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Thomas Buchanan, Paul Rohan, Viewing Point (video still), 2005

The work of Adelaide artist Thomas Buchanan hovers curiously between states. At first glance it seems firmly grounded in the traditions of representational drawing and painting. However, by colliding this mode with performance, video and animation, Buchanan manages to work both at the edges of drawing practice and within a traditional idiom.

In 1999, motivated by a passion for drawing and an ethic of accessibility, Buchanan began making drawings live in several of Adelaide’s nightclubs, accompanying bands, DJs and electronic musicians. Working on an ambitious scale, he creates ferocious drawings that resonate with the club environment and reflect the artist’s love affair with mark-making, gesture and rich, charcoal-dusty materiality. These drawings are held in a constant state of flux, erased and reworked until the last moment when the artist walks away. The drawings exist parallel to the music which is by nature ephemeral and experienced in the moment. The drawings are often perceptual, depicting their immediate surroundings, but frequently feature invented architectural spaces, like the work of Giovanni Piranesi re-imagined in an urban framework. Buchanan is aware of this lineage and also cites Jeffrey Smart and Edward Hopper as influences, evident in his definitively urban aesthetic and subject matter. However, the artist’s live drawing in particular suggests that the real subject of Buchanan’s work is drawing itself. His frenetic mark-making, fuelled by hundreds of visual decisions per minute, recalls artists like Frank Auerbach, Alberto Giacometti and Cy Twombly.

Early in his practice as a ‘performance drawer’ (for want of a better phrase), Buchanan began documenting the club sessions on video. He has since extended the video aspect beyond documentation into short films that act as adjuncts to his drawings, as well as being works in themselves. The videos are collaborative affairs, his primary partner being digital artist and filmmaker Paul Rohan. The videos also feature soundtracks from the bands that Buchanan accompanies in Adelaide’s clubs: in a nice reversal the musicians compose music to complement the drawings.

Using very simple and direct techniques, video works such as Viewing Point and Transition explore the artist’s fascination with drawing as a time based activity. The archaeological quality of Buchanan’s drawings, densely layered with strata of decisions and marks, suggest that for him, time is as much a material in his work as paper and charcoal. The medium of video has allowed the artist to manipulate elements of time, dissecting his process and compressing the evolution of a drawing over several days into a single event. Both the aforementioned video works have been edited to operate as loops and the films are cyclical in both form and content.

In Viewing Point a split-screen, time-lapse sequence shows Buchanan creating a large scale, heavily worked charcoal drawing, which then plays backwards to return to a pristine sheet of paper. In Transition, the artist ‘draws’ a line around Adelaide by filming a circular journey through the city, arriving back at his starting point. Interestingly, the loop is also the building block of much of the music that features in the videos and that fuels Buchanan’s live drawings.

The Transition DVD also shows Buchanan’s drawings passing through the filter of video and coming out the other side. The work segues between moving images, stills and transcriptions into charcoal drawings. In shifting these images from video stills to drawing, Buchanan carefully transcribes the properties of the video–the focus, resolution, light conditions and so on–into drawing terms. In other words, the quirks and imperfections inherent in the video inform the drawing in a rigorous and meaningful way.

There is a strong sense that Buchanan is entering a new cycle of work, one that seems to be propelling him directly to the heart of his concerns with space, mark-making and the conventions of drawing. In the self-produced documentary/promotional video Fusion, his friend and mentor Christopher Orchard speculates on future directions in Buchanan’s work and predicts that the artist will “probably walk into one of his own drawings and just wave as he passes through the picture plane.” During a recent visit to his studio, Buchanan excitedly described to me his upcoming video work Detour, in which he plans to do just that. Informed by William Kentridge’s remarkable films, 7 Fragments for George Méliès, Buchanan uses animation to enter his own work, playfully confusing real space with the notionally illusionistic space of his drawings.

Other works currently in progress include paintings–or perhaps more accurately, drawings in paint–on perspex, enabling the artist to view his surroundings through the drawing surface. This allows him to play further with space, transcribing the environment in a very direct way, while all the time watching for the slippages and nuances that cause the work to shift.

In testing his drawing practice in so many varied ways and in collision with so many other modes of working, Thomas Buchanan takes on the role of a speculative thinker, searching out an elusive synthesis of disciplines, media and sensory experience. Throughout this search he is constantly asking ‘how many states can the thing exist in?’. He answers this question with increasingly eloquent propositions on the elemental business of drawing. Buchanan’s work is a powerful assertion that artistic innovation lives in the attitude of the artist, not necessarily in the advance of technology.

RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 45

In response to the growth and strengthening of sound arts, the last 5 years has seen the emergence of numerous small CD labels. This survey, though by no means comprehensive, looks at several of the labels to see what they make and why, and if recorded sound art is finding a market.

One of the longest running experimental labels is Dr Jim’s Records. The Melbourne-based label was founded in 1990 by Jim Glaspole and Edgar Lee and features releases by prominent artists such as Tim Catlin, Adam Simmons Toy Band, Philip Samartzis & Rasmus B Lunding, Sean Baxter, David Brown, Tim O’Dwyer and various combinations of the above under the different monikers–Lazy, Bucketrider, Western Grey and Candlesnuffer. With 35 releases over 15 years, and an impressive international distribution network, Dr Jim’s is evidence that running an experimental music label is not complete madness

Synaesthesia has also proved a fine example for many of the newer labels. Encouraged by Peter Rehberg of renowned Austrian label Mego, Mark Harwood’s first release was Fennesz + Rosy Parlane Live @ Synaesthesia in 2000. Since then he has released a prolific catalogue of CDs and vinyl by artists including Anthony Pateras, Robin Fox, Snawklor, Dèlire and Canadian artist Tim Hecker–19 releases by the end of 2005. Of particular interest is their latest 4LP set by Marco Fusinato, 0_Synaesthesia. Fusinato is a visual artist who has produced 4 albums of nothing–no actual intentional sonic content–instead concentrating on drawing the grooves that are then pressed to vinyl. This is the commercial realisation of Fusinato’s prior gallery explorations. Harwood has solved some distribution problems, not only for himself but for many other labels, by expanding his vision into a record store (Synaesthesia is also the name of Mark Harwood’s store, a place of pilgrimage for all experimental music lovers visiting Melbourne), stocking a vast array of local and international releases. While he has secured international distribution he is not too concerned about the size of the companies he uses, preferring to connect with smaller communities rather than massive networks. Next up on the catalogue is the ‘bedroom explorations’ of Francis Plagne, a split 12″ by luminaries Bernard Parmegiani and Phil Samartzis, and an LP by Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood.

In Sydney, Dual Plover is the brainchild of the always surprising and usually extreme performer Lucas Abela who decided to create a label to document his own work and the projects that interest him. The first release in 1994 was of recordings of his kombi van. Now run by Abela and Swerve, the label seeks “artists who share a maverick attitude to music making. We have had everything from the electro pop of the Funky Terrorist to the splatter rap of Suicidal Rap Orgy and now show tunes from Singing Sadie.” Abela isn’t completely sure who the audience for this work is, “quite possibly because I never pandered to them to start with. I’ll happily press a disc without knowing if anyone would be interested in it.” But he believes that “people follow the label so intensely [because] they like the surprise of what’s next?” On average Dual Plover would press 500 units which in the past would take around 5 years to sell out. Recently the new titles have cleared in around 2 years. The label has just secured US distribution through Revolver and has small distributors in various cities in Europe. “You need to choose between small niche distributors that love your work but have minimal clout or a large distributor with wide distribution but too much to deal with to realistically promote your label.” Abela believes the solution is to “consider publicists to create a label profile or, better yet, tour as nothing is more effective in creating interest in music than playing live in front of people.”

Just approaching its fifth birthday is Brisbane-based room40, run by Lawrence English. English started the label because he had “come across some incredible recordings [that] weren’t seeing the light of day.” He describes it as a “friends and family label”, having a strong relationship with all the artists he releases, and looking for “projects that have a unique voice–something that sounds intense and focused. I feel that’s an important quality for a document to have…it lends it longevity.” As well as his own work his catalogue includes releases by Ben Frost, Erik Griswold, DJ Olive, Chris Abrahams, Rod Cooper and several limited edition live recordings with visiting internationals such as Scanner, David Toop and Maria Rosenfeld. English isn’t sure who the label’s audience is but feels that a lot of his sales are off-shore, although he does say about international distribution, “I’m not sure if we’ve made any [large] effect as such, just another dedicated boutique label focused on releasing sounds that excite us and adding another layer to the discourse on sound and new music.”

Associated with the impermanent.audio performance events is caleb k’s impermanent.recordings. He started the label feeling that “there were…very few Australian labels who support[ed] truly experimental music. As with the live scene here at the time there were one-offs but no Sydney-based labels.” In 2002 he simultaneously released Stasis Duo’s Hammer & Tongs and Peter Blamey’s Salted Felt. “All of the artists are somehow related to impermanent.audio. The label does not accept submissions, instead it invites musicians to release work.” Not just focused on Australian artists, last year saw the release of Toshimaru Nakamura and Brett Larner’s After School Activity–Toshimaru’s event Off-Site serving as the inspiration for impermanent.audio. Caleb K has no illusions about the audience for this type of work, admitting that it is small, moving around 200 units. “A-musik who distribute the label in Europe (through Germany) stated that they believed Stern and Guerra’s Stitch was the best experimental release of 2003 [but it] only sold a small number of copies in Europe. They are having a tough time moving any stock let alone a label of obscure Australian musicians. Basically I am dreaming of a format somewhere between a CD and a CD-R. 500 units is way too many for this music but I don’t want to go into CD-Rs.” Impermanent.recordings fifth release, Arek Gulbenkoglu’s Points Alone, will be out in the next few months.

Relative newcomers are Cajid and Nature Strip both emerging in 2003 in Melbourne. Cajid is the creation of Jacques Soddell who states, “we have a preference for composed rather than improvised music and actively seek women composers.” Cajid has released albums by Thembi Soddell (his daughter), Bruce Mowson and Lawrence English with a new one by Camilla Hannan and Thembi in the pipeline. 500 copies are distributed via the internet, Synaesthesia and at gigs. “[It is] very difficult to get a response (even a negative one) from international distributors, despite excellent reviews in major publications like The Wire.” Cajid is planning a 12-concert national tour to further promote the work and Soddell hopes to release video art in the future.

Nature Strip founded by Hamish Sinclair, and now involving Joel Stern, has a clear agenda–”works must have an inherent connection between the music/sound and the/their environment.” Nature Strip has 3 releases–solo albums by Tarab and Toshiya Tsunoda, and a compilation of Tarab, Tsunoda, Stern and Lawrence English with one by Loren Chasse due for release in 2005. While acknowledging the audience is small, Sinclair believes it is global–”without international distribution we would not exist.”

So predictably, the audience for this work is passionate but small. Is CD production for small labels really viable? This is a question that Shannon O’Neill, founder of Alias Frequencies is tackling. Alias Frequencies was “founded in the late 90s after bad experiences (as artists) with other labels. We are driven by a love of interesting and under-appreciated music, but…we keep expectations low and don’t make promises we can’t keep.” The house genre tends to be “electronic music with a collage aesthetic.” After releasing 4 CDs (some with additional computer playable video) and 2 CD-Rs by artists such as his own duo, Wake Up and Listen, Puzahki, Hinterlandt and Rik Rue, O’Neill has decided to concentrate on “MP3 releases published on our website and distributed free through p2p [peer to peer], audioblogs etc.” Instead of paying, there will be an option to donate via Paypal, although O’Neill is realistic about how successful that will be. He justifies this approach–”Only a tiny proportion of (popular) artists have ever been able to make a living from CD sales alone…So far we’ve lost money releasing CDs which leads to cashflow problems, which slows down the release schedule. By releasing MP3s instead we can keep costs down [and] release a lot more…digital propagation of music is the underground musician’s best distribution option at the moment…The CD format is dead. Files are the future. Music recordings want to be free.” Bold rhetoric–it will be interesting to watch the development of this new strategy.

www.drjimsrecords.com.au

www.synrecords.com

www.dualplover.com
www.room40.org
www.impermanent.info/recordings
www.naturestrip.com
www.cajid.com
www.aliasfrequencies.org

RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 47

While the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) functions primarily as a traditional concert ensemble, it also presents performances that explore the possibilities of placing a live orchestra in a multimedia context. Luminous was an instance of the orchestra collaborating with significant Australian artists: in this case photographer Bill Henson, sound sculptor Paul Healy and singer Paul Capsis. The ACO performed works beneath a screen onto which Henson’s photographs were projected. Paul Healy’s contributions were heard, while the staging was set, between the live music performances.

Although multimedia extensions of classical concert performances are not unheard of (including perfume occasionally wafting through auditoriums in 19th century song recitals!), they are still rare. While some contemporary composers conceive collaborative works with installation components–some of ELISION Ensemble’s performances are excellent examples–there are an increasing number of live performances by orchestras and ensembles providing music to film.

In Luminous most of the music and all of the photographs were conceived separately and later combined for the performance, an approach that resulted in both strengths and weaknesses. Imaginative presentation of a rich body of musical works in conjunction with other artforms may enhance the experience of both. There were moments in Luminous in which this was certainly the case.

Bill Henson’s photographs of adolescents–portraits capturing the sense of transition inherent in teenage life–have been described as “darkly glowing.” These, as well as his pictures of lonely, derelict urban landscapes, were presented on a screen in images which panned across and zoomed in and out of the original photographs. This sense of movement proved effective in its relationship with the music. It was not, however, a significant factor in the most powerful moments of the concert, when the combination of photographic subjects and music worked to suggest something more than the sum of the parts.

One of the many things music can do is suggest the progression of private thought and emotion. There were points in Luminous when this power of suggestion, combined with stills of adolescent faces and bodies captured in particularly expressive moments, produced a hauntingly evocative result. It was also a wonderfully subtle effect, as Henson’s work is often ambiguous: his images don’t tell a story so much as quietly suggest one. And the temptation to simply provide a blatantly emotional ‘soundtrack’ was generally avoided.

The main weakness in Luminous stemmed from the problem of pacing the images against musical works which, intended to be experienced only aurally, have an emotional structure dependent on the return of elements, their transformation, and the introduction of contrast. This was not such a problem early in the program with the Schnittke Trio-Sonata and music by the film composer Gabriel Yared. But in the second half, during the violin concerto by Peteris Vasks and Good Night from On an Overgrown Path by Janácek, there was a definite sense of disjunction between the play of images and the development of the music. There was also a problem generally in matching the images with fast music: images ceased entirely in the solo cadenzas of the Vasks, and then resumed whenever the music slowed.

Individual moments in Luminous were more effective than the concert as a whole. Highlights for the audience included Paul Capsis’ singing and Tognetti’s performance of the Vasks, as well as the opportunity to see Henson’s work. Other aspects did not cohere as one might have wished: none of the music matched the darkness of Henson’s photos for example (I don’t find George Crumb and Schnittke quite as shockingly sombre). And while Healy’s electronic compositions seemed to embody this character effectively, placing them around the live performances made them seem extraneous. That said, one can’t expect an ambitious attempt at such a combination of media to be without flaws.

Australian Chamber Orchestra, Luminous, artistic director Richard Tognetti, vocals Paul Capsis, photographer Bill Henson, sound sculptor Paul Healy, City Recital Hall, Melbourne, April 10-1

RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 48

Innovation

As I explain in Innovation: in a word (p2), the ‘i’ word gets more use than usual on our pages. This is an edition full of innovators and reflections on innovation, whether in cultural exchange, arts festival programming, sound art, interactive and network art, documentary, experimental and Indigenous filmmaking, or the work of bold young performance makers like My Darling Patricia and Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre and established artists like Michael Kantor and Lucy Guerin.

University arts threatened

As part of the federal government’s rabid anti-union campaign (any union will do, blue collar, white collar, and now student unions), Brendan Nelson, Minister for Education, has introduced a bill in parliament to prevent universities from collecting fees to support student services. This will jeopardise legal, employment and advocacy services, childcare, sport and especially the performing and visual arts. Many artists, including the 800 who signed a protest placed in the country’s major newspapers, acknowledge just how important university arts life, outside formal courses, has been for their broader education and, often, their arts careers and for the community in general. Protests are escalating.

Australia & Germany

This edition features the Australian-German connection in interviews with Dr Roland Goll, Director the Goethe-Institut Sydney, and Gitte Weise, the Sydney-based gallery director who now has a gallery in Berlin where she promotes Australian artists. Goll frankly addresses the not inconsiderable challenges of the cross-cultural relationship and how to improve it with benefits to the arts. Weise’s work parallels the Australia Council’s long term commitment to promoting Australian work in Germany. As well, Adam Jasper reports on a frisky new venture in Berlin with German artists selling idiosnyncratic, bargain multiples in-store and online.

Indigenous artists

Indigenous arts figure strongly in this edition. Theatre director Wesley Enoch reflects on his own work as writer and director in the broader context of Aboriginal art and performance. Lisa Stefanoff describes 25 years of successful Indigenous media production and broadcasting at CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association), based in Alice Springs. CAAMA’s birthday will be celebrated with screenings of their films at the Sydney Film Festival. Rachel O’Reilly visits Leah King-Smith’s latest exhibition in Brisbane and Sarah Jane Norman reviews Screenwest-ABC-FTI’s Deadly Yarns series of short films by emerging Indigenous filmmakers.

Farewell Dan Edwards

RealTime Assistant Editor and OnScreen Editor is leaving RealTime to work as Managing Editor of the Publications Unit of the Australian Film Commission. He’s been a hard-working and integral member of our tiny editorial team. He responded to the brief to build OnScreen’s coverage of documentary film with enthusiasm and increasing authority, introduced new writers to our pages and significantly increased the supplement’s explorations of Indigenous and Asian film. Although seriously sorry to see him going, we wish him well in his new venture, and we hope that he keeps writing. KG

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RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 3

This is the letter I sent to, but did not appear in, The Age in response to Helen Thomson’s reviews of Malthouse’s The Ham Funeral and Journal of the Plague Year (April 18).

Over the years, Helen Thomson’s enthusiasm for staged literature as opposed to live theatre has become reassuringly predictable. I have lost count of the reviews that have failed to conjure any sense of the production and yet provide a thorough and approving account of the text, so long as the play in question includes some Shavian social do-goodery or is immediately available to a kind of Year 12 Literature essay-analysis.

If audiences have attended the dullest examples of dead theatre due to her advice, then her damnation of Michael Kantor’s productions of The Ham Funeral and Journal of the Plague Year should be read as an enthusiastic recommendation to all of us who still believe that going to the theatre can be a blood-pumping adventure full of unexpected, tough and unusual visions. I say these productions are just what we need and exhort inquisitive minds to go; you will find yourself an invigorated audience member in an invigorated theatre.

But there is a massive problem here. One that must be rectified by the appointment to The Age of a reviewer that can, at the very least, approach this new theatre with something more than a cinematic understanding of narrative value (in the Robert McKee tradition) and an insufferably patronising tone. Thomson is patronising both in her choice of words and in the assumption that the bold, clearly controlled choices evident in these productions have failed according to her own limited and prejudiced critical framework. It is unforgivable, even if damning a production, not to credit artists of this calibre with intelligence and intent. But this last point is subtle compared to the broad problem.

What occurred at the Malthouse Theatre was by anyone’s definition, an extraordinary event: 2 new mainstage productions, premiering on the same day in a re-vamped theatre under a fearless artistic director who commands an ensemble of our finest actors and pushes the technical capabilities of the theatre to its limit. Instead of giving us any sense of the excitement that was palpable in the audience, Thomson writes that we were “unmoved”.

Neither will any future reader of her reviews have any impression of the epic nature of the undertaking or the theatrical spectacle. Capturing the flavour of the event, describing it and the context in which it occurs is a basic journalistic requirement, irrespective of the overall critical opinion. But this largess is beyond Thomson who instead wastes valuable space pedantically explaining the “failings” of the productions with the arbitration on taste of a bristling school ma’am.

This reviewer quite clearly has control of the language (and we should never take that for granted) but the mental gymnastics that she performs in order to reconcile her cool authoritative tone with her strangely infuriated, reactionary agenda results in a description of a production that didn’t actually exist, peppered with revealing derogations (songs that are “merely amusing”, dialogue that is “merely unconvincing”) and conclusions that are nothing short of bizarre: the idea that today’s audience have “moved on” from a Jungian framework is hysterical (and would certainly amuse most of the practising psychologists that I know), her assertion that there exists a “genuine Absurdist” theatrical approach is positively alarming, if not oxymoronic, while referring to Kantor’s individual voice within the broad church of Expressionism as Kosky-esque is simply lazy journalism (Robert Wilson, whose Black Rider was seen at this year’s Sydney Festival, springs to mind as a more apt, potentially illuminating comparison for understanding Kantor’s approach.)

For an event such as this we need to demand a reviewer who can offer something more discriminating, useful to readers and historically meaningful. These are exciting times for Melbourne theatre, our daily newspaper has a duty to provide us with a reviewer who is up to the task.

Born in Bangkok, a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (1997), explorer of Butoh and Ideokinesis, Naree Vachananda is about to premiere Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour. On September 11, 2001, writes Vachananda, “My sister, who works in downtown New York, just got out of the subway when she saw people flocking in the street. When she got up to her office with windows facing south, she saw the twin towers collapsing right in front of her eyes. When I spoke to her on the phone, she joked, ‘It’s just like looking at the funeral parlour.’”

At the time Vachananda lived in Fitzroy, on Moor Street opposite a derelict funeral parlour with a for-sale sign that read: “Revive the corpse!”. She also discovered that there was a coffin warehouse next to the parlour and that the coffin-maker used to live in her own house. She started a diary: “The result was not so much an emotional journey as a visual diary written in words.” She was also inspired by poet Jenny Joseph’s Persephone (Bloodaxe, 1986) and decided to create a dancework about mortality. “I looked at various streams of Buddhist thought–to my surprise, one link led me to quantum physics, another to the cyclic flow of life and death as parallel to the myth of Persephone. I chose these 2 ideas as the structural theme of the work.”

The work has been created in collaboration with sound composer Edward Kelly, the sonic component comprising a mix of the performer’s diary, Joseph’s poems and Kelly’s own compositions. With the support of Dancehouse’s Space Grant program, Yeap Heng Shen worked on the visual multimedia component. Vachananda says that a key visual image, among others drawn from Joseph’s poems, is of a train on a journey to an unknown destination. With 2 screens, one at each end of the performance space and the audience facing each other, Vachananda and her collaborators will evoke destinations both in our own world and the underworld. Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour merges local reflections and metaphysical musings in what looks to be an intriguing multimedia performance. RT

Naree Vachananda, Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour, fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne; June 9-12; bookings 03 9662 996

Australia Council restructure

By the time you read this the Australia Council will have met to consider its Future Planning Task Force’s recommendations. Now, after a period of intense debate and hurried consultation, these are weighted with new perspectives, concerns and possibilities (see pages Gallasch, Bott, Harkin, Shaw et al). What Council initially announced as an internal restructure just had too many implications for the future of artform practices, especially in new media, hybrid and community arts, to go unchallenged. The New Media Arts and the Community Cultural Development Boards seem most certainly on their way to oblivion, but various guarantees, quarantinings and reviews will keep in place, at least in the short term, support for the vision and momentum of these fields. The proposed restructure has generated a more vigilant arts community with the formation of new peak organisations coming out of the many meetings held across the country by new media and community cultural development practitioners and organisations. It has also unleashed critiques of the limits of the restructure, specifically its failure to fully address the overall situation for contemporary arts practices, the further erosion of peer assessment, problematic appointments to the artform boards, and the little discussed changing role of the Australia Council, an area of serious concern. On the upside, a welcome dialogue between artists and Council has commenced; lets hope it continues.

For theatre watchers

RealTime’s commitment over the last decade has been to contemporary performance in all its multiplying, hybrid manifestations, and that includes, from time to time, plays. If we had the space we’d cover more, but our attention is on productions of cultural and formal significance that break with the predictable. Theatre has not had the benefit of a dedicated national magazine; a few valiant, short-lived attempts (Theatre Australia, New Theatre Australia, Theatre Australasia) did not get the support of either the industry or audiences that they warranted. It’s a mystery, one that perhaps could be addressed in the larger context of public and press attitudes to Australian theatre by Currency Press’ Platform Papers, provocative essays on the the state of the arts. (We’ll be taking take a close look at the series to date in RT 67.) In the meantime, there’s more theatre than usual in RealTime: Melissa Reeves’ Spook, David Hare’s The Permament Way, Ilbijerri’s Rainbow’s End, Red Stitch’s The Pugilist Specialist, Max Gillies’ The Big Con, Mayu Kanamori’s Chika , Brendan Cowell’s Bed, Bell Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses, and, coming soon to Sydney and Brisbane from South Africa, John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth.

And from those in contemporary performance who are expanding the notion of what is possible in and beyond the theatre, we have Romeo Castelluci, New York’s NYC Players, Radiohole and NTUSA, the UK-USA duo, Curious, Sydney’s version 1.0 and the UK-Australia collaboration Strangers and Intimacy at Melbourne’s Westspace. Movement-based and dance theatre is a critical component of this expanding vision and in this edition we report on Alchemy (Brisbane physical theatre artists working with John Burtt and Katie Laver’s of Perth’s skadada), the dance theatre of In the Dark, Martin Del Amo’s Under Attack, Kate Champion/Force Majeure’s Already Elsewhere and Bagryana Popov’s Subclass26A.

Welcome

The Editors welcome the many new writers who have been joining RealTime over the last 12 months. Some have emerged from the RealTime-BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth) Writers’ Workshop, some are in our mentoring program (a labour intensive business; we’re working our way through the list of patient mentorees), others come recommended by our Contributing Editors and some from the many emerging talents who contact us every month, sending examples of their work and knowing exactly what they want to write about and where it fits in the RealTime scheme of things. As always, a large number of these writers are practising artists. KG

There have been some benefits flowing on from discussions around the proposed restructure of the Australia Council. Consultation took place after being initially off the agenda, new peak organisations have been formed (the National Arts and Culture Alliance, focused on community cultural development, and New Media Arts Australia), current funding structures maintained in the short term, and community cultural development and new media arts are to be the subjects of reviews. It’s a pity that the reviews didn’t predate the restructure given the utter absence of research and consultation evident in the restructure documents and in the Task Force opinions that passed for considered thought. The consultative meetings were valuable, if frustrating in many respects, nevertheless initiating what we all hope will be an ongoing dialogue in which the new peak organizations play a key role. Unprepared for the impact of the restructure and too loosely allied, new media and hybrid artists and producers have learnt much in recent months. The workshop representatives (selected by the Australia Council for 2 meetings) were Lyndal Jones, Mike Stubbs (1st meeting), Caroline Farmer, Sarah Miller, Francesca da Rimini, Rea, David Cranswick, Kim Machan (1st meeting), Julianne Pierce (2nd meeting), Rachael Swain, Daryl Buckley and myself. Task force members included Michael Snelling, Terrey Arcus, Ian McRae and Council CEO Jennifer Bott plus members of staff.

An opportunity lost?

At the consultative meetings, Task Force members iterated their claim that they had acted out of the greatest respect for new media and hybrid artists, that they saw greater opportunities for these practices under the mantle of traditional artform funding categories. These arguments were less than convincing given that Task Force didn’t see these practices as constituting artforms, that they would no longer have their own funding categories, that they would not have a voice on Council and that the quarantining of their funds would have a limited life. So much for respect.

What became clearer was that the Task Force sees the restructure as an opportunity to force onto the other artform boards responsibility for emerging practices resiled from with the establishment of the New Media Arts Board. New media arts it seems is to be sacrificed for the greater good of contemporary art practices.

But just how long will these boards commit to new practices? And with what expertise, what accumulated knowledge of a rapidly changing field of complex practices that have such significance in many aspects of the lives of all Australians? That the Task Force cannot see the value of having a board capable of publicly fronting the engagement of artists with new technological tools, new means of distribution, of audience development and income generation, as well as partnerships extending beyond the arts, is one of the most shocking aspects of the restructure. It is the sign of a great opportunity lost. See the open letters from Brendan Harkin and Dennis Del Favero and other signatories on these pages.

A half-baked restructure

From time to time in the consultative meetings, we were accused of being fixed on a label, new media arts, as validation of our practice. It was also suggested that we were against change. Far from it. A number of us argued that the restructure was half-baked. Why hadn’t the opportunity been seized to review the structure that entails all the artform boards, not just new media arts and CCD? (See the 5th paragraph of Jennifer Bott’s letter.) Did we need artform boards at all? Why wasn’t the struggling Dance Board recognised as a critical example of a small board inadequately funded and better merged with the Theatre Board? Wasn’t there a bigger problem to be addressed, the expenditure on heritage arts at the expense of contemporary arts? Isn’t that the real issue, and right across Council? And, as Daryl Buckley cogently argued, peer assessment by Arts Minister-vetted board members is no way to support contemporary arts practices. As is being proposed for ABC Board appointments, it is time that Council and artform board members be independently nominated and selected, and strictly in terms of their appropriacy. This must be fought for and along with it increased core funding for the artform boards, so that contemporary practices are properly resourced.

Heritage salvation

While we were fighting for the standing and proper resourcing of contemporary arts practices, the Strong report on the state symphony orchestras was released, recommending diminution of player numbers (outside of Sydney and Melbourne), and the Sydney Dance Company announced a deficit of $600,000. Within days, instead of the issues being seriously grappled with by politicians, the media and the public, these organisations were rescued by Prime Minister Howard and Deputy Arts Minister Kemp in the face of backbencher fear of a voter backlash(!). I have sympathy for the state symphony orchestras and the Sydney Dance Company, their collective plights illustrative of the failure of governments to commit to long term planning (how long before like crises emerge again?), but I am horrified at the ease with which the heritage arts are so quickly accommodated.

Peerless future?

One of the major concerns raised at the meetings with the Task Force was how new media and hybrid practices would be adequately assessed in the new structure with its Inter-Arts Office (no longer ‘triaging’ clients to the artform boards, but conducting ‘referrals’) and a limited number of new media expert peers distributed across the artform boards. Where would the collective knowledge and current experience of the field be shared and analysed? One worrying response came from Jennifer Bott who argued that we should regard Australia Council staff members as our peers given their experience and knowledge of the arts. Was this a forecast of even further diminution of peer assessment and the adoption of an Australian Film Commission model, where staff are a part of the decision-making process?

A related matter is the status of the Inter-Arts Office which will all too soon swing into its referring role. The interim CCD division (as part of a reconstituted and retitled Audience & Market Development Division) will be set up under section 17A of the Australia Council charter, allowing Council to appoint members, rather than the Minister. Surely the same should apply to the Inter-Arts Office while it works out exactly how it is going to operate, especially in the matter of peer assessment. Under the proposed model, peers in the Inter-Arts Office assessment meetings will make recommendations for funding, but not final decisions–these will be made by the Director of Arts Development, currently Ben Strout. Strout argued that this signing off was just a technicality and would not interfere with the judgements made by the assessors. Bott argued that other divisions of Council, like Audience & Market Development make funding decisions all the time. But, as Rachael Swain pointed out, those are not grants for the fundamental making of work, they are about its marketing, a very different matter. It would seem a major breach of Council legislature to have a staff member make the final decision on a grant, at whatever remove, however much a mere technicality, without the legality of the action properly addressed or changes to procedure formally instituted. After all, the structures put in place with the establishment of the Australia Council were meant to protect staff from accusations of impropriety of any kind.

What’s in a name?

Briefly, at the end of the second meeting and after an exacting 4 hours of discussion, the issue of relabelling the Visual Arts Board was raised. Various titles like Contemporary Arts Board (too broad), Media Arts Board (confusing) and the Visual Arts Craft & New Media Arts Board (too elaborate) were tabled. I argued that it would be hypocritical of the Task Force to put new media art into a title if they couldn’t recognise it for what it was. But I did ask whether or not the grants booklet would clearly specify new media arts as an area of practice under the visual arts banner–I was assured it would. Until a proper review of new media arts in Australia is conducted (and sooner than late 2005 as planned) and New Media Arts Australia puts a strong case for the return of the New Media Arts Board–or the creation of a cross-industry equivalent outside the Australia Council–we need to closely monitor how the artform boards handle new media and hybrid arts.

The big picture issues of the funding of contemporary art practices, the status of peer assessment, the viability of the current artform board structure, the appropriacy of Board appointments and the precise nature of Council’s role (as it appears to be moving into producer mode), all need our attention.

While noting the Australia Council has ‘done much to acknowledge and nurture new media and hybrid arts’, Keith Gallasch’s editorial (‘Australia Council unplugged’, RealTime, Feb-Mar 2005) implies that the Council’s planned organisational changes will leave this vibrant and growing sector out on a limb. Our intention and our belief is quite the opposite.

Rather than seeing new media and hybrid arts ‘erased or relegated to the small print’, they will be placed on a much stronger financial footing which will, in turn, boost their standing and influence in the arts sector. We have stated categorically that not one cent less will be spent on new media and hybrid arts under the new model, which we have designed to enhance funding opportunities.

Keith raises the issue of ‘loss of status’ by dissolving the NMAB. I would make two points here: that the status of any group depends on the art they create, not on the taxpayer organisations that fund them; and the (harsh) reality is that artists–including those in new media and hybrid arts-need money to keep going. As I said at the Paddington RSL, Sydney meeting on January 24, there has been a significant reduction in value of grants over recent years, a fact not lost on applicants, successful or otherwise. In the name of ‘status’, are we to sustain a system and structure that will diminish their funding?

It’s important to note that the planned organisational changes to the Council are not solely about new media and hybrid arts. We support artists and arts organisations working across the spectrum, and the challenge has been to shape a new organisation that meets a complex range of needs, many of them increasingly interconnected ‘out there’ but still ‘siloed’ operationally under the existing Council model.

New media is an integral and rapidly growing expression of contemporary arts practice. The underlying need is to move away from a 30-year-old, rigid model of grants and services towards one that generates ideas and partnerships. Our role needs to be increasingly about building bridges between various arts sectors, with wider society, business, government and other statutory authorities at all levels. Nobody has suggested this would be easy, but if we don’t address the issues now, the problems will multiply.

Since Keith’s editorial appeared, the Council has conducted numerous forums and workshops on the reorganisation, with robust debate, and we have employed substantial input from all arts sectors in refining the new operational models. As a direct result of these discussions, the Council intends to:

• -support a new media practice conference in September, in association with RMIT and the Australian Film Commission

• -conduct a scoping study of new media/hybrid art following the September conference, with terms of reference agreed by a reference group of new media arts leaders and Council staff

• -offer the normal closing dates for new media art on 1 November 2005 (New Work, New Work (R&D) and Residencies). This is to help the field with the transition to the new structure, and will be assessed in the same way as proposed for the 1 May 2005 closing date.

The Council has applied itself rigorously to what was always going to be a difficult task, and has outlined what it regards as the best model for supporting new media and hybrid arts. After the Council considers that model at its meeting in early April, we look forward to briefing interested parties at meetings around the country from May–a schedule will be available at www.ozco.gov.au/future_planning.

We the undersigned are most concerned about the proposed restructuring of the Australia Council entailing amongst other matters the dissolution of the New Media Arts Board (NMAB). Applying a deep, specialist knowledge of the complexities of New Media theory and practice, the NMAB has played a critical and foundational role in:

• -fostering the institutional embedding of new media arts across the disciplinary spectrum of visual art, dance, music and literature

• -exhibiting and publishing benchmark experimental arts work both in Australia and internationally

• -providing leadership in articulating the development of cutting edge new media research and practice bringing together collaborations between the very best in Australian art and science

• -bringing these collaborations to the mainstream through its groundbreaking co-operation with the Australian Research Council by means of the Synapse Program

• -ensuring a broad range of critical national benefits for contemporary Australian experimental arts

It is noteworthy that the Federal Government, through its “Backing Australia” Policy, has earmarked “Frontier Technologies” as a Government National Priority for funding. Included in this National Priority is “multimedia, content generation and imaging” requiring collaboration between artists and scientists, a core focus of the NMAB.

Australian experimental artists are at the forefront of developing these areas for Australian ICT and infotainment culture and industry. The ability of Australian culture and industry to measure up to and meet the global challenge in the digital media and experimental technology domain necessitates proactive support by Federal agencies in supporting research and development. Countries such as Germany, France, Italy, UK, Sweden, Norway, Canada, not to mention the extraordinary investment in this area by Singapore, make it clear that focused and scaled support in this domain are fundamental to Australia’s future.

Rather than undermining the domain’s official recognition, standing, accrued peer knowledge and voice on the Australia Council, the Council needs to be assessing the ways and means to enhance and magnify support, both financial and organizational, to ensure Australia’s long term artistic, scientific and technological position at the international level.

Professor Jeffrey Shaw
Executive Director
iCINEMA Centre for Interactive Cinema Research
The University of New South Wales

Dr Dennis Del Favero
Executive Chairman
iCINEMA Centre for Interactive Cinema Research
The University of New South Wales

Professor Neil Brown
Co-Director
iCINEMA Centre for Interactive Cinema Research
The University of New South Wales

Professor Ian Howard
Dean, College of Fine Arts
The University of New South Wales

Associate Professor Jill Bennett
Director of Postgraduate Research
College of Fine Arts
University of New South Wales

Professor Ross Gibson
Professor of New Media & Digital Culture
University of Technology, Sydney

Professor Mark Burry
Professor of Innovation
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Associate Professor Nikos Papastergiadis
Deputy Director
Australian Centre
University of Melbourne

Dr Scott McQuire
Senior Lecturer
Media and Communications
University of Melbourne

I write to you as a long-time admirer of your outstanding professionalism, and your enthusiastic commitment and devotion to the arts communities especially in the areas in which I operate, the digital media industries. As I have been involved in many major public initiatives in digital media, across government, industry, commerce, and culture, for over a decade I feel that I am at least qualified to offer you, with every due respect, my professional perspective on the proposed changes at the Australia Council concerning “new media” art.

I strongly and sincerely believe that a commitment to a formal, specific, new media entity within the Australia Council, explicitly denominated as such and with a dedicated budget for funding “new media” initiatives, is absolutely necessary for the successful development of Australia’s commercial new media industries.

Within the project teams and small businesses that have participated in X|Media|Lab every team and project has, or is looking for, the creative difference that changes mere technology into a feasible business proposition. For example, the Director of Programming at Foxtel told me “nothing is going to happen in this industry [interactive television] until the creative people have the chance to play with the new technologies and start coming up with great ideas. If I hear from one more technical person with a great creative idea, I’m going to scream! It has to be the other way around”.

The Digital Media Arts are clearly one of the essential nodes in the new media economy. The art, skills and creativity of digital media practitioners is a decisive input, probably the decisive input, in the successful development of national, sustainable new media industries. Because of digital convergence, these industries include not only the entire span of traditional entertainment, film and television, but also now shape all educational content, electronic publishing, the entire information industries, the internet and broadband content, the music industry, computer games, animation and the whole future of mobile telephony and telecommunications.

The issues involved are of national critical importance, and are recognised as such. The Commonwealth government has committed to the development of a fully-scoped Digital Industries Action Agenda. This Agenda will certainly contain recommendations concerning the creative skills, training, and national innovation systems needed for Australia to succeed in these vast new media industries. The Australia Council’s input into these considerations is vital and anything less than a full-scale commitment to the new media arts will appear, in my opinion, inexplicable.

An explicit, full-scale commitment to developing and funding the new media arts is perfectly consistent with the cross-support mechanisms between the Digital Arts and Commercial Media industries I have seen in the past year in Singapore, Canada, the UK, the US, throughout the European Union, and, most strikingly, in China. The explicit commitment and support for the value of the Digital Media Arts is not only front-and-centre, it is the subject of significant increases in both financial support and visibility.

One small recent example amongst dozens: within two weeks of returning to Los Angeles from the last X|Media|Lab in Melbourne, where she was one of the international Mentors, the Director of the American Film Institute’s (AFI) Enhanced TV Workshop changed the name of the AFI’s entire undertaking to the “Digital Media Creative Lab” in direct response to her Australian experience, whence she saw how we assume the inclusion of digital media artistic skills, perspectives and sensibilities in the development of commercial new media projects. Creativity is the heart and soul of success in the new media industries.

The future of the new media industries does not lie in technologies and gadgets; it lies in creative skills. The Australia Council’s explicit commitment to new media arts, artists, skills, projects, experiments and collaborations, internationally and between art and commerce, is a vital contribution to Australia’s immediate and eventual economic development in these industries.

Recently I have been involved with a number of industry bodies in having the interests of new media producers and practitioners included in any proposed Cross Media Ownership law changes. Our goal is to work towards a new media industry framework that: 1) enables satisfactory commercial opportunities and returns for Australian media and creative professionals, and that also 2) provides access to capital and funding for media producers, 3) creates demand for quality local content, 4) fosters skills and industry development as part of an overall creative economy agenda, and 5) provides careers for practitioners, along with 6) the chance of export success in the global media marketplaces.

The Australia Council has a role to play in every one of these objectives. But without explicit recognition, without funding and resources, without opportunities for professional development, and without the prospect of meaningful, successful careers as new media artists, not only will the creative practitioners in these ascendant new media industries wither and disappear, so will the prospects of developing local new media industries, and, along with that, any chance of Australia’s economic success in these vast, pervasive industries.

Australia has an excellent and steadily improving reputation in these emerging industries. Whenever a round of international mentors comes to Australia for X|Media|Lab (and there have been more than 30 of them now, from all over the world), I make sure that they all receive the latest copy of RealTime. The response is always the same–straightforward and genuine admiration. Not only for the obvious world-class quality of the publication, but also for the extent of Australia’s engagement, the high standards of work, the level of intelligent analysis and self-criticism, and the creative excellence of new media arts in Australia.

Regarding the organisational form of the existing New Media Arts Board, I have no comment. If it needs to change, by all means change it. It’s not the Board per se that counts; it’s the extent and the explicitness of the Council’s commitment to the art form that counts, both financially and formally.

To be frank, the extent of funding for new media arts in Australia is truly appalling! By international standards, funding for new media arts in Australia is virtually non-existent. If we compared new media arts funding in Australia to any European Union nation, to Canada, the UK, or anywhere in Asia (including, for example, even Thailand and the Philippines), our record is abysmal. As the primary advocacy body to government, the Australia Council needs to review its whole discourse on new media arts. Quite simply, Australia should be investing magnitudes more funding support into new media arts.

The Australia Council should consider investing in some hard statistical research into: 1) comparative national funding levels for new media; into the nexus between creativity and the innovation industries; 2) the economic importance of the digital media industries (in their ever increasing scope and reach); and 3) into developing appropriate strategies for investing significantly in innovation systems which productively combine scientific, technological, and artistic experimentation, on both grand and small scales, and which may eventuate in things which find markets and audiences.

I am convinced that we could radically alter the funding commitments to new media by re-casting and re-presenting these kinds of understandings and perceptions. We, the practitioners and the industry, really must work together with the Australia Council to reformulate a whole, new, invigorating discourse that is heard and understood in Canberra.

Viewed strictly as economics, these issues become even more potent. Australia runs an ICT trade deficit in excess of $16 billion per annum, and a Cultural Products trade deficit in excess of $4 billion per annum. To put this into the perspective, this means that we will spend the entire proceeds of the proposed T3 sale on our ICT and Cultural deficits alone in just 18 months. It is vital that we give the new media industries and new media arts their proper weight in this knowledge economy, based equally on skills and creativity.

In summary, I ask that you take into your consideration the views of someone who has chosen to work deliberately betwixt the strictly economic requirements of the commercial new media industries, and the creative skills and talents upon which every success in these new industries depends. Australia does not manufacture hardware or equipment; it manufactures talent.

As far as I can judge, removing the specific new media focus and its associated dedicated funding mechanism will inevitably come to be regarded as a poor policy choice, and a poor legacy. The only places it will be welcomed are in those economies and markets that are pouring investments into developing creative skills in the new media industries much faster, and with far greater determination, than we are.

May I conclude by saying, with all due respect, I know that you personally, and the Australia Council Board, undoubtedly possess the fair-mindedness and the rectitude to re-consider this particular aspect of the proposed organisational changes if you believe that you should do so. I therefore ask, that after you take all submissions into account, and with the benefit of your recent consultations, you conclude the consultant’s report to be in error on this particular matter; and that you make a commitment to the formal establishment of an explictly denominated new media entity within the Australia Council, with its own budget dedicated to funding new media initiatives. Such a decision will be welcomed as sensible, responsible, and forward-looking by all; and it will be a victory, not only for genuine leadership, but for the prospects of Australia’s economic and cultural future in these new media times.

Destiny Deacon, Adoption (1993/2000), Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

The lift deposits visitors to the exhibition on the fourth floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). A printed introduction to the right and lithographed tea-towels to the left are lost on the perimeter, to be read and examined on the next pass or exit. The little fish in the tank filtering the backwash of sunlight draw the visitor to the living/dining room that is modelled after Destiny Deacon’s own. She has, in fact, been living out of boxes since her furniture was exported for the show. The carpet was created to her design and resembles the mess of dolls, Twisties and crayons that might litter her own floor.

The living room seems almost miniature, dwarfed by the bric-a-brac with its vivacious clutter of colours. With so many playthings beckoning it’s like a dollhouse. Most unexpected are the wires at shin level restricting entry. A television set faces the couch, so viewers have to stand uncomfortably against the wires to watch some of Deacon’s earliest film works in soap opera style developing in complexity and quality. The first are shot in the artist’s even more cluttered living room and kitchen, depicting narratives such as a mother’s life in disarray as she drinks through the loss and kidnapping of her child. Later storylines have more developed characters with sets and camera work that mark a sharp increase in budget. The casts include actors and friends like David Page and Lillian Crombie, playing respectively, a transvestite and a grandmother.

On the wall over the television are 2 frames with collages of ideas for films that probably should be made, if only irony sold! On the dining room walls are posters from earlier exhibitions which anticipate the work around the corner, a retrospective of Deacon’s work spanning the last 15 years or so and informed by the activism she was involved in prior to launching her artistic career.

Back past the fish tank, the corridor is hung with blown-up photographs. Deacon blames her unique grainy style on technophobia, and it works to her advantage. The Polaroids, printed on a consumer level bubble jet printer, pull the viewer into the colour, action and emotion of her blurry images, many involving dolls brought to life by their environment. Anyone who knows Deacon’s work will be familiar with the black dolls used throughout her pieces. True, as she claims, they are easy to manipulate and they never complain; even truer is the incredible emotion that she elicits in her use of them.

Marcia Langton, in her 1997 essay “Black humour and the art of Destiny Deacon” (Walk and don’t look blak, MCA, 2004), says that Deacon’s work is “irritating” because of the artist’s ability to push the right buttons, kick-starting “memories, smells and emotions.” Langton describes the work as being able to “resurrect the images of our oppression, position her favourite dolls or people in her stage sets, and eke out discomfort.” Langton wonders whether the work irritates white people in the same way.

In her art, Deacon has explored her own history as depicted in photographs, matching them with portraits of her young mother as she grew up and moved south. It is a journey in which Deacon has simultaneously gathered a stockpile of insulting paraphernalia, reminding the viewer of the tough history of black Australia. This got under my non-Aboriginal skin and gnawed at me as I came upon pieces in the exhibition that mediate on Indigenous life in Australia now. Is it any easier?

The piece titled Adoption is a photograph of plastic baby dolls inside paper cupcake shells. It’s kitschy and humorous but full of irony in the connections it suggests with “shopping” for black babies at orphanages. “Humour cuts deep”, says Deacon in the catalogue. She is not so much baring her own soul as cutting deep into the world around her. From her first photograph, Koori rocks, Gub words (1990), to more recent films projected on a big screen in a dark alcove just past the cupcakes, Deacon’s art seems largely a reaction to what irks her. Both the film, Over d-fence (2004) about nosey neighbours (a pet peeve), and the photographic series depicting graffiti on a sacred site with the striking painted words “My Rock”, record and simultaneously reject acts of disrespect.

The jet print from the Polaroid, No need looking (A) (1999/2004), appears to indicate that there is so much for a black woman in Australia to contend with that even a UFO is no distraction. Further along the wall is a flat screen looping a short film from 1999 entitled, No place like home. The film’s eerie soundtrack includes clips from The Wizard of Oz featuring Dorothy whimsically repeating “There’s no place like home”, and more urgently “Oh Toto, come back!” This same soundtrack remained audible as I stood at the screen watching the silent Forced Images (2001) on the opposing wall. There it quietly (almost subliminally) increased my awareness of the 2 little 4 year olds resisting and at the same time searching for their own identities as they argued and then tried on masks of Indigenous faces. The soundtrack to No place like home matches the trance-like state of the character whose back we follow through city streets as she searches for safety and home. As Natalie King writes in her catalogue essay, “Episodes: a laugh and a tear in every photo”, there are “phantasmagoric apparitions inhabit(ing) Deacon’s funny and unnerving compositions” which match the interests and research that the artist has undertaken on the supernatural, cinema history and popular culture. As Deacon rhetorically asks on the placard explaining her period of work in 1999, “Why be a contemporary artist if you don’t know or care about what is going on?”

Deacon furthers a pointed interaction with the work of other artists by making the historical and the contemporary interact in her portraits series. In a striking self-portrait, Me and Virginia’s doll (1997), Deacon poses like Frida Kahlo except with cigarette in hand and a doll. It’s irreverent. She slouches on the bench comfortably. The photograph is grainy, suggesting that the shadows and light of the composition are more important than any crispness of face or figure. She looks down the barrel of the camera, but the focus is too blurred to imagine that the soul is laid bare. And the cigarette alight in her fingers, glowing and smoking, adds to the feeling that Deacon’s portrait is for herself.

Waiting for the lift and reading the description I missed on the way in, it feels like I know Destiny Deacon well enough from her work to see that these words are not her own. I imagine instead she might have written something like: “Fuck it. I made this. You’re welcome to figure it out for yourself.”

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Mona Hatoum responded to the conflict with a performance piece entitled The negotiating table. As in many early works, Hatoum used her body to explore universal notions of violence, oppression, confinement and displacement. She lay curled on a table for several hours, blindfolded and enclosed in a body bag covered with entrails, blood and bandages. The table, illuminated by a single bulb, was flanked by 2 empty chairs; the silence of the interrogation room jarringly punctuated by news reports of the war and leaders in peace negotiations.

Born in Beirut of exiled Palestinian parents, Hatoum has long been familiar with political unrest and environments in which cultural acceptance is uneasy at best. She found herself further displaced when civil war broke out in Beirut while she was on a short visit to London in 1975. Unable to return to her adopted home, Hatoum used the British citizenship claimed by her parents in Lebanon in 1948, and has since lived in London. Here, in a state of double exile, she commenced the exploration of cultural and physical dislocation with performance, video and installation while studying at the Byam Shaw and Slade art schools.

At the core of Hatoum’s performance and installation work is the experience and corporeal investigation of the ‘exiled’ as physically, culturally or emotionally displaced. Hatoum comments that the exiled ‘other’ exists in a space removed from their own skin, dislocated from their own culture. Her work implicates the spectator in this disrupted position of spatial discord, displacing the viewer’s preconceptions. Several performance works have focused on situations in which the body is confined and challenged: in Under siege (1982) Hatoum struggled for 7 hours to stand in a glass container full of wet and sticky clay, while Suspended (1986) saw her confined in a chicken coop at the Laing Gallery.

Early performance and video works used the effect of surveillance and audience participation to create scenarios in which the spectator alternately becomes the watcher and the watched. The voyeuristic nature of these performances continuously puts the audience in a state of unease and disturbance. In works that she has called “endurance performance”, Hatoum uses video as a third eye, collapsing the power usually afforded the voyeur. In Matters of gravity (1987) she was enclosed in a cell and could only be viewed through a spy hole that used a camera obscura lens to project her upside down. This affected complete visual disorientation for the viewer as Hatoum moved around the space and created a converse sense of place.

For the exiled the measure of distance is always in relation to their origin; what remains there and what is lost. In 1988 Hatoum explored the painful reality of distance in a video work entitled Measures of distance. During a visit to Lebanon in 1981 she recorded conversations with, and footage of, her mother. She layered the imagery of her naked mother in the shower with letters sent to the artist in Arabic, while Hatoum read the words aloud in English. This was further interwoven with segments of their conversations. The result is a narrative of Hatoum’s life as an exile that attempts to recall the intimacy of a relationship, memories faded by time and distance, and failed attempts to recapture the physicality of a kiss or the touch of a body.

In changing from performance and video work to installation and sculpture, the focus on Hatoum’s body as the vehicle for a political message shifted to an emphasis on the absence of the body: “Originally when I did performance, I used the body–my body–as a metaphor for social systems. Now I’m trying to set up situations where the viewer has a direct physical experience with the installation and becomes completely implicated by it.” (Anastasia Aukeman, ‘The body politic’, World Art 3, 1995). The viewer becomes the surrogate body caught in an in-between space, engaged in an exchange between the centre and the periphery, object and subject.

For Hatoum, space is fundamentally about its relation to the body. As an exile, her cultural space has always been discontinuous, at a point of disjuncture–neither here nor there. Her work has been about negotiating a position for the body within a state of simultaneous presence and absence, a body in conflict with extreme physical and spatial disruption. Light sentence (1992) forms a space which constantly changes as a light moves up and down, casting shifting shadows from steel lockers onto the surfaces of a room.

Corps étranger (Foreign body) (1994) represented a return to the body with the artist’s internal organs–respiratory tract, digestive system and intestines–projected onto the floor of a small cylindrical space. Upon entering, the viewer becomes trapped between the edge of the cylinder and the projected corporeal void. An edge or barrier is often used in Mona Hatoum’s work to define a space of separation, representing the “impossibility of communication across the social, political, race, class and gender divides” (interview with Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, MCA Press Kit, 2005).

The human endeavour to locate a place on this planet is explored in a piece inspired by Manzoni’s work of the same title, Socle du monde (Pedestal for the earth) (1992-93). A large cube comprising magnets with opposing poles creates conflicting orientations for iron filings drawn into a writhing and wriggling mass on the surface. Each iron filing battles for its own space, pushing and pulling to form patterns resembling entrails.

Hatoum chooses materials that create contradictory expectations and turns “the object into something dangerous or something that is unable to fulfil its function” (Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, 2005). These contradictions inform her swings made of glass, placed precariously close and facing each other, indicating potential collision; or her wheelchair that not only has sharp knives in place of its handles but also threatens to tip its occupant onto the floor. Many of the works from the late 90s are installations or sculptures that include domestic objects set apart from their familiar surroundings. Sculptures such as Mouli-julienne x 17 (1999), Grater divide (2002) or Cage-à-deux (2002) bring everyday objects such as a vegetable cutter, grater or birdcage into a sphere of danger, confinement and torture, with their extreme scale adding to the uncanniness of the work.

The domestic nature of much of Hatoum’s work undermines our initial reaction of familiarity and safety, as we recognise that what appears to be safe is in fact dangerous, sharp or foreign. For the exiled, this situation is understood, felt and breathed. For Hatoum it is a daily reality expressed in her work as a metaphor for the politics of location and dislocation.

Mona Hatoum: Over my dead body, selected and curated by Elizabeth Ann Macgregor from the Hamburger Kunsthalle solo exhibition, 2004; MCA, Sydney, March 23-May 29

You enter past a wall of coloured stills–spoon, book, bed, guitar and camera. In a plinth in another part of the room, a CD-ROM invites with its image of a Super 8 viewer–itself containing an image of a railway line leading into a tunnel. On the tracks, a mattress and a book lie abandoned.

Touch the mattress and you’re transported to a recreation of the room once inhabited by Eric Warburton whose disappearance is the focus of Vivid Fragments, the CD-ROM installation created by Mahalya Middlemist in collaboration with Justine Cooper and Joshua Raymond. A young man who lived in and around inner-city Sydney for over a decade, Eric Warburton hung out with squatters and street kids and with artists such as Geoffrey Weary, Milton Read and writer Henry Johnston, many of whom, at some time or other, included Eric in their work. John Conomos, whose essay accompanies the exhibition, recalls his own transitory acquaintance. “Eric’s presence was silent, ghostly, understated. All those twenty odd years ago in a city that was seemingly abundant with creativity and cultural and social experimentation.” Middlemist was also a friend. “When he went missing in 1987,” she remembers, “he was a ‘nobody’, his disappearance barely rating a police search or a mention in the press.” She was amazed at how little of him was left once he’d gone.

We enter a squat that friends remember as Eric’s shifting habitat. At one time, the mattress leans against a wall. In another it’s strung on ropes from the rafters. The meagre possessions now offer themselves to our curiosity. I pick up one of the books Eric liked to have around the place, though he was illiterate. Apparently, he disliked people reading in his presence; they appeared to him to be blankly staring into the pages. Touching these objects triggers fragments of memory manifest in a tiny film, a snatch of music (created by Derek Kreckler) or a spoken recollection from some of the people who knew this strange young man. There’s one precious trace of his voice. Each trajectory takes you back into the room, onto the tracks and into the tunnel.
Mahalya Middlemist & Justine Cooper, Vivid Fragments

Mahalya Middlemist & Justine Cooper, Vivid Fragments

In the early 90s, Mahalya Middlemist began compiling material for a documentary, a biography constructed from non-linear impressions and anecdotes. She started looking for traces of Eric Warburton’s life in photographs and on 16mm and Super 8 film. Then her footage and stills were stolen. Luckily, she’d made copies of some of it and this accounts for the texture of the work she describes as composed from “fragments of fragments.”

The experience of Vivid Fragments lies somewhere between meditation and séance and, like the best new media art, the materials are well suited to their subject matter. Middlemist observes that the people she interviewed all claimed a singular memory of this person but they were frequently conflicting. Here the artists give credence to them all while the non-linear architecture of the technology allows for random associations to connect in the interaction. Vivid Fragments is a deeply personal work that also highlights the power of collective memory and of a seemingly fragile community of transients, friends and casual acquaintances. The coloured photographs on the wall are the mute objects of disappearance. From the carefully rendered still, film and sound fragments, the visitor is invited inside this circle to reflect on a life which was, in Middlemist’s words, “marginal in every way.”

Vivid Fragments, CD-ROM by Mahalya Middlemist and Justine Cooper in collaboration with Joshua Raymond, sound design by Derek Kreckler with additional sound by Glenn Remington, Peloton Gallery, Chippendale, Jan 20-29

From the city’s maelstrom of activity, I ducked down a minor street into a minor laneway, past industrial rubbish bins and hospitality drones sucking back cigarettes and into the eye of the storm: the pure white dungeon that is Spacement. The noises and smells of the city disappeared as I entered Self Made Man. Curator Kerrie-Dee Johns’ motif is the dandy, and with it artifice, subversion and celebration. The dandy has an identity thrust upon him that cannot be refused, only presented back to the world in exaggerated form. Overacting, the dandy demonstrates that identity is always a playing of roles, seducing his audience with suggestive irony and meticulous attention to detail.

In Chris Bond’s The Hitchcock-Feldmar Affair the 8 glass-framed memoranda from Hollywood studio executive Warren Feldmar to Alfred Hitchcock appear aged and worn. Each memo, a day or 2 apart, contributes to a narrative culminating in the death of a woman. The clues are at times hilarious and at others disturbing, sometimes both. Alfred becomes AH and then “that man.” Fingerprint smudges appear–is that blood? Feldmar grows aggressive to the point of paranoia. Is he the killer? Veiled behind this story of rapid psychological disintegration is Bond’s meticulously constructed mockery of the ‘dream factory.’

The modest dimensions of Melanie Katsalidis and Jonathan Podborseck’s 10100 10010 00101 00101 hide its larger significance. The shape, not much more than a foot high, is of a tree, but it’s also an icon, divided into 3 segments which seem to represent the natural world (or rather our response to it), the scientific quest, and cultural endeavours. Approaching this serene work, I felt as I did with Ricky Swallow’s Killing Time–the skill is breathtaking, while the emotional weight of the work is its focus. 10100… is more explicit in its intentions–the self that it expresses is indistinguishable from its political and cultural context. One segment includes a richly ironic quotation, a poetic meditation on trees and their meaning, but also haunting in its broader application: in part, it says, “Civilisation grew from exploiting, destroying, venerating and looking back…”
Christian Thompson, The Gates of Tambo [Tracey Moffat], (2004)

Christian Thompson, The Gates of Tambo [Tracey Moffat], (2004)

I carried this reflection with me to Garrett Hughes’s My Vestige. In the centre of a display of stuffed birds, a framed bird skull and small Victorian side tables is a large photographic print of a man and a woman, behind them a screen like patterned wallpaper or carpet, behind that, an English country estate. The man’s hand is plunged into the woman’s bloody side. She is mostly naked, with the half-drugged look of the archetypal victim. As with Peter Greenaway’s films, the imagery is unnerving, almost overwhelming. Hughes, like Greenaway, insists on closing in on visceral realities, showing our civilised icons up to their wrists in blood. As I inched closer and examined its details–the faces as unaffected as any portrait, the bodies composed of re-collaged parts in a kind of Frankensteinian jigsaw–I grew more and more aware of the constructed nature of the image. Hughes whispers to the viewer that the idea of man as hunter and penetrator is not the only construction of power.

In the 3 four-foot square photographs included here from his Gates of Tambo series, Christian Thompson poses as Andy Warhol, Tracey Moffatt and Rusty Peters (a Gija man from the Kimberleys who took up painting at age 60 after a working life as a stockman). In their embodiment of fame, recognition and cultural heritage, these artists might be Thompson’s natural role-models. He plays them straight, casually, as if expressing an affinity. But, especially as Moffatt, in profile, taking a photograph, wearing lipstick, he simultaneously becomes the focus. As an Indigenous man, Thompson knows that art is never considered merely on its own merits, but also by reference to the artist’s personal history and the way the dominant culture permits and shapes each 15 minutes of fame.

The ‘dandies’ of Self Made Man secure positions from which the foundations of our identities can be glimpsed–the dread of an ever-proximate madness, the flight from nature through its destruction, the compulsory and regulated nature of fame. Leaving this composed but disturbing space, I re-entered the city-storm on the lookout for turbulence.

Shimmer’s apt title serves to neatly describe Christian Lock’s holograph and resin wall pieces, Bianca Barling’s richly coloured video and the smooth sleek surfaces of Akira Akira’s sculptures. But the title might also be extended into a more encompassing descriptor, conveying the sense that Shimmer is really about appearances rather than substance.

The works are, for the most part, formally attractive. Christian Lock’s 7 large wall pieces consist of slabs of smooth, richly coloured resin laid over thick swirls of paint smeared on holographic paper. While certainly the most ‘shimmering’ of the works, their interest is more than merely surface, the brush-streaked paintwork providing a 3 dimensional tactility and creating an interior world of infinite detail, despite being impervious inside its resin casing. The works exhibit Lock’s ongoing interest in both the appearance of a material and the material itself, although they replace the previous austerity of colour and frugality of design with gluttonish and lustful over-abundance.

By contrast, the surfaces of Akira Akira’s Snow White I and II are coolly impenetrable. Each curved form lolls on a low plinth like a long white tongue, speaking of the reduction of modernism to a formal template which seems to encompass its aesthetic but not its spirit. Previous work by Akira included subversive touches–objects were shattered and included intriguing details–but these seem docile, blunt, empty, dumb.

In a more literal manner Clint Woodger’s video Sleeper Hold also separates manifestation from its reason for being, combining imagery from the climactic scenes of action films, including explosions, balls of fire, and people leaping, running and being hurled through the air. Deprived of build-up the scenes are also denuded of their power, demonstrating not only Hollywood’s often castigated manipulation of the viewer, but also its reason: without an understanding of the rhythms of time-based work, even ‘inherently’ exciting imagery is dull.

Bianca Barling more successfully builds a completely enclosed world within her film Forever. Visually beautiful and well produced, twin screens are used to depict 2 lovers performing the pain and suffering of love and its end. In their raspberry red rooms, they speak on the phone, look pained and cry, before the girl fires a gun and the boy collapses, clutching his heart. Though its stylised look might be cloying, the romantic watches aghast as the lovers go through their painful motions, heightened by an almost hysterical operatic score in a pantomime both thrilling and heart-breaking.

Sarah CrowEST’s video Globe for Strolling depicts her stumbling about a (soon to be abandoned) local art school campus, sometimes sitting on, sometimes dribbling a large, thigh-high globe, while wearing an identical globe on her head. It’s almost an illustration of the stereotypical indulgences of contemporary art. Rather than being any sort of comment on one’s relationship with self and others, as suggested, its comedy descends into farce as CrowEST struggles to hold her headgear on while blindly staggering along, kicking the globe past a group of students or into a consternated passer-by.

