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Christine Johnston, Decent Spinster

photo Chris Osborne

Christine Johnston, Decent Spinster

The first time I encountered Christine Johnston (accompanied by Trent Arkley-Smith on cello) she was wordlessly vocalising the shape and texture of random hairstyles among the audience of The Crab Room, a short-lived but legendary artists’ space in Brisbane in the 90s. Wearing her high-necked, Edwardian cape-gown and exaggerated but immaculate nest of hair, Johnston’s handsome, slightly melancholic, straight-faced and straight-backed clown was as mesmerising to watch as to listen to: she could sing—really sing—and unlike most clowns, she was terribly funny.

That same evening at The Crab Room we’d all been thoroughly spooked by performer Lisa O’Neill whose porcelain persona and minimalist movement could fix time and space head-on with the ferocity of a strobe. Later, a taciturn fellow patiently arranged and set off dozens of noisy tea-bag jiggling devices he’d ingeniously fashioned from found mechanical objects and, as we sipped hot tea deep into the night, a couple of story-telling hombres turned up and baked (180 degrees for 45 mins) and served up an array of cakes. These were very same cakes, they explained, which had silently featured during tête-a-têtes, grievings, seductions, unholy confessions and domestic farces with which they now regaled us—using Daisy Buchanan dropped voices to make you lean forward, cake and cup in hand, to overhear the marvellously scandalous codas. I’d been living in Brisbane only a short while and I remember thinking how relieving was the artfulness of strangers in the face of suburban exile.

Soon after, Wesley Enoch invited Johnston to create a soundscape for his Queensland Theatre Company production of Louis Nowra’s Radiance with Deborah Mailman. The sense of place and dramatic colour of Johnston’s off-stage vocal evocation of birds, frogs, insects and the mud-gurgle of tidal mangrove was simply staggering. Never just a mimic, Johnston makes theatre in her throat.

With creative consultant, Lisa O’Neill and dramaturg Louise Gough, in Decent Spinster, Johnston re-works some of her familiar cabaret style vignettes and conceives the journey of the Spinster into a full length show joined by a trio of fine musicians (Trent Arkley-Smith, Peter Nelson and Owen Newcomb), as easily at home with Schubert as with Black Sabbath or Dead Can Dance. With a simple set comprising screen and curtain (and an assemblage of adapted home appliances), Johnston invites us first into her Super-8 childhood where she is a trike-riding gatherer of chooks, insects and detritus. She is alone, wordlessly befriending and exchanging secrets with the feathered, the taxidermed and the inanimate and, haunting her birthday party even then, the ghostly band who escort her with flashlights into the playing space.

In this surreal biopic, the Spinster obsessively reads, documents and sounds the world back at itself with absurdist detachment and unsettling if comic curiosity. She is in the world and out of it and employs a host of narrative devices to keep the audience engaged—she is a consummately generous performer—but also at bay. With projections of simple but witty snaps that supernaturally glide her from foregound to middle ground, from voyeur to unlikely participant, we track the Spinster’s journey from the semi-rural suburbs of Brisbane into the traffic dominated inner city—roller bladers, cyclists, scooter riders, skate-boarders and hot rod racers—regularly cadging a lift in the process. We know she loves contraptions and it is the machine not the person that she seduces. Later, there are scenes where the Spinster pleasures herself with the belt of a weight loss machine; a guitar descends from heaven (those ghostly musicians pulling strings again?) and the Spinster lets loose; while her musical duet with the ‘man-sized’ saw (no-one touches Johnston when it comes to saw playing!) is completely riveting.

Not simply the ingenue, she also insists on lecturing us with her soundings—the singing of graphs and charts, interpreting for us through the dead language of song, Latin, the bleating bumper stickers of suburban tribalism. Yet these are also some of the funniest moments of the piece, eg Comedo Magi Bubbum—“Cops Are Tops.” And Johnstone knows just when to move on. Decent Spinster reminds me of Martin Amis’ Martianism, where to be an observer is to be imbued with what is observed, but never to leave yourself free of escape. In the spaces between we can only be grateful for the artfulness of strangers—the Spinster sings: Stella Porni.

Decent Spinster, Christine Johnston, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 7-1

RealTime issue #56 Aug-Sept 2003 pg. 44

Interest in things sonic has dramatically increased across the arts. While there has always been a certain level of activity, often sporadic, the last few years have seen a development of what could be described as scenes, particularly in the electro-improvisational area, growing out of regular events and gatherings. In Melbourne there is Liquid Architecture, an annual festival of sound-related arts and Anthony Pateras’ Articulating Space along with a range of gallery and installation-based activities encouraged by the likes of WestSpace. Brisbane has Lawrence English’s Fabrique and Small Black Box set up by Andrew Kettle, Scott Sinclair and Greg Jenkins. In Sydney there’s the what is music festival (including a Melbourne component) created by Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim, and caleb~k’s impermanent.audio. These have recently been joined by 2 monthly Sydney events, Shannon O’Neill’s Disorientation and Jules Ambrosine and Aaron Hull’s 1/4 inch.

So where is all this sound coming from? And are universities and institutions playing a role by responding to the current cultural trend? During the recent tour of Liquid Architecture to the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, I caught up with English and Mowson, and later in Sydney spoke with caleb~k about the kind of education that makes a sound artist.

But is it music?

The debate in music circles on the status of sound art as distinct from music grinds on with borders blurring and lines and, occasionally, swords crossing. However while the gatekeepers dismiss whole avenues of audio art as bad music, or refuse to acknowledge the form at all, the opportunity exists to define this beast as a different species, related yet feeding on different aesthetic grounds. While a large proportion of artists within the sound area, may well be musicians they are not primarily trained as such. Mowson says of the artists in Liquid Architecture, “we just don’t seem to get people from that [traditional music training] background simply because they just don’t seem savvy enough about the culture. That kind of repertoire-based learning doesn’t seem to serve them in the context of reflecting on contemporary issues.” English concurs, “most of the music courses are geared towards people being competent players not necessarily conceptual thinkers, or exploring their craft in less conventional manners…”

caleb~k believes that certain leading music institutions still have difficulties aligning with and incorporating movements like Fluxus and artists such as Alvin Lucier into their theoretical training, so there’s very little to encourage sound art practice as a viable form. For English, it depends very much on the people teaching at the institution—“not necessarily the universities themselves saying hang on a minute let’s turn out sound artists, but more a group of staff members interested in that area, and recognising that there is a potential within students to be interested and it generally snowballs from there.”

Aesthetics and/or technique

When asked about what he looks for when curating his program caleb~k says “self awareness is quite important…people who do the most interesting things have an overall concept of their project or approach…[and] focus and direction both in terms of total output and in terms of a piece.” Mowson says “the people who are coming to us and contributing really good material may have gone to university or not, but they’ve got a professional outlook—good material and high standards seem to go with having a strong critical faculty, reflecting an engagement with what’s going on.”

So is this something that universities and training institutions are providing? caleb~k believes that it can be encouraged and developed, but it takes more than a year or even 3 “…which is why schools have honours years. By 4th year students start to do their own work as opposed to development.” Mowson believes that a strong focus of tertiary education “is to widen people’s knowledge base. Most people have an area of music that they’re passionately into…but what’s interesting is when people fill that out [and] develop a broad frame of reference. Then they’re not constantly coming up with stuff someone’s already done better—not that they should necessarily change but rather learn from this.”

Many of the artists working in the area presently have no formal training in music or sound. However, caleb~k suggests that “in an art school or university there’s a conversation…you have more reason to develop because you’ve got people to talk to, technicians and peers.” Mowson concurs that one of the really important things that comes from study is finding a peer group and people with whom you continue to work and develop.

So where does technical training fit in? It appears to be taken as a matter of course. I suggested that perhaps universities offer facilities that young artists may not otherwise have access to, but all 3 are sceptical, suggesting that as technology becomes cheaper, more accessible and more ‘intuitive’, this is less of a lure. However Mowson believes that good recording facilities and audio visual synched editing is still a drawcard. caleb~k thinks that “obviously it’s going to be much quicker to create work at a school…you’re going to find better ways of doing things…but more important is learning aesthetics, history, conceptual approaches and critical engagement.”

The attractions of education

There are now schools addressing sound (RMIT, UWS, CoFA, QUT) either through specific media-based courses in universities and elsewhere, strands within art schools or more expansive programs within some music departments. There are more and more practising artists and curators working in these courses (all 3 interviewees have lectured in universities), strengthening the connection between development and practice. Can we expect a plethora of young sound artists? caleb~k believes that it’s a bit too early to tell, as most of these courses are still in their first few years and hitting their stride, though he is seeing some increase in the number of artists in 3rd and honours years producing interesting work. There are also artists who have been practising for a while and choosing to go back to study now that there is more of a conducive environment. As English describes it, “they’re returning to get a better understanding of how different artforms work, how to amplify their ideas.” But all 3 agree that in the end, the quality and success of the sound artist comes down to conceptual rigour and, as Mowson concludes, “that seems to come from individuals. Courses may be able to facilitate that but not create it.”

Gail Priest is a Sydney based sound artist and is co-director of Electrofringe 03.

RealTime issue #56 Aug-Sept 2003 pg. 45

impermanent.audio opened as an experimental music venue in Sydney in 2000 and lately releases material by local electronic artists. The label’s output seems largely informed by the Japanese Onkyo scene (the no-input sampler/mixer work of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura for example) and lower case sounds of practitioners like Bernard Günter, Francisco Lopez and Steve Roden. Contemporary sound art practices are reflected through a focus on sound’s inner workings. The sonic minutiae of texture, frequency and rhythm are highlighted, performance is shifted from physicality, instrumentality and theatricality and reduced to austere, small gestures and low-volume sounds.

Live performances of various combinations of the impermanent roster were held recently in Melbourne. The Make it up Club hosted the first night and the Stasis Duo (Matthew Earl and Adam Sussmann on no-input samplers and guitar) began the tour proper with locals Will Guthrie and Arek Gulbenkoglu. Their set started gently with a simple oscillating tone at a barely perceptible volume. Intricacies in the fabric of the sound, which might normally be overwhelmed by volume or density, were allowed space and time to develop and dissipate. The interplay between the duo samplers, with Guthrie’s percussive and textural embellishments and Gulbenkoglu’s prepared guitar, was restrained and quiet, slowly and gently unfolding in a languid, linear arc.

Peter Blamey and Daniel Whiting followed, using mixer feedback, delay and rhythm devices. Their set built incrementally from pulsing feedback, sibilant hiss and simple permutations of delay, to sheets of white noise and wave-like surging drones. Just when they seemed to reach critical mass, the set abruptly ended. A pity, as this rhythmic and textural density had many levels of complexity that could have been pursued further.

Feedback is an inherently unstable system and to use it in live performance is to flirt with chaos. Tiny adjustments and parameter tweaks can have totally disproportionate results, causing cascading, systemic effects, which can end in extreme noise or total loss of signal. Performing this way is as risky as more traditional musical improvisation, perhaps more so. Peter Blamey’s performance at RMIT’s Kaleide Theatre was a good example of this. His set of no-input mixer feedback started with an insistent rhythmic pattern building in density and then ending suddenly when he lost the feedback loop. In silence, Blamey worked the desk to restore the signal, slowly gathering momentum and volume as he continued his performance. Although the audience couldn’t see much action on stage, it was a volatile and engaging set.

Stasis Duo and Philip Samartzis’ performance in the same venue was so quiet that the tapping of keys and buttons was often audible over the music. Samartzis played prepared CDs and an ancient Moog synthesiser, while the duo relied again on emptied samplers and tone generator. Many of the same sonic signatures were present: delicate sine tones, insectile chirruping and muted bass teased at the edges of audibility. Although they hadn’t played together before, the trio’s considered use of silence, space and timbre was well-matched.

Joel Stern ended the RMIT session with a solo laptop performance using contact-miked cowbell and other objects. Combining these sounds with gestures, Stern offered a physicality and interaction often absent from laptop performances. Using a palette of harsh metallic sounds, crunchy scrapings and busily panning cross-rhythms, he segued into a droning gentle ambience to finish the night.

A final evening at the Westspace Gallery featured further pairings of impermanent. audio performers. The improvisational approach of all 3 nights focused on tiny gesture, subtle dynamics and contemplative performance. Whether this was a reaction against more traditional modes of improvisation or our everyday sonic overload, this self-effacement left little for the audience to observe as “performance.” Attention was diverted from watching to zeroing in on the inner workings of sounds, their placement and relationship: plenty of worthwhile opportunities for focused listening.

Make it Impermanent, Make it up Club, May 20; Impermanent Records and ((tRansMIT)), Kaleide Theatre, RMIT, May 23; impermanent.audio, Westspace Gallery, Melbourne, May 24

impermanent.audio’s caleb~k will be presenting the i.audio festival featuring reknowned vocalist Ami Yoshida, (winner of the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 2003), and Taku Sugimoto guitarist and improvisor along with Australian artists. The Sydney end of the festival will also include h.phone, a selection of soundworks by artists for headphones and Variable Resistance: 10 Hours of Sound from Australia curated by Phillip Samartzis, Sept 12 & 13, exhibition Sept 12-20 Performance Space, Sydney; concerts Sept 17-18, Footscray community Arts Centre, Melbourne.

RealTime issue #56 Aug-Sept 2003 pg. 46

Ros Bandt, Silo Stories

National sound art festival, Liquid Architecture, has just completed its 4th incarnation at several Melbourne venues. Under the direction of Nat Bates and Bruce Mowson, the event featured 30 Australian and international artists, including French musique concrete/acousmatic pioneer, Bernard Parmegiani and San Francisco noise merchants, Scott Arford and Randy Hy Yau. Parmegiani’s presence was a real coup, bringing into sharp focus the rich heritage of sonic art. But could the festival deliver on its claim that we would “hear the world through a different set of ears”?

Randy Hy Yau

RMIT’s underground car park was the venue for performances from Arford and Yau, with Australian sound artists Phil Samartzis, Laurence English and Mowson. The night began with a set by Machina aux Rock—Philip Brophy on drums and Bates on electronics—a loose, percussive attack reminiscent of Krautrock legends Ash Ra Tempel. Amusingly, a couple began to dance at the back of the car park, only to be stung into submission by the segue into Yau’s solo performance. Yau played the “MegaMouth”, a battery-powered children’s toy “rewired for maximum overdriven output.” In this altered state, the toy became a potent conduit for scorching feedback, transforming simple vibrations and movement into fierce electronic overdrive, a banshee wail that seemed to erupt from Yau himself. His performance was intensely physical as he caressed the MegaMouth against speakers, against his mouth, against the concrete floor. With each twist and turn of the device a different, dissonant timbre emerged, seemingly catching the artist by surprise, jerking his body into spastic contortions; if a man could willingly subject himself to high-powered electrocution, it would look and sound like this. But even so, Yau’s effort was surprisingly musical, with some melodious moments among the throbbing squall.

During all performances, the car park’s sonic signature came into its own as frequencies bounced crazily off the rear walls—punters up the back were turning their heads, as if unseen speakers were propelling startling, unearthly tones in and out of the mix.

Bernard Parmegiani

Parmegiani’s vast, elegant body of work was presented in various forms over the festival weekend. First up was a wide-ranging discussion, including an overview of his acousmatic (“listening without seeing”) theories and his work with Pierre Schaeffer in the 1960s. When asked about his earliest sonic influences, Parmegiani needed clarification: did his interrogator mean after birth, or before, he wondered. Listening to his mother’s body in the womb, he stressed, was his earliest sonic influence.

Of the 3 GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales) film shorts scored by Parmegiani and presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the pick was L’Ecran Transparent (The Transparent Screen), a bizarre 19-minute work from 1973, also directed by Parmegiani. With a set design resembling 70s sci-fi films like THX 1138, it featured an earnest, bearded intellectual dressed in black and offering McLuhanesque theories on the “electronic human, who lives faster because he is forced to see and hear everything at once.” Then, as the film dispensed with the increasingly shell-shocked narrator, it spiraled into an extended synaesthetic exploration, with flaring video effects and heavily warped sound design amplifying the film’s central tenet: “The eye can see what the ear cannot regard. At the point where the senses meet, there is a kind of no-sense.”

On Sunday night, Parmegiani presided over a “Multispeaker Diffusion” presentation at RMIT Storey Hall. Playing his impeccably prerecorded works from CD, Parmegiani flung soundscapes all about the hall, using mixers and a battery of strategically placed speakers. Sounds “ticked” and “scrunched”, some “flipped”, some “scribbled” and some “cracked”; all edged in and out of consciousness. There’s no adequate vocabulary to describe how Parmegiani psychologically sculpts the sonic qualities of everyday objects—never has a rolling ping pong ball sounded so terrifying. The performance capped off a memorable weekend and Parmegiani was deservedly rewarded with a standing ovation.

360º: Women in Sound

A series of installations created by female sound artists, took place at first site and Westspace galleries, curated by Arnya Tehira and Sianna Lee who see gender focus as necessary to highlight the under-representation of women in sound art.

Ros Bandt’s Silo Stories was my pick. Recorded snatches of conversation echoed around and inside windy rural wheat silos. As an “audible mapping of a changing culture”, the work offered an evocative reminder of a diminishing lifestyle; stylishly presented, the installation was accompanied by barrels of overflowing wheat and mysterious photographs of silos adorned the gallery walls.

Another standout was Thembi Soddell’s Intimacy, using surround-sound speakers in a curtained-off space. For the gallery-goer sitting on the low stool within the pitch-dark enclosure, the effect of Soddell’s layered, peak-and-trough waves of sound was absolutely cathartic. Other installations featured minimal visuals and “computer chip” music and there were enigmatic, immersive quadraphonic presentations using found sounds and ritualised street textures.

And so it went that as I emerged from the first site gallery the sounds of the street became enhanced, super-real: creaking doors took on an extra dimension, as did the flushing of a public toilet, the snippets of conversation stolen from passers-by and the groan of a tram as it rounded a corner. All seemed slaves to a system of weird harmony, confirmation of some uncanny, grand design; I wandered the city centre for a good 2 hours, listening to my no-longer familiar world with a “new set of ears”— just as Liquid Architecture promised I would.

Liquid Architecture, directors Nat Bates & Bruce Mowson, Melbourne, July 1-26

RealTime issue #56 Aug-Sept 2003 pg. 46

For our annual survey of arts education this year we’re taking a bold new approach. Instead of asking university departments and training schools what they’re doing, we’ve asked our writers to approach established and often innovative theatre, performance and music directors, choreographers, curators and programmers what they think of the calibre of graduating students over the last 3 to 5 years. How skilled are these graduates, how inventive, how flexible, how collaborative, how in touch with the world and with the markets they are becoming part of? There are all kinds of interesting responses to be found in these pages. Of course, they’re bound to be impressionistic, but they’re professional opinions and no more or less subjective than a teacher’s claims as to the effectiveness of their methodology.

Overall, it seems that the relationship between training institutions and the arts industry is a mutually supportive and sometimes uneasy one. There’s plenty of praise for graduates in all fields and, occasionally, specific institutions. There are specific criticisms, for example Robyn Nevin, Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company is frustrated at graduates’ poor grasp of language: “[they] have little understanding of the fundamentals of grammar and sentence structure, and almost none of the rhythm and music of language.” She is also concerned, as is director Wesley Enoch, about vocal skills. Enoch feels that the focus on ‘internal’ states has reduced the young performer’s ability to reach out to their audience, “to pass the story.” Like Ryk Goddard, Artistic Director of Tasmania’s is theatre ltd, in our survey of contemporary performance training, Enoch laments the lack of an apprenticeship as part of the training of the performer. Enoch also wants graduates to be able to say why they are performers: “The question ‘why’ isn’t asked enough.” New media artist and curator Ross Gibson wants graduates to ask of their creations, ‘why?’ and David Pledger, Artistic Director of NYID, and Alasdair Foster, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography, both look for an ethical and political responsiveness.

In contemporary performance and sound art the issue of training is complex. Key practitioners like Tess De Quincey have developed their practice well outside and ahead of the universities over recent decades. There has been significant ‘catch up’, with a small number of courses evolving here and there across the country. However, these are rarely in the position to offer full-time 3-year courses with the focus on “embodiment” and technical skills and with the resources and skilled teachers that experienced practitioners would like to see.

What is most evident from the responses gathered here is that once your tertiary education is complete your training as an artist is just beginning. RT

It is a frequently overlooked truism that the primary elements that performance shapes are time and space. Like the watery realm evoked in the protagonist’s dream, The Inhabited Woman represents a floating world, a disconnected place in which both audience and on-stage figures drift into dreamy, atemporal states, before one suddenly catches one’s breath and lightly steps forward into the next, deliberately artificial, theatrical realm.

Richard Murphet is primarily responsible for the text of this production. He claims that the piece depicts “the space that a woman makes and fills” and asks “how can that space exist as a core of its own from which the other aspects radiate?” This confusion about where and how feminine identity is centred is rendered dramaturgically by Ryan Russell’s stage design, a giant framework cube bordered by Mondrian-like, discontinuous squares and light mesh screens, fixed on a central pivot. Early in the production there is a key transition from the completely timeless, disconnected, almost fog-like experience of the protagonist’s dream, to a point where she emerges from her bedroom to find her domestic space already scripted for her. Like Kim Novak in Vertigo finding James Stewart marking out her new identity, or Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman finding identity and memory suddenly opaque and difficult to determine in Spellbound. At the moment of this crucial thematic change, the entire set rotates, lights and all, morphing into yet another gilded cage of slight signs and slants of light that define this new world. In each of these places, the protagonist is disturbed, off-balance, ill at ease. She cannot find a firm centre in her own spatiotemporal existence akin to the one that the literal performer (Leisa Shelton) keeps crossing over within Russell’s stage design.

The spatiotemporal plasticity of this work makes it disconcerting for the audience as well. There is no central organising rhythm to the piece, no primary dramaturgical style (installation, projection, physical performance, poetry) to fix your attention. No sooner do you find a wisp of ‘narrative’ to follow, than the box rotates and Shelton moves from speaking, to building a cairn from river stones and flowers on a table.

Like tide lapping at a shore, the production beckons and captures the audience before releasing its grip to leave us resting again on the soft surface of a dramaturgical shoreline. In the finale, the journey of the work is revealed. The protagonist has not been seeking her true self, but rather her double, her shadow, her alternate life, led in sordid 1950s style motel rooms and on the crest of a great, ocean wave. As Katie Symes’ beautiful, immersive 4-way sound design coalesces into a heightened field-recording of a cataclysmic crashing of salty waters and its blue-green visual textures pour over Shelton’s inhaling body, the character reaches a consummation that seems to evoke both death and a contented, centred return to life. A female Christ or Buddha perhaps, who had to gaze into a watery film screen to find her centred state.

The Inhabited Woman, performance/concept Leisa Shelton, text Richard Murphet, projection Ryan Russell & Elspeth Tremblay, sound Katie Symes, Jethro Woodward, stage design Ryan Russell, lighting Matt Britten, North Melbourne Town Hall, June 27-July 19

Genevieve Lacey’s ambitious and seductive Melbourne Autumn Music Festival offers genuine surprises while retaining its familiar focus on early music. The event’s original incarnation, the International Festival of Organ and Harpsichord, was established in 1970 and celebrated the deep repertoire and often outstanding virtuosity of early music performance in the familiar context of the concert series. Lacey’s festival builds on this tradition of repertoire and technical excellence while revealing her concern for exposing, questioning and proposing how we listen (and perform) in the moment.

Lacey’s early music program, which is occasionally presented through radical interpretation, is loaded with works from the 15th to 19th centuries, but, experienced alongside recent and contemporary works, has the effect of collapsing time. Or, perhaps more accurately, of creating time by connecting us to the heart of the matter: the experience of creation and the creation of experience, whether inhaled by our ears or exhaled through our playing bodies and instruments.

Two central events in this festival were Astra Choir and Aelfguyv, a new performance work by Jane Woollard and Stevie Wishart. The Astra Choir (directed by John McCaughey), presented a generous, complex and immediately penetrating concert, Scenes and Epigrams, based around Carl Loewe’s intimate Passion Oratorio (1847) and intercut with recent and contemporary works by Paul Dessau, Hanns Eisler, Helen Gifford, Martin Friedel and Elliot Carter. As a form, the Passion traditionally collides musical styles from previous periods in a self-conscious reflection on time and experience. McCaughey’s extension of this idea and the themes of personal suffering and revelation through further collisions of text, sound and performance was extremely effective and profiled the substantial talents of the choir, its performers and instrumentalists.

Most memorably, Dessau’s richly eclectic settings of Brecht’s War Prime (a poem cycle in response to wartime photographs) brilliantly shadowed Loewe’s concern with the malleability of humanity and the individual stories that are central to any epic, as well as Brecht’s great dramaturgical contribution-”each scene for itself”-played out in McCaughey’s program. Arnold Schonberg’s stunningly conceived and beautifully performed Peace on Earth, tolling for peace, was a highlight, as were Gifford’s dramatic Catharsis and Carter’s March for Four Timpani.

Like all commissioned military histories-before and since 1066 AD-the Bayeaux Tapestry is a remarkable propagandist artefact. It is also intensely and immediately beautiful, and the inspiration for Woollard and Wishart’s Aelfguyva. Embroidered onto easily rolled and transported cloth 20 inches high and unfurling to well over 200 feet, the tapestry’s colourful, cartoon-like scenes with occasional Latin text depict William of Normandy’s conquest of Harold, the Anglo Saxon claimant to the English throne following the death of King Edward.

Writer and director, Woollard, in collaboration with Wishart, take as their muse the mysterious figure of Aelfgyva (performed by Margaret Mills), one of only 4 women who appear in the tapestry-and the only one named. She appears hovering above the ground between 2 ornate columns and is being struck, or admonished, or entreated, by “a certain Cleric”, given the name Aelfwine by Woollard (performed by Colin James). Aelfgyva’s actual existence can only be speculated but she is charged by many scholars as having whored the succession in a previous generation and her story is certainly notorious enough to require no explanation for the creators of tapestry. Woollard’s Aelfguyv is not an attempt to argue a biography, rather Aelfgyva is a haunted meditation, a purgatorial figure coursing through Wishart’s time-collapsing soundscape, forever freeing and weaving herself into Amanda Johnson’s imaginative tableaux set.

Woollard’s not always clear narrative surrounds Aelfgyva’s passionate seduction of Aelfwine who first succumbs and then abandons her and the material world for God. At the sound of the foreign hooves Aelfwine enlists in the war and is quickly killed on the battlefield. Aelfgyva’s land and culture are violated and in the face of vanishing certainties she descends into the earth to retrieve Aelfwine’s body. Time and culture collapse and ultimately the only thing we know in spite of the tricks of time and culture is that we know nothing.

Woollard’s strangely neutral idiom of flattened period English often thuds with cliché, as though Aelfguyva and Aelfwine are stock characters in a medieval melodrama and the effect is distinctly distancing. Aelfguyv is not in the mould of a mystery play but nor does it seem to explore a language dynamic enough for a dream in which the seams of history might be joined. Notwithstanding the undoubted strength of the music in finding these seams, in a work where action and intent substantially depend on the spoken word, a more anachronistic (or genuinely archaic) approach might have been more effective.

The constant references to embroidery and use of a physical performance language based on the gestures, attitudes and stance of figures in the Bayeaux Tapestry also tended to dull rather than energise Aelfguyv’s mysteries. The extreme style of the embroidered figures creates a dramatic, image-based tableau in the tapestry, but it is untranslatable in performance-the decision to effect a series of poses in quick succession (several times) almost risked comedy as the performers’ bodies jerked themselves from one pose to the next like a stop-start martial arts lesson. Incorporating this gestural language was possibly an inspired idea but demands extended physical rehearsal to finesse into something performative and effective. Notwithstanding these production mannerisms, Margaret Mills is a dexterous performer who gave much to the role of Aelfgyva.

The Narrator, a neatly conceived role sung by the charismatic Carolyn Connors with accompaniment by harpist Natalia Mann (also an occasional and effective chorus), is cleverly neither in the story nor apart from it but provided energy and connection between the themes and action. Connors addresses, comments and contextualises as though permanently revisiting a disaster scene with all the prescience and exasperation of a Cassandra-a role strongly supported by Wishart’s vocal score which seemed to resonate and test our familiarity with medieval sound drawing us into another, more eternal and sensual memory place.

Throughout the work, Wishart literally layers her live and pre-recorded sound in a sustained meeting of flesh and mechanics deftly engineered by Michael Hewes. Wishart’s collaborative achievement is to create an aural dimension which, like the “hairy star” (Halley’s Comet) dominating Johnson’s backdrop, strikingly reminds us of our bodily and mythical connection to the communities of 1066 AD; the experienced and the remembered; the mortal and the immortalised; the living and the dead.

Five hundred years after the Battle of Hastings, Mary, the imprisoned Queen of Scotts, worked her needlepoint in an interminable present of loneliness recounting her own history to herself and making gifts for friends she was forbidden to see. Over time, she evolved subtle variations in motif and technique and used these coded messages to secretly communicate, fatally as it happened, with her Catholic defenders. It is argued that while the Bayeaux Tapestry was probably designed by just one male Norman, it took the hands of many Anglo Saxon women to execute it. Subtle variations in needlepoint technique, figurative representation and scenic composition suggest that the embroiderers practised their art knowing that their scenes might be discernible within a censored collaboration. It is also possible that these idiosyncrasies are communicating private messages hidden from our understanding but nonetheless present. While perhaps still a work-in-progress, Jane Woollard and Stevie Wishart’s Aelfguyva is an imaginative affirmation that what is hidden from us is usually right before our eyes and already resonating somewhere in our ears.

Michael Kutschbach, strawberry ut's (trudy's turn), animation still, 2003 Greenaway Gallery

Michael Kutschbach’s friendly anthropomorphs have come out to play again, in the form of stanley, beatrice and friends. In multiple guises, they appear as shapes cut out of laminated MDF, plaster and acrylic globules, adhesive vinyl outlines and computer-animated figures. Pastel-pretty, stanley et al colonise the smooth cold concrete space of the gallery, swarming across the floor like the chalk scrawls of children’s games and clustered on the walls in chewing-gum gobs.

A large projection on a far wall animates the figures in a complex and continuous state of permutation. Like an oversized, mesmerising screen saver, we see one shape morphing into another, colours constantly changing, new nodes swelling as new divisions appear. This projection integrates the separate figures ranging across the space, binding them via their infusion with the vitality of the projected image. The space is colonised and made wholly their own, XY’s accompanying sound installation—a kind of scratchy static punctuated occasionally by annunciatory notes—functions as a soundtrack to their implicit lives.

Pretty colours, soft folds, and a focus on detail-free and impenetrable surfaces will always raise the suspicion that mere attractiveness is all that’s on offer. Yet the works’ high finish demonstrates deliberate and careful methods of production. Kutschbach’s investigations could conceivably be validated by the methodical exploratory processes of their meticulous realisation, though whether such a grounding is acceptable or (conceptually) unsatisfying depends on one’s viewpoint. Or perhaps these modes of production are merely secondary.

Kutschbach has obviously become fascinated with this shape, discovered accidentally while painting, and in bringing it to 3D realisation. The characters have been continually reinvented, toyed with, drawn out in different forms. Do we realise now, as essayist Jim Strickland suggests, that Kutschbach “has been nurturing a wonderfully eccentric personality within his blob”? This must count for something: personality is, after all, what matters in the art world. Enough personality to stand alone? Well, no, but they don’t have to, given that their very substance draws on their inherent relationship to all things shiny and pretty and consumable, that is, their embodiment of the qualities valued within our society. Enough personality to stand ‘the test of time’? Let’s just not mention inbuilt obsolescence.

stanley, beatrice and friends, Michael Kutschbach, Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide, June 25-July 27

Among the clutter of a media infested world, grief is found breathing at Sydney’s Performance Space. I remember 1948 is an exhibit of time-based and mixed media works by Arab artists. In this journey into silence and memory, artworks narrate continual acts of erasure. Although the state of Palestine has long been associated with a killing field, its culture remains alive, and its people are constantly searching for truth and a home in which to nurture it.

Many Palestinians still carry around their necks the keys to their homes in Palestine, which they were forced to leave and cannot return to. Al Nakba or “The Catastrophe” is what Palestinians call May 15, 1948 and refers to the day 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, forced to live in refugee camps or massacred. Al Nakba remains in the Palestinian consciousness as the time when their freedom ceased and it’s yet to be returned.

Many works in I Remember 1948 represent processes of dispossession and disembodiment. The absence of questions in contemporary discourse about the place of the Palestinians is well deliberated by the artists. Walking through the exhibition, I recognised that art was one of the few spaces left for a suppressed but alert and proud people to express themselves. Destiny Deacon's archival footage of her mother's life in Postcards from Mummy at Roslyn Oxley9 fused themselves in my mind to Alexandra Handal's ongoing installation, RememberOnce. In this piece, Handal retells personal stories of early and first wave Palestinian war victims by writing them over Israeli tourist guides. Patrick Abboud's olive-filled map of Palestine resonated with Fiona Foley's chili filled floor piece recently shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Aboud’s installation consisted of a floor map of Palestine covered with olives, with small lights marking the old cities. Above, video projections on muslin of olive trees and branches offered the viewer a channel for hope and peace. The soundscape–of Palestinian voices reciting names and street addresses signaled the role of memory in the healing process.

The scope of media used by various artists signified the disparate roads they came from to reach I remember 1948. A Flash animation by Fadi, of Nazareth, gave the viewer a subtle invitation to “think” while the animation was loading. His use of the tedium of waiting, so often encountered with computer-based work, projected Fadi’s political stance into the conceptual. With the mesmerising blinking of the word “Think”–a rare act in a consumer-based society–Fadi gently asked us to question our assumptions.

The mixed media wall work of Fatima Killeen used segments of corrugated iron from the walls of refugee housing in Palestinian camps. At its centre, a perfected plaster key contrasted with the rusted and misshapen iron. The immediacy of these materials created a tension between time and distance, as if prompting the viewer to anticipate and wait for the key to become a useful/used object instead of one of hope.

Poetry glazed onto canvas by Wadee Al-Zaidi ushered in the importance of the written word and the textural. Well-known poet Nizar Al-Kabani’s poem, Please forgive us was an affirmation of solidarity and the empathetic experience of pain. Soraya Asmar’s installation of fluoro drawings mapped out a journey accentuated with boots, houses and more keys. This symbolism merged with narratives which flowed along the highly visual and sensitized road of alienation. Asmar’s installation comprised of images constructed by a hand-manipulated thin wire glowing under black light. The visual text was accompanied by a soundscape of hooves, personal histories and traditional songs. The darkened room, in which erupting images shimmered in the dark, ushered in a dreamscape of memory and yearning.

Other pieces also told stories of alienation and displacement and, like Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett's Watch Tower piece in the Isle of Refuge exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, they offered hope. Here kinship might help avert a future that, left unchecked, will continue to erase the histories of a people’s dispossession and of the confiscation of their homes.

“Moist is a video created using light microscopy. I use blood, phlegm, pus, cervical mucus and tears—fluids with emotive qualities—to translate out the biological self into meteorological or interstellar geographies.”
MAAP in Beijing 2002 catalogue

Justine Cooper is a leading Australian new media artist who has been working productively at the nexus of art and science with some outstanding creative results. Back in 1998 an image of her foot, scanned using Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the work titled RAPT, appeared on the cover of RealTime 26. RAPT attracted great attention (Cooper writes about the work in the Tofts, Jonson & Cavallaro collection, Prefiguring Cyberculture, Power Publications, 2002). She has subsequently created a number of significant works and exhibited internationally in over 30 shows in 12 countries across 5 continents, most recently as part of MAAP in Beijing 2002 with the large scale video work Moist, and this year at the International Center of Photography, New York and the Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore. As well 2 of her videos have been exhibited this year at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York. Reduction, a striking video work for 2 performers was part of the Another Planet collection of Australian video curated by Keely Macarow (see review RT 54) and shown in Chicago and New York.

It’s fascinating to see you working in a variety of formats from gallery installation to animation, with performers, to creating components for use in live performance. How have you arrived at such a diverse way of working?

My first encounter with the collaborative process was at the age of 5, in the surgery room of my parents’ veterinary clinic. I opened sutures, squeezed the bag on the anaesthesiology machine, powdered gloves and kept my eyes open. It only took another 25-30 years before I went back to the ‘theatre’ for a collaborative work called Tulp with Elision [the Brisbane-based new music ensemble] and composer John Rogers.

I was commissioned to be the visual director. But in general I try and match an idea to a medium, and that’s partially led to working across disciplines. I like the sense of alchemy that comes from combining varying sets of skills and fields.

The more work I make the more I begin to see my own patterns or themes returning in different incarnations. Sometimes the connection is fleeting, but it gives me a sense of the matrix I’m working within. I think there is an aesthetic of pacing. The rate at which elements move and unfold has a certain consistency, even when one piece is quite abstract, and another one is more narrative.

You have been strongly associated with science in your work. What is the connection and the inspiration for you—awe, critique, the artistic potential?

