially in his Queensland Music Festival, Terracini turns away from what he calls the “fashionable” attack on the Australia Council to pursue inclusiveness with a passion, demanding state and local government support for the bottom-up emergence of grassroots work, amateur or professional, art rooted in a sense of place and community and telling Australia stories. He argues that “we have a top down bureaucratic system of arts and cultural methodology and unless that is reversed we will continue to agonise about the state of the profession to which many of us have given the best years of our lives.” He sees the state government art bureaucracies (the recently purged Arts Queensland aside) as out of touch with grassroots arts and innovation both in terms of limited awareness and dated application and assessment procedures.

Terracini can only outline what he has in mind, and it’s a problematic sketch involving a disagreeable metaphor: “a new structure of cultural creativity, a cultural pyramid which would have a major impact on the way we work within our cultural and artistic communities.” Without the details, the structure reads like the cultural pyramid we know only too well. Our cultural ecology only looks like a pyramid because it is a reflection of the top-down distribution and exercising of power. Our arts ecology is a more complex system of co-existence and mutualism that doesn’t have to be imagined as hierarchical.

One of the arguments that the Roberts’ report didn’t overplay was that the triennially funded theatre companies are a significant breeding ground for the talent that fuels the major companies. Many small companies in and of themselves are unique cultural phenomena who do not aspire to be big but are not short on impact. A pyramid model ratifies old values: excellence at the top and a trickle up effect with talent emerging from the many below. We know that the best work that travels overseas, representing our culture and portraying its idiosyncrasies, rarely comes from the top of the pyramid. Robyn Archer has put to rest the mythic status of the mainstream (Platform Papers, No 5, The Myth of the Mainstream, Currency House, Sydney, 2004).

My quarrel with Terracini’s imagery aside (and the weariness of having to deal yet again with “Australian stories”, what about the heaps of art that doesn’t ‘tell’?), his lecture is another valuable addition, along with those of Marr and Doyle, to a re-estimation of Australian culture. David Throsby’s forthcoming call for an Australian cultural policy in the Platform Papers series should take the debate to another level. For the first time in many years, the number of voices calling for serious acknowledgment of art’s importance (including John Carey’s questioning of it in What Good Are The Arts?) is multiplying. Their quest is not just about funding, but about access, participation, innovation, the nature of the art experience, how we talk about it, and defeating inhibitive government agendas.

John Doyle, The Andrew Olle Media Lecture 2005, Oct 7; David Marr, “Theatre Under Howard”, The 9th Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture on the Performing Arts, Seymour Centre, Oct 9 (PDF available from www.currencyhouse.org.au); Lyndon Terracini, The Culture of Place: Making Australian Theatre, Rex Cramphorn Lecture, NIDA Theatre, Nov 7

Although the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival lacked an overarching theme, any number of threads and correspondences connected individual events. Shows set in hotel rooms; performances for one; improvised street scenes; epic takes on classic texts: festival goers were challenged to compare the interlaced commonality of works while appraising their contrasts. A mosaic of Wittgensteinian family resemblance more than anything else, it was almost as if the various programmed events spoke to one another through the medium of the audience. It became something of an organic tissue of moments: any experience of a particular event couldn’t help but be inflected by the other performances, exhibitions and happenings to which one had borne witness. Is that what a festival allows its audience to become? A medium?

In this, incoming Artistic Director Kristy Edmunds has proven her mettle in going beyond the stated aim of opening up the festival to new audiences (something of a cliché in festival mission statements). Edmunds has demonstrated a keen eye for both the appetites of Melbourne audiences and the ways in which a festival can allow its patrons to enjoy works in juxtaposition and imbue the experience with a richness beyond individual moments.

Private Eye

IRAA Theatre’s Private Eye puts a flaming torch to the social contract between performer and audience. The solitary ticketholder is directed, alone, to a hotel room in one of the upper floors of the sumptuous Grand Hyatt, where he/she is greeted by director Renato Cuocolo. The furnishings are sparse, personal belongings of a coldly functional nature (a notepad, a suitcase, a diary) discretely placed amongst the cool environment of temporary lodgings. Cuocolo converses casually, mentioning the strangeness of living in hotels, of dwelling in unfamiliar cities, before explaining the odd situation which led to his hiring a private detective to observe and record the daily movements of his wife. Before long he directs his interlocuter to another suite higher in the building where his wife greets her guest in a far more intimate setting. Personal effects are scattered about, from a toy accordion to items of clothing. In the participant’s interaction with performer Roberta Bosetti, Private Eye’s exploration of voyeurism, game-playing and the power of the look are suddenly given new angles, the seductive closeness and privacy teasing out one’s presumptions of the audience/actor relationship and forcing the viewer to confront the deeper significances of watching another human perform. I noted that the name of the private eye in question was given as Hemmings, perhaps not so coincidentally the surname of the lead actor in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and it seemed a perfectly fitting offhand reference to the themes of ambiguous investigation, the exploration of identity and the changes wrought by close observation of an unknowable other. It would be irresponsible to reveal the twist which concludes the evening, but it is certainly one which gave me the most unsettling, almost cruelly humbling experience of the festival, if only because upon returning to street level I was unable to discuss the experience with other audience members. There were none.