A valiant and powerful essay by Katrina Simmons goes some way towards validation of the works shown. In it, she explains the trials and tribulations of making art and the pitfalls of risk, confusion and failure inherent in the process. Simmons speaks of the artist’s need to discover certain things for themselves, and the inevitability of stumbling a little during the search. Reading it you almost question whether you are wrong for dismissing works as lazy or uninspired. The essay pre-empts other possible criticisms, such as the erosion of a sense of objectivity or meritocracy created by the constant circulation of the same names (CrowEST’s and Barling’s film credits include Akira Akira, while Shimmer’s curator Mimi Kelly also contributed to Barling’s work). Simmons states that Kelly “makes no apologies” for this. A defiant stance? Or a shortcoming celebrated as strategy? Either way, theory doesn’t make up for the oddly self-congratulatory yet dispassionate nature of the works, their reliance on re-visiting old themes and concerns, and the assumption that what is of interest to the artist will necessarily translate into an interesting work of art.

We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. The loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.

Bagryana Popov’s Subclass26A leaves little doubt about the liberal aspirations of Australian society: when it comes to our refugee policy, don’t bother looking for any. Find instead countless petty cruelties dressed up in diaphanous civility. Subclass26A is a mixture of motion, text, speech and sound. As a work involving dancers and movement, it dramatises human relationships through abstraction. As a textual character piece, it mixes dialogue with naturalism. It also addresses the way in which the nation state imagines and practises its right to exclude.

Grey bodies interact in the grey space of detention. Some of them are prisoners, hapless immigrants, others their guards. A few guards are nice, others are less so. Whatever the case, the language is the same. It is designed to destroy people. Bodies jostle over a single musical chair, each sitting and speaking only for a moment. Who are you? Can you tell us in no time at all? Simon Ellis repeats a mesmerising set of gestures. He is at the head of a queue, articulating his self. Inmates wait for their interview, not knowing when it will occur. A man’s face is delicately mauled. One body is able to shirtfront another, to assert an invasion of the other’s personal space. How is it that one person can do these things to another with the sanction of the state?

Is passivity the response? No, there is aggression, frustration, despair, rejection, friendship, withdrawal. Each inmate has an identity. One is from Iraq. He has a story–not that it’s believed. But we believe him. He searches our faces, speaking a language we do not know. His energy pierces the gap between us. Majid Shokor, the man playing an Iraqi is an Iraqi. The real underpins the imaginary. His grace–not dancerly grace, something else–is arresting. In fact, each of the performers is skilled, well chosen.

Despite my sympathies, despite my politics, I find all my perversities come to the surface prior to experiencing Subclass26A. Perhaps I have been reading too much Nietzsche of late. Subclass26A is about our stupid and cruel treatment of refugees, a source of national shame. So why resile from an artwork which addresses such matters? Perhaps it is because I imagine that this work will manipulate its spectator towards some end, that I am to dance when my strings are pulled. However, a work like this operates at many levels. Its differences of style and form are quilted together. The use of percussion throughout the work gives it a Brechtian character in that the drums announce the drama. Yet we identify with the people depicted. Many of the texts used are drawn from Federal Government documents–form 866C, Application for a Protection Visa; a DIMIA draft letter to Iranian detainees; lists of boat arrivals, nationalities–nothing could be more ‘real.’ Yet there are sections which are silent and stylised. Some scenes pin you up against the wall, others let you circle them from afar. The audience strides off knowing that others shuffle towards an unknown destination.
Paul Romano, The Smallest Score and more

Paul Romano, The Smallest Score and more

Paul Romano’s The Smallest Score and more consists of 2 pieces: Rapid, performed by Elissa Lee and Paul Romano, and The Smallest Score, a solo work for Romano. Rapid is in sections. The dancers move separately: Lee occupies Dancehouse’s little proscenium stage towards the back, while Romano roams the space of the floor close to the audience. Eggshells crackle as Lee emerges, snaking across the stage: embryonic throbbing. Her looking is phylogenetic, an organism beginning to see the world.

In contrast, Romano simply offers his back to the spectator, crouched low on his haunches: skull-hips-heels. Time passes, he stays. Lee reappears standing, articulating her arms with a percussive, jointed motion, circling her head. She is against the wall, rather than sharing weight with it, beginning to move, arching, turning. She indicates the expanse of her stomach with her hands, a flat square, then twists away, her spine at an occult angle. She is quite beautiful, a see-saw dipping. Light infuses the movement with a quiet quality, sepia-black, contemplative, fluid. Romano performs an incredibly fast series of movements very close to the audience. His limbs, his head, flung in a flurry away from his centre. Repeat, repeat, his speed and proximity a gust of wind that tails off into a chant of panting as he catches his breath. Finally, Elissa Lee is upside down against the wall. We look as if from above, the wall is her floor because, this time, she pours weight into it.

Both Rapid and the ensuing solo proceed as if constructing movement from the limbs, their joints providing the mobility which arises from the gap between bones. The Smallest Score offers Paul as a person, not merely the subject of movement. Here, as before, his sense of flow arises in the joints as he establishes a lexicon of movement possibilities. Although these actions would seem to create machine-like motion, he turns this into fluid movement. Small moments of spinal continuity punctuate an angular succession of gestures. For the spine is intensely mobile, offering a veritable wealth of vertebrae. How is it that the whole of movement is greater than the sum of its parts?

In The Smallest Score Romano reveals his self, allowing us to watch him, engaging us directly with his look. Gobbledygook softens the atmosphere of this serious endeavour, for The Smallest Score and more represents sustained labour on Romano’s part. He asks questions of his work, finding a kinaesthetic through investigation, opening out that process through performance.

Subclass26A, director Bagryana Popov; performers Natalie Cursio, Simon Ellis, Nadja Kostich, Majid Shokor, Rodney Afif, Ru Atma; Fourtyfivedownstairs, Melbourne; Feb 15-25

The Smallest Score and more, choreographer Paul Romano; performers Elissa Lee, Paul Romano; Dancehouse, Melbourne; Feb 23-25

The dance works produced under the amorphous Chunky Move aegis are often characterised by a certain quality, regardless of their subject matter, which can only be described as party. Not celebration, not carnival, but party. From the chaotic, fragmented colour of Arcade to the dark no-tomorrow roar of Tense Dave, there seems to be a regular undercurrent of mad fraternisation which threatens to spill over into uncontrolled mayhem (ironically, last year’s I Want to Dance Better at Parties was their least party-like show). It’s fitting then that Jo Lloyd’s party-themed dance/installation High Maintenance was presented in the Chunky Move studios.

Lloyd graduated from the VCA in 1995 and has been spoken of recently as one of the “most likelies”of the current generation of young choreographers. In the past 7 years she has been developing a distinctive style which takes the nervy freneticism displayed in her work with Chunky Move and Balletlab to a level of more meditative introspection. High Maintenance is billed as a collaboration between Lloyd and fellow dancers Luke George and Tim Harvey, along with designer Shio Otani and composer Duane Morrison.

Audiences are issued with cardboard hats and party whistles as they enter the studio. We are instructed to line the periphery of the space, sitting on mats strewn with streamers, balloons, empty pizza boxes and cartons of beer. Shio Otani’s design appears consciously low key, the festive debris an appropriately haphazard mess. The atmosphere is boisterous and the audience enters into the spirit of things with gusto, filling the studio with chatter and cheer.

When the dancers enter the space we are presented with 3 bodies trying to piece together the events of the preceding night’s party. They shuffle wearily or slip into simple routines. Soon enough they begin to play out echoes of the party’s excesses, reconstructing key moments before returning to their hung-over torpor. Morrison’s dark, beat-heavy soundtrack is densely textured and the performers admirably work with the music without subsuming their movements to its dictates, falling in and out of phrases proposed by the aural soundscape. The lighting design is almost non-existent: house lights remain on for the duration, which detracts considerably from the ambience of the choreography at its most expressive. This is not a work about bodies in pure motion; where it aims to conjure a mood it does so in spite of the dull glare of the studio lights.

There are repeated suggestions of a love triangle, a betrayal, a gunfight, but these are only ever hinted at in stylised form and do not add up to a coherent series of events. The recurrence of certain sequences gestures towards the mutability of memory the morning after. One of the closing images is of Lloyd and George lying half-undressed upon a pile of lurid green streamers, shifting their hips and their centres of gravity to suggest a half-conscious post-coital discomfort without physically touching. Certain images such as this linger after the performance has finished, and though High Maintenance has difficulties adding up to more than the sum of its parts, the striking inventiveness of individual moments is somehow appropriate to its subject matter.

Ultimately, like the characters themselves, we are left doubtful about what really occurred. What is less uncertain is the potential Jo Lloyd and her collaborators display in this original and evocative work.

High Maintenance, concept Jo Lloyd, Shio Otani; choreographers/performers Jo Lloyd, Luke George, Tim Harvey; sound Duane Morrison; design Shio Otani; Chunky Move studios, Melbourne; March 4-5

Perhaps it was the sunny Adelaide weather, the film festival up the road or the post-election sense that serious work is required if the film industry is to survive the Howard era, but in marked contrast to the “air of gloom” reportedly hanging over last year’s Australian International Documentary Conference (RT60, p16), a generally optimistic tone was maintained throughout this year’s event. South Australian Premier Mike Rann kicked off proceedings in an up-beat fashion by announcing an extra $750,000 in state funding for the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) and a $600,000 deal between the SAFC and SBSi to fund documentaries with a significant broadband component. The initiative reflects an interest in the multi-platform possibilities of documentaries that dominated AIDC 2005.

Premier Rann’s launch was followed by an identity-affirming keynote address by American writer and academic Richard Florida. His thesis, as detailed in his 2002 best-seller The Rise of the Creative Class, is that the West is currently undergoing a transition to a ‘creative economy’, as significant and far-reaching as the 19th century shift from agrarian to industrial society. Prowling the AIDC stage like a slick self-help guru, complete with head-set microphone and well crafted off-the-cuff comments, Florida argued that the creative class flourished under the Clinton Administration in urban centres such as San Francisco, New York and Washington. In the process, however, blue collar workers in those cities and other parts of the United States felt increasingly threatened by, and alienated from, the new economic order. The Bush Administration is the manifestation of their resentment. Florida argued passionately that the creative class must regain the initiative, but to do so we must work towards a more inclusive creative economy that has a place for everyone.

Not having read Florida’s book, I’m not sure to what extent his speech represented a distillation of ideas more fully developed in print. In broad terms his description of the rise of the creative class and the associated political shifts of the past 15 years contains some truth, but he failed to acknowledge that the concurrent process of economic liberalisation has had as negative an impact on many ‘creatives’ as those in more traditional industries. Many Australian academics, researchers and arts workers of all kinds suffer exactly the same forms of economic disempowerment, instability and exploitation as blue collar workers–as many of those at the AIDC could testify. The so-called creative class is in fact a sector comprising several economic classes, some of whom are a good deal worse off than they were 15 years ago.

Figures cited by the AFC’s Rosemary Curtis later in the conference demonstrated that the kind of creative economy described by Florida is precisely what is missing from Australia’s cultural landscape. Only 36% of Australian documentary directors in the past 13 years have made more than one film. Wages and fees have remained static or declined, and most filmmakers lack stable employment. It wasn’t news to anyone at the AIDC when industry researcher Peter Higgs stated his recent study of the local documentary sector revealed an extremely fragile ecosystem with a tiny capital base rendering it highly susceptible to shocks. But Higgs also reaffirmed a point that recurred throughout the conference, and provided a glimmer of hope for Australia’s struggling sector: online platforms will shortly revolutionise the way we produce, distribute and consume audio-visual material. The Australian media industries need to seize the opportunity to create a sustainable production sector in the new environment or risk being permanently excluded from the 21st century media landscape.

New distribution models

In her AIDC 2004 report for RealTime, Carmela Baranowska identified the off-stage discussions between younger filmmakers about alternative modes of production and distribution as one of the event’s key points of interest. In 2005 some of these filmmakers moved centre stage. The story of how Time to Go John (TTGJ) came about in the lead up to last year’s federal election has already been related in RT65 (p18). The team behind the film conducted an inspiring panel session at the AIDC highlighting how much can be achieved by a motivated group committed to change.

The session was enhanced by the on-screen presence of US filmmaker Robert Greenwald whose internet and DVD-distributed documentaries Outfoxed and Uncovered were key inspirations for the TTGJ project. Greenwald’s real-time image was transmitted from New York via the internet using ultra cheap i-chat technology, allowing him to listen, take questions from the audience and reply with a delay of just seconds. The set up was further evidence of the pan-national lines of communication opened by accessible digital technologies such as those employed by Greenwald and the TTGJ team in making and distributing their films. The session’s encouraging tone was rounded off by Melbourne’s OPENChannel Executive Producer Liz Burke announcing the launch of a Political Film Fund created with the profits from TTGJ. The fund will allocate grants of up to $2,000 towards the completion of political film projects.

Canadian inspiration

In terms of new technologies, the real buzz at the AIDC centred on a series of presentations by representatives of Canadian production companies specialising in interactive content. In marked contrast to Australia, where independent producers lurch from project to project and find it almost impossible to build an ongoing capital base, many Canadian production companies are able to function as viable small businesses with a salaried staff of 2 to 5 people.

This situation has been made possible by regulations introduced a decade ago aimed at creating an economic base for Canada’s creative industries. Whenever a broadcaster changes hands, 10% of the price has to be contributed by the purchaser to the Canadian industry through production funds, investment in training or funding of community-based media. Over 10 years this has created several massive monetary injections. Additionally, all TV channels in Canada must meet quotas of locally produced content and cable channels have to contribute 5% of their gross revenue to the local industry. Generally, 4% goes to the Canadian Television Fund, a private-public initiative with an annual budget of around $237 million (all figures are given in Australian dollars), while the other 1% is usually put into private funds established by the broadcasters themselves. The broadcast company is permitted minority representation on the fund board, but essentially the fund must operate at arm’s length from the parent company.

There are now about 20 private funds which have invested approximately $65 million in the industry. One of the most successful is the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, which receives around $5 million annually from the Cable TV company Bell ExpressVu. The fund primarily backs interactive projects associated with a broadcast property (usually a television series) through grants covering up to 75% of production costs. The interactive content generally operates on an online platform. The budget for interactive components of TV series in Canada is typically the equivalent of one broadcast episode.

A range of innovative documentary-related projects underwritten by Bell Fund grants were presented at the AIDC, several of which were aimed at the youth market. Online audiences in this demographic frequently outnumber those tuning into broadcasts. Nathon Gunn of Bitcasters Inc discussed a project in which the website actually generated a broadcast component. Bitcasters were initially commissioned by Canada’s Family Cable Channel to create a site through which children could join a ‘kids’ club.’ Bitcasters created a game-based website that managed to generate a membership of 100,000 with no on-air promotion. Recognising the immense potential of this audience, Bitcasters developed the site with Bell Fund money into an online chat service featuring animated characters who will also feature in a broadcast series.

Patrick Crowe of Xenophile Media discussed 2 projects illustrating the diversity of work backed by the Bell Fund and the flow-on effects created by a funding arrangement that fosters a complementary relationship between television and interactive media production. Toronto’s Rhombus Media, who specialise in music and performance films, required extra funds for a documentary about a lock of Beethoven’s hair. The lock has gone through many hands and had a surprising influence on various people’s lives since it was snipped from the composer’s head on his deathbed. Adding an interactive component allowed Rhombus to apply for Bell Fund money. Xenophile Media were commissioned to create the interactive content and they in turn employed new media artist Alex Mayhew to design an interactive website containing a wealth of material unable to be included in the one hour documentary.

Xenophile Media also received a Bell Fund grant to create an interactive element for the broadcast of the Genie Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the AFI’s). This took the form of a live quiz tied to the content of the broadcast and extra information on award nominees. Interaction took place via the viewer’s television using a window similar to that used in Sky TV satellite services. The interactive component could also be accessed online.

Bell Fund Executive Director Andra Sheffer made the point that projects such as the Genie Awards interactive broadcast attract relatively small audiences and are primarily experiments. The Bell Fund’s mandate is to advance the Canadian broadcasting system, which includes funding untested innovations in interactive media, so that when these experiments evolve into viable revenue streams Canadian practitioners have the expertise, experience and technical infrastructure to become world leaders in providing interactive media content.

Instructive comparisons

The effect of Canada’s funding structures on production activity is starkly revealed by a comparison with Australia, especially on the documentary front. Funding for Australian documentaries represent 3% of the total amount spent locally on audio-visual production; in Canada it’s 12%. Even more telling are the amounts involved: 3% of Australian production spending represents $38 million, while 12% in Canadian represents $416 million. And while domestic box office returns for Canadian feature films in recent years have been even worse than those in Australia, Canada is now the second biggest exporter of television in the world after the United States. They are also positioned to become a world leader in providing interactive content for convergent technology platforms.

UsMob

There was an abundance of Australian talent and innovation on display at the AIDC, and one of the major failings of last year’s conference was remedied with an extensive screening program. Typically, Indigenous filmmaking shone with films like Dhakiyarr vs the King (directors Allan Collins, Tim Murray, RT61, p22) and Rosalie’s Journey (director Warwick Thornton, RT62, p23). Indigenous media was represented by the Warlpiri Media Association and the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). Veteran filmmaker Bob Connolly was also on hand, reading excepts from his new book about the making of Black Harvest (1991), a fitting tribute to his late partner and fellow filmmaker Robin Anderson. Dennis O’Rourke confirmed his role as everyone’s favourite agent provocateur, appearing on several panels and making fellow speakers nervous with every question. O’Rourke’s Landmines–A Love Story and several other local documentaries premiered at the concurrent Adelaide Film Festival (see p21).

One of the most interesting panels on new Australian content focused on the fruits of the AFC-ABC Broadband Initiative. Several practitioners previewed interactive web-based works which will be rolled out over the next few months, the most outstanding of which was David Vadiveloo’s UsMob (usmob.com.au). This project is based around 7 short films, each with 3 different endings exploring the consequences of particular choices. The films were created and shot by Vadiveloo in collaboration with Indigenous children living in a township on the edge of Alice Springs. Vadiveloo has worked in the area intermittently for a decade, initially as a lawyer on a Native Title claim, then as a filmmaker. His documentary Beyond Sorry (RT63, p17) screened at the Adelaide Film Festival.

UsMob emerged from a request by local Indigenous elders for Vadiveloo to create an online space where Aboriginal kids could see their lives represented. The elders also wanted to encourage engagement with digital technologies, as they fear that the digital revolution will simply represent another barrier for Indigenous kids. The UsMob films were developed from the children’s own stories, with the actual shoots largely improvised on location around pre-planned ideas. The cast comprised the kids and members of their community. Every stage of the project’s development and production was vetted by the community.

The UsMob films are to appear on the web over 7 weeks from late February. The site also contains games, scrap books compiled by the kids during the shoot, and an interactive feedback area where users can respond to the films and upload their own stories and images. The site will not only provide a space for Indigenous kids online, but also link them with children outside their own environment, forging what Vadiveloo calls a virtual “community of consequence.”

The challenge

Unfortunately, the AFC-ABC Broadband Initiative was a one-off round of grants. The projects showcased at the AIDC were as impressive as anything the Canadians had to offer, but it’s difficult to see how the groundbreaking work of our interactive media producers can continue and develop without serious, ongoing investment. This extends into infrastructure: apart from their innovative funding models, Canadians have a major advantage over Australian producers in the area of broadband take-up rates. Nearly 70% of Canadian households have the broadband connections required to carry advanced interactive content; the figure in Australia is around 14%.

There was much talk at the AIDC of campaigning for the establishment of a private fund based on the Canadian model with profits from the Telstra sale. Given the depressing trajectory of the Australian film industry, and the financial strangulation of our traditional funding bodies by the Howard government, structures which provide a degree of long term economic stability for small producers are desperately needed. For all the stimulating talks and great films, for many delegates the AIDC boiled down to one thing–money. I got the distinct impression that the real action was taking place off stage in the lunches and tea breaks, with frenzied card swapping, desperate attempts to solicit broadcaster representatives’ time and nervous corridor pitches to sceptical commissioning editors.

A week after the AIDC, the Canadian delegation appeared at a Sydney forum organised by X|Media|Lab and the Australian Writer’s Guild, focussing on new funding models for Australia’s media industries. Federal Liberal MPs Bruce Baird and Bronwyn Bishop were in attendance, and in his summing up Baird expressed a keen interest in the Canadian models. His positive tone was somewhat undercut by a frank admission that Treasury is determined that all profits from the Telstra sale will go towards servicing debt. Long term investment in creative, informational and educational industries is essential if Australia is to become an exporter of 21st century commodities. The alternative is to become an increasingly irrelevant old economy based on natural resource exports and consumption of overseas goods, generating an ever-growing current account deficit.

The way forward

The insights provided by the Bell Fund delegation provide some working models around which discussion and long-term lobbying of the federal government can coalesce. As Domenic Friguglietti of ABC New Media and Digital Services commented at the AIDC, Australia’s existing funding structures generate tension between an interactive media community and film industry competing for the same scarce resources. The Bell Fund model fosters an artistically and financially complementary relationship between interactive media and traditional film and television production.

The primary message to emerge from the discussions at the AIDC and the Sydney forum was the need for a long term industry strategy and a united voice when lobbying government. The cultural justification for subsidised media production is valid, but holds no sway with those in Canberra. However, the Canadian experience demonstrates that well planned economic structuring by government can create a viable domestic and export media industry not reliant on a constant stream of individual government grants. The Free Trade Agreement with the US is already in effect and there is only a tiny window of opportunity left before the Coalition’s takeover of the Senate and the consequent Telstra sale. It remains to be seen whether Australian documentary makers, and media producers in general, have left it too late to persuade the government to create the necessary economic structures that might allow an Australian creative economy to flourish in the 21st century.

Attending the Mobile Journeys forum at Sydney’s Chauvel Cinema in February, it was fascinating to watch the tensions playing out between new media practitioners excited by the aesthetic and financial possibilities of mobile phone art and telco representatives apparently interested solely in company profits. The presentations ran the gamut from market surveys featuring endless figures and pie-charts, to a hyperactive address from Fee Plumley and Ben Jones of the-phone-book Limited (UK) urging us to seize the medium and push aesthetic boundaries: “It’s like the early days of cinema–we’ve got to cross the line to find out when crossing the line isn’t good.”

The forum was part of the FutureScreen Mobile program of masterclasses and forums run by dLux Media Arts between September 2004 and February this year. It’s too early to say what will eventuate in the ground between the commercial and artistic poles represented at Mobile Journeys, but if the ‘MicroMovies’ commissioned for Hutchison’s ‘3’ network shown at the forum are any indication, don’t expect innovative content from our telcos. Short animations like Tightarse Tighthead aren’t exactly exploring a brave new audio-visual frontier.

Mark Pesce of AFTRS’ Digital Media Department argued that telcos will never understand the aesthetic or commercial potential of mobile phones until they start providing content that treats users as social beings first, and consumers second. Pesce’s claim is supported by Anna Davis’ feature report examining global developments in phone art. Installations such as Blinkenlights (Chaos Computer Club, Germany) employ phones as points of interaction in works that directly address a wider community. In other words, they treat phones as network devices rather than delivery points for pre-made content.

Having said that, at least some of the local interest in mobile phones has come from filmmakers desperate for any outlet in a media landscape increasingly bereft of Australian content. My AIDC report details some of the alternative funding models presently being discussed to address the general downward slide in Australian documentary and drama production. But even the mixed public-private structures outlined by the Canadian delegation at AIDC require a governmental commitment to the industry. An essential part of this is content regulation: in another short-sighted move at the end of March the federal government rejected the Australian Broadcasting Authority’s recommendation to introduce local content rules for the 10 documentary channels on Australian pay TV. Locally made documentaries comprise just 4.9% of the content on these channels, with the vast majority of programs repeated from free-to-air. Without regulation, this figure is expected to decline; a familiar story of Australian talent being stymied by the limited vision of our political and corporate leaders.DE

As I spent a week moving between the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) and the Adelaide Film Festival, the contrast between the 2 events became stark. While AIDC was all money, funding structures, frenzied networking and industry talk, the AFF was unabashedly a cultural event, complete with gala opening, premieres and international guests. In initiating the festival in 2003, SA Premier Mike Rann set out to differentiate the event from others here and overseas with a film investment fund, allowing the AFF to help produce as well as screen new works. This lent an extra charge to opening night, as the festival unveiled the first feature film made partly with AFF money.

Look Both Ways

Look Both Ways is the debut feature from Sarah Watt, previously known for her darkly original animated shorts. Set in Port Adelaide, the film revolves around the mysterious death of a young man under a train. Rather than constructing a tight linear narrative, Watt’s story follows various characters as they orbit around the man’s death, creating a snapshot of life in an Australian suburban milieu. The camera lingers on the streets, parks and wastelands that characterise the edge of all Australian cities, capturing the sense of Port Adelaide as an in-between zone that’s neither white picket fence suburbia nor dense urban space. The characters also convey a sense of being caught ‘in-between’, trapped in a position of stasis in their private lives and careers.

Look Both Ways is also notable for a degree of formal innovation, with Watt’s background evident in brief passages of animated watercolour fantasies bursting forth from the mind of one of the protagonists. The meditative pace is further punctuated by sequences of rapid fire editing unleashing impressionistic flashbacks. Watt’s mixed approach to film form, the nuanced performances and wholly convincing dialogue make for a quietly evocative film that manages to depict contemporary Australians without ever lapsing into crudely drawn stereotypes.

Documentary

The opening night of the AFF also saw Australian documentary auteur Dennis O’Rourke presented with the Don Dunstan Award for his outstanding contribution to the Australian film industry. Landmines–A Love Story, his latest account of a personal encounter with the world’s dispossessed, premiered at the festival (see p25). The AFF’s other key documentary debut was Cathy Henkel’s I Told You I was Ill: Spike Milligan. As one of the AFF Investment Fund recipients, Henkel’s film received considerable hype and the premiere was a festive affair, with Mike Rann and members of Milligan’s family on hand to introduce the film before a capacity crowd.

I Told You I was Ill was an enjoyable and intimate portrait of the Milligan clan, but I was less convinced it fulfilled Henkel’s promise to “show us a side of Milligan we have never seen before.” The extensive home movie footage was fascinating, but the film as a whole revealed little about the comic that hasn’t been said elsewhere, and the use of animated characters drifting across screen during interviews came over as twee rather than Milliganesque. In the midst of festival fever it was hard to judge the extent to which the film suffered from over-promotion; one of the dangers of an investment fund is the enormous weight of expectation placed on the festival products. In fairness to Henkel, it must also be said that an unfortunate technical problem meant only part of the soundtrack was audible at the debut.

On the international documentary front, one of the most remarkable films was Kim Dong-won’s 3 hour epic Repatriation, detailing the fate of “unconverted” North Korean spies living in South Korea. The film’s subjects were imprisoned in the early 1960s and endured harsh conditions until released in the early 1990s during South Korea’s transition to a civilian government. With no access to support or medical services, and cut off from their homeland, the North Koreans eked out an existence performing menial jobs. When one of them moved into Kim Dong-won’s neighbourhood, the filmmaker began recording their interactions, and the ex-spy introduced him to a wide network of comrades trapped south of the border.

Repatriation is part verité study of individuals caught in the currents of history and part cinematic essay on the tragic history of modern Korea. Having been raised on a diet of rabid anti-communism, Kim initially finds the ex-spies’ devotion to North Korea simultaneously puzzling, endearing and disturbing. Their refusal to countenance talk of North Korean atrocities is troubling, but their treatment by South Korea is hardly an advertisement for capitalist ‘freedom.’ In extended interviews they detail the brutal torture they endured in prison as authorities tried to forcibly convert them. Kim tracks down ex-prisoners who did renounce communism, and in contrast to the proud “yet-to-be-converted” (South Korea’s term for recalcitrant prisoners), finds them deeply traumatised by their betrayal of the socialist cause. Ironically, Kim also finds himself persecuted by South Korean police for talking to the former spies; at one point his office is raided and all footage is confiscated.

Far from being brainwashed ideologues, the ex-spies come across as men of principle, deeply committed to socialist ideals and genuinely distressed by the selfish competitiveness of South Korean society. Their desire to return home was so strong that I found myself dreading the deep disappointment, disillusionment and possible persecution that they would surely endure if repatriated. Eventually they are allowed to return home during a brief period of détente at the turn of the decade, and Kim attempts to visit North Korea to report on their fate. An opportunity to visit Pyongyang as part of a delegation covering official celebrations does arise, but he is prevented from leaving Seoul by South Korean authorities–he is still under investigation for his contact with the North Koreans. A friend is able to make the journey and bumps into the ex-spies as they are being transported to partake in the celebrations. They appear radiantly happy and in markedly better health than the aged, harassed figures we see earlier in the film. The work’s most poignant moment sees one of the men speaking directly to camera, declaring Kim Dong-won to be like a son. “I miss you” he says. In this one scene the entire tragedy of the Korean peninsular falls into focus; like Kim, we feel the yawning chasm of political, cultural, and military barriers separating us from men we have come to know. Repatriation achieves a compassionate humanism without ever sidestepping the complex cultural and ideological divisions that plague post-war Korea.

Machuca

An historical theme was also evident in one of the festival’s feature film highlights: Andres Wood’s Machuca. Dramatising life in Chile’s capital in the months leading up to, and immediately following, the bloody coup of September 11 1973 that deposed Salvador Allende’s elected government, Machuca captured the sense of unrest that characterised the period, and the disquiet Allende’s empowerment of the poor caused Chile’s middle-class. It also doesn’t shy away from portraying the middle class’ complicity in fostering the air of reaction that led to the coup.

Machuca does not, however, demonise the wealthy, nor canonise the poor. One of the film’s most revealing aspects is the middle-class horror at the brutality of the military crackdown when it finally happens, and the extent to which all Chileans suffered under the repression. The film’s portrayal of military violence was a surprise given the still-contested nature of the period in Chile itself. Machuca was Chile’s biggest ever domestic box office hit, perhaps signifying the country is ready to begin exorcising the lingering trauma of the Pinochet years.

Café Lumiere

Finally, on a more peaceful note, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumiere provided a centre of calm in the festival. A young woman attempts to locate the spaces inhabited by a Tokyo jazz musician of the 1920s which have long since been erased by bombs and redevelopment. Her friend obsessively travels the Tokyo subway, recording its sounds in order to find the system’s ‘essence.’ Hou constructs a beautiful film about space with minimal dialogue and narrative development, and obsessive framing of the highly urbanised environment through which the characters move. Tokyo becomes a network without beginning or end, in which people’s lives casually intersect and move apart in an endless, seemingly random pattern. An intertitle dedicates the work to Japan’s master of on-screen spatial relations, Yasujiro Ozu.

Festival identity

There were many other gems among the sample of films I caught at the AFF; space precludes mentioning all of them. Director Katrina Sedgwick created an innovative program and has worked hard to give the AFF all the trappings of an international festival. It was deeply refreshing to see Premier Rann not only providing financial backing for an Australian cultural event and the making of films under the festival’s aegis, but also lending support through his enthusiastic presence. However, the fact the festival is so closely identified with Rann raises the question of its fate when the Premier eventually leaves office. If the AFF is to succeed in becoming an important date on the international film calendar it needs the kind of sustained support and investment that has seen Pusan become Asia’s key film festival.

How does anyone learn to be a visionary? It’s one thing to make the notion of “visionary filmmaking” a rallying cry, as Peter Sainsbury did in his wonderful 2002 speech (RT53 & 54) urging filmmakers and members of funding bodies alike to take more risks and trust their individual judgement. But it’s quite another for a government organisation to put this philosophy into practice in a systematic way. If you believe the publicity, this is the Australian Film Commission’s aim with their new IndiVision initiative, which draws on the $15 million promised last year by the federal government to fund low budget features.

Besides funds for script development and production, the program incorporates an annual Project Lab (held for the first time in February) where 8 filmmaking teams get to discuss their projects with local and international advisors. According to the AFC’s Director of Film Development, Carole Sklan, one aim of the Lab was to encourage participants to try new approaches, in an exploratory rather than prescriptive fashion. Thus the workshops were accompanied by a touring program of recent international low budget features (most from first time directors) meant to illustrate the range of stylistic and dramatic options possible on a low budget. The blurbs for the screenings even hint that lack of resources can benefit a film by stripping it down to essentials like script, performances and a strong basic concept–though Sklan stresses that it’s films, not just scripts, which are being developed.

Some cracks in the IndiVision approach start to become visible here, and while the screening program was a worthwhile experiment, the actual films shown proved less than inspiring for this viewer. It’s easy to imagine Australian equivalents to Tully (Hilary Birmingham, USA, 2000), or The Station Agent (Tom McCarthy, USA, 2003) but by the same token they don’t add much to the local tradition of understated naturalism. A tasteful heart-warmer about misfits bonding, The Station Agent is the kind of movie where a set piece consists of the main characters taking a stroll along a railway track, eating some beef jerky and coming home (“That was a good walk!”).

Other selections register as more hip but not necessarily more substantial. Heavily reliant on post-production effects and attractive young faces in close-up, Reconstruction (Christoffer Boe, Denmark, 2003) is a lightweight metaphysical enigma, typical of one brand of current European art cinema in its reality shifts and musings on the contingency of love. Stylistically the most thoughtful of the bunch, Mon Tresor (Keren Yedaya, Israel/France, 2004) shows a teenager’s descent into prostitution in long takes that lend a classy austerity to the sordid subject matter. But by the end it’s hard to see what purpose was intended, unless the spectacle of misery is taken to be fascinating in itself.

Asked about the weaknesses of current Australian cinema, Sklan cites “a certain emotional timidity” as a problem to be addressed. “Audiences want to laugh and cry…they want a special, unique, transporting experience.” Though I wholeheartedly agree, her words suggest a potential difficulty with the entire initiative: the ‘visionary’ aesthetic outlined in Sainsbury’s address is basically a refurbishment of modernism, hence reliant on ambiguities that often block easy emotional response. Yet the evasion of direct feeling tends to be experienced by at least some viewers as a betrayal. This may explain why the screening program steers away from the zanier and more wilfully baffling trends in modern film narrative, from Gerry (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2002) to Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2004). As professional performances and well written scripts aren’t priorities in films like these, it’s unclear how far they’d be aided by a craft-based development process, while the maximalism of a film like I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell, 2004) might be problematic in a different way.

Of course there are approaches allowing filmmakers to combine emotional directness with unobtrusive formal experiment–some of Mike Leigh’s recent films are exemplary here. It’s easy to see why the program flashes back a few years to include Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (Denmark, 1998), the best-known example of the supposedly gritty, truth-telling Dogma style. But as Lars von Trier’s antics made clear at the time, there was always a satanic side to the Dogma pact. Paradoxically flaunting its lack of artifice, Festen’s camera work mocks the ‘transparent’ innocence of home movies, while its shock-horror revelations remain close to the conventions of the well made play [the post-film stage version of Festen is playing internationally, including Australia in 2005. Eds].

Though this gloating duplicity is undeniably ‘modern’, later works that draw on the Dogma idiom tend to indulge the craving for raw emotion without irony–as in the mawkish if sometimes affecting 16 Years of Alcohol (Richard Jobson, Scotland, 2003), also included in the screening program. Again, it’s hard to see what purpose is served by this emotional button-pushing, apart from “working through” personal trauma which here as elsewhere arises from the family, with broader significance implicit at best. But in a postmodern, anything-goes context, it’s hard to find the shared vocabulary which would even allow such issues to be debated.

More easily discussed are the challenges of economics. It’s little wonder that local filmmakers are reluctant to take risks given the restrictions imposed by low budgets, the difficulty of attracting audiences to any kind of Australian cinema and the ongoing need to locate additional funding sources to stay in the game. Yet in the ever expanding international marketplace there’s no way anyone can sustain an art film career by playing it safe. In Australia today, it takes all the ingenuity of a Rolf de Heer to walk this tightrope, and while his shifts and dodges command admiration it’s questionable whether his movies have gained as a result.

Still, one can hope that the would-be filmmakers who consulted with him at this year’s Project Lab picked up a few tips. As Sklan ruefully admits, whatever can be done to facilitate ‘vision’, everything ultimately comes back to the resources of the individual. “We set up a low-budget initiative but it came from us, the AFC. It should have come from the filmmakers themselves. All we can do is set up the possibilities and say, ‘What do you want to do with them?’”

The next deadline for AFC low budget feature production grants is July 15. Applicants can apply for up to $1 million. The next deadline for the IndiVision workshop and development funding is September 2. The workshop is open to filmmakers of all levels. See www.afc.gov.au for details.

Louise Curham is at the forefront of Australian moving image art. As well known for curating innovative expanded cinema events in non-traditional exhibition spaces as for provocative Actionist performances, Curham is highly regarded in the experimental film world for her work using “obsolete media.” Her hand-worked Super 8 films reinvent the home movie medium of years gone by.

Her new film, Tenho Saudades, showcases Curham’s continuing (some would say consuming) obsession with physical mark-making and intervention in the filmmaking process. The work consists of Super 8 footage which has been subjected to a range of interventions (hand painting and other ‘direct animation’ techniques including scratching, bleaching, and collaging) along with a male voiceover. Some found footage (including a millisecond of a bemused looking Bert and Ernie!) and pieces of optically printed and re-shot film strips are interpolated with treated footage shot in Brazil by collaborator Peter Humble. The layered soundscape carefully juxtaposes various pieces of music–a Bach fugue, Brazilian drumming, club techno–with traffic and street noises. For most of its 18 minutes, the male voice narrates, unusually in the second person, a visiting male performer’s encounter with the gay underbelly of Brazil: “You have a map. In red pen you mark the location of gay clubs. The first one you can’t find. The second one, it’s packed. Groups of guys, drinking, laughing, dancing. Are gay clubs the same all over the world?”

This voice-over may not be to the taste of all avant-garde film lovers. Viewed without the sound, it is certainly pointless to construct much of a narrative from seemingly random images of a South American city collaged with hand-processed film. Screened silent (as many avant-garde films are, to avoid the melodrama inherent in what Stan Brakhage famously termed the ‘grand opera’ of narrativity), the film is–typically of Curham’s work–nothing short of a visual orgasm of sublime colours, textures and forms. The intense sensuality of the bands and strips of film bleeding, weaving and colliding with each other is exquisite, as are Curham’s signature jewel colours–explosions of amethyst, emerald, amber and sapphire, the result of her alchemical explorations in hand-processing.

With the sound added Tenho Saudades joins an international conversation with other experimental films that explore themes of gay identity and interracial romance. It invites comparisons with Karim Ainouz’s Paixo Nacional (1994), a beautiful 16mm film about a young Brazilian man fleeing homophobic persecution in his homeland, intercut with touristic images of Brazil as a land of sexual license. It also brings to mind films by the highly acclaimed German queer artist Matthias Muller, whose works such as The Memo Book (1989) also evoke emotions through complex manipulations of film material and lyrical abstraction.

Contextualising Tenho Saudades in the field of gay experimental film/video, which emphasises masculine subjectivity and formal manipulation, perhaps ameliorates some of the ‘pure film’ concerns about the voice-over, since it functions as an aesthetic genre marker.

Curham famously ‘performs’ her film works with noise orchestras and other musicians, darting between multiple projectors, adjusting them, turning them on and off. This suggests that there may be multiple ways of seeing Tenho Saudades: as a gay experimental film, as an aesthetic object evidencing its maker’s fine art training, and, given its poignant title (which means ‘I miss you’), as a hymn to a dying medium. Whichever way you see it, Tenho Saudades is an extraordinary film.

Tenho Saudades, images by Louise Curham, voiceover written and performed by Peter Humble, 2005

This year’s Festival of German Films presents a culture increasingly engaged with the political, economic, social and personal problems that have emerged in a reunified Germany at the epicentre of the trans-national experiment that is the European Union. The reunification theme is most extensively addressed in Heimat 3, one of this year’s highlights. There are also the latest insider reflections on the Nazi period, controversially addressed in the festival’s other key film, Downfall.

Hitler the human

Directed by festival guest Oliver Hirschbiegel, Downfall (Der Untergang) has been a commercial, if controversial, hit in Germany. This first German account of the last days of the Nazi regime inside the Chancellory bunker has attracted criticism for treating Hitler’s inner circle as ‘human.’ Besides Goebbels (who appears pathological), the military and political leaders surrounding Hitler are recognisably ordinary; they could be the servile, if tense, senior advisors surrounding any multinational’s CEO. Downfall refuses to metaphysically ascribe evil to the Nazi regime. The benefit of such a prosaic portrayal is that Nazism can be seen as an exaggerated playing out of radically regressive elements within other historical and political moments in Western culture, including our own.

Although in theory an important advance, the film tends to overplay its demythologising strategy. While it is valid to undermine a view of the Nazi period which pretends that present-day politicians, business leaders and ordinary people wouldn’t or don’t collaborate with the power elite of the day (no matter how appalling its ideology or actions), the film seems to assume that the only recognisable humanity is a redemptive, ‘positive’ one. Hence there are often overly sympathetic portrayals of Nazi figures, belying their complicity in the horror of Nazism, the war and the Holocaust. Professor Schenk, for example, is portrayed as a selfless medical doctor tending the wounded, even though in reality he was a senior SS and Wehrmacht officer implicated in experiments using Dachau concentration camp prisoners.

The most controversial figure is the seemingly ‘passive’ or even sympathetic witness through whose eyes the film unfolds, Hitler’s 25 year old secretary Traudl Junge. She looks on with blank bewilderment and apparent compassion for her boss as the Nazi facade implodes. The film ends with the real-life aged Junge describing her realisation that ignorance and naivety are no excuse. Meanwhile the presentation of Hitler himself is far more complex, and truly disturbing. As played by master Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, the Fuhrer looks like a fallen hero shaking with Parkinson’s disease and a mercurial temper wrought from the failure of his warped dreams–”a would-be Siegfried who has collapsed into Alberich”, as David Denby puts it, invoking the Wagnerian mythology of power-deformation (The New Yorker, Feb 7, 2005). In a horrible and darkly moving performance this Hitler is both atrocious and almost humorously pathetic.

In the film’s determination to bring Hitler’s regime down to earth, Nazism has never seemed so banal. But while this may resonate with Hannah Arendt’s seminal analysis of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in Downfall it often seems to result in a kind of subdued reassurance, as yet again we see the 20th century’s central monster resuscitated and satisfyingly killed off. This is emotionally understandable, but seems more the product of fear and ritual catharsis than analytical insight. Downfall is definitely worth seeing and arguing about–it is far preferable for a nation to over normalise or de-mythologise the darkest moment of its history than to re-write or avoid it entirely.

Heimat: intimate epic

Weighty themes are played out on a much larger canvas with the latest instalment of the Heimat series, written and directed by Edgar Reitz. This is the third cycle of Reitz’s films around the theme of 20th Century German cultural identity and ‘heimat’ (the closest English translation is ‘homeland’). The first 2 were released in the 1980s and 90s respectively. Heimat 3–A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings (Heimat 3–Chronik einer Zeitenwende) comprises 6 films covering the period from 1989 to 2000.

The emphasis is on personal and small-scale layers of social history as the films follow the fortunes of famous conductor Hermann (played by festival guest Henry Arnold) and singer Clarissa, who meet on the night of November 9, 1989–the evening the Berlin Wall came down. They impulsively rekindle an ancient affair and buy an old cottage outside Schabbachm overlooking the Rhine River near the Luxembourg border (Hermann’s fictionalised rural hometown from the first Heimat series). They then set about rebuilding their blatantly symbolic house once occupied by a German Romantic poet. The first film in the series proceeds to set up both the hopefulness and one-sided economic and political reality of a reunified Germany, with East German builders and engineers coming to the West to rebuild the house.

Like its predecessors, Heimat 3’s intimate approach to epic themes is both a central strength and weakness. Sometimes I was yearning for a more ‘big-picture’ context to glean a deeper, more politically engaged historical analysis of post-reunification Germany, but also to nullify criticisms that Reitz soft-pedals the more politically problematic aspects of the notion of ‘heimat.’ Although representing ultra urbane values, Hermann is very tolerant of his family and the village from which he once fled, and his character is rather bland, too perfect. One angst-ridden visit to a brothel accounts for the only time in which he appears anything but a successful yet sensitive, attractive and highly cultured German man who wants to enjoy the bucolic charms of the Rhine Valley when not conducting in the concert halls of Europe. His profession could have been more thoroughly utilised to comment upon Germany’s cultural heritage and the role of art in social, cultural and political change. Then again this may have detracted from Reitz’s rural vision of reconciliatory ‘heimat.’

As it develops, Heimat 3 becomes more adventurous, dark and complex in its intimate yet epic portrayal of post-reunification Germany. While the whole enterprise at times plays out as high-class soap opera, it is definitely worth devoting a day to see these films. The sheer ambition and scope of the entire Heimat series makes for a substantial dramatic engagement with contemporary European history and culture. That such an engagement comes from a filmmaker working in Germany, a modern yet tradition-obsessed country that has been home to the very best and very worst of Western culture, makes for compelling viewing.

While it is not as immediately concerned with reunification as Heimat 3, the union of East and West is also a theme in last year’s most commercially successful German film, Go for Zucker. Directed by Dani Levy, it tells the amusing story of a pious rabbi from the former West Germany who meets his much poorer, ‘Godless Communist’ brother from East Berlin when their mother dies and they have to resolve their differences before her will can be read. Described by the festival as “the first post-1945 German-Jewish comedy made in Germany”, the film offers a humanist, reconciliatory message while making some telling social points about a self-described “loser of reunification.”

Other films to screen at the festival this year include: Agnes and His Brothers, another humanist comedy about siblings (centred this time around sex and politics); Kebab Connection, in which a young Turkish hip-hopper aspires to make the first German kung-fu film; Napola (directed by festival guest Dennis Gansel), the story of 2 boys in 1942 who attend a training school to become elite Nazi soldiers; And I Love You All, a documentary about a Major who worked for the GDR’s Stasi secret police for 20 years; and Música Cubana (produced by Wim Wenders), the semi-fictional tale of the formation of a band made up of younger generation Cuban musicians.

Festival of German Films 05, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra; April 14-May 1

It has become a cliché to describe veteran documentary maker Dennis O’Rourke as a “controversial” filmmaker. He welcomes the tag, but not its negative implication: “In this frightened country of ours, some people use the word controversy as a pejorative term; to me it’s not a pejorative term, it’s the most apt adjective to apply to an artist.” O’Rourke’s record of commercial and artistic success, passion for the art of documentary and ability to speak frankly qualifies him to provide a unique anatomy of contemporary documentary practice.

O’Rourke believes that an aversion to revealing uncomfortable truths lies at the heart of a particular malaise: “Sad to say, most documentary films are bogus. The documentary does attract a certain kind of earnest artist manqué. They’re less concerned about the art, which is where the true revelation can occur, than in being on the right side of things, and making statements to the converted. But what they never allude to and inscribe in their work is the fact that there’s always a contradiction, another side to the story. It’s almost like you’re supposed to be a social worker with a camera.”

After the altercations surrounding The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) and Cunnamulla (1999), nobody will mistake O’Rourke for a social worker. While his latest work, Landmines–A Love Story, is destined to be less of a hot button film, it remains topical and urgent. It is one of a spate of recent Australian documentaries connected to Afghanistan. Others have including The President versus David Hicks (directors Curtis Levy, Bentley Dean, 2003, RT63, p23), Molly and Mobarak (director Tom Zubrycki, 2003, RT60, p15), Letters to Ali (director Clara Law, 2004, RT64, p20) and Anthem (directors Tahir Cambis, Helen Newman, 2004, RT62, p18). Each of these films tangentially links Australia with the Afghan war or the oppression of the Taliban regime and the consequent refugee crisis.

While O’Rourke likes some of these works, he says they’re different from his because the subjects are “already media types in an external situation”, allowing viewers to still think of Afghanistan “as a place where life is so repressed, and not quite as human as we know it.” In contrast, in Landmines O’Rourke was “able to destroy that whole stereotype of what it means to be an Afghan man and an Afghan woman.” Adhering to a template he has developed over the past 2 decades, mixing intimate portraiture reliant on interviews with observational footage, Landmines evokes a strong sense of personality and place. The film was shot in Kabul immediately after the American invasion of Afghanistan.

On his first day, O’Rourke came across Habiba, a burka clad woman with a prosthetic leg, begging in the streets. Shrugging off his translator’s attempts to divert him, O’Rourke made contact with her. Thus began a collaboration which led into Habiba’s home where she could remove the burka and talk intimately about love, men, family, politics and the day her leg was blown off by a Russian landmine.

According to O’Rourke, he didn’t begin with the intention of having a female protagonist. “I didn’t know what sort of a love story it would be. All I had was the title. I thought that with such an amorphous title it could end up being a triptych, because there’s love of different kinds. The Russian and American military love their landmines, then there’s all the love in ordinary people like the teachers in the de-mining classes.”

Ultimately though, it became Habiba’s film. O’Rourke’s depiction of her is loving, but in no way anodyne. He reveals a feisty, flesh and blood woman who occasionally goes crazy when stuck at home with the kids, gets lippy with a policeman trying to move her on while she begs, and glumly suffers a lecture from a health professional about the need to re-train or find a job. The image presented as the camera pulls back from this final encounter achieves a special resonance-–Habiba’s interrogator and her colleagues are all amputees. It’s a moment that recalls the level of surreal pathos in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar (Iran, 2001) when landmine victims rush across the desert to collect limbs parachuting from the sky.

Of all O’Rourke’s work, Landmines… most resembles Half Life, his 1985 film tracing the legacy of American H-bomb tests in the Marshall Islands through a synthesis of interviews, and observational and archival footage. We see Soviet landmines being assembled and laid, surgical operations to save legs torn apart, and US cluster bombs being dropped. Perhaps the most mind-boggling moment, reminiscent of Dr Strangelove, comes when an American military official acknowledges an unfortunate oversight that has seen the US dropping food packages the same colour as cluster bombs. Framing this material with glimpses of mine awareness classes for young Afghans and interviews with Habiba and her husband moves Landmines beyond any narrowly political agenda.

Habiba’s husband Shah, an ex-Mujhadin soldier, is nothing like the conventional image of a rabid ideologue. Like Habiba, he has never been to school and earns a pittance repairing shoes on the street. Yet he is capable of calm reflection on Afghanistan’s history of being traded between, as O’Rourke puts it, “so many dirty hands”, and the responsibility of all parties for the devastation wrought by landmines in his country.

Summing up the film’s appeal, O’Rourke observes: “This couple are so interesting. Wouldn’t you want to have them at your Saturday barbecue? And the sexuality that subsumed that house–they were a sexy couple.” If that’s more compelling than controversial, it was reassuringly provocative to hear O’Rourke say towards the end of our interview that documentary “does attract, especially at the level of academia, a certain level of really anal aficionado.” I’ll wear that like a badge of honour.

Landmines–A Love Story, director and producer Dennis O’Rourke, 2005, distributed by Ronin Films. Landmines premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in February and will be released in cinemas nationally on May 5.

For artists like myself born in the 1970s, the activities of that decade can seem elusive, utopian and fascinating. Seemingly uncompromised by the pull of the art market, 1970s projects were remarkable for their clarity of intention and simplicity of execution. Concepts travel across time and space to the present, carried only by rudimentary texts and a few grainy black and white photos. The remnants of the processes of artists like Vito Acconci, Valie Export and Stephen Willats continue to inspire current generations who utilise and plunder their work as models for political, aesthetic and social action. But how much do we actually know about what went on? Can we trust the documents left behind?

My own particular interest in the 1970s has recently revolved around a ‘movement’ called Expanded Cinema. I use the term ‘movement’ loosely because, like minimalism or conceptual art, Expanded Cinema describes plenty of different activities in many different countries, and was not always a term used by the artists themselves. However, it is relatively safe to say that Expanded Cinema refers to that field of art in which artists and filmmakers sought to ‘expand’ the terms and conditions of what film could be. In addition, many artists were concerned with making transparent the components of the cinematic apparatus, and creating a live experience with the viewing audience, rather than merely replaying pre-edited footage. In that sense it sits quite comfortably in the company of much avant garde art of the 1960s and 70s which was redefining its own limits: paintings became sculptural and vice versa, and each of these began to incorporate performance, and the merging of art and life. Expanded Cinema, for its part, utilised multiple simultaneous projections, the incorporation of the ambient space (installation) and live performance elements. Thus, Expanded Cinema is a legitimate, although (in this country) little known, precursor to today’s ‘new media’ art.

Many artists who embraced Expanded Cinema, including Anthony McCall, William Raban, Malcolm Le Grice and Valie Export have said that they came to the form as a response to the comparatively stable nature of the Hollywood-run film industry. Le Grice, in a lecture accompanying a recent Export retrospective exhibition in London, referred to the film industry of the 1920s as having “contracted” cinema’s potential. The Expanded Cinema artists saw themselves as restoring the dynamism and experimentation cinema had possessed prior to being standardised in a feature-length narrative form.

The experiments they carried out often involved fragile and ephemeral situations: light bulbs that flashed in front of the screen, puffs of smoke which illuminated the cone of light from the projector, and performances involving ‘mini-cinemas’ utilising the sense of touch rather than sight. Like other manifestations of performance art from the 1960s and 70s, some of these were so specific to time and place that it is impossible to experience them ever again. Many, however, contained certain ingredients–prepared film material and a set of loose instructions–which might enable a re-enactment. It is partly this potential for reproduction which first drew me to Expanded Cinema. Like many Fluxus events, which borrowed from music the concept of the score, I figured it might be possible to re-experience the actual work by carefully following the recipe.

In late 2003 I visited London to meet some UK Expanded Cinema artists and delve into the rather extensive archives kept by David Curtis at the Central St Martins College of Art. I found myself in good company; there has been, in the past 5 years, a growing interest in the idea of re-enactment. Fortunately, many artists associated with the former London Filmmakers Co-op (LFMC), like Raban, Le Grice, Gill Eatherly and Annabel Nicolson, are still very much alive and kicking, and more than willing to participate in the re-presentation of their pieces. In Whitechapel Gallery’s 2000 survey of British art from 1965-75 entitled Live in Your Head, these 4 artists recreated 28 of their Expanded Cinema works from the period (www.whitechapel.org/content382.html). These were documented on digital video and are now in the St Martins archive. For myself, and my collaborator Louise Curham (see p22), these ‘digitally enhanced recipes’ are essential for enhancing our concept of the originals, given that for geographical reasons we were not physically present at the events.

Some exquisite works, sadly, will go to the grave with the artist, and cannot be re-enacted by other artists or archivists. For me, one of the more poignant works in this category is Man with Mirror by Guy Sherwin. In this piece the artist, standing in the beam of a Super 8 projector, holds and tilts a square mirror painted white on the reverse. The mirror/screen reflects back into the room, or catches and reveals the Super 8 footage shot in 1976 showing Sherwin tilting an identical mirror/screen outdoors. As the film is projected, the live performer attempts to ‘mirror’ his own earlier movements, with confounding results. Which is the real Guy Sherwin, which is the projected image? Each time Sherwin attempts to re-enact his own movements from 1976 the passage of time is further marked by his ageing body. As he has written, the work’s “subsequent enactments…have now become a sharply focussed document of transience.” Video Documentation of Man with Mirror is available at www.luxonline.org.uk/work/id/603536/index.html.

Fortunately for us, other pieces can be presented in the absence of the artist. In 2002, film curator Mark Webber hosted a night of English Expanded Cinema at the Melbourne and Brisbane film festivals as part of his Shoot Shoot Shoot program (www.luxonline.org.uk/tours/Mark_Webber/mark10.html; RT51, p33). Webber presented pieces such as Raban’s Take Measure (1973) in which the filmstrip snakes its way through the audience en route to the projector; Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973), a ‘sculptural’ film which draws attention to the projector’s cone of light through the use of smoke; and Castle 1 (1966) by Le Grice which is interrupted/illuminated by a naked light bulb flashing right in front of the cinema screen.

For our part, Louise Curham and I have been experimenting with unauthorised re-enactments of various pieces of Expanded Cinema, including works by Australian artists such as David Perry, at recent Sydney Moving Image Coalition events. Although inevitably peppered with errors and misinterpretations resulting from our geographical/temporal distance from the points of origin, Curham and I believe our re-enactments have (at the very least) educational value, and we have attempted to be true to the spirit of the original works, even where some of the technologies used (16mm film for instance) are no longer convenient or accessible. As Malcolm Le Grice has said, “I have always been interested in technology, but it is the idea of ‘present experience’ which appeals to me more.”

The striking thing about Dreams for Life the first feature film from Melbourne short filmmaker Anna Kannava is the sensual sunniness on the one hand of Firouz Malekzadeh’s cinematography, Jayne Russell’s production design and Zed Dragojlovich’s costuming of the film’s central figure, and, on the other, the monochromatic psychological intensity of this spare 75 minute narrative. The contrast makes for a curious, sometimes compelling dialectic between a closed life and the potential for something more. Like an Eric Rohmer heroine, Ellen (Maria Mercedes) can be at times profoundly irritating, her passion for a lover she has lost, or rejected (“he was a truck driver”), reads like a stubborn commitment to the impossible. She is pursued by and is attracted to his younger brother but resists what looks like a great opportunity, persisting with her waiting to be duly if somewhat strangely rewarded in what might be a happy ending, depending on how you read it. However, unlike a Rohmer ending it’s neither revelatory nor redemptive Ellen remains opaque; interpret her as you will.

Kannava gives her film a leisurely pace, allowing time for highly textured attention to detail–faces, changing patterns of light, Ellen’s collections of shells and art objects. The mood is contemplative, of a state of being quietly played out to its full extent. But there are ample unexplained references to secrets, a death and illicit behaviour hinting at a barely submerged melodrama which sometimes surfaces: having spurned the younger brother, Ellen calls after him “I love you.” But does she? It’s news to us.

I liked the ending for what I took to be sustained pathos; perhaps the filmmaker sees it as happiness. The older brother turns up out of the blue, post-marital breakup, just out of treatment for depression, and falls fully dressed into Ellen’s bed, wordless and exhausted. With a self-satisfied half-smile, Ellen slips slowly into bed after him, doubtless ecstatic that she’s waited for and got the right man. The concentrated duration of the scene places a question mark over that thought. Or does it?

Dreams for Life has enjoyed considerable critical praise and is steadily finding its way into festivals. I found its dialogue awkward, the plotting loaded and Ellen’s opacity too limiting. Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1987), a reverie on loss in which no one appears and the objects of a life are surveyed, is for me a more potent meditation on loss. But Dreams for Life certainly has its moments and a visual language to relish. KG

There’s nothing like Super 8 to connote memory. It might be the ubiquity of the form until the 1980s and its recording of younger days. It might be that, as an almost obsolete medium, it belongs to the past. But it’s also inherent in degraded Super 8 film itself; it shows its age, continually threatening disintegration with its graininess, scratches and stilted movements. And in the intensity and saturation of the reds, the blues, the greens, it evokes the selectivity of visual memory.

SBSi’s Homemade History is a series of 13 episodes comprising Super 8 home movies (and one 16mm movie) narrated by those who shot the footage or are in some way related to it. Sourced through advertisements and word of mouth, the films were constructed using footage the owners were discouraged from viewing prior to being interviewed by the Homemade History makers, in order to capture their spontaneous reactions. Some had not seen the films for over 15 years.

As far as history goes, there’s priceless footage and material here: wonderful family gatherings in the Syrian and Maltese communities from the 1960s to 80s; Leon Isakson’s road movie of Dig Richards and the RJays’ 1959 outback tour of Queensland; footage of Noel Elliot and Barry Martin performing their acrobatic Trapinos show in Tokyo, London and Copenhagen in the early 60s; and striking footage of an airport tarmac crowded with wheelchair-bound people waving off athletes on their way to one of the very first Paralympics. There’s also the beauty of the past in its material form: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the vistas, the way people move. We are given glimpses of a democratic history as recorded by those who lived it: an intimate history.

This is not to say that these histories are not subject to treatment. Episodes are deliberately crafted so that the stories reveal themselves. Don Watson’s episode begins with what looks like a family travel movie with Don when he was “rugged and handsome”, pulling the kids along in the water. As the film unfolds we are drawn into the struggle of Indigenous Australians as we return with Don’s mother-in-law to a Queensland station in a very discomforting and saddening moment.

Ken Garrahy’s film also starts quietly; a turning point emerges with the statement “I was always aware I was different.” We begin to realise we are watching rare footage of the social gatherings that grew in a groundswell to the establishment of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

The films can be particularly poignant when disjuncture occurs between the image and what we hear. In Joe Gauci’s film we see a boy playing gently with a powder blue budgie. Gauci’s narration tells us this is the last time we see his brother before he dies, aged 14, in a riding accident. Suddenly the story of migration slips: the promise of a better life through hard work is punctured by tragedy and the narrative of migration subverted. In real life things happen differently.

The Super 8 spool, very much shorter than contemporary video tapes, produced a very different kind of recording. Shots were short and usually taken at important or representative moments. In the ordering of material that occurs in Homemade History, footage was edited by the series makers: first an hour long version, then after the interviews, to 5 minutes of carefully constructed footage designed according to the revelations of the interview and the demands of storytelling. However, with these films there’s friction between our tendency and ability to narrate and narrativise our lives, and what happens on screen. Mary Wilkinson’s footage of cats was, she says, originally meant to form a story but, “no possible way…it’s just cats.”

The only 16mm footage is older, taken by Les Petty some 30 years prior to Super 8’s introduction. Featuring Doncaster (now suburban Melbourne) as a farming district, there are remarkable shots showcasing the era and its rural life. The film features quite stunning, classically composed scenes. It looks professional, which again alerts us to the democratic nature of Super 8: it’s grainy, amateur, intimate, hand-held and imperfect.

Homemade History, director Robert Herbert producer, Sophie Jackson, Arcadia Pictures, broadcast Feb 3-March 31 on SBS

Despite persistent rumblings from the scientific community that our brains are mutating, and the cries of long-suffering commuters forced to endure infuriating, one-sided conversations, it seems that mobile phones are here to stay, with global handset sales predicted to reach 730 million in 2005. The latest must-have gadget for consumers is the ‘3G phone’, or third-generation wireless phone, designed to receive and send high-speed multimedia. Its popularity has increased as handsets have become cheaper, with bigger screens and better cameras. The incredible uptake of ‘moblogging’ has also fuelled sales. The humble blog has evolved into the ‘moblog’ (mobile web log) which allows people to instantly publish texts, photos and videos online from anywhere, at anytime, using nothing more than mobiles connected to the internet (moblogs.com.au/). Moblogs, 3G phones and other technologies that allow easy creation and publication of media are pushing a phenomenon called Life Caching, defined by Trendwatching.com as: “collecting, storing and displaying one’s entire life, for private use or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse” (www.trendwatching.com/trends/life_caching.htm).

Art as content

This new trend has left telcos with wallets bulging and an eagerness to take advantage of the growing demand to create and consume ‘mobile content.’ But it’s not only the commercial sector that’s getting excited. The potential for making art designed for or using mobile phones was recognised early by artists. Sections of the business community are now looking at this art as potential downloadable content. Nokia for example has a ‘Connect to Art’ site where consumers can download works by artists such as Nam June Paik straight to their mobiles.

Watching artists and telco marketing executives happily mingling at the Mobile Journeys forum in Sydney, I had the feeling I was watching 2 worlds collide. There was definitely something in the air, that distinct whiff that often accompanies new media and its colonisation by various interest groups. Perhaps mobile technology will be the catalyst for that ever elusive link between media artists and a permanent income stream? Money was certainly on everyone’s mind judging by the chatter overheard during forum breaks. One artist to another: “People are making mobile phone web sites in Japan and being paid 80% of every download profit by their telco. There are over 44 million mobile subscribers there; can you imagine the money you could make if you made a cool site?” One telco executive to a marketing executive: “In Japan there are over 44 million imode subscribers all paying download costs to their telco NTT docomo. Imagine the dollars we could make here if we could just harness some decent content.”

Art as an earner

The-phone-book Limited is a UK group determined not to let commercial interests monopolise the mobile revolution. Their mission is to educate artists on how to create innovative content for mobile phones and maybe make a dollar while they’re at it. Ben Jones and Fee Plumley of the phone-book were recently invited to Australia to participate in a series of interstate forums and workshops by The Mobile Journeys Consortium, a group of not-for-profit bodies interested in developing mobile content skills in Australia. Having attended one of the phone-book’s Sydney ‘Making Movies’ workshops organised by dLux media arts, I can tell you their enthusiasm for mobile-phone art is infectious! The workshop’s participants could only watch bleary eyed as Fee and Ben launched into high gear at 9am on the first day, so excited about sharing their goals for sustainable mobile technology artistic practice that they completely forgot to do their planned ‘get to know you’ exercise. Their approach to teaching mobile content creation was direct, practical, fast paced, accessible and fun.