My interest in science has evolved. RAPT used a medical technology, it didn’t use science. That’s a distinction not always made—science versus the technologies of science. RAPT came out of an interest in trying to map a shift in the way technologies (not science) affect our concepts of space and time. That was a rather large supposition to make. But I’m not doing science, I don’t have to prove anything, I don’t have to have consistent results. I don’t have to ask how? Rather I can interpret in anyway I choose: I can ask why?

So I attempted to define that cognitive shifting through the prism of the body. What I mean is that we are accustomed to the physical boundaries of our physical selves, and they are fairly consistent from one individual to the next. So it was a natural starting point. I then exploded that physical body via technology. RAPT both disrupts time—in the animation the body is built and dismantled—and space. In the installation you can walk through my thorax, for instance. So I saw the artistic potential, and it was a natural fit to use a machine (MRI) built for bodies. Scynescape and Moist used other forms of imaging—SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) and light microscopy, respectively. Both ‘processed’ and created the content through imaging systems used in science. Scynescape maps the external body at high magnification while Moist used bodily fluids, but both rebuild a corporeal landscape that is unfamiliar.

I absolutely think there is an aesthetic quality to these visualisation tools. If you talk to histologists [cell and tissue scientists] many would say they were attracted to the field in the first place because it is so ‘aesthetic.’

If I were to talk about more recent work, like Transformers, there I actually start to build content that engages with ideas from science, particularly molecular biology and genomics. And the body that I’ve been using all along stops being my own (as representative of a universal one) and starts becoming a body with individuality—an identity.

There is a more critical element to Transformers because the subject is loaded. How is identity a merger of science and culture? There’s an element of intangibility and contestation there. It can’t be locked down into a percentage. There’s not an empirical assessment process. Any time you broker a relationship between two or more entities there has to be a real assessment of what’s at stake, what the benefits are, where’s the added value?

How did you go about creating your video work, Reduction, with the performers and with what technology?

Reduction was a collaboration with Joey Stein. We had access to a thermal infrared camera, which registers heat. If you look closely you can see the tracery of veins and arteries running beneath the skin. While it is a camera, it must be connected to a computer to actually interface with it. We needed to control what was going on within a very prescriptive framework. So that was one consideration in making a performative piece: we could choreograph it.

Each performer was shot separately with the idea that this could actually be a 2 channel work, the channels on side by side monitors or screens. That type of presentation would accentuate the ambiguity over whether the characters are trying to communicate with the audience or each other. The ‘language’ they use is pretty responsive and primal. Originally we were looking at dead or near extinct languages, and then ended up layering another ‘aural performance’ over the visual track, where the sound is created by recording the performers responding with a small delay, which was then re-aligned in post-production.

New York is difficult in terms of accessing facilities; or rather it takes longer. However it does have a much stronger tradition of philanthropy and corporate giving. A work like Reduction can be done at little cost, but the projects I am interested in developing now are more ambitious, involving public spaces and large technical and equipment costs. My hope is that I can make them happen. I didn’t come to New York simply because there is more money here—the cost of surviving here is considerably higher after all. There are opportunities, though, and I feel I’ve been very fortunate in both Australia and New York. I see my path as more of an orbit, moving through both places on a regular basis, working on projects in both countries.

As I dragged myself from Susan Norrie’s eddy, my gait was little more than a palsied geek boy shuffle. The art world equivalent of sitting through Das Boot, the experience of eddy was posture-damaging heavy, it mooched around my body like some endless, sticky largo. Later, as it started to sink in, the experience changed in tone. With time to mull over how this 3-part show spoke to itself and out to broader cultural shenanigans, a surprising lightness glimmered through. What was cool about eddy was its sneaky, perverse mix of rhetorical and emotional density with a maxi-skip load of light-as-a-feather interpretative aftershocks. Maybe all this reveals is the difference between literary and somatic responses—the somatic is a direct punch to the breadbasket, the literary (or the exhibition-dream-work, take your pick) a deferred detonation.

Though I felt the effect of the readerly last, it was signalled up front in the juxtaposition of text works on 2 facing walls of Perth’s Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. On the left were 2 large paintings, one grey, one a blacky maroon with under painting showing through. The texts are partially covered, partially readable; we scan these braille surfaces, our bodies set at a distance (thanks to museum conventions) and aching to reach out and confirm how the letters feel. This teasingly off-limits word play was mirrored by a slice of text from Ang Lee’s flick The Ice Storm. The segment we read is at the beginning of the film, when Toby Maguire sits on the train flipping through his Fantastic Four comic. He’s just had a kinda kooky weekend culminating in not having sex with Katie Holmes (of Dawsons Creek). (Always a plus in my opinion and, oddly, he had the same experience in The Wonder Boys). Anyway, the text is about the ways families hold us down like sludge and it’s impossible not to hear Maguire’s voice as we read, triggering all the resonances of this marvellous film (the interplay between the frozen ice and Christina Ricci’s intensely free bicycling figure, for example). The significance of this only becomes apparent, however, when we hit Norrie’s majestic Undertow. At the start it’s a pop cultural curve ball that gets you thinking about reading the surfaces of gallery walls, your own family dynamics, and whether Ang Lee’s Hulk will be as good as the hype.

The show’s other important segment is the thin rectangular room of black paintings from Norrie’s Inquisition series. The painterly equivalent of a floor-full of scurrying cockroaches, some are like scenes from one of Kossoff’s oily nightmares. Some are behind glass, Cornell boxes posted from an endless night. One is not really a painting but a concertina-ed fan of paper-geisha girl noir. Regal, elegiac, these also constitute a macabre theatre of the 2-D that gnaws at the gristle of formalism and the more dainty elements of the monochrome tradition. Their viciousness is amplified in the majestic Poisonous Fly Paper, good enough to mix even more metaphors about. A freaky, groovy Venus Fly Trap of a picture, it threatens to kiss you deadly, leering at you, aesthetically seducing you like a praying mantis out to bed some cute mantis tail. Okay, I wasn’t really that spooked, but in this beautiful, small room there is the feeling that Norrie is upping the ante in terms of the emotional and intellectual force that painting can offer at the interface of abstraction and representation.

It’s the sumptuous cinema of Undertow, however, that is the show’s lynchpin. Like walking into a Holmesian fog, the room is dull, lit only by the screens. Standing amidst them, we finally realise the Screen dudes were right: we’re part of the apparatus too. On one screen a young girl bobs along on the shoulders of a man. She’s watching the early bloom of the cherry blossom, thanks to global warming. On another, 2 guys fill a balloon and let it go. They treat the balloons the way Paul Celan treated stones—with reverence, awe and a movingly opaque symbolism. Other screens show aspects of environmental degradation, burning oil, cormorants stuck in oil, etc.

The final (or first, depending on when you find it) screen in Undertow features a scene from Orson Wells’ The Trial. The shot shows Anthony Perkins watching Naydra Shore carrying a large suitcase over the nondescript badlands. Perkins carries his own lighter box, and is relatively unfettered. From seeing the film and reading the book we all know that Perkins’ K is guilty, intrinsically so, bafflingly so. He is confused, though, because he thinks he’s a clean skin. Presented within Undertow, he is unburdened, the oil doesn’t touch him and we see him as a jerk, unaware of anything around him. Norrie is using K (as Kafka did) to stand in for all of us—we are all on trial for our slow-mo, first world terrorism against the planet. And we are jerks too when we fail to realise this.

However, what Norrie’s mobilisation of The Trial shows, is that our guilt is attached not only to environmental issues, but to our structural make-up—it’s part of the super ego. Here psycho-dynamics and enviro-dynamics are intimately entwined. Here’s where the importance of The Ice Storm kicks in. The undertow is intrinsic to us. We are glued in place by so many layers—family, spectacle, aesthetics, desire, gravity. There is no escape, and Norrie lets us know this while encouraging us to question this and question the hopelessness of this questioning. Which is to say that this is a Freudian show that turns on the logic of the death drive, the irreversible plunge back into the sludge and crap we came from when the dopey game of evolution began. When Norrie makes a plea for us to swim against the oily tide, she also makes it damned clear that to do so is impossible. It is this that saves it from being a one-dimensional “woe is the state of the world” exhibition. This makes it, strangely, even more thrillingly pessimistic.

I’m only skimming here. There’s a book-length commentary possible on eddy, in the same manner that Barthes did a job on Balzac’s short story Sarrasine in S/Z. Issues to consider for extra credit might be: whether it’s a coincidence that The Fantastic Four was the first comic to introduce a black character as a staple—the Black Panther. How does the work relate to Gary Hill’s Tall Ships— are we ghost ships in Norrie’s sea of screens? What are the precise connections between The Trial and Ian McEwen’s The Innocent? And how is film used as a substitute for theory?

How was evolutionary theory articulated in performance practices of the 19th century? That these apparently disparate spheres had a symbiotic relationship is the provocative thesis of Jane Goodall’s latest book, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order. She argues that performance traditions as diverse as theatre, circus, ballet and even the rage for black and white minstrels not only reflected the developing scientific culture but engaged it in an active, if sometimes facetious, dialogue.

Consider the career of P T Barnum, that “master of humbug” and proprietor of The Greatest Show on Earth who was born in 1810, the year after Darwin, and established himself as the definitive showman-capitalist of the 19th century. In his multifarious ventures, Barnum famously exploited traditions of the fairground and freak-show, assimilating all sorts of heterogenous acts and exhibits into increasingly corporatised spectacles.

In some respects Barnum resembles the great entrepreneurs like Ford and Edison, his mastery of American hype and know-how guided by an almost intuitive understanding of his epoch. Barnum’s fame and influence extended with the railroad and the printing press. As a manipulator of what we now call ‘the media’, he demonstrated prototypical canniness.

The entertainment empire Barnum unleashed was uniquely adapted to the geo-political empires of Europe and the trade routes of the United States. Goodall relates how, in his later years, nothing less than the panorama of diverse humanity became his spectacle. In 1884 he first exhibited the “Ethnological Congress of Savage and Barbarous Tribes” in which Zulu warriors, Afghans, snake charmers, “high- and low-caste Hindoos”, Aztecs and “Nautsch dancing girls” battled for attention in the show ring. Later, whirling Dervishes, Cossack riders and Aboriginal boomerang throwers (kidnapped from Queensland’s Palm Island) were added to the mix, jousting and competing in athletic displays of Olympian grandiosity that Barnum, in an awful pun, proudly promoted as the “races of the races.”

The spectacle of interracial competition and even the reference to ethnology (a synonym of sorts for ‘anthropology’) is indicative of Barnum’s attentiveness to the emerging “science of man” which, in the Victorian era, was irrevocably influenced by evolutionist assumptions. But Barnum’s engagement with science pre-dated the Ethnological Congress by decades. A defining moment occurred in 1841 when he completed negotiations to manage the ailing American Museum in New York and rapidly filled its galleries with dwarfs, flea circuses and anything else that was “monstrous, scaley [sic], strange or queer.”

To “startle the naturalists and wake up the whole scientific world” was one of Barnum’s professed ambitions. With a dry restraint that allows her wonderfully rich material to convey its generous endowment of humour, Goodall describes Barnum’s purchase of the “Feejee Mermaid”, a zoological assemblage, that in 1825 had been profitably exhibited at London’s Bartholomew Fair and even then dismissed by scientists as a hoax.

Barnum’s introduction of this rather shopsoiled fraud to the American market indicates his genius for publicity. The event was pre-empted by a cunning press release that hinted at the mermaid’s scientific credentials, verified by a “London naturalist”, one Dr Griffin, who had conveniently arrived for an American tour. Dr Griffin was Barnum’s stooge Levi Lyman, who had cultivated the role of expert scientist in various ruses. When the mermaid toured the US in 1843, a South Carolina naturalist called the bluff in a newspaper article, describing how the mermaid was constructed. Characteristically, Barnum managed to turn even this setback to advantage, recalling the exhibit to New York, playing up the “scientific controversy”, and inviting the public to come and judge it for themselves.

Goodall shows how Barnum monitored and exploited developments in evolutionary theory. The American publication of The Origin of Species in 1860 precipitated the revival of an exhibit titled “Barnum’s Incredible What is It?”, a creature purportedly captured in Gambia and promoted as Darwin’s missing link. This might be seen as straightforward repackaging of older traditions of the freak show and carnival, but Goodall points out that the primal fascination of such human or quasi-human ‘monstrosities’ was never the exclusive domain of the showground. Naturalists had long been interested in ‘curiosities’ and peculiar ‘productions of nature.’ Theories of evolution put the spotlight on freakishness and grotesquery, bringing new attention to phenomena that had long been the bread and butter of carnival and showmanship.

Not only Darwin but also his predecessors like Saint-Hilaire and Lamarck (both evolutionary theorists) had brought special attention to natural variety, arguing for a vision of nature in which forms were not fixed but subject to constant mutation and transformation over time. Royal Academicians certainly sneered at vulgar spectacles like freak shows, and would have applauded the 1840 legislation that outlawed theatrical entertainment at Bartholomew Fair—a pivotal event in the modernisation of London which suppressed ribald and supposedly subversive performances: traditions that dated from medieval times.

But science was imbued with its own codes of display and showmanship. Surgeons practise in theatres because an audience of students or colleagues was once de rigeur for an operation. Some appeal to theatricality was essential if the budding scientific institutions were to attract the masses, let alone be pedagogically effective. Museums provided talks and entertainment to spice up otherwise lifeless exhibits, while zoological gardens never entirely shook off their relationship with the circus—nor could they afford to if they were to maintain the flow of paying customers.

While much in this book is side-splittingly funny, Goodall’s ambition is serious. She contests a monocular view of the 19th century that developed in the 20th, a position in which, “…evolutionary theory came to mean Darwinian theory. It no longer encompassed a range of competing analyses and interpretations, and was accorded monolithic status as one of the great paradigm shifts of modern intellectual history.”

Goodall’s astonishingly agile tour through music halls, opera houses, theatres and circuses is an admirable demonstration of the remarkably heterogenous ways in which performers and audiences dealt with the new ideas about themselves that evolution threw up: the connection with apes, the loss of certainty about the human form, the terrifying prospect that primeval forces might lie secreted in the ‘modern man.’

Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are literary works that explore and exploit these anxieties. Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker, was the manager of the acclaimed “beast actor” Henry Irving whose arresting movement from the “diabolical to the divine” (Auerbach) inspired the blood-sucking aristocrat—“a stalking category crisis” as Goodall calls him.

All this substantiates her contention that a history of performance provides a paradigmatic understanding to the culture of evolution. No other form is so intricately concerned with the fullness of corporeal possibility. Curtailed by bodily limits, yet seeking constantly to extend and redefine them, the floating qualities of the ballet dancer or the versatility of the ‘protean’ mimic who could embody a member of any class, race or creed and then dissolve like magic into someone else, encapsulate not only the hopes but the culture of anxiety that accompanied all this conjecture about what people are and what they might yet become.

This is a book that covers considerable ground in little more than 200 pages: a history of performance which, in the tradition of Richard Sennett and Greg Dening, pans the stage, the audience, and the forces that combine to give them a dazzling frisson. Although I enjoyed the gallop, there were times when I wished for more. Perhaps it will come in future books.

Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order, Routledge, London & New York, 2002, ISBN 0 415 24378 5

Jane Goodall is Research Director at the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney.

According to founder, Jill Greenhalgh, the international Magdalena Project emerged from anger at the suppression of women’s voices and frustration with the consequent lukewarm quality of their theatre. This fuelled a desire to create not ‘a women’s theatre’, but a forum in which women could cultivate greater discipline and rigour in their work and develop performance that would “compel the listening.”

That was almost 20 years ago and at the recent Magdalena Australia Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse this aim was clearly still alive although anger seemed to be a less central motivating force. The annual Magdalena festivals have been likened to trade union meetings, lacking a secure funding base and geographic home, they’re hosted by artists with a passion and heightened sense of responsibility. In this case, actor Dawn Albinger conceived the colossal Brisbane event with her tireless Sacred COW performance collaborators Scotia Monkivitch and Julie Robson. With a steering committee and Indigenous working group, they aimed to ensure that Australia’s first Magdalena Festival was artistically engaging, culturally diverse, and grounded in the values and traditions of Indigenous peoples. For 10 days, delegates shared their work—at varied stages of development—and proffered performances, workshops, yarnin’ circles and debates. And while the Magdalena mantle may have changed considerably given the feminist impact on contemporary performance over the past 2 decades, the organisation continues to be driven by the work that women create, rather than by the ideologies that fuel it.

Coordinated by Kooemba Jdarra, the Indigenous program included workshops in contemporary movement and gospel choir, a screening of Black Chicks Talking with Leah Purcell, a dedicated Indigenous women’s meeting place, and a series of afternoon yarnin’ circles covering topics such as Indigenous protocols and intergenerational work. During the opening ceremony, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women shared stories and dances; a highlight was Aunty Delmay Barton’s extraordinary operatic voice singing us forward onto the festival proper. Similarly, the final yarnin’ circle in New Farm Park with Murri elders Aunty Vi McDermott and Aunty Ruth Heggarty enabled a spiritual and symbolic closure for delegates, providing sacred space to reflect on the past and give voice to the future.

The festival’s public performance program featured over 40 shows and offered all the pleasurable intertextualities and associated frissons that more generously funded and slickly-curated theatre festivals try so hard to provide. For the most part, the theme “Theatre-Women-Travelling” was interpreted metaphorically, with personal and spiritual journeying featuring in a number of pieces. Various approaches to stage-managing multiple truths in solo work created interesting generic points of reference, and debates about the ontology of theatre and corporeal presence filtered into a variety of performances and discussions.

Dah Teatar

An undisputed highlight of the festival was the poetically provocative Cirque Macabre by Belgrade’s Dah Teatar. Literally a circus dance of death, it was at once playful and violent, comedic and sinister. The misplaced hopes of the 20th century are embodied in 5 travelling players who create their arena—a wall-less circus tent—and deliver the cheerless refrains of a passionate and bloody era. Clad in evening wear, variously accessorised with army jackets and business suits, dance performers Aleksandra Jeli and Maja Miti march, writhe, distend and fall to the ongoing strains of piano accordion, double bass and violin. They perform dark tangos and “obscure circus acts” of lost balance, human powerplay and “double direction”, while the sombre and beautiful musicians are the ever-present observers, often suffering collateral damage as they counterpoint the dance or mark historical moments. The performance refuses stasis—each episode draws us inexorably into another of equal surprise and allure. With army boots balanced on shoulders, Jeli and Miti engage in a vigorous dance-off that reaches knife-edge agitation. The violinist lies down to play, without losing a beat. A routine facial shave is meticulously executed during a roll call of international commissions for conflict resolution and peace. Listed one after the other, the meetings “all account for nothing” while voice-overs of Bertolt Brecht and Martin Luther King ground the paradox of it all. Truths shimmer and dissolve in Dah’s work as we are instructed “it is only in the dark, that the stars are best seen.”

Cristina Castrillo and Margaret Cameron

“I didn’t want to do a show. What shall I call it? A performance, a thing…a…?” Umbral means threshold and is the title of Cristina Castrillo’s solo work which enthralled with its self-reflexivity and quiet parody on the process of conceiving theatre. Part narrative, part demonstration, Castrillo (of Teatro delle Radici, Argentina/ Switzerland) seamlessly merges the 2 modes with remarkable stage presence and wit. She embodies her dictum that “realness cannot just be found in verisimilitude”, demonstrating for herself and her audience-guests “how to be real and true without [producing] a single truth.” It was a life and art-affirming work that made me yearn for repeat viewing. As did Margaret Cameron’s Knowledge and Melancholy, a revelatory performance in its manipulation of the time/space/body of memory-truth. Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Louis Esson Prize for Drama in 1998, the piece is a testament to the value of ongoing creative development and repeated outings. Further complexities have been mined as a result of Cameron’s collaboration with American dance teacher Deborah Hay on the choreography of her solo character’s lyrical and evocative journey through landscapes of absence and grief. Another so-called “lecture/demonstration”, the autobiographical work is rich with striking textual play and underscored with a sense of curiosity that balances its potentially disarming darkness. Cameron’s character is at once stoic and vulnerable, personifying the vexed state of melancholy.

Stace Callaghan

Personifications of a different kind were found in Stace Callaghan’s Between Heaven and Earth drawn from the experiences of St Teresa of Avila, Hildegard von Bingen, Freda du Faur and Muriel Cadogan. Callaghan skilfully tensions the physical with the metaphysical by centring these pioneering women’s narratives in the disjunctions of their obsessions and quests—for spiritual enlightenment, a sense of achievement, love. The accompanying video text, which features Callaghan scaling the grafittied cliffs of the Powerhouse with measured calm, provides a resonant contrast to her onstage shamanistic convulsions and punishing callisthenics. The shocking revelation of the fate of lovers Cadogan and du Faur at the hands of medical and religious establishments brings a highly charged sense of the political to a piece centred in experiences of the heart and soul.

Julia Varley

The much anticipated Dona Musica’s Butterflies by Julia Varley was another solo narration, but one that failed to ‘compel the listening.’ Directed by Eugenio Barba (Odin Teatret, Denmark), Varley plays Dona Musica, a character whose originating text (and reason to exist) is soon to be no more. Three personas—Dona Musica, ‘the actress’ and ‘Julia’—deliberate on the causes and consequences of this situation, with treatises on subatomic particles, illusion and transformation flitting through the text like Varley’s ever-changing prop of the butterfly. By all accounts Varley has been performing this piece for a very long time and, to many, it simply felt tired.

New media performance

More high-tech in its interface with notions of multiplicity was Swim—An Exercise in Remote Intimacy, a “raw work” showing by Avatar Body Collision. Performed live by “globally distributed performers” Helen Varley Jamieson, Vicki Smith (NZ), Karla Ptacek (UK) and Leena Saarinen (Finland), Swim was an investigation of intimacy and its discontents when devoid of physical proximity. As Varley Jamieson, the lone corporeal presence on stage, opens her laptop and logs on, she seeks intimacy with distant friends. She initially experiments with remote voyeurism by undressing for the webcam while some of her mates—whom we see simultaneously on screen—return the favour, an act witnessed in mechanistic time-delayed fragments. Together, they then enter ‘The Palace’, an online environment, adopting avatars and playing out mythical lovers’ fantasies. Admittedly disengaged once the avatars took over, I nevertheless caught myself empathising with Varley Jamieson’s lone figure left at performance end once the screen darkened and the laptop was folded. Less focused but more ambitious was S/W/ITCHES’ The Physics Project (Leah Mercer and Amantha May), which used simultaneous remote performance to trial the application of physics to the soft science of relationships. Like Swim, this work-in-progress was fettered by generally awkward webcam technology that is yet to successfully translate simultaneity. Yet it was this very limitation that created unexpected delights such as ironic slippages of action and response-time in the remote feed. It is difficult to know how history will treat these early experiments but, as Performance Space Director Fiona Winning commented in a festival forum on the topic, many new media artists internationally are grappling with similar difficulties. And while many at the forum failed to be convinced of the viewing pleasures of this kind of work, it provoked interesting debate on what is meant by ‘presence’ in live performance.

And more…

There was, of course, much more to the festival: Vulcana Women’s Circus’ seriously sexy new community show, the spectacle of Taiwan’s Uhan Shii Theatre and Teatro Nomad’s poignant Landless—7 Attempts Crossing the Strait. There was a range of engaging works-in-progress such as Geddy Ankisdal’s politically sassy theatrical concert No Doctor for the Dead, Sacred COW’s The Quivering, Angela Betzein’s Wicked Bodies for Zen Zen Zo, and an insightful improvised demonstration by Sarah Cathcart and Amanda Owen of their collaborative work processes. “Aotearoa Day”, inspired by traditional Maori rituals of encounter and hosted by members of Magdalena Aotearoa with Tii Kouka, was a celebratory feast of traditions, new work and cabaret, while off-site Christine Johnstone and Lisa O’Neill presented their gloriously gothic cabaret concert, Pianissimo at QPAC and Sheila’s Shorts showcased 4 darkly humorous new works by young Brisbane artists at Metro Arts.

Last mention, though, to an unlikely feature with an enduring effect. Waiting Not Drowning formed a treasured double-bill with Cirque Macabre early in the festival. Originally written by Sue Broadway in January 2002 as part of the Australian Women’s Clown Project, this version was devised with director Therese Collie and Fleur Evans. Collie’s pre-show ushering/security lazzi made way for the classic clowning of Broadway and Evans whose characters contrasted delightfully in appearance, temperament and acoutrements. Two people waiting, 2 people fronting nameless authority, 2 people eventually stripped of all possessions (including big shoes, fake nose and polyester Tom Jones collar). For a brief moment, the clowns morph into faceless travellers (or are they refugees?) alone yet not…waiting, waiting. For me this downtime was just long enough to recall images of the Tampa alongside all journeys of indefinite destination. As the characters reluctantly parted, Waiting Not Drowning encapsulated the multidimensionality of the festival theme but, perhaps more central to Magdalena’s creed, it compelled a special kind of listening—the kind that’s enabled best through laughter.

Magdalena Australia Festival, Theatre-Women-Travelling, International Festival of Women in Contemporary Theatre, artistic director Dawn Albinger, executive director Scotia Monkivitch, forum co-oridnator Julie Robson, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 6-16

Performing Lines and Performance Space will be bringing Margaret Cameron’s Knowledge and Melancholy to Sydney in August.

Anthea Davis, Eugenia Fragos, Daniella Farinacci, Miria Kostiuk, The Telephone Exchange

The word ‘asylum’ once meant a place to withdraw from the pressures of the world to ponder, as in a religious retreat. Later it became associated with psychiatric institutions. Although the Women’s Circus’ Ghosts grew from outrage at Australia’s rejection of asylum to boat people, the production retains this dual sense of the word.

About 60 women with various degrees of training occupied a set that evoked institutions ranging from those established by the Japanese in Singapore and Malaysia, to Nazi concentration camps, Australia’s current detention centres, boarding schools and orphanage dormitories. A row of bunks ran down each side of the set—beyond this, cyclone fencing and towering, Tampa-esque shipping containers enclosed the rear. The space was as ambivalent as those described by survivors of the above: highly gendered (here feminine), oppressive and clearly demarcated, but also a site of mutual cooperation and support against the forces pressing through the wire.

Ghosts is the first Women’s Circus show from Artistic Director Andrea Lemon after last year’s Secrets (by outgoing director Sarah Cathcart, scripted by Lemon). This work has had a mixed reception, largely because of Lemon’s greater use of abstraction and massed choreography. Although the performers were occasionally overstretched, the use of canons (half of the cast beginning a sequence once the others were 2 steps in) masked imprecision in all but the opening and the finale.

Criticism of the piece seemed a result of audience expectations of prescriptive snappy skills and tricks within a dynamic narrative. Personally, I’m tired of high-energy tricks, even if they’re linked to theatrical plot. Though ostensibly a ‘circus’ director, Lemon is largely uninterested in a traditional approach. Abstract, dreamy physical theatre is a better description of her aesthetic, and it’s more distinctive and challenging as a result.

Much of my pleasure came from observing the women on the beds silently watching their peers when not performing themselves. Through this simple, Brechtian device Lemon drew the audience in to share moments of happiness and pain, liberation and entrapment, which were often densely intertwined. A sequence of the women doling out food from rough tin pots beautifully encapsulated this, creating a sense of hardship, of struggle for resources limited by unresponsive, absent authorities, yet also of generosity and affection between the women as they looked from plate to plate to compare their servings. The show occupied a space outside of time, a purgatory, but also a true asylum. Rather than producing a sharply focused, didactic work, Lemon created an abstract space within which issues of survival, feminine strength and communion were played out, leaving temporal or thematic resolution for outside the theatre. Ghosts represented a moment apart, yet was no less political for that.

The design of Ghosts helped achieve a temporal stillness. By contrast, playwright Samantha Bews’ The Telephone Exchange struggled against a clumsy design of irregular grey forms which the actors wrestled to rearrange between scenes, while unremitting, direct light-sources hindered the dark hallucinations, memories and desires expressed by the characters between more naturalistic scenes. Despite such shortcomings, Bews’ play had a subterranean density. Four women work 9 to 5 at a 1950s Melbourne telephone exchange, their brittle patter giving way to disturbing intrusions of sexual, ethnic and social fantasies and occurrences, which gushed in a series of intercut monologues, moving the characters into a surreal state close to delirium.

I later learned that all 4 dream figures were intended to represent aspects of the character played by Daniela Farinacci, but the relationship between various events and individuals was confused in performance. One character (Eugenia Fragos) rhapsodised about the avenging sword of the Archangel Michael piercing her with divine lust while recalling stolen moments with her deceased fiance. Another (Miria Kostiuk) endlessly rehearsed her dream kitchen, appliances and husband. A third (Anthea Davis) related her fantasies of enriching her drab Anglo experience through befriending her exotic Eastern European neighbour (a Russian princess fleeing the Reds, perhaps?) while the fourth (Farinacci) had a Mediterranean lover whose dark presence was both displaced and enhanced by the image of her mother hanging by the neck in an air-raid shelter. Untangling the precise details intended by these allusions was beside the point, as their indeterminacy evoked a dense, psychosocial world broiling beneath the veneer of 1950s Anglo-Australia.

Meredith Rogers’ direction of Peta Tait and Matra Robinson’s Breath By Breath produced a more successful interplay of racial and ethnic tensions through a meditation on the works of Anton Chekhov. Robert Jordan played Chekhov’s gently homoerotic muse, resembling a sympathetic Mephistopheles or Iago, while also playing a young Jew living at the edge of the Russian Pale of Settlement just before the 1880s pogroms. In this context Jordan’s blackness was surprising. Though one could suppose he was a displaced Ethiopian Jew, the effect when combined with his lightly mannered performance, was to render him a classic representation of otherness for European intellectuals such as Chekhov (and the mostly white audience). The mise en scène did not however exoticise this foreign racial presence. Rather, Jordan appeared as a perplexingly intangible, yet destabilising, unfixed influence—like a wisp of time or forgotten event, hovering delicately on the margins of this otherwise typically Chekhovian world with its focus on love and loss.

The staging of Breath By Breath was based on a Brechtian version of the play-within-a-play, tempered with a spartan realisation of Stanislavski’s original writings on performance. The overall effect was to sketch a parallel between Chekhov’s gesturing towards the beauty of moments of love lost in time, and a similar melancholy on the loss of history, on how events such as pogroms are only indirectly evoked, never fully grasped, like snow falling on one’s hand. The comparison is problematic; history surely has a solidity, specificity and urgency that Chekhovian emotions don’t need. Irrespective of one’s position on such debates, Rogers’ production was a sublime exegesis of these issues, all the more remarkable for its gentle, melancholy ambience. Like Ghosts, the political was addressed by withdrawing into an asylum offered by self-conscious performativity.

Ghosts, Women’s Circus, writer-director Andrea Lemon, choreographer Teresa Blake, musical director-composer Andrea Rieniets, sound Dawn Holland, lighting Gina Gascoigne, set Trina Parker, rigging Franca Stadler, costume Amanda Silk, Shed 14, Docklands, Mar 14-Apr 5; The Telephone Exchange, writer Samantha Bews, director Lawrence Strangio, dramaturg Maryanne Lynch, lighting Gina Gascoigne, set Meg White, sound Ben Grant, musical director Geoff Wallis, 45 Downstairs, Mar 5-16; Breath by Breath, writers Peta Tait, Matra Robertson, director-set designer Meredith Rogers, music Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, lighting Bronwyn Pringle, performers Neil Pigot, Anastasia Malinoff, Robert Jordan, T’Mara Buckmeister, Bob Pavlich, Bruce Kerr, Adrian Mullraney, Carlton Courthouse, April 24-May 10

Three weeks before she begins rehearsal of her new work, The Inhabited Woman, Leisa Shelton and I are talking about timing. When she announced it, some colleagues wondered why she would be leaving her teaching at the VCA now, after 4 and half successful years. Surely, this is where it all pays off? Then there was her decision some years back to have a baby at which time friends said, “Why would you do that now, when your career is taking off?” And again, in 1989, after training in Europe for 6 years, she decided to return to Australia, she asked herself: Is this the right time? As worlds were opening—Bausch, Kantor, Mnouchkine? Then again, this was a good time for Australian performance—Lyndal Jones’ Prediction Pieces, Jenny Kemp’s Call of the Wild. Having chosen to stay, she looked around to see talented dancers working up solos in scout halls with no opportunities to perform.

But for Leisa Shelton each decision has turned out to be in some way timely. She feels a sense of achievement having been at the VCA in an era of shared vision with a team that included Richard Murphet and Robert Draffin, under the directorship of Lindy Davies. Her response to the Sydney artists’ dilemma in the 80s was to start Steps a curated program of physical performance at Performance Space which showcased the work of an extraordinary generation of performers including Roz Hervey, Kate Champion, Matthew Bergan, Sue-Ellen Kohler, Nikki Heywood and Anna Sabiel. And the baby? Well little Audrey is the envy of her playgroup. How many other kids have kept time with de Keersmaeker from their mother’s lap?

LS My background has always been physical theatre more than pure dance which is really what Steps was about and working with Meryl Tankard in Canberra (1990-93). If I was going to be called a “dancer”, I wanted to push open a bit what I knew dance as being from my training and work in Europe…And in Robert Draffin and Richard Murphet’s work the language is derived from the physical state or the physical manifestations of the being inside the world.

I see the training of an actor as being, from its base, physical but the approach is very wide and it’s internal far more than external …the internal is affected kinesthetically and physiologically. Ultimately the one thing that all good theatre training eventually comes back to is the breath and the breath is a physical act. It’s still a contentious issue—what is physical and what is vocal. Breath belongs in different areas in different ways. It’s a bit like water in the world.

Which is extremely contentious—apparently we’re in for a bout of water wars. In 2000 you collaborated with Richard Murphet on Dolores in the Department Store (see RT43). Does your new work together spring from that?

In the form, yes. The Inhabited Woman is a concept that I’d started work on when I was awarded the Rex Cramphorn Scholarship. (1993) The originating question remains: What are the voices and worlds that inhabit a woman as she wakes?

At that stage I was in my early 30s and it was an almost preoccupying focus for me to have a child. The whole process was very fulfilling. But as I came out of the early baby time, the reality of having a certain career trajectory or momentum and being the mother came into real conflict….The ability of the 2 to function together I found was a myth. I started to read about other women….I became caught in what this was about, this expectation of “having it all” and the reality of, in some ways, being left with nothing.

While someone like Simone de Beauvoir set up a context in which contemporary women could see their lives, and could claim self again, in order to do that and to uphold her place in the mythic relationship with Sartre, she paid a very high price. And I guess between 35-40 [for me] a lot of things changed very quickly. That became a time to question what you can and can’t do any more and how you find the point of balance, the moment when you can say it’s enough. I am this good a mother. I’ve done this much work that I’m proud of….I can personally sit with that. Then I have these moments when I’m caught in or overwhelmed by a certain perception which says, Ah but…what you could have done!

We started with a series of provocations and from that Richard has written the language…The metaphor has come from some reading I’ve been doing about the death of Virginia Woolf, her drowning, which I always found fascinating—that a woman could walk into a river, lie down and stay there.

A few. But not enough to hold her down. The water was very shallow, thigh high. She put herself under the water and lay down and drowned. The will and the need for that release was so intensely present in her that she could do that.

So the piece begins with a dream of walking into a river and submerging and staying under. The river returns throughout the piece and remains the metaphor for the woman’s desire to be something other, to go somewhere other, to inhabit a watery underworld. And the desire which the river continues to force forward and out of her, the sound of the river, the memory of the river, the return of images from the dream [all] force this desire inside her, out and into her home.

I wanted very much for this to be about the internal world of a woman which can be calmed and nurtured, or its difficulty be enhanced, by certain circumstances. But I wanted the woman’s world to be good. She is with a good man. She has a small boy of 3 who loves her. She has a beautiful home. She has all she should need and want. She should be happy. It’s enough. And for her it’s not. And it’s not about being in an abusive relationship, or difficult financial circumstances. It’s about a world inside her which is being denied. And the river forces it out of her. And she has to leave that world and find herself. She checks in to a hotel where she could be anyone and there she meets herself.

You have a team of young artists on the production working with film (Elspeth Tremblay) and sound (Katie Symes) and architect Ryan Russell. How do those elements work within the piece?

The river is entirely sound and image. At the moment, the film occupies the woman’s internal world or the perceptive world from outside. The dream is shown in film. Her imaginal world is projected in the space on a variety of surfaces at the same time as her inhabited state is present in the room. One of the ideas we’re working on is that when she finally does enter the domestic space—in which there is no man and child, just the voices of, sounds of—the film will show how the man sees her move through the room. The other side will show how the child sees her. In the middle is the woman who is neither one nor the other.

It’s like in Asian theatre when men play women because they understand them. They’ve witnessed them, watched them. Obviously the women that Richard Murphet has been in continuous contact with have affected what he’s witnessed…The writing for the women in Dolores… was glorious. His ability to write the minute detail, the complexity of the internal world is one of the layers of [his] Slow Love [1983, 2000] that I love. I always found it surprising that a man had written that. And The Inhabited Woman is very provocative, contemporary feminist writing, written by a man. And some people may have a huge issue with that. But I actually love it that a lot of that language hasn’t come directly from me. I’ll interpret it in a world in which we’ve chosen the elements together.