Theatre for One

The title of Justin Harris’ Theatre for One: The Late Great Libido: Rock Opera is something of a misnomer, the work being rather a curious hybrid of multimedia, rock, micro-cinema and installation. The (once again) lone audience member is ushered into a curtain-lined booth at one end of which is a television-sized screen divided triptych-like. When the music begins, the 2 outside panels display a tiny landscape of silhouetted CGI performers (on one side a group of musicians, on the other a group of dancers) while the centre pane, sectioned by circular apertures, displays the disembodied head of Harris himself as vocalist. Harris and his minute accompanying band perform 4 big-beat numbers of the infectiously catchy variety, the animated characters articulating every bass slap and wailing sax solo with joyous precision. It’s tasty confectionary which offers little beyond its own purely transient pleasure; like IRAA’s work, there is no one with whom to immediately share the experience, but unlike Private Eye there is no sense of dialogue between audience and actor.

InfraCinema

The pop flavour of Harris’ music and imagery eschews contemplation in favour of a distracted mode of viewing. By contrast, Bruce Mowson’s InfraCinema seeks to avoid such distraction by increasingly minimising any sense of a recognisable referent for its projected video images. Mowson has used infra-red technologies to reduce human figures and cityscapes to a level of abstraction often painterly in style but also profoundly (and deliberately) tedious. Gesturing towards the materialist cinema of the last century, the extended sequences of monotonous, only vaguely pulsating colour invoke similar visual works by Anish Kapoor and require their audience to reflect upon the ways in which they may engage with the artwork. There is no easy way into this presentation, and it is interesting to consider how similar pieces, such as Anthony McCall’s recently toured A Line Describing a Cone (RT66, p26), offer their viewer an “easy way out” via their historical and geographical distance, as well as their positioning as notable works through the mechanisms of art history and canonisation.

Showcase

The audience for Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players’ Showcase is guided into (another) darkened hotel room, and soon enough confronted by a naked man (James Fletcher) lying abed alongside his shadow, an unnamed performer clad in head-to-toe black. The nude businessman begins to explain his situation, announcing the process which has led him to be here, alone in this room with only his shadow for company. There are intimations of sexual tragedy, direct addresses to the small audience, and an eventual dressing in which the bare vulnerability of the earlier oration is slowly covered by a neatly pressed suit. The text is delivered with minimal emotion, a blankness typical of the company’s style. But it is also confoundingly obtuse, circling its subject and forever disallowing deeper understanding of this man’s narrative.

Le Dernier Caravansérail

The displaced modern man of Showcase is put into sharp relief by other, more urgent figures of alienation appearing in the festival. The trope of the exile or displaced individual was iconic for much of the modernist art of the twentieth century, but in the process there often occurred a romanticisation of such figures at odds with the actual experiences under consideration. This is the danger facing any artistic work which seeks to address the diasporic experience: a poetics of exile is not sufficient to map out the political terrain in which exile occurs. To do this, we must first, in the words of Edward Saïd, “set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created…the refugee-peasants with no prospect of returning home.” Ironically, Saïd himself was sometimes accused of the same romanticising of the refugee, but the point remains: to conflate the experiences of exiles, emigres, migrants, refugees, homeless or dispossessed persons into a single figure is a further form of oppression against those in question.

There is no central figure in Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail. Instead, we are presented with an almost staggering number of tales, only sometimes overlapping. Authorial identity is dispersed to produce an almost ecstatic polyphony of narrative voices. The stories from which the piece arises are those of real people encountered by director Ariane Mnouchkine and her cast, and several of the performers themselves contributed personal histories as part of the piece. But more importantly, there is a sense of openness in this vast work entirely fitting with the frequent imagery of turbulent seas and rivers, constant motion and a lack of rootedness (most obviously symbolised in the way characters are never allowed to touch the ground, instead transported by wheeled platforms). If Caravansérail had at its core the figure of an orchestrating director or dramaturg, its meaning would be inextricable from this cult of personality, and as a result could be reduced to a work of personal expression. As it turns out, however, the piece seems to do its best to render its cast and crew transparent vehicles of meaning, dwarfed as they are by the massive space in which they perform.

Small Metal Objects

The spectators attending Back to Back’s Small Metal Objects were as much performers as mute witnesses, situated on a raked bank of seats at one end of the busy Flinders Street Station concourse. Equipped with individual headsets piping an evocative, plaintive score, the opening minutes of the performance saw the passing traffic take on a new significance as we were forced to simply watch the parade of life. When a leisurely paced dialogue between 2 friends joined the soundtrack, the speakers were invisible, somewhere out there amongst the crowd. Slowly they emerge from the other end of the station, companions indistinguishable from those around if it were not for the access we have been given to their private dialogue. Gary (Allan V Watt) is deep in conversation with Steve (Simon Laherty) when he is interrupted by a phone call from a high-powered businessman looking to organise a drug deal; though they are reluctant to disrupt their time together, Alan (Jim Russell) soon turns up to close the deal, enlisting the help of another powerbroker, the psychologist Carolyn (Genevieve Picot) to convince the duo to follow through with the negotiation.