“Right now is the perfect time to experiment, while the area is still yet to be fully developed”, Fee enthused. “It’s like a chicken and the egg situation”, Ben suggested, “people think there’s no market for their content, but sometimes there’s no market because there is no content being produced yet.” One of the phone-book’s key tenets is that the mobile platform is a new interactive display format, different from cinema, television, video and computers. It needs new content created specifically for its particular parameters. “It just doesn’t make sense to re-purpose old materials”, said Ben, “mobile video must have its own grammar!” He suggested we are at a point similar to the beginnings of cinema, before film’s grammar was standardised.

Phone art manifestations

Film festivals have begun including sections for mobile-movies in their programs (eg Adelaide and St Kilda Film Festivals) and numerous ‘mobile’ art exhibitions, festivals and ‘locative media’ events are being held worldwide, including last year’s ISEA with its themes of networked, wearable and wireless experience (RT63, pp34-35). ISEA2004’s introduction declares that “mobile devices are turning from communication media to become expressive media, sites for arts, social engagement, and…entertainment.”

Mobile phone art (like new media art) is diverse. The term covers many modes of art practice and is not necessarily used by all artists to describe their work. It includes art made using the mobile phone handset as a production tool but not necessarily for exhibition on mobile phones. The most obvious example in this category is camera-phone photography and video, but it also includes ring-tone creations such as Dialtones, A Telesymphony by Golan Levin (USA), a concert in which sound is produced by choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s mobile phones. There is also art using the emerging language of text messaging. KeyPadPomes by Australians Lucas Ihlein and notsusan involved the collection of hundreds of incoming and outgoing SMS poems which were then transcribed and hand typeset before being silk-screened onto cardboard, cut into postcards and hand distributed with a mobile phone number attached so more messages could be collected for a growing archive. This work explores the intersections between old and new writing technologies and asks how the ‘miniature space’ of SMS text messaging informs and alters our used of language.

Mobile phone art also encompasses works made using other media that are then exhibited or distributed on mobile phones, such as games, music, screen-savers and mobile-movies. Mobile or micro-movies are often made with high quality film and video production values and then downsized for tiny mobile screens. Mobile phone art also entails large installation works like Phonetic Faces by Jonah Brucker-Cohen (USA), which allowed people to contribute their own digital photos to a public video display, and then influence the dynamic collage of mixed images using their mobiles.

Mobile phone technology is used in mixed reality gaming, as seen in works by Blast Theory (RT60, p26) and is prevalent within ‘Locative Media’, an emerging field of creative practice that explores place, location and social networks using portable, networked and location-aware devices (such as mobile phones) to create social interfaces and artistic interventions. Examples can be seen in the social experiments of Aware (Finland), who were also recently in Australia as part of Mobile Journeys.

Beyond the handset

My own favorite form of mobile phone art escapes the constraints of the handset and moves into the cityscape, enveloping remote and local participants inside socially networked yet anonymous performative actions and architectural installations. Blinkenlights (2001-2003) by the Chaos Computer Club (Germany) transformed a building in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz into a giant interactive screen. Each of the building’s windows was made into a pixel using lights turned on and off by computer. People were able to send text messages or play a game of ‘pong’ on the huge screen using their mobile phones. Blinkenlights created a deep sense of community and local pride in the downtown Berlin area; a huge party had to be organised so the “friends of Blinkenlights” could farewell their beloved installation.

Amodal Suspension, Relational Architecture 8 (2003) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico/Canada) was another large-scale, city-based work utilising mobile technology. During November 2003 people could send short text messages to each other using a mobile phone or web browser. The messages were then intercepted and encoded as a flashing light beam sequence using 20 massive, robotically controlled searchlights. Over 10,000 messages were sent and the project had over 400,000 online visitors from 94 different countries during a single month of operation. The sheer volume of public participation turned the sky over Japan’s YCAM Center into “a giant communication switchboard.” This light show could be observed locally, as a video or as a series of still images on a networked screen.

Sky Ear (2004) by Usman Haque (UK) is a mesmerisingly beautiful, event-based work that consists of 1,000 floating helium balloons, each one embedded with a mobile phone and 6 coloured LED lights. Enclosed in a huge net attached to the ground with long cables, the balloons are allowed to float into the sky forming a giant glowing cloud. Each balloon’s phone listens out for electromagnetic waves, communicating these signals to other balloons using infra-red technology. This causes fluctuating patterns of undulating colour to sweep across the balloon network. Viewers can use their phones to dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky. In doing so they change the electromagnetic environment, which in turn affects the colour and brightness of the balloons.

These art works explore the simultaneously public and intimate characteristics of mobile messaging. They scratch the surface of what’s possible with mobile phone art and related technologies. Each work allows the public to directly and discreetly participate in a dynamic visualisation of the information network that has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.

More information about Mobile Journeys and FutureScreen Mobile can be found at: www.mobilejourneys.com and www.dlux.org.au.

Building on festival themes of previous years, transmediale.05 set out to explore the ethico-aesthetic contours of digital technologies. The festival’s theme–‘basics’–operated as a sort of equivalence for real needs beyond the bare conditions of life in a world increasingly permeated with digital techniques of organisation, reproduction, control and expression. But as noted by Florian Cramer, chair of the conference on basic security, there’s no such thing as a basic concept of security. Nor can there be an operative concept of basics. Any concept of security co-exists with its dialectical other; insecurity. As Konrad Becker, Wendy Chun and McKenzie Wark unravelled the diverse and often contradictory means and precepts by which security takes form, it became clear that complexity more accurately encapsulates the diverse conditions, institutions and practices that underpin life within information societies and media cultures.

It was with a sense of complexity that I encountered the festival as a whole. Since 2002, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures)–referred to with a kind of sceptical fondness by Berliners as ‘the pregnant oyster’–has been transmediale’s principal venue, with other events staged throughout the city. The 5 day festival comprised screenings, conferences, lectures, exhibitions, performances, workspaces and workshops. My technique of engagement consisted of impulsive wandering. Here’s a sample of the work encountered.

Taking the opening line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-philosophicus as its title, Eva Teppe’s digital video Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist (The world is everything that is the case) appears a study of accumulating horror. Bodies cascade from an undetermined height. The fall of women, children and men slowly pass by the steady frame of the camera. Their transient clarity is offset against the soft blur of figures in the background. This is the world as it appears. And herein lies the ambiguity that haunts the sense of veracity so frequently attributed to optical devices. I wondered if this was footage I hadn’t seen from the collapse of the Twin Towers. The artist’s statement functioned as a corrective: this was reworked TV footage of Spanish athletes engaged in that peculiar hobby of constructing human pyramids. What I took to be a descent toward nasty injury, if not death, was something far less ominous: these were bodies caught in the moment of collapse. Here we find it is not the digital media form that is unstable so much as the mediation of perception.

While the text demystified Teppe’s video, it had the obverse effect on Thom Kubli’s installation Stationsraum für Assimilativen Zahlwitz. Ten amber coloured gelatine cubes with concave sides are laid out in 2 rows in the middle of a small white room. Each cube is about 10cm square, their translucent mass enclosing an assortment of what look like rotting organs. I’m reminded of jars of formaldehyde containing mutant babies, preserved brains and frog stomachs that I once saw at les Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée et de Paléontologie in Paris. Upon closer inspection, there appeared to be a half-crushed, aluminum-like speaker component partially encased in silicon supports. “Eins, zwei, drei…”–the cubes are counting to 10. They never stop.

I read the exhibition blurb in the catalogue: “An interactive audio installation… the speaker whizzes past you…step back…the shock wears off…don’t get too close!” So where’s the interaction? When am I going to be blasted? I retreat to the safety of the nearest white wall. As I edge around I hear the sound of doors creaking open, slamming shut, voices wailing, instructions or commands being issued. I’m becoming increasingly anxious as I wait for the ‘interactive’ component to kick in. I test the release of sound against my movements. I can’t detect any motion sensor at work. I place my ear close to a cube. I’m genuinely puzzled. A few people enter the installation and proceed to repeat more or less the same routine. Perhaps the installation’s malfunctioning.

Frustrated, I re-read the catalogue. Amazing–I’ve been reading the wrong exhibition statement! In fact, I’m supposedly listening to “atmospheric sounds from a psychiatric ward.” Mistaking the text made for a substantially different and, as far as I was concerned, much more interesting encounter. I probably would have spent a fraction of the time with the work had I matched it with the correct entry.

Run Motherfucker Run! provided an interactive experience in a most literal and basic sense. A large screen is located in front of a moving conveyor belt. A jogger is required to activate the screen. One of 2 possible scenic options is selected by moving to one side of the conveyor belt and accelerating toward the screen. I start off with a jog through dockyards at night. Street lights illuminate the alley. I pass a ship waiting for crates to be loaded. I’m starting to enjoy the rhythm of movement. I’m supposed to be able to “explore the movie” and “experience a thriller-like adventure”, but it seems I can only ever run in a straight path. This is not an embodied version of Grand Theft Auto. The scene ends and I’m required to jog to one side of the conveyor belt in order to make the next selection. I avoid the Olympic stadium running track.

A wonderfully uncoordinated jogger takes my place. Her movements express uncertainty, hesitation and physical ineptitude. After 5 minutes of stuttering from one side of the running platform to the next, never quite managing to sustain the necessary speed to fully activate either possible scene, the screen and conveyor belt simultaneously pack it in. Superb. An exemplary “fuck you!” moment. Realistic and nausea-free as this virtual reality experience is, ultimately it doesn’t amount to a lot more than a heavy-tech, low-option arcade game. Artist-designer Marnix de Nijs opted out of exploring the sonic possibilities offered by this kind of installation.

Untitled 5 by US artist Camille Utterback was one of 3 co-winners of the transmediale Award competition. I pass by a large chinoise-expressionistic style picture of flowers on a wall with a soft rectangular light in front of it. When I return, a child is gently moving in a random manner across the blank surface of the lit floor. He watches the data projection on the wall. His movements are a catalyst for the algorithmic expansion of roots, tentacles, cells, lines and brush strokes of colour. I’m fascinated. I enter the light and shuffle about. I’m mesmerised watching the mutable textures of light respond to the sweeping gestures of my feet. There’s a distinct correspondence between this installation and what I take to be its precursor: the brilliantly annoying Etch-a-Sketch toys popular in the 1970s. But unlike the now kitsch apparel of self-absorbed youth culture, the generative system of Untitled 5 is not based on movement alone; stasis too registers as transformation in the organic composition of the digital image.

The problem with international art events like transmediale.05 is the tendency for projects to become abstracted from the conditions in which they were initiated. This isn’t a claim for the virtues of authenticity or a valorising of origins. Abstraction, after all, operates as a plane of expression. But as with any abstraction, the noise-signal ratio is altered. This can often be the case for politically and socially motivated projects such as Public Netbase (www.t0.or.at) and the Disobedience and Hack.It.Art partner exhibitions. Such a predicament is amplified with an event like transmediale, which declares an interest in the basic sociality of media culture but doesn’t go beyond the social occasion of the festival itself. However, transmediale.05 was many things. The performances, conferences, installations and the seemingly impromptu Salon and projects in the Basement ensured that this was a festival in which the symmetry between experience and production was frequently internal to the temporal rhythms of the event.

Mark Cypher, Biophilia (2004), interactive semi-immersive environment, courtesy of the artist

Paul Thomas, Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) and BEAPworks curator, wants industry to include artists “as part of their creative team on research projects.” This seems a humble ambition at a time when artists are increasingly requiring ‘code-bearers’ and software developers to provide the technical know-how that will turn their ideas into realities. Perhaps Thomas’ approach is a creative response to the current financial reality of limited funding, particularly for new media artists. The cultural capital artists may lend to industry and to researchers in other disciplines is certainly evident in BEAPworks. The works have come from a research and development grant program facilitated by BEAP with ArtsWA, showcasing 6 projects at the John Curtin Gallery as part of the 2005 Perth International Festival of the Arts.

The Little Optimum, created by Cam Merton, with Yvette Merton, is insidious in its socio-political commentary and perhaps an exemplar of the aims of BEAPworks. On the wall of the installation is an animation with enough well mown green grass, white picket fence and neighbourly conversation to make any Tidy Town proud. From the unsettling familiarity of a ‘puke’ coloured ‘well-loved’ couch I watch two men talking in drawling American accents. It’s a little like watching American male versions of Kath and Kim. I laugh and I cringe. Not that it’s really a dialogue. No real communication occurs, but as long as some kind of clumsy social agreement is achieved, it doesn’t matter. Cars drive past. Neighbours barbecue, mow their lawns, clean their fences. The conversation changes with environmental pressures. A weather vane displays the various directions of ‘intolerance’, ‘paranoia’ and ‘obsession’ dictated by real time wind data gathered from a gallery mounted anemometer. When I revisit the work I feel frustrated at not hearing the same conversation. I have no control over the content. I can only watch and listen from the couch as an unseen force affects the animated neighbourhood.

From the sensoring of meteorology we move to biology, where it’s goldfish calling the shots. Jo Law’s re:-, with 3D compositions by Hilary Bunt and Raoul Marks, re:-creates the grammar and subject matter of Marcel Proust. As I sit in the installation space, commas seem to form between the 3 large screens. On the central one, there’s a black and white magnified view of the goldfish swimming in the tank behind me. I experience a moment of disorientation as I see the back of my head pictured among the fish. On the screen to my left a hand holding a pencil writes, “Is there a history you wish to retrace?”, “Is there a decision you wish to revisit?”, and so on. Paradoxically, the sensored movement of the goldfish in the tank is responsible for these prompts to memory. Sometimes the fish swim more vigorously, initiating a series of unfinished questions. It feels like interrupted thought. The screen on the right moves through a virtual urban landscape: buildings, car parks, trains. It seems familiar. Sometimes I hear traffic or footsteps. At other times the sound of rain fills my ears. Proust and other references aside, the immersive aesthetic of re:- is totally diverting: unsuspecting gallery visitors may arrive late at their next appointment.

Cynthia Verspaget assimilates the audience’s virtual travels into the terrain of Terrasinda (RT63, p25). The audience is also tracked as they enter Creation by Nina Sellars in collaboration with Iain Sweetman and Gareth Lockett. Viewer movements and sounds activate 3 figures on the screen. The confines of the body are challenged as wireframe versions covered in drawn ‘skin’ merge and re-merge. In Cat Hope’s Pickpocket a gilt picture frame surrounds a surface of dense grey foam holding rows of silver recording devices–consumer end ‘readymades.’ These 48 devices play in no discernable order, leaving the audience to track the sound as it moves from one device to another. More than the ears are active in Mark Cypher’s Biophilia. I watch 2 audience members move about on mats in front of a large white screen. Their onscreen shadows are joined by projections of growing, plant-like phallic shapes. Sometimes they emerge from the arms or shoulders, at other times the head. It’s a little like Day of the Triffids in there.

It’s heartening to see these research projects shown in an established Perth gallery otherwise increasingly inaccessible to local postgraduate students. There is comfort too in knowing that even as those fish swim and neighbours shoot the breeze that we can already look forward to the next round of BEAPworks in 2005.

BEAPworks, curator Paul Thomas, John Curtin Gallery, Perth Festival, Feb 11-Jun 12

George Poonkhin Khut is an electronic media artist whose immersive sound installations have been exhibited in Australia and the UK. The acclaimed video installation, Nightshift, created with dancer Wendy McPhee was exhibited at Arnolfini (Bristol, UK) as part of the Breathing Space exchange program with Performance Space and PICA (see www.georgekhut.com). Khut is presently engaged in post-graduate research at the University of Western Sydney School of Contemporary Art, creating installations using biofeedback–the process of electronically measuring changes within the body and displaying these to the person being observed so they can learn to influence the behaviour being measured. Cardio-morphologies was installed at Performance Space, July 21-Aug 7, 2004.

Khut’s new biofeedback-based work, Drawing Breath, will be shown at Sydney’s Gallery 4A, April 14-May 14. Later this year it will be part of a touring concert program of the same title with The Song Company in a selection of motets, madrigals and contemporary songs, from Ockeghem to Oxygène–and the breathing rhythms of the audience.

Skin

My father came here in the 60s from a Chinese family in Malaya. My mother’s family is Anglo-Celtic Australian, and it was through her that I gained most of my early exposure to contemporary art. [Dad’s] been practicing martial arts since childhood, so there’s been an awareness of mind-body interconnections via the various internal energy and self-cultivation approaches implicit in traditional martial arts techniques.

Yes, and encouraging me to do so as well but I just didn’t have the fighting spirit! I went to Kung Fu classes every week, for many years. It’s only recently that I’ve started to get some glimpse into the significance of some of these techniques. There was also an understanding that meditation and related traditions of self-cultivation were a part of our East Asian cultural heritage and something to be proud of.

Our family culture was essentially atheist, though as time went on, it grew to include an element of ancestor worship. Although my sister and I were both educated in Christian schools, there was an open hostility towards traditional Western mythology–original sin, a God that answers your prayers, going to heaven or hell when you die, or bodily functions being somehow sinful. I think things like this really sowed the seeds for my present interest in how we represent and ‘practice’ our embodiment.

Breath

I moved to Sydney [from Tasmania] in 2001 and intentionally immersed myself in a creative crisis. I thought ‘If I’m going to do this [art practice] it better be worth my time and energy!’ I wanted to work with very basic physical materials, in a very minimal way, being very inspired at the time by artists like Wolfgang Laib and James Turrell. But I was also deeply interested in the suggestive power of electronic sound: trance-like ritual practices and the altered states of consciousness they can induce. I was also reading about fringe media practices like accelerated learning techniques, subliminal advertising and brain-wave biofeedback–the various ‘back door’ approaches to subconscious exploration. Biofeedback interaction seemed to combine both these interests very neatly.

I looked though a listing of biofeedback practitioners in New South Wales and sent out an email to all of them asking for help with learning about biofeedback! Dana Adam of the Active Learning Centre responded and enabled me to try a variety of biofeedback interactions out at her clinic. I had initially proposed working with brainwave biofeedback but it’s hard to get psychologists and psychiatrists to say on record that it’s completely safe without appropriately qualified supervision. They recommended breath and heart rate biofeedback as a safer option, and one that sat well with my interest in more ‘whole of body’ approaches like breath-based meditation. There has already been a lot of art work developed from the 70s up to the present exploring brainwave biofeedback. The idea of breath and heart centred interactions seemed relatively unexplored, and I was interested in the contributions these functions make to our overall experience and self-image.

I realised that with my early work Pillow Songs (RT24, p46) I was very interested in how people respond when they are lying horizontally in a darkened space. Later I learned that just lying down will tend to increase parasympathetic nervous system arousal [our internal rest-relax-regenerate reflex]. I’ve been interested in how various cultural practices intuitively involve this process of parasympathetic arousal. I’m thinking here about devotional practices such as prayer, chanting, meditation and trance-dancing, and the kinds of ritual architectures designed to accommodate these activities–the effect these practices have on your cardio-respiratory state, and the role of these unificatory experiences at a bio-social level.
George Khut, Drawing Breath (detail)

What are unificatory experiences?
Experiencing your self as deeply connected to a larger reality, that ‘all of nature speaks to me’ feeling. It’s curious that these sorts of experiences are usually taboo in contemporary arts practice–we tend to annex them off to dance parties, yoga classes or chronic illness treatment programs.

The gist of my doctorate proposal to UWS was “how do you develop multimedia systems that in some way enable people to navigate through their bodily experience?” For me personally it was also a response to the disembodying qualities of a lot of popular virtual reality iconographies–this idea that we will download ourselves into a computer and do away with our bodies forever.

This [biofeedback] technology provides a point of entry into aspects of bodily experience in an age when so much of our body is being left out. I’m exploring some of the functionalities we see in Eastern traditions, in a way that feels authentic to me. Rather than importing some exotic taxonomy for mind-body inquiry and cultivation, could we attempt to develop cultural practices from our own personal and immediate experience of ourselves? Biofeedback is a tool that trains our ability to sense and respond physically to our experience of the world. As an artist, I have to ask ‘how do I connect these sensations and abilities to my existing mix of cultural histories and practices?’ I’ve recently been studying the Feldenkrais Method of sensory-motor education, and it’s had a significant impact on the direction of my work. These kinds of ‘somatic’ methodologies have developed very concrete ways of investigating mind-body organisation and the body, based on lived personal interactions.

Biofeedback enables us to work with categories of experience that aren’t easily accessed by representational or symbolic forms of communication. By consciously eschewing symbolic imagery and representation…artists can foreground the physical presence of the observer. The observer’s perceptual system becomes the figure against the void-like ground of the design of the work.

Immersion

My interest in immersion relates to this process of foregrounding your own perceptual processes–processes that are usually taken for granted. Sure there’s the whole VR tradition where you immerse yourself in a panoramic imaginary landscape/narrative, but personally I’m more interested in the processes taking place inside the participant.

What I find challenging in a work like your Cardio-morphologies is that it takes some degree of training and commitment to move past the interface and achieve the full body immersion.

In terms of the interface design [by John Tonkin], you’re building an instrument and it does require some skill from the user. At the same time, I have been struggling with the idea that these works are instruments that people then express themselves through. I’m much more interested in people learning to listen to the voices of their own bodily experience, which is such a rare event in our culture.

My main expectation would be that the audience give the work some time–half an hour to 40 minutes is ideal. And a big part of what I’m doing in this work is saying there are experiences and forms of understanding that won’t unfold in 5 minutes, and there are forms of understanding and communication which can’t take place in a normal symbolic/language centred context. I want to make the learning phase [for Cardio-morphologies] shorter and let people feel confident to make correlations–which is pretty fundamental to effective biofeedback. It must be clear to the audience ‘oh that’s my heart, and that’s it changing’, and I have to manage that in terms of interface design.

Affect

People say ‘why is this art? Why not do it in a yoga studio?’ My response to this is that in presenting this work in an art gallery I’m placing that experience in a context that invites a certain spirit of inquiry and speculation–I hope. My understanding of art is that it provides people with ideas about other ways they can ‘be in the world.’

So your work is purely formalist in that it’s not about content or subject matter?

No not really. I would say that its subject is not a subject that we are used to considering as ‘subject’–that is, ourselves and our own somatic being. And maybe it’s time we started to consider that as a subject. Part of the tradition of our Western mind-body split is the separation of subject from object whereas most contemporary philosophy and psychophysiology refutes this separation. So how do we start to acknowledge that in terms of our cultural practices and representations?

In the dark of the Greenaway Art Gallery 4 digital video projections generate Transcriptions, a collaboration between Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) artistic director Garry Stewart, and digital video and installation artist David Evans (see cover image). The projections feature ADT dancers animated as textual forms in a landscape of text. Cars wrapped in words zoom through city streets inscribed with “neither this way nor that” in a metropolis of skyscrapers made up of giant letters which spell out “this” and “way.”

In this virtual landscape the dancers gain superhero powers. A figure reminiscent of the archetypal earth mother Venus of Willendorf is covered in the word “fragile.” She manifests a cape and flies through the city of “this way and that” out into the open plains where the earth is labelled “time” and the sky is “moment.” Here she stands her ground, battling with a giant cartoonish fist wielding slapstick weapons such as a rolling pin, fighting a shape-changing whirlwind of fragmented text that shakes the ground and sprays out random letters.

In Zeros and Ones (Fourth Estate, London, 1997), Sadie Plant discusses the digital space of a computer as being made up of logic or logos (the structured order of language and code) and the nomadic or nomos (the virtual space which is without a fixed state). Transcriptions features both these elements, most obviously embodied in the 2 superheroes fighting it out on an open plane.

Transcriptions plays with dualities of language/body, good/evil, weak/strong by presenting them together on the one plane. The result is “this” and “that” and “neither this nor that” at the same time. The solid earth mother figure is illogically inscribed with “fragile” but in the virtual plane we can all realise our will to power, reaching Nietzsche’s overman status if we want it.

However, the overman, the Superman, is still a product of language, just as “I understand the world through touch” (text from Transcriptions video projection) is still communicated using the laws of language. Does Transcriptions present me with the limitations of what I can be? Are we always acquiescent to language, even on the virtual plane?

Playing with the sci-fi ideal of leaving the body behind and existing on the virtual plane of endless possibilities, Transcriptions presents this as an obscene world in the sense that everything is present and anything is on offer. Somehow this reads as banal. As I watch the videos looping I begin to feel that in an argument in which all sides are equally valid, there is no opposing position to take. Transcriptions is an endless loop; a closed system which successfully places the viewer as Other to itself.

The beauty of the text dancers, in particular a couple writhing on the open plane, resides in the feeling that they are timeless, that they will always be entangling and disentangling, movement for movement’s sake, nothing to be said. The earth mother moves like a doll, legs and arms twisting in their sockets, the only figure representing action. The music track evokes superhero epics, but without passion, as if it is just playing out.

If to transcribe is to copy into another medium, it seems that transcribing our strengths and weaknesses onto the virtual plane has not freed them from the binary demons of Western representation. Rather, Transcriptions appears to revel in this binary representation by taking it to its ultimate form and displaying it in all its gaudy colours. The text characters are figures of odd beauty, but in their obviousness they also seem enclosed, separate, as if we can never feel what it is like to be them.

As I leave the viewing space I notice 4 digital images on the wall just outside. Strangely, the earth mother is no longer “fragile”: now her body somnambulistically proclaims “forget”…

Transcriptions, creators Garry Stewart, David Evans, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, Feb 22-March 1

Prospectus is a collection of 9 works from 8 Australian new media artists grappling with nuances in digital media and culture. In their catalogue essay, curators Dougal Phillips and David Teh draw attention to the recent disbanding of the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board, which aided many of these artists. The Board’s dissolution threatens the reputation and agency of Australian art’s most interesting developers.

The title Prospectus should be interpreted as a dreamy, speculative sketch of our digital destiny and how it may unfold. At the same time it is a concise delineation of what is happening right now, a repertoire of video work that brings insight to how a digitised perspective, connectivity, alteration and immersion have transformed the way in which we learn and create.

Digital culture has taught us that power lies not in our nodes but in our connections–it’s not how you think, it’s what you link. This is not to say that Soda_Jerk and Sam Smith don’t think, but their message is in what they connect. The Dawn of Remix fixes the opening sequence of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with LL Cool J’s hip-hop classic Can’t Live Without My Radio. This deftly dovetailed sequence offers a re-evaluation of history; anyone born post-1970 is likely to have come across LL Cool J long before they sourced Stanley Kubrick. As Soda_Jerk and Smith’s chimps taunt us (“rock the beat with my hand”), they are demonstrating our new ability to construct and tweak history based on personal extractions from our collective pop-cultural whirlpool.

Tweaking in a more sickly sense is Owen Leong’s agenda–we can tell from his Second Skin. Under superbly crisp studio lights, honey softly streams onto Leong’s head and is smeared over his face. After several minutes the viewing experience becomes less sweet and more nauseating as Leong’s facial manipulation seems never-ending. Reminiscent of Zheng Huan’s 12 Square Metres, in which the honey-coated artist caught flies on his skin in a male urinal, Leong’s work centres abjection on the body. But instead of immersing himself in flies and excrement, he is contemplating the infinitely airbrush-able digital sanitation of Photoshopped bodies in popular print and screen media.

Over time, variations in perspective have effected our comprehension of our surroundings. Sumugan Sivanesan’s Landslide is a minute-long scan of the city skyline. Through the sun’s glare and a harsh, cicada-like digital buzz, we decipher a rippling urban horizon, its solid, geometric structures wavering and fluid.

The excerpt from Daniel Crooks’ On Perspective and Motion–Part 1 renders a prominent street corner in Melbourne in a new way, invigorating the old dialogue concerning photography and what we see–or do not see. Daguerre’s 1839 Le Boulevard du Temple was an attempt to capture one of Paris’ most lively streets. However, due to the long exposure time, the figures moved too quickly to register and the street appeared empty. Crooks draws related conclusions about analogue’s successor, although his distinctive ‘time-slice’ technique works to reverse the effect: the faster figures move, the more conspicuous their visual presence.

Sivanesan and Crooks nudge our ability to contend with dimension: street grids are compressed, figures stretched, buildings are like water, and school boys darting in front of trams look like dragons. Perspective here is no longer about the observer’s position; it’s our connection to the whole. In a second work by Sivanesan, Seismic, eloquently-timed, glitchy pauses leave figures spasming as they pass an unaffected, motionless Falun Dafa demonstration. This kind of digital acuity reveals a connectedness between figures and time with a duality of political and nearly comical implications.

An artist enjoying the constant stream of visual data is Wade Marynowsky. His Apocalypse Later is a freakish visual and aural binge of grunting footage gathered from Sydney’s recently closed theme parks, and a recording of what is called ‘live cinema’–the manipulation of sound and image in real time. There is a level of passivity required from the viewer; instead of contemplating relational aesthetics, you must let the experience wash over you and wriggle in the data flow.

The question of what will replace the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board will determine Prospectus’ role: a projection of things to come or a relic of Australian new media art.

Prospectus: Projections in New Media, blank_space gallery, Surry Hills, Sydney, January 23-26

Solo Series #1

Following his Unsealed of 2004, Martin del Amo’s Under Attack is another utterly engrossing solo, the second part in a trilogy, this one moving in even closer on the first part’s grief (the artist’s for the death of a lover) and the impasses of ambition (in the first del Amo’s desire to sing, here a female dancer’s career thwarted when she lends her skill to a virtual performer–an animated cartoon dragon). The grief here is the kind that can pull your legs from beneath you: an animating force, love, has left you or the moves you thought were yours have been copyrighted away. If you were a marionette, your strings would have been cut. There’s a strong sense of that cut in Under Attack, but who’s done the cutting? Del Amo ponders the biblical story of Jacob wrestling the angel, asking if it was really an angel or something else, something denied or unacknowledged, our own puppetry, our own string cutting? This performance had me re-reading Victoria Nelson’s wonderful The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2001).

In the beginning a neat, still, white-suited del Amo stands in the distance against a wide cream curtain, amidst a machine pulse that sounds curiously organic. As in Unsealed, he walks and walks, but less purposefully this time, goes to speak to us, then doesn’t. The walking is interrupted by a burst of neat leaps. Finally he speaks, initiating the series of reflections on Jacob and the angel, the dancer and the dragon, and on a death. Between each episode his walking is breached by sudden involuntary movements, a kind of escalating possession, its force thrust up through the body into the arms and into the head racked side to side. He discards his clothing piece by piece. He is ever more the puppet, perpetually propelled, awash with sweat, legs dropping away from beneath him.

The tales continue to be calmly told. Grief is addressed. The grim details of a postmortem uttered. The dancer gets more work as the dragon, but no one will employ her to dance–her moves too much like that famous cartoon character. Del Amo puts his clothes back on, but it’s not easy, a sock, for example seems determined to move away from the foot. The self is dressed, reassembled and still once more, but with one bare foot, like Oedipus (‘wounded’ or ‘swollen foot’, or ‘limping’). Tragic. There’s a burst of leaps to live, bracing violin sawing. Control has returned, but everything has changed.

Gail Priest’s sound design is a more extravert presence in this part of the trilogy. In the first it was more a subliminal amplification of the performer’s body, here it’s pulse and impulse, but is it driver or driven, puppeteer or puppet, angel or inner devil? Whatever, Under Attack is a sublimely moving and highly integrated creation.
Narelle Benjamin in Cordelia Beresford's I Dream of Augustine

Narelle Benjamin in Cordelia Beresford's I Dream of Augustine

Reeldance Installations#01

Interval allows just enough time to take in a couple of One Extra’s Reeldance Installations#01, a significant intiative, installed in the Performance Space galleries. The Julie-Anne Long and Sam James collaboration, The Nun’s Picnic (RT65, p13), combines a wardrobe-cum-dressing table replete with photographs, tiny videos, clothing, books and a few intimate possessions that might belong to a nun, all framed by a subjective video journey through a forest screened on the adjoining walls. The delicate, almost sombre ambience is a foretaste of Long’s performance, Nun, next on the dance program that night. In another room is Cordelia Beresford’s installation, I Dream of Augustine featuring dancer Narelle Benjamin in 2 finely crafted black and white films. One has Benjamin performing between 2 chairs in acts of suspension and elevation deploying the magic of both film and a dextrous body. The other is a thing of beauty, a visual litany of simple if sometimes mysterious texts (“A beautiful woman rearranged by anonymous hands”; “not her, she is not real”), antique body diagrams and an intense movement vocabulary set in an old machine shop, their juxtapositions yielding lateral reflections on dance, the body and language. To be seen again, and again.

Breathing Hole

In the second part of Solo series no. 1 Nikki Heywood speaks and moves through a dark, claustrophobic reverie, adopting the persona of “a woman in a chilly zone…obsessed by a man trapped below the ice.” The image fans out to include the Russian sailors who a few years ago went down with their nuclear submarine and even further to the fate of all of us as the polar caps melt and we all go under. The persona seems to be of “a girl who didn’t know the weight of things” (program note), but for whom the performance represents perhaps an expansion of empathy. I write “seems” and “perhaps” because on one viewing the verbal and aural density of this work, the brevity of images and the heightened expressiveness in the delivery worked against contemplation. This is atypical of Heywood’s usual attention to detail, the power of sustained images and avoidance of the literal. It’s worth noting that Heywood, a major artist in my book, has been consistently denied serious funding for many years while investing her talent in supporting other artists and doing them proud. It’s time that changed and Heywood was honoured with the time and space that creation requires.

NUN

Julie-Anne Long steps inside a habit, adopting a nun persona but without characterisation, just generating an “essence…something to do with the elusive and complex feelings of the eroticism of being alone” (program note). Like the Reeldance installation this a serious work. There are flashes of humour as the nun dances to Elvis (Take My Hand Precious Lord) or Tammy Wynette (You’ll Never Walk Alone), but each says something more about the moments of freedom in a sequestered life that might seem ordinary to us (or perhaps just as liberating). And some of those moments are ecstatic, as in the Wynette, as the nun leaps and swoops and the light turns white. As in the installation there’s a sense of entering someone else’s private space, this time from a distance, the nun glimpsed at domestic duties through a small window on the Performance Space proscenium arch. But as she draws near the audience, the projected image of the house slips into the distance, the forest around it enlarging, inviting her into free space, ever private even in such openness. But it’s the smallest movements, the little images glimpsed through windows and doors that are the most memorable, declaring the nun’s otherness and self-contained aloneness.
Brian Carbee, In the Dark

In the Dark

This work, presented mid-February in the same venue, has it all: talent (performers Michael Whaites, Narelle Benjamin, Julie-Anne Long, Brian Carbee and UK director Wendy Houstoun) and movie-making. The wobbly but enticing governing conceit comes replete with an opening trailer (“what they got was the dance of a lifetime)”, various takes, calls for closeups and long shots and episodes of direction (Carbee drolly calling the shots in front of finished film). Scattered in between are gameshow antics (Whaites as a wonderfully startled host), distracted political diatribe with a smile (Long wearing a huge feathered head dress) and over-determined dance (Benjamin to a set of ridiculously demanding instructions). Performed with engaging ease amidst a sense that anything could happen, the work immediately recalls the UK’s Forced Entertainment with their penchant for imploding monologues, epic list-making, impro, gruelling durational turns and post-pomo theatre-wrecking (once upon a time mislabelled as ‘deconstruction’). Same, but very different, after all these are dancers, and a great night was had by all, though exactly what we had left me a little in the dark.

One Extra & Performance Space, Solo Series#1, Martin del Amo, Under Attack; Nikki Heywood, Breathing Hole; Julie-Anne Long, NUN; Performance Space, Feb 23-March 6

In the Dark, a movement & video performance, director Wendy houstoun, performers Julie-Anne Long, Narelle Benjamin, Michael Whaites, Brian Carbee, lighting Neil Simpson, sound Drew Crawford; Performance Space, Feb 3-13

One Extra, Reeldance Installations#01, curator Erin Brannigan, works by Cordelia Beresford, Samuel James, Julie-Anne Long, Narelle Benjamin, Heidrun Lohr; Performance Space, Feb 10-March 6

In a significant development for Australian artists wishing to access key works, Contemporary Arts Media (CAM) has established an impressive catalogue of international performances, documentaries and training films on DVD and VHS cassette, and is actively seeking to increase its Australian content. The range of artists, among many others, includes Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Odin Theatret (an extensive gathering), Julie Taymar, Cirque du Soleil, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (an excellent selection) and Nederlands Dans Theater. The catalogue also includes visual arts, music, film, dance screen and media studies. Jonathan Marshall met with CAM’s director Kriszta Doczy to discuss the range and market for her catalogue.

After teaching theatre for several years Doczy founded the WA-based company Contemporary Arts Media (formerly Hush Videos) in 1993 to distribute materials which could be used for contemporary arts instruction at schools and universities in Australia and overseas. The collection now comprises around 1,500 documentary and instructional videos, DVDs and books. Doczy notes, “I was practicing in the performing arts in the 1970s in Europe”, and CAM’s current catalogue reflects, to some degree, the chief influences to which she was exposed at that time. She cites the Polish avant garde of Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, Japanese Noh theatre and the revival of the early Soviet avant gardism of Vsevold Meyerhold as some of the chief forms she encountered during her career, all of which are now featured in the CAM catalogue. The collection constitutes an implicit canon of contemporary Western and world theatre focusing “on alternatives to realism”, she explains, “and this is why much of the Kabuki and Asian theatre is included.”

Non-Western styles exerted a critical, formative influence on Western theatre makers such as Antonin Artaud (Balinese dance), Bertholt Brecht (Beijing Opera), Eugenio Barba and others. As such, these styles are now a crucial part of the Western contemporary theatre heritage, their significance extending beyond any patronising anthropological interest. In keeping with CAM’s non-realist focus, the more readily accessible Naturalist theatre does not make up a significant part of the collection. “We have some material on Konstantin Stanislavski and his successors but not much”, Doczy says. A video on playwright/director David Mamet and another documenting an early Edward Albee production are rare exceptions.

Doczy herself is passionate about the need for artists to be exposed to historic avant garde sources and training methodologies. “Sometimes I see shows by young people”, she explains, “in which they are repeating lots of inventions, lots of elements which have already been widely used over the course of the last 40 years. These students need to come up with an original idea. So they have to see what the generations before have done so as to be able to grow out of it, to step further, and to find their own theatrical or aesthetic language. They must study these works and make their own voice. So it is very important to have this documentation available. How else can you build up a culture?”

Doczy’s background–combined with the availability of extant materials–has caused CAM to focus more on international, rather than Australian, arts. However, the catalogue currently includes audio-visual materials on Melbourne improvisers Born in a Taxi, Brisbane’s Zen Zen Zo, Jimmy Chi’s Bran Nue Dae, mechanistic body artist Stelarc, WA-based performance artist Domenico de Clario, a collection of the 2004 ReelDance Awards finalist and several WA dance makers like co.Loaded and Chrissie Parrott. Probably the most significant new title distributed by CAM is Shifting and Sliding: The feminine psyche in performance, an edited collection of video interviews and production excerpts featuring the work of writer/director Jenny Kemp and choreographer Helen Herbertson, focusing particularly on their collaboration Still Angela (2002). A video of the full production is also on sale. Although some discussion of Kemp’s work is already available in Australian Women’s Drama (Peta Tait, Elizabeth Schafer eds, Currency, Sydney, 1997) and several of Kemp’s published scripts, this is the first widely accessible audio-visual title to deal exclusively with her career.

In order to expand the collection, CAM has also moved into small scale video production. The Chrissie Parrott title, for example, was edited at the company’s Fremantle offices. It features a new interview with Parrott recorded by CAM, edited with extant documentation of productions from Parrott’s own collection. The limited funds available, coupled with the typically low financial returns for such specialist films, means that the audiovisual language and aesthetic of CAM’s documentaries tends to be straightforward. Talking heads intercut with production stills and segments of audio-visual documentation remain the standard format.

Doczy herself attributes this entirely to issues of cost: “The ideal documentary would cost about $100,000 or more to make. So companies tend to team up with broadcasters to produce them and then sell them for television broadcast. But we don’t have a choice. We make low budget, educational documentaries for which $5,000 is the absolute maximum. Otherwise these films wouldn’t be available.”

The most recent development for CAM is Doczy’s push to have the company move beyond distributing materials to educational institutions and teachers. She hopes to create a shop where artists and other interested parties can obtain some of CAM’s products, as well as establish a public library. One such open access collection is about to be established in Budapest where the librarians of the Palace of Culture have decided to add CAM’s entire catalogue to their public holdings. Doczy is putting out feelers to found a similar establishment in Australia, most likely based in Melbourne. In the interim she is happy for students and other curious people to make appointments to view selected materials at CAM’s Fremantle offices. “I tell people all the time that they can come here and curl up watching what we have,” she says.

Gantner at PS122

It’s 4 months since Melbourne’s Vallejo Gantner beat 300 other applicants to be announced as the new Artistic Director of PS122, New York’s famed centre for innovative performance. He took up official duties on January 31, appointed on a platform of bringing an international focus to the venue. Gantner proved his qualifications in his tenure as Artistic Director of the Dublin Fringe Festival over the last 3 years, using his broad knowledge of contemporary arts practice and entrepreneurial spirit to transform a relatively minor festival into an important gathering of some of the most challenging emerging artists from around the world. The board of PS122 would no doubt have been particularly impressed with Gantner’s success in bringing to Dublin 3 of New York’s most innovative young companies, the irreverently titled National Theatre of the United States of America (NTUSA), Radiohole and Elevator Repair Service, the latter to work in collaboration with emerging Dublin artists.

Gantner faces a daunting task at PS122. His predecessor, Mark Russell, had been in the position for 21 years, was well loved, and instrumental in the early development of some of New York’s most successful performing artists including the late Spalding Gray, Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian as well as more recently established companies. For many, PS122 has always been not so much a New York Institution as an East Village neighbourhood venue. The artistic community of the area has a sense of ownership over the space and Gantner’s directorship will be subject to extreme scrutiny.

Gantner intends to encourage “an environment that creates a 2 way bridge between emerging New York artists and emerging international artists” in order to challenge what he sees as an “isolationist tendency in American arts.” The manifestations of this dialogue are yet to be seen, but there is certainly the potential for initiating fruitful conversations between New York and Australian-based artists.

But what is the shape of the New York experimental theatre and performance scene today? Where is the next generation of Richard Foremans, Wooster Groups and Mabou Mines? These are questions I had very much in mind when I visited New York last year for the first time. I was there for a month, presenting The Black Swan of Trespass with Melbourne-based Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Four companies in particular caught my attention: Radiohole, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell’s NYC Players and NTUSA. None of these companies have been to Australia, although most have toured in Europe.

NYC Players

Richard Maxwell has been creating performance in New York since 1994. He moved to New York to seek out the Wooster Group with whom he interned before establishing the NYC Players. Over the last 10 years Maxwell has developed a particular brand of performance where “acting” is eschewed and “being” is the goal. “If my style is anything, it’s anti-style. It’s about coming as close to neutrality as you can.” He works with a combination of trained actors and people who have received no specialist training at all. His interest in non-performers is based on the unique vocabulary they bring to the stage, each one with their own set of rules of engagement. Maxwell believes this disarms the audience and calls for a new way of seeing. His plays, with titles like Burger King and Drummer Wanted, chart the ebb and flow of the everyday in the lives of ordinary people, finding beauty and metaphysics in the miniscule rhythms of human interaction.

Showcase played to audiences of 15 in a hotel room at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia as part of the excellent Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. It is a simple story of a man, played by Maxwell regular Jim Fletcher, who encounters his shadow in a hotel room while on a business trip. His shadow is an actor covered head to toe with a tight black body stocking–a striking and disturbing image. At times the shadow offers a facsimile of the actor’s movements with great precision, at other times he seems not to be bothered and at one point he even leaves the room, through the audience, to the bathroom. For half an hour the actor talks quietly, with little intonation, giving voice to his interior monologue as audience members lean against a wall or sit awkwardly on the bed. He often addresses the audience directly, yet with an odd solipsistic detachment. He suggests, without judgment, that we are not welcome: “I close the door of the hotel room behind me, and the only thing I want is to feel myself completely alone.” As the monotony deepens, the audience members are called upon to assign emotional valencies to words and phrases in the absence of any clear distinctions. The lack of ‘characterisation’ also acts to remove the utterances from fixed moral and social codes, and the audience becomes complicit in the character’s amoral universe.

The piece ends with a song. It is not beautifully sung, and the melody meanders in the way that a conversation might. The backing music, a sequence of slowly shifting chords, is played on a dictaphone held in the actor’s hands. This is a device used by Maxwell in earlier pieces, and it creates a sense of extreme fragility and vulnerability.

Radiohole

Radiohole is a New York company which has been investigating innovative approaches to the notion of acting since 1998. There are 3 permanent members and a host of occasional collaborators. Radiohole’s early work was presented at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street and at Richard Foreman’s Ontological Theatre, and the influences are evident. For the past 4 years their base has been at the Collapsable (sic) Hole, a (barely) converted garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Here they are able to develop their work over long periods, usually 18 months to 2 years. I saw their most recent creation, Radiohole is Still My Name, on my last night in the US, and it was a fittingly excessive and vertiginous experience.

Radiohole Is Still My Name is aptly described on the company website as “a spaghetti docu-drama guest-starring Guy Debord.” Guy Debord, Situationist philosopher and author of The Society of the Spectacle, was an influence on the punk movement, cited by artists such Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid. And there is more than a little of the punk aesthetic in Radiohole’s work, in its intoxicated interweaving of dense political commentary and pure libidinal excess. In this show, the cast of 4 indulge in bitter personal arguments, gun fights (using party poppers for sound effects), beer guzzling, binge eating as they reflect on the current financial and moral woes of the company. The actors play versions of themselves, answering to their own names.

By the end of the show, which ran for an hour, the space had been completely transformed by the actors. As they cleaned up the mess of food, beer, props and discarded costumes, most audience members hung around for more beer and music. I left high on the buzz that only a rich blend of deconstruction and drink can induce.

NTUSA

NTUSA has been presenting work in New York since 2001, predominantly in non-theatre spaces including a basement beneath a 42nd Street shopfront, a Brooklyn bar and a tiny room above the Henry Miller Theater. I saw their most recent production, Placebo Sunrise, at Dublin Fringe where it was included as part of the focus on theatre of the Americas.

Set on a nightmarish cruise ship, all the action of Placebo Sunrise takes place in a long corridor that extends back from a tiny semi-circular thrust. The form is surreal vaudeville, a 2 act pastiche of cheesy Broadway dance numbers, Beckettian expressions of existential isolation, slapstick and music hall. Yehuda Duenyas and Ryan Bronz as Garvey and Superpant$ perform a kind of Vladimir/Estragon double act with the one constantly battling to understand the nature of his predicament while the other is quite happy to be taken on a wild journey, no questions asked. There is an ontological slipperiness to the form that bears a family resemblance to Radiohole and Foreman. It was an impressive production, very assured, conceptually tight and very funny.

Lineage

My experiences seeing the work of New York based emerging independent companies was really invigorating. These companies share a spirit of adventure and critical inquiry combined with a range of skills developed over years of continual engagement. The companies have no doubt benefited from support, in the form of mentorship and resources, from the previous generation of experimental companies. This kind of industry mentorship is something that is only possible in theatre cultures where conceptual, process-orientated companies have a shot at longevity and stability.

I hope that we are able to see some of this work in Australia in the near future and look forward to the possibility of a productive dialogue between independent New York companies and their counterparts in Australia. Hopefully such trans-Pacific exchange will be facilitated through Gantner’s appointment in New York.

Romeo Castellucci’s Genesis, From the museum of sleep (Melbourne International Arts Festival, 2002) was the apex and the conclusion of a meta-narrative of theatrical thought from Castellucci’s company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio. In 2001 the company embarked on a major new project, a cycle of 11 episodes/productions called Tragedia Endogonidia, an open system of representation that, like an organism, changes and evolves with time and geography, with the name ‘Episode’ assigned to each phase of its transformation. This system forces a radical re-thinking not only of creation, but also of the whole theatrical system. The aim is to represent a tragedy of the future. The graphic emblem, and one of the aesthetically consistent throughlines of the cycle is a representation of Man and Woman (Adam and Eve), originating from the third planet (Earth), orbiting a star (Sun). This is an image which is being carried by the Voyager space ship launched in the 1970s in search of extra-terrestrial life (and still en route).

The word Endogonidia refers to those beings which are made up of, or have within them, gonads–organs such as the testis or ovary which enable them to reproduce unceasingly. Endogeny implies immortality. Tragedy, to the contrary, involves an inevitable end. The figures living on the stage of Tragedia Endogonidia do not resemble any recognizable myth or history; instead they follow each other in frames that are themselves separate, and the thread joining them is not a narrative, but rather a synchronic memory, where images alternate according to alogical and simultaneous sequencing. Each figure refers to its own frame. No biographies emerge, rather biological instances: fundamental elements consistent to all life, free of context, hierarchy or narrative, addressing questions about humanity in relation to animals, machines and even extra-terrestrials.

These bio-political themes may have been present in Castellucci’s work for a number of years, but in Tragedia Endogonidia they are organised in such a way that the inevitability of any kind of classical tragic narrative becomes impossible. Fragments, images, echoes and remnants can be deciphered, and these are titled and presented to a specific community. The often non-sensical and yet related and familiar way these remnants are organised, both within episodes and as repeated figures throughout the cycle, points to the relationship the episodes have both with each other and with the city which hosts them. In any particular episode then, one will neither be getting the ‘whole thing’ nor a fragment of a totality. It is useful, in this case, to think of a remnant, as “neither the whole… nor a part… but, rather, the non-coincidence of the whole and the part…” (Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive).

Tragedia Endogonidia has developed over a period of 3 years with a total of 11 episodes in 10 cities, each an interdependent episode but a complete production in itself. Episode names are acronyms of cities and the number of the production in the evolving work. I observed rehearsals of P.#06 (Paris), R.#07 (Rome) and C.#11 (Cesena) for 3 weeks (on 2 separate occasions) in Cesena, and the rehearsals in the theatre in both Paris and Rome.
Tragedia Endogonidia

Tragedia Endogonidia begins with fragmented images and metaphors based on sequences and patterns from the chemical and biological elements of life on Earth. While the vocabulary of the score and the scenography is structurally determined by the movement of sperm and the growth of fundamental elements and minerals, the random patterns of the behaviour of a goat (the derivation of the name of tragedy) determines the linguistic properties of the work. Tragedia Endogonidia connects with each city where the work is presented, the focus being on the tragic remnants of the community’s relationship with life on Earth, and even the possibilities of a future on a new world. Consciously or not, the episodes reveal the various stages of their evolution within the cycle, including the influences of the cities which host them. Likewise the actions, props and other objects which form the vocabulary of the cycle evolve and mutate as they reappear in numerous episodes. Like letters in an alphabet, they can be arranged to make sense or not, but they always belong.

In Cesena and Avignon there is a gold box, a child, blood and milk, core elements. In Berlin, the front rows of the auditorium are filled with life-size rabbits, and the stage 3-dimensionally transformed from black to white. In Brussels, the space is a marble cube with fluorescent lights, where the head of a robot tirelessly recites the letters of the alphabet to a newborn baby, to begin the show. In Paris, Carravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac is recreated over 2 washing machines; Jesus breaks into the space (which by now has become a kind of museum) through a window; and 2 cars are dropped from the ceiling. In Rome, there is again a cube room–the same as in Brussels–but this time white and, instead of a baby, a chimpanzee. Here Catholic priests force the confession of Mussolini, and while they play basketball, the whole set comes apart and is flown off as an Italian clown breaks into the theatre through the floor. In Strasbourg, the back of the stage is left open, exposing the real European Parliament; a group of actors arrive by bus and watch Hitchcock’s Psycho; and a tank drives into the theatre through the exposed back stage. In London, a variety of spectacular stage transformations and extraordinary figures includes scores of cats, while in Marseilles there are 2 parts at 2 separate theatres. One is a strange representation of a banquet as a photographic still life with extreme stage mechanics representing the photographic revolution, while the other is a sensational sequence of huge screens with macro-projections, a refined music score and opera singer performing towards the end.

The final episode, C.#11, back at the company’s home town is also made up of 2 parts, but in the same building. One is a bedroom with a cleaner, a boy, a cat, 7 men dressed in 1940s suits (including Castellucci himself) and a solid flat which descends and blocks the action to the point where only the feet are visible and pre-recorded voices heard. The audience is then led to the second, larger space veiled by a screen onto which a film of sperm is projected. The raised screen reveals a huge, real forest. Men with torches (very little is visible) find and appear to behead a boy who has been hiding from them, but then present the head of a cat.

These extraordinary stage events are not effects, they are all mechanically real, there is no scenic art. The connection to the city, which gives each episode its name, is obscure or subtle or vague, often no more than a passing image which signifies a specific event or characteristic.

The theatrical and representational essence of Tragedia Endogonidia is the possibility, the impossibility and the inevitability of language. This is a theatre which–acknowledging the relativity of past, present and future–exists within a history which is before, within and outside culture and mythology. By portraying extreme and confronting remains of cultural representations, Romeo Castellucci’s theatre allows for extraordinary juxtapositions and can have a profound and emotional effect. Collectively and individually, the audience possesses conditioned and developed reactions to images and ideas which, in some way, quote or distort cultural references. The core of the distortion is the clash of sacred and profane, cerebral and banal.

The burning images and breathless atmospheres in Castelluci’s creations are inspired by fundamental and original cultural references (drawing on biblical, Renaissance and contemporary iconography), meticulously rehearsed and then re-arranged in a multitude of ways, until ultimate potency has been reached. Therefore the ‘real’ work of rehearsal is not developing the theatrical ideas and images for meaning and interpretation, but rather working and tuning the representation of these ideas to have the maximum sensory, emotional and physical effect on the audience. The arresting power of the imagery and the sound of Castelluci’s theatre invites rich psycho-emotional reaction, happily bypassing rationalism, plunging the viewer into a space which is at once foreign and familiar, a space which is a type of core, a fundamental where the intellect and the senses are neutralised.

In 2004 the Sydney Festival at last foregrounded innovation and got some heat for it, and praise. In 2005 it reverted to form, wide-ranging and generalist with lots of interesting shows. A couple of the less heavily produced events proved festival highlights–the address by director-performer Robert Wilson, made possible by an initiative from the Centre for Continuing Education, Sydney University, and the Came So Far for Beauty celebration of the Leonard Cohen canon as performed by a wonderful array of largely Canadian and British singers directed by the American music producer Hal Wilner. The Shen Wei Dance Company from China excited audiences and reviewers and is rumoured to be returning to Australia. Thanks to the festival’s stingy press ticketing I didn’t see it, and I’d already parted with $128 for a ticket to The Black Rider!

Robert Wilson

Wilson was in town for the staging of The Black Rider, a minor if commercially successful collaboration with William Burroughs (libretto) and Tom Waits (a bevy of nice enough tunes without the magical weave of an opera or musical) but replete with enough of the maestro’s sublime design (a rich technicolour expressionism), theatre trickery and lateral vision to satisfy. For some young afficionados raised on videos of the classic Wilson oeuvre in performance studies courses, this briskly paced showbizzy Faustian tale looked too much like a Rocky Horror Show for the intelligentsia. For others it was an entertaining and accessible introduction to Wilson’s universe of improbable transformations, signifiers that really do float and a theatre in which the object is as important as the performer, and the performer just as much an object for contemplation. These characteristics were in evidence in Wilson’s engaging 90 minute talk where he spoke with relish of the exquisite stillness of untrained performers, the unexpected wisdom of the autist and the power of slowness–telling us the exact number of minutes (26) it would take for a tortoise to cross the stage in his theatre of image.

Delivered in his characteristic drawl, a slowing of time in itself, Wilson joins the long list of American performative autobiographers (from Mark Twain to Will Rogers to Spalding Gray) in his expert, seemingly off-the-cuff blend of anecdote, re-enactment and illustration (here in felt tip pen on paper and projections). He began at the beginning, a life without art until his late teenage years, and then detailed his earliest influences–architecture and dance (Balanchine, Cage and Cunningham)–and their non-narrative transformations of space; and the boys he adopted (one actually, one symbolically), one deaf and one autistic who became performers and collaborators in his work and helped shape Wilson’s re-visioning of time and space in the theatre. He described the evolution of works of 7 and 12 hours and more on grand themes, often created with untrained performers, sometimes drawn from communities or from the street (just as much a community for Wilson, he said). He demonstrated the art of being on a stage (as opposed to acting-being-on-stage) and elaborated on the space around the performer. He spoke of the images that consume him and which he creates on stage, refusing to interpret them; of the beam of light that thrills him as it takes 16 minutes to cross the stage–”the light is written from the beginning.” He is at times stentorian but also funny, reproducing the phone exchange with his grandmother in which he invites her to come to Paris to play the non-speaking role of Queen Victoria (A Letter to Queen Victoria, 1974-75), and she accepts as calmly as agreeing to a cup a coffee.

Already Elsewhere

Contemporary photographers like Gregory Crewdson and Bill Henson and video and filmmakers like Bill Viola and Matthew Barney create works that look like and sometimes actually have the resources of a small feature film or a major stage work and the credits to match. Crewdson’s large, colour photo series, Twilight (1998-2002; published by Harry N Abrams Inc, NY, 2002) exhibits a kind of magical realism in which distracted figures in suburban USA find themselves in rooms that have sprouted flowers, or are caught in shafts of light from the night sky. A giant cone of flowers appears in the middle of a street, a man scales a jack-and-the-beanstalk column also covered in flowers. People find themselves naked in public places. A woman floats like a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia in her flooded home. Often there’s a sense of disaster, particularly of the moment after–a tree crashed through a ceiling, an overturned bus, houses and cars on fire or things more mysterious. In her new work for the Sydney Festival, Kate Champion and designer Geoff Cobham pay tribute to Crewdson with a simulation of his art transformed into dance theatre in a series of haunting tableaux and surreal actions that add up to no narrative in particular though suggestive of some, all enveloped in that long, shocked moment that follows disaster.

In the sustained, claustrophobic opening blackout we hear what we soon take to have been the sound of the disaster. Lights sweep up from behind an immaculately realised house, sunken to its window sills. It’s almost all roof. Security guards with torches and real Alsation dogs pass through. The light brightens. Limbs can be seen protruding from windows. Bodies come to life and drag themselves onto the lawn or from over the top of the roof. The survivors gather loosely, assist one another but show no sign of affect, like the numbed townspeople in Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass who have lost their heritage and all meaning with it, or the citizens under the threat of the chemical cloud in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise.

Like Crewdson’s images, Already Elsewhere is eerily beautiful to look at and complexly suggestive, but whereas you can linger over a photograph as long as you desire, Champion’s creation involves a greater number of images, along with micro-narratives, voiceovers and video projection passages. It’s a very busy work and although sometimes generating the power peculiar to Crewdson it rarely gives itself time to make the most of any one image or set of movements. While the work steers clear of a narrative through line, nonetheless some of the performers manifest character traits and obsessions and form uncertain relationships that provide recurring motifs. In Champion’s previous work, Same same But Different, these manifested in a lucid structure with mounting intensity and powerfully sustained dance images often entwined with projections of the dancers that enabled them to perform with themselves. The structure of Already Elsewhere is elusive, the personae of most of the performers slender, the video projections insufficiently integrated, the spoken texts dominated by a wearying list-making poetic and too little relationship between word and image. In attempting to give literal voice to what Crewdson-like characters might be thinking (the inner self unseen by parents; guilt fantasies; wish lists; a litany of bitter dislikes) Champion risks undercutting the power of both her visual imagery and her dancers.

There are wonderful and haunting moments scattered across the work–sudden madness as the community races dangerously up and over the roof, taut passages where care could turn to kill (Champion is adept at the embrace that turns to tangle, tussle and wrestle), bodies possessed by itching or convulsive shaking, still in shock, and collective stillnesses, the watching as a plane passes, the final quiet waiting. So too do single images linger with photographic intensity: a strange light emanating from the house; a woman burying herself in the lawn; the tiles of the roof flying off in a late, apocalyptic moment that takes this community no closer to salvation, either in the form of rescue or redemption as characters threaten or withdraw. Already Elsewhere is a great idea, beautifully realised in its design, but otherwise needing radical reconception.

Otherwise

Came So Far for Beauty filled the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House thrice with audiences astonishingly young and predictably getting on. Brett Sparks (of LA’s The Handsome Family), Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker provided the requisite baritone vocals, with the rest ranging through the embracing mezzo of Beth Orton on to the wonderfully idiosyncratic, folk inflected voices of the McGarrigle Sisters and Linda Thompson, Martha Wainright’s rich, raw twang, to the tenors of Teddy Thompson and Rufus Wainright and the soaring vibrato of Antony, along with the classic harmonies of veteran Cohen backing singers Perla Battalla and Julie Christensen. The great band included the UK veteran guitarist Chris Spedding and an amazingly effective deployment of the musical saw in the hands of David Coulter. Singers sang solo, in duets and trios and in chorus, and proved the durability of the Cohen repertoire. With concert curator Hal Willner, the performers offered an incredibly generous program gratefully received by a passionate audience.

Elision Ensemble’s Visionary Landscapes was a small scale festival highlight, but the works it presented were conceptually grand with the intimate Opera House Studio allowing close observation of some virtuosic playing. At the end of the concert we were rewarded with a repeat of the opening work, Brian Ferneyhough’s Terrain for solo violin and ensemble (1992). With such a complex work, seeing was learning, in fact seeing was believing, and Graeme Jennings on violin was utterly persuasive in his demonstration of the work’s dynamic cogency. Works by Liza Lim, Michael Whiticker and Timothy O’Dwyer (my second experience of his remarkable Sight and sound of a storm in sky country for saxophone and live electronics [2003]) completed an exhilarating and exemplary program.

The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet brought to the festival an astonishing fluency and fullness of tone with their unflinching embrace of Ligeti’s 10 Pieces for Wind Quintet and 6 Bagatelles for Wind Quartet along with the sombre and richly inventive Winter Songs for tenor and wind quintet set to e e cummings’ poems by the festival’s chamber music series curator, Brett Dean, and adroitly sung by Gregory Massingham. Also on Dean’s festival program was more popular fare in the form of 12 Angry Cellos, a gathering of fine cellists (including the UK’s Robert Cohen and Australia’s David Pereira) with works by Xenakis (a fine Retours), Pärt (yes, Fratres) and Villa-Lobos (yes, Bachianas Brasileiras No 5). Dean’s own Twelve Angry Men proved to be the most intense of the works. Although the voice of reason (from the famous American stage play which inspired the work) wins in the end the argument is a hard and bitter one, the flurries and storms of entwining string voices more remembered than the resolution.

Sydney Festival Artistic Director Brett Sheehy now moves on to the 2006 Adelaide Festival. Let’s hope that his occasional flare with Sydney’s small scale festival takes fire with Adelaide’s big budget and, for the greater part, its uniquely courageous programming history. In the same year, Lyndon Terracini will launch his first Brisbane Festival after doing great things across the state with the Queensland Music Festival. Kristy Edmunds, with a solid background in programming contemporary dance and avant garde performance in the USA, presents her first Melbourne Festival in October 2003. See our interview with Edmunds in RealTime 67 (June-July).

Already Elsewhere, director/choreographer Kate Champion, designer Geoff Cobham, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House; Elision Ensemble, Visionary Landscapes, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 9; Robert Wilson TALK, The Sydney Theatre, Jan 10; The Black Rider, Tom Waits, Robert Wilson, The Sydney Theatre, Jan 17; 12 Angry Cellos, City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Jan 15; Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, Program 1, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Jan 27; Came So Far for Beauty, An Evening of Leonard Cohen Songs, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 28-30; Sydney Festival 2005, Jan 8-30

Deported to Danger (2004), a report by the Edmund Rice Centre, found that of 40 asylum seekers deported from Australia to 11 countries, only 5 were safe. Another 10 were found to be in so much danger that it was not safe to interview them. There are other stories. Ardeshir Gholipour, an Iranian artist and democracy campaigner, faces deportation after being detained for 5 years in Australia. By deporting him to Iran, the government is exposing him to reprisal, if not immediate killing, by the Mullahs for his work as a writer for the democracy movement. Alvar Moralez sought refuge in Australia in 2001 to escape the paramilitary in Columbia. He was deported and murdered shortly after his arrival in Bogota. An anti-narcotics campaigner, Ahib Bilal fled Pakistan in 2000 due to threats from a drug smuggling group. He was deported from Villawood Detention Centre and was murdered within 2 months of returning to Pakistan.

These case histories are frightful indictments of government policies and help to contextualise 2 recent productions by the Queensland Theatre Company. The first was last year’s Far Away by English playwright Caryl Churchill (RT64, p45), written before 9/11 but prophetically making the point that the current chill is undermining struggles for social justice everywhere. In the opening act a young girl, Joan, challenges her aunt Harper with childishly persistent questions regarding horrific events she has seen taking place outside, in which her uncle is implicated. Her aunt obstinately defends her husband and warns Joan to ask no more questions, or she will be branded a traitor.