It’s inside a lot of men too. I don’t think it’s a mid-life crisis point but I think it affects a generation of women who are having children later, who have tasted a certain level of autonomy and self-driven life choices who find it very difficult. It’s a big thing for a woman to walk out of a family. So the struggle is to find a point of equilibrium. And I don’t think the examples are there. It’s ‘give in entirely and be this’ or ‘let go entirely and be this.’ But if you’re trying to tread the 2, then you’re just disappointing everyone.

Personally I feel like it’s an area that we’re not managing to cater for together at all as women because it’s layered with a certain level of guilt and desire to prove we can do it. And it’s all getting bottled inside us as we all try to make it work. Everyone’s watching to see who’s managing to make it work or failing to do so. And for others it’s the not-having-had the child that’s the constant….so that having had the child seems like you did the good thing without realising what it means to have had the child. So there’s no easy ground…And this is not an autobiographical piece—much as it terrifies me to realise how close, particularly over the last 3 years, the material of this work is—some of it is absolutely not my experience…I wanted to investigate the other, not go to the autobiographical place…and I have no answers. This piece unfortunately doesn’t answer things for anybody (WE LAUGH).

When the young P T Barnum bid for the Scudder family’s natural history museum in New York, he referred to it as a collection of “stuffed monkey and gander skins.” No doubt his intention was to discourage rival bidders, but it would have been a fair description of most private natural history collections of the time, which was 1841. The remnants of dead animals: how do you make a show of them likely to appeal to anyone other than a fellow collection freak? “Wonderful variety”, as Darwin called it, is a wonderful concept, but when it comes to hundreds of rows of bottles containing assorted coils of beige slime, or thousands of dusty fur corpses with glass-eyed stares, or millions of spiky insect corpses pinned on boards, who really wants to get lost in the wonder of it all?

Barnum’s genius was to organise a co-habitation of the stuffed monkey and gander skins with a noisy and vigorous assortment of live creatures and to have the entire ensemble choreographed into a provocative wonder show that set out to confuse the difference between real and fake biological forms. Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s work, with its performative interweaving of live and dead forms, maintains a knowing but detached relation to this tradition. The first works you meet on entry to her new exhibition Zoomorphia at the Museum of Contemporary Art are the Mating Ball (petrified) and the Cardoso Flea Circus (alive and hopping in this video version of the internationally toured show).

The first of these is a basketball sized tangle of red-sided garter snakes in plastic replica, accompanied by a curious narrative. In the mating season, the males of this species converge en masse on the females, so that each female becomes surrounded by a writhing ball of would-be mates. Seeking to steal an advantage over their rivals, some of the males secrete female pheromones and so masquerade as females in order to get a place on the inside. But “on close inspection” researchers at the University of Texas have discovered that some of the mating balls contain a counterfeit female and that in 29 out of 42 tests, the impostor was indeed first to reach the genuine females. With its particular scientific credentialling and its improbable imagery, this is just the kind of story Barnum loved to make up. He called it the art of humbug. The narrative could be as fake as the plastic snake bodies, but Cardoso says she never makes up stories. Her genius is to identify natural phenomena that behave like sideshow acts.

The fleas in the circus are real. Cardoso feeds them herself, from the blood in her hands and arms. Throughout the action, they are shown in magnified simultaneous projection so that every detail of their minute forms is visible, and at the end of the show, children are invited to watch up close. What the fleas perform, though, is pure human fantasy: high wire acts, high dives, flights across the arena suspended from personal kites. There’s a cross-species joke going on here that belongs quintessentially to circus humour. Of course, height is no problem for fleas. The difficulty is in getting them to imitate human high-wire performances, and so evoke the classic fiction of a world of miniature beings surrounded by miniature artefacts and replicating all the sophistications of the human social world.

More sharply disconcerting is a large ring of frogs posed like black-face minstrels, with heads thrown back, hands splayed in front of them and knees bent in wide plié. But they are held together by a wire skewer that passes through their bellies, and they are as dead as the proverbial doornail. If they remind you of a chorus line, they also remind you of all the lovingly tortured small creatures that make up the natural history collections of the world.

Cut flowers, impaled grasshoppers, tiny lizards twisted into a crown of thorns, preserved snakes knotted together around a pole they will never climb all contribute to this impression of violated rather than suspended animation. There is violence in the traditions of animal show business as well as those of natural history, but in acknowledging this, Cardoso’s work also maintains an ironic distance from it, displaying above all an affinity with the natural poseurs and tricksters of the animal world. The chickens whose extravagant crests look like the off-track competition on Melbourne Cup day; the red-sided garter transvestites; butterflies that perform sudden disappearing acts through their “uncannily perfect” camouflage techniques. “The vanishing butterflies pose more questions than answers,” says the caption. How come to look dead might be a good thing? Suddenly, one of the common facts of natural behaviour turns into a vortex of speculation.

Zoomorphia, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, April 9-July 6

Jane Goodall’s new book, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin review by Martin Thomas

Speaking to women at the wheel of 2 national women’s arts organisations, I sense they’re comfortable in the driver’s seat and that the road ahead is as important as the roadworthiness of their vehicles.

Vitalstatistix: Maude Davey

Embarking on her first year with Vitalstatistix, Australia’s only full-time women’s theatre company, Artistic Director Maude Davey wonders whether seasons of plays are the only or indeed the best way to debate and circulate ideas within Waterside Hall, the heritage building the company occupies in Port Adelaide. “In some ways theatre companies are dinosaurs.” While mindful of the expectations that Vitalstatistix will produce a number of plays each year, Davey who has worked for over a decade in the “independent” sector is also in favour of more flexible approaches to performance as reflected in Vitalstatistix program for 2003 and beyond.

Work that deals with “technology, politics and biology” interests her and especially “how these fields are impacting on the status of the corporeal human creature.” In her own work, she has been concerned with the mediated body—“the impression that the body you wear makes, in spite of you,” she says. Being a twin (her sister is physical performer Annie Davey) might have something to do with it. While heavily pregnant recently, Maude performed The Pickle or the Pickle Jar in which she appeared as herself but was also played by other people who materialised on TV monitors. “It’s weird being inside that body. Suddenly you are regarded by others as something other. You are what you represent. You are a mother-to-be.”

She’s fascinated by debates around reproductive technology. “It’s easy to say it’s about wresting power from women to enhance male domination, but I prefer to look at how interesting, how difficult, how horrifying and how amazing the technology is—all at once.”

Vitalstatistix 2003 season opened this month with Davey’s production of Parallax Island co-written with partner David Pidd. A 2-hander performed by Pidd and Astrid Pill, it’s described in the press release as “Not so much a play, more a performance about the performance of gender.”

In July the company embarks on Playgirl, a 4-week intensive play development project with open readings of works scheduled for production in 2004. With some notable playwrights on board, Davey is eager to play with possibilities. Catherine Zimdahl’s Wharf at Woolloomooloo is about a visual artist. “Visual art excites me more than theatre,” says Davey. “What is it about our attention to a work of visual art and what can it say about our attention to performance?…Melissa Reeves has written a musical about crime celebrity matriarch Kath Pettingell and we’d like to bring the musical into some new territory.” Davey is interested in the culture developing around computer-generated sound/music making. The night before we spoke she’d just seen New Pollutants at the Exeter Hotel. “They’re great….I’m looking for the female equivalents.” Valentina Levkowicz has written about a group of actors from the 70s whose guru returns to create a new work with them in the 21st century. Here Davey sees the potential to examine what’s changed in performance practices in that period.

The program also includes Part 1 of Davey’s Future of the Species series. Directed by Anne Thompson, it takes on society’s ambivalent attitude to the maternal body and is set inside a uterus. Part 2 will focus on the smallest social unit (which could be a family but not necessarily) and will take the form of a physical theatre piece. Part 3 will be created as a site-specific, community collaboration.

Also commencing in July is the 21 Days Journal Project initiated by writer Rosan Chakir and composer Lucy Jones in which women living on the Le Fevre Peninsula will be invited to help create a work by keeping daily journals for 21 days. The diaries will

provide the basis for a play and also manifest in part as a radio program in which each of the contributors will read a minute of her day.

In September a co-production with the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust’s InSpace program will see the next incarnation of Cazerine Barry’s multimedia performance work, Sprung. “The thing about technology that interests me,” says Davey, “is how to make it truly performative…The ideas it throws up are interesting to think about, not necessarily to watch…Cazerine Barry has made the mix dynamic, the live body still central.”

“We’re reinventing the world around us, how we live, how we die…” says Davey, “we have to reinvent our theatre as well, how it looks and how we look at it.”

Playworks: Francesca Smith

After a pause in proceedings following the departure of former director Anna Messariti for the top job at ABC Radio Drama, Francesca Smith has been guiding Playworks since February and looks set to take on the role permanently. She too sees the importance of opening up organisational structures in order to elicit work of vitality and relevance.

In 2003, says Smith, “the focus is less on assessment of early scripts and more on catching the ball that is already in the air; less on workshops and more on strategically designed development. We’re using resources in more flexible ways. This involves everything from managing the dramaturgical development of promising works so they reach their best possible form in production to taking on a fabulous idea which has no play yet, just a new writer whom Playworks believes can pull off the project.”

Smith is particularly keen to expand Playworks’ Indigenous Dramaturgs Traineeship Project this year by offering the possibility of actively mentoring gifted Indigenous theatre artists through the process of writing their own work. Playworks has been working in 2002 with Nadine MacDonald (Kooemba Jdarra), Irma Woods (Yirra Yaakin) and writer Jadah Milroy. They decided that the best way to discover how dramaturgy works was for each of the would-be dramaturgs to write a play.

Playworks is commissioning short works on particular themes in collaboration with organisations such as Playlab, Brisbane Writers Festival and the Australian Script Centre. They’re also involved in a partnership with ABC Radio conducting radio scriptwriting regional workshops with writers such as Noelle Janaczewska in Tasmania and Janis Balodis in Lismore assisting local writers over 2 months with production as one possible outcome.

Still taking shape is an idea of Smith’s for a collaborative writing project with Islamic communities. “When the war was at its height, I had an urge to organise a responsive writing project to stimulate creative ideas,” she says. An overarching desire is “to encourage works that situate performance writing as important.” She wants to nurture strong voices, “to fan flames that are already glowing…[to see that] something actually happens in response to what we do…I don’t want to denigrate the private but these days I’m more interested in work that engages with the world.”

As a practicing dramaturg, director and teacher, Francesca Smith had reservations that taking on an administrative job like this might take her too far out of the creative plane. But 3 months in she’s discovering that “an organisation can be a creative entity. And flexibility is the key. Opening up. Not locking into things. Playworks is no longer bound by the page. Words are part of a spectrum. Music theatre is a special interest. We even have an opera in the pipeline. We receive videos, DVDs. What matters is that there’s clarity on the part of the writer about what she’s doing and what she wants in the way of assistance.”

Kerrie Schaefer and Laura Ginters are gradually updating the valuable research done by Colleen Chesterman on the working patterns of women writers in Australian theatre in Playing with Time (1995). “It’s hard to be a playwright,” says Smith. “It involves invisible ways of being. Networks are crucial. This has been important for the success of all those hot young things who are still more often male than female. You need relationships and access to getting things on. As always an important role for Playworks is fanning the flame, strengthening the commitment, enthusiasm, the love to keep going.”

There is an obvious aesthetic comparison to be made between the cultures of contemporary S&M fetishism found in glossy magazines such as Skin Two and global fetish clubs, and cyberpunk fantasies of the last 2 decades, spawning their own sartorial techflesh codes. In fact spaces such as Sydney’s infamous Hellfire Club and those within popular culture (The Matrix films for example) already exist and testify to the regular meeting and interchange of postindustrial, cyber and sexual fetishism. It seems odd, given fetishism’s entry into the mainstream, that we have had to wait until now for the kind of sustained cultural analysis of this phenomenon found in Amanda Fernbach’s Fantasies of Fetishism. It is this very proliferation of forms of fetishism that provides fodder for her academic investigation, which simultaneously acknowledges the publishing industry’s demands for fetishisation: it’s presented as a hybridised cultural studies coffee table book. The book provides just enough theory to titillate, while a range of large format black and white photos offer glimpses of club freaks; features objects of worthy art criticism such as Stelarc; and provides some free advertising for New York’s professional dominatrix community.

Although Fernbach’s book should provide a much needed cross-subcultural study of the pervasiveness of millennial fetishes, most of it is a diatribe against the psychoanalytic theory of fetishism. In classic Freudian terms, the fetish provides a mechanism of both acknowledgement and refusal; a disavowal that the male subject uses to hide his traumatic sighting of the female genitals. The fetish, such as fur, lace, whip or cane, is the last thing he remembers seeing before his moment of horror and so he clings to it ferociously, worshipping and adoring it above all else. As in many post-Freudian feminist readings, Fernbach suggests that Freud sustains a phallic sexual economy in which women are always seen as lacking and threatening to male sexuality.

Her contribution to a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary fetish comes through suggesting other forms of fetishism that can come to terms with the transformative and transgressive qualities of present fetishistic fantasies. She introduces new and old alternatives for understanding posthuman, S&M, technopagan and cyborgian fantasies. These range from decadent fetishism, in which she compares fin de siècle culture with millennial crises of disintegration, to magical and pre-oedipal fetishism. This strategy proves useful when she undertakes a reading of, for example, Stelarc, suggesting the many competing fantasies at work in the man who needs his body to interface with the technology he claims is overcoming it. However her overall analysis is haunted by a naïve desire to always configure the cyberpunk, the dominatrix, the club kid as radically transgressive, whereas anything mainstream, such as the cosmetic industry, remains trapped within classical Freudian fetishism. Ultimately this has the effect of holding onto the Freudian fetish as an object against which we should fight the good fight until the very last of the book’s 230 pages.

There is something lacking academically in Fernbach’s conceptual apparatus that I found surprising in a book that stakes so broad an interdisciplinary theoretical claim. For the fetishism lacking in Fantasies of Fetishism is contemporaneous with both Freud’s and our time: the commodity fetish. There is a corpus of theoretical work as rich as the psychoanalytic understanding of the fetish from Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard and beyond, that analyses consumerism as a culture of the commodity fetish. Here the commodity, like Freud’s fetish, disavows the social relations of consumerist exchange that provide the fetishised object with its value. And yet this hardly rates a mention in Fernbach’s book. If it had, it may have proved more difficult for her to paint the technofetishist and commercial S&M world as necessarily transgressing subjective norms. For the utopian, pre-dotcom crash desire to remake the self via the gadgetry of cybernetic hard and software, along with the belief that the commercial dominatrix is a figure autonomously choosing her professional destiny, belong to the fantasy of individual freedom that is the bedrock of consumer fetishism. The libertarian philosophy of both subcultures can be found strewn across the glossy pages of Black and Blue (advertorial for the US commercial S&M community) and Mondo 2000. Fernbach’s failure to acknowledge consumerist culture in the structuring of contemporary fetishisms, and her dated choice of material for analysis, keep the book in a kind of mid-90s bubble of longing for the coming techno-queer cultural revolution.

Amanda Fernbach is an Australian writer who has published widely on the subject of feminism, and lives in New York.

Amanda Fernbach, Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Posthuman, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002, ISBN: 0748616160

Nicola Loder’s solo show wild thing appeared at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography April 10-May 10. Her work has featured in several local and international exhibitions including Telling Tales, the Child in Contemporary Photography at the Monash University Gallery in 2000, Strangely Familiar at the Australian Centre for Photography and Orbital at Lux Gallery London. She has also curated several shows, received project grants from Cinemedia/Experimenta and has lectured in media arts and photography at several Melbourne universities.

“…The movement of crowds across these spaces resemble the meandering of desire lines of sheep across a paddock. Indeed, these are images of tourists ‘flocking’ to the attractions of London, Sienna, Florence and Venice, corralled like sheep toward one prominent site or another. Contrariwise, a field full of sheep is reworked into an exclusive, loving portrait of only two newly clipped merinos, caught frolicking in a soft clear light. So while tourists pay homage, grazing the rich cultural pastures of Western civilisation, another introduced species makes itself at home on the cleared plains of a new land….

“Not surprisingly, Loder’s images were first conceived a few years ago at the height of debate over genetic engineering, and in particular the cloning of the first living thing, a sheep called Dolly. The interrelation of key terms in her work bears this out: crowds, sheep, species, digital manipulation. And let’s recap the benefits of new media technology too: co-extensiveness in time and space (or omnipresence); manipulability and mutability; infinite reproduction and refinement. Photoshop is not just a useful tool but also a terrifying premonition of things to come, after war, at the end of the world. To judge by Loder’s virtual scenarios, public space, as it turns out, is a cul de sac and the ideal paddock is where the real sheep plays happily with its identical copy.”

wild thing, Nicola Loder, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, April 10-May 1. Photographs and text reproduced with permission.

A couple of years ago New York art historian Shelley Rice predicted that spirit photography was going to be big. Speaking at the Art Gallery of NSW’s World Without End exhibition (2001), Rice seems to have forecast a Zeitgeist (fittingly ‘time ghost’) manifest in recent Sydney photography shows that evoke the phantasmagoric, the spectral and the uncanny.

At the Gitte Weise Gallery, 19th century spirit photographs with their white plumes of ectoplasm are directly referenced in Cherine Fahd’s A Woman Runs. The first of Fahd’s 9 large black and white photographs is a composite image of 3 women. One superimposed, cloth-draped figure dominates the frame, hovering like an oversized genie. Through her smoky shape we see a woman in a landscape of dark trees, running across the pine-needled forest floor. Another translucent figure appears to lie limp in the arms of the genie, legs askew, head out of frame, neck bent awkwardly back. In appearing to haunt the running woman, these pellucid forms suggest we cannot escape—running or standing still—the constant spectre of our inevitable death.

Because it hangs near the gallery entrance this work, A Woman Runs into the Invisible, has a prologue effect—its deathliness, its invocation of an intangible plane (also suggested by its title) ghosted me as I viewed the series. All works feature women, singly or in pairs, running from a stand of pines. In all except one shot, the women are photographed face-on, they are often barefoot, occasionally bare-chested, partially clothed in shawls or skirts of grass and underwear as if in preparation for some woodland ritual. The composition prompts the question: who or what are the women running toward? Because they wear expressions of serious intent or abandon rather than fear, they do not appear to be escaping or fleeing but we sense they will inevitably arrive. With arms outstretched, some seem about to alight in robust flight.

Fahd’s work is strongest when its slightly naive and overtly celebratory qualities are implied: in the final work the face and torso of young Alicia are centre frame and though we cannot see the body running, the suggestion of movement—her blurred features emanating light, the grass tossed around her neck—is enigmatic. Alicia’s adolescent face has an inchoate quality, her expression of tender expectation beguiles because it’s ambiguous. This last image completes a kind of magic circle, in which we move backward from the spectre of death, through exuberant feminine energy to blithesome youth. In all works the introduced landscape (pines, not native bush), the women’s dress and behaviour suggest an evanescent realm outside real time and place: an otherworld.

Also haunting and otherworldly but far less ethereally so, is Polixeni Papapetrou’s bold series Phantomwise at Stills Gallery. On first glance these one metre square, unframed prints, tacked poster-style on the walls, seem to depict lifeless dolls, in quaintly cliched scenarios. These character ‘types’: The Last Pharoah, Gatsby Girl, Pilgrim Quilting, Turkish Pasha, Gypsy Queen were inspired by a set of Victorian masks that Papapetrou purchased before the birth of her daughter, Olympia.

It’s 4 year old Olympia, we discover, whose eyes and forehead are masked in each photograph. But like the subjects of 19th century portraits whose heads were sometimes clamped to still them during the lengthy process of taking the shot, Olympia appears more statuary than flesh, hardly alive, but not quite dead. Because of this, I found myself searching her masked and costumed body for signs of life, of her identity. In Granny (2003), Olympia in bonnet and nightgown, perches on the edge of an iron bed clutching an impractically long wooden cane (it would tower overhead if she stood beside it). Because it was at odds with the scene I liked to think that the frosted polish on Granny’s fingernails was Olympia’s contribution, a perhaps unnoticed glitch. In all the works there are identifying signs—the small brown mole that punctuates Olympia’s chin, the delicate wings of her protruding ears, the neatly pursed lips. But we cannot see her eyes through the holes in the masks. Because they are widely set, the eyeholes give all the characters a strangely encephalitic countenance (which we expect only in the regal Elizabeth 1 with her fashionably receding hairline.)

Why do we search these deathly pictures for signs of life? Perhaps because as Papapetrou’s title suggests, the frozen charades in each photo seem less like child’s play than a phantasmagoria, less like performance than stasis: a series of lifeless caricatures. Of course, that’s the thing about archetypes—as generalities they are inevitably bland. But we might expect, given a child’s involvement, an element of ‘play’ here: it’s dressups after all. And if play is a metaphoric state that enables the child to move from one experience to another via the imagination, we get the feeling this is Polixeni’s game and her imagining. Each scene is painstakingly composed, with a touching and uncanny fidelity to detail. In Pilgrim Quilting, the dour subject, stiff-backed in her chair, sews by candlelight; books piled by her side include, of course, The Bible. The Gypsy Queen sits at a table with 6 Tarot cards, a crystal ball and a delicate teacup for spooking up mystic wisdom; the Turkish Pasha poses—naturally—on a flokati rug.

If this is child’s play then it’s a peculiar hybrid of hide-and-seek and statues. There’s no active abandonment in this inert masquerade. In most photos Olympia reclines—demurely on the chaise lounge as Gatsby Girl, primly in smocked dress and milkmaid plaits beside a chipped enamel bucket of tulips as Dutch Girl. But where she is posed more dynamically we have a greater sense that she is truly present—the wonderfully moody Jack Tar shows sailor-suited Olympia spoiling for a brawl, hands on hips, a length of rope slung over her shoulder. In Indian Brave she sppears even more alive (see cover image). Standing close to the frame, cut off below the torso, in feathered headdress, she poses bare-chested without props against the velvety black background. By exposing Olympia’s skin, in the light and shadow that highlight the grooved architecture of her ribcage, the unique knot of her navel, Papapetrou literally gives us more of her. And Olympia’s defiant, macho stance is poignantly contradicted by the youthful doughiness of her arms, the lovely formlessness of her muscles and the fact that we know he’s a she. Just as Cindy Sherman’s work suggests the scripted predictability of feminine cliches in contemporary culture, Papapetrou’s images play with cultural and national archetypes, age and gender. By miniaturising adult personas in the body of a child there is an uncanny dislocation between what’s real and what’s being enacted. And in suddenly accelerating Olympia’s physical age through the simple act of masking, these pictures also carry an eerie premonition of death.

While 19th century spectres seem composed of light and air, Papapetrou’s phantoms are entirely solid. Their spectral effect comes from the literal effacement of the human subject: Olympia’s neat mouth, slightly open in Court Beauty, reveals nothing more of her self but blackness.

Those early spirit photographs resulted from re-used glass plates during processing. A less intentional but equally apparitional effect can be produced from darkroom chemicals. While pondering an increasingly digitalised environment in the impressive, recently relaunched Photofile, editor Alasdair Foster notes the uncanny qualities of an anonymous 1920s snap shown at the MCA’s Other Pictures exhibit last year. The lighter tones in this image of a man in a white suit, Foster writes “…had faded, creating a luminous aura around the figure.” Because it was insufficiently fixed, the photograph, with its slowly growing bloom of white had, from its very beginnings, assured its subject’s “eventual disappearance” (“Art Without the Artist”, Photofile No 68, “Futures”)

A Woman Runs, Cherine Fahd, Gitte Weise Gallery, April 30-May 31; Phantomwise, Polixeni Papapetrou, Stills Gallery, April 23-May 24

Among critics who regard innovation and aesthetic worth as closely linked, it is common to see Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami referred to as one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers. It is particularly exciting, then, that this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival will feature a retrospective of his work. The retrospective and the presence of Kiarostami, should be a great attraction for the festival given its significant history of introducing his work to the Australian public.

Born in 1940, Kiarostami started his film career in advertising and film titling before working on educational films for the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (KANUN) in the late 1960s. It was this background, away from the Shah-ist entertainment cinema, that provided a path to the post-revolutionary cinema (which in some ways resembles the Soviet cinema of the montage period) in which everything was suddenly up for grabs.

Is he representative of Iranian cinema? I’d like to say yes, and make the case that given Australia’s recent role in international affairs, we need to see films that help us past the glib abstractions of conservative geopolitical agendas. Whatever one believes about Iran, it has undeniably produced some of the strongest cinema of the past 20 years, doing more to reinvigorate realist filmmaking than any recent national cinema.

But while he is its most internationally prominent director, it is problematic to read Kiarostami as a representative of Iranian cinema. His international success has tended to make him an isolated figure within Iran. His films stake out increasingly oppositional positions within increasingly isolated physical spaces. Kiarostami’s protagonists have always felt more at home in their cars than in the social world of Tehran. His work has moved toward reflexive concerns rather than the sentimental art cinema represented by a filmmaker like Majid Majidi (The Colours of Paradise, Children of Paradise). Kiarostami has more to tell us about the axis of action than the axis of evil.

As with any truly visionary artist, it is difficult to provide an overview of Kiarostami’s films. They are rich in uniting previously opposed ideas and tendencies, producing complication where facile simplification has reigned.

From the criticism of authoritarian education practices in 1989’s Homework through to the man intent on suicide in Taste of Cherry (1997) to the divorced woman’s discussion of her atheism in last year’s Ten, Kiarostami’s social critique has been that of the individual trying to maintain a place for personal choice, for the creative imagination.

It is this personal politics that provokes a discussion of Kiarostami as a distinctive cinematic innovator. If he’s often compared to Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, it is because of their common interest in exploring alternative stylistic systems based on imaginative invention rather than the dictates of convention.

Ten, for example, is an austere narrative consisting of 10 conversations all taking place in the front seat of a car. One conversation shows only the passenger, the next shows only the driver, while a third takes the conventional approach of shot-reverse shot cutting. A formulaic construction of space is defamilarised and shown merely as one option among others.

Kiarostami has spoken of his films as “half-made”, meaning that they leave gaps to be filled by spectators. He has said, “you did not always have to show something to let your spectators know about it.” Perhaps this explains his increasing interest in off-screen space. There is always more around the frame than what is shown, always more to be believed than there is to see.

A case in point: in Taste of Cherry there is a medium shot of the protagonist in his car. As he pulls up, the voice of a man is heard off-screen. A conversation ensues in which the camera simply holds on the driver. He pulls away, the car turning in a circle before pulling up again and we see, in the deep space of the shot, a man in a telephone booth. The space of the scene is unpacked in a gradual and complicated way, and the pleasure for the spectator is in putting it together from the unconventional cues we are given.

Related to this concentration on off-screen space is the way Kiarostami is unafraid to prise apart picture and sound. In Homework, he simply turns off the soundtrack during a school recitation, the better to observe the anarchic individualism of the children in preference to the rehearsed chant they are repeating. In ABC Africa (2001) the screen is black for a prolonged period as the filmmakers stumble around during a power blackout.

One constant at the heart of Kiarostami’s style is a fascination with repetition. Characters repeat actions, traverse the same spaces which are shown using the same framings. Consider the narrative example of The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) in which the protagonist has to drive time and time again along the same route to get to the one elevated point of good telephone reception. Consider the documentary example of Homework in which children give the same answers to the same questions framed in the same shot punctuated with the same cutaways.

There is a refusal here of major ellipses or compressions so that the spaces between, the throwaway material of conventional narrative, start to matter. Where is the Friend’s House? (1987) is one of the greatest meditations in the cinema on getting from point A to point B. Like other great realist works, it finds fresh methods for renewing our wonder at what has been right under our noses all the time.

This unconventional attitude toward space motivates Kiarostami’s interest in people driving. This represents a way of being both in the social world and profoundly private, of seeing landscape in a direct way and abstracted through the framing of windscreens. Kiarostami is interested in restricted spaces but these tight framings also set up extreme long shots, such as the conclusions of Life and Nothing More (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994) in which the decisive narrative actions are rendered in such extreme long shot as to be implicit.

This brings us to the nub of the narrational dialectic in these films. On one hand, they are built around simple, tangible tasks—a small boy tries to find a schoolmate’s house, a filmmaker tries to find a small boy, a man tries to find someone to bury him. Kiarostami’s protagonists have a single goal, though the complication is that these quests are generally left in a nebulous state. In Life and Nothing More, the inability of a car to ascend a steep slope closes the film, while in The Taste of Cherry narrative resolution evaporates into Brechtian gesture. The Wind Will Carry Us is about how a film doesn’t get made.

In keeping with the idea that there is always more than we see, these narratives beget other narratives. Where is the Friend’s House gives birth to the filmmaker’s quest to re-find his child actor following an earthquake in Life and Nothing More from the interstices of which a romance is generated in Through the Olive Trees. Behind the narrative space there is also a complementary space from which the narrative is constructed. Life and Nothing More, Close-Up, Through the Olive Trees and The Wind Will Carry Us all feature filmmakers as their main characters.

This retrospective provides a rare opportunity to consider the work of a filmmaker with the courage to see differently and to reinvent the way films tell stories. If Australian cinema is to step away from its decline into international irrelevance, there are lessons here that we need to ponder, and acts of imagination to stun us with wonder.

52nd Melbourne International Film Festival, Forum Theatre & various cinemas, Melbourne, July 23-Aug 10

Duncan Thompson, Blake Ayshford, Christina Andreef, Sofya Gollan, Raymond Devitt

Aurora’s artistic director, Duncan Thompson, opens the door of the slow combustion fire and suggests we throw our scripts in to burn. With scriptwriters Christina Andreef, Ray Devitt and Sofya Gollan, I’ve been selected for the New South Wales Film and Television Office’s Aurora Scriptwriting Workshop. It’s our first day at a remote campsite near Jervis Bay and we’re gathered in the camp’s central meeting area when Duncan makes his suggestion. That, he says, is what the coming week is all about.

Aurora involves flying in international writers and directors, and local industry figures, to work with 4 creative teams for a week of intensive script development. This year’s industry advisers are producer Jan Chapman (The Piano, Lantana), screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), screenwriter and director Bill Forsyth (Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero) and screenwriter and director Chris Noonan (Babe, The Riddle of the Stinson). The teams are: Cut Snake, writer Blake Ayshford, producer/director Nicholas Parsons; Shiver, writer/director Christina Andreef, producer Helen Bowden; Ice, writer/director Sofya Gollan, producer Matt Carroll; and Highway Toll, writer Raymond Devitt, producer John Cruthers, director Marcus Gale.

Christina Andreef remembers Duncan’s script-burning suggestion as “one of those moments where your breath stuck at the back of your throat—half angry at the arrogance of it, and [yet] three-quarters flying, and open to making the most of what such fine filmmakers might offer.”

I felt disbelief, and fear. I knew I had work to do, but expected it would revolve around the 108 pages of my existing script, which I’d been writing for 3 years. Wrong. Over the next week my script would be taken apart, debated, expanded, deepened, cut to pieces till I was left with an exhilarating glimpse of the film it could become. And all without ever having taken the script from my bag. Aurora is about the ideas behind the script, not the words on the page.

Now in its second year, Aurora was established by the New South Wales Government through the FTO to solve the problems of existing script development models where many Australian projects are under-funded and pushed to seek production finance before they are ready. Aurora is intended to substantially reduce development time as well as provide intensive script focus for the selected projects.

Although based on the successful models used at Sundance (USA), Moonstone (UK) and eQuinoxe (France), the Aurora Workshop differs in that it involves the collaborative team—writer, director and producer—rather than solely the writer. Aurora also provides significant funds for the teams to produce another draft, followed by a formal feedback process. One of the scripts from Aurora 2002, More Than Scarlett, is already in production while another 2—Axe Fall and Little Fish—are both very close to being financed.

The workshop takes place at the remote Paperbark Camp where each writer stays in a luxury tent. The proximity of bush and wildlife and abscence of distractions creates a camaraderie amongst the writers and advisers and seems to help trigger creative script solutions. While we are there our 4 scripts seem to be the only films in the world and the possibilities for them appear endless.

My first session was with Bill Forsyth, described as the director “who gave hope to a generation of British filmmakers.” Bill’s approach was gentle, low-key. My film, Cut Snake, is a love story between crims, loosely based on the burning of Brisbane’s Whisky Au Go Go nightclub in 1973, which killed 15 people. It’s an Aussie crime drama about men who find violence easier than love. So it was a revelation to hear Bill explain that the script’s theme was the main character’s search for family. As he explained it I saw how this theme was present in every scene of the writing though I’d never consciously set out to put it there. But after he’d said it, I’d never see the film the same way again—he’d given me a tool for writing the script, and he hadn’t changed a word.

Jan Chapman was perceptive and penetrating, zeroing in on parts of the script I felt least happy with, but hadn’t been able to find solutions for. I soon discovered I couldn’t bluff my way out. That wasn’t the point.

Simon Beaufoy’s mission was to put the ‘sex’ into my film. He was energetic and generous with ideas and excited by the territory the script explored. With Chris Noonan we looked for striking images and tried new techniques to dramatise those moments in the script I wished to change.

Because in my case the advisers agreed on the direction the script required, the process was like a rolling conversation, one taking up where the other had left off. I found them rigorous, generous, and respectful of writers and our scripts. Sofya said she loved the freedom of the discussions—any story direction felt possible, and “right.” For Christina, “the most refreshing surprise was that not one of the 4 advisers mentioned a “3-act structure in the entire week, nor a Hero’s Journey, or Arc.”

In between sessions we dined, wined and jokingly plotted the world’s worst film, in which we cast the world’s worst actors, titled Bad People. In Huskisson we saw films Road to Nhill and This is Not a Love Song and afterward had a Q&A with the films’ writers Alison Tilson and Simon Beaufoy. Halfway through the week the other members of our creative teams arrived and after ‘debriefing’, the script meetings were repeated. Luckily my director, Nick Parsons, agreed on the areas I proposed and so we spent the rest of the week refining our ideas with the advisers.

Each writer now has 4 months to produce a new draft for the 4 advisers who will provide written feedback, and for 3 new consultants, chosen for their knowledge of the international and local feature film marketplace and their creative abilities with script. Also scheduled is a reading of the scripts with experienced actors. Sofya says the workshop “…will be a highlight of my writing career, in that I will always wish for this level of involvement with future scripts when they’re ready for feedback.” And I agree. As Christina says we’ve been given “myriad fantastic ideas” as well as “an enormous amount of work…sorting and trying them out.” And as well as friendships, and confidence, most importantly the process has given me a belief in my abilities and courage as writer.

Aurora Scriptwriting Workshop, NSW Film and Television Office, Paperbark Camp, Jervis Bay, April 5-12

As a central part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Liquid Sea, 6 of Jean Painlevé’s enchanting surreal films from the 1920s to the 70s, were screened at The Studio, Sydney Opera House. The screenings were introduced by Brigitte Berg, the Director of the Painlevé archive at Les Documents Cinematographiques, Paris. Her informative and stimulating lecture shed invaluable light on Painlevé’s art and life. All of us who regard him as one of the bewitching marvels of surrealist cinema are indebted to Berg’s dedication to keeping Painlevé’s unprecedented poetic and acategorical films, photographs and documents (including broadcasts) alive for appreciative generations of art lovers, cinephiles and scientists.

For me these screenings were a watershed viewing experience. The multifaceted and quirky combination of surrealism, science and cinema that distinctively characterises this artist’s magical oeuvre has so far eluded all existing film canons. Who was Painlevé and what of his rarely known and seen films?

Born in 1902, Jean Painlevé was the son of a distinguished mathematician and French Minister of War. Originally trained as a biologist, he became interested in films in the 20s. In 1924 he became a founding member of the French Surrealist movement. Painlevé’s absorbing marine study films were surreal hybrids: research works about aquatic life for scientists; and films that popularised science for a lay audience. It’s the latter that are usually celebrated.

Painlevé was a friend of Luis Bunuel (he almost fainted when Painlevé showed him a real eye surgery film!), Antonin Artaud and Jean Vigo. He was more than a marine biologist fascinated with the strange balletic movements of a seahorse (The Seahorse, 1934), the erotic life of an octopus (The Love Life of the Octopus, 1965), or the allegorical Nazi-like attributes of a vampire bat (The Vampire, 1939-45). He was a tireless promoter of cinema. Arguably, his films were a vital precursor to the multimedia creativity of the 1960s and beyond. In the 1970s he was working on the creative and technical possibilities of the video self-portrait.

Painlevé was a political activist who, in the 1930s, became interested in supporting popular democracy and popular science. During the French occupation and the following decade, he fought for French cinema’s independence and the documentary form.

As a surrealist, Painlevé’s quirky sensibility is immediately recognisable in its idiosyncratic interplay between science and surrealism. Possessing a remarkable eye for life’s eerie curiosities, Painlevé’s cinematic art pivots on the premise that science is fiction. As a pioneer of underwater filmmaking, he introduces us to the wonderfully weird creatures and their rituals that comprise underwater life—a world extended to our television screens in the 1950s and 60s, by Jacques Cousteau. Our ceaseless anthropomorphic amazement at Painlevé’s uncanny films have much to say about our dreams and passions.