Ordinary commuters were often startled at the sight of a mass of headphoned spectators observing their motions, and several approached the audience to ask questions, offer their thoughts or request spare change. While Gary and Steve were offered as individuals rendered invisible by the strictures of consumer society, we were made all too visible in our act of appropriation. Conversely, the drama played out before us bore testament to the way marginalised peoples are nevertheless inveigled into economic systems which see them only as resources—in this case, drug distribution acting as the dark flipside of economic rationalism.

Bloody Mess

It’s perplexing that so many reviewers appeared to take Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess at face value. Certainly, the performance lived up to its name by creating an apparently chaotic staged mayhem in which each performer’s ego prevents an actual ‘performance’ from taking place. Clowns, roadies, narcissistic thespians and a woman in a gorilla suit cavorted across the massive space enacting impromptu dance routines, launching into unfinished lectures or flinging popcorn, streamers and candy in all directions. To a certain point, there is an obvious ‘kitchen sink’ approach: anything and everything goes, as long as it doesn’t appear to add up to anything resembling a definite meaning or message.

But this simplistic reading seems to commit an injustice, ignoring the craft which has gone into producing a semblance of disorder. A great deal of care is required to create convincing chaos, and Bloody Mess in fact features very little that isn’t tightly planned and rehearsed. More importantly, this is a show about the twin poles of chaos and order, and even a cursory survey of the various recurring themes and motifs of the work reveals this to be the case. We repeatedly return to concepts of creation and destruction, whether it be the universe itself, human life, or the creation of a moment of art from the primordial soup of experience. Bloody Mess’s form is fully integrated with its content, offering as much of an experience of becoming as its various lectures and dance numbers.

The Odyssey

Malthouse Theatre’s The Odyssey was a mixed success, stumbling for some of the reasons Bloody Mess succeeded. This version of the classic tale also takes the road of excess, carnivalising Homer’s epic tale through daring aesthetic choices which too often come across as unmotivated, at times even indulgent. It is a lavish and visually arresting production: a rusted metal set evocative of a missile silo’s interior or a grinding turbine; costuming which bridges various periods of warfare from an American Civil War-styled Odysseus to a monstrous and seductive Circe in Nazi drag; a massive and bone-rattling score and sound design; and a complex lighting routine which keeps the space vital for its long running time. This version of The Odyssey makes its set and visual design a kind of character as much as the actors on stage. But its final form does not offer much of a challenge to its audience, essentially following a safe traditional structure somehow at odds with the exciting possibilities offered by the striking set and strong performances (Stephen Phillips impressive in the lead role).

Amongst the 2005 Festival’s diverse program, in which the audience’s role and self-awareness frequently became central, perhaps the most representative work turned out to be Guy Dartnell and Tom Morris’ Oogly Boogly, tucked away in that often overlooked festival corner: the family-friendly events. The audience for this improvised piece was limited to pre-lingual toddlers and their carers, and saw the performers imitating the actions of the children who quickly came to recognise the unexpected power afforded by this opportunity. Being as yet offspring-challenged, I wasn’t able to witness firsthand this experience, but all accounts suggest that the young participants were quick to immerse themselves in the proceedings. Perhaps it helped kickstart their introduction into that Lacanian mirror stage by which their misrecognition of the boundaries between self and world introduced their budding egos to social being. Perhaps the unusual pleasure of pulling an adult’s strings provided them a rare sense of respect from adults. And perhaps they weren’t so different from any other audience, at once witness, judge and performer—and medium.

Melbourne International Arts Festival: IRAA Theatre, Private Eye, Renato Cuocolo, Roberta Bosetti, Grand Hyatt, Oct 7-22; Justin Harris, Theatre for One: The Late Great Libido: Rock Opera, Federation Square, Oct 7-22; Bruce Mowson, InfraCinema, North Melbourne Town Hall, Oct 13-22; Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players, Showcase, Langham Hotel, Southbank, Oct 12-16; Théâtre du Soleil, Le Dernier Caravansérail, director Ariane Mnouchkine, Royal Exchange Building, Carlton, Oct 11-16; Back to Back Theatre Company, Small Metal Objects, concourse, Flinders Street Station, Oct 7-22; Forced Entertainment, Bloody Mess, The CUB Malthouse, Oct 6-10; Malthouse Theatre, The Odyssey, writer Tom Wright; director Michael Kantor, The Malthouse Workshop, Oct 6-23; Melbourne International Arts Festival, Oct 6-22