This caution was echoed in real life when the spokesperson for the California Anti-Terrorist Information Centre recently proclaimed: “If you have a group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism…You can almost argue that a protest against such a war is a terrorist act.” Millions of dollars spent on the brutal security crackdowns at the November 2003 Miami FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) summit and the 2004 G8 Summit in Georgia came from a US Congress Iraq Appropriations bill.

In the second act of Far Away a march constitutes a grotesque fashion parade of condemned prisoners wearing ornately stylised hats which have been entered in a competition. The ominous staging instantly recalled photos of the degradation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Here a remark by another prescient writer is pertinent: “Where liberty has been promised most, they had the biggest, worst prisons” (Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet, 1970). The final act suggested an absurdly apocalyptic, horrifying conclusion in which nations, plants and animals were at war: the foxglove is as murderous as bleach, the cats come in on the side of the French, and the mallards are in alliance with elephants and the Koreans.

QTC’s initial offering this year was a remounting of Company B’s production of Melissa Reeves’ The Spook, directed by Neil Armfield. If Churchill’s was an intense, surreal fable, Reeve’s work was a sometimes uneven mix of comedy, farce and drama set in Australia in the late 1960s, when the White Australia Policy and Robert Menzies’ legacy still held sway, and Australians were embroiled alongside US troops in Vietnam. Despite stylistic differences, the 2 plays are based on the familiar premise that when there is a war on enemies are everywhere, and the protagonists are obliged to extirpate them. Hypnotised by rhetoric into a false focus on who’s on the right and wrong side, they don’t ask questions about who’s getting killed.

A naïve young working class man, Martin–Damon Herriman in a spirited and sensitively modulated performance–is recruited by ASIO agent Alex (Steve Le Marquand) to spy on the South Bendigo branch of the Communist Party. Kerry Walker as Martin’s conservative, acerbic mother, Trixie, and Anna Lise Phillips as his bouncy, put upon wife Annette, are splendid comic foils for his sense of mission, while also subtly communicating their sense of betrayal by Martin on other fronts.

By the late 60s the Communist Party was a spent political force due to splits. The 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia hastened its demise. In the irascibility of the Party hack, Frank, splenetically portrayed by Russell Kiefel, Melissa Reeves suggest it’s become a holding operation. The incisively written parts played with such complete dignity and humanity by George Spartels as the Greek fish and chip shop proprietor, George, and Eugenia Fragos as his wife, Elli, convey the attraction of progressive Communist ideals for some of the best people of the era. Their warm embrace of Martin leads to the tragedy of their deportation to Greece with the expectation of George’s murder by the Junta. We are back to the future.

Melissa Reeves’ script is brilliant in the small clinches. She maintains a light touch, choosing to eschew allegory. Both Spook and Churchill’s play serve satisfyingly contrasting functions in QTC’s brave, alternative programming.

The Spook, writer Melissa Reeves, director Neil Armfield, QPAC Playhouse, Brisbane, Feb 15-March 5

Far Away, writer Caryl Churchill, director Leticia Caceres, QPAC, Brisbane, Nov 11-Dec 4, 2004

From the version 1.0 bunker, David Williams, one of the makers of A Certain Maritime Incident, which provocatively rewrote the verbatim theatre idiom and pulled huge audiences eager to chew over Australian evil, reflects on the motivation for the company’s new show, The Wages of Spin.

The Wages of Spin charts both the War on Iraq and the culture wars. In poring over the documents from the war and its electoral aftermath, we were struck by two things. Firstly the outrage about the torture of kittens on a Sydney railway station makes national newspaper front pages, erasing ongoing revelations about Abu Ghraib abuses. Kitten torture is widely regarded as a more significant sign of catastrophic moral decline than the torture of Iraqis under the power of Coalition forces in ‘free’ Iraq. The kitten saga sucks all the media oxygen from the Abu Ghraib stories. We the people are happy to move on.

Secondly, we were struck that out of a year’s worth of newspaper front pages, Delta Goodrem appears to be on every second one. Delta has cancer. Delta has romances. Delta is ditched. Meanwhile Falluja is being obliterated and the piles of uncounted Iraqi dead grow larger. These are obviously the real issues, and it’s time political theatre got real. Some of us have been mugged by reality, and it’s an uncomfortable feeling.

It’s clear that no decent Australian citizen truly believes that Australia’s good name has been dragged through the mud entering a war under false pretences, and then failing to adequately prepare for the peace. So we’ve got to get with the program. Performance makers have a responsibility to provide bang for buck. Can’t be wasting taxpayers’ money at a time like this. We’ll need it for our boys on the front line, fighting for our freedom. In this ‘real’ context, freedom means compliance and democracy means silence. The silent majority are the only people worthy of citizenship, but only if they stay silent. We read between the lines in Gerard Henderson, Miranda Devine et al, and hear the call to shut up and let real Australians get on with the business of being comfortable, relaxed and proud.

Version 1.0 promise problems for the converted. As our dramaturg Paul Dwyer puts it attacking the hypocrisies of our representatives is “like money for jam.” We have to find another bit of purchase on the slippery surface of the spin machine. Everyone knows that Australia went to war on a lie. But so what? Freedom and democracy are worth fighting for, aren’t they? We are good people, aren’t we?

We hope The Wages of Spin, like the plaintive meows of the kitten, gets under the skin. We think it’s dark and dangerous, and completely not the show that we expected to make. Join us for the rollercoaster ride. There may be casualties.

version 1.0, The Wages of Spin, Performance Space, Sydney, May 20- June 5 Bookings 02 9698 7235; The Street Theatre, Canberra, July 20-30, bookings 02 6247 1223

There’s something gothic in the Brisbane zeitgeist. Running counter to the anodyne stainless steel and blonde wood aesthetic currently bedevilling architecture in the new ‘smart’ Brisbane, it seems as though the city’s artists are scrambling to uncover a sinister underbelly where it doesn’t officially exist. Priding itself on comfort and liveability (“laze and languor” as Jane Austen might have it), Brisbane doesn’t really ‘do’ seaminess. But in the absence of a state fostered culture of oppression post-Bjelke-Petersen, or a ready-made culture of cracks-and-fissures creepiness (á la Adelaide’s urban ‘Family’ mythology), writers, musicians, dancers and performance artists seem to be turning to gothic fable as a way of framing the corrupt past, or hankering for a more dynamic and romantic alternative to the present preoccupation with antiseptic urban veneers.

Norman Price, Angela Betzien and Errol Price have made recent gothic contributions to theatre discourse; Christine Johnston and the delightfully mordant Kransky Sisters celebrate the gothic in cabaret form; and Frank Theatre have danced with the devil in the guise of Nick Cave. Now a collection of the city’s most exciting young performance, multimedia and sound artists has come together under the auspices of Western Australia’s John Burtt and Katie Lavers (skadada) to create Alchemy, a theatre/dance performance that celebrates “the magical and surreal world of Grimm’s fairytales” in a refreshingly wry contemporary urban setting.

Funded in the dying breath of the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board, the Alchemy workshop was presented at Brisbane’s suitably gothic Powerhouse, the ensemble including a range of freelance and company-trained (Polytoxic, Vulcana Women’s Circus, Frank Theatre) practitioners.

This work-in-progress presentation depicted the twisted goings-on inside a tiered brick veneer home that could ostensibly have been in any city. Marika Sasnowski’s grand edifice projections onto translucent scrims of floor-to-ceiling fabric created a strong sense of a universal gothic, but still seemed somehow anchored to the Powerhouse’s industrial carapace. Three grotesque Ugly Sisters primped and preened in grubby corsets and knickers in the attic, while Pearson’s Cinderella toiled with mops and buckets in the cellar. As she began polishing the anodised metal teapots, the sisters transformed into rat-like ghouls and descended to torment her in a unison dance sequence that owed as much to Beetlejuice and Thriller as it did to the Brothers Grimm. As the frenetic polishing unleashed a distinctly sensual and urbane genie (Fez Fa’anana), I couldn’t help but feel we were back in the bowels of the Brisbane psyche, with the anarchic spirit as the city’s collective urban repressed.

The disorder and dis-ease insinuated itself through the building’s floors and helped loosen up its anally retentive inhabitants to joyful effect. A narcissistic dandy and a stitched up English spinster found groove in their respective cloisters, then found love in a teacups-to-the-wall ritual of eavesdropping and sublimation. The Ugly Sisters transformed momentarily from slatterns to starlets in a wish fulfilling aerial display that nodded camply to the Follies Bergere. Then it all abruptly ended with a ‘to be continued’ teaser.

For a developmental showing, the piece was incredibly rich, and the performers clearly relished the opportunity to indulge in personal flights of fancy (away, perhaps from the dictates of more established company or ensemble aesthetics). Indeed, part of the joy of watching this enchanting work lay in the exuberance with which its team of performers embraced a sense of play. Under Burtt and Lavers’ assured and irreverent directorship, the ensemble exemplified some of the finest principles of capital ‘P’ performance: in abandoning spoken-word, the team were still committed to embracing rich characterisation; while in exploring innovative ways of communicating and abjuring linear narrative structures, they still maintained a patent respect and affection for storytelling. All this charm and ebullience was ably helped along by a manipulative and cheeky Astor Piazzola nuevo tango accordion score and Lawrence English’s atmospheric soundscape. Alchemy gave us a fine taste of things to come.

Alchemy, artistic directors John Burtt, Katie Lavers; performers Lisa Fa’alafi, Fez Fa’anana, Amanda-Lyn Pearson, Leah Shelton, Sofia Woods; Brisbane Powerhouse, March 9-12

Abductions was an ambitious mixed bill mounted by Perth’s Artrage, featuring 5 new playlets from emerging artists. The program was characterised by the usual highs and lows of mixed bills, and despite best efforts, the unforgiving concrete bunker design of the Bakery Theatre was not always equal to the technical demands. Dividing the venue into 6 with curtains led to some less than ideal speaker and lighting placement. Despite these rough edges, Abductions contained gems from artists who look likely to produce impressive work in the future.

Patti Pied, for example, was an assured monologue from writer/performer Vinyl M’shell. Beaming at the audience, she revelled in enunciating a mixture of dirty realist details of sexual escapades and drug taking, blasphemously seasoned with a rich Christian iconography. M’shell powered through the largely nonsensical tale of a grubby Goth chick reborn as the new, sexually alluring “chosen one” and sister to Christ. This spoken word performance was accompanied by an equally symbolically overloaded background video projection, giving the show something of a careening punk cabaret ambience. While this rich melange did not amount to much conceptually, the energy and poetic craft underlying the monologue promised great things for the future. Compared to the mad energy of Patti Pied, Xavier Mitchelides’ more coherent one man show, Loving the Alien, came across as simply fine stand-up comedy: a funny work within a well-established format (right down to Mitchelides’ Eddie Murphy impersonations).

The wild card of the season was writer/performer Tomás Ford’s improvised Difficult Second Novel. For this bizarre work, an audience member was chosen to act as ‘God’ for the night for a struggling writer and his wayward, cocaine-snorting muse. The audience member had to suggest a genre in which the artists might craft a story and adding various ‘pressures’, such as fear of losing readers. In addition to the madness of this conceit and the visible struggle of the actors to cope with its demands, much of the piece’s appeal lay in the incongruity of having these characters represent the classic artist and muse. The latter was weaselly, whining and generally not very inspiring, spending most of his time trying to escape his author, while Ford as the writer was a volatile mixture of brooding anger and down to earth, no nonsense logic. He behaved more like a truckie taking a break on the Birdsville Track than any idealised sensitive writer in his garret. Although the ‘novel’ produced on the night I attended was stupid in the extreme (an endless Western gunfight between Bob Dylan and David Bowie), the crass illogic of the piece and the way it endlessly threatened to collapse under its own conceits made for absorbing viewing.

The highlight of Abductions was Afterwards We’ll Go Away. This wonderful, comically existential production drew heavily on the aesthetics of David Lynch, with a greater emphasis on overt humour. It also featured some particularly striking surrealist stage images at the beginning and end of the performance. Ineffectual, love-struck detective Dennis Moon pined for retired jazz chanteuse Mary-Lou Bakerman as he tried to find out what happened to her departed pianist lover. Moon’s office became a field of combat for Francine Hopscotch, the delightfully shy and dorky secretary pining for Moon, who was replaced by Mary-Lou’s venomous, beehive hairdo afflicted sister. Meanwhile the strange couple of singer Baby Red Shoes and her subservient pianist took over from Mary-Lou and her partner at the local jazz club. The group devised script moved deftly between these multiple romantic entanglements and each character was given a space to propound his or her take on the world and the woes inherent in it.

The well balanced, 3 level day-glo and tulle set was rich in an ironic 1950s American aesthetic, with neon-like glowing blocks of coloured light. Afterwards We’ll Go Away embodied not only a sharp, controlled sense of staging and dramaturgy, but also a delightfully amusing sense of the absurd–while also serving as an excellent showcase for the cast. If these modest, clipped pleasures were not sufficient, the final image of Mary-Lou’s returned shock-haired pianist, his gigantic, hairy foam hands waving in front of Mary-Lou before she vengefully severed them from his wrists to release cascades of red cloth, was pure Tristan Tzara. This Dadaist moment provided a suitably melodramatic conclusion to this hot-house comedy of manners.

Artrage, Abductions, coordinator/curator Sam Fox; featuring: Loving the Alien, writer/performer Xavier Michelides, director Adam Mitchell; Patti Pied, writer/performer Vinyl M’shell; Afterwards We’ll Go Away, cast devised, director/designer Zoe Pepper; Difficult Second Novel, writer Tomás Ford, director Claire Boreham; Bakery Theatre, Perth, Feb 3-19

co.loaded: Aqueous

The 2005 Perth Festival premiered the newly reformed dance group co.loaded, led by Margrete Helgeby and Stefan Karlsson. Though established for mature artists along the lines of the Nederlands Dans Theater III, the choreography in Aqueous was sharply classical in its nuances, with no visible accommodation for less virtuosic bodies. Indeed, much of the appeal of the series of pieces comprising Aqueous was the way they collectively showcased the exceptional technique of Karlsson and particularly Helgeby whose clean turns and poses were flavoured with subtle hints of emotional expression.

This somewhat odd collection included Mar, an exaggerated, ballroom dancing style duet from choreographer Jon Burtt in which Karlsson’s hands powerfully manipulated the compliant body of his female partner. Like witnessing a reincarnation of Gene Kelly performing the sexy but nevertheless sexist aesthetics of a Parisian Apache tango, this seemed a bizarre inclusion–though sequins and feminine submission never go out of fashion in ballroom dancing. Natalie Weir’s contemporary ballet Every Moment was less jarring, the restrained ebb and flow of black clad groups of 5, 3, 2 and 1 constructing pleasingly abstract geometric sequences, far removed from Weir’s somewhat melodramatic earlier works.

The most choreographically distinctive work was Paea Leach’s Wan. Being new to Western Australia, I was struck by the way Wan’s visual design and music recalled the pop-influenced staging of other Australian choreographers such as Obarzanek, Stewart and Guerin. However, despite the similarities of a dark, ambiguous tone, an initial glitchie electronica score from Sydney’s Pretty Boy Crossover, and an almost brutal, minimalist visual design of blocks of white light and clearly delimited spaces, Leach’s physical language was distinctive. The resemblance was dramaturgical rather than choreographic. For me, Wan produced an intriguing sense of familiarity and scission.

The haunted air of the space was established by dramaturgical dichotomies. Glitch music depends for its affect on punctums and caesura, on clicks and errors that cut up and contaminate silence. The stage was similarly dissected by light and movement: a wide, open floor deliberately circumscribed by the few squares and shafts of light which the dancers were permitted to enter. This was further enhanced and made concrete by a small raised platform upon which much of the tangled duet was enacted. Leach’s dancers were not constrained by the twisted forms or harsh muscular contractions which characterise the choreography of Obarzanek, Stewart and Guerin. These were nevertheless cramped and cribbed bodies, curling in upon themselves, or reaching up and out only to deflate and hold their position. The limp, half collapsed body was a particularly marked image, its ambivalent energies encapsulating both defeat and striving, summing up the dense minutiae of physical gesture which Leach explored in movement and breath.

Tura Events: Rothko Chapel

US composer Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel provided the musical highlight of the festival. Performed in the foyer adjacent to the Seeking Transcendence exhibition, it was eminently satisfying to see Marc Rothko’s paintings and other pieces immediately after the concert, enhancing the critical and contemplative edge of the event. Nestled about and upon the gallery’s stark, coiling spiral staircase, with fierce, dramatic light pushing up from floor level, the awesomely restrained sound masses produced by the Giovanni Consort Choir and the local Q8 Ensemble were in keeping with the utopian aesthetics of late modernist post-World War II art. The principal of cutting away extrinsic ornamentation to reveal only the underlying, essential, universal structures of sound, light, architecture and visual form united these installed works. The subsequent loss of confidence in neo-Supremacist visions of unifying all peoples, faiths and experiences through the discovery of an irreducible human aesthetic also gave the event a wistful tone. Artists are more likely now to respect and celebrate the particular, a point reinforced by Gaurav Mazumdar’s wonderful sitar recital following the Feldman piece. Though both performances evoked a contemplative response, the extruded, floating psychokinetic affect produced by Rothko Chapel had little in common with the increasingly fast and playful beat patterns or excited absorption in the music elicited by the sitar and tabla improvisation.

Feldman attempted to reflect Rothko’s use of large slabs of colour with a composition characterised by slow, quietly resonating extended notes, chord clusters and gently sustained choral hums into which were integrated lonely repeated notes or instrumental sequences, as well as some solo vocal lines. These slight leading motifs gave the piece its elliptical drama and an endless sense of becoming, rarely reaching a crescendo or building to a full resolution. Rather, there were plateaus and groupings which, like Rothko’s paint, spread across the aural canvas to produce an effect neither epic nor modest. The quietness and lack of forte in the playing further enhanced the impression of a series of soft sound blocks gradually cycling across the work–the opposite of György Ligeti’s almost fervid choral layering and confluences. This requirement for restraint in the execution was masterfully achieved by conductor Iain Grandage and his performers. The closing section featured the piece’s only lengthy rhythmic melody: a simple viola line supported by a glowing vibraphone beat, said by Feldman to have “the sound of the synagogue about it.” This gave the performance a particularly beautiful, emotive conclusion.

Akram Khan: Ma

The jewel of the Perth Festival was Ma by Anglo-Bangladeshi dance artist Akram Khan. Citing his experience as a teenage performer in Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata as a critical influence, Khan has also identified himself with the current generation of Asian diaspora artists who are less concerned with publicly defining their cultural roots and distinctive identity. His use of multiple cultural forms within an ostensibly placeless dramatic space certainly recalled Brook’s ideal of a universal acting method. However, this model is destabilised by Ma’s highly ambiguous meditation on place and identity. Like Melbourne’s Not Yet It’s Difficult performance company, Khan prefers to characterise his process of cultural assimilation as “confusion” rather than fusion.

There was much within the production which suggested that Ma’s aesthetic echoed the familiar model of Indian subcontinental identity as uncomplicated, earth-bound and mythic in its qualities. The dancers performed in earth coloured costumes and much of the choreography drew upon Kathak and yogic forms which placed the body close to the ground. Deep squats and wide leg shifts at low level spun the bodies about as the hands delineated virtual curves across both the stage and the cosmos surrounding the performers. The familiar tones of Indian percussion supported and dramatised much of the early choreography as the performers introduced a particularly ground-based physical metaphor. Bodies rested on their heads, arms outstretched like branches before 2 female performers relating stories about trees. The first of these was of a barren woman who was given seeds by God. The seeds were planted and grew to trees, which God explained were this woman’s children–an image of maternal continuity fixed and sturdily embodied by forms whose roots ran deep in the soil.

Woven among these motifs were complications and discontinuities which eroded the metaphoric ground upon which much of the work was established, interrupting the cultural logic of the piece much as the second female storyteller constantly interrupted her partner. The Hindu mythological dramas of Kathak are traditionally performed to the northern Indian tabla, for example, but here the more hollow sounding southern Indian mridanga was employed, alternating with the soaring vocal lines of Moslem Pakistani Sufism and a variously textural and vocal use of European cello. Glitchie musique concrète from the Ictus Ensemble later replaced these live musicians altogether. The second narrative presented by the dancer who had interrupted her partner was that of the baobab, this tale providing a more comprehensive metaphor for the overall dramaturgy.

The baobab was cited as a tree whose stubby branches suggest it has been ripped from the earth by an angry god and placed upside down, its roots waving in the air. This was precisely the sensibility evoked by the broadly associative scenes and familiar yet displaced cultural motifs. A sense of place was conjured–one of earth and land and spirit–yet it was neither nowhere nor somewhere. It was distinctively Asian and mythic yet abstracted and dissociated, with cultural forms waving loosely like roots in the wind. Between sections of rapid-fire rhythmic foot stamping and tala (the vocalisation of Indian percussive patterns), bodies suddenly slowed, arched like bridges, leant against each other for stability, and then were carried off, supine, their cultural specificity and associations suddenly stripped or arrested, leaving them as bent, abstract, branch-like forms.

Like Pina Bausch’s dancers, Khan’s fellow performers frequently asked the audience if they could tell us a story or a dream–a desire to spill the contents of one’s head like Khan in the childhood story he told of hanging upside down from a branch in Bangladesh. Often, however, this offer was deliberately withheld, leaving one with the impression of cultural identity as an illusory yet unspoken, recurrent dream.

Perth International Arts Festival, 2005: co.loaded, Aqueous, various works, Playhouse, Perth, Feb 19-25; Tura New Music et al, Rothko Chapel, Art Gallery of WA, Perth, Feb 17; Seeking Transcendence, Art Gallery of WA, Feb 13-March 24; Akram Khan Company, Ma, choreographer/director/performer Akram Khan, His Majesty’s Thetare, Perth, Feb 16-19

The Big Con

2001’s Your Dreaming: The Prime Minister’s Cultural Convention brought together the acerbic political wit of Guy Rundle and the latex-laden parody of major Australian figures embodied by Max Gillies. An unofficial sequel (or perhaps series of out-takes), The Big Con is less successful: a buckshot spray of vitriol that only occasionally hits its targets.

Joining the Dreaming team is young artist Eddie Perfect who, it must be said, has matured as a consummate cabaret performer, slipping easily from debonair compere to unobtrusive backing pianist, maintaining an implacable demeanour throughout proceedings. He is the perfect foil to the grotesque hyperbole of Gillies’ satirisation which eschews subtlety in favour of the long-clawed swipe. His characterisation of Alexander Downer as an effete geographical dimwit is hilariously exaggerated; on the downside, his rendition of Amanda Vanstone as a KFC-scoffing glutton lowers political comment to the level of obscene fat jokes.

The layers of irony ultimately undermine the efficacy of The Big Con: Perfect and Gillies repeatedly stab at the notion of chardonnay socialism to an audience digesting the 2 course meal they ate before the show, their wallets more than $80 lighter. To feel a sense of self-satisfaction simply because one buys The Big Issue or attends a play about refugees is, according to Perfect, ‘so September 10’, yet alternatives are not forthcoming. The line between despair and complacency is warily trod here, and the underlying rage propelling Guy Rundle’s script too frequently spirals into labyrinthine self-referentiality.

Perhaps the most poignant, if disturbing note is hit when Perfect exhorts his audience to join in the chorus of his (we hope) parodic far-right anthem against homosexual marriage, and actually gets voices chanting along: “Gay people shouldn’t get married!” The enthusiastic bawl of several attendees had this viewer squirming; when political theatre takes on a South Park ethos (“It’s funny because you’re not allowed to say it!”) then we are in troubled times indeed. As a clamorous broadside directed at the foibles of major Australian rubbery figures, The Big Con aims true; as a spur to political enquiry, it hobbles itself at every turn.

Chika

Mayu Kanamori’s Chika is a beast of a different stripe. Billed as a “documentary performance”, it blends live music, dance, photo and video footage with performed narration to tell the story of Chika Honda, a Japanese tourist jailed for over a decade for the alleged importation of heroin. Kanamori, a documentary photographer, regularly visited Honda during her incarceration and, though her subject was initially reluctant to be photographed, gradually developed a kind of visual diary conveying her experiences. This reticence, it appears, is part of the reason the resulting documentary is largely impressionistic: the projected images of clouds or wire fences suggest the hand of an artist rather than an objective recorder of facts, and Kanamori eventually acknowledges that at some point she moved from documentarian to friend. The record of injustices portrayed thus takes on a personal hue: Kanamori’s plain narration from the front of the stage does not suggest artifice, but neither does it pretend to offer the facts from an impartial standpoint.

Supplementary material on offer in the foyer (a letter from Honda’s pastor and a religious statement from Chika herself) hints at stories untold. What Chika does provide, in the end, is not so much the story of one person’s life gone awry as the story of a sensitive and sophisticated artist’s response to another person’s pain. This is apparent in Kanamori’s decision to invite Butoh artist Yumi Umiumare to perform several interpretive renditions of themes suggested throughout the piece. At the same time, Kanamor’s journalistic kudos is affirmed with police video and television news footage. Tom Fitzgerald’s musical direction and erformance alongside musicians Anne Norman (shakuhachi), Satsuki Odamura (koto) and Toshinori Sakamoto (wadaiko) is an astonishing complement; a concert-level performance that adds immeasurably to the emotive power of this intimate unfolding. Chika is an impassioned plea for justice that speaks well of its creator, and records an otherwise unnoticed travesty of the Australian justice system.

Pugilist Specialist

Red Stitch Actors Theatre has made a name for itself through solid productions emphasising psychological realism and dynamic staging; recent productions have expanded this brief to include less naturalistic works. The decision to stage US playwright Adrian Shapiro’s Pugilist Specialist furthers this expansion, with mixed results. Certainly, the work is a powerful if problematic intervention in the field of contemporary US politics. Four marines prepare to assassinate an unnamed Middle Eastern personality. We witness their training and eventual raid on the victim’s mansion, but action here takes a backseat to dialogue. Shapiro’s polemic against US militarism is fettered by a curiously verbose, almost Beckettian rendering of language which prevents engagement. Characterisation remains static, circling endlessly around the basic conflicts between team members. Certainly the ensemble deserves applause for seeking out new directions; in this instance, though, the limitations of a complex but confounding script are too apparent.

Rainbow’s End

I approached Ilbijerri’s production of Rainbow’s End warily—media materials and other press had focused on the work’s nostalgia. True, its creators include Stolen writer Jane Harrison and director Wesley Enoch (Stolen, Conversations with the Dead, The Sapphires), but the pre-press mentions of the 1950s setting, including the Queen’s visit to Australia, radio’s Pick-A-Box and the Melbourne Olympics, connoted a staid if not conservative view at odds with the stated subject matter. Surely the story of 3 generations of Aboriginal women couldn’t be so retroactive? Thankfully, this wasn’t the case.

Rainbow’s End emanates joy. Its trio of female leads face horrific hardship (rape, dislocation, poverty) but the sense of triumph they generate is well nigh overwhelming. Early in the piece I sensed I was viewing a musical without songs: the characters and situations were painted with broad brushstrokes, emotions were over the top and the pace was rapid. Secondary characters were given less depth: Gareth Ellis’encyclopaedia salesman who falls in love with Tammy Clarkson’s Dolly seems a little too innocent to ring true, and Lionel Austin as Dolly’s attacker is a constant though rarely acknowledged presence at the stage’s periphery (fitting, as he also acts as the assistant stage manager). However, this technique of generalised typing only heightens the effectiveness of particular scenes of acute psychological intimacy; when the 3 women are forcibly moved to a concrete housing block the simple act of searching for change to feed the failing light meter represents a far more pervasive desperation.

Pauline Whyman as the family’s core, Gladys, manages to transcend the script’s generalities to produce a remarkably touching and sophisticated character. Grandmother Nan Dear (Beryl Booth) and daughter Dolly occasionally suggest more superficial characterisations, but once again this is perhaps in keeping with the script and the style of the work. Rainbow’s End is a gently involving piece that merits acclaim for its many creators.

The Big Con, writer Guy Rundle; directors Aubrey Mellor, Denis Moore; performers Max Gillies, Eddie Perfect; The Arts Centre, Melbourne, Feb 23-March 12; The CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, March 13-April 3

Chika, writer Mayu Kanamori; director Malcolm Blaylock; performers Yumi Umiumare, Satsuki Odamura, Anne Norma, Toshinori Sakamoto, Tom Fitzgerald, Mayu Kanamori; The CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, Feb 23-26

Pugilist Specialist, writer Adrian Shapiro; performers Kate Cole, Dion Mills, Richard Cawthorne, Kenneth Ransome; Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Feb 2-March 5

Rainbow’s End, writer Jane Harrison, director Wesley Enoch; performers Beryl Booth, Tammy Clarkson, Gareth Ellis, Pauline Whyman; Sidney Myer Ampitheatre, Melbourne Museum; Feb 21-March 5

A feather falls to the street: a message from a disembodied hand to one of the waiting audience. She is sent up the stairs into West Space, alone, with the fallen invite. At the top, a young man greets her warmly–as if she has arrived at his party at last–and directs her to a room on her right. She opens the door and inside finds those sent before her, waiting in darkness.

And so Strangers and Intimacy begins, with each audience member suddenly engaged in a disarmingly intimate scenario. There in the dimness, among strangers, there is the accidental touch of hands, shared breath, a ripple of anxiety, the joint anticipatory wait for something more.

Strangers and Intimacy is a 3 part exchange project between Australian artists (Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Brian Fuata, Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari) and artists from reader, a collaborative performance group with bases in Glasgow and London (Eilidh Macaskill, Robert Walton, Pete Harrison and Lalge Harries). The project began last September, when 8 artists were assigned a pen pal on the other side of the world. Weekly letter writing engaged the artists in a process of exchange that revealed personal locations, contexts and intimacies. After the artists had met and sorted through the materials and ideas came stage 2–the performance in Melbourne. It is a highly innovative excursion into performance in which the audience is strangely part of the act.

In fact, the term ‘audience’ is rendered useless–the work engages everyone so deeply that no-one and everyone is ‘watching.’ We, who were not part of the letter exchange, enter a world in which we develop intimacy; suddenly we are paired with another audience member, dancing slowly, closely, repeating a forced echolalia of “My darling, I love you, I have always loved you. I always will.” We are thrown into a bizarrely intimate situation with a complete stranger: we feel ‘close’ to them, bound perhaps by a mutual sense of discomfort and awkwardness. It’s not real intimacy, but a re-enactment of it.

Then we are seated on the floor of a room where we listen to Madeleine Hodge tell us about dating etiquette. We laugh at her act, engaged momentarily in the traditional audience/actor theatre dynamic. Gently, Alice Chang places her hand on my elbow and whispers “come with me.” I am led to another room to be seated at a table and offered a glass of water. Soon I am joined by Pete Harrison and Sarah Rodigari. Suddenly, the theatre dynamic is broken. I am sitting at a table, sipping water, while 2 of the ‘actors’ discuss a day at the zoo and a lost friend. There, thrown into the act itself, I am suddenly eavesdropper, participant, dinner guest, audience (maybe) or even ghost. I watch and listen to the intimacies of 2 strangers, but the intimacy itself might or might not be real, just as the glass of water might well be a prop.

And so the night unfolds, room to room, activity to activity. Essentially, Strangers and Intimacy strives to conjure the sense of closeness that develops as people reveal themselves to one another. At the same time, in the context of a ‘performance’, the intimacies developed within the hour or so at West Space are in themselves feigned. In a way the piece successfully imitates the real experience of human connection and the development of relationships.

There is no narrative, more a series of moments strung together, each delivering a particular experience to the audience. There is no driving personal drama. Eilidh Macaskill writhes and strips and orders us to declare love to our dance partner, and then all at once we are shifted toward the doorway, where in a disjunctive and unrelated scene we watch Sarah Rodigari and Pete Harrison farewell each other in an hysterical and anxious goodbye. There is no sequence, no storyline and no characterisation. The strength of this work lies in its ability to stimulate a series of emotions in the audience while the actors themselves remain strangely like machines set to elicit our feelings.

The party is over. Again, a hand on my elbow and a jacket thrust to me; “Thank you for coming, I do hope we see you again”, says Alice, staring deep into my eyes. She leans in for a hug, and in this moment of farewell, I am suddenly unsure whether I have really known anyone in the room. With one foot on the landing and one in the theatre, I am hazy with confusion–am I still in the act or is this a real goodbye? “Thank you so much for having me,” I say. “I hope we meet again.”

Strangers and Intimacy, co-ordinator Madeleine Hodge, West Space, Melbourne, Jan 28-Feb 5

An audience of two. No sooner have we entered the tiny house in suburban Tempe than we’re corralled by Lois Weaver from the UK performance group, Curious, who takes us a little too easily into her confidence. She offers chocolates and then whisks them away. The gesture calls up a childhood memory that still stings. Before we know it she’s inveigled us into a disturbing tale of lost scents as she sniffs from bottles and speaks to a video camera in the corner. Only as we’re ushered out of the room do I notice that the couch we were sitting on is littered with rose petals and that we have shared the performance with a fish watching from a giant bowl. Such is the hierarchy of the senses.

The kitchen is more welcoming; the table piled high with red chilies. Leslie Hill seems at home, though this place is not her own. For us over here on the other side of the table, on the other side of the world, she conjures a dark reverie from a girlhood in New Mexico using her own sure fire recipe: tobacco smoke, the sweet sizzle of pork chop in frying pan and a special blend of “sacred” chili powder which at one truly alarming moment she sniffs through a bank note like cocaine. Add a sqirt of hairspray and a mess of popcorn erupting onto the floor from a cartoon appliance on the bench, some ceremonial Native American music and our own oily shot of Tequila served with lime and salt and you have it: a whiff of the uneasy calm of living in the shadow of the H-bomb tests in Los Alamos. Like the liquor, this memory burns in the throat. We drink, with Hill, to homesickness.

In the darkened bedroom, Helen Paris is home sick. She languishes between the sheets; feverish with snaffled angst, female trouble. She wallows in a bog of constrained desire and disgust till, consumed with hunger for something other, she upends herself into the box of biscuits she’s concealed under her pillow. As she recalls the quest for her mother’s very par-tic-ul-ar perfumed lotion, I sense anger in the bitten lip and catch the sudden, bracing stench of disinfectant.

Shown the door, I’m wary of the lady in the lounge. I don’t like the sound of either rose or violet cream. As it turns out it’s just our scent memories she’s after for the camera. We snaffle the sickly treat and swap her for linseed oil on a cricket bat, the pine needle tang of Eau de Givenchy, and leave.

On The Scent is one of a number of performances I’ve experienced in houses. All have had their moments and this one has many. The one that’s intrigued me most was the very first part of IRAA Theatre’s Secret Room (2000) in which Roberta Bosetti invited an audience of 7 to join her for a meal. At the table we sat with a mix of familiars and strangers. In the corner was a website version of the same room on a monitor, like a mirror. Bosetti came and went between kitchen and dining room, dishing out food and improvised small talk, dropping in small clues to her dramatic purpose. For a time we around the table could not place ourselves. We were functioning from the learned habits of theatregoing using the gestures of table manners and yet we were ‘elsewhere.’ I could have stayed for days. What was happening in the room was live and uncertain. The performer lost me when she led us upstairs into a small room and shifted suddenly into actor mode and, though we were in a real house, we might as well have been watching a play on a stage.

Impressed as I was by many aspects of the Curious performances, I experienced something of the same sense of distance. I loved the ease of these performers, the sinewy syntax of Paris’ diatribe, Hill’s dark materials casually meted out in her kitchen confidential. The scents were rich and real enough but I wondered why, despite the intimacy of the site and the proximity of the performers, the work felt curiously close to theatrical monologue.

In their double bill at The Studio, Smoking Gun and Family Hold Back, we experience even more powerfully the clash of cultures between US and UK with Leslie Hill and Helen Paris occupying that same elusive performative space.

Hill arrives onstage in the outfit of a Klansman, striking matches to light her way. What follows is a droll monologue that begins with an intriguing tale of genetic mapping. Seeking to find out “where we come from, where we’re going?” Hill traces her own lineage to Europe, realises she’s a “mongrel” and that everyone is related. In fact, she narrows us down to a grassland species that came out of the trees and drifted onto the savanna. She unpacks her own patch of lawn from a suitcase and takes off her shoes. Unfortunately, from here, her story is all association. She meanders into gun control, leading into a participatory segment in which audience volunteers get to wield a firearm as long as they conform to the Australian laws, ie sign a document in the presence of the licensed armorer who’s onstage to receive them. Her tale fans out to the UK, to twins, The 10 Commandments, which she says in the US, need to be re-written: “Thou shalt not kill (us).” We pass around glasses and a bottle of rum as she talks about Cuba and American isolationism. “Would you like to explain exactly what you were doing in France?” she’s asked when she returns home. There are coincidences aplenty and witty synchronicities and through it all Hill remains an ambivalent witness.

Though evoking some of the same spookiness of Smoking Gun, Helen Paris’ Family Hold Back is a more clearly theatrical, ritualistic performance. While the extraverted Hill is all loose talk, Paris, in pent-up persona, offers us a clipped British treatise on table manners and language. The skilful performance offers a fascinating lesson in code cracking. Vocally, the performer is all restraint and correctness. She talks about being constantly interrupted, displays suitably excessive gratitude (Thank you for serving me. Thank you so much for taking my money. Oh, thank you for giving me my change.) In the British manner, she is expert at the profuse apology. At the same time, Paris offers some striking physical images–notably, when having explored every surface of the table and its accessories (cloth, knives, and serviettes) she arches backward into a tabletop miraculously converted to rectangular pool. As in Smoking Gun, Paris’ monologue works associatively, spinning out from everyday observations (What exactly you might deduce from 16 bottles of Bacardi and one can of carpet cleaner in the shopping trolley in front of you at the supermarket) to The Last Supper. Some of the hardest hitting and hilarious observations come from the ghastly rituals of table manners including the secret code “FHB” of the work’s title, whispered to family members as a warning to restrain themselves in the presence of non-family. I’m hoping it’s not just me and that this one has yet to be unleashed on the big Family we’re all becoming. If so, let’s hope the Brits can keep it under their hats for a bit.

The Australian visit by Curious was hosted by Performance Space, The Studio, Sydney Opera House and ringside productions; On the Scent, performers Leslie Hill, Helen Paris, Lois Weaver, performed in a suburban house in Tempe, Saturday 19 February; Smoking Gun & Family Hold Back, Leslie Hill, Helen Paris, The Studio, 23-25 February

It’s long been a Mardi Gras tradition to program a New York drag performer. Back in the 90s, being more a stalwart of local queer shows like Performance Space’s cLUB bENT, I never made it to the imported divas, who seemed primed for a more exclusively gay male audience. So come 2005, with the more humble and ‘sweet hereafter’ feel of the New Mardi Gras program, I wondered: Who goes to drag now? And does New York still hold sway? Or has everyone moved to Massachussets, where gay marriage is legal and “you should see all the masculine couples walking down the aisle in matching tuxedos, and that’s just the lesbians”–boom boom.

The audience for Varla Jean’s Girl With a Pearl Necklace was primarily middle-aged gay couples, the mood one of familiar camp cabaret, the central theme the search for love. Out here to look for her “very own Peter Allen”, Varla has always “wanted to perform in Austria.” Standing on the small Studio stage, she remarked that the Opera House looked so much bigger from the outside. Relying heavily on New York shtick, she showed home video shot in Provincetown (where she had lobster cunnilingus) and Coney Island (involving obligatory jokes with Nathan’s hotdogs). The sausage theme continued with a yodelling wiener (“the wiener takes it all”). Reworked numbers, such as If We Could Talk to the Genitals (“Are you speaking clitoris? I’d say no shiterous, can’t you?”), were interspersed with shlocky video footage, including an 80s Heart power ballad.

Varla’s persona is a lisping, Southern big boned belle, who reminded me of Marcia Cross (Kimberly of Melrose Place and now Desperate Housewives). Famous over the years for her ‘fat’ drag (she has been compared to Divine) you get the sense that Varla’s alter-ego, Jeffrey Roberson, has lived the experience of being outside the buff gay culture, which is then paralleled in drag through engagements with celebrity diet culture. In her current incarnation, however, Varla is far from frumpy and was resplendent in bright campy frocks, making it clear to Vermeer that pearls are nature’s bling bling. Classically trained, her Crazy in Love medley coupled Beyoncé with Puccini. And a Hello Kitty obsession took her to Japan where she discovered a vending machine selling “beer water.” There wasn’t a single Scarlett Johansson reference, and, rather than Girl With a Pearl Earring, the show became Lost in Translation, as Varla showed footage of herself wandering around the Tokyo subway to cheap cultural effect. The show’s piece de resistance, however, was an act in which she yodeled while tipping her head back and downing the contents of an aerosol can full of cheese (only in America).

It’s funny, yes. A very crafted camp. Loony and tightly-timed. And weirdly virtuosic. Yet grating. It’s ‘bad’ drag, but somehow conventionally so. Nothing deeply queer, or underground, it’s more surface bad taste. Being in the audience felt a bit like going to a cultural zoo to see some exotic endangered species. Is drag now a requiem for a dream?

In a documentary on cross-dressing my partner saw, she told me there was footage of 18th century ‘pansies’ running around in dresses and giving birth to rounds of cheese. The birth theme was there in Varla’s opening number–it seems the drag repertoire has always been pretty set. So why hope for more?

Perhaps context is all important. Once drag is taken out of the drag bar, club act or toured, what happens? Perhaps the most interesting insight for me was how heavily the show relied on the parochial side of New York life, and that in a globalised world this is what travels.

Varla Jean Merman–Girl With a Pearl Necklace, writer Jeffery Roberson with Jaques Lamarre and Michael Schiralli, performer Jeffery Roberson, director Michael Schiralli, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Feb 19

For its first venture into Sydney, the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) is presenting third year students under the direction of renowned Brazilian circus director Rodrigo Matheus in The New Breed. It’s also the first NICA show to feature an international director. Rodrigo has worked with companies and schools in Brazil, the UK and France, and in Australia with Circus Oz and the Flying Fruit Fly Circus.

The performers range in age from 18 to 25, their backgrounds an intriguing catalogue of professional circus, youth circus, archery, Olympic standard gymnastics, street performance, extreme push-biking, dance, music, athletics and kung fu. Along the way careers in computing, cabinet-making, graphic design, professional sport and ballet have been discarded for juggling, slackwire balancing, hoop diving, bowl spinning, flying trapeze, unicycling, poles, bars, handstands, spider bungy, tissu, foot juggling, sky-walking, cloud swing, diabolo and German wheel. Their ambitions include a life in the circus, movie stunt work, creating solo works, forming their own companies and joining Moulin Rouge.

The show’s producer, Jeremy Gaden, describes The New Breed as more physical theatre than circus in format, though rich in circus routines and tackling the problems of communication in an urban setting. The show includes spoken word, choreography for the 19 performers, and a cross-cultural score from Circus Oz musical director Chris Lewis.

Given the Australian penchant for circus and physical theatre and the international success of its practitioners, The New Breed offers a fascinating opportunity to see a new generation nearing their graduation from a relatively new institution uniquely dedicated to the circus arts. The show will tell us as much about NICA as about its young artists. RT

NICA, The New Breed, director Rodrigo Matheus, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 4-15

White Australia has a lot to learn from South Africa about reconciliation between its black and white peoples. While black playwrights in Australia create works that pave the way to understanding, their white peers largely write of other things. In my younger years, South African Athol Fugard was an inspiring and courageous writer-director-performer. In the 70s he brought black performers with him to Australia to perform Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island; the actors’ presence, their craft and their power were revelatory. Now one of those actors, John Kani, returns to Australia with his own play, an intense domestic drama, Nothing But the Truth, about his murdered activist brother. For Kani, the journey to reconciliation is a long way from over.

As Christopher Breyer has written, “The mere existence of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996-2001), much like the peaceful end of apartheid itself, is so miraculous that we tend not so much to overestimate as misapprehend the commission and gloss over its complications, compromises and limitations as well as its true purpose…The TRC in no way attempted a comprehensive portrait of apartheid–its focus was gross human rights violations (murder, attempted murder, torture, assault) committed between 1960 and 1994; it did not explore the structural, endemic oppressions and exploitation of the apartheid system. It did however create an overwhelming public record of the worst horrors of four decades” (Performances Magazine, 2001. SOH press release, Feb 23, 2005).

Kani himself writes, “In 2000 I began to long for my favourite pastime, storytelling. I decided to write a little story as a tribute to my younger brother who was a poet of the struggle against apartheid, and was shot by police in 1985 while reciting one of his poems at the funeral of a 9 year old girl who was killed during the so-called riots…” This telling became a play, Nothing But the Truth, “a story of 2 brothers, of sibling rivalry, of family secrets, of truth and reconciliation , of exile and the perplexities of our freedoms and democracy.”

Nothing But the Truth, won the 2002 Fleur du Cap Award (South Africa) for Best New Indigenous Script, Best Actor and Best Director. It has had sell-out seasons in South Africa and North America. Now it comes to Brisbane and Sydney.

John Kani, Nothing But The Truth, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 14-23; The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, April- 28 May 21.

Wars of the Roses

The Bell Shakespeare Company has given itself a wonderful birthday present in celebration of its 15 years. The 3 Henry VI plays have been judiciously and joyously compacted into a single work to play across 4 engrossing hours. The economy of the editing is a delight in itself, unleashing an epic sweep and baring the bones of Tudor propaganda but at the same time revealing the young Shakespeare’s ability to brilliantly hone the dramatic moment and to create unexpected emotional complexities amidst the one-dimensional drives of ambition and vengeance that govern these plays. This is a brutal world of opportunism and pragmatism, fatally wrong turns and betrayal, with little or nothing by way of metaphysical compensation: Joan of Arc here is more warrior than saint, appealing to the earth rather than to the heavens. Among the many fine performances Greg Stone shines as the Duke of York, his ambition for himself and his thuggish sons steadily escalating. Finally trapped and thinking the sons dead he lashes out at his captor, the king’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, raging against her as the most unnatural of women. But Stone plays York’s grief at the same pitch; the sense of loss is unbearably palpable and this for a character with whom you’d not expect to empathise. It’s also testimony, at this late stage in the play, to the despair that comes with the appalling accumulation of evils, misjudgments and deaths that blur the moral boundaries in a grubby civil war made more complex by the yoked history of England and France.

The majority of the performers play numerous roles, switching with great ease from soldiers to courtiers (with hilariously appalling Franglish) to rural upstarts, coming together for the battle scenes as well as playing key if short-lived characters throughout. Georgia Adamson as Joan of Arc is brusque and driven with swordplay dexterity straight out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Christopher Stollery plays the Bishop of Winchester made mad by his complicity in murder, the yokelish rebel Jack Cade and the deceptively bland Buckingham. Joe Manning as Henry VI is suitably ethereal, out of touch, stubborn at the wrong moments and accepting advice only when it’s too late, his withdrawal tantamount to a deathwish, and displaying precious few moments of insightful interiority. Darren Gilshenan as Richard III-to-be, plays out the classic deformities of body and soul with vigour and his own take on the wheedling and insinuating, ever inviting the audience’s complicity. Blazey Best as Margaret of Anjou plays the queen as outrightly sexual and manipulative, leaving not a lot of room to move, but somehow she convinces because Margaret is often irritatingly right, however base her motives, and her loyalty, if erratic, makes her an implacable force.

Wars of the Roses is spendidly paced, full of pertinent jokes and beautifully voiced. The poetry is always musical but never the plummy sing-song that can still be encountered. It’s enhanced by the steep ampitheatre setting by Stephen Curtis in a huge steel curve. It’s a work of art in itself that has us looking into a stage that looks back at us and where characters gather and observe, climb and fall, the whole framed with shipping container walls hinting laterally at SS Tampa and our own crises, just as the images of capture calculatedly suggest Abu Ghraib. Only the costumes seem to lack a conceptual through line, a rag bag of type dressing that fits the play’s broad characterisations but has little thematic weight beyond the suggestion that things are pretty much the same wherever you’re placed historically.

Like the jigs reputedly danced at the end of Elizabethan tragedies, we are entertained here by Richard, fresh from murdering Henry, microphone in hand singing his way to the throne atop a mountain of bodies in anticipation of a play to come with his own name in lights.

Bed

In Brendan Cowell’s new play, developed in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Blueprints program, another kind of Vice figure is on display. He’s Phil, a big city business man-cum-artist-cum-psychopath. Built from short scenes, propelled by an often acid wit and cyclically structured to systematically go back over a life and reveal the making and unmaking of a man at key stages, Bed is certainly engaging, though the initial effect is more powerful than that which lingers. For all its viscerality and frankness, Bed is curiously abstract.

Betrayed by his mother, loved by a fellow school boy, oppressed by his first female lover, Phil is deserted by his beloved wife who cannot compete with his success (even after he’s given up his job to look after their children so she can work). Subsequently dissolute and sadistic, he is served by a homosexual slave whom he incinerates before dying in the arms of an older woman in whose large breasts, he tells her, he finds solace. On a set that’s a cross between bouncy castle and mattress, Phil’s life comprises a series of bedroom encounters that sketch his trajectory, the looping back through his life an interesting structural device which works well enough in the relationships between the 2 boys and then the men, but there’s little if anything that’s revelatory in the soapy scenes with the women. A larger problem is that however well played (and Dan Wylie suggests more than the script proposes) Phil is an abstraction, a generic businessman, an unidentifiable artist, so everything depends on love, sex and power, with art and work as mere ciphers. It’s not a long play, so there’s room for Cowell to expand his vision of his central character, but also to rise above the epigrammatic pulse of too much of the writing, albeit a reflection of Phil’s admiration for Oscar Wilde. Cowell directs his own play ably with Thomas Campbell evoking power and then pathos as Drew who will be murdered, a punishment for all the wrongs visited on a man incapable of turning such force on himself.

The Permanent Way

Just as bookshops are now placing their non-fiction stock at the front of their stores and feature length documentaries are filling cinemas, so too has verbatim theatre made a comeback. Productions include version 1.0’s A Certain Maritime Incident (based on the Senate hearings on the Tampa incident), Ros Horin’s Through the Wire (the relationships formed between refugees and visitors to detention centres; currently touring regional centres where it is much in demand) and, a couple of years ago in Sydney and now in Melbourne, The Laramie Project, about a gay murder in a US community. David Hare’s The Permanent Way (created with actors from the National Theatre, Out of Joint and director Max Stafford-Clark) documents the disastrous consequences of the privatisation of British Rail. The content alone is deeply alarming with not a few parallels with smaller but just as devastating rail crashes in NSW in recent years in a public system. Although clearly opposed to the way the railways are operated, the play throws you into the complexities of what happened to the people involved (from management and politicians to victims), the contrasting responses between the survivors and the families of the dead in the campaign for justice, and why the British continue to let such things happen. The latter is the big question which the show begins with but never really answers except rather facilely at the end when one of the characters suggests, “In England we’ve never been very good at the communal thing.” The play asks why the public is not really upset by such disasters, nor by 3,500 dead on the roads each year. Why aren’t they furious that the privatised railways draw more heavily on the public purse than when they were public? Why isn’t there a legal category titled ‘corporate manslaughter’ given cutbacks in training, appallingly poor safety records and cover-ups with government and police complicity? The answer is partly evident in the range of responses to the train crashes: here is a public that is divided, confused and misled, while the government and management can form a united front, and an executive, for example, move on from an awkward position post-accident to a much better one without recrimination.

The Permanent Way is presented conventionally with deft multiple role-playing, and tautly edited material wisely and compellingly run without an interval. The literalness of the playing, the banality of some of the miming (recalling the old theatre-in-education days) and occasional overacting didn’t detract from the work’s raw documentary power. The much touted multimedia effects were less impressive: some nice opening animations of old rail travel posters, a poorly projected automated train timetable signalling the crashes, and a big one-off special, for the second accident, of an animated train racing towards us and flying off the rails, accompanied by a grating, noisome crash. Although the latter effect was impressive it is typical of the failure in the mainstream performing arts to make anything of multimedia other than background or momentary diversion, and one from which the performers are tastefully removed. Otherwise, The Permanent Way was rewarding, and, for those who wondered why we’d want to see a play about British railway accidents, it’s not so far removed from our own experiences of life under neo-liberalism with its attendant feelings of civic helplessness.

Constellations

I just managed to catch the last night of PACT’s contribution to the New Mardi Gras Festival, Constellations, an exquisite gem of a performance sparkling with perspectives on queer life on the cusp of late adolescence and early adulthood presented as monologues and small encounters framed by the night time anxieties and reveries of a wonderfully poetic insomniac. This is a show about getting through the night or life’s dark passages and emerging intact and even triumphant. That might be pride in being a male Palestinian belly-dancer and finding the like-minded; or discovering that the bicycle used for escape has become a tool for championship racing; or looking back into one’s Aboriginal or Asian heritage as a way of moving forward. Finely crafted video images (Sean Bacon) and audiotracks (Gail Priest) lent the words greater resonance and coherence, while director Karen Therese choreographed the movement between individual and group, between still image and action (sometimes as simple as gathering before the glare of a television set or circling the stage on bicycles), between light and dark with effective simplicity. The performances were physically assured and vocally firm, the writing often admirable, and the overall mood satisfyingly reflective.

Bell Shakespeare Company, Wars of the Roses, director John Bell, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, March 5-April 16; www.bellshakespeare.com.au

Sydney Theatre Company, Bed, writer-director Brendan Cowell, performers Dan Wylie, Sam leis, Hayley McElhinney, Caroline Craig, Thomas Campbell, Annie Byron; design Genevieve Dugard, lighting Damien Cooper, composer Nick Arnold; Blueprints, Wharf 2, from Feb 12

Sydney Theatre Company: Out of Joint/National Theatre, The Permanent Way, writer David Hare, director Max Stafford-Clark, set, costume and video design William Dudley; Sydney Theatre, from Feb 19

PACT Youth Theatre, Constellations, direction Karen Therese, dramaturgy Chris Murphy, performers/writers Alexis Armytage, Kath Bicknell, Ghassan Kassisieh, Sarah Jane Norman, Tatea Reilly; PACT, New Mardi Gras Festival, Feb 23-March 6

In the last 7 years the Australian experimental music/sound scene has undergone a huge explosion in production, promotion and audience interest. Sydney alone is host to 2 large experimental music festivals: What is Music?, the longest running and most influential at 10 years; and 4 year old The Now now. In addition Sydney also holds a number of regular events and by late 2004 there were 5 such nights: impermanent.audio, if you like experimental music we like you, Disorientation, 1/4 Inch, Sound No Sound plus the long running Frigid (also 10 years old) which occasionally features experimental music.

Not long ago there were a few irregular evenings and one-offs that attracted large crowds of people mostly interested in catching up with each other. The experimental music scene was focused on one yearly event, What is Music?. Directed by Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim, it brought together the local and national community, providing the only major outlet for performance. In addition the festival brought a few international (often Noise-based) musicians who provided a reference point, introducing new ideas but, perhaps more importantly, proving that the local scene was as good as anything happening abroad. The importance of this festival in the past cannot be overstated–it simply generated an entire scene.

This scene is now at a turning point. Events, performers and audiences have been established but due to their experimental nature, the events are always going to form at the edges of music, performance and art and as such the audience by its very nature is small. Without funding support it is impossible to pay musicians and organisers. How far can this funding stretch to allow new festivals and regular events to enter the fray?

To their credit the funding bodies do support some of these endeavours. What is Music? is a key organisation with the Australia Council and has been funded by Arts Victoria and the NSW Ministry for the Arts. Over the years it has expanded to become a travelling festival, touring to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It also has support from a number of venues including The Brisbane Powerhouse in 2004-2005. However in 2005 What is Music? was unable to raise the requisite funding, a situation that required a major rethink of the festival.

The Now now 2005 run by Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas was also affected by lack of funding support. Three successful festivals had previously been staged on a shoestring in Space3 and Lan Franchi’s, though neither venue suited the music. For the fourth festival no funding was received, a short-sighted decision given the event’s strong history of success.

Two very different strategies were taken up by these events to cope with this situation. The Now now found an extremely supportive venue, @Newtown, a location accessible to a major part of the event’s audience, and attempted to sell enough tickets to make the venture possible. They did this by producing an almost 100 percent local, Australian music festival. The audiences included the usual suspects but most excitingly a new group of curious patrons, perhaps attracted by the ‘above ground’ nature of the venue with its comfy chairs and air con. What provided the most excitement for the future of the scene was the willingness of this audience to try something new–4 nights of Australian experimental music with no ‘big names’, simply the promotion and celebration of Australian improvised musics. The Now now has taken over from What is Music? as the focus of the experimental music year in Sydney, from the point of view of both musicians and audience.

What is Music? made some drastic decisions in the face of its funding problems, albeit in drastic circumstances. The producers sought industry support from outside the experimental music scene through The Big Day Out promoters, resulting in the ONATHON. While this appeared to be part of the festival, the event was run separately and was not produced by What is Music?. On paper this seemed exciting–a mega experimental music festival with the possibility of stacks of locals and high profile internationals. However, it was not What is Music? but a privately funded event that was costed out of the market at $80 a ticket. The producers of What is Music? were distanced from their own festival, a loss of control that was felt in the scene. In Sydney What is Music? staged only 2 nights of music, more of a mini-festival. The biggest problem for the event was that exactly the same acts, bar 3 local performances, had featured the previous night at the ONATHON. There was little reason for most to attend both events, but those who did venture to the Gaelic Club witnessed a much better listening environment.

The first show was more akin to a metal theme night than a new music festival. It started out with the fantastic local trio of Peter Blamey, Jim Denley and James Heighway, a first-time outing combining 2 mixing desk performers with Denley’s wind improvisation. This was a gratifying performance filled with texture and focus. The drone metal of Reverend Kriss Hades followed. The size of the sound and the virtuosity of his guitar playing was exciting providing an intelligent juxtaposition of metal and experimental music. However with Sunn O))) (USA) also on the same program we heard 2 performances that were similar, and a DJ playing more metal.

The Dead C (NZ) is a band I hadn’t seen for 12 years and I was way too excited to be objective. They lived up to all hopes showing what the combination of Flying Nun style pop and Sonic Youth guitar noise could produce. There were no surprises here, simply a band that has been playing brilliant noise-pop for 18 years. The night ended with Sunn O)))–loud beyond belief with a row of Marshall guitar amps, 4 musicians playing electronics and 2 guitarists. The performance included electronic drone, massively slow strum guitar and monks’ hoods. The combination of subterranean metal and experimental drone was bliss: my ears will never forgive me.

The second night was more what we’d expect of What is Music?, but the environment could not support the focused listening required. Brendan Walls played a set of resonant cymbal feedback, a slow drone, which I found extremely difficult to listen to in the rock environment. Black Dice (USA), looking like cool American indie kids singing along to noise (though the singing was itself noise), performed a set which was either brilliant or kinda terrible. I still can’t decide. The night ended with a virtuosic display of minimal dance meets noise in the duo Pan Sonic (Finland). The simplicity of their oscillator projection and the stripped back rhythmic noise was sublime.

The Now now and What is Music? have been forced to take creative steps to solve the problem of under-funding. What is Music? has turned to the private sector, but in doing so duplicated its program, pushed up ticket costs (for ONATHON), diminished its support for local and emerging musicians and alienated its audience. The Now now on the other hand has turned to what it knows, calling on local musicians to support a festival that is fully behind their practice. The outcome of The Now now approach was a large audience, an exciting vibe and a community feel. That musicians were not paid is an unsustainable outcome, but hopefully this year’s success will encourage the funding bodies to recognise that the scene is large, vibrant and highly creative, and that it needs and deserves support. If festivals such as What is Music? are to be maintained at the standard they themselves have set then arts funding bodies need to wake up to what is actually happening in contemporary practice and come to the party.

After spending more than a decade as a viola player at the top of his profession–in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and as a soloist and chamber musician–Brett Dean started composing. He began with forays into Berlin’s improvisation scene, substituting a leather jacket for his orchestral tux and “slamming the crap out of the viola.” Since then his ascendancy in the world of composition has been meteoric, sparking interest and commissions from the Melbourne, Sydney and BBC Symphony Orchestras, the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He is currently writing an opera based on Peter Carey’s novel Bliss for Opera Australia. I spoke with him during his recent visit to Sydney in which he curated the chamber music program for the Sydney Festival.

What might your initial idea for a piece be? Is it sometimes a texture or sometimes a motivic idea?

Mmmm. Definitely with 12 Angry Men [for 12 cellos, inspired by the American stage play and film] I had the title long before the piece was written. The Berlin Philharmonic cellists thought it was about them when I first gave them the piece.

Your program notes seem to focus on the inspiration behind the works, such as works in other artforms and contemporary events, but a lot of your titles don’t directly refer to those inspirations. If someone doesn’t read the notes, what do you hope their experience of the piece is?

I must say as far as writing program notes about a piece or talking about a piece, one thing I really couldn’t stand in Germany was this heightened sense of having to go into what a composer is doing technically in a particular piece. It’s so boring. Go and put your underwear back in the drawer, we don’t need to see it. If you’re writing about it for a musicological journal that’s different. I find that it’s led to a kind of over-intellectualisation of music. Which isn’t to say that those techniques aren’t valued and aren’t worthy–and I’m using a lot of the same techniques myself–I just think that’s got nothing to do with what a listener needs to know about a piece.

The listener may not need to know the story behind the emotional side of the piece either. And for that reason I’m always hopeful that, although most of the pieces have some sort of a story behind them, ideally that’s just for me to know how to shape the piece. It’s very useful to have when you’re in the process of writing. But I’m always fairly confident that the pieces can stand on their own, that hopefully they’re musically interesting enough just to follow and see how the ideas unfold.

Vernaculars and syntheses

Do you feel that process is possible because although you’re using an expressive language which is certainly unique, some of its elements come from musical language that’s more widely known?

A vernacular? Well to some greater or lesser extent everyone feeds at the same trough, human experience as seen through sound or as heard through sound. And that can also be something you might hear at the What is Music? festival–on one level you might think that’s as removed from that vernacular as it’s possible to be and perhaps also consciously endeavouring to make a new vernacular. But I think also its strongest moments are when there’s a synthesis of something forging ahead in a completely new direction that’s still making somehow the remotest wink or nod at some kind of formal structure or something from the past. That, I find fascinating. And I would argue that it’s not even possible to completely remove oneself from what sound has been before. Even the sound world of the most avant-garde sound exploration is also bound up in some sort of pre-existing language. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a desirable thing to forge ahead and find something entirely new, I’m trying to do that myself in some way or other too. But I think there’s just this common thing in the way humans respond to all sound, some sort of accumulated reservoir of sonic experience.

I’m quite fascinated actually in the whole soundtrack-soundscape thing, which isn’t to particularly forge a new direction. However, I do find that the combination of that with an orchestral ensemble is something that no one else I know of is doing in quite the same way as in [my orchestral piece] Moments of Bliss, for example. So I find there’s a new avenue I’m wanting to explore there.

So I’m as interested as the avant-gardists to find something new, it’s just that I have come from a much more conservative musical background and upbringing. I played in the Philharmonic in Berlin, you can’t get more conservative than that! There were things about that that were incredibly frustrating and that was probably what made me turn into a composer. I just couldn’t stand some of the conservatism. And I got bored playing in the Philharmonic to some extent. I was getting to a point where I thought, “Mahler 9 today, ho hum.” But that piece of music is too magnificent to get to that point.

Having lived with a visual artist I guess there was always this niggling desire to do something creative myself. I felt that it was all very well to play the viola in the Philharmonic but that couldn’t be it, could it? On the other hand there were parts of it that I loved and acknowledged because they were honouring a wonderful artform. If people don’t give their life to it, it would die, and that would be a tragedy. So I find that there are wonderful ways of reconciling all of these worlds.

A figurative expressionism

How would you describe your aesthetic? What do you want your music to do in the world?

Look, I want it to touch people. I think that musically and compositionally there’s hopefully enough interesting things going on for the pieces to be worthwhile from the musicological point of view. But I’d rather they be worthwhile from an emotional point of view, simply because that’s always been my way of taking on music myself. I’ve always found it a particularly beautiful career to be involved in, a beautiful profession. And playing in the orchestra was a very emotional thing, it was very cathartic to be in that kind of sound and really dig in. That real hands-on gutsiness of playing in an orchestra like that was incredibly emotional and I guess that went over into how I’ve written music.

My wife Heather talks of her work as being a particular type of figurative expressionism and I think that that also relates to my music. It is figurative in that you can recognise figures in it, you can recognise motives in the way that if you’re looking at an artwork of figurative expressionism you’ll be able to see what the story is that’s being told. It might require the viewer/listener’s imagination but it’s not entirely abstract. It’s got its moments of sonic onslaught and can sound quite ‘new’ at times, but basically it still has an acknowledgement of the whole musical tradition behind it. I think I’d most like it to somehow touch a nerve somewhere.