Irrespective of their subjects, his films also force us to reconsider our devotion to categorical thinking. Noted for their unsettling amalgam of droll clinical matter-of-factness, playful irony and surreal perversity, Painlevé’s exquisitely photographed and lit films generate wonder and unease. They also innovatively embrace art and science, cinema and documentary, educational function and surreal spectacle. As a surrealist poet of the nature film, Painlevé, is in a class of his own. His films bring to mind Bunuel’s definition of cinema as that marvelous white eyelid screen reflecting its own light to blow up the world.

One of the many inventive qualities of Painlevé’s cinema was his unpredictable use of music such as hot jazz (Duke Ellington) in The Vampire; avant garde music (Darius Milhaud) in perhaps his most famous film of all, The Seahorse; and electronic music (Pierre Henry) for his 1960s octopus film. Painlevé’s ear for marrying unusual sounds to his images is distinctive in French cinema. It was Painlevé who introduced the film composer Maurice Jaubert to Jean Vigo. My first viewing of The Vampire with its combination of Ellington, the hideous bat and its unsuspecting victim was an unsettling imagistic and sonic encounter that remained with me for years. Only in film noir do we find such an engagingly resourceful use of jazz in the cinema.

A welcome surprise at the screening was the 1938 satirical animation Blue Beard, with its vivid and dramatic use of red, blue, yellow and brown and its strange clay figures (fashioned by sculptor Rene Bertrand and his 3 children) forming a hallucinatory fairytale film of explosive lyricism with an operatically inflected soundtrack (Maurice Jaubert and Jean-Vincent Brechignac). This is a film that deliberately seeks to unsettle our most basic assumptions about reality. An extraordinary achievement.

For too long Jean Painlevé’s surreal eclecticism has been paid lip service in certain quarters of film history and theory. Curator Rachel Kent and the MCA are to be congratulated for bringing these films of “accidental beauty” (Andre Bazin) to a wider viewing public. Painlevé’s legacy is a singularly marvelous one: zoological documents that double as provocative cine-poems of unparalleled chance, humour, lyricism and unsettling beauty. A cinema to engulf you with its delirious magic.

A life in film: The extraordinary world of Jean Painlevé, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 14, part of Liquid Sea, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March 14-June 8

In early May an intimate but vital industry conference on the state of Australian TV was held in Perth. Size does matter, but in this case less was more. Where else but the annual Small Screen Big Picture TV pow-wow can you schmooze with leading local and international producers, broadcasters and agents while buttonholing the new heads of the Film Finance Corporation (Brian Rosen) and SBS Television (Shaun Brown).

It seems that the challenges and opportunities of digital technologies are not being met by either industry/producers or consumers/audiences. On a panel devoted to “crossing the boundaries” of film to digital, producer Vincent Sheehan, AAV digital lab head John Fleming and the FFC Investment Manager Ross Mathews grappled with the implications (creative, technical and financial) of choosing digital over film. While Mathews suggested the FFC would be increasingly flexible with lower budgets for digi-features, Fleming’s presentation of post-production costs was sobering: there was still little to be saved using a digital pathway.

The PAY-TV panel signaled trends in both programming and industry economics. With nearly 12 times the amount of content shown on Pay TV as on all the free-to-air broadcasters combined, subscription content providers say regulation is damaging their industry with onerous local content provisions and erratic anti-siphoning laws. Although resistant to the 10% requirement for local drama, Pay operators suggest that as more subscribers take up Pay TV, additional programming will be devoted to domestic productions.

One of the most forthright panels covered trends in factual programming, ostensibly recognising the “revolution” in programming and the “plethora of new styles of storytelling.” Daryl Karp, head of Factual Programs at ABC Television, began the session with a showreel of the past 18 months’ top rating ABC programs followed by the top rating Australian programs. Surprisingly, most were non-fiction with an aesthetic bias towards dramatic reconstruction, the monarchy (past and present) and CGI special effects. All attracted an audience of about a million and there was not much difference in audience size for locally made, versus imported, top raters. For Karp, successful stories need recognisable names and accessible content entertainingly told, but more critically, they have to fit within the ABC’s program schedule.

Reading the trends in such recently commissioned work, Alex Graham, Chief Executive of UK production house Wall to Wall, quipped, “Yeah, I’m waiting to see the Dinosaur Queen of the Nazis next.” Graham is responsible for ‘reality history’ programs such as The 1900 House, Edwardian Country House and Frontier House and the ‘speculative future’ documentaries Smallpox 2002 and The Day Britain Stopped. His creative model for factual programming is drama, whether it’s fish-out-of-water shows that immerse 21st century families in recreated historical environments, or creating a not-too-distant future and invoking catastrophe to ‘retrospectively’ comment on the folly of contemporary social policy. While acknowledging the “fakery” of these oxymoronic “reconstructed” futures, Graham beguiled the audience with his pitch, “Everything in this show is true, it just hasn’t happened yet….” Despite the impressive imagery and pomo rationale it all seemed deeply derivative—Peter Watkins pioneered the same thing at the BBC 4 decades ago with Culloden and The War Game.

Mark Hamlyn, Executive Producer at Film Australia, rhetorically asked what the ‘revolution’ in factual programming meant for Film Oz with its unique national

interest program and “cultural remit as a specialist documentary house.” His answer invoked the economic mantra of Bill Clinton, reminding the audience that “it’s about the entertainment, stupid.” In TV, it’s not the facts surrounding any event or life story that are important but the creative treatment of these and their entertainment value. Increasingly, Film Australia is looking to “the classic 3-act structure” of narrative, where recreations are embraced, but these dramatisations are ultimately measured against the “cheesiness factor” (too much or not enough).

Marie Thomas, Commissioning Editor at SBS, met session chair Celia Tate’s challenge to be “provocative”, saying few projects she’d been pitched in Australia had “excited” her. Thomas confessed to being a little jaded from reading countless treatments that referenced Fred Wiseman or Nanook of the North. Bureaucratic limitations frustrate her ability to entrepreneurially solicit projects, she said, and she does not share Hamlyn’s lament for the demise of the Commercial Television Production Fund, which takes millions of dollars from the sector. After years at the UK’s impoverished Channel 5, Thomas knows compelling programs can be made consistently on minuscule budgets.

Other stand out conference sessions included Scott Buck, Supervising Producer of Six Feet Under, who charmingly deconstructed the series and showed an episode yet to be aired here. The vicissitudes and pathologies of Six Feet’s dysfunctional ensemble characters are drawn not from fiction, Buck said, but from the scriptwriters’ personal experiences of death and its taboos.

Mother and Son and Grass Roots writer Geoffrey Atherden’s poignant yet hilarious lunchtime delivery stole the show. Atherden’s shtick included a whimsical meta-analysis of the act of presenting with a Powerpoint display that added new meaning to digital performance. As guests tucked into the buffet, Atherden drolly delivered his belief that a bilateral free trade agreement with the disproportionately powerful US will have dire consequences for domestic creative industries.

Comparing the situation in Australia with the US, New Zealand, Mexico and Canada, Atherden assured us that “the argument is not about free trade, it’s about fair trade.” After encouraging his audience to support intervention in Canberra, he received a loud, sustained ovation. Whether the warm response to this inspirational rhetoric translates into effective industry action and subsequent federal policy remains to be seen.

2003 Small Screen Big Picture TV Conference, Hotel Rendezvous, Observation City, Perth, May 7-9

When the 2003 Queensland New Filmmakers Award screening night opened with Peri Campbell’s experimental short Eating Disorder, an imaginative video self-portrait cleverly effacing its 90s-feminist-sounding title, viewers might have expected the other shortlisted films to be similarly bold exercises in style and content. But with a couple of exceptions, most of the works selected—particularly the winners—from the many entries (QNFA won’t give exact figures) strove more for industry-mimetic technical proficiency than innovation.

Teenager Campbell received an award for her hyper-kinetic, absurdist piece—complete with alphabet-soup text—about her diasporic family history. Another successful film, Pens at Ten Paces (dir Tim Noonan), about 2 dueling letter writers, illustrated the potential for formal experimentation within the confines of the ‘odd couple’ narrative structure. Painting the Tomatoes (dir Elizabeth Murphy), with its ambiguous, dreamlike story about an elderly man’s recollections, and daring thematic use of colour and texture, was one of the few defiantly arthouse films seen at QNFA in recent years.

Nonetheless, the winner, Prep Rules (dir Luke Mayze), which received numerous awards, was a typical—some would say archetypal—QNFA winner. Technically faultless, with strong performances and a cautious, if irresolute melodramatic narrative about bullying in a boys’ school, its key creative talents have significant but unrecognised industry presence, like the professional animators of the much-rewarded Cane Toad (dir David Clayton). In both cases the awards confirmed the industry standards achieved by both works and their semi-professional makers.

Since its launch 16 years ago, QNFA has become Australia’s biggest industry-sponsored award event, which explains the judicial emphasis on technical perfection over formal innovation or risk-taking content. The inherent conservatism of the film industry hardly needs reiterating: the capital-intensive nature of film production usually results in filmmakers avoiding anything too adventurous that might limit a film’s profit potential in the market. Risky work has a necessarily small niche in the industry and QNFA explicitly recognises that by rewarding the films (and they are usually films, video is still considered the province of the novice, amateur or artist) that most closely reproduce the industry’s commercial criteria.

However, QNFA’s critics argue that adhering to the conformity-as-survival model obviates innovation and ignores other kinds of emerging talent. Some say few audaciously different films make it to the judging round: films that are very experimental, that are anti-plot or deliberately disjointed are the ones that miss out on selection. Whether or not QNFA’s initial selectors are bombarded with a panoply of adventurous, innovative audiovisual works remains shrouded in the famous mists of QNFA secrecy about the judging process.

However, along with the unambiguous commercial orientation within the field, there is discernible discontent about the selection process—judges are given a shortlist of about 5 films from which to select the winner. John Willsteed from Scope Sound Post Production, a QNFA Craft Industry judge for 6 years, says he “hates” the abbreviated selection he receives as “most people have cloth ears.” Other judges expressed similar concerns about the selection process, which they consider flawed because “…you see films up for awards in other categories that are much better than 3 out of the 5 you were given in your category.” Willsteed, as famous for his witty and incisive speeches at QNFA as he is for mentoring young media makers, makes a convincing case for more expert involvement in the pre-selection process.

Other critics, particularly from the production sector, are more concerned at what they see as the Awards’ subtly coercive role. Sarah-Jane Woulahan of Square-eyed Films says there is an internalisation of the status quo among budding film talent in Queensland. At “…precisely the moment young media makers should be taking risks and pursuing their own unique ideas” they are encouraged to produce “what the QNFA wants”—inevitably something “safe and bland.” Woulahan says this sense of implicit compulsion, stemming from the Awards’ hefty industry backing, inures both makers and audiences to staid, prudent modes of practice. “[T]here are some great works that slip through the cracks because they’re not seen as ‘marketable’ forms. The issue here is…how does the market know what it wants if it doesn’t even get a chance to choose?” When the financial security assured for work that fits commercial standards is set against the risks posed by experiment—the industry wins outright.

Others still argue for the importance of the awards given their function as a gateway to the industry. But how much do QNFA winners represent the greater production of emerging talent in Queensland? Independent producer Judd Tilyard says QNFA “is an awards ceremony with particular tastes and attracting limited submissions. No festival, market or awards ceremony could ever hope to represent the work of an entire state, or even an entire city for that matter…QNFA reflects the kind of filmmaking that people thought stood a good chance at winning QNFA.” This tallies with other voices from the production-sector that commend the awards’ unique nursery/laboratory role in bringing industry sponsors and aspiring filmmaking teams together.

Forcefully pragmatic considerations of ‘quality’ and ‘professionalism’ underlie QNFA’s commercial imperative. However, though the Australian industry undoubtedly needs commercial talent, it also needs equally bold attempts to re-invigorate old forms.

There is an argument for a greater balance between the QNFA’s role in perpetuating sanctioned modes of filmmaking and fostering the exploration of new forms and ideas. Perhaps, as Tilyard says, Queensland film and video artists could one day dare to dream of “a whole new awards ceremony, maybe sponsored by an arts body, where the emphasis is on creativity instead of commercialism.”

Warner Roadshow Studios 17th Queensland New Filmmakers Awards, Queensland Conservatorium of Music, April 30; public screenings, Hoyts Regent Cinemas, April 14

Australian cinephiles will be well and truly aware by now of the stir that Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark has produced around the globe. The film has sent many a respected film critic into raptures over its artistic and technical merits. Our own filmmaking culture is so often accused of being formally and thematically conservative that it is worth examining any overseas film that has been almost universally hailed as groundbreaking on both counts, and asking what lessons, if any, it can offer Australian filmmakers.

Russian Ark takes place entirely in and around St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, formerly the Czar’s Winter Palace. As the film opens, the audience immediately have the sense of falling into a dream. We hear an unseen narrator, through whose eyes we see the entire movie, mutter something about experiencing an accident, and suddenly finding himself stumbling into the Winter Palace, unseen amongst a group of 19th century aristocratic revellers. Inside the Palace, he comes across a fellow time traveller, the Marquis Astolf De Custine, a 19th century French diplomat, and the 2 begin a journey through 33 rooms and 300 years of Russian history. Among other things, they see Catherine the Great wandering in the snow, Czar Nicholas II dining with his family, and the last great ball held at the Palace on the verge of the First World War in 1913.

One of the primary reasons Russian Ark has attracted so much attention is the film’s immense technical accomplishment. By shooting on high definition video and recording the uncompressed image straight onto hard disk, Sokurov was able to capture the film’s action in a single, uninterrupted take lasting approximately one and a half hours. When one considers that the film involves a thousand extras, takes place in 33 different rooms, and had to be set up and shot in the course of 3 days (the time the Hermitage’s directors were prepared to have the museum closed to the public), one begins to comprehend what a stupendous technical feat Russian Ark is. What all this logistical genius actually adds up to, however, is at best an empty spectacle dressed up with all the trappings of old world, pre-modern classical art, and at worst, a deeply conservative and ahistorical piece of reactionary nostalgia.

There is a long tradition of modernist filmmaking heavily reliant on the long take, stretching back at least as far as the Italian Neo-Realist films of the 1940s. The contemporaneous commentary on Neo-Realism provided by French critic Andre Bazin still provides an incisive reading of the philosophical implications of this stylistic approach. At first glance, a single-shot film like Russian Ark may seem like the realisation of the ultimate Bazinian filmmaking fantasy, but as Benjamin Halligan argued in a recent essay in Senses of Cinema, Russian Ark actually goes against all of Bazin’s philosophical ideas [www.sensesofcinema.com.au]. Not that Sokurov is obliged to conform to the views of a long-dead French film critic. However, the ways in which Russian Ark violates what Halligan calls the “Bazin maxim” can illuminate how the film’s seemingly innovative technical approach dovetails with its conservative and profoundly anti-modern agenda.

For Bazin, the long take had value only to the extent that it left the film’s action in its objective spatial and temporal context. Which is not to suggest the long take presents a more objective ‘truth’ in any essentialist sense. Rather, it allows the action to be ‘played out’ before the camera, potentially demanding a more mentally active attitude from viewers required to read meaning into the image, rather than having the scene analytically broken down for them through a more classical editing schema.

In Sokurov’s film, however, the single continuous shot functions as a stylistic choice allowing the narrator and audience to float over the surface of history, divorcing the scenes we witness from any kind of historical and political context. Although Russian Ark is ostensibly about history, it is history as a rather facile costume parade, blankly played out as a series of disconnected scenes held together by a wandering camera. The effect is of a sense of self-contained wholeness that allows the narrator to pass through countless historical episodes without ever having to stop and deal with the messy question of what it all actually means. Not that the film should provide definitive answers, but Sokurov does not seem interested in the questions pertaining to the historical period through which his film moves. This approach might have worked well as part of a critique of the hermetically sealed world of Russia’s aristocracy in the early 20th century. Rather, Russian Ark appears to maintain the same kind of blind, uncritical investment in the values and traditions of the pre-modern world as the historical characters themselves.

While the sheer material grandeur of Russia’s upper classes prior to 1917 cannot be denied, it seems deeply abhorrent to nostalgically celebrate and mourn the passing of that grandiose tradition without any acknowledgment of the absolutely grinding poverty upon which this opulence was built. In the end, it was the sheer intensity of this poverty that brought down Russia’s royal ruling class, not the intercession of some ‘outside’ disaster, as the film seems to imply.

Russian Ark’s final scene, in which the doomed aristocracy slowly exit their last great ball, positively drips with a sense of melancholy and mourning. The entire ball sequence is shot with a sumptuous celebratory glow. In contrast, of the 3 scenes that take place after 1917, 2 are shot in heavy shadow and near darkness. In one, the current director of the Hermitage discusses the extreme financial strain of preserving the Museum’s cultural riches, while in another we see a coffin maker working furiously during the siege of Leningrad in the middle of the Second World War. The modern world is associated with darkness, death and destruction, while pre-revolutionary Russia is uncritically celebrated as a world of eternal beauty, glowing luxury, and untroubled wealth. In this way, the film is a fundamentally dishonest dip into Russian’s history. Whatever horrors the country endured under the Communist regime, they cannot nullify the arrogance, stupidity, and cruelty of Russia’s royalty under the Czar. The tragedy of Russia’s history is not that the aristocracy’s last great ball took place in 1913, but that such an event was still taking place at a time when most of Europe was rushing head-long into the 20th century. If the aristocracy had spent less time ensconced in the dream world evoked in Russian Ark, and more time engaged with what was happening to their people, they might have spared themselves, and their country, the whole tragedy of the Russian Revolution.

If Russian Ark has any lessons for Australian filmmakers, it is that technical innovation does not, in itself, represent something of value for cinematic art. When innovation is harnessed in the service of an essentially reactionary agenda it hides the implications of that agenda. Australia, like much of the world, is currently facing a deeply uncertain future, and the last thing we need is an uncritical retreat into a nostalgic, glossy dream of past repression.

Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov, distributor Potential Films, various cinemas nationally

The AFC-ScreenSound Australia integration

“The Australian Film Commission welcomed tonight’s Budget announcement by the Federal Government that the AFC and ScreenSound Australia will be integrated from 1 July 2003, foreshadowing that the integration will enable the continuation of the important work of collecting, documenting, preserving and providing access to the national film and sound archive alongside an enhanced program of audiovisual cultural activities for all Australians.”
AFC press release, May 14

Integration’s the word. It’s peppered through the press release and, when I speak to him by phone, in Chief Executive Kim Dalton’s reassuring words that neither organisation will suffer. It’s not immediately clear however which party is being integrated into what—ScreenSound into the AFC, which is what it looks like—or is this going to be a merger into a new entity?

Dalton explains that the AFC Act “will be amended and for the first time require the AFC to be responsible for the collection of our visual heritage.” What will the organisation be called? “The AFC.” There’ll be no ScreenSound? “Not strictly. The name is secondary. This is a critical task and we have made a commitment to it.” Dalton is adamant that the AFC and ScreenSound will each “maintain the integrity of their function and retain their own identity.”

There would seem to be positive implications in the merger for Australian screen culture. Use of that term was apparently discouraged on Dalton’s arrival at the AFC. However, he says he is “absolutely excited at the prospect of new ventures, in an area in the middle—screen education, national exhibition, interactive media-where [the AFC and ScreenSound] are both involved and can work together…providing national perspectives and leadership.”

Things look good, if, as the press release promises: “The integration will enable expansion of current audiovisual culture activities, enhance coordination of such activities, and provide leadership with a national focus by what will be a key cultural organisation.” Australian “audiovisual culture” will be well served if this merger is not a cost-cutting, staff-slashing exercise. Dalton says it is definitely not.

The Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive are “surprised by the merger” (integration’s not a word they use), cautiously optimistic, if rather anxiously “pointing to the dysfunctional relationship following the British Film Institute’s merger with the National Film and Television Archive in 1998—which was reversed after 4 years.”

In their press release the Friends are also concerned about representation: “Strong credentials in film or sound culture are vital prerequisites for those representing the National Film and Sound Archive on the new AFC Board…The Archive should have a long-term guarantee of a minimum of 3 dedicated expert positions on the AFC Board.” The Friends are eager to restore the title National Film and Sound Archive “after its ill-considered ‘rebranding’ as ‘ScreenSound Australia’”, as a matter of priority.

New OnScreen Commissioning Editor: Daniel Edwards

The Managing Editors are pleased to announce the appointment of Daniel Edwards to the position of OnScreen Commissioning Editor, a significant position in RealTime, dealing with film and digital media across Australia and working with Contributing Editors in every state. Daniel is a post-graduate at University of New South Wales, where he tutors in film and edits the UNSW Union magazine. He has made several short films and written about film for a range of publications. Daniel commences his editorship with the August-September edition of RealTime+OnScreen. KG

Thirty years ago the only way to a career in cinema, and it was risky, was to find cinema by subterfuge. The usual trick was to take a degree in literature or history, and work film into the final project somehow. At the time there was almost nowhere in Australia to study film as itself because it was always subsumed within the theoretical confines of literature, history or anthropology.

This was how the head of Ronin Films, Andrew Pike, found himself in Canberra at the Australian National University, doing a Masters in the history of Australian cinema. Quickly the degree became tangential to the real objective: to watch, critique and make films.

There is something, he says, about the “scale of the experience” of the darkened cinema and the projected image that is irresistible. This same sense of magic, of calling, has affected the humblest and the greatest of cinephiles, from the anonymous film watcher to obsessives like Godard or Wenders. For Pike the cinema was more than images and the totality of its experience has been his guiding force.

Now there are support networks, courses and grants and the legitimacy of film as art and business is well understood. But Ronin’s struggle in the preceding period was based on a passion rather than a decided and clear pathway. That’s not to say that current structures are unwelcome, or unnecessary to sustain an Australian industry that is by turns fragile and prosperous, but for Pike as for myself, there was some satisfaction in the loneliness of the cinematic obsession.

This might seem romantic in the cool cash world of today’s film industry, but we are only here because others have taken a chance on what we might want to see. Imagine the effort involved, the quiet sense of pioneering, of working outside the system.

Andrew Pike’s early contacts with cinema are best described as pure and personal. Anything less is trifling with the greatest art. First sightings are always important and often not revealed in public. Pike cites Jules et Jim and Rashamon as the first and earliest influences beyond the standard Hollywood films he saw in the suburban cinemas of his youth. The classical and the new authorship, a perfect conjunction in the history of cinema. This was the best of times to encounter the art of cinema.

Like the New Wave directors so admired then, ensconced in the Cinematheque Francais, it was important to watch as much cinema as possible. The canon as it has come to be known, was developing, but not always accessible in Australia.

This was not movies but cinema, and that difference has driven Pike ever since. His approach has set him apart from other distributors and financial supporters of emerging film projects in Australia. He admits his choices are often “eclectic” and based on self-interest, or perhaps self-pleasure. There is a degree of this in every cinephile, and it is an acceptable indulgence. One only has to read the early writings of Bazin and the directors he inspired to understand that the obsession with the cinematic experience is something that takes over a life.

From writing his first book, Australian Film 1900-1977 (Oxford University Press, 1980), Pike took a natural leap into making films. As history was his intellectual base, production started with documentaries. Along with other emerging filmmakers based in Canberra, such as Dennis O’Rourke, Pike went to New Guinea with a 16mm camera. His instinct was to film the real. The result was Angels of War, an award-winning film about New Guinea in World War II.

Pike shies away from admitting to a career plan, but it’s obvious that inevitable steps were taken to shape a life in film. If the documentaries were shot, who would see them? It was at this moment, in 1974, that he and his wife, Dr Merrilyn Fitzpatrick, made a most important decision to move into distribution. Pike has always believed there was an audience for the theatrical release of documentaries.

For 30 years his company, Ronin Films and the cinemas Pike has been associated with (Electric Shadows in Canberra and The Academy Twin in Sydney), have championed the cause. He remains convinced that distribution is a nurturing process and that each film has an audience that must be attracted and rewarded. He has never believed in the ‘day-date-release’ method of distributing films where a title is simultaneously opened across the country and if it does not find its audience immediately, is withdrawn. The possibility of the darkened room and the white screen also allows for other, niche audiences to be found and for word-of-mouth and critical support to spotlight a film. This balance between the mass market and the niche is well known in publishing, music and other arts, yet in film distribution it seems to be increasingly pressured off the circuit.

“At first we distributed the films we wanted to see and hoped others would like them too,” he says. It is an innocently disingenuous explanation for the creation of a local art house cinema that has had enormous influence on screen culture in Australia. His passion for French cinema began in the late 1960s with 2 important retrospectives on Resnais and Truffaut then later Ronin distributed titles by Rivette and Resnais such as Celine & Julie Go Boating and Melo. Ronin also began to invest in Australian feature films at script stage and he admits to successes such as Strictly Ballroom and to some “awful failures.”

As regional and suburban independent cinemas struggle to get first release titles or even a fair proportion of art house films, the importance of distributors such as Ronin Films cannot be overstated. Following the early French titles came new and often challenging Japanese and Chinese films, matching the increasing influence of what might be called the ‘new art house’ extending from Tokyo through Beijing to Taiwan. There was then, as now, little room for these cinematic and cultural experiences in the programs of the multiplexes that now dominate the circuit and which clearly have a different business objective.

Ironically, Pike is now back where he started. Production of a new documentary set in New Guinea is underway (Betelnut Is Bad Magic) as is a feature film about asylum seekers, White Lilies, written and directed by Canberra-based Iranian film-maker, Jamshid Malekpour. He also plans to direct a new project later this year.

Andrew Pike has come full circle from his early 16mm documentaries in New Guinea and has retained the principles that enabled him to chart an independent course. He knows that passion can be eclectic and difficult and the most interesting cinematic careers come from the combination of conviction and risktaking rather than predictable and cautious decisions.

Kay Armstrong’s first full-length, one-woman show has been a long time in the making. Parts of the work were seen in Twosome at One Extra in 2001, a showing of The Narrow House at PACT in 2001 and LEDA at the Sydney Fringe Festival in 2002. Armstrong has had to make her own opportunities to present most of her work, which is par for the course in Sydney, as is maintaining and funding her own rehearsal space. For Rara Avis however she was aided by Western Sydney Dance Action (WSDA) in partnership with Paramatta’s Riverside Theatres as part of WSDA’s Dance Bites season of works by independent artists.

Armstrong is a very watchable and genuinely comical performer, particularly in ‘storyteller’ mode. Elements of her past work have come together in Rara Avis in a more coherent way. The 2 themes of Rara Avis-Australian car culture and Swan Lake-have both featured throughout this idiosyncratic dancer’s career. Although an unlikely combination, there are moments where the themes have been worked to advantage. The final image of Armstrong perched on a car bonnet, draped in fabric blown against her, is a striking moment where bird and hood ornament merge. Another is the dancing dog designed for car windows, here balanced on a car tyre, jiggling to the Swan Lake ‘theme song’ cranked by the dancer from a tiny jewellery box mechanism. And there’s the dying swan, performed in a car seat with a sound score of aggressive traffic forcing Armstrong down and down again every time she tries to raise herself up.

Small objects throughout the work are ‘animated’ and suggest an interest in puppetry. Tiny cars move magically out from the dancer’s body curled on the floor. The dancing dog is another instance where the inanimate undergoes a tricky transformation. Armstrong’s dance with an exhaust pipe during which she transforms herself into several animals in a forest of pine tree car fresheners is a clever play with mimesis and the nature/industry opposition, again transforming props and giving them a ‘life.’

The episodic format of the piece, a structure so familiar in dance theatre work, ultimately works against the dual themes of Rara Avis with most sections devoted to one or the other. The “101 things to do in cars” monologue is my favourite section with its pumping movement-piston-like action and aggressive, half-formed gestures of road rage working Armstrong into a frenzy. The problem with such structures is that a few strong scenes are sometimes expected to carry a loosely formed totality. Jumping from one idea to the next involved, in this case, some bold leaps with major changes in performance mode and tone. The more dance-based sections, such as a movement across the floor with a side mirror or an arm solo from behind the back curtain, seemed oddly subdued and abstract given the more literal, comic and whimsical mood of the rest of the work.

Rara Avis, performer/deviser Kay Armstrong, dramaturg Kate Gaul, lighting Stephen Hawker, music selection Kay Armstrong, Drew Crawford, Parramatta Riverside Theatre, April 30-May 3

There are now 2 cathedrals on each side of Flinders Street. For more than a century, visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral have been quietly contemplating the life of a Jewish rebel, celebrated in stained glass. Alternatively, we can now cross the road and descend into the Screen Gallery at ACMI, and be lulled by the glowing projections of lost lives.

These 2 ‘halls of light’, from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, seem to fulfil similar needs. Urbanites are given the chance to step back from the world of dizzying possibility to contemplate the realm of presence. This odd symmetry raises a question. St Paul’s places the aesthetic delights of its architecture in the context of religious faith. What’s the context for ACMI?

ACMI is in the unusual position of evolving its own context: it takes the moving image out of the cinema and into the gallery. Rather than experiencing film while trapped in the dark by comfortable seats, conspiratorial silence and ushers, ACMI brings this ritual into the public domain.

The cultural politics of this transformation is an interesting story in itself. ACMI’s curatorial staff were mostly imported from Sydney. They brought with them a culture of reverence for the archive (see Museum of Sydney). The first exhibition, curated by Victoria Lynn, was originally shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as Space Odysseys: Sensation and Immersion; it made the most of the opportunity to realise the moving image as a spatial journey.

Prior to Lynn’s appointment as Director of Creative Development, former Director Ross Gibson sketched out a series of themes that would feature in the first years of operation. Since his return to Sydney, Gibson’s own curatorial work is limited to Remembrance + The Moving Image, a series of 2 exhibitions, of which Persistence of Vision is the first instalment to be followed by Reverberations.

Gibson’s Melbourne sojourn was critical. His slim-volume thinking helped extract ideas from their French incarnations and bring into play local experience. With Gibson came an understanding of the metropolitan archive as repository not only of historical data but also of mystic revelation. He brought Sydney light into the Melbourne darkroom.

On first visit, there is much in Remembrance to justify this graft. The signature work, Bourgeois Dictionary, by Péter Forgács, trawls a Hungarian film archive for wartime images. We are conditioned to associate this era with footage of jackbooted parades taken from official newsreels. By contrast, Bourgeois Dictionary shows us an almost defiant intimacy as middle class Hungarians play up for the camera. History becomes less a story of the masses and more a journey of individuals captive to their own worlds. The graphic design for Remembrance extracts a still from Forgács of a father and son ice-skating. The quest of the archive seems to be in finding such ecstatic moments.

But Remembrance doesn’t relax into nostalgia. The ‘eyes’ prevent that. Traces, by Naomi Bishops and Richard Raber, was commissioned by ACMI and drawn from donated Super 8 home movies. Their deft editing released a nascent poetry from its suburban context: short excerpts are punctuated by moments when characters frozen in film look out to the viewer, as though a spell is being continuously broken. This halting eye contact was reinforced by the naked characters lined up against an invisible screen in Versifier by Gina Czarnecki, and the piercing stares of Tibetans in Mind of Tibet by Geshe Sonam Thargye & Sue Ford. Such eye contact with the past threatens to unnerve the confidence of gallery visitors.

In a curious sideline, Remembrance stumbles on a popular suspicion about galleries. Though usually associated with the ‘Pete and Dud’ school of art criticism, the sense that the subjects of portrait paintings have eyes that follow viewers around the gallery bears some thought. It doesn’t take much analysis to understand this suspicion as a displaced recognition of voyeurism. While as omnipotent viewers we appear to have the power to gaze into the souls of painted subjects, we must also find a point of identification if that gaze is to be meaningful. Imagining ourselves in their position makes us the subject of our own gaze. In granting images on gallery walls the power of movement, perhaps ACMI is releasing the spectre of paranoia previously consigned to tired jokes. Yes, the eyes are following us around the gallery.

It is the gift of Remembrance to take such things seriously. In her review for The Age (May 3), Philippa Hawker used the exhibition to meditate on the role of cinema as a house of memory. In an article of surprising seriousness for a daily newspaper, she writes, “Much of the exhibition invites us to summon up our own memories, to engage with the memories of others and to conjure up other images; to imagine unseen, unrecorded, unmemorialised stories.” This seems the ultimate testament to Remembrance—that it gives a Melbourne writer licence to publish a reflective essay for a general audience. We step back from the escapist world of cinema to consider the inner fantasies that draw us to it.

So is this what ACMI has given us?—a kind of confessional for delving into our internal cinema (or what Saint Augustine called “a cloister of my memories”)? That might be so, but I think there is something more going on.

In going from cinema to gallery, the moving image is transformed from a diachronic to a synchronic medium. In Remembrance, this process is almost machine-like. The curatorial mechanism for this transformation is the dissection of continuous works into discrete parts that are screened simultaneously. Permission was sought to present the 6 parts of Aleksandr Sokurov’s epic Spiritual Voices on simultaneous screens. Andrish St Clair’s single video of his Trepang opera performances is cloned to form an installation. Classic cinema is kaleidoscoped into splintered reflections in Les LeVeque’s 4 Vertigo. This pervasive curatorial method goes beyond personal memory and works at the medium itself.

Difficult questions are raised. Is this film dissection a way of carving up cinema into bite-size pieces small enough to fit a contemporary attention span? Does this synoptic overview of cinema befit the transcendence of narrative, as we move into the realm of metadata and sampling?

But there is nowhere to ask. Though the curatorial method in Remembrance raises important questions, they are abandoned by its thematic framework. The evangelical call to visitors fails to measure up to the structural experiments at play in the exhibition itself.

I can understand the reticence. Federation Square represents an investment in the elite arts that is out of step with a populist state government. It’s reasonable that its prime tenants, National Gallery of Victoria and ACMI, take great pains to present work in its more accessible form. And politically it seems to have worked.

But such populism also comes at a time of increasing insularity in contemporary art, with few opportunities to encounter experiences beyond the self-referential. Tying the exhibition to a theme that brought our attention to the media might have provided more room for thought.

In terms of cultural chemistry, there may in the end have been a little too much Melbourne and not enough Sydney in Remembrance. The works themselves call for something that touches on the mise en abyme, time travel and Batman’s cave. Not just remembering, but also looking back.

Remembrance + the moving image, Persistence of Vision , curator Ross Gibson, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, March 21-May 25

The New York Times recently posited that only 2 things succeed on the internet: shopping, as perfected by Amazon and searching, as perfected by Google (pornography could be added, too, perfected by everyone). The Times (May 11, 2003) paints a flat, numb panorama, with creative pursuits and the promise of genuinely new media levelled by e-commerce. The pestilence of spam is a direct illustration of this—base levels of consumerism replicating themselves and subsuming online space with exhortations to buy, sell, consume.

Is the net really dead as a viable medium for original artistic concepts? In Australia, our arts bodies seem to have a waning interest in online content. The Victorian Government’s launch of 6 new digital media funds, while positive, is skewed towards animation and game platforms (there’s a brief deference to internet content under these categories). But the net has obvious potential for interaction and collaborative action that is done a disservice by this abduction into the arena of “things that move”—animation and film.

Cornerfold, an SBS website, subverts this impetus by melding comic art and zine-style writing with multimedia techniques. Cornerfold editor, Michele Sabto, defines zines (including some comics) as “independent, not-for-profit self-publications made for love, not money.” She points to a developing trend in Australian zine and comic publishing: the switch from punk-style anti-establishment rants to autobiographical writing—immediate, short reflections on everyday life, but still resolutely non-commercial. It’s an aesthetic she says is ideal for the web—and it’s the stuff of Cornerfold.

Initially Sabto wanted to publish examples of Australian zine writing as a stand-alone e-book for Palm Pilots. “But no one really thought e-books would go anywhere,” she recalls. “Then I took the idea to Film Victoria and they put me with a great program manager, David Tiley, who’s no longer there (because they don’t really have program managers any more). He said, ‘Why not do it as rich media?’ So we reworked the whole thing and that was really valuable because David guided me through the entire process.”

Tiley recommended the joint SBS/Film Victoria fund. Sabto then met Suzie Hoban, SBS’s New Media supervisor, and discovered that the reworked proposal fell in neatly with the broadcaster’s new media aims. “SBS want to position themselves towards the youth market,” she says. “They have this particular idea that they’re a niche publisher and so the whole ethos of Cornerfold really appealed.”

But Cornerfold is not simply a writers’ platform. For the site’s art director, Dylan Nichols, “it’s about content-driven multimedia. In terms of what’s out there that’s similar, the closest would be Born magazine, but that doesn’t have the zine focus. Born is high art and more experimental, and a lot of the pieces aren’t really that cohesive.”

Cornerfold consists of the cornerfold ezine, featuring writing and comic art commissioned by Sabto (each edited piece is given to a designer who builds a visual complement in consultation with the writer); 2 web logs: pixelstories, for visual essays, and like it is, for text (anyone can post to these, although they are vetted by Sabto); swap, run by the designers, with the aim of pitching writers and artists together in “madcap creative schemes”; and spit it out, a discussion forum. Cornerfold is themed and renewed every 5 weeks—all components must address the theme and the word limit is 800.