ACO interludes

Can you tell me about the piece commissioned by ABN AMRO that you're writing for the Australian Chamber Orchestra to be premiered in July?

It’s for an ACO tour with the flautist Emmanuel Pahud playing an array of 6 Vivaldi concerti which will then be recorded. In each concert 4 of the 6 will be performed. They wanted some little, spicy sorbets to be played in between, so I was asked to write interludes. It’s a good challenge because most of my music so far has been in fairly major statements with movements at least 10 minutes long. I’m intrigued by the idea of limiting myself to one musical idea per piece. Each interlude will explore only one sonority.

In my works I sometimes revisit things from previous pieces that I would like to extend. In the string quartet Eclipse, for instance, there is a particular sonority of very high arpeggiated pizzicato chords that I could revisit in a string orchestra setting. The ACO was keen to be able to perform the interludes as a freestanding piece on other occasions, so this is my first purely string orchestra piece.

Brett Dean, Three Interludes (world premiere), Breath Taking Vivaldi, Australian Chamber Orchestra, July 2-13, www.aco.com.au

Jodi Rose is a self-proclaimed nomad, travelling the world in pursuit of undiscovered songs. But unlike a traditional ethnomusiclogist Rose is not looking to capture the voices of people but rather of bridges. What started as a “throw away idea” in 1994 has developed over the last decade into what can only be described as an obsession. However, rather than narrowing the scope of her artistic investigations, her fetish serves as a springboard for a multitude of ideas and future projects.

Rose’s epic journey began on a bus on the way to art school, watching the construction of the Anzac Bridge spanning the city to Glebe. Her lecturer at the time, sound artist Nigel Helyer, set the project of imagining the ultimate public artwork, unconstrained by practicalities of money or technical feasibility. Rose says that at the time, “Joyce Hinterding was tuning us in to listening to sounds in space, and I looked up at the bridge and thought ‘I wonder what those cables sound like? I can make a global bridge symphony of cables around the world’.” While telecommunications are only now developing to where this might be affordable and possible, Rose acted upon the initial idea and approached the construction company as well as Ros Cheney, then head of ABC’s The Listening Room, in order to make the first recording. The project took on a momentum of its own. The recording was broadcast by the ABC, a 4-track mix by Rose (the opening track on the CD) was included in Alessio Cavallaro’s Sounds In Space Audioteque at the MCA in 1995 and Douglas Khan then included the work on the Leonardo Music Journal Vol 6 CD in 1996. In 2000 Rose enrolled in a Masters degree in the Media Department of Melbourne University and decided to put all her effort and resources into realising the global idea. By 2002 she had gathered her own funds to embark on a bridge odyssey.

“I was away for 7 months. I made an itinerary of particular bridges I wanted to go to for various reasons and cruised around and recorded them, with varying degrees of success. The one in Vietnam was stressful because it was the first one I’d done and I couldn’t get any sound from the vibrations of the cables, so I just banged on them to get that metallic bell sound… [But] Joyce Hinterding gave me fantastic advice when I started, she said ‘Jodi, it doesn’t matter what the sounds are like–the fact that the sound is there is what it is’.”

Rose’s recent CD release Singing Bridges offers the results of this adventure. A double set, the first CD Vibrations is mostly unadorned field recordings. Compiled in chronological order it offers a strong sense of the journey itself from the Anzac Bridge recording in 1994 to bridges in Vietnam, Holland, Finland, Germany, UK, USA, Spain, Geelong, Tasmania and back to Finland by the end of 2004. While on the surface the sonic palette of most of the bridges offers a booming, clanking similarity, several of the recordings stand out as significantly different. The Brooklyn Bridge piece presents sonorities that are deep and ponderous–a world weary under-rumble with metallic shivers and rolling rattles–concluding with an evocative siren in the distance. In contrast the Golden Gate sample is full of fast, high pitched zaps and snaps with a natural flange effect conjuring the sci-fi sonicscape of William Gibson’s bridge colonies from Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties. The MacIntyre Bridge in Geelong has tuned cables that can be played like a crossbred harp and gamelan, and the recording of the Heureka Silta bridge in Tikkurila Vantaa (Finland) provides a minimalist electronic static reminiscent of the finest no-input mixing.

Rose’s process is mostly one of selection and editing with little intervention, effects or overlays. The exceptions are the original Anzac Bridge piece that was manipulated on 4-track tape and included some reverb, and the F6 Coalmining Bridge in Germany–not a suspension cable bridge like all the others–in which she uses small loops to create a post-human industrial scape.

Through her extensive travels Rose has also developed a significant international network which she draws upon for the second CD Variations. Artists such as Fransico Lopez (Spain), Ed Osborn (US/Germany), Gintas K (Lithuania), Melbourne artists Steve Law and Jacques Soddell and others, all have a crack at making music out of the rich source material with some very satisfying results.

Rose sees the CD as the culmination of the research phase of her obsession. In that time she also undertook the ABC-Australia Council Listening Room residency, making 2 works. The first was a radiophonic piece concentrating on the lives and stories of people in, on and around bridges; the second a series of improvised instrumental pieces with Trevor Brown, Ion Pearce and Ben Fink based on visual scores comprising drawings of the bridges themselves melded with technical diagrams of electronics. Another manifestation of the material was included in Ros Bandts’ Hearing Place, part of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in which Rose crafted small model bridges to accompany some of her audio pieces.

As ideas for future phases just keep on coming, it’s clear that Jodi Rose has found herself an ouevre. She has been invited to work with a Swedish engineer to record the cables on a bridge in Bangkok while they are being tensioned. She is also in conversation with Denzil Caberrera and Michael Bates from the Acoustic Research Lab at Sydney University Architecture Faculty to investigate different recording techniques such as industrial vibration monitoring equipment in order to pick up the lower frequencies that her current piezo contact mikes are not registering. And of course there is the global bridge symphony that she is still keen to realise.

At the time of this interview, Jodi Rose was packing to head off to Finland to start preparations for a trial performance of a live streamed performance mixing several bridges in Finland. She is also going to run Particle Wave (with Sophea Learner, a fellow Australian now based in Helsinki), a program of workshops and discussions on experimental radio practice which will be part of Pixel Ache in April 2005. It appears that the nomadic life certainly agrees with Jodi Rose and her practice.

Jodi Rose, Singing Bridges–Vibrations/Variations, Sonic Artstar, 2005, SAS001, www.singingbridges.net

The 19th century interior of The Apothecary 1878 wine bar–dark red walls, chandeliers, mirrors, innumerable drawers with arcane inscriptions–contrasted sharply with the resolutely minimalist work presented in Project 2. Composer and concert promoter Michael Yuen assembled performances and installations by Adelaide artists whose work is little known outside the city. To these he added works by Lawrence English and venerable members of the avant garde, Gyorgy Ligeti and Steve Reich.

Entering the cellar of The Apothecary required an adjustment from the bright lights and noise of Hindley Street to near darkness and low level sound. Michael Yuen’s sound and light projects a cone of light that also functions as a movement detector. Once inside the cone, the viewer can influence the sounds that emerge from piezo speakers on a glass table top. This is a continuation of work with specially mounted piezo speakers that Yuen has been doing for several years. As is often the case with works of this kind, one must question the purpose or significance of the interactive elements. It is not an act of communication, unless with an alien, machine intelligence, but it is unlikely that even the most ardent proponents of artificial intelligence would push the boundaries of metaphor so far at the present level of technological development. The most successful interactive installations involve an element of play, with a concomitant possibility of gain (however broadly defined) once the rules are understood.

It is precisely the playing of a game that lies at the heart of CONflict, a collaboration between composer Luke Harrald and artist Hugh McLean. Eight software agents adopt various strategies of cooperation, defection and betrayal within the context of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, one of the text book cases of game theory. Realised in real time using a program created in Max by Harrald, the agents control sound and visual output. The visuals (created by McLean) have a blurred, lo-fi quality that makes them akin to peripheral or hypnagogic vision (Stan Brakhage said the best movie show in town can be seen when you shut your eyes). The images were projected onto ornate mirrors covered with material, precisely filling them and illuminating the intricate frames. The slowly evolving, richly coloured, abstract visuals were accompanied by monochrome sound developing through unpredictable harmonic fields. Although both were controlled by the same process there was no mickey-mousing of sound and image. The Prisoners’ Dilemma can be used to explore social dynamics in highly volatile situations, but the result here was meditative, a glass bead game rather than Aussie Rules. CONflict was presented as a performance (the agents being the performers), but it hovers on the boundary between performance and installation.

In the darkest corner of The Apothecary’s cellar was projections, an installation by Tom Szucs. Lights glow between bottles of vintage wine, a plastic tube hovers in mid-air while sounds emerge from an unseen source. The result is enigmatic but engaging. Upstairs in a room with tea chests was Ghost Towns, an audio-visual environment by Lawrence English. Iconic images of the outback–flat, parched landscapes, abandoned farm buildings, windmills–are accompanied by sounds that originate within the pictured environment. The common enough outback sight of a ruined piano, explored extensively by Western Australian composer Ross Bolleter, appears in the video and provides some of the most interesting sonic material. Once providing a tenuous link between the pioneers and European culture, ruined pianos have become symbols of rural decay, not quite mute witnesses to the transience of culture and its technology.

Gyorgy Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique was created for 100 clockwork metronomes, mechanical rhythmic devices that have tortured generations of music students. The choice of this useful but reviled mechanism is evidence of Ligeti’s musical wit. Closely related to Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music and other classics of early minimalism, the elegance of the concept lies in its easily grasped illustration of a fundamental technique of musical minimalism: phase relationships. The very unpredictability of the metronome (some of which are completely crazy, according to Erik Satie) leads to chaotic polyrhythms of great complexity. For this performance 10 actual metronomes were used, the rest being realised through software modelling.

Ligeti led naturally into Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint, played by clarinettist Stephanie Wake-Dyster. The multi-track accompaniment was realised by Wake-Dyster and Tom Szucs, and for once actually sounded like an ensemble of clarinets, from baritone upwards. The live clarinet part was played with complete assurance and the performance had an infectious jazziness.

In the dusty heat of Horsham strange things were happening to the showgrounds. Two oversized silhouettes of bright yellow dogs sniffing each other were fixed to the historic gates, the skeleton of an enormous eel trap was being constructed by the river, and the finishing touches were being added to a sculpted stone fire pit. The Meeting Place 2004 Regional Arts Australia conference was about to begin.

As Artistic Director of the “part festival, part conference”, performer Donna Jackson lent her signature style to the event: great art and ideas minus the waffle. The focus on frank discussion of meaningful issues carried throughout the conference, as management tried to steer away from topics that had been done to death and to concentrate on questions relevant to the artistic program and, more importantly, today’s regional arts environment.

Keynote presentations included The Great Koala Debate, a satiric discussion of the merits of the Giant Koala on the Western Highway; the Ladies Committee Address by comedian Tracy Harvey, which looked at the role of the Ladies’ Pavilion in Australian show culture; and a presentation by Rick Farley on leadership in regional Australia. Meanwhile, the majority of the debates and discussions were held in the numerous participatory Showdown sessions, where invited guests, including artists, academics and arts managers, discussed a range of topics with the delegates.

While the majority of the conference looked at issues involving the broader arts community, there was a particular focus on regional arts. The large artistic program of Meeting Place was testament to the fact that great art is being made outside Australia’s cities. A large proportion of the work came from the vibrant community in Horsham and nearby Natimuk.

Space and Place, a hybrid performance work featured interactive animation, music, aerial dance and shadow play on the 27m high Natimuk silos, attracting an audience of 2,500 to a town of 480 people. The work was directed by Jillian Pearce and performed by physical theatre company Y Space, with animations and still projections by Dave Jones, puppetry and shadow play by young people from Natimuk led by local artist Mary French, choral music and sound by Warburton artist Santha Press and the Wallup Mara Indigenous dance group directed by Farren Branson. Another striking work on the program, Fire Dog–Smoke Lizard combined sculpture, neon, fireworks and sound on the Wimmera River and its banks. It was created by visual designer and artistic director Catherine Larkins with pyrotechnics by Philip and Rachael Aitken, sound design by Vincent Lamberti, art fabrication by Delta Neon, neons by Dean Phillips and pontoon design and construction by Glen Critchley.

Working the resources

Methods and strategies to support the development of regional arts were examined in a number of sessions. One suggestion was greater utilisation of existing community resources, such as Horsham’s showgrounds. While unconventional, the venue was ideal for a regional arts event, combining history, character and the beautiful, natural surroundings of the Wimmera River.

The role academic institutions play in the survival of regional arts was also discussed. Professor Peter Matthews of Ballarat University argued that art schools have a responsibility not only to their students but also to provide experiences for the community, and to advocate on behalf of the arts. Gippsland-based artist Catherine Larkins explained how the establishment of the Gippsland School of Art in the 1970s allowed “a network of artists to be created that otherwise may never have met, exhibiting works that may never have been seen.” In the current climate of extreme funding shortages in Australia’s educational institutions, arts resources which once enhanced and enlivened communities may soon disappear entirely.

Rick Farley’s inspiring address drew on his experience coordinating major projects in regional areas, such as the development of Landcare and the Cape York Land Use Agreement. His contention is that without extensive consultation and research there can be no ownership of the outcomes of a project, leaving the parties involved disenfranchised and unsatisfied. This scenario can easily be transferred to any arts or cultural project involving government, business, community or Indigenous groups where a consensus must be reached between stakeholders.

Whose art?

One of the challenges of Meeting Place was the definition of art? Who can make it, and who is it for? The inclusion of wearable ‘hair art’ and a new take on the show tradition of the Ladies’ Pavilion were prime examples of the blurring of the boundaries between art, craft and other creative activities not traditionally viewed as art, such as hairdressing and body piercing. Lisa Eltze’s towering hair sculptures were cunningly created to blend in with the wearer’s natural hair and were worn to stunning effect at the Dinner Dance. The Ladies Pavillion exhibition featured works by local artists and guest artist Yvonne Koolmatrie looking at the ideas surrounding women’s traditional show entries, such as handbags, preserves and quilts.

In a session entitled “Who is art for?” the complex topic of disability and the arts was tackled, particularly by a number of delegates who were simultaneously involved in the Awakenings regional arts and disability festival. When is a performance about an experience for the audience, and when is it for the benefit of the performers? How can the audience know what standard of performance to expect? Back to Back Theatre Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin expressed his frustration at having to prove the professional status of his company which involves artists with disabilities. The company sees itself as part of the community but, at the same time, different in its aims from amateur groups. The argument was intense, and little was resolved in the time allocated.

There was a push towards the notion that anyone can make, and be involved in, art. Singer-songwriter Fay White explained how through involvement in Vocal Nosh sessions of singing and sharing food (http://cmv.customer.netspace.net.au/stuff_vocal_nosh.html), an audience is not so much ‘developed’ as invited in to discover. Following this logic, if more people had the opportunity to be engaged in significant arts activities, the notion of audience development would become redundant. Taken a step further, this idea suggests that audience development resources should be redirected from publicity campaigns and instead target specially conceived, participation-based arts projects.

The issue of popular culture in art was raised and passionately debated, down to the very definition of the concept. Next Wave director Marcus Westbury in particular was adamant that there should be no distinction between high and pop culture, but that we should be supporting, sharing and driving the existing culture. It was claimed that the current funding bias towards high culture has its basis in cultural cringe, but may also be due to the fact that capital ‘A’ arts are ‘safe’ and ‘known’, both for funding bodies and audiences. This argument comes down to a fundamental issue around government funding: by favouring certain projects or companies, some censorship inevitably occurs. “Let’s not prostitute ourselves to bureaucracy”, shouted one delegate. “Funding does not equal culture!” It seemed that a majority of delegates were in favour of broadening the definition of art, taking in elements from the wider world.

Useful art

Another question running through many of the discussions was ‘what is the point of all this art?’–what can it do, and what purpose does it serve? The answers were many and varied. PhD student Kate MacNeill was a proponent of the ‘art can be subversive’ argument, awakening people to new possibilities and changing patterns of thought. According to Di Shaw, the City of Greater Geelong’s Arts and Culture Manager, art was successfully employed to help change the public’s perception of Geelong’s waterfront when the council redeveloped it. A large number of distinctive bollards developed by local artists were installed, changing the image and ambience of the area for both locals and tourists.

Tom Zubrycki explained how his documentary film, Molly and Mobarak (RT 60, p15), used art as a means to understand our culture more fully, even if the consequent insights were disturbing. The film focused on the recent integration of Afghan refugees into rural Australia. Zubrycki highlighted that the humanising aspect of the film made it important in the debate over Australia’s intake and treatment of refugees, enabling asylum seekers to be seen as people rather than just government statistics.

For many delegates it seemed the process of creating art was as, or even more, important than the end result. Community arts practitioners promoted the fact that making art can also facilitate healing, self-understanding, confidence building and celebration, both in individuals and communities. Even back in October 2004, it was recognised that the Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council was narrowing its definitions, making funding applications more difficult. Now that the board is to be dismantled, the funding for broad-based community arts projects is likely to become even more fraught.

The concept that art making can be used, alongside other activities, as a means of identifying, maintaining and sharing local culture was generally agreed upon. Yet it appears that it is being underutilised in some regions. The symptoms of this manifest in a number of ways, but as one delegate announced, “If I see one more menu in Australia with focaccias on it, I will vomit!” In terms of cultural tourism, there was a general understanding that each region must find what makes their area unique in terms of arts, food, wine and any number of other elements in order to reflect an authentic cultural experience to locals and visitors, rather than relying on the bland, homogenised fare symbolised by café culture.

Looking at all the functions that art fulfills within our society, it became increasingly obvious that for many people, art and culture are inseparable from other daily activities. Meeting Place was an up-beat event, full of positive energy and motivational ideas underscored by serious exploration of the state of regional arts.

Meeting Place—Regional Arts Australia National Conference 2004, Horsham, Victoria, October 21-24, 2004

Like a visit to a foreign land, You Must Have Been in Strange Places requires adaptation to new concepts in a perilous theoretical topography, an ecology where contrasting narratives co-exist like different species in a re-envisioned Australia.

Andrew Best’s Knox Elements I-III (2005) crowds the space like lantana with a large thick vine curling around the centre pole of the gallery. Hallucinatory objects are reflected in a mirror on which lines of cocaine have been cut, a looking glass wonderland portraying an interior world of the imagination where reason is emptied of any currency. Curator Jeff Khan has cleverly placed this challenge to notions of time and narrative to create the introduction to an exhibition that needs navigation.

Kate McMillan’s Lapses in Judgement (2005) presents disparate sites of turbulent history as the tourist attractions they have become. The images conceal history with an unsettling stillness. Sunlight filters through trees in a video of a peaceful Rottnest Island, the site (the catalogue explains) for a mass Indigenous grave. The concrete bear pits of Switzerland are pictured in a typical snapshot. A tree with sawn-off branches impotently reaches for the sky, whilst the bear remains impassive in its surroundings. Understatement generates emotion without crossing into activism.

Helen Johnson’s mural, Super Natural (2005) diagrammatically deconstructs the history of Australian settlement to reveal how European culture has reconfigured the environment. At its beginning, a girl stands viewing a landscape through the lens of painterly abstraction. At the other end, the landscape is romantically depicted as undeveloped wilderness. Drawn into the mountain peaks are the faces of explorers who made claim to the landscape through hardship and sacrifice but whose utopian yearnings have seen negative consequences.

Bec Dean adds a Freudian dimension to the exhibition. Rebecca (2005), the work and the artist’s namesake, is also the tile of a novel by Daphne DuMaurier, written in 1938, and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. In this work the artist explores how the fabrication and the myth of Rebecca contribute to her own identity. The work is like an echo, evoking more than one narrative.

In the film, an ominous memory of Rebecca haunts the house of Manderley — like a horror film without a ghost. The memory of this legend torments the second wife of Maxim de Winter like a taboo. Instead it remains repressed as an elemental force represented in the treacherous coastline of Manderley and the roaring ocean heard from the house. It is only when secrets are told, that their power disperses.

In the enigmatic work by Dean, a woman (which of the Rebeccas, we do not know) appears in every frame of a series of cinematic light boxes, each a liminal sphere conflating myth and reality, landscape and memory. Surrounded by swampland, in Victorian period dress, she appears like the ghost of our heritage. Preserved photographically, her aura remains to remind us of a secret she keeps. The series of light boxes offers us a kind of 3-dimensionality, so that we may circle her but never get too close.

Her secret is one bound in national identity, underplayed, but emphasized by her presence in the Australian landscape, but far from cliché of the outback. Rather, like those traumas and turbulent histories featured in McMillan’s work, it shows what remains hidden in our national identity. In its gothic character, it refers to mysteries that cannot be solved, nor neatly packaged in museum format, such as The Picnic at Hanging Rock and the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain. It is also in this unresolved nature that it allows the audience to stake claim to historic narratives, as if they were puzzles to be completed by each of our own answers. Cleverly illustrated and tightly curated, this is the way the exhibition suggests we take claim of our heritage: to map it for ourselves, and alllow alternative narratives to converge with the past.

You Must Have Been in Strange Places, curator Jeff Khan, Getrude Contemporary Arts Spaces, Feb 2-26

The work of Regan Tamanui is refreshing even in the innovative world of contemporary art. I first encountered this Melbourne graffiti and stencil artist last year when he gave a public forum at Hobart’s Art School and had the predominantly youngish audience eating out of his hand. His laid-back, iconoclastic attitude, combined with a dry, laconic wit is echoed in his artmaking which is resolutely anti-big business and against conformity, multinationalism, conservative politics and the police state.

Tamanui has been working in Melbourne’s underground stencil and street art scene for more than 5 years and is arguably the most prolific stencil artist in reputedly largest street art city in the world. Yes, that’s Melbourne and Tamanui and his colleagues have succeeded in raising graffiti and stencil art from low to high culture status. Going by the tag name of HA-HA, Tamanui has ‘graduated’ to formal gallery walls. He also has a liking for exhibiting in disused warehouse spaces.

At the Criterion Gallery, his work consisted of 6 installations or composites of enamel on board, all characterised by the strong colours of the commercial spray can. The signature image for the show was the clichéd logo, ‘I © NY’. In a simple and funny gesture Tamanui slashes out the NY and sprays in the word ‘HOBART’, a play on popular culture and parochialism.

All of the works at Criterion were witty, and most were informed by more serious social and political criticism. Tamanui addresses Aboriginal rights, the David Hicks saga, the ‘Australian Dream’ and notions of Australian citizenship. The Iraq War makes an appearance with stenciled faces of Bush, Blair and Howard (The Meltdown of the Axis of Evil). Then, in the upbeat, large scale work, Identifiable, resembling the pieces of an unfinished jigsaw, Tamanui stencils dozens of iconic faces over a white surface.

Tamanui's work is also notable for the seductively appropriate shape each piece assumes. The David Hicks piece (The Australian Dream) is an angular, stylised Eureka flag, while in The Real Australia the Aboriginal flag appears in a rounded, 1960s daisy-like format (or is it a pool of splattered blood?), with the Aboriginal colours sharp and bright and the words “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” graffitied across the centre.

Regan Tamanui is a fascinating character and a gifted, self-taught artist dedicated to his artform, producing work that excites and challenges. A newspaper vox pop asks “Is aerosol painting art or just vandalism?” It’s art.

This production is an exchange of surreal and fragmenting stories performed by the improvisation group, The All Audreys. Drawing on collective skills in music, dance, free form improvisation, clowning and visual art, Exchange was devised by these mature performers as a sequence of solos, duos and quartets.

Leigh Tesch, Sally Edith, Helen Swain and Andrea Breen interact across the starkness of the Backspace performance area. They reminisce, observe and comment, sometimes standing or sitting against blank walls that function as a reference point for alienation, fear, and despair. The unembellished space also accentuates the recurring theme of exchange.

The All Audreys’ narrative invokes the 1950s Menzies’ government family of conformity and religiosity. The performers unashamedly refer to the political and cultural stirrings of the 60s that became embedded in 70s theoretical frameworks.

Andrea Breen’s viola bow slices the air like a lure, strongly suggesting the Pied Piper of Hamelin. She beckons and entices children, while her words “Jesus loved little children” offers a discordant play on a text resonant with familiarity.

Exchange provides a panoply of oral and aural histories. The highly interactive imagining, physicality and intermittent craziness creates an interpersonal dynamic informed by aloneness. These stories shift from the personal and spill into the malleable and abstract realm of culture. While Exchange makes this connection apparent, the impact is occasionally lost in glib references to contemporary issues including the Cornelia Rau case, the Asian Tsunami and Dafur.

Lea Tesch’s physical improvisation is uncompromising in its evocation of paranoia, highlighted by television images of faces screaming “ratbags” and “communist.” The All Audreys’ emphasis on this aspect of their collective storytelling re-creates the fears of the 1950s that infiltrated and oppressed many Australian lives. Such scaremongering remains a potent force in John Howard’s Australia, but The All Audreys diffuse the fear of uncertain times by surreally linking families with animals. The question, “are you a dog family or a cow family?” counteracts the impact of sloganistic threats.

Exchange continually hints at the impact on people’s lives when individuals and a society are unable to embrace diversity. Despite some of our more infamous racial policies, no culture can remain mono-cultural.

The All Audreys situate their perceptions of self and the world through a cacophony of stories that inlcude the restraining events in the lives of the performers. Exchange evokes memory as present tense. “Anyone there?” asks Sally Edith. “No I’m not and I never was” comes the response.

The All Audreys, Exchange, performers Leigh Tesch, Sally Edith, Helen Swain, Andrea Breen, Hobart Fringe Festival, Backspace Theatre, February 12-13

Anne Landa Award/Australia Council Restructure

One of the great ironies of the moment is the simultaneous demise of the New Media Arts Board in the Australia Council’s projected restructure and the launch of the first Anne Landa Award + Exhibition with a $25,000 prize for the winning artist working in moving image or new media art. The winner was David Rosetzky whose cryptically engaging installation Untouchable, is pictured above. Another artist selected for the exhibition was Craig Walsh whose Contested space appears on our cover. Click here for more on the exhibition.

Some 200 people including many artists gathered in Sydney to meet Australia Council CEO Jennifer Bott to voice their dismay at the restructure and to ask her for an explanation of how it came about and what would happen to new media and hybrid arts funding, assessment and standing as a consequence. See detailed report.

International

As part of RealTime’s expanding international coverage, we have reports on multimedia artists in the Philippines, an international performance event in Singapore and an Australian collaboration with Indonesian artists in Java. The latter coincides with new funds becoming available through the Australia Indonesian Institute and the Australia Council for collaborations with Indonesian artists in the Saraswati Art program.

OnScreen

Our focus in OnScreen is on activism in film, video, TV and new media, a realm energised by recent election battles. Despite conservative victories, artists in these media have learnt a great deal about practising dissent and establishing alternative means of distribution. OnScreen also introduces you to the delights, dangers and ethical risks of Bio-art as they are met head-on when Catherine Fargher enrols in a SymbioticA workshop. It’s a timely reminder too that there’s more to new media than screen art. RT

At the meeting convened by ANAT, dLux media arts, Performance Space, Experimenta, MAAP and RealTime at the Paddington RSL, Sydney on January 24 we hoped to hear from Australia Council staff why the Taskforce’s proposed restructuring of the organisation entailed the dissolution of the New Media Arts Board (NMAB) and why there had been no consultation with the sector and, at the time of the December press release, none offered in the future.

Over 200 people gathered at the RSL, including many new media and hybrid artists, artists from other fields including music, visual and community arts, academics, curators, managers, a range of Australia Council staff, AFC staff and members of the press. Kim Machan, director of MAAP flew in from Brisbane, Artrage director Marcus Canning (also on the NMAB) from Perth (carrying a detailed response to the restructure from WA artists and BEAP), Fabienne Nicholas, manager of Experimenta, from Melbourne and visiting artists from the UK all attended. The mood of the meeting was serious, often emotional as concerned artists tried to express the depth of their feelings.

ANAT director Julieanne Pierce hosted the meeting, outlining the issues she hoped the Australia Council’s CEO Jennifer Bott and Acting Executive Director, Arts Development and NMAB Manager Andrew Donovan would address. She then introduced 3 speakers: artist and academic Anna Munster, artist Lynnette Wallworth and me. I spoke about the field’s response to the restructuring from replies to RealTime’s December email and other documentation.

I looked at the language of the response to the proposed changes, how the impact was felt viscerally and how metaphors of blindness, lack of vision, short-sightedness were used by correspondents to describe Council’s actions along with images of regression, of their “going off the map” and “back to the dark ages.” The second strongest feeling I reported was of betrayal, that the Xmas-time announcement and lack of consultation amounted to “a pre-emptive strike against innovation in the arts.” Above all there were feelings of imminent loss: of identity (new media and hybrid arts were being un-named, un-represented by an artform board and at Council level), of expertise (the accumulated knowledge of NMAB), of coherence and continuity (the forms scattered to other artform boards). Finally, the restructure was felt to parallel the growing conservatism of Australian society, here with the return to the fundamentals of traditional artform categories. I described the key issue as not being about money, after all the Council was saying that the same money, even more, would be spent on new media and hybrid arts, but the very standing of the forms was at stake if their names were to be erased or relegated to the small print.

Central to Anna Munster’s talk was the significant role of the NMAB in building an experimental arts culture in Australia. She also pointed to the careers enabled by the AFC’s short-lived but highly significant Interactive Fund. New media art might not yet have the commercial outcomes some had fantasised for it but, said Munster, its social potential was strong, its place in universities and other institutions growing. Why then should the Australia Council demote it? She felt particularly for graduating students utterly familiar with new technologies but having no place to turn to where support for experimental art would be visible. Overall, Munster saw the Taskforce “turning away from delivery to outcomes” at the same time as university research was being impelled into dull empiricism and homogenisation. She forecast an arts brain drain of the very same kind as has happened in other fields where the costs of reversal are already high.

Lynnette Wallworth described new media art as an emerging form, impossible to categorise in simple terms because it requires knowledge of and responsiveness to the constant changes in technology. Wallworth, like Anna Munster thought the restructure would cut off the possibilities for emerging work by denying artists a board responsive to change, a board ready to fund unknown outcomes, a board ready to dialogue with artists.

Michael Keighery, chair of the National Visual Arts and Craft Network (NVACN), spoke briefly from the floor, reporting that the network was perplexed by the proposed restructure and sought clarification on how the model had been researched and analysed, whether other options had been considered, and on the attitudes of Australia Council staff. NVACN looked forward to meaningful discussions with the Australia Council, and other parties like state and local governments who would be affected by the changes.

Jennifer Bott declared that the Taskforce’s recommendations “had been made with the best of intentions” and for strategic reasons in the “competition for the public dollar.” She explained that the Taskforce had not been consultative in the way that Nugent, Myer and the Small to Medium reports had been because those had been strategies of Council, not an assessment of the Council and its workings as a whole. In other words, this was an internal report. She said that the Taskforce had noted the significant reduction in the value of grants over the years and that to ignore that was to “put our heads in the sand.” The report was developed from May to October, its delivery delayed by the federal election and “not for any sinister reason.” Council, she said, “was unanimous” that the Taskforce’s recommendation was the direction in which it wanted to go. Central to the plan was the belief that to get increased government support there was “a need to do bigger projects that would show what art could do for Australian life” as opposed to offering “more small grants.” Pivotal to Council’s planning was its own forthcoming application to government for triennial funding. Clearly it is hoping that a restructure and some big public outcomes will attract additional funding or at least the long-term possibility of it.

Council’s aim, said Bott, would be to use its funds “for maximum impact.” Many at the meeting assumed that existing grants money would be taken from artists and absorbed into these large projects, of which no clear example was given, no joyous sales pitch, or even the suggestion that it was something which artists present could be part of. A reduction in grants is not intended and took a while to clarify, an indication of how unprepared the Council is to sell its new model. What muddied the waters was Bott’s reference to doing big, long term community projects (presumably a Richard Florida-type model involving urban/suburban/renewal), “rather than spending $20,000 each on lots of small projects.”

Bott thought that the new model with its big projects would speak to government and to the public: “as artists we talk to each other too much instead of to the public.” This was going to be a better model and was not, she emphasised, an attempt to get rid of community and new media arts. More money could be invested in infrastructure in the new Key Organisations section and Council itself would be involved in strategic initiatives, using the discretionary funds hitherto allocated to the artform boards. Bott invited the audience to participate in “looking at how we can make [the restructure] work.”

Of the many questions and statements that followed, the assumption that very big projects would have any impact was challenged, as was the increasingly top-down model of Council’s operations. The success of many of Australia’s small to medium projects was pointed to as part of our international reputation. Rachael Swain from Marrugeku Company pointed out that a company like hers already created large scale, long term works with communities (see interview with Swain).

On the matter of political interference or compliance in the decision to restructure Bott was adamant that “all our boards continue to offend and the Australia Council defends them.” As to why the NMA and CCD boards were dissolved, she replied, “It’s not just a board which validates an artform.” She iterated that funding to these areas would be maintained and that the new Inter-Arts Office “flagged an investment in new media arts.” Rachael Swain outlined her concern that without a board specifically committed to new media and hybrid arts her company could not continue the carefully established conversation that had enabled the company’s work: “how can we continue that process?” The projected staff numbers for the Inter-Arts Office are 2 and with no ongoing peer presence the situation looked like “a vacuum.” Andrew Donovan suggested that there would be dialogue with relevant peers and others on specific projects that would provide “a more focussed and targeted assessment.” But, again, the process had yet to be worked out.

Lyndal Jones spoke eloquently, declaring that we were really discussing a conflict between identity and strategy. Here was a strategy that included dissolving the NMAB. The anger which had greeted this was, she said, to be expected as the Council had helped form the new media arts’ identity. Kate Richards thought it too late to turn the clock back and fold the complexities of new media arts into traditional artform categories. Others pointed out that without the branding and the status offered by the existence of the NMAB, artists would find it increasingly difficult to form the partnerships and sponsorships that have been typical of a field that can work with commerce, science and education. A number of speakers were alarmed by the loss of status that the erasure of the board would mean for the standing of Australia’s new media arts both here and especially overseas where Australia is widely regarded as a leader in the field.

Above all, in the face of Bott’s clear commitment to push ahead with the restructure, speakers from the floor wanted assurance that their concerns would be taken to the Taskforce and to Council. Could there be change? Bott only anticipated small changes from working parties and consultations up until the end of February, prior to the March 11 meeting where Council would ratify the plan which would take effect from July 1.

At the end of the meeting, Fiona Winning asked how the current boards would equip themselves for the change in such a short time frame and what staff training would be involved. She called for a lot more time for consultation and asked how we might go about rebuilding trust between artists and the Australia Council.

After the meeting there was little sense that Council’s plans or their rationale for them had been made much clearer. The erasure of NMAB seemed to be solely in terms of cost-effectiveness rather than its success or potential. People were angry at the fixity of Bott’s position constantly reinforced in the manner of the modern politician with the “at the end of the day …” mantra. There was also curiosity about the new leadership role forecast for the Australia Council. What kind of leadership will it offer? Increasingly hierarchical and less and impinged on by peer assessment? If, as is being suggested, the new Directors (previously Managers) of the artform boards are to go to Council with proposals for the ‘big projects’ as their own initiatives, will their respective artform boards be involved in the process? Will Council, strategically allocating funds to the winning directors, become in effect another group of peer assessors? Is that’s what Council is there for? Will the Australia Council become itself a cultural producer as well as a facilitator? Is that part of its charter?

Pressure is being applied to the Council by organisations across the country to suspend any changes for a year, in which time serious consultation could be undertaken. If Council decides to push ahead (we’ll know this as of March 11), and will not change course, then we need to urge it to visibly commit to the promises currently made about preservation of funding levels for new media, hybrid arts and community cultural grants, and to argue for improved ways of handling these in the new structure. Above all, the terms new media arts and hybrid arts must retain prominence in whatever ways feasible so that their standing and the opportunities that go with it are not lost.

The Australia Council, having done much to acknowledge and nurture new media and hybrid arts must not abandon them or the key role it plays in their development and dissemination around the world. To do so is to betray itself, to be blind to its own achievements as well as those of a plethora of remarkable Australian artists. As a communications industry consultant observed after the meeting, this is a moment when Council should be investing more in new media arts, let alone retaining the NMAB.

Beyond the breezy prelude to the exhibition (diary notes, postcards, family photos and snapshots from the 2-year road trip that Trent Parke and his partner, photographer Narelle Autio, have just undertaken around Australia), the atmosphere is apocalyptic—dark walls, portentous text rolling on a black screen, an animated clock-face counting down. In the installation of the work, Parke says, he wanted to create “an experience for people—something on the grand scale of epic cinema.”

Minutes to Midnight is a vivid experience. Parke has returned from his odyssey with a dark vision to share of an Australia that he sees as very different from the one in which he grew up.

“I suppose it’s a hard country with the droughts and firestorms and poverty. And while there is a kind of freedom to it, there is also a stifling sense of ‘this is the way it is.’” Diary entry, Trent Parke

Our journey begins with a midnight self-portrait taken in outback Menindi, the photographer annointed in his own ghostly light. In the series of large, unframed photographs that follows, Parke works the film to its limits, employing his trademark wide-angle slabs of black intersected by myriad patterns of light to powerfully reveal a shadowland of violence and unease. There’s a palpable sense in his pictures of the photographer wrestling with what he sees. It’s a tough, sometimes frightening view but nuanced with signs of exuberant life. Threatening looking crowds transform into ecstatic tableaux or become transcendent in a shower of rain. There’s roadkill, but also animal life and evidence both brutal and benign of human co-existence with nature.

“At times I feel like I’m looking through the eyes of an actor in a film. We stop at some strange place, pop into the live set and click away as the plot unfolds before us, the scene and characters ever changing as the reality reel rolls on.” Diary entry, Trent Parke

Some images appear snatched in passing, others offered freely to a welcome visitor or through gritted teeth to an intrusive one. Transience abounds—people living in caravans, sleeping in cars. A camper sleeps beneath a dead pig dangling from a tree; a line of local lovelies draped on car bonnets is caught between smiles as their funereal parade stalls. In one of the few portraits in the show, the photographer is held in thrall as a strange young girl sizes him up.

My eyes rest for a minute on pictures that glisten from light-boxes—a slither of silver of Sydney Harbour, a jellyfish preening for the camera. I read in the floor notes how this image turned into a nuclear explosion for the photographer and am drawn back to the dark.

In the last room are 3 large photographs, some collaged into diptychs. A playground at night spells out some sudden poetry, a word in light—”Hum.” Then, the most desolate of all the images in the exhibition, a group of Aboriginal people in a dusty street exposed to the glare of their country’s neglect. “Welcome to Paradise” says the sign above them. On the wall opposite, the hauntingly serene image of the photographer’s parents, he motionless in pyjamas, she ghostly in her nightgown. What do these pictures whisper to each other at minutes to midnight, I wonder? The sound of insects. Overhead, a fluorescent flying fox and a circle of moths drawn to the light. In the corner, the photographer’s newborn son—another outcome of the journey—rises from water like the moon, a vision of promise.

We leave as we entered, past the collage of what seemed at the outset like sunny snapshots and as we pass the photo nostalgia, the romance of the journey, a shot of Narelle Autio’s legs covered in insect bites leaps out, then Parke rinsing film in a grimy shower block, his strips of film like flypaper drying in dead trees. In the final image as we leave, on a TV screen in some nondescript interior, John Howard announces Australia’s entry into the Iraq War.

Minutes to Midnight, Trent Parke, Australian Centre for Photography January 7 February 20 2005. Curator Alasdair Foster.

Jayalitha is a smoky-eyed mistress of the lash. Whip toting and dressed like a man, she is clad in black from head to toe with a belt of knives around her waist. Whether she is a huntress, a stealthy liberator or an agent of vengeance, I can’t quite translate. She stands casually and assertively against the painted backdrop of a domestic interior, ready and waiting. Pushpamala N and Clare Arni’s collaborative photographs, Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs Series is the first work encountered on entering the ground-floor gallery space of Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). As an entrance statement, their work clearly sets the tone for this survey of 37 artists from across the country. Pushpamala N and Clare Arni combine a clever, staged critique of ancient Indian customs against the introduced classification systems of colonial times, while referencing the format of early studio-based photography. Native Women of South India engages in the politics of power, sexuality, tradition, religion and caste—prevalent themes throughout the exhibition.

Surendran Nair’s large-scale painting, Mephistopheles…otherwise the quaquaversal prolix (cuckoonebulopolis) (used as the promotional image for Edge of Desire) is one of the most sinister and unnerving works in the show, depicting the stylised form of a man levitating in a yoga position. His face is elaborately and beautifully masked while the fingers of his left hand form the sign for silence against his mouth. His right hand morphs into a pistol and he wears a severed tongue on a necklace. Mephistopheles is presented by Nair as the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, following his smaller watercolour series Precision Theatre of the Heavenly Shepherds, an apocalyptic symbol of deceit exacting both censure and violence.

Upstairs, Nalini Malani continues this line of enquiry with her light-based installation The Sacred and the Profane. Her paintings of gods and monsters made with synthetic polymer on large, rotating mylar cylinders have seen some exposure in Australia through the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial in 2002. When back-lit her images become animated and intermingle on the back wall in an orgy of worship, sex and death, all inextricably linked.

A video self-portrait by Sonia Khurana entitled Bird shows the artist—an overweight, middle-aged woman—naked and pushing her body around in an uncoordinated dance, testing the limitations of her physicality. The video speed is also pushed and fed through a digital filter so that her body becomes less sexualised and more cartoon-like. While the computer-generated solarisation is tacky and cheap, watching Khurana spinning out of control with jerky little leg extensions, almost falling over and rolling round on the floor is mesmerising and hysterically funny.
Subdoh Gupta, Bihari, 1998

Likewise, the self-effacing humour of Subdoh Gupta sees the installation artist representing himself as both erotic and abject figure. In the photograph Vilas he is naked and smeared all over with Vaseline, slouching resplendent in a green leather chair. In Bihari he has painted an image of himself surrounded by actual cow dung with a flashing neon light. ‘Bi Ha Ri’ is the name of the poor town he was born in, and also a vernacular phrase used by Indians to imply stupidity. The works of Khurana and Gupta tackle conventional and accepted modes of behaviour, and in Gupta’s case the transcendence of class.

Artists manipulating traditional artforms and crafts to critique contemporary issues include NS Harsha and Sharmila Samant. Harsha’s large-scale drawing in green ink, For you my dear Earth, is about 10-15 metres long and divided into 3 parts. Intersecting the middle is a panel of gold leaf from which the dainty, botanical drawings of plants and flowers on either side begin to sprout. As the drawing extends, the plant forms become larger and more unruly, incorporating introduced species and gradually evolving into monstrous looking, Day of the Triffids-style blooms. Sharmila Samant’s A Handmade Sari, made from rusted Coke and Diet Coke bottle tops, incorporates the traditional mango motifs that appear on many Indian fabrics. While each of the works is aesthetically stunning, both artists interrogate the effects of globalisation on the environment and the cultural economy of India respectively. On the way out of the exhibition, Dayanilta Singh’s framed portraits of political and spiritual leaders in-situ in people’s homes and work environments remind one of the omnipresent politics and political thinkers in India’s population. It’s hard to imagine Australians choosing to wake up to the uninspiring likeness of John Howard.

Outside the gallery, in the lead-up to the exhibition opening, Shilpa Gupta re-staged a performance inviting us all to “use blame—feel good” by handing-out free samples of a new product, BLAME! as a remedy to the world’s problems. These small bottles of red liquid were installed inside the exhibition on shelves, and lit by red fluorescent tubes like luxury cosmetics set against a video promoting the product. Shilpa’s previous work includes the fabrication of candy kidneys and an installation representing a designer store for the trade of human body parts. She critiques the cultures of discrimination, commodification and power that effect both Indian society and the global culture at large. (For more on Shilpa Gupta see page 27.)

Installed on 2 levels of AGWA, and travelling straight from Perth to New York, Edge of Desire is diverse in its selection of artists, and is contemporary in the broadest sense of the word. As a survey, the exhibition has its share of overtly didactic and poorly resolved pieces, but these are countered by the work of some of India’s finest contemporary practitioners. With such a broad scope, the exhibition should have been teeming with visitors, but was rendered quiet by a prohibitive ticket price that left most punters hovering on the edge. Outside the exhibition, and appropriately close to the exhibition store, the Paan Beedi Shop was one of the only works made accessible to the non-paying public. Literally an uprooted stall selling such everyday items as cigarettes, sweets, incense and biscuits, the shop’s keeper was replaced by a recessed monitor repeating an endlessly entertaining selection of video-fillers from MTV India. With a plethora of history and tradition to lampoon, these shorts by Cyrus Oshidar take off everything from Bollywood dance sequences and cheesy Indian pop stars to the simultaneously painful and relaxing, all inclusive hair-cut at an Indian barber’s shop.

Edge of Desire, curator Chaitanya Sambrani, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Sept 25 2004-Jan 9 2005

Established in 1974 as Australia’s first government funded experimental visual arts organisation, the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) celebrated its 30th anniversary by introducing important new strategies in its 2004 program. Under the leadership of Melentie Pandilovski, director since mid-2003, the EAF’s program has emphasised new media, the nexus between art, technology and science, the impact of globalisation on art and, most importantly, international cooperation in commissioning and exhibiting art.

Bioteching

The EAF’s main event in 2004 was Art of the Biotech Era, coinciding with the Adelaide Festival of Arts in March. This involved an exhibition, symposium and workshop, and a forthcoming book documenting the event. The 5 day workshop led by Gary Cass and Oron Katz of SymbioticA (see Fargher's Bio-art: adventures in ethics ) addressed subjects such as DNA extraction, plant breeding, tissue culture and biological research ethics. The symposium addressed a range of subjects including bioethics, genetic manipulation and the definition of life itself, asking questions such as whether it is possible to ‘kill’ a ‘living artwork’ of tissue cultivated outside the body? The workshop will be exported, and in March 2005 will be conducted in London under the auspices of Arts Catalyst.

The number of artists working on biotechnological themes is growing exponentially, and Pandilovski previously organised exhibitions and seminars on this theme in Europe. He secured international grants to help fund Art of the Biotech Era, which was seen by some 8,000 people (RT60, p4). Many works were deliberately controversial. Heath Bunting’s Natural Reality Superweed Kit 1.0, for example, is supposedly a weed that will kill GM crops. As Pandilovski notes in the exhibition catalogue, such artwork is neither image nor text-based, nor is it simply an encoded program in action: “it is conceptual beyond its biomateriality.” There is an emerging aesthetic concerned with the conceptualisation and evolution of biotechnical processes. As well as showcasing existing work, such exhibiting catalyses new work and theorisation.

Video perspectives

For the remainder of the 2004 EAF season, Pandilovski mainly selected artists concerned with photographic technologies, primarily through video. Shaun Gladwell and Samstag Scholarship winner TV Moore, both young Sydney artists with an urban youth culture focus, showed CONCRETE 000, a series of collaborative video works that included Moore’s paranoid chase scene and Gladwell’s introspective skateboarding. Oliver Musovik of Macedonia followed in June; his photographic work in Friends, Neighbours and Others also addressed urban existence, resonating with the work of Gladwell and Moore. The idea of the observing camera, central to our society of surveillance, permeated these artists’ work.

Dundee-based Lei Cox’s July exhibition Retrospective Elements brought to Australia a scaled down retrospective of his work from the past 15 years. His typically large-scale installations, in which we see giant hand-made flowers and artificial grass that interact with the viewer, could not be brought to the gallery and so videos were used instead.

Irish artist Grace Weir followed Cox’s exhibition. Her video installation A Fine Line explored the philosophy of science, featuring scientist Ian Elliot as actor/presenter/philosopher and Weir as the investigator. Her elegiac work conveys information televisually and induces a meditative state, approaching the subject of physics both intellectually and psychologically.

Russian performance artist Oleg Kulig’s videos, shown in an untitled exhibition in October, are records of his performances from 1994 to 1999. His work challenges the social standards of the former USSR and contemporary Russia. By portraying guard dogs and the EU flag in the work I Love Europe he questions various political tendencies in Europe such as the territory’s expansion and the appearance of new borders and their ‘guarding’. He also questions the nature of the police state and the dichotomous nature of such dogs, who are at once obedient friends and uncontrollable monsters. Kulig’s video also muses on what it is for a human to behave like an angry dog confronting an unaware public. His performance I Bite America, America Bites Me references Joseph Beuys’ 3 day performance in New York I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) in which Beuys cohabited with a coyote.

In the 2004 work System of Coordinates, naked actors in a water tank photograph themselves and each other, challenging the boundaries of pornography and disclosing aspects of human sexuality. Such work has a sociological edge and becomes a way of mapping (Russian) societal development.

The Slovenian connection

The final exhibition for 2004 was Slovenian group IRWIN’s Like to Like. This exhibition, complete with a visit by IRWIN members, was made possible through cooperation with Sydney’s Artspace, where it was also staged (RT64, p32). Established in the early 1980s, IRWIN is central to Slovenian contemporary art. As Igor Zabel notes in the catalogue, IRWIN’s defining characteristic, in addition to functioning collectively, is their concern with the ‘retro-principle’—combining images and symbols from past high and low art to re-examine art itself. Like to Like features a series of large Type C photographs, each of a carefully staged scene constructed to represent an adjacent diagram. Each diagram is a reconstruction of an earlier tableau or event. For example, Wheat and String 2003, by commissioned photographer Tomaz Gregori, is a photographic reconstruction of a work by the 1960s Slovenian art group OHO. The original Wheat and String (1969) was in turn inspired by Suprematist art. As the artist’s statement notes, the work references environmental concerns and ‘earth art’, but is ephemeral and conceptual. An accretion of artistic forms and history is embodied in each image.

Opposite the photographs is Corpse of Art, a recreation of Russian Suprematist artist Kasimir Malevich’s lying in state. A sarcophagus, designed by Malevich, contains a frighteningly realistic mannequin of the artist, above which hangs a facsimile of a Malevich painting. IRWIN’s work addresses the impact of Russian revolutionary art on the USSR’s satellite countries and, more broadly, the cultural and political history of Slovenia and its neighbours. IRWIN’s exhibition also included extensive videos and artists’ books tracing past work, and commentary by theorists such as Slavoj Zizek.

Global resource pooling

Pandilovski has brought to Australia important European work that would not otherwise travel here. The EAF’s networking has also assisted local artists to exhibit and travel overseas: Adelaide artist Martin Thompson exhibited at Web 3D Art in Monterey (USA) and SIGGRAPH 2004 in Los Angeles, while Adelaide writer Maria Bilske participated in the curatorial seminar Trans-global Art-ground at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, in December 2003. This seminar involved curators from several countries addressing the question of a global art system. Pandilovski is looking at Australian video artists for an exhibition planned at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje and other European venues.

In 2004, workshops were held in Adelaide for artists to learn new technologies, and further workshops are planned for 2005. Karl Dudesek, from Van Gogh TV, will run a 3D web art workshop, presentation and exhibition for the local industry in February; and Brazilian-American artist Eduardo Kac will undertake a residency and conduct a workshop on Biotech and Telematic Arts.

The EAF is planning more twinning arrangements such as the one with Artspace that sponsored IRWIN’s visit: Pandilovski is working with the art and technology centres in Britain and Germany on parallel projects. Oleg Kulig’s work will also be shown at Artspace. The book of Art of the Biotech Era will be sponsored by the IMA (Brisbane) and the Gordon Darling Foundation. There will be thematic exhibitions on the intersection of art, technology, science and information mounted in tandem with overseas institutions, which will see local and overseas artists being shown together. The EAF will rely on funding from overseas institutions to underwrite such projects and the exhibitions will travel to those institutions.

Pooling resources in this way permits the mounting and touring of larger scale projects and international travel by artists, curators and theorists. The EAF sees itself as a traffic manager. Pandilovski’s intention is to enrich Australian art as a whole, not just that of Adelaide. Importantly, the EAF is positioning itself as an international player and linking Australia to the global scene. In this age of rapid evolution in art, technology and society, it is essential that Australia’s art is closely connected to the world circuit, and organisations such as the EAF (as well as CACSA, Artspace, IMA and others) play pivotal roles. As Melentie Pandilovski says, “we can’t work in isolation in the 21st Century.”

Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace, Adelaide, www.eaf.asn.au

The practice of Tasmanian digital artist Mary Scott evolves, as ever, seamlessly, from one series of works to the next. From her painting to her current digital prints, seemingly disparate yet tangentially related themes recur to create a quirkily pleasing continuity in a masterful body of work.

Scott’s interest in digital imaging developed when she lectured in painting at the Tasmanian School of Art, where she was a founding member of the Digital Art Research Facility (DARF), “exploring the aesthetic potentials of digital imaging technologies” (exhibition notes). In what can be a slow process of intervention and experimentation, Scott combines several techniques—appropriation, collage and digital manipulation—to enable each work “to resolve itself.”

In her solo exhibition skirted, Scott addresses themes of identity versus social standards and subjective intimacy—the tension between social expectations and the individual unconscious. With these notions, she interrogates defiance and rebelliousness as her subjects “refute social obligations through…evocative gestures and insolent stances.” Women parade, turn their backs and swing their skirts, their stiff waistbands and respectable gloves contradicted by seductive fabrics that enhance their bodies and create a tangible aura of sensuality.

Pinch, for example, is an association-laden depiction of an archetypal 1940s or 50s demure woman seated pertly on a stool, her back turned on the viewer, her magenta short-sleeved top and skirt dominating the image and forming, thanks to her ideal figure, an hourglass configuration. The image is at once familiar and surreal, whimsical and threatening; this is by no means a conventional portrait of a hausfrau from a cosy bygone era. Scott has taken a very innocent subject and subverted it utterly.

The Blue Joke triptych is a particularly strong example of Mary Scott’s style and her ongoing interest in identity encoded by prevailing social standards and the individual’s revolt in the face of expectations of respectability and conventional behaviour.

In Blue Joke Dangle, the series’ subject, a gamine, Audrey Hepburn type in a 50s floral patterned dress wafts upside-down in the top left corner, defying gravity and logic, as does a partly glimpsed small canine below her.

In Plunge, the central and most seductive of the 3 Blue Joke works, the same woman appears to be falling rapidly through space, her skirt billowing around her legs which are pointed and straight, diving-style. This work is a triumph of composition and form.

In Blue Joke, disembodied elements float on a visually powerful blue-black background. The woman appears physically fragmented, as bits of her drift through the ether, a trick of the eye that works well. Again, the print is cropped to show only parts of the subject and in each of the 3 works, the woman’s red and white dress contrasts strikingly with the dark blue background, a result, perhaps, of Scott’s painterly eye. These works are difficult to apprehend, but clearly speak about female freedom, “respectability” and sexuality.

The subtly erotic Magnolia is emblematic of Scott’s current work. In the contemporary context a portrait—or figure study— of a semi-clad female, buttocks naked, ought not to cause a frisson. But Scott has deftly taken this subject, complete with billowing skirt, à la Monroe, and defiantly turned her back—the surprise at the juxtaposition of elements is palpable.

The exhibition is full of other females asserting themselves in the face of social mores of an era recent enough, but clearly before modern feminism. Trick features 3 identically dressed young girls, again cropped so that only the middle girl is seen in full. They flaunt their digitally enhanced pink coats, socks and fancy shoes, just as the women in Gathering Lies, Skirt and Prink swish their party finery.

skirted is an exhibition that displays a very strong and satisfying thematic coherence. The works all address aspects of Scott’s leitmotiv—feminist ideas that are here contemplated in new and challenging ways. This is significant work, very much worth the making and achieved with wit, skill and discernment. The works all ‘speak to’ and inform each other in interesting ways, so that the sum of the seductive parts makes for a very satisfactory viewing experience.

The Saraswati Arts Program is a new initiative of the Australian Government’s Australia Indonesia Institute. It’s designed to encourage greater cultural exchange between the 2 countries. There’s been a steady stream of activity over many years with some fine examples, for instance in the performance installations of Deborah Pollard, the puppetry and music collaboration The Theft of Sita (Paul Grabowsky, Nigel Jamieson and leading Indonesian artists) and, more recently, Sidetrack Performance Group’s collaboration with Indonesian performers and musicians. On page 32, Sidetrack Artistic Director Don Mamouney recounts the challenges and the excitement of collaborating with Indonesian artists, playing to large, eager audiences and touring the new work to Javan cities. There’s also the ongoing work of Indija Mahjoeddin’s adaptation of the West Sumatran performance form, Randai. It’s intriguing that her work includes the martial art practice Silat, which also features in the practice of Sidetrack and in the Marrugeku Company’s latest Broome-based work (see the interview with Rachael Swain on page 12). The Sydney group Actively Radical Television recently worked with Teater Buruh Indonesia to develop and stage a theatre work on the plight of women factory workers in Jakarta, called Beyond Factory Walls. These are just a few of many successful projects that have also included visual arts exhibitions, CDs, textile workshops and Australian involvement in the Ubud Writers Festival and interest in the growing significance of the Jakarta Film Festival.

However, proportionate to the size of the Indonesian population (200 million) the volume of cultural exchange has been fairly small and the Australia Indonesia Institute would like to change that.

In partnership with the Australia Council the institute is launching a new program to support collaborative ventures for artists in both countries. The Saraswati Arts Program, named after the Indonesian goddess of learning and the arts, provides up to $20,000 for up to 10 projects per annum to organizations and individuals. The program is aimed at supporting projects where there is already an existing relationship and where the outcomes are “lively, contemporary and collaborative.” The closing dates for 2005 are in February and June. RT

Enquiries: Bill Richardson, Director, Australia Indonesia Institute, tel 02 6261 3827. Information: www.dfat.gov.au/aii Institute Board member Alison Carroll (Director, Asialink Arts program) is available to speak to potential applicants, tel 03 8344 4800

Complex, rich, sophisticated, funny and critical, Travelling Light is a collection of collaborative projects that makes eloquent and intricate connections between past and present, cultural and personal histories, cultural inheritance and colonial practices. It also explores our multi-layered ideas about identity, inheritance and migration.

Interference travelling light by Jonathan Jones and Jim Vivieaere, an installation comprising plastic plants, a chandelier and the sound of waves coming languidly to shore, makes reference to our cultural constructions of nature and the fakery of history and myth, highlighting the objectification of all three. The work inhabits the ‘viewing cube’ of the Museum of Sydney, site of the colonial view, of property and real estate (a hot topic elsewhere in the Museum), taking on the logic of both the gaze and commodification. The work is at first deceptively simple, its elements then setting up a rhetorical cascade of images that traverse history, colonialism, nature and culture. By creating a kind of spatial and temporal vortex, the work both enters into and withdraws from the past and present; history and the street; landscape and culture.

Against this backdrop—the screen of the city—and especially at night, the space becomes a glowing hothouse, a deck encased in glass, and a specimen cabinet all at once. The plants included Asia Pacific generics (gums, wattles, palms), making reference to the bush and the tropics. These plastic imitations functioned as signs of a nature/culture reversal. It reminded me of tree works by Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, only Interference is ironic, even cheeky, inhabiting the space with both humour and a critical edge. It calls the viewer to bear witness to a contradictory and not easily assimilated present. The sound of waves lapping the shore is seductive, mesmeric and embedded in a kind of aural authenticity broken only by the irregular sound of buses lurching their way to Circular Quay. It transports me into a concept of nature. A nature that is, however, purified, abstracted and represented—acculturated and signified.

Bright faux candles burn in the antique crystal chandelier (sign of European proto-modernity) and conjure the faded, nostalgic glitz of the ballroom. This direct allusion to the 19th century and its defining colonial practices undercuts the postmodern seriousness of museum practice, not only qua museum, but qua architecture. It presents a clash of history and kitsch; a wrangle for the ‘facts’ of the site, of which this space, though slightly hidden, is paradigmatic—elevated, privileged, and a cipher for the scopic/mastery paradigm. The historiography and museology of the site is made apparent, and the viewer is drawn by the context into a present conditioned by fragments, quotations and fact files from the past.

The other works of the exhibition were all staged at Performance Space. Wish you were here by Hilda Ruaine, a collection of images, includes snapshots from the 40s, black and white images from perhaps earlier, washed-out 70s Kodachromes and old fashioned portraits. They depict sports days, holidays, lounge rooms, landscapes and groups of friends. It is part family photography, part postcard collection; intimate, personal, yet, as with all photographs, marked by time and place and the emanation of the referent.

The work traces correspondences: between family; between faces and photos; between personal private history and photographic codes. As an archive it documents the evolution of life, of time, of relationships. Aesthetically, the images also show the signs of subtle distortion and changes in scale and focus, simultaneously partaking of the ‘documentary’ nature of the analogue image, and the myth of memory. The images are affecting in a slow, modest way, a testimony to identification and difference.

Take Taki Tiki by Keren Ruki, hung from the opposite wall, is a series of oversized cast Tikis. By changing the scale and colour of the familiar icon, remaking it and drawing attention to its origins, the work challenges the uses and politics of kitsch, tourism, exploitation and commodification, of the object detached—and perhaps reattached—to its symbolic and cultural content. The reappropriation of the Air New Zealand souvenir proved, not unlike some of Destiny Deacon’s work, that there is a compelling critique to be made of the relationship between the forces of racism and the aesthetics of appropriation, commodification and the trivialisation/symbolic evacuation that ground kitsch.

Stripsearched again by Haro consists of a carved base on wheels and a lamp with the artist’s signature tag. It references design, domesticity, furniture, and the language of identification that is available only to those familiar with a particular kind of belonging. In some ways it sat on the cusp of the signature as that which is most personal and most abstract, most singular and most general at the same time.

These 3 discrete works spoke a common language of personal memory, lived experience and symbolic exchange, demonstrating a refreshing stillness and directness.

The projection Pacific washup, by Rachael Rakena, Fez Fa’anana and Brian Fuata, is part performance document, part short film. Floating on the waves of Bondi are a group of people in large plastic checkered bags. Coming to shore, they are washed up like beached sea creatures, resting, rising, walking out of the ocean. The sequence is a contemporary narrative of migration, undercutting historical and anthropological discourse with culturally located signs that are commodified, anonymous, temporary, disposable, functional. Simultaneously full and empty, the imagery evacuated expected meanings and the weight of personal and cultural baggage.

Also at the Performance Space, Day of Invigilation by Victoria Hunt and Brian Fuata with consultant Barbara Campbell, is a compelling exploration of ethnography and identity. Five pairs of busts inhabit the room, its walls painted in panels of brown reminiscent of a 19th century museum. Four pairs are backlit and made of tissue paper—delicate, descriptive and seductive, caught up in the rhetoric of historical object, discourse and power. The paper figures trace a lineage and a naming process, the relationship to language always doubled by exhibition discourse. They demonstrate that there are always 2 versions of identity, one objectified and one lived experience. The work accentuates the realities brought about by a clash of discourses and places of enunciation, and it directed a challenge to both museum and viewer.

The fifth exhibit—‘live’ performers encased to their shoulders in plinths—is startlingly visceral. Representational and individual at the same time, they implicate the viewer in the colonial gaze and in the construction of identity and representation as an always-political act. Hunt and Fuata re-made themselves as bodies simultaneously of the past and the present, subjected to the objectification and ‘othering’ of exercises of power.

This inspired critique of anthropology and history lays bare the falsified objectivity that is not only an historical violence, but a personal encounter. Profoundly affecting, the work speaks of the reality of an embodied, internalised gaze through living, breathing portraits. It distills the real, the image and our ideas of representation, and quietly demonstrates why really good performance work is so powerful.

I was fortunate to see the performance during which Hunt cried, her tears leaving a wet trail on her cheek: a deeply moving moment that in turn brought tears to my eyes. It would be significant to see this work re-staged somewhere like the Museum of Sydney. It was a terrific show—I hope you saw it.

Travelling Light—Collaborative Projects by Pacific Artists, curated by Blair French and Fiona Winning; Performance Space, Nov 20-Dec 11; Museum of Sydney, Nov 13-Dec 5; Pacific Wave Festival 04

The Marrugeku Company’s new work is Burning Daylight, an evocative response to Broome, that idiosyncratic and richly multicultural coastal town in remote north-western Australia. Intriguing and highly entertaining excerpts were presented last December at Red Box. This huge, well-equipped rehearsal and workshop space is the erstwhile home of physical theatre and performance companies (Stalker, Marrugeku, Erth, Gravity Feed, Legs on the Wall) in Lilyfield prior to their move to their eventual home at Eveleigh St Carriageworks in Redfern, along with Performance Space. These are some of the Carr Government’s very welcome arts initiatives over recent years which have included significant developments in Western Sydney, regional NSW (see RT64) and, recently, the Critical Path dance program (see RT66) and its wonderfully located Drill Hall workshop venue in Rushcutters Bay.

The capacious Red Box showed off the potential of Burning Daylight’s emerging dance vocabulary, its vigorous and sometimes strikingly surreal sense of humour, powerful performers, a well-tuned ensemble sensibility and a dynamic design prototype heightening a sense of fantasy and of the past in the present. I spoke to Rachael Swain, artistic director with both Stalker Theatre and the Marrugeku Company, about Marrugeku’s latest venture, the point of instigation and why Broome as its subject. The company’s Crying Baby emerged from a long, complex process of successful cultural negotiation (the company was founded in 1994) and went on to tour internationally. “There was a sense from the founding company members,” says Swain, “that we had done everything we could do in Arnhem Land without continuing the same model. Three of the company members are from Broome and the community there had been wanting us to come and perform for some time, but the show was huge and getting there—before Virgin started flying to Broome—was outrageously expensive…so we failed.”

But Broome still beckoned: “We started a dialogue about what it would mean to translate the intercultural and collaborative process we’d developed in Arnhem Land into the context of Broome, which basically meant completely reconceiving our approach to negotiation with the community, our approach to choreography, and the kinds of relationships we’d built up between notions of traditional and contemporary performance.” Negotiation proved to be a key issue: this was a very different place from Arnhem Land where, says Swain, cultural practices are still strong despite significant social problems. “I think the big difference in Broome is the legacy of the assimilation policy of the Western Australian Government which was one of the most brutal and far reaching. And even though Broome was exempt from the White Australia Policy it still had a major effect. Cohabitation was illegal, so there were a lot of deportations, a lot of ‘lost’ relatives and family breakdowns. The forced removals had a big impact on the way communities and families pass on stories, dance, song and relationship to country. We were interested to work with what the legacy of this means for young people in Broome now.”

Cultural negotiation is even more complex in the circumstances of the Native Title Case that’s currently before the Australian Government for Rubibi, the whole of the Broome Peninsula. “Being in the shadow of the case with disputes over authenticity, arguments about who’s ‘real’ and who’s ‘fake’ and who can really talk for country, means that the community is very tense, and very careful, as it should be. It’s a very different experience from Arnhem Land. After several research trips and the support of people like Pat Dodson I am happy to say that there is a lot of excitement and trust in the community about Marrugeku’s process. I hope that the way we are working will help to bridge some of the tension Native Title builds in a community.”

Burning Daylight is “about halfway through its creation”, says Swain, and beginning to realise its choreographic dimension. “In the last rehearsal period we focused very much on the choreographic process we’re trying to build. Dalisa and I had lots of conversations about how we could inject some new influences into what we think of as contemporary Indigenous dance in Australia.” To this end, with the support of the NSW Ministry of the Arts, Swain went to Europe “to explore what was happening in the crossover between contemporary European dance and traditional and contemporary West African dance, because in some ways there’s a parallel set of issues being explored over there.” Swain cites the work of Mathilde Monier from which emerged the Salia ni Seydou company in Burkina Faso; the French Government-funded AFFA which runs the Afrique en Création program; and Dancas na Cicade in Lisbon with its focus on contemporary dance exchange. She was inspired by the consciousness about the importance of exchange from both sides and the awareness of the damage done by colonial attitudes.

Swain talked with these organisations, participated in classes and “took the skin completely off my feet—I had to try it out on my own body—and ended up being introduced to West African choreographer Serge Amié Coulibay…He was mixing traditional and contemporary forms himself and he was working with Belgium’s Les Ballets C de la B.” It was seeing him dance in Platel’s big new work Wolf that convinced Swain to “invite him, more or less as an experiment, to come to Australia” because “he mixed what I would think of as traditional and contermporary in such a way that the definitions didn’t matter anymore.”

Swain recalls that Serge’s first experience of Australia was a hot night at a Pigrum Brothers concert at the Roebuck Bay Hotel. “I’ll never forget the look on his face, with his chin on his chest looking up at Aboriginal Broome celebrating itself. And all these people were coming up to him and putting their skin next to his and saying, ‘Where you from?’ And he’d say, ‘Burkina Faso,’ and they’d say, ‘Where’s that?’ So he started carrying around a map in his back pocket.”

The focus, says Swain, “has been on what it means to be working with ‘a memory in tradition’ in a contemporary choreographic process.” This came after the first stage of working in Broome with Yawuru elders and “learning the dances and the company members showing each other the traditional styles. We’ve had in-depth conversations about traditional dance, ‘tourist dance’, ‘semi-traditional dance’ and what’s okay to do with it and what’s not.”

The choreography that is emerging is also textured with another influence, Silat, the Malaysian and Western Sumatran martial artform which, as Swain explains, “the elder ethnic Malays in Broome still practice. Datu Amat, one of the Malay grandfathers in Broome taught class to the company the whole Broome period, and he’s allowed Dalisa to go on teaching it. So I guess we’re trying to devise a movement style that the locals would call ‘mixed breed’, responding to the multiple traditions that exist in Broome. I feel like we know what we’re doing choreographically now and we know where we’ll go with it and it’s time to start making the show..

For Swain and Pigrum the kind of Indigenous dance and its representation in Burning Daylight is a key issue. Pirgrum writes, “I think that more Aboriginal choreographers are needed, coming from a wider variety of trainings and backgrounds so people can see that there are other styles of Aboriginal dance to appreciate and understand…In proposing a new work for Marrugeku in Broome using different forms of performance in new ways with Aboriginal dance (contemporary or traditional) we wouldn’t be taking anything away from what has already been developed. We would only be increasing the possibilities of what we think Aboriginal dance is today. I think other Aboriginal groups in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions for example and many more have not had the opportunity to have their story told or their dance style shown.”

Although the work-in-progress showing focused on dance passages there were narrative moments, indications of emerging personae, bursts of satire, songs and some of the ingredients for the musical score to come. In what way would all these come together?

Swain says that a key inspiration for the show is the image of Broome from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century as an “Asian Wild West”: “the traces of that are still very strong.” Another inspiration is Tracey Moffatt and her working from “particular filmic and photographic genres and playing with the cultural stereotypes within those frames.” Just as influential are the “noodle western” genre (big in Thai cinema) and the Broome-style karaoke night at the Roebuck Bay Hotel on Monday nights—“seriously wild west”, quips Swain. Consequently Burning Daylight is set in the street outside the karaoke bar from midnight to dawn with songs from the whole multi-skilled cast. Swain explains that “with each karaoke number there will be a noodle western-inspired video: “The videos will have classic interracial melodrama narratives. They’ll be shot by the fabulous (cinematographer and filmmaker) Warwick Thorton featuring the historic characters of Broome—the pearl diver, the Aboriginal stockman, the geisha—as the characters in the noodle western, set against the backdrops of the White Australia Policy, assimilation policies and the internment of Japanese locals during World War II. There’s a kind of haunting of the contemporary world of Broome with these historic figures.

“We’re just at the point now where we’re starting to weave backwards and forwards between the video narratives and the characters we’re developing onstage and looking at the echoes and reflections between the live performance and the video content.”

How long before the work is realised? “We were very happy to get 2 development stages in one year: quite a big achievement for us in terms of raising funds. We hope to build the set, shoot the videos, have 6 weeks rehearsal and begin commissioning at least half an hour of music this year. And we plan to have a showing of all of that in Broome in September. It will probably take us another 9 months to put it all together with lights and costumes, edit the videos, put the whole jigsaw together and run it. We’re aiming for an avant-premiere in August-September 2006 which we’re hoping will take place in Broome, Kununurra and Darwin, playing the show in front of the audience who will have lived the experience of the subject matter.”

Marrugeku Company, Burning Daylight, a work-in-progress, director Rachael Swain, co-choreographers Dalisa Pigram, Serge Aimé Coulibaly, cinematographer Warwick Thornton, designer Joey Ruigrok van de Werven, dramaturg Josephine Wilson, musical director Matthew Fargher, musician/consultant Lorrae Coffin, composer/musican Justin Gray, composer/musican Cameron Goold, composer Kerri-Anne Cox, performer-devisors Dalisa Pigram, Trevor Jamieson, Yumi Umiumare, Katia Molino, Scott Grayland, Owen Maher, Sermsah Bin Saad (Suri), trainee Toto Djiagween

A one-off performance by Julie-Anne Long with a cast including Narelle Benjamin, Kathy Cogill, Martin del Amo, Rakini Devi, Bernadette Walong and Michael Whaites, had a bunch of Sydney-siders driving to Hill End an hour west of Bathurst on a dirt road in the middle of summer for an overnight stay. With a 6 month-old baby, and technician Mark Mitchell in tow, we too set out. Of course 5 hours is a modest journey in Australian terms, but as expected, the journey amounted to more than the clicks of the odometer.

Like a breadcrumb marking the trail, the installation component of The Nun’s Picnic was exhibited at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery. Heidrun Löhr’s eerie oversized prints of Julie-Anne Long in nun’s habit were hung outside a room containing Samuel James’ footage of Long and the Hill End landscape projected on 2 adjacent walls. Inside an old wooden wardrobe, flickering images lurked in a drawer and deep inside the open closet. James’ black and white films are heavy with dark drama, drawing visual parallels between the nun and a magpie, both deliberate shapes against the spiky clutter of nature. These images were intercut with scenes of the nun’s living quarters, the camera revealing her alone at prayer, or scanning her possessions as if part of a narrative. The installation works up the striking visual spectacle of a nun in the Australian landscape, tantalising the visitor with what is to come at Hill End, while also drawing together the convent and the landscape to suggest an interior life.

Outside Bathurst we hit the dirt road which passed from dry, drought stricken contryside complete with ambling goanna, into the oddly green oasis of Hill End. Discovering that the centre of town is actually the town in its entirety, we joined other wandering souls in the heat for some nun spotting. We encountered them coming around a bend at the far end of town, walking solemnly in formation. There were more dotted in the following crowd—the crew had also donned habits—and it seemed we were surrounded by a black and white flock.

The figures moved like the nuns in The Sound of Music, floating serenely along as if on another plane. They popped up above fences, were seen kipping and twitching on the grass, revealing sexy underwear as they trudged across fields, praying before some grassy mounds and piling into a Tarago blaring Madonna’s Like A Prayer. Some more literal images such as a nun on a cross seemed misplaced in this otherwise gently poetic and humorous performance. The action led us around the town and eventually to the Catholic Church where picnics were distributed.

But the evening performance was definitely the hot ticket in town, the dress rehearsal open to the Hill End locals having stirred up controversy the night before. There were whispers of beautiful naked women and upset parents. The husband of our Bed and Breakfast host also had issues with the use of the crucifix during the day. Suddenly the 5 hours we had travelled from Sydney meant more than just a historical, rural location.

Long’s subject matter is bound to Hill End via Jeffrey Smart’s painting The Picnic (1957). Long has been regularly sneaking off to the town since May 2003 on a residency program instigated by Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, taking collaborators James and Löhr along with her. The residents must be accustomed to having artists blow through town, but it is unlikely that many of the resulting works have inhabited Hill End in quite the way Long’s performance did. What did they make of the curious, old-fashioned and entertaining ‘vaudeville’ that erupted in their steamy town hall that night?

Everyone sang along to Too Good to be True, guffawed at sight gags and ogled amazing physical feats. After a couple of teaser acts, including a deadpan version of the ridiculously patriotic G’day G’day by Martin del Amo, Long opened the proceedings as a Mae West-style show ring mistress, strutting across the stage in a bustle and a feather, whetting our appetite for the coming acts with an introductory song and a montage of mock one-reelers projected onto her skirt.

The acts rolled on. Benjamin and Cogill performed a take on contortionism in white bloomers to Aren’t Women Wonderful? Whaites, Del Amo and Long all appeared in drag, the latter 2 lip-synching to Nellie Lutcher and Nat King Cole’s Can I Come in for a Second? (Hats off to Long’s choice of music throughout and Drew Crawford’s impeccable job as music advisor.) Four bearded, heavy footed dancers performed the iconic choreography of the 4 cygnets to The Flat Foot Floogie. And my favourite (and cause of the aforementioned controversy): Cogill’s erotic fan dance, into which Long entered as a grumpy red rabbit to consume Cogill in a flurry of feathers.

The show shifted gear after a del Amo monologue about a relative who was a nun; she quit the convent and was outraged when she rang them and was put on hold to Ravel’s Bolero. Did his aunty know this was music people had sex to? Segue to a simple walking dance by Whaites against James’ video projections of the dancer in the Hill End landscape. The mood became sombre for this ‘postmodern turn’ played out to Bolero’s musical drama. Then we were back again with Cogill’s rendition of My Heart Will Go On and a stirring finale with audience participating in a quickly taught dance sequence.

Our first response was how the hell did Julie-Anne Long do it? This idea, that team, those songs, costumes, films…in this town? As Mitchell put it, she is just remarkable, and the audience, locals and blow-ins alike, went off like a cracker in the big Hill End night sky.

Hill End is popular with visual artists as an ideal location for residencies. Recent artists-in-residence have also included video artist Sam James, new media artists Andrew Gadow and the Svenja Kratz and Sarah-Mace Dennis team whose pre-Electrofringe encounter with a Hill End ghost was reported in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. Photographer Heidrun Löhr will take up a residency in the town this year, as will ceramicist Toni Warburton, poet Rudi Krausmann, painter Marnie Wark (SA), painter Kate Dorrough, sculptor Mary Douglas, photographers Tamara Dean and Dean Sewell and new media arts curator Sarah Last (of Wagga Wagga’s unsound) among others. Bathurst Regional Art Gallery has invited a total of 20 artists to participate in 2005. RT

The installation component of A Nun’s Picnic will appear at Performance Space as part of Reeldance Installations #1, One Extra, February 10-March 5.

The Nun’s Picnic, director/choreographer/performer Julie-Anne Long; performers/collaborators Narelle Benjamin, Kathy Cogill, Martin del Amo, Rakini Devi, Bernadette Walong, Michael Whaites; video Samuel James; music advisor Drew Crawford; photography Heidrun Löhr; Hill End, NSW, December 4, 2004

Australian work is increasingly registering at major international dance screen events. Narelle Benjamin’s On a Wing and a Prayer and Madeleine Hetherton’s Together have been presented at a number of festivals and Sue Healey’s Fine Line (RT61, p48) took out the Independent award at Coreografo Elettronico in Naples last year. With very few of our independent dance artists being presented overseas, film or video work is a way of having a presence on the international scene. How this will pan out in terms of overseas performance opportunities remains to be seen.

I attended Monaco Dance Forum 2004 to present new Australian films and videos within a meeting for dance screen festivals. There were about a dozen participants mainly representing European festivals from a variety of countries, including Finland, Italy, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, the UK, Norway and Portugal. Russia, Canada, the USA and Japan were also represented.

A challenged forum

At Monaco Dance Forum 2002, the dance screen component of this enormous event was hosted by IMZ Dance Screen—Europe’s largest dance screen event—and a forum for curators was set up. In 2004 IMZ were not hosting but the Monaco Dance Forum was keen to continue offering a dance screen event, this time focusing on festival organisers rather than producers, television programmers and the filmmakers themselves. The absence of the latter was a significant omission and ultimately diminished the event for everybody involved. Those attending in 2004 were mainly representatives from small to medium sized festivals, who were each given an opportunity to describe their events and present work from their respective countries. The screening of Australian work, which included new films by Peter Volich and Michelle Mahrer, was well received with concrete outcomes for a number of filmmakers.

Overall, the Monaco Dance Forum seems to have run aground regarding organisation and programming. The sprawling event meant that participants stuck more than ever to their particular program. These included: the live performance program that ran day and night and included a one-off performance of Australian Dance Theatre’s Held (RT60, p28); the aDvANCE project on ‘career transition and the professional dancer’ attended by members of the Australia Council’s Dance Board and Ausdance; a forum for works selected from a call for digital projects in which Gideon Obarzanek presented Chunky Move’s Closer installation; and multimedia presentations including Chrissie Parrott’s Trans send project with composer Jonathan Mustard. There were also installations, a workshop on dance and technology led by Johannes Birringer, a scenography conference, the First Job Auditions for young dancers and a dancesport event. For this reason it seemed less like a festival than a series of discrete events run by one organisation clearly stretched to its limits. Or maybe it was only my particular component that suffered from technical hiccups, room allocation hassles and a poorly organised video library.

New tech and no-tech

The performance program seemed, at first glance, to be tied together by the engagement with new technologies—a theme running across the entire festival. This was true of Held, Jyrki Karttunen’s Fairy (Finland), Henri Oguike Dance Company (UK) and Compagnie DO Theatre’s Bird’s Eye View (Russia). But other key performances such as Emio Greco’s opening night work Orfeo ed Euridice (Netherlands/UK), Compañía María Pagès’ performance (Spain), and Gahar Azimi and Emanuel Gat’s trilogy of works (Israel), were not compatible with this theme. As in 2002, the performances were too mixed in style, quality and vision to create any cogent spectatorial experience.

Karttunen visited Sydney in 2001 performing Digital Duende at Performance Space. Fairy is worlds away from that, set in a fairyland with Kartunnen playing an elegant imp desperate to fly. Combining his graceful and incredibly light-footed figure with projections of the character onto transparent scrims created a magical effect that the kids in the audience loved, especially when he bared his bottom on screen. DO Theatre’s performance was an incredibly dated piece of dance theatre grounded in the circus arts and full of World War II imagery. Opening with the plane-ballet footage from Flying Down to Rio (1933), interest was sustained only by some very skilled performers.

Ex-Richard Alston dancer Henri Oguike’s work came for me at the end of a long week of chronic back problems. For this reason I can’t be sure that the heavily percussive quality of the choreography was as irritating as I remember it. I stayed for only 2 of the 4 works which were immaculately framed by ‘modernist’ lighting and video design that is uncredited in the program and on the company’s website. The dancers worked incredibly hard but it showed, and the unrelenting pace had a numbing effect that eventually shut down my ability to ‘marvel’. Music by Shostakovitch and Scarlatti was tackled head on with choreography that rhythmically attacked, adding thumps and stamps to the aural field. Baroque flourishes and parading from court dances sat oddly with this extreme physicality, but it did look and feel fresh, which would account for Oguike’s new status as the darling of the UK dance scene.

María Pagès’ formidable presence was riveting in her company’s epic 2 hour performance. Like a Spanish version of Garland/Minnelli, Pagès’ physique is all limbs which makes her braceo—curling arm flourishes—hypnotising. The overall effect of her towering height, burning expressions and incredible grace is astonishing. But when combined with her signature contemporary twist the artistry seems compromised. A solo to John Lennon’s Imagine brought this to a head while the chorus dancers had few opportunities to show off their flamenco skills, more often dancing as an ensemble in a contemporary, jazzy hybrid form.

All about dancing

The works of Gahar Azimi and Emanuel Gat sat well together. Neither use sets and the choreographers perform in their own works that are all about the dancing. Azimi’s So Said Herzel resembled animated conversations that kept missing the mark. Two interchangeable bald men fought for the attention of a very feisty young woman in this physical piece that had nothing new to say but did have surprising moves, a sparky energy and unforced humour. Gat’s duet Winter Voyage (again 2 bald men) was performed to a Schubert score in high-necked frock-coats and was elegant and serious with a touch of sacred tranquillity. The dancers are not so much partners as point and counter-point in this swirling, seamless dance that, like Akram Khan’s work, stresses the upper body over the lower. And as with Khan’s choreography performed in the same theatre 2 years earlier, the dancers seemed hemmed in by the venue’s small stage.

Opera as dance

Emio Greco’s collaboration with Pieter C. Scholten (Emio Greco/PC) and Opera North of Leeds (UK) was a stark, powerful version of Gluck’s opera, Orfeo ed Euridice. Having seen more dance than any other performing art form, when watching opera and theatre it often seems to me that the performers are remarkably unaware of their physicality. However, like many other recent opera collaborations, this work shifted a huge amount of the focus toward physical performance and mise-en-scene. It opened with a line of characters upstage, Greco and Claire Ormshaw (Amore) moving downstage in a duet. Greco scanned the space before him with small twitching movements and Ormshaw manipulated his progress. Ormshaw moved remarkably easily between choreography and song in a way that the other principals, William Towers (Orfeo) and Isabel Molnar (Euridice), did not. The chorus also seemed uncomfortable with the simple, stylised choreography; the distracting large white robes and matching Robert Smith-style wigs did not help. Orfeo was dressed incongruently in street clothes but with a bizarre hair style combining baldness with long hair which also grew out of his T-shirt sleeve. A chorus of dancers who flurried around Towers completed the ambitious and mostly successful integration of dancers and singers, and their movement echoed Greco’s twitching, sliding, mercurial quality. There were intensely dramatic lighting changes (designed by Henk Danner) and bold silences in this fascinating if slightly awkward production.

Some astounding contemporary performers came out of the artist-driven Brisbane venues The Crab Room and Cherry Herring in the 1990s, and they have continued to astonish with their pursuit of strikingly individual lines of development. Christine Johnston and Lisa O’Neil come to mind (both singly and in collaboration), as do The Kransky Sisters (including Johnston), who recently wowed the Melbourne Festival. Brian Lucas is also of this ilk and generation. He has remarked that his career decision to remain in Queensland has paid off in terms of a supportive and non-competitive peer milieu and an environment that has nurtured the continuation of his practice. These are artists who are deeply personal in their approach, less the progeny of a suspect deep north Gothicism than the result of new found freedoms in the aftermath of the Bjelke-Petersen regime. It is work that is singularly impressive and has legs, despite sometimes falling outside the neat categories of touring bodies. It is self-proven and self-generated, rather than subject to fashions.

Lucas’s The Book of Revelation(s) is the product of his ongoing tenure as artist-in-residence at the Brisbane Powerhouse. It has matured through a lengthy process, beginning as part of the EMERGENCY project funded by the Australia Council and performed as a work-in-progress at Sydney’s Performance Space during the Antistatic dance event in 2001, at Brisbane Powerhouse as part of the National Review of Live Art 2002, and the Brisbane Gay and Lesbian Pride Festival 2004. It is his second major solo work of dance theatre since his acclaimed Monster produced under the same aegis—a moving and tender piece about family and an ended relationship.

This work is a successful interweaving of text and contemporary dance with a beautifully crafted score by sound artist Brett Collery adding its own layer of meanings. Lucas is a strong, mature performer, and his tall, imposing physicality and tangible inner repose lend authority to his utilisation of the simplest, most iconic modern dance moves. Lucas is less interested in investigating new pathways of movement than in exploring personal themes, so meaning is foremost when he moves from naturalism to abstraction.

Repetitions in different contexts suggest the accumulated ‘scars’ we wear. Lucas wants to describe being in motion, the process of momentarily becoming the idiosyncratic ‘I’ that emerges from multiple selves. He moves, as does the text, by association and metaphor, dealing concretely with quite complex philosophical ideas. As a raconteur Lucas is engaging, fascinating us with the details of his life.

The structure is elegantly formal, composed of 10 sections, 10 words, 10 gestures, 10 steps, 10 songs etc. The piece is driven by a series of encounters delivered by anecdote and powerful physical exposition. Lucas’ grand guignol treatment of the findings of the coroner’s report on Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper’s sixth victim, is an outrageous tour de force performed chillingly to Pink Martini’s Bolero and effectively enhanced by Morgan Randall’s clever lighting. This is essentially a detective story, and Lucas is careful in laying his clues. His uncovering of an accidental fatality that occurred in his family before he was born was laconically (devastatingly!) disclosed at the end by a slide projection. As Lucas moved between projector and screen, his body was visibly made permeable by this new found knowledge as he tangentially recited his own bodily litany of sensuous memories (“That was then, this is now…”). Poignantly, the body cannot go back, cannot inhabit a time before there were only stories, only this story, this performance.

Nudity is confronting for certain viewers, including some of those who aver the most sophistication in the hierarchies of looking. But it is crucial to Lucas’s idea that the body is the “book of revelation(s)”, “a personal text that continues throughout our lives, written and embellished by the experience of being.” Lucas’s divestiture in fact asks questions about the body’s relegation to the necessities of function, its performability, a constant self-questioning of limits and expectations that surmount purely artistic considerations.

He deftly and wittily explores the endemic preoccupation in his solo work with being both subject and object, self and other. He darkly circles the changes on this notion when he speculates about meeting Paris Hilton in the flesh but concludes that it is pointless because he already knows her cloyingly enough—through her media representation. But the inference is that the highly mystified concept of the artist’s ‘presence’ is both a presence and an absence: “Now, I’m not really sleeping—but you know that. Who’d sleep on stage?”

Ten things to admire about this work: it is accessible; it is not hurried; it knows when to stop; its sophistication is stimulating, not intimidating; it is funny and frightening; it makes you feel you live in your own skin; it is in-your-face live; it is about death; it is consummately ‘cooked’; it validates a long working life in the arts.

The Book of Revelation(s), creator/performer Brian Lucas, sound Brett Collery, lighting Morgan Randall; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Dec 15-18, 2004

A man in a dank apartment vacuums, staples back peeling wallpaper, and tidies up. But the activity has little result. The room—with its exposed pipes, old furniture and solitary shaving sink—remains shabby and tired, barely concealing the banal awfulness of past lives. Two other men sit nearby, one reading, the other contemplating breakfast. In a sense, they are ‘everyman’, occupying themselves with quotidian routines. But when cockroaches scramble from behind the hands of the one eating, it becomes evident that something more sinister and unexpected simmers beneath the surface.

Upbeat Hawaiian muzak, a precursor to a delightfully synchronised dressing sequence, gives way to moodier strings and a crescendo of crickets, indicating a surreal move to eternal night. In a compelling shift of choreography, a suited man yields to the dark power of his environment as others physically manipulate him to disturbingly graceful and measured effect. As with many moments in Splinter Group’s Lawn, there are allusions to a real horror never quite revealed.

To call Lawn a ‘horror fantasy’ is close to the mark, but any attempt to categorise risks cheating this work of its sophistication and inventiveness. Even with major adaptations made to accommodate performer Vincent Crowley’s serious opening night injury, the Brisbane Powerhouse premiere season of Lawn was inspiring stuff: exemplary dance theatre, playing most effectively in the margins of visual perception and reality, while at the same time providing an edge-of-your-seat narrative tension. It was like a well-crafted horror film with moments of surreal quirkiness, such as the unannounced appearance of composer/performer Iain Grandage in various guises inside the wardrobe.

Yet Lawn also operated on a number of other levels. The yearning for an open, uncomplicated and spatially unencumbered life (represented by the motif of an expansive Australian lawn) was frustrated by the claustrophobia of a northern hemisphere indoor existence and an imposing European heritage. Set in an old apartment in Berlin during winter, utopia is signified by the vista of a tropical beach which emerges from behind the wallpaper. Wedged in this divide between the real and the imagined, personal neuroses become physically manifest: one performer scales the walls; another is trapped and bound in cling wrap (“I am running, in the forest, with eyes tight shut…”); another marvels at Houdini’s amazing escapes while watching television programs dubbed into German.

The acknowledged influence of the eerie domestic dioramas of American photographer Gregory Crewdson is evident as repulsive subtexts erupt in the otherwise grey setting. The humour is dark and even cheeky at times, and there’s a delectable weirdness to it all, owing much to the films of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, 1991; City of Lost Children, 1995).

Lawn is the first production of Splinter Group, a threesome comprising Australian dancer-choreographers Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood and Gavin Webber. Since working together as members of Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre in the early 1990s, they have worked across Europe with choreographers such as William Forsythe, Luc Dunberry, Maguy Marin, Joachim Schlömer and Wim Vandekybus. Back in Australia, they recently formed Splinter Group and were commissioned by the Brisbane Powerhouse artistic director (and production dramaturg) Andrew Ross to develop Lawn with designer Zoë Atkinson and composer Iain Grandage. Atkinson is working with Compagnie Philippe Genty and Theatre DRAK in France, while Grandage is the current Western Australian Symphony Orchestra composer-in-residence; his composition credits include Cloudstreet, Plainsong and Corrugation Road. Crowley, Millwood and Webber are continuing to split their time between Europe and Australia: Grayson performs with Sasha Waltz and Guests in Berlin; Crowley continues to work with Schlömer; and Webber regularly returns to Brussels to teach for Vandekybus’ Ultima Vez. The considerable experience of these artists is apparent in the dramatic texture of Lawn, as is their finely-tuned precision as performers and their obvious ease as collaborators.

Atkinson’s set is integral to Lawn’s success, its bleak surface at times revealing the horrors of history as well as the dreams and delusions of the present. In perfect complement, Grandage’s score literally and metaphorically emerges from under the surface as he performs live behind the apartment walls, appearing at strategic intervals on stage and helping to bring the performance to its nauseating climax. Outside the Powerhouse Theatre, the work continued to resonate in exhibitions by photographer Tim Page, who captured various rehearsal moments, and Kellie O’Dempsey, whose ink, acrylic and pastel drawings (presented on a very ‘backyard’ Hills Hoist) extended the moody movement of the piece.

Lawn leaves its audience with images that disturb and delight, and definitely deserves a repeat viewing. It will undoubtedly become a festival favourite highlighting as it does the depth of Australian dance theatre.

Splinter Group, Lawn, performer-choreographers Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood, Gavin Webber, composer Iain Grandage, designer Zoë Atkinson; Brisbane Powerhouse, November 11-20, 2004

“You are about to be implicated in genetic engineering, are you sure you want to go on?”, asks Oron Catts, director of SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia as workshop lab scientist Gary Cass starts a procedure with a group of 12 participants to clone some glow-in-the-dark e. coli bacteria. We will create genetically modified organisms painted onto Petri dishes, which will not live beyond the duration of our experiment. They will later be destroyed in the ‘autoclave’—a kind of giant pressure cooker that kills biological waste.

In this way we confront one of many lessons that arise during a week of experiments and wet biology practices: we are responsible for the organisms we create. If they come into being it is because of us, and if they need to be destroyed, it’s our responsibility. It’s perhaps fitting that 2 of the students participating in the workshop, Tim Watts and Ali Bevilacqua from Edith Cowan and Notre Dame Universities in Western Australia, are doing research for their production of Frankenstein.

I’m participating in the SymbioticA Wet Biology Workshop, held as part of BEAP 04 (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth, see RT’s online coverage). There’s a group of us ranging from 82 year old Professor David Allbrook, formerly head of the School of Anatomy and Human Biology of which SymbioticA is part, to UK-based visual and performance artists Kira O’Reilly and Julie Freeman. As well as the drama students, Tim and Ali, there is an anatomy and anthropology student Megan Schlipalins, already an old hand at dissecting foetuses and asking ethical questions, and 2 bio-artist participants/ workshop leaders. Phil Ross is from San Francisco and sculpts with fungi, and Marta De Menezes is a Portuguese artist who creates visual art using biotechnology. Both artists exhibited in the Bio-difference exhibition at BEAP (see RT’s online coverage). Most of us are interested in the ethics and practice of incorporating biology into our performance/installation/visual work.

“We want you to ask questions”, say Oron and Gary. “The more you get involved in the science, the more complicated the lines become and the more you will confront your audience and ideas. It’s so easy to paint a fantastic picture of what you can create with this science when you have never practiced it. Maybe if Patricia Piccinini did our workshop she would make totally different work.”

Oron stresses that rather than creating monsters, most of the partially living beings which can be made through cell culturing are in fact highly vulnerable and need to be taken care of in laboratory conditions. He also encourages us to think about presentation, rather than representation, of the science in our work as a means of taking the ethical debate to a wider public.

Throughout the workshop we’re working with hazardous chemicals. “We will deal with possible mutagens”, Gary tells us. We hear about lab explosions, contaminants and genetic materials that can escape. We have been warned.

The first day involves extracting DNA from plant material. It’s as simple as following a recipe and the result is thrilling. I cut and measure one gram of snow pea leaves and pound them in a mortar and pestle with an “extraction buffer” (a basic detergent like lauryl sulphate), literally breaking down the cell walls. We centrifuge it for 5 minutes and then add some ethanol to the extracted liquid that contains the DNA. We put in a glass hook to ‘spool’ the DNA strands. The strands hang off my hook like tiny threads, or tendrils that curl up, literally winding around it. A thrill runs through me—this is life. Later I find out that the DNA threads themselves can be dried and maybe even spun and knitted, which I hope to pursue for my new media work, Chromosome Knitting.

The talk between participants is excited and intense. How great are the bio-hazards? How often does genetic material escape from labs? Are people working on genetically modified organisms despite the 5-year government moratorium?

The next day the work becomes more intense. We’re in a cell-culturing lab working with cells from freshly killed meat, in this case a pig’s trotter straight from the butcher. Oron has outlined the work of 2 pioneering scientists, Dr Alexis Carrel and Dr Honor Fell, who were the first to culture living organs from embryonic cells. In our own experiments we work under a sterile flow hood, trying to keep the contaminants from our skin, nails and hair away from the cells we are trying to culture. There’s the roar of saws as we cut deep into the flesh and bone, locating the marrow, which is scraped out, pipetted into dishes with nutrient solution and placed in an incubator to culture. The atmosphere in the lab is a palpable mixture of fear, curiosity and excitement. Three vegetarian drama students, here for the day, are recoiling in the corner.

In the corridor outside the lab door, Julie spots an empty cardboard box. “Contents: six mice, one pregnant female.” We look at each other. Where is the pregnant mouse? This is a workshop full of lines to be crossed and questions to be asked. Would I be prepared to kill animals? Is it different if I work with cell lines and materials which are now ‘immortal’, but involved many invasive processes to reach that point?

I interview Marta about her ethics. She says she will not work with live animals but is prepared to work with cell lines or materials that are already in existence. She says that science can’t be stopped, but we can’t do everything just to know more. “It has to be flexible enough to be re-evaluated constantly… but you can’t just stop science, you can’t just go back, no matter how romantic you want to be.”

That night, when I return to the airy North Fremantle flat where I am staying, I close the door and am relieved no one is home. I feel the need for sanctuary after a day facing such intense questions, making decisions about life and dominion over others. Is this how surgeons feel? My mind is racing and my body is tense. I remember the first time I saw the cloning of a human embryo on film, and the strength of my gut reaction to that procedure. I remember the effect of the amniocentesis needle penetrating my uterus during antenatal genetic testing. This is not about glossy life science brochures with happy smiling faces and life-science solutions; this is also about invasive procedures on animals and humans in the name of science. I know it isn’t popular to question the progress of science, and a lot of these views can be seen as ‘pro life’ and aligned with the religious right. I can also see how seductive the science is, and how curious humans are; despite ‘gut’ feelings I might do it again in pursuit of a goal.

The next day the discussion heats up. The personal stories make this like a consciousness raising group. Tim has spent the night contemplating ethics. “I was playing with my dog and I thought, ‘I don’t want my dog to die.’ I just felt really hypocritical and guilty.” Marta, who grew up on a farm is unfazed “I always knew our pet pigs would die at slaughter time, I don’t have this ‘yuk factor’.” Megan on the other hand felt that as an engineer of genetically modified organisms, however tiny, she had a responsibility: “I am a creator, I take a moral responsibility.”

In our final discussion on selective breeding in plants, animals and humans, Kira recalls her friend, Matt, a performance artist in the UK with disabilities from a genetic abnormality. He performs without words, but with a sign around his neck that simply says ‘kill me’. We do have the power to question scientific ethics through art.

SymbioticA wet biology workshop, BEAP 04, Perth, University of Western Australia, Sept 20-24

For anyone interested in local screen culture, or the arts in general, it’s difficult in the wake of last October’s election result not to sink into a quagmire of depression at the relentless downward thrust of arts funding, dismantling of the public sector and erosion of civil liberties and free speech. So what does another 3 years (at least) of Howard mean for the film industry? One of the key tenets stressed in the government’s film funding policy released shortly before the election was “attracting greater levels of private finance”, but there was little interest shown in seriously investing public money in the flagging sector. Of the money that was promised, some was earmarked for specific projects, such as $7.5 million for a government commissioned “10-part series of high quality documentaries on Australia’s history” from Film Australia. One wonders what the content of these documentaries will comprise, given the government’s open refusal to countenance any historical perspective that doesn’t conform to its own. Tom Zubrycki wrote about how openly censorious the government has become in RT60 (p15), describing an attempt by Joint House Leader Bob Wedgwood to prevent a screening of Zubrycki’s documentary Molly and Mobarak at Parliament House, on the grounds that the film “promotes the theme of widespread opposition to government policy.”

Most of the rest of the government’s film-related election promises were a list of vague measures aimed at attracting money from the private sector, which in recent times has been singularly uninterested in local film investment. The AFC was promised another $2.5 million this financial year, and an additional $5 million per annum for the following 3 years. This money will be used to develop “better Australian scripts” and fund “a slate of low budget, first time feature films.” Worthy aims, but tinkering with the edges of the industry in this manner will not alter the fundamental problem: a lack of money has meant fewer films and a prevailing conservatism in the form and content of the films that are being made. Nor will it change the fact that the vast majority of our first time filmmakers will never get to make a second film.

The production and box office figures for local feature films in 2004 tell a dire tale, with just 15 features produced in the last financial year, nearly half the average annual output of the mid to late 1990s. Of these, Khoa Do’s ultra-low budget video feature The Finished People (RT59, p16), conceived and shot without state funding, was one of the best, and is indicative of a broader trend that official industry figures don’t reveal.

Video features made outside the traditional funding and distribution networks are becoming increasingly common, creating a vibrant and innovative film culture running parallel to the subsidised commercial industry. In our last issue we covered David Barison and Daniel Ross’ The Ister and Paul Jeffrey’s In The Moment. In this issue we focus on a younger generation of socially engaged filmmakers taking a guerrilla approach, harnessing video and digital technologies to get their work made and distributed. In the long term this cultural insurgency may prove more effective in developing innovation and expressing dissent than lobbying an increasingly constrained bureaucracy. DE

Time To Go John (TTGJ) represents a new incarnation of cinema on the net and DVD. It is also part of a new documentary genre. In the bar of the 2004 Melbourne International Film Festival, Pip Starr and I whined about the lack of Australian documentaries critiquing the government. There was Tahir Cambis and Helen Newman’s Anthem (RT62, p18), but it seemed unlikely to attract distributors. Otherwise there was a dearth of brave filmmakers willing to critique their principal patron, the government. After Pip left, I realised it was possible to create a documentary critique of Howard’s government and get it onto screens before the next federal election. The key was to create a compilation of 5 minute works by individual filmmakers. There was no way the TV broadcasters would have the stomach for this, so it had to go into the cinemas.

For years now the film schools have been training documentary makers, and at the same time TV hours for screening documentaries have been dropping. This has created a crisis. Baby boomers (bless their radical souls) have addressed this by lobbying the broadcasters and the funding bodies. But generation Xers have, on the whole, been quietly discussing for some months the possibility of bypassing the limited TV hours and moving into the cinema and onto DVD and the net.

Meanwhile, in America new laws have restricted the use of campaign money. To deal with this the political parties have set up arms-length web sites and organisations. Robert Greenwald (director of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War Journalism) has been commissioned by moveon.org to make a series of films about what’s wrong with America under Bush. Greenwald’s team have taken underground techniques into the mainstream. They combine direct sales from the internet with copyright free versions of the films, so people can burn and distribute them themselves. The audience then watches the DVD at home with their friends. I was handed a home-burnt copy of Greenwald’s recent doco on the Iraq war, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, at a party in Melbourne in mid-2004. Here was a distribution network that thrived on the increasingly fragmented nature of modern cultural consumption.

Back in Australia, John Howard represented a common ‘enemy’ that united a group of producers, editors, distributors, post-production facilities, cinemas and filmmakers from around the country who would never normally have co-operated. In 8 weeks the TTGJ team created a feature film from conception to opening night. No mean feat. Thank you John!

The production team used old activist techniques that they probably hadn’t employed since their uni days, the difference being that everyone was now professional, and very capable. Kate McCarthy headed up the production team who organised the shooting of the linking segments featuring Rod Quantock. With no budget she sourced a set, studio, crew, a top post-production facility and audio mix. Philippa Campey became the liaison with the filmmakers who submitted segments, and she kept track of the money. While it was a no-budget production, DVDs were selling at quite a pace. Carmela Baranowska teamed up with HT Lee to coordinate the theatrical release. Jennifer Hughes had already begun the process by securing seasons at the Lumiere (Melbourne) and the Mercury (Adelaide). The sweetener for the cinemas was that TTGJ wouldn’t take any box office; in return cinemas had to show a film they wouldn’t see until they turned on their projectors for opening night. It hadn’t been cut at the booking stage, so no-one could tell them how long it was going to be or which filmmakers would be in it. They were also asked that they slot it into schedules normally booked months ahead.

Carmela brought Gil Scrine’s film company on board to help with marketing and distribution. Gil pulled screenings of his own so that TTGJ could hit the screens in Sydney. The theatrical release team identified all the marginal seats and heavily promoted small screenings in these areas, using the Greenwald distribution model. Buyers of the DVD registered to have literally hundreds of classification-exempt screenings. Andrea Foxworthy liased with the censorship boards in each state to organise the classification, pushing the bureaucracies to the limit.

Meanwhile the website was constantly growing. It started as a call for entries and internet guru John Pierce together with Keren Flavell worked with a Sydney designer to transform it into a fully fledged site containing all the films in download versions. The site was a winner. DVD copies of the film were sold before it was edited, let alone burnt, and that funded the initial DVD production and post-outs. Here was a national release film self-distributed and funded entirely from internet DVD sales.

John Pierce created a full version of the film using ‘bit torrent’ technology and people from around the world started to download. There are over 1,190 mentions of TTGJ on the internet. At the same time emails were sent out by everyone involved in the film. These emails generated an audience for the screenings, the site and DVD. Keren Flavell headed up marketing and promotion. Drive-time ABC radio and a lengthy review in Le Monde produced the biggest spikes in sales. One of the marketing ploys developed by the team was to organise other people to endorse the film. Margo Kingston, who was touring with her book Not Happy, John, was more than happy to promote screenings in each city that she visited. This helped enormously. Unexpectedly, a large percentage of the audience for the film were baby boomers. The only part of the chain that didn’t link up to the project were Australian film reviewers. TTGJ challenged the ‘sacred cow’ view of cinema, and sadly on the whole critics ignored it.

The election has come and gone but the film still has legs. Kate McCarthy and Keren Flavell are working on a new version of the DVD to be released by Madman in time to challenge Howard’s takeover of both houses of parliament. It includes interviews with the filmmakers about the process of making TTGJ and a commentary track by a range of comedians.

TTGJ is a success story. The filmmakers loved it because their work was out there. The cinemas loved it because it attracted sell out crowds. The audience went because it was immediately relevant to their situation, proving that viewers are prepared to open their wallets to see a documentary—and they don’t expect it to look like a million dollar flick.

“Television can no more speak without ideology than we can speak without prose. We swim in its world even if we don’t believe in it.”
Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time

“If young people are not engaged in the gathering and trading of data that directly informs their perception of the society, the potential for a widespread tactical overthrow of the system is threatened. And if activist content producers are not willing to use all the means at their disposal to compete with the mainstream broadcast spectacle, then they are not serious about building a movement to silence it.”
Stephen Marshall, Guerrilla News Network founder

The histories of video practice are characterised by regular confrontations with its ‘frightful parent’, television. Brisbane-based anarcho-activist video collective Kill Your Television (KYTV), in producing a series of works designed to screen on TV and stream on the web, represents a particular mode of engagement with video’s forebear: oppositional television.

Audiences at the 2004 Straight Out Of Brisbane Festival (SOOB) sampled a cross-section of KYTV’s boisterously political endeavours from the last 2 years. Although openly hostile to the central role of television in the mass media’s production of spectacle, the manufacturing of consent and cornerstone support of consumer capitalism, KYTV does not tread the same formal ground as previous radical television collectives. Unlike many radical videomakers, particularly from the 70s and 80s, the group is less interested in the aggressive pursuit of viewer alienation through form than the subversion of television’s representational regimes. Political articulation is central to most of their work, but KYTV eschew radical video works’ earlier myopic fixation on foregrounding formal devices. Rather, the programs generally seek a specifically televisual aesthetic and audience engagement.

Crowning the popular SOOB screening program, the episodes of KYTV looked and felt like 3 hours of variety-style television, albeit with a distinct political bent. Comprising a plethora of segments, ranging from news, animations, short documentary, skit-style comedy and fly-on-the-wall observation, the anarchic, fast-paced concatenation of the KYTV format could feasibly unsettle some viewers’ expectations of television. ‘Reality’ TV is a particular target, as mercilessly lampooned as that other contemporary newspeak phrase requiring quotation marks, the ‘Pacific Solution’ (the subject of Laura Krikke’s clever stop-motion animation Overboard, in which ‘Phil’ and ‘Johnny’ meet natural justice when marooned at sea). The Keaneysville segments saw experimental poet/street philosopher Gerald Keaney accosting bemused market shoppers and demanding they define ‘freedom’, or debating the merits of reform versus revolution with a local councillor, upturning the narrow conventions of the managed confessional talk show.

The greatest challenge to the normative artifice of Reality TV emerged in the short observational fly-on-the-wall documentary segments. Some of these were warm but not particularly consequential conversations with artists and activists. However, in the more intimate observations, KYTV offered some truly unique, if not easy-watching, television. In a particularly memorable segment viewers were confronted with the paranoid delusions of speed psychosis as a member of the artist colony at the Chateau House (for a time, the nerve centre of KYTV) repeatedly checked the window for the police car he was convinced was waiting for him.

However challenging the individual segments, the collective’s conscious employment of broadcast television’s conventions and appropriation of the youth-oriented, attention-deficit aesthetic of music television and other cable shows made the work intelligible for a substantial audience. Co-founder and independent filmmaker Sarah-Jane Woulahan sees the central goal of KYTV as challenging the “moribund, artificial, dishonest, manipulative and repetitive” mediascape by creating works that “challenge viewers to construct their own meaning from what they see…We are making media ourselves that seeks to challenge, offend, incite, excite, educate and entertain…We want KYTV to feel like it’s your friends speaking directly to you without all the candy filters, lies and desperate attempts to sell you something. KYTV is about simultaneous television consumption and action.”

In this, they differ profoundly from previous radical television undertakings such as Jean Luc Godard’s characteristically introspective forays into a “television of opposition.” The high production values and manifest confidence of the KYTV program not only evince the expertise of Woulahan, Squareyed Films partner Sean Gilligan and other experienced video and filmmakers in the collective, but invite comparisons with other alternative television projects. In its marriage of pop aesthetics and politicised content, exemplified in Michael Tornabene’s cutting to the beat in a piece showing the most graphic imagery of atrocities in Iraq an Australian audience is likely to encounter, KYTV resembles the video work of the Guerrilla News Network (GNN, www.guerrillanews.com).

GNN’s Stephen Marshall argues that activist television “can either snobbishly reject the ‘populist’ approach or take our cues from the mainstream realm of advertising and music television and deliver socio-political commentary in the most charismatic style possible.” GNN’s short, rhythmic political documentaries have enjoyed significant international festival success, are featured on community access TV and streamed on the web—all long-term goals of the KYTV collective. However, where GNN’s aim is to seriously compete with mainstream corporate media, KYTV’s orientation is less ‘serious-leftist’ and more ‘chaotic-libertine.’

Indicative of KYTV’s anarchic style was a piece in which a member of a prominent Brisbane band related his experiences standing at a urinal after playing at the World Cup next to “this short little man in a suit and a scarf…then I realised who it was and wondered if in that moment, I would piss on the Prime Minister’s shoes.” But suddenly he is frightened by the little man’s “evil presence, like someone who is very angry and his vibe is like a hot coal up your arse, it freezes you.” With painful sincerity, Paulie apologises to Australia: “Sorry…I just froze…and passed up the opportunity…Hopefully if you have the opportunity you will be more brave than me. I’m sorry.”

KYTV’s anarchic approach was also evident in the way their program unfolded at SOOB—a mad jumble of heterogenous segments, punctuated by Gilligan’s acutely constructed newsflashes—and in the other activities of the group such as mobile guerrilla screenings, underground film and music nights, and staged, videoed actions. The overwhelming aesthetic is of an insouciant, freewheeling onslaught with committed subversion at its core. In its libertarian reinvention of political protest, KYTV employs tactical media to counter the media manipulation of neo-conservative governments and global corporations. In this weaponisation of the tools of representation, KYTV has the same transformative goals of GNN and other new wave video warriors.

Kill Your Television Second Annual Screening, Straight Out Of Brisbane Festival, Village Twin Theatre, Brisbane, Dec 12, 2004

PVI Collective is a Perth-based new media and performance art collective with a mission to expose our deepest public fears and interrogate our most private experiences. Established in 1998 by performance artist Kelli McCluskey and visual artist Steve Bull, PVI’s members include visual artists, sculptors, researchers and performance artists collaborating on site-specific works for galleries and public spaces.

PVI’s work is grounded in conceptual frameworks both political and psychological, and is presented in a way that encourages audience interaction, making participants reconsider their assumptions about everyday activities. Their latest project, tts:australia, had its beginnings in tts: route 65, a performance produced as part of Perth’s Artrage festival in 2002. Billed as an “intimate, alternative sightseeing tour of the Perth cityscape”, tts: route 65 invited participants onto a customised 22 seater bus for a multimedia tour of local architecture and tourist attractions, creating a simulated pseudo-military “tour of duty” which sought to expose security lapses and hidden corners in familiar business and government-related sites.

The original impetus for the project was a consideration of the post-September 11 political climate as seen through the lens of the mainstream media. “tts” stands for ‘terrorist training school’, the project’s original title. In essence, PVI’s terrorist training consists of performance artists at the helm of a simulated mobile training school that is ‘alert’ and ‘alarmed’ in its surveillance of city streets—a satirical response to the federal government’s call for the public to be on the look-out for potential terrorist threats in the wake of September 11.

Four days before tts: route 65’s opening in 2002, the Bali bombings hit the newspaper headlines. At the behest of the show’s sponsors and out of respect to those who died on October 12, the show was postponed and remounted in December 2002, using the abbreviated acronym. However, the project’s topicality was, if anything, reinforced as the mainstream media picked up on Western political leaders’ renewed commitment to the ‘war on terror’ and re-instigated heightened security alerts across the globe.

The positive response to tts: route 65 enabled PVI to secure funding for a 3 city eastern states tour of the project. Having conducted extensive research on sites of interest in each city, and with a rotating roster of city-specific volunteers and collaborators, tts:australia kicks off in Sydney on March 17, then travels to Melbourne and Adelaide.

Exploring the theme of terrorism as a form of social control, tts:australia is a response to the media’s role in creating a climate of fear amongst individuals and communities and, at the same time, a consideration of the way this mediated climate affects our understanding of our geopolitical landscape. This climate of fear can translate into wariness about the safety of living in our own cities and homes, affecting our sense of place in both public and private spheres.

Conceptually tts:australia draws on everything from the tabloid media’s war on terror, Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest, Nietzschean philosophy, Hollywood action films, conspiracy theories, military training manuals and the works of various terrorism theorists and analysts, including Walter Lacquer’s influential book Terrorism and Andrew Sinclair’s Anatomy of Terror.

The project engages with the idea of urban mythology, taking well-known sights, monuments and buildings and removing them, in the psychology of the viewer, from their established context or significance via “on-site activities that just don’t quite ‘add up’: paranoid tour guides, security defects, bus inspections and simulated ‘training’ exercises… Passengers are forced to question their susceptibility to scare-mongering. Where does the caution end, and the unnecessary panic set in?” (www.ttsaustralia.com).

Steve Bull says the tts tour aims to disorientate its audience by playing with their perceptions and preconceptions through black humour and satire. How well do we really know the cities in which we live? How secure are we going about our everyday lives? Are threats to our safety in the public sphere real or imagined? And to what extent do we internalise the war on terror discourse we are exposed to via the mainstream media?

The most crucial aspect of tts’ “tour of duty” is its interactive and participatory nature. McCluskey says the tours are intended to challenge the notion of tourism as a passive act, and performance art as a one-way delivery of meaning from performer to audience. One of the core concepts behind PVI’s work is the idea of exchange between performers and audience: “We’ve always wanted to find a way of directly involving people in the work, whether it be volunteers getting involved on the spot, or people working directly with us”, McCluskey comments. “A lot of the projects we’ve done involve members of the public actually coming in and experiencing the work—either unwittingly, or by filling out a questionnaire online and then joining in…I think people are becoming a lot more receptive to this style of performance art. We’re really interested in the idea of breaking down barriers between performers and audiences, the idea of the audience becoming really immersed in the work.”

In keeping with tts’ multimedia focus, PVI Collective has produced a DVD to accompany the tour. tts: recruit will be available as a limited edition DVD on sale at performance sites, but will also be available to rent in video stores. As a “step-by-step guide” to military recruitment, the PVI DVD draws on traditional recruitment formulas—motivational videos, aptitude tests, game-play and role-play scenarios—to critically interrogate the methods by which a heightened state of alert is translated into a combat mentality.

A critical reader will also accompany the project, incorporating essays, writings, images and research intended as a conceptual “back-up” to the live work. “It was really good for us to be able to write about the work”, says McCluskey. “You don’t normally get a chance in performance art to talk about the processes of what you’re doing. We wanted to be quite playful with it; it’s a kind of training manual that you can refer to during the tour, or read afterwards as a companion to it.”

tts:australia is a truly multimedia performance art concept. It is deeply conceptual and politically questioning, but also promises to be a great deal of fun. In the words of PVI Collective: “Join up. Board the bus. And hold on to your seats.”

tts:australia, written, filmed and performed by PVI Collective in collaboration with Version 1.0 (Sydney), Cicada (Melbourne), Drive by Shooting (Adelaide), March 17-May 22 www.ttsaustralia.com

“If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him.”
The Google Buddha.

Resfest, the sexy Brazilian wax of the film festival world, has pores that bleed. These were evident in the clips curated for Bushwhacked, Resfest’s compilation of mostly animated George Bush Jnr pisstakes, but the selection also served to spotlight pain in ways the selectors might not have expected.

Eat my shorts

A month after Bush’s re-election was never going be a good time to dissect his bad points. Given the amount of US influence on our country, it is bad enough that we don’t get a vote. Watching another country make the collective decision to reinstate him was gruesome on another level entirely. Granted Resfest have a busy globetrotting calendar, but during pre-US election cocktails, surely they could’ve pencilled in some provocative clips for the post-election audiences that went beyond the ‘Bush-bad’ genre, if only to dull the pain, or help map other potential universes.

In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, US President Eisenhower warned about the dangers of “unwarranted influence…by the Military Industrial Complex.” Post World War II, it was still possible to smell the approach of a machine that might eat up governance and civic society. That machine is so well oiled these days, machine-fearers instead call it the ‘Military-Petroleum Complex’, or in reference to the heroic PR machinations involved in maintaining any such enterprise, the ‘Military-Entertainment Complex’.

While Bushwhacked piled on the potshots at the monkey dangling atop that complex, precious few of the clips aimed below the monkey veneer. Pirates and Emperors was probably the best of those with fangs. It was directed by Eric Henry, best known for his co-direction/animation of Wave Twister, the revered hip hop animation feature for Q-Bert’s album of the same name. Opting this time for a simple 2D cut-out animation style, Henry managed to provide a sharp and nimbly visual analysis of current ‘freedom fighting’, tracing aggressive US foreign policy from contemporary assaults, back through Nicaraguan conflicts and linking it to Alexander the Great. Snappy as a soft drink commercial yet a little more illuminating than many of the films on offer.

What Barry Says by Simon Robson (UK) similarly combined inventive lateral visualisations with critique of US foreign policy to great effect, though it was the filmmaker’s succinct condensation of ideas through motion graphics that really made the piece sing. With a heroic effort in Adobe After Effects, Robson delivered persistently sublime vector transitions—the oil, it flows from Middle East pipes, across the Atlantic, then up the Statue of Liberty until bursting into flame, you know? All with a rumbling soundtrack underbelly detailing the Neo-cons’ ‘Project for a New American Century’. Google and debate amongst fellow conspirators.

The Horribly Stupid Stunt (Which Has Resulted In His Untimely Death) found another Yes Men prank stretched across 25 minutes, with typically absurd anti-World Trade Organisation punchlines, and a WTO audience passively accepting a Yes Men proposal to let the market place buy votes from disenchanted voters (the Yes Men had received another conference invitation sent to their fake WTO website, and accepted). Alt-doco pin-up boy of the month, Michael Moore, also got a leg in with an edited clip for System of a Down, cutting together charged scenes of anti-war rallies around the world. Warming, if not revelatory.

Careful listening in most Melbourne cinemas can often reveal collective pain—the whisperings of film graduates, buffs and camcorder owners: “I could do better than that.” Another burden carried by such creative audiences is balancing the hope that their skills might bring about change with the knowledge that a monster the size of Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to make a sufficient splash. Rubbing their noses in the even dimmer impact of a range of Flash-animations and 30-second nobody clips was probably a case of too cruel, too soon.

Seen the site that jockeys uncannily resemblant monkey photos beside 20 different George Bush facial expressions? If anything, it demonstrates the almost too obvious ease with which monkey-boy is satirised, which was part of the problem with Bushwhacked; the appeal wanes once you dip into the exhaustive catalogue of audiovisual collage techniques and realise each has the same cartoon punch-line of ‘bush=bad/absurd/evil’. Johan Soderberg’s guerrilla lip-syncs probably deserve some accolade, but even re-animated lips inevitably wear thin.

Exhibiting a wide range of techniques would seem to be where Resfest finds its niche, rather than in ‘ideas’ as Jeremy Boxer, the Res-boy argued. Or if they really do plan on running the gauntlet with ‘ideas’, now that ‘digital DIY’ ain’t novel no more, let’s hope next year’s selection offers up a platter of world-changing insights and possibilities as Res wrestles with the rest of the Bush presidency. As it stands, the festival’s breadth of audiovisual exploration seems to draw in the curious creatives who in turn lure the uber-brands (eager to prey on ‘tastemakers’) and soon enough, there’s the Branded (or was that branding?) Session, where audiences pay money to see Brand-funded flicks resonating with corporate identities. Knowing I wasn’t in that session at least soothed some of the pain.

Bushwacked, Resfest Digital Film Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Dec 3-7, 2004

This article arises from an ongoing struggle to realise a series of works that address notions of low tech interactive TV which started for me in the USA in the early 90s with The Operators, a cable show about a bunch of answering service operators staving off unemployment caused by the advent of the answering machine. The show was designed to be interactive and contextually narrative—that is, the interactive element was in keeping with the narrative drama, so viewers interacted in real time via telephones in a drama about telephone operators. After considering the resurgence of talk-back radio occurring at the time, and influenced by early live television as personified in the US by Ernie Kovacs, I wrote an outline for a live, low-budget TV series which became the manifesto for Community TV that I delivered to CTV in Perth in 1995.

In 1998, I took a job in the Media Department at Edith Cowan University developing a practical teaching program utilising the instigation of community and educational TV in Western Australia as a focus. In the first 6 months of operation my students and I produced 42 hours of TV and Artoffical, an arts program which won the CBAA award for infotainment that year. However, my recommendations for live and interactive TV fell on deaf ears at the university and the TV consortium set up to manage education and community interests.

In 2001, I was able to present THIS IS I.T. (with the help of the Festival of Perth Fringe and CTV) to illustrate the power of interactivity. I used a small studio set up for the weather at Channel 31. Although the virtually content-less interactive show was unpopular with the TV station and the cultural elite of Perth, Telstra phone records showed it had over a million viewers and over 1000 calls an hour during the 4 weeks of broadcast. Ironically, it proved to be the most watched production in the festival. It was only a gesture towards our vision for community interaction but it was as far as we got. After Channel 31 shut down the show, SBS bandied around a narrative version with a budget and upgraded computer interactivity, about a transparent TV show. Eventually they refused to develop it even with the financial support of ScreenWest. Comments included that it was another retro stereotypical office drama (such as The Office). Six months later the office drama 24/7 emerged on SBS with its non-contextual interactivity (ie via email and not inside the characters’ real time).

The Australian Film Commission then granted me production money (the first time it was given for a program produced on Community TV) if Channel 31 would schedule the show in Melbourne. After 6 months, with sponsors in place and on the point of signing a development contract, Channel 31 Melbourne refused to program the show.

One reason for the sector’s reluctance to embrace interactivity is an irrational fear of people saying the wrong thing or using ‘inappropriate language’ on air. The possibilities of slander and defamation charges have created a climate where self-censorship dominates. However, the ABA guidelines are quite liberal in relation to these issues, with different standards for different time slots and an understanding of the differences between factual, fictional and satirical programs. In my opinion, self-censorship has become so pervasive that there is now virtually no politics, social comment or discussion of serious community issues in community media—and this is without even considering the possibility of live interactivity with the public. Yet the on-air surveys that we did on both TV and radio indicate that this is what the ‘community’ wants. They want talkback and interactivity. The ABC realised this and their ratings on radio have increased as a result. My local community radio station plays music without any talk, commentary or discussion, something you could do on your CD player at home. Even the 2003 CBAA conference of community presenters and produces at Surfers Paradise couldn’t take the idea of talkback or interactivity seriously in their ‘innovation’ think tank sessions. Yet another demonstration of how creatively conservative we are in this country.

The other big stick waved about by cultural bureaucrats is ‘quality’ and the mantra of ‘good sound, picture, cuts and always use a tripod’. It must look like regular TV. The word ‘quality’ is used to cover anything programmer executives don’t like—consequently all programs now look the same. There is very little stepping outside the structures imposed by commercial stations. The art world, while developing all sorts of time-based video works, has not embraced nor been embraced by Community TV. If ‘form follows function’ then a new form of broadcasting needs to be developed to provide a continuing function for Community TV. And developing true television interactivity is a way to achieve this.

Manifesto for CTV, 1995

1. That the Broadcaster has facilities for live transmission of television from studio facilities.

2. That it incorporate interactive facilities such as telephone and computer interface for community participation and comment.

3. That it operates on a non-professional, hands-on presentation system based on a radio station set up, allowing a community group to come in with minimal technical expertise and present a show.

3A. That it emulate the talkback radio format with interchangeable studios, even supporting the technical hierarchy of sound over picture.

4. That the content be prioritised over form. This is not an aesthetic position, but rather a political one, in which aesthetics will develop in unexpected ways inside the formal constraints as familiarity and provera (poor) methodologies are celebrated and demonstrated.

5. That it experiments with low end available technologies like computers and online systems to create interactivity and participation.

6. That there is no “NO”, it is “YES, but what about…” followed by a positive suggestion.

Flickering between past and present in a visual and narrative rendering of childhood memories of pain, fear and resilience, Victim is the audacious directorial debut of Perth-based filmmaker Corrie Jones. The film takes its viewer inside the mind of Sera, a kidnap victim who wakes up bound, gagged and trapped inside the boot of a car. Through a voiceover, Sera recalls situations in which she felt afraid as a child (a bike accident, a visit to hospital), compulsively reminding herself that she has survived these relatively minor traumas.

The film’s frequent childhood flashbacks are dreamy and visually beautiful, suffused with a light deliberately contrasted with the dark, grainy images of Sera’s terrifying present. The film opens with images of the young Sera chasing butterflies through a field, as the camera lingers on a book whose blank pages are ruffled by the wind. The symbolism of these early images—butterflies as symbols of flight and freedom, a blank book as a story yet to be told—becomes evident once the voiceover intrudes and reveals a much darker tale. A close-up of young Sera’s innocent face transforms into a shot of a darkening sky, and suddenly the viewer is confronted by a fear-stricken, panicking face, mouth taped, terror in the eyes.

This balance between dark and light, terror and resilience, claustrophobia and open space is beautifully crafted and delicately maintained throughout, as the film moves between images of the adult Sera’s struggle against her kidnapper, her childhood experiences and her memories of loved ones she fears she might never see again. Victim’s mood of psychological intensity is quite extraordinary given its brief 10 minute duration. Tight editing, unusual camera angles by cinematographer Torstein Dyrting and an eerie score by Alex Ringis further contribute to Victim’s escalating sense of tension. The voiceover by New York poet Nicole Blackman is eerily hypnotic and calm, a whispered soundtrack to an unimaginable ordeal.

Corrie Jones discovered Nicole Blackman’s work during his time as a film student at Curtin University (he graduated in 2001). A friend working at the independent music store, 78 Records, recommended he listen to Blackman’s spoken-word recordings after noticing the sort of music he was buying. Victim was the first track on the album: “The first time I listened to it, I was totally captivated, in awe of it”, says Jones. “I kept playing it over and over. But the idea to actually do Victim as a film didn’t come until a couple of years later.”

Jones contacted Blackman via her website and proposed translating the poem into a short film. Blackman’s initial response was tentative; according to Jones, she felt deeply protective of the piece, but was convinced by his script treatment and the strength of his emotional response to the narrative.