A recent highlight was “Jesus Christ: A Who Weekly Tribute”, a Flash-built piece written by Melissa Sorini and designed by Adam Horne. Sorini’s insights on celebrity culture were presented as a hand-drawn tome, with flippable pages. When certain highlighted words were clicked, mesh-like illustrations draped over the page to reveal hidden meanings in the text.

The piece’s execution demonstrates Cornerfold’s mission to reinvigorate web-based writing. As Nichols and his fellow designers (all from the Forecast Project collective) are keenly aware, reading lengthy text from a computer screen can be quite a chore. For Nichols, “it’s a hard balance to have an 800-word text on the screen and keep it interesting, and to also have movement and animation while not being too literal or too filmic. We distil key themes and ideas and try to keep the reader interested as well.”

That approach has paid off. Sabto points to very positive feedback that has “picked up on the design. There’s a lot of writing on the internet, but it’s rare for good design and writing to come together coherently. Sites driven by authors tend to have images whacked on as an afterthought, and sites driven by designers tend to be too conceptual.”

Is there tension in the idea of a corporation like SBS co-opting “independent, non-commercial” art forms? According to Sabto, “It’s all in the way it’s done. The pieces aren’t massaged or commissioned to fit some marketing person’s idea of what the ‘target market’ wants. For Cornerfold authors, getting paid doesn’t mean selling out—it just means they’re being remunerated for their efforts for a change.”

Cornerfold has successfully built a welcoming online community for new writers, and has introduced many of those writers to new avenues for publishing their work. Sabto and her team demonstrate that the internet’s potential for artistic expression isn’t limited to porn, or to heavy design that treats text as just another graphic. And although Cornerfold’s web future is finite (funding is for 9 issues; there are 4 to go), it will live on—SBS plans to repackage selected pieces as television “interstitials” (short blocks between programs), and there’s talk of a print anthology.

“Cornerfold got up because it did fit in with SBS’s aims,” Sabto says. “But perhaps there should be more scope within digital funding guidelines for independent, specifically internet-based content—rather than seed money for concepts. It’s a shame there are no longer program managers to guide applicants through the often arduous and confusing application process.”

It remains to be seen whether the Cornerfold baton will be passed on. Perhaps that’s up to the rest of us—and to the funding bodies.

It made the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald: “Escape game wires the minister” (April 30, 2003). You’ve probably heard about Escape from Woomera (EFW), the new Australian game being developed with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts. Needless to say, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock is less than impressed about the project, which recreates 4 detention centres, including the now mothballed but infamous Woomera, for players to escape from. He and Arts Minister Rod Kemp have been highly critical of the Australia Council’s decision to award $25,000 in development funding to the Melbourne-based team, with Kemp demanding an urgent explanation from the Council. Chairman of the New Media Arts Board, Michael Snelling, told the media that while he was aware the project could be controversial, the application had ranked competitively and met all the criteria.

Ruddock’s main claim is that the game will promote unlawful behaviour, and support for his position came from unlikely directions. Some refugee advocates were keen to denounce the project, claiming it “trivialised the plight of asylum-seekers”, and was “tasteless”. And Human Rights Commissioner, Sev Ozdowski, issued a press release calling the project “at best…insensitive.” At least one refugee spokesperson took a different view, welcoming the Council’s support for any project that highlights the horrors of mandatory detention.

These quick opinion grabs, framed adversarially by the news media, conceal much that is of interest about this project. A significant cultural intervention, its complexities should give us pause. EFW is the first computer game in this country to tackle such a contentious issue. And while a few games elsewhere comment on important politics (the Syrian intifada game Under Ash being a notable example), this project has the potential to transform the way we think about games.

Computer games possess a rare capacity for mobilising public anxiety, so it’s unsurprising that some have reservations about the project. But what needs to be understood is that, far from constituting training for ‘real life’ actions, computer games enable players to do things that they can’t do in ‘real life’. Players report that this is one of the things that makes playing a game enjoyable. Claims that EFW will encourage detainees to break out, jeopardising their chances of a visa, or that the project characterises them as criminals trying to “bust out of jail [sic]”, as Ozdowski puts it, largely miss the point. Rather than being a game ridiculing the situation of detainees, EFW will enable those who are unlikely to ever get inside a detention centre, to imagine themselves there. Virtually recreating these sites elegantly undermines their ‘no go’ status, simultaneously shrinking the space between ‘us’ and ‘them’. As Julian Oliver, one of the EFW team says:

EFW is, therefore, an exciting project with a bold vision. It is edgy because it addresses one of the most divisive issues that citizens of Australia have faced in recent years: the governments’ detention of refugees in their name. The game will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but as it is planned to offer the game for free download over the internet, no one need play unless they want to.

To equate the playfulness of this project with triviality, as some have done, is a mistake. Like humour, play is anything but lightweight: play is important because it enables that which has become stale, old news, a source of anxiety even, to be reapproached. In playing a game, one partially leaves behind the workaday world and its competitive pressures—to ‘keep up’ and ‘get ahead’. Play enables different engagements and encounters, making it possible to envisage things being otherwise.

In inviting us to play at escaping from Woomera, then, the makers of this game are returning something precious to us, namely agency. Amidst the government double-speak and blaming, where enough seeds of doubt are sown (about asylum-seekers’ motives, backgrounds, health and wealth) so we never really know quite what to think, EFW offers action, for players to actively experiment with what it’s possible to do and be, in a game. Making a game that enables players to seize some initiative in relation to the refugee question is significant.

The EFW team knows it takes more than a good idea to make a great game. While their credentials as refugee activists have received attention in the mainstream press, their expertise in game design and development is arguably as important to the final product. Gamers are astute judges of interactivity, and any game that sacrificed gameplay for an earnest political message simply would not cut it. Between them, the EFW team has many years experience in the commercial games industry, including work on the biggest budget Australian game for international release. Other credits include public art commissions and work on the popular ABC satire CNNNN. The main assembled team includes Mark Angeli, Julian Oliver, Ian Malcolm, Stephen Honegger, Kate Wild and Morgan Simpson. Rather than trying to offer solutions to mandatory detention, the team’s focus is, as one member puts it, on asking “what are the great game elements about these stories, and trying to make a game out of those, rather than actually try to present all the information and points of view.”

With all the controversy over this particular game and its content, it is easy to lose sight of the significance of this project receiving Australia Council support. Many already recognise that as a medium, games are ripe for artistic experimentation. But this funding indicates that the New Media Arts Board also recognises the maturing of games as a medium, and the significant potential of games for contemporary art.

The release of a playable demo of the EFW game is still some 6 months off. But the importance of this project is already becoming apparent. Since it hit the headlines there has been an amazing degree of discussion of the project. Apart from postings on gaming message boards, pro-refugee e-lists, and games industry news sites, EFW has made it into classrooms, onto TV comedy shows, and, significantly, onto talkback radio. Over the space of a few weeks, it has become a powerful meme, a concept for thinking with—about refugees, their detention, and the humourless state of current politics in this country. Evidence that it has fired imaginations is contained in the witty suggestions for sequels, posted to newspapers: Escape from Nauru and Manus Island and Escape from Camp X-Ray.

We might not have known it, but we needed an Escape From Woomera. It broadens the field of what can be said, thought, and felt about Woomera, refugees and detention. That is where the art lies. That it also leaves Ruddock spluttering with indignation is icing on the cake.

In the second half of 2003 Australian artists will be highly visible in Berlin in artsaustralia berlin 03 (following on from the premiere 2002 program) and in Ancient Future in Japan. These events manifest recognition of the need for long-term Australian programs that become part of the cultural lives of other countries. The way they’ve been put together indicates a maturing integrative and cooperative approach, not only between Australian arts bodies but also with their overseas equivalents.

In recent years the foray of Australian art into Europe seems to be growing from strength to strength with innovative performing arts practitioners now making a strong and consistent impact. The venture into Asia has been less certain, with moments of success but with some strong foundations, for example in the work of Asialink, and improved long-term planning.

The Asian market

Karilyn Brown, Executive Director of the Australia Council’s Audience & Market Development Division reminds me that “for Asia in the early 90s there was a very strong focus on an almost quota system. Something like 50% of the Australia Council’s international budget was to be spent in Asia. In recent years it’s not been seen as the most appropriate way to go. There’s always the issue of balance. How do you create developmental opportunities for the work you want to market and at the same time respond to demand from various parts of Asia, where there are market strengths in some areas and not others.” To achieve this, Brown believes that partnerships play a key role, as does identifying potential demand.

Brown cites as a recent, successful example of a joint initiative between AMD, the Literature Board, the Tokyo Australian Embassy and the Australia-Japan Foundation in identifying a market and acting on it—the Bungei Shunju Australian Crime Fiction Project. 15,000 copies of a paperback with translated works by Shane Maloney, Peter Doyle and Marele Day were published by Bungei Shunju last December and a very effective publicity campaign mounted. “The project came out of the Visiting International Publishers Program,” says Brown, “where we brought a Japanese publisher here a few years ago, creating the opportunity as well as responding to the interest…With Asialink we’re looking at a broader strategy over 3 years, 2 countries per year, a real focus on contemporary Australian writing involving touring, workshops, reading presentations and establishing a very strong connection between publishing industries in Australia and Asia.”

Brown explains that developing relationships with Asia, “is a long haul, something some of us have recognised for a while. But recognising and implementing it are 2 very different things, because it’s not about 2 or 3 years, it’s about 8 or 10 years. You have to be consistently present to sustain relationships.” In consolidating its programs, AMD always has an eye on the bigger picture, on how to consistently make the best use of performing arts markets, art fairs, publishing groups and the expertise of presenting partners in Asia and Australian collaborators like Asialink, the Australian Film Commission, the Australian Tourist Commission and others, as well as key collaborators, the Federal Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Australian International Cultural Council (AICC).

Brown rates the Melbourne-based Asialink very highly for its pioneering work in brokering relationships, connecting Australian artists with Asia, opening up networks of opportunity and as a partner in the AMD’s ventures. The Asialink program (partly funded by the Australia Council) also caters for arts managers and administrators, offering them experience with arts organisations in Asia where they can develop contacts. On the visual arts front, the Asialink Studio Program and the Australia Council’s own (through the Visual Arts & Crafts Board) have been very productive and, as Brown points out, there has been a long history of touring exhibitions to Japan.

She also points to the importance of co-curation based on pairing galleries from each country. “Asialink sought proposals from Australian galleries and curators. They negotiated with Japanese galleries, building on the interest in and knowledge about our art. That’s how you can tour works that are fully contemporary and fully embraced by the presenting partner—because they are involved in the selection, the promotion, and the financial risk. The program was set up in consultation and with substantial investment from the Australia-Japan Foundation—a major commitment to a 3 year, in-depth project and based on the very long term visual arts engagement with Japan through the VACB and Asialink. The array of artists is fantastic. These shows represent very important areas of contemporary practice and finally open some doors to really key museums and galleries around Japan that we’ve been trying to engage with for some time.”

Japan

Ancient Future is based on strong Japanese interest in Australian art—contemporary and Indigenous. It’s a 6 month program in the second half of 2003 managed by the Australian Embassy in Tokyo in close collaboration with AMD. It has a strong visual arts, craft and design focus, including the Spirit Country show after its Shanghai visit and, later this year, Patricia Piccinini’s Venice Biennale work, “a breakthrough follow-on showing”, declares Brown. The program also includes performance, music, film and literature. How did it come about? “AICC and DFAT were thinking about where we are going in the next 3 to 5 years and where that meshes with the Australia Council, AFC, the Tourist Commission etc. DFAT approached all its posts and the Australian Embassy in Tokyo came up with a very good proposal. We all identified Japan as a key target: it is dynamic and offers opportunities at the moment. This has meant that a number of players got together in Japan, primarily driven by staff at the Australian Embassy—Katherine Hunyo [Cultural Officer] and Cathy Gallagher [Counsellor, Public Policy].”

Many of the 20 events in Ancient Future were going to be taking place anyway, Brown explains, but together they will have a stronger impact, bringing together a range of partners and with a government imprimatur that helps open important doors in Japan. “There are new projects as well like an ACO concert and the Dinosaurs Design exhibition (originally shown at Sydney’s Object Gallery) as part of the Tokyo Design Block which is a huge contemporary design event that was highly successful last year for an exhibition prepared by RMIT.”

A major visual arts component in the program is the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial 2003 [July 20-Sept 7] in the 6 largely rural municipalities of the Echigo-Tsumari region. Of the 120 artists selected internationally, 5 are Australian: Janet Laurence, Nigel Helyer, Robyn Backen, Lauren Berkowitz and Anne Graham, curated by Sally Couacaud. Most of the works are to be permanent installations. Spirit Country will also appear at the triennial before its Tokyo showing. Touring exhibitions include Light Black from Adelaide’s Jam Factory: works by Catherine Truman, Robin Best and Sue Lorraine exploring the links between art and science [Tokyo May 7-June 29; Kyoto Sept 8-Oct 13].

With Spirit Country at the centre of a program with individual and collective shows, there will be a series of accompanying lectures on Australian Indigenous art and a Japanese theatre company will perform Roger Bennett’s riotous Up the Ladder, a play about what life in tent-show-boxing meant to Aboriginal people.

Berlin

A key component of the artsaustralia berlin 2003 is Australian participation in literaturWERKstatt berlin, a literary festival quite unlike any in Australia or, in fact, anywhere. It is focused on contemporary literature in its many manifestations in and well beyond the book. It is network-based, across Europe and with many other countries, includes the commissioning of international collaborations, often cross-artform, a superb online introduction to the words and voices of many poets (lyrikline.org) and numerous translation projects. Its large scale poetry event, the Weltklang Festival on Potzdamer Platz, attracts thousands; the festival can draw 100,000 visitors in all.

The director of the festival, Thomas Wohlfahrt, visited Australia and invited sound poet Amanda Stewart to literaturWERKstatt berlin as part of artsaustralia berlin 2002. This year he’s invited her back not only to perform but also to curate a program of leading international sound poets including Henri Chopin. Wohlfahrt has commissioned collaborations between visual artist Ruark Lewis and the German dance duo, Rubato and between the dancer-choreographer Lucy Guerin and German sound poet Michael Lentz. UK-based Australian new media artist Simon Biggs is also in the program, as is Elision, the Brisbane-based new music ensemble already well known for their international collaborations and presenting here works inspired by poetry and myth, Eastern and Indigenous Australian. Australia is represented at every level of this festival under the banner, Australia 5th Dimension.

Ruark Lewis & Rubato

On a dour Good Friday afternoon, to the accompaniment of the footsteps of the Kings Cross congregation of the Church of St Canice negotiating the stations of the cross above us, I had the pleasure of watching a rehearsal performance of the literaturWERKstatt commission that Ruark Lewis and German dancers Rubato (Dieter Baumann, Jutta Hell), had been working on for 3 weeks before further rehearsal in Berlin. Rubato was formed in 1985. They have created 28 works, a number of them televised, and performed in many countries. Their recent work has often emerged from intercultural residencies: working with the Guandong Modern Dance Company; teaching at the Beijing Academy for Dance; choreographing for the Jin Xing Dance Theatre in Shanghai and the modern dance ensemble at the Ankara State Opera in Turkey.

Ruark Lewis is a visual artist with a substantial body of work, often “translating” the work of others (Rilke, Rimbaud, Beckett, Sarraute and a number of Indigenous Australian artists) by various means (tracings, palimpsests, lithographs) into other forms so that we read them afresh. In Raft, a work inspired by Carl Strehlow, the German missionary documenter of an Indigenous song cycle, Lewis collaborated with writer Paul Carter to create an acclaimed and widely exhibited sound sculpture with a dynamic interplay of text on timber and a soundtrack sourced from Central Australia.

With Rubato he is involved in a very different act of translation, between words and the body of a dancer. Hell is physically, almost violently, implicated into Lewis’ delivery of his collation of found texts, Banalities, until a reversal occurs, transforming the speaker himself into physical performer in the very space he has verbally generated. It looked very good in rehearsal and should be even more powerful in Berlin.

There will much else Australian in Berlin over the rest of the year, one of the most exciting events being the exhibition of some 14 Australian artists at the magnificent Hamburger Bahnhoff gallery in Berlin. More later.

The 2001 Queensland Biennial Festival of Music was a memorable event, immersive and provocative, remarkable for its commitment to new music, to music-making in communities urban and regional and to debate about the ways music is written about and reviewed in the media. It’s on again in 2003 with an even more ambitious program and a greater regional reach, furthering connections established in 2001, making new ones and inviting Australians to be part of contemporary music.

For Artistic Director Lyndon Terracini (a renowned baritone, expert in contemporary music theatre and opera, and director of NORPA—Northern Rivers Performing Arts—in Lismore) it was never a matter of taking 20th-21st century music to the regions. Like the best examples of Australia’s developing model of cultural exchange (Elision ensemble’s international commission process, the Nigel Jamieson-Paul Grabowsky collaboration with Indonesian artists in The Theft of Sita), it’s a matter of joint effort and openness, of drawing on each other’s resources. The people of Barcaldine who made and played their own marimbas for the 2001 festival get to play again in 2003, joined by other communities and international artists. Having got to know the composer Elena Kats Chernin through the symphony she successfully composed for them in 2001, the musicians of Rockhampton (orchestra, brass band, choir) get to tackle Symphony No 2 and play No 1 again.

At the press launch of his festival in Sydney, Terracini says that his brief “is to create a festival of international excellence accessible to all Queenslanders…”, and quips, “a pretty easy thing to do really!” In 2001 the festival was realised in 13 centres, this year it’s 17. He says the festival has never been conceptualised “as a tour but as growing a new work in each of those centres so it relates to their cultures, so they can embrace and own it…And it’s obligatory for those city and town councils involved to pay or we don’t play there. I believe that if they don’t contribute a significant amount of cash that they will not support the event.”

As for the challenge of the brief and the inclusiveness of his vision, “it is the largest festival in the world geographically…It’s 23 hours on the train from Brisbane to Barcaldine for example…It can be a logistical nightmare sometimes which is part of the challenge, part of the charm.”

Percussion paradise

The festival again starts at sunrise in Barcaldine at the Tree of Knowledge, with the 250 strong Barcaldine Big Marimaba Band on the same bill as Slava Grigoryan, Synergy Percussion, and percussion virtuosi Omar Faruk Tekbilek (Middle East), Hossam Ramzy (Egypt), and Ali & Adama N’Diaye Rose (Senegal).

The same players feature in The Big Percussion Concert in Brisbane, says Terracini, “a 4 hour percussion and World Music extravaganza that’s on Saturday night. On the Tuesday we’ve commissioned the Queensland composer Gerard Brophy to write a new piece called Brisbane Drumming with the featured players and 100 kids from Brisbane and nearby. Leading instrument makers Elliot Hall and Steve Langton have worked with the kids to make their own djembes and tonga bells. Brophy’s written this piece for those kids and all those percussionists.” The equivalent event in the 2001 festival, also with a Brophy commission and the Anumadutchi ensemble, was a full-house, rousing celebration of music-making.

Talking up music

The ubiquitous Spiegeltent makes its first Brisbane appearance where it will provide a centre for the festival with daily talks with musicians, some significant forums on the state of the arts, Australian Contemporary Music Market showcase performances, a cabaret every evening at 8pm and a festival club at 10pm. The tent will be located by the Queensland Performing Art Centre. With the market stalls and the adjoining Sound Forest (an expanded version of Linsey Pollak’s hugely popular ‘instrumentalisation’ of Southbank’s Rainforest Walk) it will, Terracini says, provide a village atmosphere. Festivals need a day and night centre providing a gathering point for artists and audiences, a focus for the exchange of opinions and starting points for networks and collaborations. This is a significant development for QBFM.

An important initiative in the 2001 festival was the introduction of the International Critics’ Symposium, a rare opportunity for overseas reviewers, music writers and the musicians to mingle with their Australian peers and to assess the calibre, standing and influence of critical writing. The event will be held again in 2003 at The Powerhouse, this time with Andrew Porter [UK], one of the world’s leading music critics for the last 50 years; he’s written books and translated many operas, including The Ring.

Heiner Goebbels

Goebbels is one of the most exciting of contemporary European composers, employing a vast palette of integrated musical styles and collaborating with musicians who sometimes incorporate their own scores into Goebbel’s. His Black on White was a 1998 Adelaide Festival hit, with Ensemble Modern as both musicians and choreographed stage performers. QBFM 2003 presents Goebbel’s Surrogate Cities, which Terracini decribes as “an extraordinary symphony. It premiered in the same year as Louis Andriessen’s Rosa [in which Terracini featured]; both are large scale pieces with massive orchestration, a wall of sound, but incredibly intimate at times.” In Surrogate Cities, musical forms jostle, mixed with sampled ambient sound and texts from Heiner Müller, Hugo Hamilton and Paul Auster. The Queensland Orchestra gets to play with the featured artists who performed the work at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival—conductor Andrea Molino and soloists Jocelyn B Smith and David Moss. Terracini says of Smith that “she is an amazing singer of opera, jazz, blues and has a very high range.” Surrogate Cities was recently released on the ECM label: the Australian premiere concert is a major reason to be in Brisbane for the festival.

Meredith Monk

I saw American singer, composer and dancer Meredith Monk perform with her company in Japan in 1982. Her vocal technique is ethereal, the group singing an ideal companion to the Rautavaara choral program (see below). Along with Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and John Adams Monk is an iconic figure, and like her peers can range from the intimate to the epic, as in her opera, Atlas. She has never been to Australia. With her vocal ensemble she will perform a concert version of Mercy, an opera she wrote about compassion and refugees with Ann Hamilton. Terracini admires her as a key initiator “in the whole minimalist movement, before Glass, before Adams and with work characterised by an absence of words. It’s wonderful the way she expresses sounds, expresses the exact meaning of what she wants to say…it is an amazing experience to be at a Meredith Monk concert.” For those readers who have experienced only the more ethereal Monk creations, Mercy is an overtly passionate work, dark, sometimes raw and certainly moving.

Elision

Elision, the internationally acclaimed, Brisbane-based new music ensemble is back from Europe with many plaudits for its opera, Moon Spirit Feasting, and its massive music installation, the Australian-Norwegian-British collaboration Dark Matter. Their QBFM concert is titled Burning House after the work of the same name by composer Liza Lim for solo voice and koto on a program with works by Richard Barrett [UK] for electric guitar and live electronics and John Rogers for water dripping crotales and dog whistles, plus a new work from Melbourne saxophone virtuoso Tim O’Dwyer.

Einojuhani Rautavaara

One of the major composers of orchestral music and opera of the moment in Europe (though little performed in Australia) is Einojuhani Rautavaara. He is one of a number of notable contemporary Finnish composers, certainly no longer an avant gardist he forever expands orchestral possibilities in the tradition of Sibelius, Shostakovich and Holmboe with uncommon melodic invention and dense and stirring string and brass textures. Like many a Baltic composer he revels in writing for a living choral tradition. His Vigilia and a selection, Sacred Works for Mixed Chorus, both available on the Ondine label, reveal a theatrical vigour, innovative orchestral-style layering, moments of sheer transcendence and an absence of the church choir mustiness some audiences fear and avoid. The 30-strong Kampin Laulua choir from Finland perform the sacred music of Rautavaara for the first time in Australia at St Mary’s, the politically progressive church a few blocks back from QPAC.

Terracini has commissioned a second St Mary’s Mass from Australian composer Stephen Stanfield: “I wanted to do this at a time when very few composers are writing for the church, and the last one, Critical Mass, about homeless people, was incredibly successful. This one is called We Choose and features the Queensland Choir and the Symbitronic electro-acoustic ensemble. We also have a choir of refugee children in a concert called Alafiah, a creole word for freedom, in a range from symphonic to hiphop and pop in a concert they share with Australian-born kids at Brisbane’s Powerhouse. They have a CD out called Scattered People.

Serious jazz

The Gonzalo Rubal Caba/David Sanchez Quartet are giving their first and only Australian performance at the 2003 QBFM. “All of them,” declares Terracini, “are frontline players.” The highly-rated pianist and saxophonist are joined by drummer Ignacio Berroa and bassist Armando Gola.

Terracini describes Katie Noonan, lead singer with pop band George, as “a kind of Queensland icon.” He recalls, “When I first heard her she was singing jazz with her other band called Elixir at the Woodford Folk Festival and I took Paul Grabowsky to hear her. It was pouring, rain running down our backs in the tent, but Katie was singing and Paul was impressed. So we got him to write a jazz song cycle for her with a text by Dorothy Porter, the first cycle ever written for Paul’s trio and for Scott Tinkler, a wonderful trumpeter.”

To market, to market…

Terracini is very proud, and rightly so, of this latest development, an Australian Contemporary Music Market in partnership with the Australia Council’s Audience & Market Development Division. Although an admirer of the bi-annual Performing Arts Markets, he says, “My feeling was that music had been badly served with a 20 minute Spotlight performance. By the time the musicians have set up it’s time to pack up and leave…and the venue wasn’t particularly conducive either. This market is only about contemporary music and we’ve invited 15 of the major programmers from all over the world, from the Barbican, from Southbank (London), BAM (New York), Germany, Singapore…they’re coming to Brisbane specifically to see Australian new music in the Spiegeltent at 5.30 every evening and they’ll see 40 minute showcase performances. There will be stalls outside and artists and companies and organisations and state arts ministries will be represented.

“The managers of the performing arts centres throughout Australia will be at the market. Contemporary music has changed a lot and I feel that all these centres that were put off in the past and wouldn’t book it, would be attracted now to companies like Toplogy and the David Chesworth Ensemble who could easily travel regionally. This is about creating a new market for Australian contemporary music here and abroad.”

And a lot more…

The festival program also includes a Prokofiev celebration with Stephen Savage playing all the remarkable piano sonatas, 2 days of electronic music from the Melbourne-based Liquid Architecture Event (with special guest, international sound innovator Bernard Parmegiani), Small Black Box (Brisbane’s experimental sound listening space), the ACO premiering Carl Vines’ Pipe Dreams for Flute & Strings, Sound Builders (Instrument Makers Exposition) and, for the first time, the National Music Therapy Conference. In towns and heritage houses and woolsheds across Queensland there is a wealth of performance from locals and festival guests.

Bobcat Dancing in Mt Isa

Terracini is excited about the festival’s Mt Isa venture. “Philip Dean has written the text, John Rogers (The Sunshine Club) the music. It’s about a drifter who comes into town. ‘If you can fix the bobcat,’ says a local mechanic, ‘I’ll give you a job.’ He starts the machine unintentionally and wins acclaim as a Mr Fixit with his laying on of hands. And so the bobcats dance and 25 ton excavators do a love duet…the bobcats are their progeny. It’s set by the Leichhardt River with the mine looking, as people say, like an amazing ‘ship in the desert.’ We’re using local talent, 50 performers, the show has 3 night-time performances and like most of the shows outside Brisbane, it’s free.”

The QBFM legacy

Terracini is a keen commissioner of new works and has built the commissioning process into his festival so that its legacy goes beyond recollections of inspiring concerts and events. Communities will own works that they can play again, locals will become musicians inspired by the instruments they’ve made, and towns, it is hoped, will develop their own contemporary music programs. In Winton, locals will collaborate with hands and voices with Graeme Leak to create a musical fence, which they can play but which also can be played by the wind alone on one of the flattest landscapes in Australia—an installation that will become part of Winton’s heritage. In 2003, Terracini has also commissioned a new didjeridu, a film about its making and a symphony from the maker and composer, William Barton.

William Barton

Terracini explains: “Young Indigenous composer and didjeridu maker William Barton is from east of Mt Isa. [He went to] his tribal land to find a tree and to make a didjeridu from that tree. And we sent a filmmaker, Brendan Fletcher (Black Chicks Talking) with him, camping out for 2 weeks, and William made the didjeridu in the traditional way. The film will be shown at the Singsing Bilong Pasifik exhibition of the musical instruments of Pacific peoples at the Queensland Museum. William will play the didjeridu to launch the film and the exhibition on July 19.” Roland Peelman will conduct the premiere of Barton’s Songs of the Mother Country, a fusion of traditional and contemporary music, at The Lagoons & Mackay Botanical Gardens on July 26. Terracini regards the premiere as a unique moment for Australian Indigenous music and for this composer.

Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Southbank, and Brisbane Powerhouse, New Farm, July 18-27

The burgeoning sound culture scene, in its many and often overlapping manifestations, moves from strength to strength. Audiotheque—Cinema for the Ears at Sydney Opera House’s The Studio (April 14) was a sell-out success combining works created for radio with some deftly coordinated video. The outcome was an audience eager for more events of this kind. The International Symposium of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology was recently held in Melbourne (see p30) and the coming months offer a plethora of other events. They include the national sound art festival Liquid Architecture in its 4th incarnation, spreading its sonic wings across Australia and the history of an artform.

The greater part of Liquid Architecture 4’s program will be held in Melbourne, but there’ll also be a 2-day program as part of the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music. As well, the festival’s famous guest, French sound art pioneer Bernard Parmegiani, will be appearing at the Australian Computer Music Association Conference in Perth (July 6-9), impermanent.audio in Sydney (July 15,16) and the Brisbane Powerhouse (July 18-19).

In its Melbourne program of performances, workshops, forums and gallery exhibitions, Liquid Architecture is hosting some 30 artists from Australia and beyond, including Scot Arford and H Y Yau from the San Francisco noise/sound art scene. Women artists are given prominence in 360º: Women In Sound, featuring Ros Bandt and Thembi Soddell. Gail Priest appears in the Brisbane program. Other Australian artists include Lawrence English, Phil Samartzis, Bruce Mowson and up and coming local electronic musicians and video artists. On Saturday July 12 and Sunday July 13 in Legends of Electronic Music, a surround sound concert, Ferrari and Parmegiani will present retrospectives of their work hosted by Philip Samartzis.

Another unique feature of Liquid Architecture 4 is GRM Soundtracks, a cinema screening at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. As the festival press release puts it: “During the 60s and 70s, composers at the GRM (Groupe Recherches Musicales—France’s most important experimental music institute) studio in Paris produced soundtracks for moving image makers of the day. Two of its composers, Ferrari and Parmegiani, will be present to provide a live accompaniment and commentary.” Curated by Jim Knox the proposed program will include Jean Painlevé’s Amants de la Pieuvre, scored by the great Pierre Henry. (See page 17 for a review of the Sydney screening of the Painlevé films.) With this program Liquid Architecture 4 honours a tradition of which it is a vibrant part. RT

Liquid Architecture, directors Nat Bates, Bruce Mowson, producer ((tRansMIT)) sound collective; Melbourne, July 1-26; www.liquidarchitecture.org.au

The last couple of years have been busy for percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson and pianist Erik Griswold of Clocked Out Duo. They have performed individually, as a duo, and in collaboration with a range of other musicians, artists, writers, dancers and theatre performers—in China, Korea, the US, UK, Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide, as well as appearing at the London Jazz Festival and the Shanghai International Festival. They’ve recently released 2 CDs: water pushes sand (their second CD as Clocked Out Duo), and More than my old piano, Griswold’s second solo piano CD (reviewed on earbash, www.realtimearts.net). Now based in Brisbane, where Tomlinson is Head of Percussion at Griffith University, they are collaborating on a new project Bridge Song with new media performance group Bonemap (profiled in RT 54). And in the midst of all this, they’ve recently had a son.

I recently saw Clocked Out Duo at a series of “house concerts” staged at an Adelaide artists’ cooperative. Pitched in the space where vaudeville and Dada intersect, the concerts involved a stunning variety of musical styles and theatrical gestures. Sitting astride an enormous balloon, Tomlinson performed a virtuosic solo that coaxed a surprising range of moods from the unusual ‘instrument’, from the low rumbling of a motorbike engine, through crisp violin-like notes to the wavering ethereal sounds of the theremin. One of Griswold’s piano solos, in the tradition of the one-man-band, simultaneously combined prepared piano, toy piano and melodica (a kind of toy keyboard instrument with a tube and mouthpiece, like a miniature melodeon). Duets involved Tomlinson drawing on her impressive collection of percussion instruments, from the tam-tam (an enormous gong) through to the tiny sounds of tinkling shells and ceramic bowls, while Griswold extracted a similar range of colours and intensities from the piano. Collaborations with other performers involved, among other things, bravura choruses of rapid-fire chanted nonsense syllables, Fluxus-inspired interventions where audience members shouted, stamped and clapped on cue, and live phone-in performances from collaborators overseas.

However, the remarkable thing about Clocked Out Duo’s performances is not so much their wild eclecticism, but the way they maintain a strange cohesiveness and integrity. Attempting to explain how their collaboration works, Griswold jokingly paraphrases Donnie and Marie Osmond: “I’m a little bit jazz; she’s a little bit classical.” Tomlinson’s background is in the European avant-garde, and reflects her interest in women’s performance art, while Griswold’s influences stem from American improvised music traditions. The pair recently spent 5 months in Chengdu, China, where Tomlinson studied Sichuan opera percussion and Griswold explored the structured improvisations of folk and street music traditions. So, with so many diverse influences behind their music, how do they manage to produce music that is aesthetically coherent?

Tomlinson explains: “While our travels, experiences and collections of instruments continue to effect the sound of our music, the actual method of making it is consistent. Whether it’s balloons, prepared piano or conventional instruments, the working process is the same. Often it’s a case of one of us coming up with a musical idea, and the other failing to understand it. Then it becomes necessary to push it and play with it until it becomes something we can both work with.” She likens the process to a foley artist working on a film soundtrack. “It’s a matter of building up a sound world with whatever happens to be around in the studio.”

The vaudeville atmosphere of their concert performances, with their constantly shifting moods and stark contrasts of styles, is a way of balancing eclecticism and integrity. Griswold explains: “We want to set up an environment where it will seem natural that a complex, sophisticated piece can come up next to a pop song. There’s a certain amount of nostalgia there, going back to a time before the split between high art and low art became such a dominant part of culture. In vaudeville, serious musical performance can rub shoulders with slapstick theatricality, and neither is the worse for it.”

Both Griswold and Tomlinson are renowned for the ways they explore the outer limits of their instruments. For Tomlinson, this means not only extracting new sounds from familiar instruments, but also exploring the potential of unfamiliar instruments. Her interest in playing the balloon came from seeing pioneer virtuoso Judy Dunaway perform in New York (one piece on the new CD, “Dear Judy”, is dedicated to her). “Trying out the balloon for myself, I was amazed at the range of sounds you could get from it. It has a very powerful palette. I wasn’t interested in playing it in an orderly or mannered way. What was interesting was that it was so difficult to control, that here was an everyday object that had a wild and unruly world of sounds within it.”

Tomlinson is also exploring the sound of Chinese ceramic bowls. Rubbing the rims of bowls filled with different levels of water, produces a much more earthy and grounded sound than the ethereal sound produced by wine glasses, but with a similar shimmer of overtones. “As a percussionist, the collection of instruments you build up over your lifetime maps out the course of your musical exploration. But a percussion instrument collection is never complete; it’s an ongoing record of where you’ve been that is constantly changed by the journey itself.”

Griswold’s explorations of prepared piano are taking him in 2 main directions. There’s the potential of prepared piano, with its twanging strings and array of wooden and metal percussive sounds, to sound like a quirky folk instrument, reversing serious concert music’s colonisation of home and community-based musical traditions. On the other hand, prepared piano is also capable of producing similar sounds to electronic music. “It’s a way of reclaiming the space of electronic music, raiding some of its sounds and bringing them back into the domain of the acoustic.” Most notably, Griswold’s version of Al Green’s Tired of Being Alone on the new CD sounds exactly like an electric piano in the middle register, with the upper register producing music box effects, while the lower register sounds like a twanging acoustic bass guitar.

Attempting to find ways for the piano to express sounds that are apparently alien to it is one way Griswold keeps exploring the boundaries of the instrument. “We spent a long time developing a musical language in which the balloon and the piano could interact. It’s one of the more difficult things I’ve ever done on piano. The musical language we developed was based on spoken languages, especially Vietnamese and Chinese, which, with their rising and falling tonal inflections, have a certain melody built into them. It makes it natural to adapt them to music.” Tomlinson had to develop a clear understanding of the balloon’s musical language before they could work with it as a duo. “I ended up with 12 sound groups which I then taught to Erik. We’re both interested in discovering the dormant sounds within things, and this was the perfect example—first finding the sounds within the balloon, and then finding the balloon sounds within the piano. In other words, the balloon taught the piano how to play the piano.

Bridge Song, Bonemap in collaboration with Clocked Out Duo, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, June 12-14

Information about Clocked Out Duo’s performances and CDs is available at www.clockedout.org/

The Melbourne sound scene is a factional, sprawling, many-headed beast. If this sounds like a gripe, it isn’t. Take it as fact posing as opinion. The audience required to sustain such a monster exists, though it consists largely of sound practitioners, and we are prepared to venture far and wide, geographically and aesthetically, to look each head in the mouth and hear the echoes of our own voices shouting down the chasm.