With limited student work to show potential financers, Jones had to rely on extensive storyboarding and director’s notes to persuade investors he had the ability to make the film. Amy Lou Taylor, a producer with a commercial background, was brought on board and a $120,000 budget was secured from ScreenWest and the Australian Film Commission. Victim was filmed and produced in Perth by a group of relative newcomers, but its local impact was immediate. The first screenings in Perth were controversial, where it was shown with Siddiq Barma’s Osama as part of the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival. With the serial killings of 3 young women in Perth’s northern suburbs still haunting the newspaper headlines, Victim hit a raw nerve. Although the film shows a bound and gagged woman at the mercy of an armed kidnapper, many viewers interpreted the film as being about a woman’s rape, which is not even indirectly implied.

Jones views the film’s real subject as self-empowerment rather than victimisation. His protagonist struggles to the end, and when she realises she may die, she attempts to live the last moments of her life with psychological strength and resolve, rather than annihilating terror. “I wanted to show an inner strength through the detachment of the narration”, Jones explains. “The film is about a woman confronting her fears, dealing with them as they hit her.”

Victim has already won a number of prestigious Australian awards, including an Early Career Award at the 2003 WA Screen Awards, the SBS Eat Carpet award, and Best New Director award at the 2004 St Kilda Film Festival. Jones is now in the embryonic stages of developing a script for a feature film. He admits making the transition from a critically acclaimed 10 minute short to a feature is a little daunting. With influences ranging from the European avant-garde to Wong Kar-Wai, Jones envisages a more autobiographical story that explores the impact of memory and moments of personal significance. He claims to be uninterested in making mainstream films, and suggests he is naturally drawn to darker themes and issues: “In Victim I was trying to push the envelope”, he says. “I wanted to go to places that were a bit darker, a bit more risky.”

Victim, director Corrie Jones; producer Amy Lou Taylor; writers Corrie Jones, Nicole Blackman; performers Rebecca Davis, Jade Richards

In 1995, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell broke new ground in anime aesthetics, pushing the medium towards uncanny realism with unforgettable imagery and attention to sound. It proved that the form could also be used to explore philosophical questions rather than simply market game cards and cheap plastic toys. The sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, seeks to take these aesthetic and thematic projects further. On a recent visit to Australia sponsored by the Japan Foundation, Oshii said that he “put everything he knows” into this film, and it shows. But while undeniably gorgeous, the film is not an unqualified success.

The time and money spent and the labour of his team of artists and animators are abundantly evident on screen, but the sequel’s reliance on 3D digital imagery for backgrounds is strangely jarring. The film is also at times overloaded to the point of distraction and confusion, with borrowed ideas and imagery from both recent sources (notably Blade Runner and A.I.), the music video for Björk’s All is Full of Love and older texts (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future and writings by ETA Hoffmann and Descartes).

Oshii is obsessed with the uncertain and ever-blurring lines between life and death, human and machine. This film, even more than its precursor, is one long riff on those themes. At the Australian premiere at Sydney’s Valhalla Cinema, we were fortunate enough to be addressed by the reclusive director himself. A short, rumpled man muttering softly in Japanese, he apologised through a translator for reneging on his promise to come to Sydney in 2000. What seemed at first a touchingly silly excuse (the death of his pet cat) elicited a ripple of giggles from the audience—giggles that fell into awkward silence as he continued to speak of his loss and what the cat meant to him. This tale of mourning segued into a more general point: that the death or loss of those we love tears an aching hole in us that is never really filled. A self that is torn by successive losses is perhaps the non-corporeal “ghost” of his films’ titles: a ghost forever disappearing piece by piece. Mourning, prosthetic technologies, the guilelessness of animals, and the struggle to retain our ‘ghost’ are just some of the strands running through Oshii’s work.

Set in the year 2032, Ghost in the Shell 2’s central character is cyborg detective Batou, Major Kusanagi’s colleague in the first film. A hulking figure with blank camera lenses instead of eyes, Batou and his mulleted sidekick Togusa are assigned to investigate a recent spate of killings caused by concubine “sexaroids”, androids designed for sexual pleasure produced by the Locus Solus company. The sexaroids have inexplicably turned violent, murdering their male owners. These “Hadaly type” (in reference to L’Eve Future) robots adorn much of the promotional art for the film and are appealingly girlish, pale and plump, with rosebud mouths and sleepy vacant blue eyes. The bulk of the main narrative is taken up by Batou and Togusa’s quest to uncover why these figures, valued for their compliant sexual innocence, are becoming violent puppets—who is controlling them, by what means, and for what broader purpose? The answer turns out to be quite sinister, especially in the context of the Japanese sexual fetishisation of school girls, but it is not the answer you may expect.

Batou’s sordid investigation is broken by interludes of a slower, more contemplative pace where we are shown clouds of birds wheeling through the sky, the majestic scape of the metropolis, and almost indescribably beautiful images of a religious festival parade. Here, gargantuan red and gold gods and mythological figures sway in glacial motion down rainy streets crowded with onlookers beneath a sea of umbrellas. As in the first film, Kenji Kawai’s spare and striking use of percussion and ululating female voices mark these changes of pace. It is not merely the music, but the use of real sound, the vibrations recorded from street and traffic noise, that conjure a physical sense of things and people moving in space.

Recorded sound also contributes to the essential “dogginess” exuded by Batou’s basset hound, a pet that serves as a gentle respite from the cold violence of the detective’s work. While the introduction of animal characters into many films can signal cloying sentimentality, the hound is so well realised that it reminds us why humans adore pets and their innocent exuberance. Perhaps Oshii is suggesting that the unconditional love and animal innocence of our pets is one of the few things that keeps us from becoming truly dehumanised while living and working in dehumanising systems.

Elsewhere, this moody rain-slick world, with its cityscapes, hallways, carparks, stairwells, alleys and many machines, is rendered in painstaking and startling hallucinatory detail with a heavy reliance on 3D digital imagery. Every surface seems layered with the grime and wear of use and pollution, as though the artists have been using a rendering software that at the click of a mouse covers everything with a Blade Runner patina. This detailed 3D context emphasises the stark flatness of the 2D characters, with their faces composed of ridges and ungraded planes of dark and light. At times they become haunted drawings brought to uncanny life, drifting forlornly through a world that is more solid, real and ‘alive’ than they are.

Later the action shifts to a locale with an entirely different atmosphere. Batou and Togusa enter a baroque mansion decked out in gold filigree and filled with the chiming and ticking of clockwork, its gilded rooms inhabited by a variety of enigmatic dolls and automata. It is as though we have travelled back in time to a perpetual twilight in the machine age. In this mansion, didactic and ponderous conversations take place on the human and the machine. The characters seem to become puppets themselves—mouthpieces for Oshii’s own explorations of ideas not fully thought through. Some insight does float to the surface though, regarding our uneasiness around dolls and automata: the human form reduced to matter is a reminder of our terror of death a future in which we are reduced to lifeless object.

After the film has finished it is less the mish-mash of platitudes and philosophical questions that stay with you than certain images and their sounds: the hiss of a spent cigarette crushed into a plastic cup of butts suspended in filthy liquid, or the lovingly drawn basset hound snuffling eagerly as he scrapes his metal food bowl around a tiled kitchen floor with his soft wet snout and skittering claws. The attention to these everyday details bring a grounding realism to the work that takes it beyond the usual anime fantasy world of sci-fi and cynical toy-marketing.

There is no doubting Oshii’s sincerity and the effort that he has put into this work. He reminds me of a character in a JG Ballard novel, obsessively gathering together clues and repeatedly arranging them in bizarre patterns, with a belief that the perfect alignment will create a blinding enlightenment. Perhaps the film requires repeated viewings on DVD before his magical patterns can emerge with clarity. Upon first viewing, don’t struggle with interpretation; simply surrender to aesthetic pleasures and let the maelstrom of images and ideas roll over you. As Oshii himself suggests, this is a film that should be less understood than “vaguely felt.”

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, director Mamoru Oshii, producers Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, Toshio Suzuki, Japan, 2004

Refugees have been a hot topic for Australian documentary makers over the past half decade, with recent notable examples including Tom Zubrycki’s Molly and Mobarak (2003) and Clara Law’s Letters to Ali (2004, RT64, p20). Given our draconian detention laws, it is not surprising that most of these films have focused on the plight of incarcerated asylum seekers or those enjoying the precarious ‘freedom’ of temporary protection visas. Faramarz K-Rahber’s award winning Fahimeh’s Story takes a slightly different tack, focusing on the 47 year old Iranian woman of the film’s title, who fled her comfortable middle class Tehran existence to escape a desperately unhappy marriage. As Fahimeh puts it: “Everyone saw what I had on the outside, nobody saw the unhappiness on the inside.” She arrived in Brisbane with 2 sons and obtained a divorce, only to fall in love and marry John, a 77 year old white Australian ex-soldier she met at a bus stop. The film begins soon after Fahimeh and John’s first meeting and traces their relationship across the course of a year.

Although largely shot in observational style, K-Rahber resists the temptation to leave himself out of the story. Fahimeh and her family frequently glance at the camera, sometimes in embarrassment, sometimes with sly grins, and the filmmaker often questions them from behind the lens. He positions himself in the story from the beginning, telling us in voiceover that he met Fahimeh through one of her sons, became fascinated with her tale and decided to make a documentary. Rather than any pretence at objective depiction of the situation, the finished work comes across very much as K-Rahber’s experience of becoming increasingly entangled in the emotional web of Fahimeh’s family.

This impression is reinforced by the director’s refusal to hone in on one aspect of the multi-faceted situation, following the strands of the family web in a loose manner that allows all the ambiguities and intricacies of familial relations to play out over the film’s 83 minutes. Fahimeh and her sons are refugees making their way in a foreign land, but K-Rahber never reduces them to stereotypes or symbols.

Like Fahimeh’s sons, many viewers would undoubtedly be dubious about her relationship with John when it is introduced. Initially he comes across as a vague and somewhat doddering old man who appears to have little understanding of what he’s got himself into. Appearances are deceiving, however, and John gradually emerges as the film’s most intriguing figure. He has a keen interest in leftist politics and we’re given the impression that as a younger man he was involved in the labour movement. At one point, he and Fahimeh go on a march to Villawood Detention Centre, protesting the imprisonment of refugees.

John also has a 30 year old son who cuts a tragically pathetic figure, forever unemployed, depressed and constantly returning to his father for handouts. At times John is driven to distraction by his son’s inability to look after himself. But it’s his own actions and attitudes that make John so intriguing. Despite his good-natured demeanour and salt-of-the-earth air, he becomes an increasingly enigmatic figure, his motivations more and more difficult to fathom. He seems to genuinely love Fahimeh and goes to extraordinary lengths to please her, including converting to Islam. At the same time, he spends prolonged periods away from her living in his own home, and by the film’s end is spending most of his time alone.

John’s affable indeterminacy is nicely counter-balanced by the straight-talking attitudes of Fahimeh’s sons. As teenage boys harbouring healthy doses of resentment towards their Iranian father, while also negotiating a foreign culture and coming to terms with a 77 year old ‘step dad’, they are the most volatile of the film’s subjects. The elder son is deeply alienated from the rest of the family and is living in Sydney at the beginning of the film. Even when he returns to Brisbane, he seems to have little contact with his mother and refuses to meet John, despite earlier cautiously endorsing his mother’s right to choose whoever she wants as a partner. He becomes increasingly bitter in interviews, glaring at the camera with a palpable anger. K-Rahber offers us tantalising glimpses of this boy’s views and daily life, but remains frustratingly distant from the details of his situation, giving us few clues about the precise source of his antagonism.

In contrast, Fahimeh’s younger son appears throughout, and despite being clearly suspicious of John, tries to help his mother and to tolerate the older man’s presence. His animated comments to camera when away from his mother provide some of the film’s funniest moments, as he expresses frank amazement that his Mum “actually seems to like John!”

Oddly enough, although Fahimeh exudes energy and a vivacious charisma, she is the film’s least interesting figure. Which isn’t to say we don’t feel sympathy; our impression of her simply doesn’t develop beyond that conveyed in the opening minutes. It’s hard to judge whether this is a failing on K-Rahber’s part, or if Fahimeh is simply more straightforward than the rest of her family.

K-Rahber’s film is quite different in tone to the sense of outrage generated by Clara Law’s Letters to Ali, or lesser-known works such as Seeking Asylum (Mike Piper, 2002), Out of Fear (Bettina Frankham, 2003) and Through the Wire (Pip Starr, 2004). At a screening of Letters to Ali before last year’s election, I wondered where the refugee ‘genre’ could go if John Howard was returned to power. Was the anger of our documentary-makers having any impact and could the rage be maintained if the Coalition won yet again? Perhaps it is important to simply keep bearing witness to the atrocities being perpetrated by this government and endorsed by many Australians, even if these films don’t seem to be having any political effect. K-Rahber’s documentary also indicates that refugee stories can provide a vehicle for examining broader issues.

Although titled Fahimeh’s Story, the work is really a snapshot of the social, racial, cultural, class and generational tensions that run through contemporary Australian society. Representing the full range of refugee experience is as essential as protesting asylum seekers’ arbitrary imprisonment. Fahimeh’s Story is a political film not because it offers a didactic or polemical position on refugees or race, or because it attacks specific government policy. Fahimeh arrives on an aeroplane and never has to endure the horror of detention. The film instead shines a light on the infinite complexities of familial and emotional relationships, in the process undermining the essentialist, one-dimensional, homogenising discourse around family and the notion of what constitutes “Australianness” that currently dominates our public and political spheres. In other words, K-Rahber textures Fahimeh’s story with the shades of grey that Howard’s vision of Australia erases.

Fahimeh’s Story, director Faramarz K-Rahber; producers Ian Lang, Grigor Axel, 2004

Fahimeh’s Story will screen as part of the SBS Independent Signature Works Festival, Western Australian Museum, Fremantle, WA, Feb 26, and will be broadcast on SBS later in 2005.

In April 2004, the ScreenSound film and sound archive was merged into the Australian Film Commission. The move was not without controversy, especially when the AFC mooted plans for the relocation of some activities away from Canberra, and for changes to the Archive’s public programs. In September 2004, Paolo Cherchi Usai took up the position of the Archive’s new director. The appointment was widely applauded, given Cherchi Usai’s international prominence. He is a founder of Italy’s Pordenone Film Festival, which has become a focal point for the study of silent cinema, and the author of several books on archival history and practice. He was also Senior Curator at George Eastman House in New York.

In November 2004, the AFC Board approved Cherchi Usai’s initial vision statement. It is a bridge-building plan aimed at reconciling the opposing camps which had taken up positions around the archive’s integration into the AFC. The plan highlights 5 points: (1) the development of a curatorial culture; (2) the maintenance of Canberra as the central hub; (3) the establishment of an Indigenous Branch; (4) consideration of the role of digital technology; and (5) an integrated approach to acquisition, preservation and access. The divisive ‘ScreenSound’ name has also been jettisoned in favour of the institution’s original title, The National Film and Sound Archive. Cherchi Usai says that the change “is of symbolic significance and of political significance. It has a political meaning because of the words national and archive—a reconfirmation of the primary mission of the institution within the AFC to collect, preserve and make accessible the heritage and to do this as the national entity responsible for this.”

The place of the Archive within the AFC has been a sensitive issue, and Cherchi Usai is at pains to resolve these tensions. “I am being asked ‘what is the distinctive contribution of the archive actually and potentially to the development of the AFC?’…it is not a matter of seeking independence in disguise, it is a matter of making very clear the cultural identity of the archive per se, as an organisation which has a national mandate, a cultural mandate and is now being asked to be part of a broader cultural agenda.”

He claims that emphasising Canberra as the centre will restore faith in the future of the archive for its staff, as “the historical identity of the archive is here.” He adds: “this doesn’t mean that the archive has to see Canberra as a sort of fortress where the archival culture is cultivated in isolation from the rest of the country. Quite the contrary, being based in Canberra gives the archive a clear responsibility to become the centre from which audio-visual culture is disseminated across the entire Australian territory.”

He plans to emphasise a more heavily curatorial approach in order to “give the archive a stronger sense of intellectual authority in the audio-visual community, especially now that the archive is part of the AFC, which is now declaring the intention to position itself as a national cultural institution. We want…to have the archive as a protagonist, as a leader, in the cultural debate within the AFC.” This will involve the creation of “a team of highly qualified and highly motivated people with specific expertise in their own areas of activity, who will be given the responsibility to determine the cultural, intellectual profile of our strategy.”

He also calls for “a highly diversified range of access and programming activities.” These may range from internet access to the collections, programs designed and implemented by the archive or in collaboration with other divisions of the AFC, to simply fulfilling its institutional mission to make audio-visual artefacts accessible for projects, educational purposes and festivals. So, the spectrum really includes the archive as “the leader and the protagonist, the archive as the collaborator, and the archive as the provider.”

Cherchi Usai speaks of strengthening the exhibition galleries in Canberra, which the AFC’s Directions discussion paper had called into question, “in order to reflect not only the identity of the Australian audio-visual heritage, but also to highlight what the archive does.” He also stresses he found agreement with the AFC commissioners in the “development of publications which are meant to create very authoritative points of scholarly reference for the study of the national audio-visual heritage and culture…works that not only remain but also become the symbols of an intellectual leadership of the archive…These publications will also be part of the agenda of a new entity within the archive called the Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research, which will be the hub where the internal intellectual energies of the archive, and the scholarly and archival community around the archive nationally and internationally, will gather in order to promote new approaches to the study of the audio-visual culture.” Planned publications include national filmographies and discographies as well as a registry of audio-visual collections in Australia.

Cherchi Usai adds that he wants the archive to encourage a “pluralistic and diversified” approach to audio-visual research: “There may be areas or approaches I may not particularly care for, but it is our moral responsibility to make sure that those who come here don’t see this as a place where the audio-visual culture can be studied only in a certain way.”

The collection policy of the archive has been criticised in the past for pursuing a nationalist cultural agenda to the point where rare international films and related materials have been sent off-shore. Cherchi Usai wants a more internationalist collection policy, arguing that the ‘national heritage’ is all that Australians have heard and seen: “In practical terms, this also means that if we found a collection of international films that no other national archive has, it would be absurd to give this collection away. This collection would be an intellectual asset for the archive.”

Where the AFC had initially considered moving Indigenous collection responsibilities to Sydney, Cherchi Usai has won approval for the establishment of an Indigenous Branch in Canberra, in part because of the proximity of IATSIS (Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies). While recognising that he has much to learn regarding Australian Indigenous culture, he is adamant that “in creating an Indigenous Collection Department, I do not wish to create a ghetto for Indigenous culture and I would very much like to foster communication with Indigenous culture as a priority for the organisation. Recruitment will be an important challenge in that we want to empower Indigenous curators in the development of Indigenous culture at the Archive.”

The last of Cherchi Usai’s 5 points is the need to address the role of digital technologies in preserving and making accessible audio-visual material. While he claims the intention “to aggressively develop digital technologies for the sake of access to the collection”, he warns that “digital technology is not meant to be a long-term preservation or conservation medium, as digital technologies of today are inherently ephemeral.” He also cautions that “access in digital form should not distract the archive from its mission to make accessible the audio-visual heritage in its original form. Australians should have the right to choose whether they want to see a 35mm film in the glory of its original format, or in the practical, democratic, but different medium of digital technology.”

For those looking for a cool, dark room to escape the in-your-face Mardi Gras street festivities this year, the 2005 Mardi Gras Film Festival provides the perfect solution. Opening night will see the works of 9 Australian filmmakers screened in the sumptuous State Theatre in the My Queer Career program of locally produced queer-themed shorts. Highlights include Oranges (director Kristian Pithie), focusing on 2 school boys coming to terms with their nascent feelings for each other, and Moustache (director Vicki Sugars), an absurdist tale about the unexpected effect of over-active female facial hair on a flagging marriage. Oranges screened at Germany’s Oberhausen Short Film Festival last year while Moustache appeared at the illustrious Venice International Film Festival.

Queer Screen has always sourced a wide selection of gay and lesbian features from around the world for the festival, but this year has a particular Asian focus. From Japan comes Queer Boys and Girls on the Bullet Train, an omnibus of 10 five minute films by different directors, running the stylistic gamut from sex dramas to anime. Queer Boys and Girls will screen with 2 gay-themed shorts from India: Barefeet (director Sonali) and Calcutta Pride March (director Tejal Shah).

From Hong Kong comes Butterfly, directed by up-and-coming talent Yan Yan Mak. A 30 year old woman’s chance encounter with a young singer triggers memories of a rocky relationship while at university during the turbulent period leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Man skillfully flits between past and present to forge a poignant tale of personal loss that is also a mourning for the youthful idealism that characterised China’s pro-democracy movement of the period. The colour-saturated visual style and fragmented narrative is strongly reminiscent of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai.

The festival also features 2 programs of Asian-related shorts, providing audiences with an interesting point of comparison with the Australian works of My Queer Career. They are Gaysia, a collection of films by Asian directors from around the world, and Hong Kong Lesbian Shorts. The latter will be introduced by one of the directors of Hong Kong’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Several documentaries are included in this year’s schedule, including Wash Westmoreland’s Gay Republicans. One million voters identifying as gay or lesbian voted for George Bush in the 2000 Presidential election; this film asks why these voters support a party and president seemingly at odds with their own interests.

The festival’s closing night film is A Dirty Shame, the first work in 4 years from the legendary John Waters. With plenty of full-frontal nudity and crooner Chris Isaak in the lead role, A Dirty Shame promises to provide a happily trashy conclusion to some serious and culturally diverse proceedings.

2005 Mardi Gras Film Festival, curators David Pearce, Megan Carrigy; State Theatre, Palace Academy Twin, Valhalla Cinemas; Sydney; Feb 17-March 3; www.queerscreen.com.au

Short Site: Recent Australian Short Film
edited by Emma Crimmings & Rhys Graham
Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2004

While turning the pages of Short Site: Recent Australian Short Film, I dozed off and had a nightmare in which I was at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and got trapped in an industry-sponsored forum where all the sessions had titles like “New Ways of Seeing” or “Off the Beaten Track” and were illustrated by clips from Harvie Krumpet, with a sidebar focus on new digital technologies and Cate Shortland and Ivan Sen giving masterclasses in script structure to spellbound graduates from the VCA. I was about to leap up and set myself on fire, or something of the kind, when an angel came to me and said: “Oh ye of little faith! Imagine a world without Australian short filmmakers! Think of our cultural impoverishment if young artists did not strive to produce significant work on low-to-moderate levels of government funding, reflecting the many facets of our diverse contemporary society!” I was at a loss to reply, and so awoke.

Returning to the book, I felt bound to agree with its editors, Rhys Graham and Emma Crimmings, that local short filmmaking stands in need of serious criticism. But in focusing on primary documentation through interviews and scripts, they don’t go a long way towards filling the gap. The essays that make up perhaps a quarter of Short Site’s content—a few pages on each of the 10 films featured from half a dozen writers—are billed as “personal and passionate” responses, meaning they move between sometimes flowery evocation, craft-based analysis, and stabs at cultural or historical perspective. As introductions to their subjects they’re mainly serviceable, though often marred by a stylistic carelessness that forces the reader of goodwill to sort through masses of cliches (“seamlessly edited”, “fluid camerawork”) to retrieve the occasional buried insight. On the other hand, in the more stylistically assured contributions the confession of “personal” feelings and attitudes begins to look like a familiar rhetorical weapon, which a writer like Clare Stewart (covering Ivan Sen’s Dust) wields with a touch of knowing melodrama.

What the book lacks, in a nutshell, is a genuinely critical approach. And not just because the assessments are cover-to-cover positive—the unrelenting tone of ‘celebration’ does get a bit wearing. Whatever the editors might claim, the choice of films covered suggests committee-think rather than anyone’s personal taste, gathering together plenty of well-known names and relevant social issues. My own “personal” assessment of the films covered in Short Site which I’ve seen range from decent (Cracker Bag) to dire (Harvie Krumpet, the Aussie Forrest Gump). But more important than the book’s specific endorsements is its unexamined reliance on a particular model of “quality” short filmmaking, a model largely shared by festivals such as St Kilda. Mostly, this means fictional narrative (a single documentary, Shannon Sleeth’s The Meat Game, makes the cut). It also means that the discussion of craft in the interviews leans on a common set of terms and assumptions: even the blokey team behind the Tropfest-winning comedy Wilfred joke with appalling ease about structure and sub-text as hardened veterans of the script-editing process.

Above all, the rhetoric of sincerity that sets the critical agenda for Short Site is mirrored by the uniform emphasis which the interviewees place on their desire for emotional connection with an audience. In most cases, the technique used to establish this connection is the familiar one of fictional epiphany: inviting identification with a protagonist, then structuring a narrative around an image that challenges their sense of self. Thus the abortive firework display in Cracker Bag, the rush of sounds that restore memory in Mr Wasinski’s Song, the guy in a dog suit in Wilfred. There’s nothing wrong with the principle, but when taken for granted such dramatic devices harden into cliche as quickly as the terms of praise used by critics—in both cases, a sense of the “personal” being exactly what vanishes.

One of digital video’s mixed blessings has been to allow even rank amateurs to aspire to professional production values, on the whole reinforcing the dominance of industry standards of “craft” and storytelling (video artists and the local Super 8 diehards like Tony Woods seem to be operating in a whole different medium). What’s sacrificed here is the possibility of an aesthetic that’s both more primitive and more expansive, with less attention given to the script as a blueprint for a cohesive world (invented or documentary) and more to the activity of capturing and playing with images. At events like St Kilda, it would be nice to see more patchwork movies—diaries, documents, improvisations—as well as forms of narrative that are neither naturalistic nor locked into established genres (shorts being obvious vehicles for such experiments, as demonstrated, say, in the work of Chantal Akerman). Of course, this kind of play still goes on in Australian cinema—in music video for example, a field several of Short Site’s interviewees have worked in. But the book barely acknowledges the existence of these different options, much less placing them on any kind of map.

In response, the editors might say that Short Site was never meant as a comprehensive index of current Australian short film, or of anything except individual critical “passion.” But it’s precisely this innocence that feels symptomatic of a disease probably familiar to anyone who has been following the mixed fortunes of ACMI, where a commitment to promoting undervalued work becomes indistinguishable from the hype-driven mindset that “celebrates” the already known, and personal feelings are happily found to correlate with success as defined by crowds pleased and awards won. One mystery remains: why didn’t ACMI try releasing a DVD-ROM including all of this material plus the films themselves? As well as demonstrating their enthusiasm for multimedia, from a marketing point of view such a package would surely have ideally supplemented this book, or replaced it.

The 2004 Seoul International Media Art Biennale took its name, Homo Ludens, from a book published in 1938 by Dutch Historian John Huizinga, on the importance of play in human culture. A team of 5 international curators including Liz Hughes, Director of Experimenta Melbourne, put together this impressive exhibition of 45 works exploring the language and structure of games and play. There were 8 Australian pieces included and I was there with Bio-tek Kitchen, a computer game modification made in collaboration with Leon Cmielewski.

The speech by the Director of the Seoul Museum of Art delivered at the opening oozed with pre-dotcom crash rhetoric about the promise of new technologies, whereas the Korean artistic director, Yoon Jin Sup, spoke about the importance of artists bringing the human spirit to modern media and counteracting what he sees as the negative effects of computer game violence. As the line between computer games and military training and recruitment software is becoming increasingly blurred, it is not surprising that war emerged as a strong theme throughout the exhibition.

Eddo Stern, an Israeli artist based in the United States, built a small robot to play pre-programmed scenarios in the game America’s Army. Released by the American military as a recruiting tool, America’s Army was recently cited in the press as the most popular computer game in the history of the medium. In Stern’s installation, the game is housed in a miniature medieval fort reflecting the role-playing Dungeons and Dragons fantasy element that permeates gamer culture. The work’s title, Fort Paladin, references American military base-naming conventions.

Velvet Strike, a project by US artist Anne-Marie Schleiner, began as a response to the war on terrorism, with a competition inviting people to create and submit anti-war graffiti for Counter-Strike, a game allowing the user to play on a team as either terrorist or counter-terrorist. Counter Strike, a modification of the computer game Half-Life, was initially released as free software and quickly became so popular with online gamers that a commercial version was released in 2000, with enthusiastic gamers creating hundreds of new maps or mods for the game. The Velvet-Strike website (www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike) presents a collection of images to be downloaded and used as graffiti on the walls, ceiling and floor of the game’s 3D environment. Schleiner is concerned about the current direction of computer game culture, and writes: “…although briefly showing signs of progress in the late nineteen-nineties, computer games have again been gendered as male fighting zones with so-called ‘realistic’ military sims gaining in popularity. This male militaristic culture coincides with a war climate in the US and other parts of the world where patriotism and military fetishism are on the rise” (catalogue essay, Games, Computerspiele von KunstlerInnen exhibition, Dortmund, Germany, October 2003).
Shilpa Gupta with her untitled installation at Homo Ludens

Shilpa Gupta with her untitled installation at Homo Ludens

In the video installation by Mumbai artist Shilpa Gupta, viewers interact with video loops of a row of young women dressed in various camouflage fashion outfits. Clicking on each figure triggers different movements, such as marching, squatting, jumping and spoken phrases like “don’t interrupt”, “order order shop shop”, “shut up and eat”, “look straight” and “I belong to you.” As the viewer plays, it becomes clear that they are all the same woman—the artist herself. The work explores issues of control and fear, reflecting on the position of young middle class Indian women. Gupta says the concept for the piece was sparked by her observation that camouflage clothing had become hip since the war on terror began.

Back at my hotel in Seoul I watched the US Armed Forces TV station, where camouflage is definitely the preferred fashion of the blonde news presenters. The Korean War ended in 1953, but there are still 37,000 US military personnel stationed in South Korea, and Christmas messages were going out to them with images of troops enjoying time out with their families and giving presents of toy guns to their kids. There were also community announcements encouraging the military to say no to drugs and giving advice on how to cope with suicidal soldiers under one’s command. Apparently suicide is the second biggest killer of American troops, although we weren’t told what the first is.
Telescopes overlooking the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea

Telescopes overlooking the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea

I travelled north from Seoul to visit the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea and followed the tunnel excavated by the North Koreans for a planned invasion of the South in the 1970s. Apparently this and other tunnels were discovered before the North Korean army had a chance to invade. At the border there is a row of binoculars set up on a platform, allowing visitors to gaze across the DMZ to the other side, where the North Koreans have set up a ‘freedom village’ so visitors can see how they live. I put my coin in the slot but my time ran out before I spotted any people in this part of the “axis of evil.” However I watched an eagle soaring over the DMZ, which has become a sanctuary for plants, birds and animals too small to trigger the landmines covering the area.

In a square white room, 8 monitors, facing in, are arranged in a circle in front of a wall marked with pencil lines. The video commences on the first monitor with a hand holding a lead pencil drawing a horizontal line on a white surface from right to left and then on to the next monitor and so on, until it starts all over again on the first monitor. The manner is loosely systematic but the result is quite effective. The drawn lines overlap continuously until the dark lead almost fills the screens.

Conceptualised in 1999 by video artist Poklong Anading, Line Drawing is probably one of the best examples of Filipino multimedia art. Poklong started out as a painter in the mid-90s while studying Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. Before the decade ended, Poklong discovered a medium that could carry his ideas and a new kind of approach through the convergence of what was commonly known as traditional art and the technology already prevailing at that time—video. Poklong explained, “My works based on video started way back in 1997 when one of our art teachers at the university began offering classes on video, and extensively experimented on the medium. We were still using Video-8 back then, and there was no such thing as editing; all we did was cut-to-cut.”

As video components and computer peripherals became more commonly available, Poklong rode with technology’s evolution. Today he knows his computer, shoots video and stills on digital and edits on Adobe Premiere. “The thing about video is that it’s immediate,” says Poklong. “And with digital technology everything seems to be easier to access and manipulate.” Despite the Philippines still being identified as a third world country, technology—particularly in the capital Manila—is almost on par with its more affluent Asian neighbors. Mobile phones are in the hands of almost 30 million Filipinos, IT infrastructure is visible all around and broadband connection is readily available. So, there is no excuse for a Filipino artist to avoid the onslaught of technology and handle modern video and audio electronics.

In Walking Distance (2002), Poklong’s video collaboration with award-winning visual artist Ringo Bunoan, 2 video frames are played side by side with both showing a hip-level shot of a short back and forth walk, one on a narrow art gallery corridor in Manila and the other on a pedestrian overpass in Gwangiou, South Korea. Again, the framing is slightly out of synch but the effect is visually hypnotic just the same. For Poklong, “since the technology is readily available, it has now become an extension of my own ideas that I can easily project to my audience.”

Artist-photographer Wawi Navarroza, who manipulates photographs with the available technology, says, “…multimedia art is just a collective term I use for the different modes of expression I’ve chosen to utilise. I travel across platforms.” She describes herself as a “darkroom baby.” She is in love with the chemicals, the magic, the romance and all the secrets under the red light. Yet, she cannot escape what technology offers her kind of art. “When digital came about, I didn’t abhor it. It was a stranger that I gladly sought out to know. And it was another tool in the bag that opened other possibilities for me in terms of imaging. I stumbled upon this new world of post-production and a strange but familiar world of ‘digital darkroom’ alias Photoshop…I wanted to create an amalgam of analogue and digital. I wanted to bring together the organic beauty of film and the precision and control of digital. I’m still learning the ropes and I guess it will never end. One thing I know is that digital is here to stay and it should be up to something good.”
Tad Ermitaño, Hulikotekan (2002)

The multimedia experience is very obvious in Navarroza’s artworks whose combination of old school photographic style and computer manipulation techniques radiate from a Victorian Gothic backdrop with a wonderfully dark and gloomy inventiveness. “Artists can’t be contained”, she says. “The thirst of the artist for expression often leads to exploration of new ways to articulate meaning, which change with the spirit of the time, and which eventually alters the world-view of an era.”

For established video artist Tad Ermitaño, who has been doing video and sound art for almost 2 decades now, it’s a different and relatively cautious approach. “The term multimedia is a terrible phrase. There is a lot of stuff that would like to call itself multimedia just because the artists use sound and image, even if the channel of interaction is a mouse and a monitor,” says Tad. “I think the word multimedia ought to be tossed out and at least 4 new categories put in its place: audio/sound art, video art, smart art and interactive art. Audio and video art would encompass everything that involves playing looped audio and video, while smart art would involve having the art react to the audience. As in evolution, smart artworks currently aren’t very smart, but I’m sure that could change. Some of the virtual characters in computer games are full-fledged AIs already. Smart art could be the new film: requiring a level of investment and expertise that can only be matched by corporate backed teams of specialists.

“Definitely we should go back to using the word interactive the way the coiners used it…mean(ing) that the audience would be free to create permanent and maybe fertile changes in the work. In this original sense, a folk song or a recipe with a 100 variants is interactive, while a CD-ROM game, however entertaining, is not. This, I think, is a very radical and exciting option, striking hard and deep into and against our ideas of what art is, what artists do, who artists are.”

One of Tad’s independently produced video artworks, Hulikotekan (2002), a 9-layer video feedback of found instruments gradually synchronising was exhibited at the Hong Kong Film Festival in 2002 and was also shown at The Library in Singapore during the 2004 Singapore International Film Festival. His work with experimental sound art group Children of Cathode Ray was also included at the MAAP Festival at the National Institute of Education last October of 2004, also in Singapore.

Poklong and Wawi are a small sample of characteristic multimedia artists in the Philippines, Tad expresses the need for more focus on the genre. “Well, there are a lot of people playing with sound and video, because there are a lot of computers and a lot of pirated software. But there have been almost no shows focusing on it. Nor is anyone writing on it, giving feedback that leads anywhere. Feedback on sound/audio art (like feedback on all art here) is mostly on the “Okey yan pare” (that’s pretty much okay, man) level. The possibilities that a work opens up, the questions it raises etc remain completely unraised/unpursued.” Reasons for this include a lack of a recognised multimedia movement and of an acknowledged venue for the genre. “Aside from places like Big Sky Mind in Cubao and a handful of other art houses, there is really no place to exhibit multimedia arts here in the Philippines,” says Poklong. Wawi has had to rely on pocket exhibitions at alternative spaces, producing them herself or even showing at one night-engagements, right before a band performance, notably her own, The Late Isabel. “So many ideas on the shelf,” she quips.

Nonetheless, the constraints don’t prevent these artists from continuing to find ways to make multimedia central to the structure and evolution of their work. Multimedia art has become a part of a new energy of expression. In the Philippines, as in many parts of the world, it is a crossroads where artists and techies meet, or, as Wawi describes it: “the left and the right hemisphere of the brain collaborating.”

PROOF is an investigation into evidence and truth. While overtly political—not least in the PROOF Overboard title of the cinema program—the line of questioning extends to a tracing of proof: its mediums, trajectories and traces, from the mechanistic to the digital and the phenomenal, drawing in sound, movement, space and light.

In Ross Gibson’s startling, ruminative Street X-Rays, the fixed evidentiary nature of crime photographs gives way. The space is dark, contemplative; 5 screens are arranged in the space. The projections travel through the screens so an imprint registers on the walls; the effect is ghostly. On the screens, archival crime scenes are juxtaposed with recent footage of the same places. Present and past are conflated, layered upon one another, interacting. No one perspective is allowed to dominate: our eyes move between screens, to the ‘X-Rays’, to the sculptural projectors; we move in space as time and place collapse and things become “little pulses in history.” One effect of multiple screens (such as in Jem Cohen’s Chain Times Three, which uses 3 screens and makes you wonder how you ever watched a film on one) is to highlight the artificiality of the fixed perspective. This is extended in Gibson’s work: the use of small screens arranged in a spatial matrix creates a kind of living space. And there is an emphasis on darknesses which are to be imagined into, that are engendering. When I entered Street X-Rays, with its use of light and incantatory sound, I was reminded of Mizoguchi’s film Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), not in terms of content, but in the clamouring, haunting forces drawing the present and past into an akashic vortex (the akashic record is a Sanskrit term which refers to an etheric field or realm where everything, past, present and future, exists, simultaneously, as a permanent record)

The collapsing of past and present also emerges in Nizar Jabour’s Greetings from Iraq. After exile in northern Iraq, detention in Iran, escapes, arrests and 7 years waiting for an answer from UNHCR at the Pakistan-Iran border, Jabour was accepted as an Iraqi refugee by Australia in 1997. After 17 years in exile, having been declared dead by the authorities, he returns to Iraq. We watch as his father sings a song; his son is still alive. In the streets there are palm trees, rubble, people walking on their way to another city. The footage is intercut with family snapshots, those icons of family unity. Here is the pain of exile. It is also a place of censorship, a place in which Australia has gone to war, but whose people (especially victims of the war and refugees) have never been shown in the media. What’s the danger in seeing the truth of another place, of people? Surely a pertinent question for a government that rode to victory by re-captioning a picture of children struggling in open seas.

Questions of evidence and the right to know arise explicitly in Jeff Riley’s arresting Obstruction, a montage of scenes involving obstruction of the camera: often a hand across the lens. The camera as witness is extended to the camera as threat and the relationship between subject and camera becomes very loaded, even scary. A logger, having picked up and thrown an environmentalist, turns his wrath onto the camera, and by extension, us. A police officer yawns as he removes his identification badge before heading into one of the most violent protests Melbourne has known. Obstruction records damning evidence, not least of all the testimony of obstruction itself.

While Uluru might be the centre of our aspirations regarding tourism and national identity, Woomera, having hosted missiles and atomic testing as well as a detention centre, seems to register our national fears. This is the point Peter Hennessey makes in My Woomera Project (What do you fear?). The Ikara missile—developed in the 60s to be launched at distant submarines—is re-created in pale wood; but unlike the contained miniature models, this re-creation dominates. Monitors feature a static image of the missile overlaid with voices in languages such as Arabic, creating a complex sense of the feared expressing their fears, drawing on Woomera as detention centre, but circling the place of contention. We never see Woomera, we don’t know if the voices are those of refugees: it’s unsettling and elusive, circling this island that, from its deep heart, has always feared threats from the sea.

The behaviour of information, truth and proof emerges as phenomenal: its interactivity; its replication of living systems. In Adam Donovan’s beautiful Heterodyning Cage sound and image movement are generated through interaction with exhibition visitors, and the 3D images move almost imperceptibly, as if breathing. This idea of information being physical and phenomenal is also explored in Paul Rodgers’ The Spectrum Chart and the Spectrum Drum, which traces normally unseen electromagnetic pollution. Rodgers provides evidence: a fluorescent tube is lit up under powerlines, shortwave radio picks up signals that seem discarded in the ether. The spectrum drum underscores this culture of waste, constructed out of discarded materials. Like John Hansen’s Senju-Kannon Buddha Bot No.1—a gorgeous buddha that looks like it’s from the set of Dr Who, with moving wooden and metal arms holding defunct data storage—it sits on the border between mechanistic and technological. In both pieces there’s a strong sense of excess and multiplication. Hansen’s Buddha’s face is supplanted by faces made from contemporary facial creation software comical in its already-dated look. The intruding faces effectively evoke maya and proliferation (Maya is the Vedantic term which speaks of the unreality of matter).

Proliferation is also manifest in Sarah Waterson and Kate Richards’ sub_scapePROOF. Here, political rhetoric is spliced with footage from confessional shows and treated to effects that rupture: Dr Phil’s are you honest with her? sits alongside one of George Bush’s speeches. The turbulence of truth and untruth—making, a texture of bombardment and disruption, creates a chaos that we are familiar with: patterns arise and with them a deeply political questioning of rhetoric.

This immanent critique where the movement and meaning embody each other, and which can move along a line of questioning from the phenomenal and philosophical to the political and playful, shows us what ACMI can do so well. It should also be considered that the hybrid arts of the moving image may be the only forms which can represent our world in this way, something I hope our funding bodies are considering carefully.

PROOF, curator Mike Stubbs, Screen Gallery, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Dec 9 2004-Feb 13 2005

Pink-themed, multi-layered, and at times violently noisy, Mechalust is a small international exhibition of new media works exploring “robot love/automated lovers/machine desires” packed tightly into an empty Fortitude Valley shopfront space and the IMA screening room over the first 3 days of the Straight Out of Brisbane (SOOB) festival. Curated by Thea Baumman, artists from Melbourne, Tokyo and California utilised 3D animation, slides, sculpture and photography to interrogate and rework specific narrative conventions, identities and fan-informed emotions within Otaku (anime lover) culture, first person shooter gaming and the broader anime culture.

In Skinpack 2000, Melbourne-based artist Linda Erceg has modified the Quake 2 game engine using pornographic shareware and deconstructive editing techniques to satirically overplay the violent, sexualised agencies and objectives of first person shooter games. Modded avatars like Crack Whore, Chastity Marks and Nude Chick wear clichéd buxom nude skins, all pulled from Quake 2 fan-sites, crouch, duck, and splay their fannies in long episodes of masturbatory gun-play. The codes of subjectivity in first person shooter genres are further disturbed: the ‘I’ identifying gun barrel close-up is often absent; shooting between all players is unnervingly put off for long periods; and when shots are let fly, killing is slow, nonsensical (moreso because of the viewer’s uncertain orientation) and jackhammer-loud against the eerie silence of the game/gallery environment. Meanwhile, close-ups and disorienting points of view voyeuristically immerse the viewer in the action (or its absence). If you hang around long enough, despite the lack of narrative connection between various players, every girl eventually dies in a naked heap of clunky, low-polygonal-count reality. A glitchy and unnervingly ambiguous all-girl, go-nowhere act, this highly choreographed work throws into stark relief some of the more disturbing codes of immersion and performance embedded in First Person Shooter game culture.

Mechalust is about machines, but it is also about artists themselves, and their passions—the kinds of identities that are forged from personal histories spent producing and consuming virtual pop-cultures. SomeGuy’s 8 Bit E-Motion Comik is a self-published net-based geek’s soapie (www.wearethestrange.com -expired). Heavily plumbing the visual styles and romantic narrative conventions of anime works like Battle Angel Alita, this Californian artist’s self-confessed fantasy girl, ‘Blue Wander’, travels through a strange robotic underworld, and over 9(!) melodramatic episodes, escapes the clutches of Star Trek-style robot foes and monstrous n’er-do-wells on her journey towards self discovery and true love.

Gaunt, widescreen shots of the blue-black haired heroine drive a somewhat patchy narrative and are overlaid with a dissonant Commodore 64 soundtrack and eerie, cliched subtitles, like: “Someday you will find a voice and sing a beautiful song that will change the whole universe.” It’s awkwardly clunky, amateur and mishmashy—part comic, part cartoon of 3D, 2D and claymation techniques—but it’s also richly pop-referential, beautifully drawn in parts, and sincerely affecting.

Also very much within the Automated Lovers’ theme was Tetsuo Takahashi’s G-Spot-Pleasure of a Japanimation robot. Tetsuto positions himself as a self-reflexive Otaku, making independent erotic art for mecha-Otaku’s (lovers of anime with a particular penchant for robot mechanics). “I want to find the G-spot of mecha-Otaku, and why they love Japanimation robots like Gundam. The study of mecha-Otaku is also the study of myself, because I grew up in Otaku culture.” Exhibited across 3 horizontally aligned projection screens, G-Spot consists of hundreds of freeze-frame still images of a single, intricately rendered Japanimation robot made by the artist with 3D CG software. Perhaps Maya? Each image closes in on body parts in masterful detail, unashamedly emphasising the masculine capabilities and aesthetic beauty of head, torso, sword-wielding fists and a massive flailing penis. Also within the slide collection are partially rendered sketches of a robot in development. It’s incredibly detailed work; tiny screws, shadows, and reflections of other body parts are visible even upon the metallic surfaces of his body. Collectively, the 3 carousels of images provide a disorganised narrative montage of swordplay and general might, in which the robot finally masturbates to climax all over himself and then commits harikari.

The ‘Otaku’ label is derisory in Japan, and the artist’s own mechalust is hardly the norm, let alone an acknowledged meme of discussion in Otaku culture. But Tetsuo’s artist statement goes beyond reclaiming words and divesting the Otaku of self-loathing, towards a revolutionary homoeroticisation and politicisation of current forms of mecha-Otaku subjectivity: “After (the robot’s) destruction it is reborn. To let the Otaku see the world in new ways, we need to crush and reconstruct the Otaku’s conservative nature with our own hands. This era demands a new breed of Otaku. Otaku must be reincarnated as the New type. Otaku, wake up now!” The choice to exhibit such masterful, high-tech artistry depicting such antiquated technology is what makes this work most interesting. Instructional, clinical, masculine, and emphasising a moment of past production, the slide show format intimidatingly frames the artist as a master of CG art, and exaggerates the masculine exhibitionism inherent within the work itself.

The Straight Out of Brisbane program gives equal importance to both the critical discussion of artists’ practices in context and the display of finished works. This combination of skills workshops, panels, and exhibitions in temporary galleries worked well in packaging Kirsty Boyle’s multi-layered practice. Her ‘Girltron’ photographic prints Dolls in Space made less rewarding viewing as art objects in themselves but the premise is clever fun—a recombinatory gluing together of ‘boys toy’ body parts (robot), with girl toy’s heads (dolls) as part of a practice that the artist conspicuously labels ‘toy hacks.’ (Additional toyhack sculptures were also constructed by workshop attendees during the festival, and added to the Mechalust exhibition space.) It’s a very material, feminine and tactile redefinition of hacking which, interestingly, entirely bypasses coding—that back-end, practice/habitat of electronics and computer programming overrun by masculine forces. For festival-goers who managed to attend the Mechalust-related panel and workshops, Kirsty’s background in Linux ladies user groups and her anthropological studies into robot cultures like Karakuri added important layers of meaning to her art practice, and to the exhibition as a whole.

Mechalust, curator Thea Baumann; TC Beirne Centre, IMA, Visible InK (Brisbane City Council); 2004 Straight Out Of Brisbane; December 5-8, 2004

The Anne Landa Exhibition + Award is the first in a biennial series of exhibitions, each with an acquisitive award of $25,000. It’s also the first significant award in Australia for moving image and new media work. The award was established in honour of Anne Landa, a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales who died in 2002. As Anna Munster’s talk at the January 24 meeting in Sydney held to discuss the Australia Council’s axing of the New Media Arts Board suggested, the juxtaposition of the arrival of this major new media art award and the demise of the board that has had nurtured such work was deeply ironic.

Craig Walsh’s wonderfully witty DVD projection, Contested space, is adroitly installed into the architecture of the main entrance of the gallery (see cover) suggesting an institution infested with giant cockroaches on a horror film scale along with more metaphysical speculations about art and nature. The pleasure of unexpected transformation and the revelations afforded by scale are also to be had in Peter Hennessey’s giant 1:1 plywood recreation of Voyager 2, My Voyager, amusingly installed in the foyer below Walsh’s swarming insects.

In the gallery space dedicated to the Landa exhibition, the first encounter is with a vertical wall screen full of more cockroaches, providing a gruesome level of intimate inspection on the way to Van Sowerwine’s child-scale doll’s house for Play with me. This installation looks quaint until you squeeze in and activate the animation of a little girl, triggering terrible acts of self-mutilation which no amount of panicky mousing can halt. Fellow gallery-goers peer accusingly at you through the doll’s house windows and you move quickly on to Shaun Gladwell’s big-screen Woolloomooloo (night), a contemplative, slightly slo-mo’d video of a Capoeira practitioner performing in a petrol station, as if that’s what you do in the everyday Gladwell world.

David Rosetsky’s Untouchable features 3 video monitors elegantly integrated into a stylish piece of display furniture on which 3 domestic duo scenarios are played out in 3 different rooms, sometimes sharing the same dialogue and, all at once and whimsically, a dance. The pleasures of these short film narratives (essentially monologues, but whose and about whom?), the video clip verve, the challenge of adding up the 3 experiences into one and choosing where to direct your gaze make for an entertaining engagement in the art of interpretation, sharply heightening the sense of one’s subjectivity.

Guy Benfield’s Exploring pain (electric wheelchair boogaloo), is a large-scale action painting work which entails video documentation of its creation onsite in the gallery. It’s a work that afficionados of the form regard as their Landa winner. Peter Hennessey’s Golden record (Fitzroy remix), a companion piece for My Voyager, is a video animation of the craft eerily breaking up in outer space while bland messages from Australians of various cultural backgrounds are broadcast to whoever might be listening out there. The Rosetsky, Walsh and Van Sowerwine works looked like the chief contenders for the award with Rosetsky taking out the big prize.

The award and the exhibition raised a few queries among video and new media art watchers. With only one work that could be called interactive and given the absence of other new media art forms, was the show really about new media art? Why wasn’t there a new media art curator/artist among the selectors? Certainly as an illustration of the current varieties of ‘moving image’ art facilitated by new technologies, it succeeded, and that’s part of the new media adventure, and Rosetsky is widely regarded as an innovator in the new media art scene. It is, however, to be hoped that future selections will move further into the growing new media terrain.

Anne Landa Award + Exhibition, selectors Wayne Tunnicliffe, Juliana Engeberg, Edmund Capon; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Dec 2, 2004-Jan 23, 2005

SAWUNG GALING kembalinya Legenda (BLACK ROOSTER the legend returns), Bandung, Indonesia Tagor Siagian

Sawung Galing depicts a wild and fantastic world where despots sow confusion and cultivate prejudices amongst the people to maintain their power and justify war. Into this world is born Joko Berek, a young girl raised as a boy, who with the help of her magical black rooster reconciles the warring kingdoms of Fazzar and Crazzar. Sawung Galing (Black Rooster) was adapted from the popular Indonesian Sawung Galing myth from East Java, an inspirational story about the struggle against Dutch colonial rule. I was immediately attracted to the story because I saw it essentially as a critique of leadership. The Sidetrack production maintains the mythic dimension but develops new angles on the story.

Sawung Galing had its first performance in September 2004 in a fallow rice field beside the village of Nitiprayan. It was rehearsed for 6 weeks in Yogyakarta (Central Java), mainly at a wonderful place called Joglu Jago where we ate, slept and rehearsed. In the final 2 weeks of rehearsal we moved to Nitiprayan on the outskirts of Yogya where we were able to rehearse and at the same time trial the show. It was there that the production really took shape. Each night we would rehearse and up to 200 people would turn up to watch, giving us invaluable feedback and practice at finding the tempo and energy necessary to make the show work.

The performance team comprised 12 performers and 5 musicians lead by Sawung Jabo, my co-creator and musical director, plus production and support personnel. Six of us were Australians. Rehearsals started at 6am with voice and choreographic work and training in Pencak Silat (an Indonesian martial arts form which we used as the basis for the show’s fight scenes) lead by our fight director Pepen. There would be a short break for sarapan pagi (breakfast) and work on the play would resume until makan siang (lunch) at 1pm. In the hottest part of the day we would rest and then rehearse from 4pm through to prayer time at 6pm, returning to work for a further 2 hours from 7.30pm. The day would end with a half-hour yoga recuperation session.

Getting Sawung Galing to its opening performance took around 4 years. It began with a casual remark from Sawung Jabo as he was exiting the Sidetrack Studio Theatre following a performance of The Promised Woman; “How would you like to make a show like that for Indonesians in Australia?” I remember replying something to the effect that I would love to make a show with him, but not an Indonesian version of The Promised Woman. It would have to be something different. I had no idea what that was but we agreed to discuss it.

There is always a degree of audacity in making a completely new show. There is never enough money, never enough time, and a deadline is set which then conditions everything. You start with a vision splendidly contained in a series of ‘what ifs?’—expansive, heady, glorious, perfect. The rest is a story of compromises. Sawung Galing was indeed an audacious project seriously compromised by shortages of money and time. But it was also a work in which a collaborative team from Australia and Indonesia defied compromise and extraordinary difficulties to turn what should have been a creative development project into a major performance that toured to 5 cities in 2 weeks.

When we started rehearsals we knew we only had enough money to get the first show on. We had been living with this awful fact for sometime. Back in April when I had gone to Indonesia to cast the show and obtain real costings on the technical equipment and tour, I almost cancelled the project. The deficit seemed impossible. We were more than $50,000 short. The expensive part was touring this large production to 5 cities. Even though the initial aim of the project was simply to develop and trial a show, we couldn’t cancel it as we had already obtained large amounts of funding and sponsorship by promising a tour across Java.

One very late night in Bandung at Rumah Nusantara, the arts space managed by our production manager Tompel Witono, Jabo, Tompel and I talked over the problem until the early hours of the morning. The later it got the more pessimistic I grew. Then Kurt Kaler, an American who grew up in Indonesia and who now runs a music production business, joined the discussion. “Have you got enough money to get the first show up?” he asked. “Yes if we cut the rehearsal period to about 7 weeks, we could have an opening night, but that’s it” I said. “That’s enough” he said, “you can do it, push ahead, this is Indonesia, the place of magic and miracles, all you need is faith and courage and to find a few more sponsors.” Kurt’s enthusiasm and conviction that others could be found who shared the desire to foster a living example of Indonesians and Australians working together somehow made it all seem possible. So we resolved to push on.

And eventually the sponsorship came. Perhaps it was a miracle or maybe it was that the show had something important to say about the world, articulated with energy, joy and laughter by a joint Indonesian-Australian team. It was certainly also the product of the relentless search for sponsors by Jabo and Tompel, Kurt and Sue Piper, using all their contacts and local knowledge to find companies who wanted to share in the making of Sawung Galing.

The night of the first show in Nitiprayan was certainly magical. The audience arrived early, sat on the ground, stood, or climbed onto what ever they could to catch a glimpse of the 2 hour, 20 minute show. Later Heri Ong, the village leader and main organiser of the Nityprayan festival, told me he estimated the crowd to be about 3,000 people. He was ecstatic with its success. I have always dreamed of theatre drawing large community audiences, but the huge crowd that night, made up of people from all age groups and walks of life exceeded even my wildest dreams.

We then took what was a show of circus proportions on the road; 5 trucks and 2 buses journeyed to Solo, Surabaya, Bandung and Jakarta. With the exception of Jakarta we played to huge audiences. This was especially so in Surabaya (the home of the original story) where it was estimated that the audience exceeded 4,000. In Jakarta the show played to a meagre 600 or so, as the performance space was a sports field only a few hundred metres from the Australian Embassy, which had been bombed exactly a week before. That night, the then President Megawati decided to mark the tragedy with a visit to the Australian Embassy site, causing a traffic jam of Jakarta proportions and leaving us with a comparatively small audience, half of whom were police, the bomb squad and our own security people (all “black belt” members of our fight director’s Silat group).

We started the show late, partly in the hope that more audience would find their way through the traffic, partly for security reasons. By the time the show started the only people who seemed to be taking their job seriously were the Silat group; the bomb squad had relaxed and were enjoying the show. Clearly Sawung Galing had become community theatre of a different kind.

So stage one is complete. Now we have the challenge of getting Sawung Galing to Australia.

Sidetrack Performance Group in association with Wot Cross-cultural Synergy, SAWUNG GALING kembalinya Legenda (BLACK ROOSTER, the legend returns), writer/director Don Mamouney, musical director Sawung Jabo; performers Sawung Jabo, Fajar Satriadi, Gusjur Mahesa, Sri Erita, Desiandari, Nunung Deni Puspitasari, R S W Lawu P.U., Agus Margiyanto, Anton Obelix Triyono, Wrachma Rachladi Adji, Yoyojewe, Indrasitas, Donny Sawung, Abdul Syukur Paembonan, Sept 4-16, 2004, various venues, Java, Indonesia

I embarked on a short visit to Manila in late November from Perth, a prelude to a project called the life and wandering times of arnulfo tikb-ang, a performance work-in-progess. The purpose of the visit was to track and bring together people I had not seen for many years—people who worked closely with my father, a piano-maker, who passed away 20 years ago. Taking my video documentation and recorded conversations along with old photographs, personal objects and mementos from the past, I packed my gear in the middle of a familiar, raging typhoon and embarked on a flight to Singapore for Future of Imagination 2.

Coordinated and directed by Lee Wen and Jason Lim, Future of Imagination, initially staged at the Substation in 2003, was re-launched as Singapore’s first international performance art event in December 2004. This ambitious 5 day event aimed to provide an expanded platform for the revival of performance art. It was an inspiring undertaking, a creative collaboration made possible by the generosity of the local artist community and its growing support network of students and volunteers.

Bringing together artists from 14 countries in Europe, North America and South East Asia, FOI2 was a welcome opportunity for local audiences to experience and actively engage with a diversity of practices of live and time-based art. It was also a community celebration, a milestone marking the lifting of an effective ban on performance art through the no-funding policy of the state—the punitive action imposed by the National Arts Council for 10 years following an overblown and sensationalised attack by the conservative press on the pubic-hair snipping performance by Joseph Ng in 1994.

Staged in Chapel Gallery at Sculpture Square, a late 19th century Methodist church, there couldn’t be a more fitting venue for the resurrection of faith in this marginalised artform. In his welcome, Lee Wen improvised an illustration of the state of cultural affairs in Singapore with regards to live art. Holding a benevolent looking, soft white-haired grandma doll in his right hand and a rather cheeky looking red devil with a hammer in the other he randomly picks victims from the congregation, pounds his prey on the head, recoils and squeezes the wheezing, mocking doll against his cheek. The devil takes on many victims from the assembly, each one submissively accepting its blows. A religious style rant follows about an archaic obscenity law in the Penal Code designed “to protect the man on the street”, on which the restrictions on performance are based. Just who is this man? Lee backs off, jokingly blaming the chapel for his behaviour. Nervous laughter. Opening night was a curiously ambivalent but intensely engaging affair, an occasion for jubilation, but the policing of performance persists.

In background: Lee Wen, Jason Lim

Lee collaborates with Jason Lim on a symbolic hair-shaving, an historical rewind, refreshing the audience’s memory of the infamous pubic-hair-snipping incident. With an electric clipper they take turns to shave each other’s heads while 3 teenage performers dance to high-octane hip hop, the sound of the clipper powerfully amplified. Then Lim burns joss sticks in a trance-like, body purification ritual, running the bundle over his body, with only the groin escaping the burning tips. Lee takes a bird from a cage, hobbles it with a string, tying leg to neck. The bird frantically flutters, heads up towards the beams overhead and falls exhausted to the floor. Lim shaves his exposed body forcing the clippers into his skin. An angry young woman emerges from the audience with scissors and cuts the string. The performance is aborted. Lee Wen regains his composure and asks the woman to complete the removal of the string before she releases the bird outside. It was a disconcerting and poignant moment as I too was dislodged from my own role—I had been asked earlier by the artist to assist in cutting the string, on cue, just before this intervention occurred. What was the performance about now? I was aware that it had a very personal meaning for Wen about the suicide of a very close friend a month earlier, something more than the issue of censorship and ‘the man on the street.’ More accusations dogged the artist that night, prompting him to post an open email to explain and contextualise the work.

Ironically, no one intervenes as Lim’s skin reddens from his aggressive shaving but the collective relief is palpable when the clipper is turned off. He stretches out on the floor like a model in a photo session, applies waxing strips and rips the remaining hair from his body. The performance ends.

While the opening performance focused on issues of censorship, freedom of expression and state power, Silent Logistics explored the dynamics of power between individuals in personal relationships. Performing a series of repetitive actions, Canadian partners Julie Andree T and Dominic Gagnon defined the central area of the chapel as a temporal stage, cordoning it with elastic lines stretched mid-level between walls. The domestic setting included kitchen objects, a water-filled plastic bucket, a glass mixing bowl, a brown paper bag, flour, a tray of eggs and 3 durian fruits, the smell distinctly reminding us of the season, 2 more buckets, newspaper strewn under the table, and an empty chair nearby. In sustained silence, the protagonists mirror the other’s gestures, position their mouths against the elastic line and walk towards each other. The illusion of the squared-off area is broken as the lines stretch and literally form a cross. The performers lean forward and fall together, shoulder to shoulder—the stretched cross-line presenting an illusion of two bodies suspended in space.

A series of actions, including being slapped while holding eggs in the mouth, is followed by the man covering his head in pink slush from a bucket while the woman splits open the durian fruit and cups the flesh under her shirt, dramatically enlarging her breasts before immersing her head in the pink liquid. The pair return to their opening positions, the elastic line in their mouths, and suddenly and aggressively lunge at each other with an intense animal cry. The display gradually becomes a sustained, passionate kiss, with the two pink heads amazingly morphing as a single entity, reminding us of Magritte’s iconic surrealist painting The Lovers, with the sludge substituting for the cloth. They slowly manouver a release from the locked kiss and pivot their heads in opposite directions while remaining balanced together, the crossed lines still in tight tension. They slip and fall. A cigarette is lit. The act is consumated. The intensity of this piece draws its power from the multitude of metaphors animated in this temporal space.

A number of works from the region were participatory and playful. Using different flavoured icy poles, China’s He Cheng Yao instructs participants through an interpreter to join her in an intimate game of sucking, later asking them to write a description of the experience, which is then projected onto a wall. The effect was relaxing, animated by teasing, physical humour and shared laughter. Yuan Mor’o (Philippines) offered ritualised walking on a narrow path in a maze-like floor mandala made from rice seeds before throwing a spherical object into the surrounding space. A similar strategy was deployed by emerging Singaporean artist Dennis Tan with his dust-collecting performance inside the chapel. This later developed into a participatory walk around the physical architecture of Sculpture Square, climbing and traversing surrounding sidewalks, footpaths, walls and the rooftop ledge. Ray Langenbach’s (Malaysia/USA) engaging work took the form of an illustrated academic lecture, in drag, on information systems as the apparatus of state hegemony and the way transgressions of performance art are assimilated back into the system. He demonstrated this by re-enacting Vincent Leow’s urine drinking action (a precursor of the 1994 Ng incident), in which Leow would ask the volunteers from the audience to go on stage and urinate in a plastic cup which he/they would later drink. This was a performative illustration of the feedback response to the body, a recontextualisation of performative, critical art practise within a politically conservative state.

Sakiko Yamaoka (Japan) performed a mesmerising 4 part action, a poetic meditation about the cycles of time, about permanence and change. Grains of salt crushed between her hands fell onto a mirror on the floor. In the repetitive passing of water between 2 vessels, a basin and a cardboard box, until the water finally disappers, the box is reduced to mushy pulp. A brown bag is cradled until it breaks open and pours out its contents—granules of seeds, beads, and marbles, scattering and colliding in all directions. The final segment was a poetic orchestration of previous elements with repetitive cycles of emptying, falling, crushing and retrieval as Sakiko climbs up and down a tall ladder, emptying her coat pockets of apples and descending to retrieve the fallen objects. The higher she goes the greater the battering until the apples too are reduced to pulp. The act of watching became a highly pleasurable experience, engaging all my senses in a heightened awareness of detail, colour, texture, movement.

I had a similar experience with the powerful durational work of Alastair Maclennan (Northern Ireland) who performed in the small windowless, air-conditioned space of the Lower Gallery. Two hospital beds are littered with animal body parts. Rows of heads, claws and feet from chickens, pigs, rabbits and fish as well as well as burnt limbs from plastic dolls are neatly arranged for forensic examination. Known for his early works commemorating people who have died from the political conflict in Northern Ireland, Maclennan invites us to reflect on the fragility of life and our own mortality. Clad in black balaclava, trenchcoat and a pile of 6 bowler hats on his head, the performer slowly moves like a masked shadow haunting the walls of this space, fixing a propped fishing rod, arranging upturned hats, filling them up with burnt debris. The overpowering smell of dead flesh is punctuated by the haunting squawking of animal cries. The audience was allowed to view the work between other performances in the chapel. Experiencing it at various intervals created a disconcerting perceptual dislocation as the earlier images were later recreated in the opposite corner of the space, the slow and suspended replay creating a state of temporal confusion.

Roddy Hunter’s (UK) Joy of Life was similarly structured in a gruelling 8 hour duration. While MacLennan used ‘mirror-objects’ as fixed markers via which the slow moving masked body navigates, Hunter employed life-size ‘mirror-image’ video projections of himself. Standing near one corner of the room (with the words “Joy of Life” spray-painted on his right), he faces a video camera, the shot projected to the opposite wall by the other corner, juxtaposed with the same words. The presence of a blinking camera makes it appear as if this is occurring in real time. Hunter slowly raises his arms at intervals, which also appears to be a time measuring device. But the projected image betrays our perception as it is not synchronised with the live action. Recorded earlier, it runs as a loop accompanied by the artist’s soliloquy about the future of the imagination.

Future of Imagination is a significant development in contemporary art practice not only in Singapore but also in the South East Asian region. While performance art has been around since the 1960s, its recent popularity may be attributed to the parallel socio-cultural and political climate of the region. A significant number of regional artists at FOI have also been actively engaged in the advocacy of political and social awareness in their respective countries regarding issues on human rights, the environment, AIDS and globalisation.

After reassembling and returning a borrowed piano and naming and finding a temporary home for Foi, the beautiful rooster who assisted me in my storytelling event, it was time to pack my gear and head back to Perth with inspiring memories and stories shared with new friends and with the many creative people who made Future of Imagination a profoundly rewarding and enriching experience.

Future of Imagination 2, An International Performance Event, curator-performers Lee Wen (Singapore/Japan), Jason Lim (Singapore), performers Alastair Maclennan (N. Ireland), Alwin Reamillo (Australia/Philippines), Andrée Weschler (Singapore/ France), Ben Denham (Australia), Cassandra Schultz (Singapore/ Australia), Dennis Tan (Singapore), Dominic Gagnon (Canada), He Cheng Yao (China), Irma Optimist (Finland), Iwan Wijono (Indonesia), Jeremy Hiah (Singapore), Julie Andrée T (Canada), Juliana Yasin (Singapore), kAI Lam (Singapore), Lynn Lu (Singapore) Marilyn Arsem (U.S.A.), Padungsak Kotchasumrong (Thailand), Ray Langenbach (U.S.A./Malaysia) Roddy Hunter (UK), Sakiko Yamaoka (Japan), Yuan Mor’o Ocampo (Philippines); Sculpture Square, Singapore, Dec 8-12, 2004, http://www.foi.sg/

As 2004 drew to a close, a producer of The Producers claimed that the show’s success was partly the result of an increasing conservatism in local audiences. Australians, apparently, “want a safe bet…they’re not particularly interested in experimenting and going to new things.” Anyone who attended anything besides The Producers last year (and there are a few) will know that 2004 wasn’t nearly as “safe” as this statement would imply. Audiences were challenged in a variety of ways, and a number of events in the latter half of the year specifically called into question the various relationships possible between audience and performer. Blowback, by not yet it’s difficult, asked viewers to make sense of a dystopian future defined by recognisable media images; the Little Asia touring dance festival Double Happiness brought to light the complex expectations contemporary audiences bring to movement-based performance; and La Mama’s Season of Explorations included works harking back to the “audience reflexive” days of 1970s experimental theatre.

A Season of Explorations

A Season of Explorations is La Mama’s annual mini-festival of works-in-progress, experimental off-cuts or embryonic fragments of future projects. The proceedings kicked off with an audacious happening by director Laurence Strangio, taking the text of Peter Handke’s Kaspar as its launch point. The original drama, the first full-length work from the enfant terrible of 1970s European anti-theatre, is a confounding riff on the power of language—how words speak their speaker. In Strangio’s production, the seating lay scattered across the space, chairs on their side, graffitied in chalk, missing legs, backs, safety. Po-faced actors wearing sunglasses stood vacantly amongst the audience. I thought I’d nabbed a secure vantage point, then turned to discover that the ‘wall’ behind me had risen to showcase a blank-faced Kaspar slowly peeling fruit. If there is no “I” outside of language, there is equally no safe place outside of Kaspar’s performance itself. To view it is to move within it.

The historical Kaspar Hauser appeared in Nürnberg in 1828 equipped with a single sentence (“I want to be a rider like my father.”) In Handke’s text his phrase is the more evocative “I want to be somebody like somebody was once” and for a time this is the only phrase spoken, incessantly. Initially, the effect is that of stumbling into a novice drama class, actors playing with a line for no purpose other than to explore its phonic potential. We are given no frame within which to interpret the utterance.

Amidst the linguistic chaos, Strangio himself darts to and fro scribbling notes for future performances, a surrogate scribe aping each audience member’s own process of interpretation and uneasy participation. Strangio has already proven himself a strong director with works such as Portrait of Dora, Alias Grace and a gripping recent adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. Here we see him in action, and indeed the overall impression provided by Kaspar is of watching the creative process in media res, as it flowers, unpolished and unpredictable.

If Kaspar conjures phantoms of 70s experimental theatre, Penny Machinations summons up more distant shades. La Mama’s theatre, courtyard and carpark are dressed like a faded carnival sideshow, curtained booths hiding different performances. Audiences buy tokens for each booth, choosing their own route for the evening. I sat in on a poker game featuring dialogue cribbed from popular songs, answered a telephone that offered a garbled rant from a tourist in India, and watched a couple fight over dinner (I chose “Dance” from the menu, and so this piece was movement-based). For each performance, the audience consisted of a single person; the confrontation with actors in an unknown setting created a wonderful thrill of fear. Penny Machinations, developed by Telia Nevile and Matt Kelly, turned out to be a fertile and highly entertaining experience. With many versions of each performance available, I found myself returning to Kelly’s Car Tape, performed by Bron Batten and Kate Summer. From the back seat of a car, I watched 2 performers play out a ritualistic gestural pattern of everyday driving, accompanied by the mix-tape I’d chosen. For my second visit, I chose the “Bloopers and Out-takes” reel, and was given a show of mistakes and mishaps ‘deleted’ from the original.

Blowback

In an article in The New York Times, the late Susan Sontag noted that since the advent of the camera, wars have come to be known primarily by iconic images which reduce the complexities of conflict to simple, mediated moments. “Photo-graphs,” she wrote, “have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events,” and it is this repository of images, the “Western memory museum” which underscores the political potency of the most recent production from the increasingly prolific not yet it’s difficult (NYID).

Like many NYID events, Blowback situates its audience in the middle of things: upon entering the performance space, we are ushered into a live television studio ringed with video cameras, monitors, actors making small talk and a mixing desk/production HQ issuing orders through amped mics and headsets. As cameras are positioned, we find our own faces flashing up on screens, or are repositioned in our seats by PAs according to gaffered marks lining the floor.

Eventually, the ‘show’ begins. We’re here for a live taping of the final episode of TV soap A World of Our Own. The first scene features lead cast members Scott and Charlene (Todd Macdonald and Roslyn Oades) trying to escape the confines of suburban domesticity to strike out and discover a life less ordinary. Then things change. Across the space a prisoner is led, naked but for a makeshift hood. He is beaten, humiliated. More stories emerge, each as jarring. A military officer educates her junior through a cruel exercise in power; a media-starved prisoner submits himself to a sympathetic interrogator; a cheerleader is brutally questioned by a monstrous, nearly silent figure. Slowly, cross-currents appear suggesting that what we are viewing is a future Australia dominated by imperial rule, a world in which identity has become fused with the culture of our oppressors. Our cheerleader thinks she is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it’s impossible to tell where Scott and Charlene end, and the actors portraying them begin.

Lost in this funhouse, there are repeated attempts by the characters to “break through” into another, less mediated reality. A recurrent motif is that of the body slamming against a white door—several characters launch themselves frontally into these frames with a bone-jarring impact. The visceral, then, would appear to be offered as one form of escape from a disconnected reality, but this is soon problematised as an exercise in masochistic futility. The interrogation victim who is thrown against the white square by her captor and viciously raped is gradually revealed to be her tormentor’s accomplice, re-enacting her own victimisation as part of an education program for the colonised.

But if Blowback is damning of the image’s power, it is not unambiguously so. It comes as a surprise to find the various strands of the narrative converging on a single piece of grainy video footage depicting trees alongside a bush highway. A number of characters are hunting down this image, and it appears to hold a kind of key to the psychic liberation of the people in question. The video was apparently shot via a camera placed within Scott’s eye, and has been coded virus-like in the computer networks of the oppressing regime.

To offer this dreamy, near-silent panoramic piece of footage as the catalyst for some sort of change, however, is a disconcerting twist in the prevailing logic of Blowback. Does it suggest the possibility of a more “authentic” simulation? Is it an ironic folding back of our hopes for a cliched, Truman Show door out of the mediated sphere? Or is it a sudden re-emergence of a Romantic innocence which can once again find meaning purely in what is represented, regardless of its mode of representation?

To add to this complex and troubling conclusion, we are finally left with a short sequence of non-diegetic dumbshow re-enactments of several iconic images from last year in Iraq. As the cast recreated the degraded humanity revealed in the photos from Abu Ghraib, I was left unable to reconcile the horrifying power of this image with the preceding denunciation of that same power. As a postmodern meditation on contemporary war as simulacrum, Blowback produces a commentary quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, suitably composed of incommensurate elements that cannot be reduced to a single statement. Yet from another standpoint, such as that of the post-colonial critic, this could equally be seen as a failure to offer a political position by a work too lost in its own internal complexities. Either way, the richness of NYID’s latest offering is indisputable.

Double Happiness

Double Happiness, this year’s Little Asia Dance Exchange tour, brings together dancers from Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne and Hong Kong. Each participant presents a solo work and collaborates with the others to produce an ensemble piece to accompany the tour.

Requiem, by Hong Kong artist Daniel Yeung, is an elegy of sorts. For much of the piece, the dancer’s body lies prone in darkness while black and white video footage of a prerecorded performance plays out on a massive screen above. The images of Yeung’s naked body hint at death, loss and decay. When the screen darkens, Yeung rises from the floor to repeat many of the same gestures seen before, but the potent physicality of his presence carries a sense of reanimation, of life breathed into the lifeless. Most stunning are his vertical leaps, limbs jackknifing forward with whiplash intensity.

Natalie Cursio, also Blowback’s cheerleader, is the local participant in the exchange, and produces a piece fairly representative of Melbourne’s contemporary dance climate. Cocooned in a doona, haunted by fairytale horrors and suburban banalities alike, Cursio’s ticcy gestures reflect the critical dominance of Chunky Move’s modes of charming defiance. The piece’s refusal to provide a narrative grounding, and its foregrounding of fragmented moments and sudden revelations, echoes the trajectory of Dance Works under Sandra Parker; and the tongue-in-cheek allusions to myth and childhood stories resonate with the recent directions taken by Phillip Adams’ Balletlab.

Interval arrives, and the house lights go up. But we slowly become aware of a figure at the far end of the stage, standing nearly motionless but for a simple, repetitive extension of the arm, hand across the chest and forward into space. A slight step. Jung Young-Doo’s performance—if it can be called that—has begun. The same gesture, repeated again and again. He disappears offstage. He returns, on his back, arching his spine and inching across the space. He leaves. Is this a butoh-style exploration of nothingness or, as a companion remarks, heroin-chic for the dance crowd? Jung’s apparent indifference to the presence of his audience walks the fine line between nonchalance and neglect.

After the interval proper, the various participants in the project present a group-devised piece, Doubling. It’s easy to see that each member has taken the reins at various points, and the particular styles that have been showcased previously are given a new slant through the involvement of other dancers. Cursio’s contribution forms a glorious climax: the archetypal Aussie pub classic Khe Sanh makes an incongruous accompaniment, but it’s presented here without a hint of sarcasm. It challenged my preconceptions of parochial ‘ocker-ness’ and its opposition to dance, and the sense of joy radiating from the performers challenged the somewhat limited emotional palette so often employed in Australian dance today. Doubling was always dynamic, sometimes daggy and utterly delightful.

A Season of Explorations: Kaspar, writer Peter Handke, director Laurence Strangio; November 2-4, 2004; Penny Machinations, creators Telia Nevile, Matt Kelly/Interior Theatre; La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, Nov 2-Dec 5, 2004

not yet it’s difficult, Blowback, writer/director David Pledger; St Kilda Memorial Hall, Melbourne, Nov 25-Dec 4, 2004

Little Asia Dance Exchange, Double Happiness, North Melbourne Town Hall, Nov 11-13, 2004

In a political climate that bears the hallmarks of a 1950s church revival, the staging of religious subject matter in contemporary theatre runs alongside the Bush Administration’s sermonised rhetoric in the push for electoral victory and Tony Abbott’s resurrection of the anti-abortion issue. Sidetrack Performance Group’s latest production, Sanctus, takes on religion in its most classical of incarnations and tweaks it with a touch of panto-camp wryness in an attempt to cut through this alignment of Church and State mythology. Set in the antiquated world of a simple young priest, Sanctus is Carlos Gomes and Liam Wallington’s adaptation of Friar Bentinho of Saint Anthony by Brazilian playwright Djalma Di Frattini. Written in the late 1980s, the work is an exploration of Catholic and evangelical notions of the divine, the miraculous and of faith. It is also an attempt, as the program suggests, to critique the ways such notions gain weight in a world that ignores both the sacred within religion and the secularity of state life.

In this context, we enter a sacrosanct space. Mystic panpipes float in the gloom. A friar sits, praying, draped in monkish brown robes. In the background beckons the silhouette of a humble church, its small steeple casting shadows out to the edge of the space. Incense burns from an altar outside and peels smoke into the dimness. This is theatrical realism in all its unfamiliarity, with a historical mise-en-scène akin to a BBC medieval drama. Played in Marrickville’s Sidetrack Theatre, I’m not sure whether to read the sober tone as deeply sincere or highly ridiculous. But then, as God’s voice booms wrath at humankind’s bent for illusion and falsity and promptly drops a letter of “mission” from the heavens above, wry humour undercuts the solemnity and gives a taste of the satire to come.

Friar Benjamin’s (Kirk Page) calling is to restore the vandalised and abandoned Chapel of Saint Anthony, but as he begins dusting off the local church iconography 4 religious statues resurrect themselves and with a crack of thunder from above their comedy of “miracles” begins. St Francis, St Anthony, St Clare and Our Lady (Carlos Gomes, Drew Fairley, Kym Vercoe and Katia Molino) stand in holy repose, their faces stretched with expert choral grimace—eyebrows lifted, teeth gleaming—to begin their battle over who can produce the best divine intervention to save the world. What results is an up-tempo, witty burlesque in which the mere prospect of “a papal announcement, an act of healing, the raising of the dead, a statue with bleeding stigmata” becomes cause for the church to debate its own irrelevance in an era “that feeds on celebrity and wickedness.”

Gomes’ theatrical exuberance, the precision of his images, his timing, rhythm and comic technique are all revealed in the expert choreography and physicality of a Mass-turned-musical. Part camped-up pageant figurines, part Commedia stock, the saints jostle, bicker, hymn, shudder and pray; a malleable flock out of kilter with itself and the world it is trying to save. Our Lady wears a knife in her heart that is painfully removed, only to be ironically re-inserted in the name of martyrdom at the close of the piece. St Clare offers an orgiastic rendition of holy service, climaxing with a sly afterglow sigh at the effects of repression. The impeccable production values combine sophistication with simplicity to enable church pews to become objects of suggestion: a pilgrim’s forest, a bed of lust. The performers whirl the pews in the space as poetic evocations of transformation, miracle, acts of the divine; layering physical grace against their more rudimentary caricatured states.

Sanctus is a frivolous portrayal of Catholicism and its various hypocrisies, offering more in surface reflection than deep interrogation. If you can ride with the fun, the polished production and animated performances offer a deliciously gleeful parody of all things sanctified and harmonious. If the humour starts to grate after a while, the play’s claim to social relevance also increasingly wanes. I laughed but felt let down by the didacticism, the kind of critical tactic certain politicians have recently practised only too well.

Sidetrack Performance Group, Sanctus, writer Djalma Di Frattini, translators/adaptators Liam Wallington and Carlos Gomes; performers/devisors Carlos Gomes, Drew Fairley, Kirk Page, Kym Vercoe, Katia Molino; Sidetrack Studio Theatre, Sydney, November 18-28, 2004

Michael Kantor was appointed artistic director of Playbox Theatre earlier this year, taking on a brief to revitalise the financially troubled Melbourne institution without breaking it. As a symbol of the organisation’s new direction, it is now to be known by the name of its home: the Malthouse. Kantor is enthusiastic about the programming changes he is introducing and the company’s novel eponym: “What I like about the name ‘Malthouse’,” he explains, “is that it refers to a melting point with the aim of intoxication. It’s about a confluence of elements: malt, water, barley—or sound, text and image, in the case of theatre. So it’s about collaborative forces coming together to create something which is seductive, which is ultimately transformative (like alcohol) and which allows for a multi-disciplinary approach to what you put on in a theatre.”

Kantor agrees that the Playbox name was apt in the past, when the company’s primary brief was to stage new Australian scripts. Under Kantor’s stewardship however, this will no longer be the case: “The previous name, Playbox, enshrined the centrality of plays in everything we did,” he observes. The new Malthouse is to be, in Kantor’s terms, a “theatre of the senses” as much as a theatre of scripts and writers.

Vintage re-mix

Kantor is launching the 2005 Malthouse program with 4 productions early in the year, 2 of which he is to direct. These are Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral and Tom Wright’s Journal of the Plague Year, to be staged with the same ensemble of performers and designers, and the same set. The inclusion of a play by White serves as a model for the way Kantor approaches theatre, text and performance. The director notes that the author of such difficult Australian classics as Voss still “hovers over Australian theatre as this sort of naughty godfather in the cupboard who whispers: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way! It doesn’t have to be naturalistic! It doesn’t have to be logical!’ White was a great writer who had great thoughts about the theatre and he merged the two into these messy theatrical events, offering up volatile Australian worlds. But they’re not well made plays…They’re actually kind of awkward things. But they have the tactility of great works, and when you’re dealing with something conceptually great in that sense there is an inherent strength that means you can take risks as you tear into it. One thing we should be doing is looking back at our theatre history and saying, ‘What are the things that need to be thought about again?’” Given that debate still rages around White’s theatrical writings, Ham Funeral is an ideal choice for such re-evaluation.

A similar mining of history to produce radical new visions underlies Wright’s Journal of the Plague Year. Kantor and Wright collaborated last year on the darkly acerbic, crazily satirical contemporary panto Babes in the Wood. Just as Wright trawled through 19th century Australian and colonial history and writings for Babes, so the writer is now examining the religious and political discourse which emerged from the tensions between the restored British monarchy and the post-revolutionary Parliament while plague ravaged London in 1664-5. “Tom excavates history on the stage,” Kantor explains, “using artefacts, novels and extant plays to access an historical moment which he feels has great relevance for us right now. So it’s about dredging up history to present it as part of the now.” Kantor adds that for Journal of the Plague Year Wright is drawing on descriptions and metaphors which arose in the 1660s relating to “the physical decay of bodies, of a city and of a people—and the mounting hysteria that was attached to that. There is this overarching contemporary metaphor of a morally diseased society.”

Wright notes that before today’s Western alliance became bogged down in protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet bloc had led to much talk of the “End of History.” Instead we saw “the Balkans and Rawanda implode; and to me, it seemed like history was a disease of bestiality which periodically bubbled up, destroying our illusions.” Journal of the Plague Year thus constitutes a critique of the messianic delusions of Western rulers, and the way the very materiality of flesh, and of societies, make a mockery of them.

Intoxicating curation

Perhaps the most significant change which Kantor is inaugurating at the Malthouse is in transforming the organisation into a curatorial venture. Rather than hiring out the Malthouse’s theatres when the company is not staging its own productions, outside artists will be selected according to how they meet the aims and programming needs of the company. All productions housed at the venue will be scheduled as part of an overall season of adjacent works, much like a curated show at a gallery. Currently, the only institution to employ this model is La Mama, which chooses works from a wide pool of applicants that are then staged within La Mama or the nearby Carlton Courthouse.

The Malthouse will also be hosting regular workshops and popular fora. “We want to create great opportunities for theatre-makers,” Kantor explains. “Not only writers, but also directors and actors to work on shows which they think are important—and to imagine an audience for them. It’s about a series of relationships. We want to make the theatre about not merely a play, but an event, which starts as soon as you arrive. It’s about what’s going on in the foyer and how shows are talked about beforehand; what’s the relationship between shows that you might see in any one season.” With Kantor at the helm, Malthouse should be curating intoxicating goodness for years to come.

Malthouse Theatre’s Autumn 2005 program can be accessed and ordered from www.malthouse.com.au

Director Rose Myers and Arena have long been addressing 2 major challenges in producing young people’s theatre: how to theatrically engage adolescents whose major cultural references are popular television, movies and music; and how to produce theatre which is educationally or morally instructive without being didactic. The consistent, a priori linking of juvenile aesthetics to instruction—however ambiguous—has secured Arena considerable resources and impressive multimedia technologies. It has, however, also reduced the inherent complexity of the company’s work.

Gamegirl deals with the emotional conflicts experienced by Lila following her parents’ separation. Lila is shown using a gaming environment to ‘work through’ her emotional conflicts. Writer Maryanne Lynch’s elementary metaphors lie at the opposite end of the spectrum to the complex Christian or feminist symbolism of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Ursula LeGuin’s fiction for young people. The game character of the “Weeping Woman”, for example, unsurprisingly represents the mother. Lynch is nevertheless to be commended for presenting gameplay itself as positive: a rare phenomenon in depictions authored by adults.

Revelations within the play suggest that earlier paternal infidelity during the marriage caused the break-up, yet the piece ends with a ‘happy families’ conclusion that sees father, mother and children all embracing following a brief period of largely implied parental friction. This is presumably to foster supportive post-show discussion with school groups, but the blatantly contrived simplicity of the finale blunts the theatrical affect and interest of Gamegirl. Previous darker Arena productions like Panacea (1998) and Play Dirty (2002) have also tended to channel their exuberant and technically sophisticated energies into a fairly banal closing motto of ‘have confidence in oneself and everything will come out alright.’ The trade-off between aesthetic stimulation and confidence building seems to produce dramaturgically mixed results.

This is, however, to take a particularly sharp and adult (though not inappropriate) eye to Arena. Gamegirl also brims with Myers’ strengths, although the performances are somewhat uneven. Myers largely resists turning the father’s ditsy girlfriend into a comic villain but this leaves actor Amanda Douge little to do but wander around looking dim and uncomfortable. Luke Elliot though is excellent as the father, his gently assertive yet consistently felt physical presence making even the mother’s cartoonish boyfriend (complete with cheesy grin, blond wig and a macho, bent-leg pose) appear sympathetic—if at a loss before the children. Jessamy Dyer as Lila is moreover suitably charismatic and confident, if at times brittle.

The most interesting development in this work is in the gaming projections from Anna Tregloan and Cazerine Barry. Arena has previously employed slick and in some cases custom-designed multimedia tools, from the revolving screen which encircled the performance space for Eat Your Young (2000) to the ingenious use of weather balloons as screens in Panacea. Here, real time projections of Lila are matted onto animations shown on 2 screens above and behind the stage. Rather than exhibiting the company’s typically glossy aesthetic, the gaming design consists of rough, shuddering montages of ingeniously assembled cut-outs and scraps. The visual mapping and animation is jerky and imperfect, stressing the provisional nature of this fantasy and its construction from shards of experience, post-industrial cast-offs and cultural tropes. The setting of such overt formal ambiguities amidst the otherwise closed circuit of Gamegirl’s narrative helps punch holes in the simplistic dramaturgy, creating a space for dreaming and allusion. In short, this design enables real play.

Gamegirl is a pleasing, accessible and not entirely unchallenging young person’s theatre piece. I have reservations though. Having attended the recent festival of director Hayao Miyazaki’s gob-smackingly inventive, disorientating and yet hugely affective animations such as Spirited Away (2001)—also made for children—one cannot help but suspect we are selling young people short if we accept that youth theatre cannot be as abstract or complicated as the music produced by the 6 year old Mozart.

Arena Theatre Company, Gamegirl, writer Maryanne Lynch, director Rose Myers; performers Jessamy Dyer, Dave Lawson, Carole Patullo, Luke Elliot, Amanda Douge; Playhouse Theatre, Perth, Awesome Festival, November 24-27, 2004

PACT Youth Theatre’s Suspect vividly places the surveillance issue in the bigger context of a voyeuristic, Reality TV culture, but at the same time draws stark parallels with more familiar intrusions by peeping toms, stalkers, policemen, private detectives and bureaucrat interrogators. Here surveillance can turn transmute to murder and disappearance. New technologies of surveillance appear at times to be mere extensions of some nasty human impulses. The wide stage, multi-level design populated with video monitors, systems operators and the perpetrators and victims of surveillance generates a density of the surveillance experience with a range of comment and many opportunities for a well-trained, large cast.

Even so, not all the characters are realised with the same attention to detail and theme, iconic figures (like the film noir femme fatale) don’t connect, some performance images seem to be repeats from PACT’s previous show Song of Ghosts without rationale, and the final sequence where the whole cast line up to reveal what’s been been surveilled of their lives is unrevealing. There is no sense in the finale of intimate detail, whether real or fictional, of the pain of being opened out to a prying world. The mechanical performance conceit sits oddly beside the angst and raw humour played out in the first part of Suspect. And the suggestion that we the audience were part of this surveillance process was not convincing. Direction and most performances are strong, as we’ve come to expect from PACT. They’ve set their benchmark high, but here the focus on types undercuts the power of the surveillance theme except where an idiosyncratic persona is realised, as in the case of the ‘dog lady’, where we witness her loss and its impact, not naturalistically played but surreally embodied.

In the latest Breathing Space program (an enterprising collaboration involving Performance Space, PICA and Arnoflini, UK), Dan Belasco Rogers’ (UK) solo performative lecture, Unfallen, was a delight. He has a curious aesthetic and thematic kinship with the late Spalding Gray if with none of Gray’s seductive poetic musicality. But the melding of personal anxieties with larger speculations and the calculated shaping of revelations are familiar, though very different in tone and effect with Belasco Roger’s quiet, hesitant delivery. Synchronicities of mapping (he uses projections of overlaid city maps to reveal disturbing conjunctions) and of accidents (with a touch of Gray’s almost superstitious fatalism) suggest a universe as dangerous and sometimes as funny as Douglas Adams’, but more worrying. On the same program it was good to see the return of Martin del Amo’s Unsealed (RT 61, p47) confirming the work’s distinctive power. As a quite lateral exploration of self and a career fantasy it was an ideal companion piece for Belasco Roger’s reverie on destiny.

PACT Youth Theatre, imPACT Ensemble, Suspect, directors Regina Heilmann, Chris Murphy, design Kate Shanahan, video Sean Bacon, music/sound Nik Wishart; PACT, Dec 2-12, 2004

Breathing Space: Unfallen, Dan Belasco Rogers; Unsealed, Martin del Amo; Performance Space, Nov 25-27, 2004

There is a notion current in contemporary experimental music that you can define a musician as ‘new’ or ‘old’ school. Is this division real and helpful? Is there a paradigm shift here? Or is the division a construct of a cocooned scene, inbred and preoccupied with its own little twists and turns?

We also have labels ascribed to the so-called new schools: ‘minimal’, ‘reductionist’, ‘New London Silence’ and ‘New Berlin Silence’. Wittgenstein once said:

Either a thing has properties which no other thing has, and then one has to distinguish it straight away from the others by a description and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things which have the totality of their properties in common, and then it is not possible to point to any one of them. For if a thing is not distinguished by anything, I cannot distinguish it—for otherwise it would be distinguished.

You can imagine what an affront it is to experimentalists to be distinguished as ‘old school.’ So are there distinguishing features to the new school? What Wittgenstein says lends some weight to the idea that a real schism is taking place. So are there defining features to music of the early 21st century? Should we be making distinctions, and are the labels good?

Darn negative labels

Reductionism, outside of music, is associated with neo-conservatism (and experimental music has always situated its ethical and philosophical soul to the left). It suggests fewer events per minute. This begs the question, “What is an event?” In non-notated music there is no easy tally.

Reductionism could mean limiting certain parameters in the music and allowing others to flourish. But all music limits some parameters and concentrates on others. You would never label Western classical music ‘melodically reduced’, or Indian music ‘harmonically challenged’; it’s too darn negative. I don’t believe that a trend towards reducing or minimising is the thing that makes the ‘new’ new (although there is some quite stark work).

One such work was performed in February 2004 by Basque musician Mattin and Sydney-based Matt Earle as part of Sydney’s What is Music? festival. Mattin employed computer feedback using an internal microphone and Earle was using a no-input sampler. They produced blocks of loud sound and abrupt long silences. It was impossible to distinguish Mattin from Earle; they were not playing individual lines.

One could only describe the resulting sonic material as reduced if you heard the blocks as simple events (you would have been bored out of your brain). If you listened carefully you could only describe them as immensely complex; it was beyond my power of analysis. They were sound events across the frequencies all at once and none of the fleeting particles of sound were long enough for me to define; they seemed to be weightless, but too interesting in frequency to be described as ‘noise’. They composed open ended, chaotic systems which interacted with each other in ways that they didn’t want to predict. To suggest this is minimal seems silly.

In one view there were myriad events per minute, in the other there were about 4 events over 40 minutes. But looked at from this minimal or reduced perspective the work made no sense at all. It was not minimalism that was giving the work its power and novelty.

Subminimal minutiae

A more scientific use of the term ‘reductionism’ means trying to explain phenomena in terms of its smallest or simplest constituents. It seems misguided to say musicians are breaking musical phenomena into their smallest constituents in order to explain them, because explanation isn’t the function of this music. But just as physicists have been inspired to understand the nature of matter by colliding particles at faster and faster speeds, musicians are focussing on sonic material. Was Mattin and Earles’ search analogous to the search for the Higgs Particle?

I’d like to think now about the trumpet playing of Axel Dörner. I sent a CDR of myself and Axel to Martin Davidson of the Emanem label because he had released a CD of the group Lines in 2000, which included Axel and me. The new duo seemed a logical extension. He wrote back:

I am afraid it’s too subminimal for me. 30 years ago, I used to like it when people used to go to that area during performances, but they came out of it when they had exhausted the possibilities. I don’t find much of interest in extended performances which limit themselves to that area.

I respect Martin’s honesty; he made and named a distinction, but what could he mean by “subminimal”? Presumably we explore an area so lacking in input that ‘minimal’ is too weak a term. So I listened as dispassionately as I could to the CD concentrating on Dörner’s contribution.

We hear huge flexibility in the duration of the units of music. There is the potential for the next bit to be as long as it needs to be, not shaped by the limitations of phraseology based on breath. Silences are part of the music and can be as long as they need to be. The underlying rhythmic pulse of the music is unpredictable but much calmer and more patient than improvised instrumental music from 5 years ago. Frequencies are often at the extremes of what is possible on a trumpet. Many of the complex events are multi-frequency and inherently polyphonic. They are not drones; these events are dancing internally. Dörner employs glissandi and microtonal movement when he plays a solid tone, so we hardly ever hear a discrete note; frequency-packed noises yes, but notes that are employed in a system and organised on a time line to produce a melodic unit or phrase, never.

I would say his music is the opposite of submiminal (and I certainly don’t remember hearing anyone sounding remotely like him 30 years ago). There’s too much undefined ephemeral phenomena and hence the number of events per minute is indeterminate. Just like Matt Earle and Mattin, he asks you to listen deeper than the surface. He wants you to follow the short-lived, high-pitched whistle tones at the edge of the noise; he wants you to juxtapose that with the low growls at the bottom of his range.

Martin Davidson may be judging the CD as bad, but I think he is listening in the wrong direction. More evidence of a schism, and hence a need for new terms? But how useful is a term like subminimalism?

The note split

Is another definition of the new possible in a rethink of the role of frequency and the abandonment of conventional notions of melodic and harmonic systems? We find now an interest in frequencies at the extremes of the listening spectrum where they don’t function within conventional systems. In the mid-range there is no reference to the well-tempered scale and its harmonic constructions, only the harmonic potential of feedback. The smallest particle of sound is no longer the note; the note has been split, and the focus is on ephemera. Minutiae are of great interest; musicians are going microscopic, focussing on tiny fissures and amplifying them.

It is not only the note that has been split. In the 80s and 90s the use of samples, concrete recordings within a piece, was an important feature. However, appropriation has all but disappeared from the new. Not that samplers or recording devices disappeared; as we saw from the performance of Mattin and Earle, these instruments have stayed and proliferated. But here there is a focus on going inside the sample, and inside the sampler, making something from scratch rather than making new things from old. I find this tendency touching in its positivity.

With Will Guthrie’s Building Blocks (Antboy 4) we hear 3 works that cannot be broken down into units—the music is not constructed using conventional phraseology, or episodic form. He employs battery-operated vibrators, and mechanical devices, as well as haphazard sounding and promiscuous attacks with his hands, playing a multi-layered and eccentric array of percussion. There are no sequencing engines here; by deploying mechanical devices Guthrie has multiplied the attacks to uncountable events per minute and allowed himself to create polyphony. The effect is an escape from any personal touch or expressionism; he sets up long events and sculpts the music from its one moment of attack and eventual decay or stop in one sweep.

Of course, dispensing with conventional phraseology and the discrete note has been going on for decades. The work of Austrian trombonist Radu Malfatti is an example. But Malfatti set his fleeting sonic quarks in a pool of silence. Axel Dörner confidently asserts that you can create big sound objects, and Guthrie, Mattin and Earle make their blocks gigantic. These are significant changes that leave listeners from the old school scratching their heads, hence the negative terms ‘reductionist’ and ‘subminimal.’

There is a ‘new.’ There are now too many practitioners for anyone to have an authoritative overview, but the new has been named, because it can be distinguished. Whether the labels are good enough to stick remains to be seen.

the NOW now events have always charmed with their low key loungeroom feel, squeezed into the urban grunge venues of Space3, LanFranchi’s Memorial Discotheque and the Frequency Lab. Surprisingly the shift to @Newtown (the former Newtown RSL) did nothing to damage the intimacy and ambience; rather it added slickness and confidence to a festival that has grown in only 4 years to be one of the most significant and satisfying events of the Sydney (and national) sound and music scene.

the NOW now 2005 brought together 70 artists in 4 days of spontaneous music creation, using all manner of instruments. With 7 sets per night there were many moments of wonder but I will focus on Thursday January 20, as it offered a concentration of the highlights and some relatively new faces.

Opening the evening was Ubercube—Monica Brooks on accordion/laptop and Emily Morandini on glockenspiel/laptop. Playing single sustained notes, they sampled and processed the minimal live input to incrementally build up sustained drones. The tones separated and harmonics rubbed up against each other creating pulses and gentle undulations. The set was serene and controlled with the shifts happening almost imperceptibly, which is why the end felt rushed—the peak had only just been reached when the layers were too rapidly removed.

In dramatic contrast to the flow and space of Ubercube was Ben Byrne and Shannon O’Neill’s hyperactive aural agitations. They created a frantic set filling every moment with shredded sounds—squelches, lashings, tears, rips, rendings, blendings. O’Neill has been known to be passionate about issues plunderphonic, so it is was not surprising to find unidentifiable music samples adding a pop to the snap and crackle of their palette. Though it was clear that creating a solid barrage was the structural choice, I did find myself wondering: is there such as thing as too much texture?

International guest Audrey Chen (USA) works with cello and voice, frequently taking the voice into the aurally challenging and sometimes abject, while sawing, scratching and plucking at the cello. The most beguiling moments arose as the half-piped vocal explorations twined around the squeaks and scratches of the cello, so that neither source was identifiable. She concluded the piece by passionately kissing and nibbling her instrument undercutting any perceived seriousness in such extended explorations.

An addition to the 2005 event was a film component. Along with screenings in the tiny alcove misnamed “cinematheque” there were also live soundtracks presented to significant avant garde films (projected from 16mm prints) curated by Sally Golding. On this evening it was James Heighway on an ancient analogue sampler to Paul Sharits’ 1966 Ray Gun Virus, which consisted simply of shifting colours. Heighway’s stutters and chunks of brutally undecorative sound worked well with the stark abstraction of the vision. The previous evening’s exploration by Robbie Avenaim on percussion activated by vibrating devices responding to Duchamp’s infinite spirals in Anemic Cinema (1926) was particularly beautiful in its subtlety and sensitivity.

The highlight of the night, and the festival, was NOW now co-director Clare Cooper on the ancient Chinese guzheng and Chris Abrahams on (what some described as equally ancient) DX7 keyboard synthesizer. Perhaps inspired by Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras’ whirlwind tour in early 2004 (see RT61, ), Sydney artists have been gradually realising that the 20-30 minute escalating set is not the only structural possibility. Cooper and Abrahams chose to play 6 pieces focussing on different techniques and sonorities. The first was a frenzy of gesture—digits fidgeted over strings and keyboard making a solid wall of rattly texture, impossible to separate sleights of sound. The second piece involved metal rods suspended between the strings of the guzheng hit with a mallet producing sustained vibration—the pure ringing tones accompanied by crystalline additions from Abrahams. Moving through bowing, scratching and moments of bravely held silence, the duo created a set that was awe-inspiring in its precision, quiet confidence and beauty.

The quality of the evening was maintained by Anthony Pateras on prepared piano coaxing liquid bubbles, clatters and glassy tones out of the instrument, though it seemed he lost momentum in the final section, missing several possible natural endings. The sensitive collaboration of Lawrence Pike on drums and Adrian Klumpes on prepared piano on the opening night should also be mentioned as a highlight, with its minimal delicacy and broken arpeggios creating a mesmerising piece.

The final set featured Robbie Avenaim and Tony Buck on drums and Max Nagl (Austria) on saxophone. Developing slowly and tentatively as the 2 drummers negotiated their territory it eventually found its feet, building into an all out frenetic drum battle with Nagl’s sustained drones and split notes making for an exhilarating finale.

The NOW now has always run on collective enthusiasm, passion and obsession, and despite a lack of funding, directors Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas were able to create a bigger, more tightly coordinated event in 2005 than ever before. Audience numbers were more than healthy with some nights attracting over 400 people. Part of this is due to the art school patronage of the scene at the moment, as well as a significant growth of general interest in sound/music culture. Hopefully this will be maintained and, more importantly events like the NOW now will be supported by meaningful funding to further develop the artform and its audience in the future.

Musicircus—a festival of music for John Cage brought together a prodigious number of performers to perform an equally prodigious 20 Cage pieces across one day at the Brisbane Powerhouse, proving a test for both audience and musicians alike. Through the integration of sounds taken from our daily milieu, Cage endeavored to make music where “sounds are just sounds” and “people are just people”, unencumbered with psychological and theoretical allusions.

Musicircus was organised by Rebecca Cunningham and modelled on the first version of the event staged by Cage in 1969, where numerous musicians, ensembles and visual artists were allocated space to perform simultaneously in a large hall. There were no scores, focal points, formalities, admission charges or performance fees. The Powerhouse generously supported this rare opportunity to hear Cage pieces in performance, allowing musicians and audience to become acquainted with the composer’s complex, unique and unconventional methodologies. In accordance with the Cage ethos, as each performance began and ended the next, unannounced, had already begun in another space.

Telephones and Birds (1977) was performed by Cunningham and Miranda Sue Yek, triggering bird sounds recorded onto a laptop and a list of phone numbers that were responded to by answering machines. The selection of bird tracks and numbers was determined according to the I Ching through the chance process of flipping a coin. The use of the I Ching, characteristic of Cage’s compositions, makes each performance unique, while the eloquent simplicity opens the performance to unpredictable encounters and asynchronous tempos. This relinquishing of ego-dependence renders the very fabric of the pieces free of judgment and conditioned aesthetics.

For Roaratorio, Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), a particularly virtuosic piece in the Cage oeuvre, the composer laboriously listed the sounds from 626 locations in James Joyce’s novel, recorded them, and painstakingly converted the book’s text into spoken word. The Powerhouse performance used the original recordings of Cage’s distinctly engaging and affable voice, combined with the original ambient sounds and Irish music to elicit a kaleidoscope of visionary sounds as Jan Baker-Finch, a eurythmic dancer, engaged in a gestural flux to the dynamics of the language.

Here and there across the day Zane Trow read randomly from Cage’s various writings, overlapping with screenings of 2 important films on the composer: From Zero (directors Frank Scheffer and Andrew Culver) and I Have Nothing to Say and I am Saying it (director Allan Miller). A key event in the afternoon was Music For… (1985), which here was Music For Fourteen, an Australian performance debut. For comparatively conventional instrumentation, the piece offered extremes of playability, including long passages of single notes and challenges to the physical limitations of the performer through parts generally regarded as impossible to play.

Cartridge Music (1960) was performed by 2 players, each selecting, according to the I Ching, a map of irregular shapes which was overlaid with transparencies determining actions and timing. Dispensing with modified record cartridges, the performance was updated using highly sensitive microphones with one performer making music with mushrooms (another John Cage obsession), the other with a vessel of water, each applying the actions of splashing, mashing, tearing and stirring, resulting in an unstable rummaging and delicate melange of vibrating timbres.

Variations IV (1963), for “sounds or combinations of sounds produced by any means with or without other activities”, was performed in the Powerhouse lift by Joe Musgrove, Scott Sinclair and Andrew Thomson using laptops, electric toothbrushes and an assortment of electronic toys rollicking in screeching feedback.

At the eclectic and avant-garde end was a performance of one of Cage’s later pieces, Four4 (1991), by Petar Gocic, Markos Zografos, Kahl Monticone and Joel Stern. Proving Cage’s enduring ability to astound and confront an audience the performance incorporated a tricycle, toast making and violin playing with bread crusts.

Musicircus—a festival of music for John Cage, Brisbane Powerhouse, December 11, 2004

In April 2004, the Federal government announced that ScreenSound would be merged into the Australian Film Commission (AFC). The move was not without controversy, especially when the AFC announced plans for the relocation of some of the archive’s activities away from Canberra and changes to its public programs. In September 2004 Paolo Cherchi Usai took up the position as director. His appointment is generally seen as a major step forward for the archive, given his leading role in the international archiving community. He was one of the founders of the Pordenone Film Festival, which has become a focal point for the study of silent cinema. He is the author of the books Burning Passions and Digital Images, and was the Senior Curator for many years at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

In November, the AFC board approved an initial vision statement prepared by its new director. This was based around the following 5 points: 1) the development of a curatorial culture within the archive; 2) the maintenance of Canberra as the central hub; 3) the establishment of an Indigenous Branch; 4) the institution of a role for digital technology; and 5) a holistic approach to acquisition, preservation and access. As a symbol of this new direction for the archive, the ScreenSound name was abandoned in favour of a return to the original name, The National Film and Sound Archive.

Paolo Cherchi Usai spoke to Mike Walsh shortly after the announcement of the name change.

Well it is of symbolic significance and of political significance. It is symbolic because it represents a vindication of the archive’s original mission in Australian audio-visual culture. It has a political meaning because of the words ‘national’ and ‘archive’–a reconfirmation of the primary mission of the institution within the AFC to collect, preserve and make accessible the heritage and to do this as the national entity responsible for this.

Primarily it is the fact that it is a rare example of a national audio-visual archive with a very strong, active connection with the audio-visual community. Archives are normally perceived as entities floating somewhere in an indistinct area that is accessed by researchers, by TV stations, by filmmakers. Here I see a much greater degree of involvement of individuals in what is happening to the archives, so it is clear that this archive does not exist in a vacuum. There is a very strong, vibrant community of people with diversified interests, with diversified agendas, who look at the archive as a point of reference. To be able to bring my contribution to a situation of this kind is a way for me to engage directly in a debate with this community.

One of the 5 points of your vision statement involves the development of a curatorial approach. What are the means by which you plan to develop this?

I wish to create a team of highly qualified and highly motivated people with specific expertise in their own areas of activity, who will be given the responsibility to determine the cultural, intellectual profile of our strategy. These are people who will decide what needs to be acquired first. They will decide how audio-visual archives will be preserved and what are the parameters for their dissemination. This is to say that they will be given a high degree of authority on the cultural criteria of their activities. In deciding what needs to be done, it also has to be explained why certain acquisitions have to be made. So far the archive, for very plausible reasons which I understand and respect, has taken a process-oriented approach in terms of functions, in terms of work flow. This has been beneficial to the archive. I think it is time to now make a step forward, a step further and give the archive a stronger sense of intellectual authority in the audio-visual community, especially now that the archive is part of the Commission, which is now declaring the intention to position itself as a national cultural institution. We want to make the archive stronger within the AFC and we want to have the archive as a protagonist, as a leader, in the cultural debate within the AFC.

You’ve described the relation between the archive and the AFC as one of collaboration. Do you see it as important for the archive to maintain a separate identity within the AFC?

The AFC is made up of different areas. In all likelihood, these areas will become divisions. Each division of the AFC will contribute to the activity of the AFC and will contribute to the implementation of a strategic plan which is being designed by the AFC with the active involvement of all the divisions, meaning that I am being asked, in the course of this discussion, what is the distinctive contribution of the archive actually and potentially to the development of the AFC. When I say ‘distinctive contribution’, these 2 words are equally important. It’s a contribution because we contribute towards the overall plan. It’s distinctive because it’s something that the archive, and only the archive, can provide. So, it is not a matter of seeking independence in disguise, it is a matter of making very clear what is the cultural identity of the archive per se, as an organisation which has a national mandate, a cultural mandate and is now being asked to be part of a broader cultural agenda.

You emphasised Canberra as the intellectual and strategic centre of the archive. What do you see as the advantages of maintaining a Canberra base as the strong centre of the archive’s activities?

First of all it gives back faith in the future of the archive for the people who work for the archive. The people working for the archive feel empowered; they feel that they are here for a reason. The audio-visual artefacts are here, the historical identity of the archive is here. It is for me also a way to explain that, being a national institution, there are very strong reasons why the archive has to be in Canberra, in the capital of the country. This, as I explained many times to the stakeholders and to the Commissioners, doesn’t mean that the archive has to see Canberra as a sort of fortress where the archival culture is cultivated in isolation from the rest of the country. Quite the contrary, being based in Canberra gives the archive a clear responsibility to become the centre from which audio-visual culture, from an archival perspective, is disseminated across the entire Australian territory–in Sydney, in Melbourne, but also in other capitals, also in major cities, and everywhere in Australia. So Canberra…should not be perceived as the ivory tower where policies and collections are being held. It should be a sort of catalyst for a debate and I think that should really spread all over the Australian territory and actually, internationally as well.

You have put a lot of emphasis on the need for a programming policy. What kinds of programming do you want to give the highest priority?

I’m thinking of a highly diversified range of access and programming activities, ranging from internet access to the collections nationwide and internationally, to programs designed and implemented by the archive, to programs designed and implemented in collaboration with other divisions of the AFC, to programs where the archive simply fulfils its institutional mission to make audio-visual artefacts accessible for educational projects, for other projects, for festivals. So, the spectrum really includes the archives as the leader and the protagonist, the archive as the collaborator, and the Archive as the provider.

As far as exhibitions are concerned, I would like to strengthen the current exhibition galleries in Canberra in order to reflect not only the identity of the Australian audio-visual heritage, but also to highlight what the archive does. Clearly, there is a way to explain to our audience, whether it is specialised or non-specialised, that archive work is quite exciting, it’s quite compelling. It can reflect the interest of primary school audiences and highly specialised scholarly audiences. We should be proud to show what we are doing, because what we are doing is not only important, it is also quite interesting. As for publications; as the archive exists within the AFC, there will be a holistic approach to publications within the AFC. The archive, in my view, should contribute, and I found the agreement of the Commissioners in the development of publications which are meant to create very authoritative points of scholarly reference for the study of the national audio-visual heritage and culture. So I’m talking about the works that not only remain, but they also become the symbols of an intellectual leadership of the archive. The examples I brought up to the Commission are the creation of a national discography and a national filmography, the creation of a national registry of audio-visual collections in Australia. These publications will also be part of the agenda of a new entity within the archive called the Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research, which will be the hub where the internal intellectual energies of the archive and the scholarly and archival community around the archive nationally and internationally will gather in order to promote new approaches to the study of the audio-visual culture. It is very important that we take a very pluralistic and diversified approach to this. The archive has sometimes been accused of privileging certain aspects over others; for example the social history component over other components, and I’m receptive to this kind of comment in that I think the archive should encourage a variety of approaches. The archive should be equally welcoming those who are interested in social history and those who are interested in completely different approaches–even in approaches we may not be personally interested in. There may be areas or approaches I may not particularly care for, but it is our moral responsibility to make sure that those who come here don’t see this as a place where the audio-visual culture can be studied only in a certain way.

It is premature for me to say anything specific. We have just received a study prepared by an outside consultant [Peter Spearitt], who has provided an overall view about what the Centre could be. I would not yet want to discuss this paper. As I have been dealing with research centres for most of my professional life and have created a study centre at George Eastman House, this is something that is very close to my heart. I want to have a very direct involvement in the development of this centre and I am going to listen to as many opinions as possible in order to design a plan which I think will position the Centre as a place where the diversity of approaches I have mentioned can find full expression.

You have mentioned the need to develop an international collection. What criteria will guide your collection development policy here?

The main criterion will be the recognition that there is an audio-visual canon. As you know, as an organiser of the Pordenone Festival, I have been questioning the canon all my life, but in order to question the canon, one has to know what the canon is. The archive should be prepared to discuss the canon by making it available. The second criterion is the fact that to perform its mandate including access and programming, I would like to make sure that the archive has at least some archival resources necessary to integrate international film culture into its programming activity. Third, national heritage is to me what Australians have heard and seen. If I found in Australia a collection comparable to the Desmond Collection in the Netherlands, I would consider this as part of the Australian audio-visual heritage. It would be international but I would fiercely protect its Australian identity and promote the archive within the AFC as the custodian and interpreter of this component of the audio-visual heritage. In practical terms, this also means that if we found a collection of international films that no other national archive has, it would be absurd to give this collection away. This collection would be an intellectual asset for the archive.

Another point in your plan involved an emphasis on Indigenous material. What complications are there for you in working with other organisations such as IATSIS who also have interests here?

I would not see these as complications so much as opportunities. We recognise that IATSIS plays a leading role in the development of an Indigenous audio-visual culture and that is part of the reason why I wanted to have an Indigenous collection department based in Canberra. I recognise that what we call Indigenous culture is a highly diversified, and to some extent, fragmented entity. It is not this monolithic entity which is implied by this term ‘Indigenous culture’. We might better refer to Indigenous cultures in the plural…I am aware that the existence of a separate Indigenous Collection Department is a matter of debate. I know that in creating an Indigenous Collection Department I do not wish to create a ghetto for Indigenous culture and I would very much like to foster communication with Indigenous culture as a priority for the organisation. Recruitment will be an important challenge in that we want to empower Indigenous curators in the development of Indigenous culture at the archive.

Finally, I’m finding that the most exciting part of this is that I have a lot to learn. I am a newcomer. All I have read about Indigenous culture comes from books and not from direct experience. Fortunately, I am not totally unfamiliar with the issues of ethnic cultures, linguistic cultures. In Europe there has been a whole theory of regionalisation of archives based on the interests of linguistic and ethnic minorities. There are archives where specific linguistic and ethnic minorities are represented. In North America, African-American and Native American audio-visual heritage, in Canada, the Inuit’s audio-visual heritage has been part of the archival state. A different approach has been taken. So I’m keen to compare these past experiences with what is clearly going to be a new experience for me, an experience requiring a great deal of consultation with stakeholders and with specialists in the field.

Part of your vision statement involved developing a role of digitisation. What role do you see for digital technologies in the work of the Archive?

Digital is perhaps the magic word of today’s culture. I do recognise that digital technology can make, and should make, a big difference in the dissemination of audio-visual culture internationally. Digital technology offers unprecedented opportunities to make archival holdings available to all Australians in a way that would not have been even imaginable 15 years ago. It is therefore our intention to aggressively develop digital technologies for the sake of access to the collection, without forgetting 2 important principles. The first is that digital is not meant to be a long-term preservation or conservation medium, as digital technologies of today are inherently ephemeral. The second principle is that access in digital form should not distract the archive from its mission to make accessible the audio-visual heritage in its original form. Australians should have the right to choose whether they want to see a 35mm film in the glory of its original format, or in the practical, democratic, but different medium of digital technology.

The launch of Don Bate and Nick Lesek's album Tonewheel in Hobart saw the audience taken on a visual and aural journey where some of the landscape was recognisable and some wonderfully intangible, but always with a mercurial groove. An electronic funk soundscape emerged from the layering of 'organic' live elements with 'synthetic' recordings taken from the pair's ongoing collaboration and live improvisation. Electronic amorphousness moved in and out of more familiar sounds – a snatch of vocal narrative, a radar blip-before dissolving again into the abstraction of stylised beats and bass lines.

Bate and Lesek's creative relationship began around 7 years ago when the 2 realised they had similar approaches to composition, albeit with very different styles. They shared backgrounds in classical trombone and a mutual love of big band and funk. As the project's stylist, Lesek generally manipulates the overall sound effect, while Bate steps in as the traditionalist with melody, songs and improvisation.

The 2 brought together their trademark lay-it-down bass samples and loops (Lesek), and largely jazz inspired tunes and vocal rantings (Bate) to original tracks that Lesek subjected to his dismantling and remixing. In the course of the Tonewheel collaboration, the physical rendezvous took place in Hong Kong, Sydney and Hobart, but the majority of jamming and tinkering took place over the net via broadband. An extended session in January 2004 saw a collaboration with artists from the fluid musical outfit Benjafield Collective, who also appeared at the launch.

The Tonewheel album begins with the quiet tangle and an expectation of an orchestra settling in. Bate's melancholy vocal sweeps over the top, tumescent with longing before opening out into funk which Lesek has manipulated and looped back at various speeds. Elsewhere, cascading piano, brass exclamations and throaty gesticulations weave through a ballooning and reverberating bass. Using Live software at the launch, Lesek recorded, imported and arranged multiple audio clips and loops, altering the pitch and tempo of recorded material in real time and layering recorded audio on top of Benjafield Collective's live jazz/funk improvisations. On-the-spot recordings of the Collective were also woven into the mix.

Lesek drew on creative connections in Tokyo, recruiting one of Japan's leading video jammers, Jeff Klein of Terabyte Station (www.terabytestation.com), for the launch. Klein's bleeding of live performance footage and pre-shot material matches Lesek's live-synthetic approach. Klein projected his footage onto 2 adjacent screens that dropped from the bar's ceiling to bracket the stage. The screens flashed images that, like the music, moved from coherence to abstraction. Footage of Japan's bullet trains, monorails and cityscapes were used with aerial footage of the Tasmanian wilderness to build on the project's organic-inorganic juxtapositions. Klein also converted the Tasmanian footage to NTSC and sped it up to warp the contrast. A particularly nice effect was achieved, via the 'luminance' key, by transporting dynamic Japanese cityscapes to the Tasmanian clouds.

Like the everchanging Benjafield Collective, Tonewheel defies neat labels. Its soundscape segues between chill, disco, funk and death metal country, and Bate is confident that Tonewheel's 'moving feast' will be the first in a long series of similarly inspired, transpacific collaborations.

Regional arts

Regional arts are enjoying new levels of activity, prominence and support. Innovative models of participation, infrastructure and audience development are emerging as a generation of regional artists are making significant work with an impact far beyond their homes. The interplay between urban, rural and outback artists is also reaching a new level of intensity.

Our original impulse was to do a brisk national survey of innovations in regional arts practice and support networks, but the enormous volume of activity in New South Wales alone suggested we start there before moving on to other states in later editions of RealTime. While we were preparing this edition, Meeting Place, Regional Arts Australia’s 2004 conference, was being held in Horsham, Victoria with record attendances, forums, exhibitions and performances.

Space and Place, a hybrid performance work at the conference by Victorian regional artists, featured interactive animation, music, aerial dance and shadow play on the 27m high Natimuk silos, attracting an audience of 2,500 to a town of 480 people. The work was directed by Jillian Pearce and performed by physical theatre company Y Space, with animations and still projections by Dave Jones, puppetry and shadow play by young people from Natimuk led by local artist Mary French, choral music and sound by Warburton artist Santha Press and the Wallup Mara Indigenous dance group directed by Farren Branson. Another work on the conference program, Fire Dog—Smoke Lizard combined sculpture, neon, fireworks and sound on the Wimmera River and its banks.

More regional arts & film

There’s more from the regions in our reports from the Darwin Festival, in multimedia performance group Bonemap’s northern Queensland collaboration with British artist Simon Whitehead and, also from Cairns, JUTE Theatre’s My of course life at the Brisbane Festival as well as their collaboration with Darwin’s Knock-em-Down Theatre on Surviving Jonah Salt, for the Darwin Festival. We also report on FTI’s Making Movies Roadshow which teaches participants, often young Aboriginal people in regional areas of Western Australia, how to script, film and edit short movies.

Performance Space turns 21

2004 continues to be a year of birthdays, the most recent and one of the most significant being Sydney’s Performance Space celebrating 21 years of nurturing and hosting performance, dance, visual arts and debate. See our cover and a report on the celebratory events, reflections on the history of the space and a polemical reponse to how we think about it. Many Happy Returns Performance Space! RT

The nurturing and celebration of innovative art are in evidence right across New South Wales. Distance, once a tyranny, has become a virtue as towns and communities embrace the arts as means for expressing local distinctiveness, at the same time reducing the sense of cultural distance between city and country. The interplay between urban, rural and outback artists is increasingly complex and rewarding with city artists moving to the country for the short or long term, collaborating and workshopping with regional artists who in turn are influencing the shape of things to come.

Our survey of regional arts in New South Wales is the first of a series taking us around Australia. You’ll read about innovative events like Electrofringe and Live Sites in Newcastle, unsound in Wagga Wagga, the exhibiting of new media and video art in Broken Hill and Bathurst and beyond, the revival of rural cinemas and a surge of new filmmaking in numerous towns, and regenerative community development through workshops and projects driven by committed artists. There’s also much state government support and encouragement and a progressive regional arts infrastructure which encourages self-determination.

Once upon a time, cultural deprivation outside of Australia’s major cities was addressed by taking art to the countryside. Nowadays, Regional Arts NSW (RANSW), the peak body for the arts and community cultural development in regional and rural NSW, declares that it is “fostering and enhancing the capacity of regional communities for sustainable, self-determined cultural development.” Of course, that doesn’t mean the end of touring art to regional centres; in fact the case for touring grows even stronger as urban and regional artists search for new audiences and markets within Australia as well as overseas. Wollongong-based Circus Monoxide, for example, casts its touring net widely across NSW.
Linsey Gosper, 2NDSK1N: Modern Machine Girls series

Linsey Gosper, 2NDSK1N: Modern Machine Girls series

RANSW’s comprehensive quarterly magazine, ArtReach, reveals the enormous extent of contemporary arts activity across the great distances of the state and reveals the organisation’s capacity to co-manage the big picture with 13 Regional Arts Boards (RABs) around the state. This network services over 100 local government areas over 662,000 square kilometres, with a population of 1.7 million people and some 1200 local arts and cultural groups.

As a peak organisation RANSW acts as advocate and lobbyist, and is involved in audience development, collaborative marketing and cultural mapping. Additionally, it offers seed funding for one-off community projects as well as major funding to 2 to 3-year projects, and advises on governance and administration. RANSW communicates with the sector through ArtReach, its website and an e-Bulletin. Financially, RANSW CEO Victoria Keighery explains, “The core budget is largely provided by the NSW Ministry for the Arts, but it is local government contributions that increase the capacity and reach of an RAB” (ArtReach, March 2004). Federal funds for regional development add to the budget.

The RABs comprise representatives from local arts groups and councils, from local government, tourism, community organisations, individual artists and community members. Each employs a Regional Arts Development Officer (RADO) who manages the delivery of cultural programs in their area. Regional Arts NSW acts as the secretariat for the RABs and RADOs as well as assisting with their recruitment, supervision and coordination.
Linsey Gosper, 2NDSK1N: Modern Machine Girls series

The NSW Ministry for the Arts statistics on cultural participation in the state show that people who live outside Sydney collectively make good audiences as well as potential arts practitioners. They make up a large part of the population, 21% to 32%, who attend galleries, cinemas, museums, libraries, popular and classical music concerts, theatre, dance and opera performances (www.arts.nsw.gov.au/ pubs/NSW_Cultural_data/cultdata.htm). The refurbishment of old cinemas in country towns and the building of new arts centres (some with cinemas as well as theatre, gallery and workshop spaces) will doubtless strengthen attendance levels and suggest that Playing Australia, Visions Australia and Mobile States will all play major roles in the future of Australia’s arts.

A significant initiative in this era of networks and clusters has been the NSW Ministry for the Arts 2003 appointment of Clarissa Arndt as Cultural Development Broker for the Lower Hunter region—Newcastle and the local governments of Lake Macquarie, Port Stephens, Maitland and Cessnock. Brokerage is the latest of a string of terms borrowed from business to enter the arts, with Arndt “to play a key role in building and facilitating partnerships across the arts, community, private and education sectors in the Lower Hunter region”, said then Director of Arts Development, Susan Donnelly. This appointment is no mere ‘top-down’ imposition but a response to some significant and idiosyncratic activity much of it from young artists in Newcastle exemplified by the Octapod Association and the This Is Not Art festival incorporating Electrofringe. The 2 Til 5 Youth Theatre, Newcastle Region Art Gallery and Rocketart gallery also play key roles.

The arts are crucial in the regeneration of Newcastle. Theatre Kantanka’s Michael Cohen has moved from Sydney to Newcastle to manage Newcastle Live Sites, a free cultural events program designed to enliven the city, taking place in 6 public spaces. It has included concerts, dance, circus, a Legs on the Wall workshop, a fire spectacle (with 500 jumbo-sized burning candles, 3 commissioned sculptures including a gigantic burning brazier, 4 burning log sculptures and public lantern-making); installations (eg illuminated tents created by artists Vicki Sienczuk and Caroline Hale, and sculptors, performers, artists and craftsmen creating contraptions from scrap material, under the direction of Stalker Theatre’s Joey Ruigrok van der Werven); the Reeldance dance-on-film program; and a wide range of music from gypsy and swing to electronica and the truly eclectic Randai Circus Project. True to the pervasive contemporary principle of partnership, the program is jointly funded by the Newcastle Alliance, the Honeysuckle Development Corporation, the Newcastle City Council and the NSW Ministry for the Arts.

The report on regional arts in NSW on these pages can only be introductory, offering some sense of the context in which artists practise, the support and networks available, and the vital interplay of local, regional, national and international that is part of the emerging picture of regional arts. You see this in the current Newcastle Region Art Gallery’s Auto Fetish, The Mechanics of Desire (www.autofetish.com), a contribution to the city’s hotted-up car culture with, for example, images from Bill Henson side by side with Newcastle photographers including Linsey Gosper whose work featured on the cover of RealTime 62. Electrofringe mixes international new media innovators with locals in an event that draws artists, emerging and established, from across Australia to its workshops, forums and events. At the same time, regional artists develop on their own terms. This dialectic of independent development and mutual influence is vital to the evolution of regional arts. Rachael Vincent, editor of ArtReach writes in “Finding the voice of many in one” that RANSW could be thought of “as a decentralised organisation made up of diverse components, each with their own distinctive needs and characteristics. But we are also a group, which must at times speak with a singular voice…” (ArtReach, March 2004; www.regionalartsnsw.com.au). As Fiona Martin’s account of the arts on the NSW North Coast makes clear, local cultural ecology can evolve in complex ways, breeding its own identity and networks of support. The very acknowledgment of that difference, created in part by distance, is fundamental to the future of regional arts.

Newcastle Region Art Gallery’s Auto Fetish, The Mechanics of Desire, Nov 27-Jan 23