As pleasant as it is, Footscray Community Arts Centre, a bluestone basement on the banks of the Maribyrnong River, is not the most accessible venue. It takes a brave aural adventurer to take on the quest. The 5th series of Articulating Space, held every Monday night in March, ran the gamut of sweltering heat to biting cold, and veered sonically from grating tedium to compelling aural assault.

This, of course, is one of the series’ main strengths. A diverse and challenging program is essential to the health of any event, and it’s a feature of the many other heads of the Melbourne sound art beast, but Articulating Space distinguishes itself by the context within which work is presented. It’s show-and-tell. Artists present their latest works in a matter of fact way that largely sidesteps or informalises the ‘performance before an audience’ aspect.

This trend really became apparent when the out-of-towners performed, becoming exceptions that prove the rule. Jim Denley (Sydney/Brussels), KK Null (Japan) and even the pairing of Philip Samartzis and Casey Rice (Melbourne/US) for the first (and last?) time, were compelling more for performance reasons than necessarily sonic ones.

Meanwhile, among the locals, there was an almost total removal of the entertainment factor; the performances were more akin to demonstrations, or workshops. That’s not to say that the issue of performance was not addressed at all—c’mon, this is still the performing arts, folks! In particular, performances by followers of the extended techniques religion (Jim Denley, Anthony Pateras, Tim O’Dwyer etc) obviously had to address performance. Denley was most interesting, perhaps because he chose to perform from the centre of the seated audience in what seemed an attempt to direct attention away from himself as performer. However, watching Denley’s bodily gestural theatre is as crucial as the sound.

In contrast, Thembi Soddell also performed within the audience, but as transparent sampler anti-performer. She presented a compelling combination of shy quietcore and abrupt volume/intensity cuts that hinted at a perverse grunge aesthetic.

There was the usual predominance of laptop/mixing desk performances, which seem to naturally raise the question of performance. The laptop performance argument is getting somewhat boring, and increasingly irrelevant, but I have to say the ‘3 amigos of laptop’—Steve Adam, Ross Bencina and Tim Kreger were exceptional because they gave a real sense of 3 musicians/artists playing as an ensemble. This was also largely evident in the sound they produced, as the usual range of smirks and grimaces in the glow of the monitor screens gave little away. Showing even fewer facial tics, Tim Pledger and Dave Nelson, ostensibly twiddling knobs on a mixing desk, presented a focussed piece of restrained discord and harmony interplay, and tonal tension.

But back to the show-and-tell where Klunk (Rod Cooper) stood out. Prefacing his performance with an explanation of how he came to design and build his continuous bowing instruments he methodically moved through the instruments’ koto/hurdy-gurdy-like plucking and dronal effects, offering a mesmerising sonic insight into his work.

The show-and-tell format also becomes interesting when familiar performers present, allowing analysis of the micro developments in an artist’s oeuvre. Tim Catlin continued his explorations of the sonic range of the electric guitar, presenting the instrument in perhaps the most fragile and delicate fashion he has to date. Natasha Anderson has extended her wind instrument fetish so far that the only remnant of an instrument was a hand operated air pump! Robin Fox and Will Guthrie stretched the ‘Fox Paradox.’ Fox, an extremely knowledgeable analog synthesis historian, performs using software processing that requires audio input to process, in this case Guthrie’s percussive tinkering. Fundamentally this is the opposite of synthesis, which generates output from a purely electronic starting point.

Ultimately, deliberately dismissing any pretence toward entertainment means audiences need to consider not whether they enjoyed the event, but rather whether they learnt or discovered anything. Articulating Space consistently provided fertile opportunities for sonic discovery.

While Anthony Pateras takes a well-deserved break from organising the series, and its return to Footscray remains in doubt, it would be a shame if this type of sound art event disappears from the scene.

Articulating Space: Live Electronic Performances and Extreme Acoustic Practices, A Music Hive Presentation, Footscray Community Arts Centre, Melbourne, Mondays in March

Seeing something isn’t the same as listening to it. Seeing is about location—the eyes track the moving object and fix it upon the retina. But hearing is about objects in action. Our ears listen to a world in motion and the resulting sounds tell us about substance: crystalline or liquid, cracked or whole, being one or many. So through listening we hear the physical substance of a dynamic world and learn something that vision does not reveal.

The systematic exploration of the phenomenology of listening became prominent with the work of R Murray Schafer and the beginnings of the Acoustic Ecology movement in the 60s. Schafer challenged the dominance of ‘eye culture.’ He claimed that the acoustic environment has pragmatic and aesthetic value and that there is a moral imperative to improve the quality of life through the preservation and enhancement of our acoustic environs.

By the 90s the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology was formed with members across Asia, Europe and North America. Their latest symposium, including talks, presentations, group chats, soundscapes, soundwalks, an audiotheque, exhibition and a concert was held recently in Melbourne. Topics for discussion included linguistics, field recordings, methodology, performance, composition and noise pollution. At first the varying methods and topics among presenters made for an annoying lack of focus. But by the end I wished I’d been able to get to everything (cursed work hours). Nowadays, inclusion, multi-discipline and cross-practice get the prime logo spot on the academic corporate guernsey but Acoustic Ecology (AE) actually practices the exploration implied in working across boundaries.

Hildegarde Westerkamp, a hero of AE, took us on a soundwalk, or guided listening tour, through a nearby park. The walk had a lovely symmetry, beginning with the crunch of leaves underfoot and ending with the rustle of leaves overhead. In between, the acoustic space took on architectural qualities, indicating varying degrees of enclosure as we moved through open lawns, next to walls, alongside a lake.

The soundscapes concert was held at the new BMW Edge Auditorium in Federation Square: Scandinavian floor timber meets crazy-pave Meccano and glass beehive. Composers worked the mixing desk at the front, while the speakers of the sound diffusion system from RMIT’s Spatial Information Architecture Lab were distributed all around. The resulting acoustics were maybe a bit harsh and reflective in the upper mids.

First up was Doug Quinn’s perfect underwater recording of Weddell Seals. Evidently the furry brutes had been building some sort of cruel and gigantic cheese grater 50 feet below the Antarctic ice cap and a fight had broken out. One for the marine mammal noise cognoscenti. Certainly changed my attitude to the clubbing of baby seals. Gabriele Proy then presented 3 beautifully recorded pieces. Lagom used sounds of children dive-bombing in water, playing tennis and football. Transitions from tram rides to water to ballgames hinted at the easy sociability of games. Natural sounds were treated as both document and material for synthesis in Barry Truax’s Island. The sound of wind across a lake, waves on the beach, frogs croaking, water dripping in a cistern and a final windy shoreline produced an intense mood and drama, volume and space. Next was Angel by Jo Thomas, with program notes about the passage of time, the body and the voice. I didn’t hear that within the piece but the audience liked it.

Lawrence Harvey played his Canopies: chimerical acoustic environments, originally produced for the 200 metre long Soundscape System in central Melbourne. This work showed off the spatialisation capabilities of the diffusion system, particularly the use of the front/back axis, as well as Harvey’s expertise on the mixer. Transformed wood-chimes, shells, beads and small bells made up the sonic material in a piece that moved to a beautifully quiet finish. Westerkamp used ‘rainsounds’ to evoke the west coast of British Columbia. Cars on a wet road. Wet gravel walks. Subtle modulations across short and long time scales and another clear and dripping ending.

Westerkamp (with photographer Florence Debeugny) also had an installation in Hearing Place: Exhibitions and Audiotheque, organised by Ros Bandt and Iain Mott of the Australian Sound Design Project (www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au). At the Edge of the Wilderness explored the ghost towns of British Columbia through recorded soundwalks and photographs. The poetry of the images, the rhythm of their presentation on the wall, the soundwalk as a narration, all evoked the damp decay of abandoned timber towns. I’m familiar with Ros Bandt’s work through CDs, books and her symposium talk. An acute sense of space comes through in her recorded works, and I regret only glimpsing her piece and missing those shown at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery.

I did however get a chance to hear Iain Mott’s piece in the Audiotheque—a binaural recording of Mott having a haircut. In a binaural recording, microphones are placed as though they are in the ears of a real head: this technique achieves a spatial representation of sound that is close to actual listening. The technique is particularly good for headphone use—the speakers-in-the-ear headphones mirroring the stuck-in-the-ears microphones. Mott’s decision to record a haircut binaurally (mics in his ears) is inspired. The proximity and pressure of the headphones replaces the hands and the scissors to give a haircut without the cutting. The haircutting sounds are heard as intrinsic to the haircut experience. Mott’s piece, like the strongest work in the symposium, used sound to recreate the sense of being within an experience while drawing conscious attention to the importance of the acoustic environment for the emotional and informational content of that experience. Which is where Acoustic Ecology began.

International Symposium of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, hosted by The Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology & The Victorian College of the Arts in co-operation with Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes; various locations in Melbourne, March 19-23

Hydrogen Jukebox is an opera from 2 of the 20th century’s most controversial artists, composer Philip Glass, transgressor of classical music boundaries, and Beat poet/hero the late Allen Ginsberg, whose work is still about as contemporary as any can be. Using 18 Ginsberg poems as libretto, the opera paints a musical mosaic of America from the 50s to the 1988 Presidential election—and into the present. Synchronicity and the 60s still conspire: while this Australasian premiere was in rehearsal, the war in Iraq was brewing. In Hobart the show’s dramatic posters, on which Ginsberg’s words form Stars and Stripes dripping like paint slowly attracted a layer of anti-war graffiti. The war was at its height during the performance at Hobart College and we were all “…listening to the crack of doom on the Hydrogen Jukebox” as Ginsberg wrote in HOWL.

Rarely performed, Hydrogen Jukebox has a reputation for being difficult, but this production moved seamlessly from poem/trance to musical lightning strike across a canvas of controversial, confronting territory—political propaganda and anti-war feeling, personal anguish and sexual politics, religious and cultural dissonance, so content-rich and energetic it left me gasping.

Director Robert Jarman deserves high praise for making this important work accessible to a new generation eager for the hard-won truth: that sometimes art can explain life better than we think. Jarman’s innovation was the side-screen projection of scrolling computer text, taken from the net, listing US government and CIA interventions. Meanwhile, centre stage, Ginsberg’s lyrics rode effortlessly astride Philip Glass’ mesmeric musical lines. Glass uses the human voice as instrument and instrument as voice—just as Ginsberg played around with bizarre adjective-noun combinations. Medleys of incantations—“Who is the enemy, year after year…battle after battle…” (Iron Horse) form hypnotic, lilting word/sound waves that travel from performer to audience like electric musical current. This is a powerful and confronting production.

Behind the singers, actors made a living fresco—in Grecian white robes, or statuesque in plush towelling, slowly rubbing the stars and stripes off bronzed flesh, or forlorn in trench coats, travelling, crying. There’s humour too—Aunt Rose in lopsided 5/8 rhythm, and The Green Automobile, camp, upbeat.

Many in this production’s cast perform regularly with Hobart-based IHOS Opera. Of particular note were Sarah Jones’ crystal soprano, Matt Dewey’s wonderfully resonant bass-baritone, Chris Waterhouse’s and Craig Wood’s smooth tenor and Robert Jarman’s reading of Ginsberg’s Wichita Vortex Sutra. Thematically, as we crossed beyond America into the buddafields, into now-ness, I felt I’d watched a new media form being invented. This beatnik opera’s mix of imagery and soundscape is explosive, but gentle beyond words.

Hydrogen Jukebox, University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music, composer Philip Glass, libretto Allen Ginsberg, director Robert Jarman, conductor Douglas Knehans, choreographer John Rees-Osborne, lighting Tony Soszynski, sound Malcolm Bathersby, Hobart College, April 15, 21, 24-26

This year’s Totally Huge New Music Festival featured established artists from opposite ends of the new music spectrum. Putting experimental electronicist KK Null on the same bill as renowned contemporary classical composer Roger Smalley says a great deal about Tura Events Company’s eclectic and inclusive approach to programming. By amalgamating practitioners from various musical practices (who share only instrumental virtuosity and an infatuation with possibilities), the organisers demonstrate a commitment to continually blurring the boundaries that define new music.

Those unfamiliar with Smalley’s contribution to Australian new chamber and piano works might have found scheduling a 60th birthday concert in a ‘new’ and cutting edge festival somewhat contradictory. However when Smalley and the West Australian Symphony New Music Ensemble premiered Kaleidoscope, such preconceptions were quickly erased. The work is defined by short contrasting movements, circulating a divided ensemble (strings, woodwind and a horn, trumpet, percussion and harp group). The music was built up in thirds, creating great variation within a relatively limited space; swarming dynamism against stasis.

Smalley also paid tribute to the influence of 20th century composers, performing Suite No 1 by Stravinsky and a transcription of Scriabin’s 10 Poems, a reclamation that highlighted the continuing significance of work from new music pioneers. Principal oboist Joel Marangella had the perfect vehicle to display his technical talent in Smalley’s Oboe Concerto, his riveting presentation followed by the first performance of Piano Study No 1 (Gamelan). Composed for left hand alone, this was the first in a trilogy of projected pieces that focus on producing sound from the piano’s lower register, exploring the percussive, gong-like qualities of the black keys. The impressive works performed that evening confirmed Smalley’s reputation as a principal innovator among the local and international new musical field.

Belgium’s Rubio Quartet attracted a similar, but not quite as diverse audience to the Perth Concert Hall. Patrons packed into the foyer, an intimate, but perhaps not ideal venue for the Australian debut of Dirk Van de Velde and Dirk Van den Hauwe (violins), Marc Sonnaert (viola) and Peter Devos (cello). The quartet’s inventive programming enthralled the audience with instrumental virtuosity in an intense and refined performance from their modern repertoire. The players clearly revelled in the String Quartet No 4 by Shostakovich, whose music they describe as a “second language.” The audience was then lulled by the gentle ambience of Luc Van Hove’s lengthy Opus 3, before the unexpected outbursts of Wolfgang Rihm’s String Quartet No. 4. Undaunted by the structurally unusual piece, the players tackled each challenge with emotional energy, revealing their passion for works that manoeuvre at the edge.

However, it was the work of the young composers of Breaking Out that truly reflected the freedom and independence characteristic of new musical approaches and convinced audiences that chamber music is far from an insular form. Among the groundbreaking artists were David Howell with a bold statement in Chipped Chrome, a striking viola and trumpet combination; Nela Trifkovic with the 2nd song-cycle of Give Me Back My Rags and Year 12 Christchurch Grammar student Kit Buckley (the youngest composer in the program) whose String Quartet No 1 explored the sound worlds of an emotional response to architecture.

Chamber music experimentation continued as ethnomusicologist and artist in residence from Hanoi, Vu Nat Tan introduced listeners to the unique timbrel qualities of the Vietnamese bamboo flute. The ethereal music inspired many Perth improvisers to join in with Tan. Ross Bolleter’s improvisation on his famous ruined piano (part-prepared to retain some of its melodic function but mostly fractured by squeaks, groans and the rhythmic tapping of soundless notes) was later joined by Lindsay Vickery on clarinet, infusing the textural palette of sound with a lyrical quality. Then came an unexpected performance by Tos Mahoney on flute and finally Jonathan Mustard, playing a unique variety of wind and percussion instruments, setting the pace for the intense musical ferment to follow.

Relationships between traditional Western, Vietnamese and found instruments were explored in collaborations between Daryl Pratt from Match Percussion, Peter Keelan and members of Tetraphide Percussion. One of the few electro-acoustic collaborations involved Hannah Clemen, using her own invention to manipulate the sound of the bamboo flute. The first of a series of installations, the instrument in Clemen’s Intraspectral, was designed to separate and highlight the sounds that comprise the harmonic spectrum of voice. Back in the gallery, listeners were invited to vocalise into a microphone while a computer analysed the various qualities of their voices and responded unpredictably. This unique discovery challenged audiences to explore the extent of their vocal expressions and discover new ways of listening and responding to sound in daily life.

While the festival had an undeniably acoustic flavour, electronic noise fanatics were not forgotten. Perth’s reputable Lux Mammoth gave audiences one final aural nightmare to remember them by, leaving the senses truly alert for the devastating onslaught of Japan’s KK Null. In a predominantly improvised performance, Null’s pounding techno beats, intricate, dense and fascinating layers of noise and abrasive rhythms interwoven with some heavily distorted vocals, produced moments of juddering physical intensity. Null’s performance completed this year’s diverse conglomeration of local and international artists, in a festival that bristled with an undisciplined intermingling of sounds, instruments, media and music methods, giving greater complexity, new meaning and expanded purpose to the musical arts.

This title suggests the common view we have of Medea, who slaughters her children supposedly out of jealousy when her husband leaves her. It’s a powerful and enduring myth—she’s the ultimate Bad Mother. (And our own continuing horror/fascination with Lindy Chamberlain testifies to this phenomenon.)

In another night: medea Nigel Kellaway pairs this classic with one from the modern repertoire, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Albee’s play answers Medea, with George killing off the (imaginary) child the couple has raised, after a night of cold fury, slugging it out in the living room in front of transfixed guests (a role designated for the audience).

This work is less concerned with the children’s deaths, though, than their parents’ lives: it is the Jason/George/Nigel and Medea/Martha/Reggie show. (Indeed, later on “Nigel” has little patience with “Reggie’s” [Regina Heilmann] pillow-baby smothering.)

Welcome to the Games that Lovers Play—or at least the rather less innocent and more manipulative ones long-term couples play. You have to know someone very well indeed to unerringly home in on and bring out their worst every time—or, in the case of long-time collaborators Kellaway and Heilmann, their best, as in this production.

another night isn’t just about middle-aged dysfunction, nor does it merely display the rubble of plundered texts. It also has more profound comments to make on the material itself and there is a clear logic at work which rebuilds these stories into a commentary on those same old, same old stories we fall back on, and the dead-end, self/mutually destructive grooves we lapse into. It’s an invitation to think anew.

This we particularly see through an especially gorgeous feature of this production, the 18th century Clérambault Medée cantata, sung by counter tenor Peretta Anggerek. The cantata itself stops short of the dastardly deed of infanticide and thus cuts short the natural conclusion of the Medea story. The pierced, tattooed, half-naked body-builder is not our usual image of an opera singer, and Anggerek embodying Medea the foreigner, Medea the enchantress is thus a double reminder that things aren’t always what they seem and assumptions can be dangerous. This Medea might well tell a different tale from the one that has repeatedly been told of her.

The set also echoes this invitation to shake out our preconceptions. Beginning mostly in darkness, all we can see are the grand piano downstage right and, prominently centre stage, a golden sofa (with Heilmann resplendent upon it).

Uh oh. In the last month both a playwright and a designer have commented separately to me on how much they hate “sofa” theatre, the writer claiming that it was almost worth checking in advance to see if there was a sofa on the set before buying a ticket: it’s become shorthand for unadventurous, naturalistic TV theatre-family drama at its most banal. Of course that doesn’t turn out to be the case here (though no one takes the credit for the set design), and a black gauze screen swings up to reveal 3 more musicians, behind them a cascade of scarlet drapes descend from ceiling height creating performance spaces on several levels.

What I also find particularly fascinating in this work is its lively conversation with opera in its high art form, rather than in its original (and opera Project) understanding of a “work” in its broadest sense.

Kellaway sways towards opera with live music (4 very talented musicians, including a truly delightful trio of harpsichord, baroque violin and viola da gamba), surtitles and the outstanding talents of Anggerek. At the same time, the sumptuous artificiality that is opera is neatly paraphrased/parodied by the ballerina-in-the-jewellery-box that is Anggerek in his opening scene; framed by red curtains, dressed in golden silk, revolving jerkily to the sounds of appealing music. An ironic answer to the all too familiar “park and bark” school of opera performance?

While static display is not part of Kellaway’s aesthetic, display certainly is, and Annemaree Dalziel again contributes costumes. Most gorgeous are Kellaway and Heilmann’s robes with full swishy skirts—great for flouncing about the stage—a sumptuous pink and gold for Heilmann, regal purple with frills for Kellaway. And Anggerek’s 18th century inspired half gown (all the better to see your pierced nipples and tatts with) is truly fab.

This show is also, I feel, The opera Project at its most accessible yet. Surtitles! A play (well, movie) we all know! Of course, there’s Heiner Müller mixed in there too with his Medea Material, but even he is digestible, given enough context, as we are here—and he certainly provides the text for some of the most theatrical and striking moments of the piece, especially in ‘solos’ by Kellaway and Heilmann.

Heilmann in her toxic frock sequence is wonderful: as she plans doom for Jason’s bride-to-be, she brings it (literally) on herself—and, unwittingly, thousands of years of condemnation with it. Twitching and grimacing on the floor, this lethal charmer is mesmerising.

That Kellaway revels in the language and music and their interplay in this production is clear. The sung and spoken texts are better integrated here than ever before, and they work powerfully off one another. An extract of Müller’s Landscape with Argonauts transforms into a visually and aurally arresting duet between Anggerek singing the cantata on the top level of the stage with Kellaway standing immediately below him, spitting out the text in the music’s pauses.

At the end, the screen descends once more, again cutting off the musicians from the performers, returning us to the beginning, and “Nigel” sends the “children” (the musicians) off to bed, before wandering off himself.

Everyone has gone except Medea who remains sprawled on her couch, her fiery, golden chariot; there before it begins, there after it ends. After 2500 years, she’s not going to stand for being pushed around/pushed off stage anymore—she concludes the evening with a defiant “Fuck you, Nigel!” But was anyone listening? Well, yes, the “guests” were still there and paying close attention.

The opera Project Inc, another night: medea, director Nigel Kellaway, performers Nigel Kellaway, Regina Heilmann, countertenor/narrator Peretta Anggerek, piano Michael Bell, baroque violin Margaret Howard, viola da gamba Catherine Tabrett, harpsichord Nigel Ubrihien, lighting/production Simon Wise, costumes Annemaree Dalziel, music Clérambault, Poulenc, Schubert, Melissa Seeto, Performance Space, Sydney April 30-May 10

As Harriet Cunningham reported in New Music in Sydney: a lively corpse? (RT 52), contemporary music doesn’t fare too well in Australia’s biggest city and not for want of trying. However, Ensemble Offspring, a project-based collective of musicians with a commitment to new music, is one of a handful of groups that keeps the scene turning over, this one with idiosyncratic programming and keen audiences. Later this year they’re off to take up invitations to perform in the Warsaw Autumn festival, and in Krakow, London and the Netherlands. Then in November, as part of the New Music Network’s New Music Now series they’ll present the ‘imaginary opera’ of Matthew Shlomowitz, The Cattle Raid of Cooley or The Show, which is described as “a double narrative singerless opera exploring the (im)possibility of program music.” The same concert will also feature a multimedia work by composer Barton Staggs and digital artist Justine Cooper (see article). In their most recent concert they explored the work and legacy of idiosyncratic American composer Harry Partch (1901-74) with a day long exhibition of musical sculptures and new instruments and a night-time concert. Partch has no obvious musical heir, but his legacy has been widely distributed and appears in part in the work of many, hence the concert title Partch’s Bastards.

Partch’s percussion-oriented, instrumental inventions were influenced by ancient Grecian and Eastern models and were integral to his music theatre works like the magnificent Delusion of the Fury. Believing that Western music was out of tune, Partch proposed tonal alternatives, creating a rich musical vocabulary of his own, often working with voice, spoken, intoned and sung. In his Illegal Harmonies, Music in the 20th Century, Andrew Ford describes Harry Partch as a key precursor to Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. It was appropriate then for Ensemble Offspring’s concert to open with the composer’s Barstow (1941), a droll musical ‘road movie’ of hitchhiker inscriptions (Partch spent years as a hobo and itinerant worker) for voice and adapted guitar. Performer Christiaan van der Vyver ably rose to the demands of the work’s moments of gospel beauty and personal lament, and folk-tune iterations. The work required the guitar frets to be shifted to realise Partchs’ microtonal tuning. Other ‘instruments’ included 60 ceramic tiles (with a surprising range and sometimes bell-like depth) scratched and tapped in Teguala (2002) by Juan Felipe Waller (Mexico/Netherlands) and wine glasses in Amanda Cole’s Cirrus (2003), rung with fingers, tapped and bowed until they vibrated and whistled, evoking fragile violins and theremins.

The second Partch work, Two Studies in Ancient Greek Scales (1950), deftly executed by Jackie Luke (dulcimer) and Julia Ryder (cello), was a more demanding experience, worth a re-hearing to allow the brain to adjust to its strange tonalities. Christiaan van der Vyver’s ensemble piece, Light Flows Down Day River (2003), was a gently marching, bluesy concoction with an Eastern tang and featured the composer’s home-made xenophone with its bright, rounded notes. With characteristic flair, flautist Kathleen Gallagher brought the requisite theatricality to a Partch evening with her performance of William Brooks’ (US) Whitegold Blue, a relatively abstract piece requiring notes to be bent or plucked from the flute, and the voice to speak, hum and whistle. Lou Harrison’s engaging Canticle No 3 for the largest ensemble of the night (5 percussionists) had its welcome gamelan-ish moments and some notable passages for guitar and ocarina (Gallagher again) and ranged through intimate and huge sounds, pauses and delicate hesitancies. The concert lived up to its subtitle, An alternative world of sounds, and although the tonalities of Partch and his bastards sound for the most part more familiar than they did half a century ago—so broad has our collective musical experience become-there was still much to challenge the well-tuned ear. The excellent program notes were by Rachel Campbell.

Ensemble Offspring, Partch’s Bastards, concert coordinator Damien Rickertson, Paddington Uniting Church, Sydney, May 3

Simon Cavanough is a path-maker artist, his work is about forging myriad in-roads towards ascension, as in Head on a Stick, the impossible blueprint for the clever boyish self-image (no body, but a spindly tower of etched lines and geometries), holding aloft its cute decapitation. Happy as Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, who ends up flying high above the city in a glass lift. Cavanough’s show, Pathway to Wellness at the Scott Donovan Gallery, contains the dream of becoming an anarchic Biggles, except the planes are all plastic or in pieces, co-opted for the war machine or wedged between bits of rock in a precision flying fantasyland. What else goes up? There are balloons inflating, little bridges, factories, houses, Puffer Dude! All Knockin Back the Sky.

Though what you’ve really got is a beer bottle flying machine, propped on top of a delicate, almost collapsing, undercarriage. That’s where the strain comes in. What must come down. After all Cavanough isn’t singing naively along to the radio in an impossibly green field-sky rockets in flight, afternoon delight—his work reminds us that we are grounded horizontally in a world of detritus, not vertically in the ether. And his inventions are all awry, are unnecessary, like Structures for Holding Up Clouds—a piece of scaffolded yellow styrene. Also toying with precarious suspension is his collapsing bridge, The Road to Wetness and Dribble, a reinforced gloopy drip about to break. Nothing inspires confidence, All the Good Things Sometimes Fall Over. (And indeed, at the opening, people are accidentally bumping into and knocking fragile pieces off the podiums!)

Model making seems to have become very popular in contemporary art—artists are making models of things popular consumer culture already produces en masse, and exhibiting them in galleries. Cavanough’s antipathy to recognisable form—he uses everyday materials similar to arte povera—comes with the criteria that things must be dissembled and unrecognisable as such. He might use the pared back frame of a plastic lotus flower, as in I’ve Been Looking at the Ways of Higher Beings, though by the time it’s incorporated it’s been completely pulled apart. You get the sense that it’s important that the work doesn’t reek of popular culture, that the impulse behind it is a frustration with form and meaning, the dumb materiality of what’s finished and proper and produced. His reconstructions are forever attaining, never achieving, recyclable and fragile in their coherence—just one possible iteration. This isn’t the model-making associated with late 20th century nerd boys making sci-fi, anime, mecha—it’s deliberately not that pop.

The assemblages are the products of a ‘poiesis’—“or all representation whether visual or verbal is a making, a constructive activity, a poiesis” (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics). Though model-making is technical, formulaic, you must follow set procedures, there are diagrams, it’s in every way rule governed. It’s a craft, if anything. Perhaps Cavanough is attracted to the anti-art nature of craft—is tempted to abandon art practice. Just as Duchamp gave it up “in favour of playing chess” in 1923 (though he didn't really). “In fact he continued working on his long-term project The Large Glass…What is important here is the gesture rather than the fact. (Kay Campbell, “Out of Humour” in Wit's End, MCA, 1993). And Cavanough seems also to deviate, because the instructions don’t allow for an intuitive or perceptual path. So he ends up making art after all. Once you leave the manual behind, what emerges is bricolage. And there’s the sense that the artist has had to invent his own narratives driving the will-to-form from these askew assemblages—there’s a wizardry, a role-playing or warped war game feel. Why are the plastic figures of Airmen suspended on stalagmites of fibreglass, tumbling like circus performers, euphoric and gleeful, or, more likely, are they free-falling from the sky? The organising principle of these often small 3-D works is that they are whatever the artist has scavenged, perhaps from a studio floor strewn with beer cans, model aeroplane parts, Redhead matches, and the refuse of styrene and foam, as it fell in the bin. All the accidental flotsam and jetsam of one person’s idiosyncratic practice and aesthetic eye. The process reminds me of Hany Armanious’ fantastic folky and arcane installations, involving the chance juxtapositions of found objects.

Cavanough is also technical, literally inventive—like his contraption for failing to fully inflate a pink balloon—which again puts in way too much effort for outcome. Its electric bellows, piston, plastic tubing and dirty old saw blade, all try to breathe life into the balloon—while straining and trembling with effort, shaking under the pressure. Is there a pathway to wellness for the patient on such a shonky respirator? Or does playfulness undercut the masculinity, the whimsy of pink balloons that will cure? It seems the artist is as wistful as his titles. You feel he might be wryly writing off some punk excesses of his youth—Silly Aggressive Lust signals his awareness of the eternal air of adolescence underpinning the avant garde: Graffiti: I once thought it would be cool to nail some meat to a wall of a bank but now I’ve mellowed.

Failure is a leitmotif. Cavanough once tried his hand at rocket-science in the suburbs—I’m Going Higher Than I’ve Ever Been Before II—though the event, the aspiration, the experimentation was what cathected. It was an attempt not just to test a hypothesis with almost guaranteed results, but to witness the danger, and abjection of failure, harking back to when flying machines crashed at air shows, rather than today’s high tech ‘friendly fire’ accidents. The rocket did get a metre or more off the ground, climbing the structure built to launch it, getting as far as the path went—while failing to reach the sky’s aporia (perhaps luckily for the residents of Tempe). I get the feeling the artist would also like his practice to launch and re-launch itself in unpredictable directions, while necessarily factoring in failure—I can see him as artist-in-residence at a regional RAAF base—as a dishonorary wing nut. Poetic licence, pilot’s licence—wanting both.

This show is toned down for the gallery setting, less elemental spectacle. It’s Cavanough in ‘hobbyist’ mode, building A Little House for Me & You in a city bedevilled by property development. It’s a modest, generative show, making some runways out of the ‘endism’ that characterised the embers of the late 20th century. The minutiae of this work is fitting, giving a perspective on the ground that suggests the aerial view—it’s metaphysical (both poetic and material) but doesn’t require transcendentalism out of the cosmos. And the show adds subtle continuity to the artist’s body of work that exceeds the gallery paradigm—his work has always been endlessly deconstructive/reconstructive, concerned with both disinvention/invention. Simon Cavanough continues to make fragile, failed objects—resisting art—in that they are kind of hard to classify, fetishise and buy. He’s also exhibiting here in a gallery facing imminent closure (perhaps to re-open somewhere else)—though this isn’t about being trapped in any victimhood cycle, Oh Wizard, rescue me with your canoe. It’s more a bit of nostalgia for old magic—for the sky which remains plentitudinal.

Prime Two was like an SMS conversation—fast and focussed. The Queensland Art Gallery was given over to people, movement and multiple performance spaces, with a dynamically different (and younger) crowd than at the openings I’ve attended. Inside, the noise was louder than at the largest opening, with the boom of the outside stage audible and overlaid with other music, acoustics and percussion. Instead of the usual focus on one event, this more disparate arrangement saw crowds gather around performances. Others flowed past, on their way to other dance, music, sound or performance points.

Prime Two was an ambitious program developed by the Gallery to engage a youth audience (13-25 years) they believe are “up for the challenge of contemporary art.” Its focus was hybrid art forms. Short performances from musicians, artists and performers working around and over each other ran from 2 until 8pm. Planning was required if you had an agenda and a wish-list of things to see, although simply following the noise and crowd had its charms.

The central water mall hosted Rock’n’Roll Circus 5 times over the 6 hours, teetering tantalisingly close to the edge of the bridged walkways. But despite acrobatics on precariously stacked chairs, nobody fell in. There were sudden and spectacular fashion and design parades. In an adjacent space, Phat! Streetdancers were synchronicity in motion, building on hip-hop, pop and rap influences, playing to riveted crowds and enthusiastic applause.

There were 5 strands—prime movement, prime art, prime fashion+design, prime interactives, and prime sound—none of which was privileged over the others. Performances and changes were not announced—each just began and ended or morphed seamlessly into the next.

While some strands of Prime were static displays—exhibitions and paintings up to the QAG’s usual exacting standards—those with performative and interactive possibilities moved outside the gallery ‘square.’ Chalk it out by Archie Moore provided a blackboard for graffiti from “the whole class”, and the audience shared their views on schools with little inhibition. This was located in the sculpture courtyard within earshot of the Prime stage where DJ Indelible alternated with performers Menno, MC Battle, and the first Australian show by Samoan rap and hip-hop duo Feliti+JP.

A Prime performance that literally intruded into the crowd was Jemima Wyman and her “Body Double”. Jemima and sister Aja variously rode, beat, pushed, and kicked an oversized carrot-shaped orange bolster around the space in moves influenced by kickboxing, Kung Fu, mime and slapstick. Any conceptual depth was hard to identify, but the 2 performers clearly enjoyed the catharsis of letting go on a large phallic signifier.

Refuge was available in the Prime rumpus room, designed to celebrate the fads of the 1980s. If you hadn’t played Twister since childhood, here was your opportunity. There were also video clips and retro music designed to bathe you in comforting childhood memories and orange light—nostalgia for the young.

As night fell it was standing room only in the sculpture courtyard as Resin Dogs took the stage for the first performance of their national tour. As they exited, a white screen rolled down from the marquee, transforming the space for a mesmerising performance from Lawrence English and Tara Pattenden mixing sound and visuals. It was a fitting finale to 6 hours of stimulation attended by 4,000 young people, it brought the crowd to a brief silence.

Three distinct categories of work exist within Scott Redford’s exhibition I’ve got my spine/I’ve got my orange crush. Yet though the shockingly pink Surf Paintings, the almost abstract photographs of the Urinal series, and the Dead Board video works are segregated, they are thematically interrelated by their references to homosexuality and in the use of the surfboard motif. These also mark them as a continuation of Redford’s previous distinctive explorations.

The large Surf Paintings are made, like surfboards, of resin-coated Styrofoam. Painted onto this foam base are sketches of Gold Coast scenery: high-rise buildings and palm trees, all in evocative silhouette. The smooth, highly reflective works initially seem all impenetrable surface, and, struck by their size and intense colour, the tendency is to regard them as a group and at a distance. But beneath their shiny seals the painted foam is grainy, like layers of multicoloured sand, and a closer look at the fine washes of pigment reveals their painterly qualities.

Redford has boldly—brashly?—interspersed these works with pieces that are similarly highly-coloured but otherwise blank, except for attached surfie-logo-like stickers, or text: “Our goal must be nothing less than the establishment of Surfers Paradise on earth.” Secret Surf Painting gradates horizon-like from pink to purple, accompanied by a plaque that proclaims: “The content of this painting is invisible; the character and dimension of the content are to be kept permanently secret, known only to the people of Surfers Paradise.”

The surfboard is, for Redford, linked to homosexual sex: his catalogue interview with Chris Chapman recounts a story about a well-known surfer who strapped boys to his favourite board before having sex with them. While this link may be personal, Redford also works with a more commonly recognised gay sex location in his Urinal series. The dark and gleaming close-up photographs present this quotidian hardware as surprisingly beautiful, the scratched surfaces burnished by the flashlight and coated in streams of water trickling in skittery rivulets down the dented, rusted facades.

The contrast of the brightly-coloured Surf Paintings with the dark and impervious metal of the urinals seems to pit the glitter of the tourist strip against the secret confines of the public toilet. The Surf Paintings are almost iconographic, potential mottoes of Gold Coast publicity. Possessing an entirely different glamour—not to mention comfort and hygiene—the appeal of the urinals is far more private. Each Urinal work’s title is followed by a location—(Surfers Paradise) or (Fortitude Valley)—and, so noted, they seem to function as mementos, fixing an encounter firmly in history like a scribbled phone number or snatched Polaroid.

The surfboard motif is continued in the video works Dead Board I, Dead Board II and Dead Board III (a “dead” board being one that no longer floats). In the first a surfboard leans against a parked ute; written on it in large red letters is the word “DEAD.” A young man takes a handsaw from the Ute and cuts the board in half. As it collapses, he stands back and regards it for a moment, before glancing toward the camera as the shot fades. Dead Board II shows 2 men cutting up surfboards and spraypainting “DEAD” on the boards. The excruciating Dead Board III features bikini-clad models—all perfect skin and limbs and hair—performing the same task in the more upmarket setting of a Gold Coast hotel room. In the catalogue Redford explains the girls were chosen to replace the boys in order to please his (straight) video collaborator. This last video is painful to watch: the girls are uncomfortable and horribly inexperienced at wielding the saw, coming fascinatingly close to severing fingers or scraping expanses of smooth tanned flesh. After they finish their chopping and hacking they stand and leave, admirably concealing their relief. The floor of the empty room is left littered with sorry and broken boards, not unlike, in the setting of the expensive hotel, prone lovers exhausted by their exertions.

Unlike the finely executed Surf Paintings and Urinal photographs, the Dead Board videos are an inelegant case of point-and-shoot. Redford was assisted by different artists on all 3 bodies of work, but the disappointment of the Dead Boards cannot be blamed solely on the shortcomings of the video. Rather, they have the off-putting sense of being made on a whim, and as such demonstrate the considerable distance that often exists between concept and manifestation, a distance that must be negotiated with care. Unfortunately, in this context the accompanying catalogue validation becomes almost humorous, if not objectionable. The repetitive screeching of the handsaw possibly does illustrate the “concept of modernism as an endlessly recycled paradigm.” But there’s a difference between “a play on the idea of boredom” and just boring.

I’ve got my spine/I’ve got my orange crush, Scott Redford, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, March 28-May 4

An hour from Melbourne—a small cream fibro cement cottage, paint peeling, curtains fading. Inside it’s dark, cool, ants are making their way around. It is 2001, and the owner has only just left for the nursing home, but all over the house is evidence of the last 70 years. A calendar from 1956 hanging in the kitchen, letters from the turn of the century in the cupboards; old tins of laxative pills, matchboxes from the 50s with Aboriginal men standing on one leg and the sunset behind. There are recipes for Sao biscuits from the Depression, there is hand stitched linen; the laundry pegs are the big wooden ones Victorian children used to fashion into dolls. There is a collection of old mops hanging up, a wringer, and many old tin buckets and basins for handwashing. So much it is overwhelming. It’s a museum. And a few months later everything is collected by a younger relative who torches it in an all-night bonfire after downing a bottle of Jim Beam. Such is the ephemeral nature of most of our archives. Like memory, they can disappear overnight.

But the job of the archivist is to fix, to preserve. We are all collectors, accidental and considered. We hoard, we classify, we fetishise; magical objects arise from the everyday. The House of Exquisite Memory, at the Sydney State Records Centre, tips its hat to the “natural born archivists” (the hoarders, the children, the obsessives), although most exhibitors here are art professionals, a fact which is initially disappointing. However, the exhibition is necessarily reflexive given this: while some pieces work precisely as archives—Megan Hick’s Flat Chat, a photo documentation of footpath graffiti, is a fixing and celebration of what is fleeting in the everyday—others explore the nature of archive and memory.

In The Housing of Memory: off her rocker Fiona Kemp returns to the family home where her father, certainly a natural born archivist, has allowed the family archive to accumulate. From this, she has selected objects from her childhood and arranged them in a series of Perspex picture boxes—an autobiographical narrative of fragments, junctures and collisions. In one a type of suburban mise-en-abyme emerges: a hanky with images of washing hangs on a mini washing line, Astroturf below, in front of a photo of a backyard washing line. In another, the text “she always rocked herself to sleep at night” underscores a box in which a small blue dress hangs beside an empty hanger, with old receipts for clothes arranged underneath. There’s a haunting quality to it, and while there’s certainly an element of play here, there’s also loss and longing; gaps between objects and part-stories.

This is also the case in Barry Divola’s Critterholic, which traces a recuperation, not only of the objects but the practice of archiving. There is something here—in the recreated suburban kitchen setting, in the empty kitchen chairs at the Laminex table, and the Perspex cereal boxes, containing small toys—that resonates with a nostalgic recovery; not least because Divola’s present collection attempts to recover his lost one of 60s and 70s plastic cereal toys. (Divola resumed his cereal toy collecting 5 years ago—his mother had long since thrown out his childhood collection.)

Sally Gray’s My Garden as a Family Archive features dried flowers, images, and text suspended from the ceiling by string tied to rocks on the ground. Each picture twists with the breeze and movement in the room, giving us glimpses, a moving ephemeral montage of memory and attachment, where the familial and familiar are implicated in the complex of the garden. Memory, we are often reminded in this exhibition, is a collection, an archive. And in these works memory seems to disrupt more linear archival practices. Zoë Dunn’s first sounds and words, as recorded by her parents, again alert us to our often unnoticed practices (parents are always doing this kind of archiving), and the trajectory they trace along all our anxieties and desires.

James Cockington’s Memory Triggers is an assemblage of knicknacks and miniatures dating from 1966 (small because they had to fit into a shoebox in his bedhead) and features such objects as a mini Fanta bottle, and a Whitlam era it’s time badge. The miniatures are time capsules, synecdoches for an era. The collection is assembled as an enclosed checkerboard, part of a loungeroom setting facing a TV which plays Maree Delofski’s film The Trouble with Merle, an exploration of the conflicting stories about Merle Oberon’s background. I caught the end, with Merle’s “return” to Tassie where the convergence of studio bio and truths, gossip and secret (all archives in themselves), marks “a disaster” for the film star and the beginning of her so called decline.

That the exhibition is anchored in references to the everyday—loungeroom settings, checkerboards, kitchen settings, gardens—affirms that the everyday and familiar are sites of desire, longing, loss and recovery, asking us to consider what makes us collect; what are the practices and rituals that trace memory and recuperation about?

In David Waters’ Bus Farm, at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery, miniature wooden buses, perhaps a hundred or more, made from redgum sleepers with burnt relief, are arranged about the room; children visiting the exhibition wanted to move them around (and did). Playful, nostalgic, indelible, the repetition does recall childhood, toys—but they are rendered with a precise aesthetic that marks the work as artisan. Waters gestures to mass production, hence Bus Farm, and there’s some irony intended in the mass production of something so obviously hand crafted, raising broader issues about the question of replication. But this replication evokes a feeling of comfort, both in the reception and, I imagine, in the production; there’s a delight in this, an intimacy.

Considering this, I sit on the refashioned bus seats, and, looking down on the buses I see a street scene, a herd, and recover a feeling of the power of childhood; our domain over our magical objects.

The House of Exquisite Memory, curator Susan Charlton, designer Kylie Legge, State Records Centre, Sydney, Mar 28-Aug16; Bus Farm, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 19-March 12

Brendan Lee’s video work is founded on a dissection of the technical devices used in mainstream cinema to produce emotional effects in the viewer, and his reinterpretation of those effects to subvert their original context and experiment with their use in isolation for other purposes.

Death is a matter of time is a short work building on the use of the eye in cinema. We all know that the eye is the most compelling of human features, window to the soul and all that. To me the eye means little without the face around it, so let’s see how Lee broadens the meaning of the image of an isolated eye with his digital wizardry and intellect.

Death is a matter of time is a companion piece to the installation “…a matter of time”, showing in May at Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary Arts Space. I haven’t been able to see the larger work, so must examine this smaller work in isolation. The video comprises 3 images: an LED countdown clock on 0:00:00:00; images of a flame and an explosion superimposed on the pupil of a man’s eye, from which tears drip. Then an ambiguous image I’m told is a sniper, is superimposed on a woman’s eye, it whites out then reappears as the eye widens before whiting out again. These superimposed images stutter in time with a faint heartbeat sound.

The implication is that the eyes express their owners’ realisation of their imminent death; that which kills them is reflected in their pupils. Removing this cinematic device from its context allows the possibility that these eyes are also those of the cinema audience. The “eye of the soul” cliché takes on new meaning as I consider the eye as portal to the language of symbols, accessing the subconscious, where the layers of correspondence a symbol brings become the building blocks of further meaning.

One image of the eye from modern cinema that leaps to mind is the recurring dilating pupil in Darren Aronofsky’s drug-filled Requiem for a Dream. I don’t think of that particular image as a device: it’s a coded message with one layer of meaning for the general public and a deeper, exhilarating but scarier one for those who’ve explored life’s darker pathways. Experiencing Death is a matter of time is instead more poignant in light of recent world events. We all think of ourselves as possibly immortal, until we aren’t.

My copy of the CCAS press release with its still of a man’s eye has been sitting beside my computer for a couple of days, spooking me. It’s too quiet. They say you never hear the one that gets you.

Death is a matter of time, Brendan Lee, Canberra Contemporary Arts Space, March 29-May 3

Love Tester, a site-specific, installation-based project opened at the Virus Lounge, a gaming centre on Francis Street in Northbridge Perth, one hot, late-summer night. Regular clientele were locked away behind glass in a grid of computer consoles, air-conditioned, seemingly oblivious to the swelling art crowd and intent on blowing their opponents’ virtual brains out.

Here they creep through dark labyrinthine environments, avoiding ghouls and zombies in search of the prize. In our case, we are informed, the prize is art, and the labyrinth is a somewhat brighter (if no less seedy) Northbridge. The zombies are self-explanatory, especially on a Friday night.

The arcade game, Timezone, pac-man, pinball, Playstation and Pot-Black are all plundered in Love Tester’s hot-pink, heat-sealed promotional material. We get it already! Love Tester is the product of Nintendo-generation boredom, short attention spans and engagement with a local arts scene that continuously battles the seemingly effortless high production values of popular culture. Pilar Mata Dupont’s opening-night performance, Estrella the Pony, engaged the audience with the generational theme of the Love Tester. A 20-something woman with a My Little Pony fetish grooms a life-sized plastic horse in the Virus Lounge car park.

Love Tester is the latest attempt by 2 curators and 13 young artists to shift the local visual arts paradigm from the confines of gallery-based exhibitions and thrust it in the face (or at least the peripheral vision) of the general public. It follows similar successful event-based and site-specific projects including Hotel 6151 (2002), Peep-in-Death (2002) and the video-based Drive-by (1999) to which it is more closely aligned.

Scattered between various Northbridge businesses, the locations of Love Tester’s individual works are disclosed on a map: large hot-pink symbols at each venue guide audiences from place to place. These measures largely avoid the risk of each intervention being subsumed within its environment, although investigations in the weeks following the jubilant opening night revealed some fragile points of connection between project aspirations and the actual work.

I searched in vain for Nathan Nisbet’s Bentley the Bear, an audio-visual collaboration between Mark McPherson and Philip Julian, putting its absence down to the kind of natural attrition that often occurs when site-specific works are displayed over long periods. Things break down. Julian and Nisbet’s Flow Form at Merizzi Travel did however successfully project its morphology of symbolic and design forms for the duration of the show.

Pearl Rasmussen and Danny Armstrong’s Empty Man Comic Strip stencil series was barely distinguishable from the greasy, black patina of chewing gum on the pavement of William Street, but this may have been its point. The artists’ subtle monochromatic animation is activated by the viewer only while walking, and staring down at the pavement.

Poolside Manifesto’s Forgetting Tuesday at Virus Lounge was easily the most resolved and engaging installation in the program. Consisting of a disturbing ice-cool, pastel wall painting and cut-outs illuminated by fluorescent lighting, the work takes its cues from retro fairy-story illustration and early learning texts such as the Janet and John series. Spanning at least 15 metres, this immersive work describes disembodied scenes, including a robin redbreast caught on a hook, and a boy flying his heart like a kite.

In Bennett Miller’s 2-part installation, Where’s The Love, at Pot Black and the WA Skydiving Academy, the artist repeats motifs from previous installations involving stuffed animals (this time, a leopard caught in a net) and a TV set showing the still, pixilated image of a cat, or boy. Enigmatic and indecipherable, Miller anticipates audience confusion with a quote from the late William Burroughs, “What is this asshole Bennett, who smokes two packs of cancer a day, really saying?”

Love Tester, AFWA’s Emerging Curator Project, curators Jess Clarke & Jennifer Lowe, various venues around Northbridge, Perth, March 28-April 20

The most engrossing works in this fine exhibition by Adelaide artist James Cochran are self-portraits in which the face is either not realised in detail or just not seen. In the most striking, The Artist’s Tears, we see neither eyes nor expression, only the copious tears of paint he weeps (the work has been purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia). In the smaller portraits the visage is a soft blur of blocks of colour, their arrangement curiously evoking a forceful personality in meditative moments. An accompanying video shows the artist stretched out, staring into a puddle of water on a busy city footpath, studiously ignored by passersby. Other works reflect the artist’s interest in down-and-out street life with a vivid coloration that draws on his years as an aerosol artist and brings an odd warmth to scenarios of despair.

Dead Man Walking

Alongside its successful venture into Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and Parsifal, State Opera of South Australia continues its commitment to contemporary opera and music theatre creations (John Adams’ El Nino, Philip Glass’ Akhenaten) with the forthcoming staging of another American work, Dead Man Walking. Inspired by the film and book it was based on, the opera takes on the issue of capital punishment, a potent one in the USA with an increasing number of states rescinding the death penalty (partly a humane decision, partly a legal one driven by DNA testing revelations of innocence and threats of considerable litigation) despite their President’s commitment to it. The widely produced Dead Man Walking is accessible, emotionally intense, naturalistic opera (music by Jake Heggie and libretto by Terrence McNally) and as was so common in the 19th century, its audience will know the story from its appearance in other media. And this story is a true one. The opera makes a great companion piece to the Handel oratorio Theodora, as staged by Peter Sellars for the Glyndebourne Festival in 1996, which convincingly frames this tale of Roman persecution of Christians as an allegory for the ills of capital punishment, replete with the modern tools of execution (Channel 4/Warner Music Vision/NVC Arts VHS 0630-15481-3). As with the Wagner and the contemporary works in the company’s program, doubtless interstate opera fans will be crossing borders to see Dead Man Walking.

Dead Man Walking, State Opera South Australia, Sung in English with English surtitles, Aug 7, 9, 12, 16, 7.30pm Festival Theatre, Bookings through BASS 131 246

Dancehouse curator Helen Herbertson’s Bodyworks 02 was a showcase of well-developed, inspired works from Rosalind Crisp of stella b, Tess de Quincy, and Phillip Adams of balletlab. By contrast the 2003 program largely consisted of modest pieces at earlier, tentative phases of their development. Martin Kwasner, Tim Davey, Rakini Devi, Eleanor Brickhill and Phoebe Robinson presented fine studio studies containing compelling elements or moments, but none was cohesive or satisfying in overall form. Sue Healey’s Fine Line Terrain also had a searching inconsistency for the opposite reason, it was adapted from several longer studies with more dancers and a complete design. Although Bodyworks 03 reinforced Dancehouse’s position as an institution promoting catholic, innovative choreographies, it remains unclear if Bodyworks is an annual ‘showcase’, or a more experimental season.

The uncertain, sketchy quality of Bodyworks 03 meant that those pieces developed from a strong, cohesive idea, or which self-consciously grasped and worked with their own play and ebb-and-flow were all the more impressive. Born in a Taxi for example presented a superb structured improvisation, using general yet stringent narrative and characterisations on which to hang exuberant yet often vaguely melancholy clowning and movement. Although The Potato Piece was new, performers Penny Baron, Nik Papas and Carolyn Hanna have worked together for years and so the project represented a more evolved showing of their established physical, dramatic style.

Michael Nyman’s lightly pulsating, neo-Baroque music helped emphasise the Peter-Greenaway-esque, tangibly sensorial nature of the production. Simple set elements such as heavy, wooden boxes and planks, a pile of rough tan-bark, water, textured hessian and garden produce-potatoes, apples and oranges-solidified the show. It also made it as much about the audience’s empathetic identification with the performers-smelling fruit, discovering new tastes and textures, or settling to work seated upon cool, upturned tin pails-as about any overt narrative or character development. Three figures, each associated with a particular fruit or vegetable, moved from isolated introspection and self-devised physical rituals, to meet, exchange produce and gestures, and sort through their collective materials. The performance was like a quizzical coming-to-life of a still-life, complete with the glistening, painterly patina of ripe, cut fruits and warm lighting by Nik Pajanti in the style of the Dutch masters; a sort of opera buffo in Buster Keaton style physical game-play and dance.

The show concluded with the characters’ discovery of books amongst their surrounds-another element from the tradition of late Renaissance still life. This final device led to a delightful sequence in which each performer stood on a heavy, oaken cube, gesticulating and physically relating the tale that they had just read intently to themselves. However this sequence was less well integrated into what preceded it, the characters failing to return to their central, identifying props (potatoes, apples, oranges), closing with an explosion of business largely unrelated to the motif of the 3 growers. The Potato Piece was nevertheless a thoughtful, joyful performance.

Dianne Reid’s Scenes From Another Life also sustained a sense of comic play. For Reid however, this was tied to an interest in her own self as a form of remembered, public performance. Reid’s physical intonation exhibited a quality common to several of Melbourne’s mature independent dance-makers (Sally Smith, Felicity MacDonald, Shaun McLeod, Peter Trotman). Although her apron-like costume and clearly-defined musculature evoked Chunky Move’s young dancers, Reid and her peers have abandoned the exploration of physical extremity as a device for developing choreography. Reid performed with more of a sense of the everyday and with a wonderful softness and lightness, which made the sudden lilts of strength and precision that come with a dancer’s body all the more charming.

Using text, music and projection, Reid explored the uncertain body of the public performer. Unlike the more conceptual, linguistic model developed by choreographer Simon Ellis in Indelible (see RT 54), here memory was inherently psychokinetic, melding pleasure, discomfort, hallucination and the physically remembered past in the act of recalling events. While Ellis clinically yet evocatively rendered the idea of memory, its structures and its conceits, Reid amusingly depicted the psychophysical experience of finding one’s body suffused with the quirks of recollection.

Tiny, projected versions of the performer clambered and tumbled over her torso as she looked on, disconcerted by this bodily revolt, yet also lovingly empathising with her diminutive other selves, helping them over her shoulder with a gentle push or lift from under their feet. Reid explained that she wasn’t even sure if these and other remembered gestures and songs were her experiences or moments from films she’d seen, or stories she’d told. As the show’s title indicates, the body and our sensory memory constitutes another life, including dreams, awkwardness, yet also our pleasures and our most comforting personal sensations. Reid concluded that the bemused confusion she felt about the source of these impulses and sensations mattered less than the idea that one can recall with absolute certainty such mundane feelings as “stretching out on your stomach, in the sun, like a cat.”

The highlight of Bodyworks 03 was director Phillip Gleeson’s The Follies of Emptiness. Ben Rogan’s most notable performance trick is a roiling of his abdominal organs and musculature to represent psychophysical disorder and alienation. Under Gleeson’s guidance though, Rogan’s form became a microclimate of electric ripples and erratic tremors. Gleeson’s lighting created an environment in which Rogan and Trudy Radburn’s bodies melded with wavering tangibility sustained by Expressionist aesthetics (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Pandora’s Box etc). By using barely perceptible, misty illumination, juxtaposed with brightly-focused points of light hovering in darkness, Pajanti helped render the performers as semi-decomposed, textured phantoms, unfixed within the audience’s perception of space and depth.

Emptiness was not, however, a neo-Expressionist homage, despite its superficial visual similarity to that dark scion of illusionistic, vaudevillian cabaret. The show was characterised by a more viral sense of mutation and interaction. Jen Anderson’s exquisite, scintillating sheets of noise drew on some relatively ‘popular’ music such as Aphex Twin and Einstürzende Neubaten, but overall the score sounded similar to contemporary French electro-accoustics like those on the label Les Emprintes Digitales. The turbulent, musique-concrète-crazzle echoed and reinforced the sense of an explosion of sensations outwards and inwards-of bodies and personalities absorbing and projecting everything from cheap, electrical lights to hissy 1960s tango-pop; from the lurid, luminescent orange wallpaper Radburn absent-mindedly sashayed before, to the vinyl and chrome kitchen chair Rogan fused with, spider-like. Just as the score sometimes resonated with a sudden backward sweep of magnetic tape sound, one had the occasional impression, watching Rogan and Radburn, of viewing videotape in rewind.

There was a bleed-through of signals, influences and emotions, a mutual contamination of sparse, thematic elements that made the few moments of robotic, automatic movement seem more akin to a wildly visceral form of wet-ware, virtual reality (which of course it is), than the now venerable idea of Cartesian, mechanised life. As in David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, or even Jean Luc Goddard’s more raggedly inter-cut work, the very DNA of character and emotional ambience here became subject to spontaneous change, producing an uncontrolled, hypnotic sense of instability at every level. This jumble of references created a deliberately abstruse portrait of weird, (sub)urban, formlessness, or domestic cyberneticism. Emptiness was particularly impressive in this respect, given that Gleeson eschewed almost all of the touted, glossy tools of contemporary new media normally employed to achieve such effects within his own rich yet minimal dramaturgy.

Bodyworks 03, curator Helen Herbertson, lighting Nik Pajanti, John Ford, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Mar 12-30; The Potato Piece, Born in a Taxi, devisers/performers Penny Baron, Nik Papas, Carolyn Hanna, direction Tamara Saulwick; The Follies of Emptiness, director/choreographer/lighting/set Phillip Gleeson, performers Ben Rogan, Trudy Radburn, Max Beattie, music & sound Jen Anderson, Kimmo Vennonen; Rust, performer/choreographer Martin Kwasner, dramaturg Tim Davey, text Allan Gould; The Dusk Versus Me, performers/choreographers/projection Tim Davey, Katy MacDonald; Q U, performer/choreographer Rakini Devi, percussion Darren Moore; Scenes From Another Life, performer/choreographer/video Dianne Reid, costume Damien Hinds, dramaturgy Yoni Prior, Luke Hockley; Waiting to Breathe Out, performer/choreographer Eleanor Brickhill, performer Jane McKernan, music/text-performance Rosie Dennis, lighting Mark Mitchell; The Futurist, choreographer/performer Phoebe Robinson, music Tamille Rogeon, sculptures Alex Davern; Fine Line Terrain, choreographer Sue Healey, performers Shona Erskine, Victor Bramich, music Darrin Verhagen.

In the world of film noir the femme fatale is mysterious, duplicitous, heartless and usually gorgeous. In classic thrillers we know them as helpless damsels in distress. Think of the forlorn Isabella Rosselini in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the terrified Janet Leigh in Hitchcock’s Psycho and the cunning Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. A long tradition of violence has been perpetrated on and by women in stories like these. They’ve been paraded through popular culture to become mythic icons in themselves.

As in their previous works, which have lightheartedly explored aspects of the female psyche, in Blue Moves The Fondue Set (Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders) examine the leading lady in their own terms. Through an ensemble of dance, movement and monologue the work steps beyond the archetypes offered by film to present a more contemporary brand of mademoiselle.

They enter wearing uniform red-patent boots and clingy dresses. They sashay, hips swaying, looking nervously behind them, legs giving way with every second step. The moves suggest archetypal victims, but these women are strong, graceful, coy, sexy, noisy, angry and violent.

The more successful moments of Blue Moves take just a small element of the archetype and play with it. One piece sees Ryan sprawled on the floor, crawling after a microphone that is pulled away from her. Panicked, breathless and silenced, it’s an arresting analogy for the victimised woman.

The work is less effective when the group tries to modernise the plight of their women. In one piece Saunders pounds out a vengeful version of Kylie’s You’ve Got to Be Certain, hurling punches, sideswipes and knee jerks at an invisible ‘ex.’ An amusing take on modern revenge for the broken hearted, the premise is too thin to entertain for the length of the song. Elsewhere, in an awkward chorus of laughter, wavering between the cackle of the femme fatale and the howl of the wounded, the idea seemed lost on both performers and audience. Rather than unpacking any filmic codes, it felt like we’d missed out on a private joke.

The most exquisite moments captured an element of womanhood using what is clearly the Fondue Set’s most expressive talent: movement. In a brilliantly choreographed trio, they twist around the room, continuously swapping partners while leaving the third dancer to fall away. Fluidly losing and joining each other mid-stride, the dances create a graceful and hilarious analogy for the swiftness of the modern relationship—being hurled into a succession of short flings.

The final piece in the show used dance to embody one of the most sacred elements of female friendships. In this routine they stood talking together and as one girl fell, the others picked her up, then another fell and the others picked her up and so it went on in a swift succession of ‘pick-me-ups.’ Beyond a reply to the woman as ‘helpless victim’ archetype the scene was a perfect metaphor for the cycle of support that often characterises female friendships.

Created as a dance translation of contemporary live music, The Fondue Set usually performs in pubs and clubs—venues frequented by people their age. In the atmosphere of a noisy pub and set to the music of a live band, their usual audiences are prone to more distraction than the formal setting of the Seymour Centre allows. Perhaps this is why Blue Moves feels like it lacks a bit of flesh. The attentive theatre audience brings more expectation to the performance. That the shorter, more flamboyant scenes are more successful is a reflection of the dancers’ natural inclination to perform for a more rowdy crowd.

It might have been the absence of their live band, The Screamers, who usually perform with the troupe, that made the space seem empty but this can’t account for the weaknesses in some of the dramatic scenes. Simple ideas expressed physically ultimately carried the most strength. While Blue Moves struggled to articulate a resounding idea about the cinematic myths of the female ‘victim’, it offered some beautiful moments about what it is to be a woman and a taste of what could be a new breed of femme fatale.

Blue Moves, The Fondue Set, created and performed by Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan, dramaturg Keith Gallasch, set design Imogen Ross, lighting Simon Wise, Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney, March 6-8, 12-15

Before 5000 dimly discernible faces in Adelaide’s Botanic Park, the Australian Dance Theatre presented their new work, Nothing. Part of the 10th anniversary of WOMAdelaide. The work by Garry Stewart and dancers continues the company’s commitment to diverse presentations. The electronic soundscape of sound designer Luke Smiles pulsates over the crowd, turning the chilly night air electric with anticipation. Four dancers enter, dropping into a twisted hyperactivity with gargoyle faces while an intricate, powering duet of sweeping angular movement between Roland Cox and Larissa McGowan intersects the space. For 40 minutes the ADT troupe will be adrenalised terpsichorean rock stars.

Paul White crosses the stage with a series of liquid contortions that embody a positively pagan animal magnetism. The sound of breaking glass heralds a quintet whose synchronised movements exude a sense of fragility, of something ‘other.’ Wearing sheer, torso-revealing, underwear, designed by Gaelle Mellis, these creatures look out with trepidation, extending and quickly withdrawing limbs into a personal, protective space. The work continues in a seamless collage of physical arrangements: solo, duet, layered with solemn clan ritualism. Limbs are tossed while idiosyncratic gestures are momentarily suspended by protracted, finitely balanced extensions and gravity defying flight. A vocabulary motivated from internal spaces is a departure from the signature Stewart style. This work unfolds from the inside out as the composition slides in and out of formation, creating space for startling, short dynamo solos by Lena Limosani, Anton and, on a bare stage, sinuous Amazonian flexions from Sarah-Jayne Howard.

Inspired by Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Elisabeth Kubler Ross’ On Death and Dying, the work has a reflexive quality, the states-of-being it suggests are ‘not of this world’, but gesture to something past. It’s as if time has reverted to the reptilian dawning of mankind, stretching the tenuous thread between life, death and the hereafter. Nothing is loaded with abstract signs, both in the dance language and in the dancers’ ethnic tattoos. The movement vocabulary is a primal soup of dance history, with borrowings from Ashtanga yoga and gymnastics, reconstituted to create something hybrid and new.

Less esoteric, Artifice by Peter Sheedy was planted firmly in the realms of human behavior and the influence of technology. It was performed at Adelaide’s tertiary dance training institution, the Adelaide Institute of TAFE. Sheedy has danced with many of Australia’s leading companies and has made work for Chrissie Parrott, Leigh Warren and Dancers and Csaba Buday. Artifice is the culmination of 3 years’ development, a fragmented journey of spoken text, contemporary dance and video imagery.

On stage the dancers stand, casually conversing, dropping in and out of pedestrian movement, peering and commenting on audience members as they enter. An industrial atmosphere with dim blue lighting, search lights, slowly rotating gobos and a red light grid create a cold geometric world in which the 4 dancers try to relate. Melissa Jaunay’s lighting dissects the space, delineating areas for actions. Boundaries are tested through physical and verbal play. A series of couplings, solos and trio unison phrases unfold, clearly marked by entrances and exits that highlight the superficiality of attempts to win each other over.

Solon Ulbrich and John Leathart perform a seamless duet of intertwining bodies, manipulating each other to get what they want, suggesting the games people play. Kim Hales McCarthur delights in a hot pink latex dress, improvising a self-flagellating text that merges into popular songs with deconstructing movement phrases. The strain of this stream-of-consciousness solo ultimately results in a shutdown of all communication. Lisa Heaven’s repetitive text on the theme, “Mummy thinks you’re really pretty”, delivered via a microphone, becomes a sinister torment, subliminally leading to the narcissistic breakdown of McCarthur’s character.

The projected visual narrative, blurred spinning tops and the rear view from a driving car—cross-dissolved with a body to the eerie scene inside—interrupts the traditional contemporary dance and verbal vignettes. We discover the car has crashed, perhaps suggesting self destructive tendencies—technology driving us too fast, humans thinking too much, wanting too much, wound up and spinning into a subjective oblivion; ultimately outsmarted by the artifice of their own design?

“If you don’t stand for something you can fall for anything,” says one of the characters in Artifice, expressing my impression of a work that nonetheless tested many artful devices.

Nothing, Australian Dance Theatre, choreography Garry Stewart, ADT dancersMcCormack, Larissa McGowan, Paul White, guest dancers Sarah-Jayne Howard, Caitlin McLeod, Paul Zivkovich, designer Gaelle Mellis, sound Luke Smiles, lighting Damien Cooper, WOMADelaide, March 7-8; Artifice, choreographer Peter Sheedy, performers Lisa Heaven, Solon Ulbrich, Kim Hales McCarthur, John Leathart, Adelaide Institute of TAFE, Feb 25-27

Questions about what defines puppetry or ‘figure theatre’ arose repeatedly in this year’s Ten Days on the Island Festival. When should puppets assume more naturalistic styles, and where does that leave the performers who work alongside them? When is puppetry just a bit of fun and when do our expectations become more complex?

The Heart of the Andes by New York’s Red Wing Performing Group told 2 parallel stories: one about a young boy retreating from a school bully into his picture books; and the other the story of 19th century American painting. This is the 7th in a series of works on sight subtitled “Everyday uses for Sight” and described as a “love letter” to seeing. The homage has a number of frames—miniature worlds, the biological structure of the eye and theories of composition, such as the Dutch grid used by 19th century painters.

Frederic Edwin Church and Winslow Homer are paid particular attention, with one of Church’s paintings providing the title for the show. We are told that opera glasses were worn to fully appreciate his painting. Where Church’s work dealt with frontier themes, Homer’s subjects included rural life, children and play.

Red Wing employ shadow and Bunraku puppetry and manipulate objects in the spirit of a magic show. Heart of the Andes is a series of intricate reveals—using frames, tape measures and beams of light pulled like threads through paintings. These guide the eye and play with the idea of optic distances—blending science lesson and art.

At one point, Hurlin and his puppet interact—the puppeteer’s thoughts echoing around the theatre—suggesting a postmodern take on the form. Objects representing the science of painting are revealed and fetishised. A stylised soil cross-section becomes a chest of treasures containing the artifacts upon which the show hangs: opera glasses, a miniature piano accordion, a tape measure.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs by Tasmania-based Terrapin Theatre, has been reworked from its original 2000 version. Written by Noëlle Janaczewska, it’s a non-linear narrative inspired by the myth of the lost child which has “haunted the Australian imagination since colonisation” (program note).

Most of the changes, in performance style, scripting, projections and music, were intended to make the new version less literal. In 2000, the journey was more character-based—this time the performance was more centred on the emotional world of Carla, the protagonist. The present became ambiguous. Avoiding traditional narrative highs and lows, designer Julia Christie and director Jessica Wilson took on the challenges an actor existing in a puppet world and a character existing in a world of memories to which she can’t directly respond. Carla was directed to be more puppet-like, the goal being to distance her, and resist letting the actor carry all the emotion—thus realising the form’s potential.

The gypsy puppet that makes love to Carla is operated by 3 puppeteers. A tawny exotic, with stumps for legs and dangling genitals, he floats before settling on her. The scene moves from the sensual to the unnerving. Like the cicada puppet and the Indian doll, Carla discovers that bejewelled exteriors often conceal less savoury, if not grotesque, cores as they become confused in her memory.

Michael O’Donohue plays the lepidopterist who cautions Carla about the hazards of traveling through India. He wafts around her unseen, as chilling as her memories and as Carla’s sinister and neglectful parents—Czech style marionettes with gashes for mouths and vacant eyes.

The drama in The Dark was most intense when disconnected. This was a powerful reminder of puppetry’s ability to go where primarily text-based theatre would struggle to escape gratuity. My breath caught when violent kicks were delivered backstage and a tiny puppet convulsed in the foreground. Carla, now adult and helpless still, stood between them. The Dark was an intense and suspenseful journey that challenged its audience by substituting potent sensual layers for conventional narrative principles.

Where Heart of the Andes displayed conventionally masculine preoccupations in its delight in the technical, the structural, and the ‘reveal’, The Dark was feminine in its immersion in the internal terrain of emotion and memory. A haunting emotional landscape was brought to life by Glen Dickson’s projections of deserted rural roads, headlines of lost children, and Ben Sibson’s menacing soundscapes of cicadas.

Urban Safari, a New Zealand company, introduced audiences to the inhabitants of Gondwanaland in the streets of Salamanca and on the sprawling cricket green of Port Arthur’s original settlement. Endangered Kennel Pigs and Cantaloopas were presented in nature documentary format, lead by the breathy commentary of a Steve Irwin/David Attenborough hybrid and full of awestruck kiwi “crikeys.” The puppets were The Lion King-like and galumphed unperturbed on architecturally unsound limbs. It was intriguing to ponder these mutations of familiar forms and speculate on what was going on inside them. How many people were under there? Do hand or foot stilts create those dimensions?

Ferocity built up as the 1 metre Kennel Pigs went about their mating rituals with all the conflict that their name implies. Saggy 3 metre Cantaloopas gangled, apparently benign, until provoked to deliver one of their “lethal kicks.” The show was well chosen free family theatre through which you could drift.

Stories of Faces began with a dust-coated pianist playing an old standup piano in an RSL hall. She is so unobtrusive that no-one suspects she’s anything more than a local fill-in. Then the flourishes begin—growing steadily until she turns to greet the audience in a playful accent. It dawns on the audience that this is not the filler, but the act. Belgian visual artist Horta Van Hoye allows herself to be lead by a tall roll of paper. She elaborately twists, crumples and teases it to produce gentle, ancient faces. The first, a bearded man becomes smitten with his creator. Later, other ‘faces’ are collected from the wings to form a benign ensemble.

The transformations and reveals are pure silliness—a human bouquet, a face hat, a horse becoming a palm tree—as is the final mask installation, at which point I realized my craving for more narrative would not be sated. Perhaps the extended show provided this. For me the title of the work was representative—the performance offered stories of faces, but not characters, and was delightful mainly for Horta’s own facial animation.

Arrivals was a non-verbal work by Mixed Media Productions that employed puppetry, dance, video projection and an original music score. Again, paper featured strongly. The set was created from sheer textured drops of it, moveable cage walls, and a projection screen. Paper is slashed and burst through. A tense flashlight search follows. Houses are meticulously cut out and envy motivates one character to destroy another’s claim. Paper becomes a symbol of reinvention, of fragility of place and home.

A running or climbing puppet—with percussion creating the tension of fleeing—was an intermittent refrain and an aspect of the show I found most moving. Projections were used not so much as embellishment but to say something in their own right. A captive child creates a miniature world, populated lovingly with flecks of paper—the camera allowed us into her imagination. When a cage moves over the camera, there is the sense that her imagination had been trespassed.

While the work began as a show about arrivals in the broadest sense, it gravitated specifically towards the subject of detention centres and refugees during the devising/rehearsal process. The traumas of uprooting, of trying to escape to freedom, the randomness of rules for granting freedom, and the objectification of people, were recurring themes.

The representation of puppetry in this year’s Ten Days festival demonstrated both the present global renaissance, and the many manifestations, of the form.

Ten Days on the Island: Heart of the Andes, Peacock Theatre, March 28-31;The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Terrapin Theatre, Earl Arts Theatre, Launceston, April 4-5, Peacock Theatre, Hobart April 9-12; Stories of Faces, performer/creater Horta Van Hoye, various locations; Arrivals, Mixed Media Productions, Princes Wharf No.1 Shed, Castray Esplanade April 4-5

Every decade or so, since the 1960s in Australia, the craft of dramaturgy seems to come into focus as a part of theatre practice, and calls for our attention. One set of investigations currently underway has arisen from conversations among Melbourne dramaturgs over the last couple of years. The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project devised by Melanie Beddie, Paul Monaghan and Peter Eckersall is a continuing investigation designed to generate a diverse range of discussions and workshop activities that focus on issues in professional dramaturgy.

There might be good reasons why dramaturgy is due for special attention. For one, the field has expanded to include applications moving beyond literary models into performance, dance, technical and production dramaturgy. This trend has been on the rise since the 1980s and the evolution of hybrid spaces for theatre has extended and expanded the importance of dramaturgical activities in the production process. Technical innovations and increasingly diverse means of production and dissemination have likewise made the theatre environment even more structurally complex, polycultural and information-rich. This has created the need for creative specialists who keep track of the complicated flow of ideas, technologies, and forms. The rise of performance studies and the interest in investigating aspects of cultural theory in and through performance has further created a need for a new kind of dramaturgy which responds to the postmodern influences currently engaging theatre artists. As a practice that is often called upon to act as a contextual presence in the rehearsal and development process and keep alive the memory of alternatives in the pressure cooker environment of production, dramaturgy lies at the cutting edge of creative praxis.

Secondly, as Australian artists continue to participate in debates about theatre culture and seek to make productive interventions into dominant social and cultural spheres, the need to develop our political understanding of dramaturgical practice also grows. Like other forms of cultural production, theatre is now produced in a globalised cultural landscape and faces ongoing aesthetic, representational, and ideological challenges both in the facilitation of theatrical production and in its various modes of reception. Thus we might ask what can theatre do, be, and become when we live an age of “ambient anxiety”, a worldview proposed by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and experienced through the dramatic manipulation of events. When the hegemony has become theatrical and power has become a mediascape of representations, violent performative acts, and staged lessons in discipline and fear, where is the alternative space, what can the artistic response offer?

In the first of the dramaturgy forums during the 2002 Melbourne Festival, John Romeril said, “I live today in an age in which words represent an incredibly corrupt medium. The feeling I have is that we’re living in an age of liars, where what is spoken is almost inherently untrustworthy. In those circumstances, I suggest that the theatrical response [is] to go into dream state, to go into physicality, to go into visuality, is to maybe ask an audience to make sense in areas of their own sensibility that have not been invaded by the general corruption to which language in our time is being subject.”

The Dramaturgy Project has thus far produced 2 contrasting symposia, the first public and the second more in the line of professional development. Dramaturgies: the artist as agent provocateur and cultural interventionist was a half day public event held in partnership with the Melbourne Festival. It featured a panel of artists whose work was presented in the Festival: Federico Leon (writer and director, Argentina), David Pledger (writer and director, NYID), Scott Rankin (writer, director Big hArt), Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bossetti, (IRAA) and, on video, writer, director, Romeo Castellucci (Societas Raffaello Sanzio).

Co-convenor Melanie Beddie set the tone of this forum in her introduction, “Dramaturgy could be considered to be the midwife between theory and practice. It provides a process of bringing performance ideas into a concrete form, and it can also allow for the essential luxury of contemplation and evaluation of both process and product.”

The symposium gave rise to a profound sense of discourse rather than the more commonplace artists’-talk-as-marketing-formula common at festivals these days. Participants all remarked that speaking with other artists was a rare and rewarding the opportunity.

Among the many provocations raised by participants was the idea of the artist as somebody who is acted upon, with the everydayness of the artist as an essential way of imagining one’s work. Castellucci termed this an “accidental community” that aimed to generate a sense of vitality and danger in our lives. Cuocolo and Bossetti also stressed how dangerous theatre should be—not in any abstract sense but in the confrontation of staging theatre in their home. “Theatre shouldn’t repeat politics but make politics,” was how Cuocolo expressed his aim, as a “ripple effect” and an artistic expression that might become a wave of critique and change.

Pledger and Rankin likewise spoke of theatre’s “ripple effects” and “concentric circles of consequence” as a cultural agency that extends from a singular activity and enlivens and creates opportunities for social-cultural interactions. Rankin’s nKnot @ HOME, presented in the festival, was described as a framework for political acts—art as way of accessing power. Pledger spoke of the politics of process as praxis that underlies his creative approach. The elements of making theatre—his collaborators, his understanding of the world, and his use of literature and popular culture—come to shape the production as a whole. Leon expressed the importance of crossing borders and how theatre is made as a contract of negotiated effect between the stage and audience. Eckersall said that in a world of borders and constraints interventions through the community of theatre might cross the boundaries imposed on the world: an idea of interaction as intervention.

In February 2003 the project moved into a second stage with a 2-day symposium designed to focus on dramaturgy and professional practice. Eckersall’s keynote paper: “What is dramaturgy? What is a dramaturg?” reviewed the history of dramaturgical praxis and outlined models for its politically interventionist character. Panels chaired by co-convenors focused on particular aspects of dramaturgy and were organised around the themes of performance, dramaturgy, text, design, dramaturgy and curatorship. Each panel featured 3 speakers who discussed their personal case studies, which were presented with discussions of future directions for theatre and performance praxis in general.

For the final panel, artistic directors and senior staff from major organisations and independent companies were invited to respond to the project themes as a whole. The panel largely accepted the need for dramaturgy to be valued in the wider creative process; the question was: how to pay for it. An audience largely drawn from the theatre community reinforced the convenors’ intentions that the forum act as professional development. Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter gave a rousing performative wrap-up to the proceedings.

We are now considering ways to extend the project, specifically into workshop based activities and possible studio-performance based outcomes.

An edited transcript of Dramaturgies: the artist as agent provocateur and cultural interventionist from the Melbourne Festival forum is published on the RealTime website. [currently offline] A report on the second Dramaturgies conference will appear in RT56.

The dramaturgy and cultural intervention project was devised by Melanie Beddie, Paul Monaghan and Peter Eckersall. We gratefully note the support of Arts Victoria and thank the Melbourne Festival, The School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne and all the artists who generously participated in the project.

The Sydney Theatre Company’s busy and highly productive Blueprints Literary program is run by Nick Marchand, Artistic Development Manager, and, until recently, Artistic Associate Stephen Armstrong who has left Sydney for Melbourne.

Overall, the Blueprints program adroitly combines development and production, offering playwrights very practical assistance and staging some of the most interesting and challenging work from the STC in recent years, as directed by Wesley Enoch and Benedict Andrews. Benjamin Winspear (a fine performer: Kate Champion’s Same, same But Different; Max Lyandvert’s production of Richard Foreman’s My Head is a Sledgehammer) has taken over the resident directorship, staging 2 plays in 2003 that are emerging from the writers’ program: Ben Ellis’ These People and Brendan Cowell’s Morph.

The literary program of Blueprints comprises professional development for an invited “assembly” of 5 playwrights, bi-monthly rehearsed playreadings (including in 2002 a rare opportunity to experience recent German playwriting) and public forums (The Advance Party). Other writers in the assembly are Vanessa Bate, Emma Vuletic and Marchand himself, all working on the development of full-length plays with dramaturgs Beatrix Christian, Louise Fox and Jane Fitzgerald and mentors David Berthold (the newly appointed AD at Griffin), Verity Laughton, Marion Potts, John Romeril and, until recently, Nick Enright (whose recent death is sadly lamented). The program also includes short-term ‘responsive projects’ allowing writers to work experimentally with actors, directors and dramaturgs on smaller projects. That’s where this discussion with playwright Ben Ellis (whose Falling Petals opens shortly at Melbourne’s Playbox) and dramaturg Louise Fox (a film and television writer remembered as a striking performer in Barrie Kosky’s Gilgul Theatre).

Ben Ellis The Responser project I did as part of the Writers’ Assembly in 2002, where each of the writers took on an 8 week time-frame, picked an article and used it as source for a half hour presentation. Mine was based on the transcripts of the Senate Enquiry into ‘the children overboard affair.’ It involved a workshop with actors, a really rewarding process, both for verbatim and imagined responses to the text but also in having to work outside the box. The “fog of war” was really interesting. Admiral Shackleton more or less accidentally said that there hadn’t been anyone thrown overboard and in an attempt by the Navy to get themselves out of a problem he read out an amazing statement that read like a postmodern poem about how things come together and create a fact and then they disperse…a kind of mist of Naval language.

These People is another project, originally inspired by peoples’ experience of detention centres in Australia—they’re actually called “Immigration, Reception and Processing” centres. ACM have advertised positions for detention centres even though legally they’re not to call them that. I gathered interviews with people who’d worked in the centres but we didn’t want the focus to be on them and Ben [Winspear] and I had talked about how it couldn’t be just a verbatim piece as told by refugees…there were certain problems of reception of voice, of attitude, which you can solve with say a play like Aftershocks [about the Newcastle earthquake]—not that that’s an easy piece…

BE …[So] we realised we’d have to investigate those variables in the process. After a while I decided it had to be about the Australian response to the refugee story, which is a story older than the Bible…We have to see what’s changed, what’s the rupture—it’s a change in the Australian mindset to asylum seekers by boat…something has shifted and we had to investigate that.

KG It was something bigger, not just a matter of falling for government rhetoric?

BEYes, something bigger and how that was interfacing with that government rhetoric. At the same time there was a Human Rights enquiry into the effect of detention on children which brings up a lot of horrific details.

Louise Fox I’d read a lot of the material Ben had sent us and I was there for the 2 weeks and then, when we came back together, the play formed. When we started off we were just throwing all kinds of exercises at the material. The concept of the play genuinely grew out of the workshop.

BE And we did a lot of exercises dealing with attitude, taking bits of language and speaking in different ways, working with archetypes.

BE I think that’s what it’s about when, as a body politic, we’re encountering a refugee, it’s someone we’re imagining. The first project, Select Committee For Imagining a Certain Maritime Incident: A Progress Report, looked at a recurring nightmare of the threat of cultural and geographic invasion. The words that kept coming up were completely related to the imagination, the subconscious if you like—not just the fact, but the dreaming of the fact and how those 2 interrelate. If you look at Philip Ruddock’s language it’s devoid of specific details, and he’s a master of that, [creating space] for people to imagine that refugees are hitting and cutting themselves for a good outcome…

LF Not as concretely as it became. What we noticed was that we had a ‘family’ in the room, with 2 older and 2 younger actors, a family in an odd space confronted with this odd information. Once we’d said they look like a family, Ben went away and then came back with characters, in many ways Australian archetypes but with very specific details about them. Ben’s plugging into a history of anxiety—half of the material is [documentary], half is generated from these characters who pretty much speak in third person, so there’s a level of dissonance in the way they deal with themselves.

It’s about making you listen because we’re so assaulted with mediaspeak and it’s very easy not to actually hear. The moment you shift an attitude you begin to hear…There’s not a single moment in the play where you hear a piece of information from the person you’d expect to hear it from…so it’s constantly trying to shift your ear.

KG Australian political writing is not good at language analysis, though Guy Rundle’s Quarterly Essay on John Howard is an exception.

LF I think that’s where Ben is gifted. The play feels as politically sophisticated as it is theatrically.

BE I think the area itself [the ‘refugee play’] is a place where normal storytelling or story as function has all of sudden failed, because every person who wants to tell their story thinks it will deliver the final word and the release—from having it listened to and accepted.

BE The audience have to listen. They have to make a story themselves, in terms of their own lives in response to the show.

LF There wasn’t a script initially, so I’m here to help Ben and everyone make the best piece of theatre they can. It was about provoking Ben and finding links for him all the time…

KG …moving towards a script? Worked on by a group but not group-devised, still writer-centred?

BE You need as a playwright, at some stage, to get in contact with the idea that it’s actually a craft, with bodies in time and space and that’s what it’s about. You can, if you’re a developing playwright, be left in a room with no idea what an actor does, or what you need or what kinds of things might spark you off.

KG This oscillation between the aloneness of writing and the togetherness with the creative team, do you enjoy it?

BE I like it when it’s very compressed—it’s a conversation between those 2 states…

Late summer in Brisbane. It’s a shock to be asked to leave the cool cavern of the Powerhouse foyer to face the mid-afternoon sun. The expanse of river blunts the blow, but as I venture out with other ticket-holders to Altered States, I’m anxious we might be in for a dose of al fresco youth theatre.

Thankfully we re-enter via a fire exit. Another sensory adjustment—this time far more promising. The gritty backstage of the Visy Theatre is awash with movement. A map of terra nullius flashes unevenly on the bare brick wall. A phone operator welcomes a Brisbane Transport enquiry. A sail billows as we float among the words and images of first settlement folly and contemporary city life.

Altered States was a collaboration between Brisbane’s Backbone Youth Arts and Sydney’s PACT Youth Theatre that aimed to investigate notions of identity emerging from a sense of place, in this case Brisbane and Sydney. Originally conceptualised by former company directors, Caitlin Newton-Broad (PACT) and Lana Gishkariany (Backbone), it was brought to fruition by a team of over 20 writers, performers, and new media artists directed by PACT’s Regina Heilmann and Backbone’s Brendan Ross. It was an ambitious task that must have had its fair share of long distance difficulties. One can only wonder at the kind of intensity wrought in the final 2 weeks of the process when the teams met in Brisbane; a period described in the program as “a perilous negotiation between each team’s ideas, processes and material, with the intent of gradually rubbing up, intruding and merging with each other.” Whatever they did, it worked. Altered States was an exhilarating exploration of 2 cities and the restlessness that they and their histories invoke.

Having moved through the initial sense-scape, we took our seats for the rest of the performance, played out in mostly alternating scenes: Sydney/Brisbane, Brisbane/Sydney. The predictability of the format was avoided by intelligently integrated video (Sam James) and sound (Gail Priest and Lawrence English), key collaborative segments, and the energy of partly improvised scenes. The jovial banter among the cast gave an open and confident feel to the performance, which featured some great writing, particularly from the Sydney mob.

The take on Sydney was sexy, sinful, and grimy. It opened with the bawdy Polly Lee who “came to tea, had some whisky up her sleeve.” This established the tone of the Sydney trajectory and demonstrated the impressive ensemble capabilities of PACT. They persuasively gave form to the city as “a woman wearing too many petticoats”, moving effortlessly between its star-spangled marketing, pre-dawn underbelly and congenial absurdities (where did that human fly come from?). These vignettes segued into ruminations on national character and identity, while the group scenes about metropolitan life delivered some treasured lines: “Exhausted exhausts create sunsets immaculate/shall I speed up your thighs into the nitty gritty of you, dirty city?”

Quite a contrast, then, to languid Brisbane stories marked by the paradox of hot coffee and humidity. Apart from the pre-show trek outdoors, Brisbane was introduced by its “planned hipness”: all blue sky, palms and phallic office buildings. Puncturing the touristic fantasy were the fabulous jests of sliding off chairs, slipping out of focus, melting into stupor…until the inevitable Munchian “FUUUUUUCK.” So Brisbane. Then came the thunderstorm and, for the lucky audience, the watermelon. Slurping in our seats, all was again good with the world. While the Northerners’ writing was not quite as developed, the evocation of urban tropicality was cleverly nuanced and self-reflexive. Bodies were infused with the city’s summertime rhythms and the physicality of the work was strong.

An integral link was the shared desire for altered states and constant movement. An inevitable consequence of being young? Or standard issue for contemporary urban living on Australia’s eastern seaboard? On many levels, the Backbone/PACT performance was insightful, sophisticated and fun. Here’s to more “perilous negotiations” of this type.

Altered States devised, written and performed by members of Backbone Youth Arts and PACT Youth Theatre, directors Brendan Ross, Regina Heilmann, video Sam James, sound Gail Priest, Lawrence English, original concept Caitlin Newton-Broad & Lana Gishkariany, Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Mar 7-11

The Works is an 8-day community arts festival that celebrates the art, heart and soul of the City of Glenorchy. A community-driven, grass-roots arts event, it is unlike anything else seen in Tasmania. More than 40 commissioned Tasmanian artists worked with school kids, youth groups, pensioners and people from Aboriginal and other communities to build collaborative relationships and create 36 diverse projects including film, sculpture, theatre, writing, music and visual art.

An initiative of Glenorchy City Council and Kickstart Arts, The Works succeeds because it is a themed festival that energetically explores the ideas of working life that are central to the Glenorchy community’s view of itself.

Pasminco’s Zinc Smelter was the venue for the Dusk Drive short film night coordinated by Roland Gabatel. Assisted by creative mentors, 24 filmmakers produced short video, animation and grooves. While often focused on young male enthusiasm for skateboarding, motor-X, horror and music, the art and animation clips interspersing each video short included the talent of Trent Robert Fisher’s Witness da Quickness, Squid and Jester and Tara Ford’s smart and imagistically street-wise SK8 Girl. Sixteen of the filmmakers contributed to the shoot-to-show Pocket Maxi program of 3 minute super 8 films, with the Benjafield Collective providing an enthusiastic and often amusing live backing track.

The Community Spirits exhibition at historic St Matthews Church, coordinated by visual artists Chantelle Delrue and Gwen Egg and audio designer Geoff Allan, explored the meaning of individual and community spirit. The exhibition featured hundreds of individually painted prayer flags, each with a Peace motif and a temple sculpture developed by the Burmese Buddhist Society beside Jo McCann’s delicate painted-glass mandala tiles.

Palawa Aboriginal Corporation was the setting for an open day celebration of contemporary Aboriginal culture and the screening of Muttonbirding, a continuous journey by video artist Fiona Richardson. This work featured a group of Tasmanian Aboriginals on their annual mutton birding trip and includes a moving sequence that revisits and reinforces the potency of traditional ways.

At the hard rock, hip hop sound stage, Lab A revved it out as part of the multi-arts street party. Professor Psycho’s arresting vocals were backed by the impressive drummer Evil, bassist Komodo and lead guitarist Gede.

A pack of reporters accosted a surprised spectator. Microphones, cameras and sound booms were thrust into the victim’s face. The quirky Jamie Thompson group of local grade 8 drama students interviewed in unison, extracting intimate confessions in a barrage of mindless copycat reporting.

With a section of Main Road covered in piles of junk, enthusiastic teams competed in the loud and live Collex/Recovery Sculpture Slam. Urged on by MC Ian Pidd, the wannabee Robert Klippels managed to create the humorous and bizarre with the winners decided by spectator applause.

Norman Circle, Glenorchy was the hilarious setting for Sight Seeing, one of 4 plays included in Blockbusters Theatre. Metro bus passengers observed residents and supporting actors during 4 circuits of the street. The plot unfolded with the aid of a shepherd searching for his sheep, an inebriated father en route to his daughter’s wedding, a Santa being chased after nicking a video recorder, and the recurring rear view of a streaker. Directed by Jessica Wilson, the delight of Sight Seeing was the involvement of local families in a realistic drama that will be the talk of Glenorchy.

Situated on Tasmania’s West Coast, Queenstown has a reputation as a tough town with a savage pride. On March 22, 70 Queenstown residents crowded into the Mt Lyell Mining & Railway Company General Office. They witnessed their story at the launch of Mining the Imagination, a multi-media CD-Rom depicting Queenstown’s social history and contemporary life, landscape industry and culture. Mining the Imagination is a complex community cultural development project that included an artistic team of 12 and 70 community members involved in making art and photography. The project’s thematic elements were developed in consultation with over 245 community members during the last 2 years. Another initiative of Kickstart Arts, this time with the West Coast Heritage Authority, Mining the Imagination included mine worker portraits by local photographer Dayle Sturgess and video interviews and stills by Matt Newton. The project also featured Martin Walch’s unique animation of the landscape around Mt Lyell. Taken from mining survey photographs, Walch’s images are a testament to the spirit of an extraordinary place. Mining the Imagination aims to deepen understanding of the Queenstown community and to enable connection with a magnificent story.

The Works: Art, Heart and Soul, artistic director Ian Pidd, producers Richard Bladel, Fiona Richardson, City of Glenorchy, May 3-11; Mining the Imagination, producer Richard Bladel, creative director Steve Thomas, animation & imaging Martin Walch, video Matt Newton, editing Raef Sawford, photography Dayle Sturgess, sound design Boo Chapple, design Dean de Vries, programming Chris Reeves, community outreach worker Karen Sturgess, writer/researcher Melinda Standish, Mt Lyell Mining & Railway Company General Office, Queenstown, March 22

Crouching BBoy, Hidden Dreadlocks is an engaging mix, a guided tour of the grassroots of hip hop that comes disguised as a workshop for violent offenders. The structure seems a little creaky at first, functioning less as a frame and more as a dodgy alibi that allows Morganics to yoke together the various elements of the performance. But at the same time, there is a logic to it, since much of the material is loosely anecdotal and draws on his several years experience running hip hop workshops.

We’d been promised an evening of hip hop theatre, and I wasn’t the only one who found that a somewhat uncertain prospect. “Aw, what?” some hulking homeboy asked uneasily at the bar beforehand, “Is it gonna be like a play?” Well, actually, no, not really. Morganics appeared on cue, checking our security passes and ushering us upstairs. Suddenly we’re in Long Bay Gaol, participants in the violence prevention program (and if the numbers tonight are any indication, overcrowding is rife in the NSW penal system). People jam onto windowsills and floor, and there’s a short pause as everyone squeezes together to make room for the performance.

So what is hip hop theatre? A little bit of everything, really. We get a brief lesson in beatboxing that culminates in a simply jawdropping virtuoso demonstration of the possibilities of the art. We’re shown some basic bodyrocking moves (not enough space for us to try it ourselves) mixed up with some documentary video clips on a tiny television that’s really too small to see from the back of the room, but which perfectly fits the hip hop poetic of making do with whatever you’ve been dealt.

Morganics is full of energy, and he and the show move with a nice sense of pace and timing and impressive verbal and physical dexterity. There’s a prepared rap, some freestyling and breaking (the under-subscribed audience participation segments are saved when the littlest bboy grabs the mike and busts a move), and some amazing monologues performed as a range of characters that pack a deep emotional punch. If anything seems slightly downplayed, perhaps it’s the music, but that might be part of the point. The basic premise of the show (maybe of Morganics himself?) is that hip hop isn’t simply a musical genre but something between a culture and a cultural toolkit.

Seen like this, the frame starts to make more sense—for Morganics, hip hop is about empowerment at the community, not the record or clothing company level, and in one sense the show is a personal history of hip hop activism. There’s a layered poignancy here, a sense of frustration, anger and sadness (a kid from one of his workshops yelling “Morganics!” from the back seat of a police car in Redfern) laced with positive action, humour and hope (“never seen so much rayon in the bush”) and if the evening sometimes veers from hip hop theatre to hip hop evangelism, it’s also infectious and deeply real.

Crouching BBoy, Hidden Dreadlocks, Morganics, The Performance Space, Redfern, April 16-26

The scene in the dimly lit Bankstown Old Town Plaza is post-apocalyptic. We wander along a sideshow alley of grim, heavy, metal cages inhabited by a man watching a tired television in one and 2 girls in another playing at mutual assault. A tall mechanical sculpture towers over us, ominously still. A group of young people with a ladder scurry to a nearby store and pinch a fluoro tube from the awning. And so, with the stealing of light, begins Mechanix, a latter-day constructivist paean to collective invention and unalienated labour. It’s a drama of transformation: the sculpture whirs into life, links with the cages (creating opportunities for aerial performance) and, astonishingly, hoists them (with associated mass human effort) to form a giant tower that the performers triumphantly ascend, waving aloft a bright electric light. It’s a transcendent moment, not exactly spiritual, but with the large, singing and dancing and pretty much uniformly attired cast, it is quite un-ironically imbued with Bolshevik good faith. That’s not surprising for a generation that can only hope for work, let alone work that is meaningful and genuinely collaborative.

On the way to liberation there are entertainments both raw and virtuosic, tense moments between individuals and between groups, the display of bizarre machines, the creation of light sculptures, and collective dance and drumming (bringing a new meaning to the term ‘drum machine’). The whole is framed by the intense musical compositions (with some fine guitar and sax) of Liberty Kerr and Reza Achman, Simon Wise’s dramatic interplay of ambient and performer-manipulated light and co-director Joey Ruigrok van der Wervens’ magical mastery of the machinery around which Mechanix is built (and which he constructed with his collaborators). With van der Werven, UTP Artistic Director Alicia Talbot and movement director Lee Wilson have transformed a cast of some 30 young performers into a pretty much coherent and confident team. Anything seems possible in Mechanix, found materials become sculptures, machines and musical instruments, artforms intersect and, thanks to some very lateral resourcefulness and a great sense of communality, a depressed horizontal world rises up with its makers into a tower of light.

The National Institute for Circus Arts (NICA) was formally established in Melbourne in 2000, building on the strength and vitality of Australian circus and physical theatre work. So now kids, you can run away and join the circus, but Mum and Dad will be happy because you’re getting a formal education. Never mind the fact that you spend all day hanging on ropes or balancing tables on your feet. This year, NICA’s first graduating students come leaping and swinging into the public eye with On Edge—like at a graduation, they even have funny hats.

The BMW Edge at Federation Square bears up well. The 3 dimensional exploded geometry of the building has an uncanny resemblance to a circus rig. Its metal angles echo the larger architectural statement of the building itself, and have some of the same functions—these are structures for people to swing from, crawl over and occupy in multiple ways.

Eighteen young performers saunter into the space, an ensemble of clowns—low key, dressed in identical long, red coats. Performers emerge from this red collective to showcase their skills as individuals and groups—with hoops, tissue, balances, trapeze, cloud swing, Chinese poles, juggling—and then return to the ensemble. There is a feeling of support, of people who’ve worked together for years, who know each other’s sweaty armpits intimately.

Much individual virtuosity is evident on stage, with a respectable amount of nerve wracking anxiety and exuberant energy. Many performers demonstrate the fit and focused presence of hardened circus professionals. This toughness and confidence is frequently evident in the performers’ backgrounds in gymnastics and martial arts. Yet skills without art are simply the Olympic Games—the trick with this form is to do something more.

On Edge is more interesting than a showcase for a series of neat tricks. Gail Kelly (who has directed youth companies as well as Circus Oz and The Party Line) and Celia White (a performer with Legs on the Wall, The Party Line, and now directing) bring to the work a hint of their experience of Club Swing, allowing a natural overlap between youth, physicality, sexuality, thrills and loud music. It all reflects the crossover of circus in Australia into club scenes—and club scenes back into circus.

Further links emerge in Lynton Carr’s phenomenal turntable work. If inner city club/circus could talk, this is how it would sound. Carr’s high energy musical shifts and scratching work feed into the live performance. It’s sometimes hard to know who to watch in this dialogue between bodies and sound. Carr throws in everything—from the flashy brilliance of Carmen, through 1950s schmaltz and into the mindless doof doof bass rhythms of house—scratched together in a live interaction with the energy of what is happening on stage.

On Edge, director Gail Kelly, assistant director Celia White, lighting George Kulikovskis, costumes Jill Johanson, turntable composition Lynton Carr, riggers Derek Ives, Finton Mahony, producer Andrew Bleby, National Institute of Circus Arts; BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne, April 10-27

The day before we put this edition of RealTime to bed, Senator Richard Alston commenced an astonishing assault on the ABC, charging it with anti-American bias in its reporting of the Iraq War, and threatening funding cuts. This is one of the most alarming government incursions on journalistic responsibility in recent memory in this country. But Alston was not alone in this attack on liberal democracy and its cultural manifestations.

The next day, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (May 29) used composer Jon Rose as its prime target in an attack on art funding, citing Arts Minister Rod Kemp’s caution to the Australia Council about “exposing itself to ridicule by handing out grants for questionable projects.” The Telegraph chose the wrong target. Rose is an established artist with an international reputation. He has had a popular success with the Adlib project (a marvellous archiving of everyday Australian music making) with the ABC and with his Great Fences of Australia performances in the Victorian Arts Centre for the 2002 Melbourne Festival. There are many grant projects that are likely to be beyond the comprehension of Minister Kemp and the Telegraph, either because they are difficult to interpret (and all too easy to mock when taken out of context) or they are simply beyond Kemp and some journalists’ arts experience. This does not make those projects or the artists undertaking them fools or opportunists.

Earlier the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board funding of the Escape from Woomera computer game hit the front page of the The Sydney Morning Herald. The report was an opportunistic waving of a red rag at the Ruddock bully. Melanie Swalwell puts the event and computer gaming in context.

In the security-building wake of September 11, authoritarian governments—whose only notion of freedom is the free market—can make the most of opportunities to censor the media, the arts and, with workplace agreements, tighten the reins on universities.

‘Arm’s length’ used to be the operating principle for government relations with the Australia Council. Along with freedom of the press, it needs to be restated and confirmed.

The women’s pages

Without any effort on our part, women writers have always made up 50% of the writers for RealTime and the work of women artists is always strongly represented in our pages. In this informal feature survey of recent and forthcoming works, our articles, reviews and interviews reveal female artists still grappling with, if often overcoming, some of the restraints on careers, craft and vision that have long dogged them, or which, like motherhood and working with men, are part of the dialectic. However, whether in the intricate re-shaping of the vision of support organisations, the extended inclusiveness of festival gatherings or the expanded breadth of material and means (the engagement with new media, with the technology of science, with zoology, anthropology and cultural history), there’s a strong sense of expansive views and new vistas.

Dramaturgy and screenplay writing now

The fortunes of dramaturgy in Australian theatre have been mixed since the early 1980s, doubtless fueled by an imagined tension between British pragmatism and European folly. That opinion was still in evidence at the second of the Dramaturgies conferences held at the University of Melbourne in April, but was outweighed by growing interest in what dramaturgy can offer as it becomes an increasingly integral part of Australian theatre, dance and opera. In this edition we have a report on the first of the 2 Dramaturgies events, an online transcript of the first event, and an interview with playwright Ben Ellis and dramaturg Louise Fox as they work on Ellis’ play about Australians and refugees as part of the STC’s Blueprints program. As well, screenplay writer Blake Ayshford reports on his and fellow writers’ experience of the NSW Film & Television Office’s script development program, Aurora.. There’ll be more in our Dramaturgy Now series in RT 56.

New editors

It’s a great pleasure to welcome to our editorial team new Contributing Editors, Mick Broderick (WA), Mike Walsh (SA), Danni Zuvela (QLD), Mary Ann Hunter (QLD) and OnScreen Commissioning Editor, Daniel Edwards (NSW, see OnScreen Editorial). RT

Ross Gibson
Seven Versions of an Australian Badland,
University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2002
ISBN: 0702233498

Seven Versions of an Australian Badland is a creative non-fiction that’s easy to read, and painful to think about. The book is a mixed platter, that superimposes 7 takes on the collective badlands of the colonial psyche generated by the jagged road from Rockhampton to Mackay in Central Queensland, known as ‘The Horror Stretch.’ Queensland’s mixture of sunny availability and dark desperation provides a telling backdrop. It’s both an advertiser’s daydream and a sinkhole where unassimilable events of white settler history congeal like fat in a pan.

No stonehearted sociologist, Gibson throws together the skill of the historian, the forensic detail of the crime reporter, the narrative hooks of the filmmaker and the rich resources and dark wonder of childhood memory. The analysis of this historical crime scene joins a growing body of work that could be labelled psychogeography, a form of study that makes a Möbius strip of fact and myth, real and unreal, place and the unconscious. What Iain Sinclair does for London in Lights Out for the Territory, Gibson does for the blitzed out brigalow country of Central Queensland. The visible country or city could be the object of sociological enquiry: population shifts, consumption patterns, and economic reconstructions. Much of psychogeography addresses the invisible and to understand it requires a suspension of the literal and routine. To advance on it requires the imagination, rather than surveyor’s poles or trigonometric equations.

For example, Germany’s psychogeography might be found in Anselm Kiefer’s paintings in which eighteenth century optimism is buried in lead and sand and propellers, where the landscapes are set alight, and the letters of the German past burn back to ground zero in order to make ‘Germanness’ available again to the post-World War II imagination.

To this genre you could add the images found in Tracey Moffatt’s Up in the Sky series. Overqualified as protest art, there’s something powerful in these distantly lyrical photos set in the rural hinterlands of Australia—the submerged narrative of the Stolen Generation told sideways, like wisps of songs on a desert wind. Then there’s Gordon Bennett’s Inland Sea. The mismatched representational categories of the Indigenous and non-indigenous territories colliding to expose the hauntedness widely sensed in the pictorial spaces of Australia’s image field.

Likewise beneath the sparkling facades of bank lobbies and tizzed-up heritage sites, lie Juan Davila’s infernal portraits of corporate and sexual follies, or Adam Cullen’s ringbarking of conventional painting where no material is too dumb (marker pens, biros, aerosol cans), no image too mean (a tree stump, a pair of underpants), and no notion too fucked up (an extraterrestrial black being sodomised by a clownish member of the Ku Klux Klan with a ‘spiritual petrol bowser’) to be beyond further debasement on canvas.

But here, written in a prose to savour, Gibson picks apart the bones of Capricornia where local landmarks include names like the Styx River, Charon Point, Grave Gully and the Berserkers Range. While it’s pitilessly there as a physical place, it’s also this floating thing in the unconscious. It’s both mileage on the odometer and a nightmarish idea. It can be seen with the eyes as well as the hackles of the neck.

Brisbane-born, Gibson begins by evoking childhood memories of holiday trips through the terrain staring from the car’s rear-window: “Each time the road bent at a special angle, the slanted sun showed me columns of steam twisting up, man-sized in pursuit of the car. Five or six of them stalking us for a few heartbeats…” At the blurred edges of consciousness you dream a little bit of the road, and this bit of scrubby floodplain remains a haunted place, a site where white man’s hubris has grown way out of hand. In trying to figure out why, Gibson’s “quest becomes an inquest.”

With each of the 7 ‘versions’ Gibson uncovers buried historical layers. Violently gutted by colonialism, and scorched by successive generations of settlers and migrants, this malevolent landscape conjures Old Testament ferocities. (“Static seared the preacher’s voice occasionally as the transmission bounced and scrambled off the distant ridges.”) The grotesque extremes of climate—convulsive cyclones, apocalyptic floods and droughts—seem to be the meteorological correlative of the greed, brutal homicides, nonchalant racism, suspicion and betrayal that boils away there. There are dead bodies everywhere, not least the 1869 massacre of an estimated 300 Aborigines in the so-called Goulbolba dispersal.

Gibson’s account reminds us that the way we explain ourselves, our favourite story, is a passion play where the European confronts the ‘savage’ in the desert. Injun, outlaw, black, heathen, infidel. Hence the appeal of the classic Western: Who makes the law? What is the order? Where is the frontier? Who are the good guys? We like to conjure the celebrated and enlightened gentlemen of the colonies solemnly composing a constitution and a nation (Sir Robert Garran, Henry Parkes) in Canberra. When really it was the rogues, the adventurers, missionaries, landboomers, traders, hunters and Aborigine-fighters—like Frederick Wheeler who Gibson anatomises in this book—who killed and were killed until they mastered the bush or desert. The blacks always personifying the demonic aspects of the wilderness in the white imagination.

Along the way Gibson trawls documents and oral histories and traces acts of random desperation in a spooky echo chamber: Disappearing hitchhikers. Travellers shot by the roadside in their sleeping bags. A missing 14-year-old girl. A couple of English holidaymakers shot at by snipers. A 26-year-old Aboriginal woman sexually assaulted, murdered and dumped in the Fitzroy River. A man found slumped, still seatbelted, in the front seat of his Toyota Celica shot dead through the head with a .22 calibre rifle. Two weeks later his wife, also shot through the head, is found in a creek, bloated and sun-broiled.

“Rootlessness and poverty-stricken itinerancy; the imposition of imported law; the geography of vastness, deluge, heat and erosion; the rural culture of firearms; the mind-altering pressures of isolation; nervous, nocturnal predation.” More than a report card on vexing societal malaise, and more than just a roadmap to his own neuroses, Gibson’s investigation is a stairwell to the basement in the Australian psyche. The urge to explain and explore those feelings shaped by the apprehension of the darkness in that basement counters our New World tendency to forget and numb out. Even though we tear through The Horror Stretch in our shiny dentless cars, it remains a metaphysical antiplace where memory is boundless and a sense of loss never quite disappears. Gibson revisits the unremembered dead in the basement in order to learn from them.

Death creates problems for society. On the one hand we need to push the dead away. On the other, we need to keep them alive. Conventionally we console ourselves with a hundredweight of Victorian statuary and bad calendar mottos. At the level of the national psyche though, there needs to be reparation if we are to grow beyond the trauma. The abnegations (the Prime Minister’s inability to apologise to our Indigenous populations) deny information about ourselves, our own arcane culture: savage nobles at the heart of whiteness. Many other cultures seem to have useful ways of dealing with the afterlife. On which point, Paolo Portoghesi notes, “It is the loss of memory, not the cult of memory that will make us prisoners of the past.”

Again some contemporary examples reveal the strange homoeopathy of dealing with the afterlife: Ramangining artist Jimmy Wululu’s entry for a recent Biennale of Sydney was plain white sand for cleansing rituals after the death of a member of the community. The sand is sung over, danced on and destroyed at the end of the ceremony. Ximena Zomosa marked the absence of her dead mother with oversized skirts and furniture outlined in human hair. Colombian-born Doris Salcedo’s Altrabiliaros marked the absence of the disappeared in their family member’s donation of a shoe put in an altar and covered with translucent animal skin held to the plaster by surgical sutures. Here wounding and healing are one.

When asked whom he wrote for, the German playwright Heiner Müller claimed he wrote for the dead. The dead are in the majority. It is probably unwise to mention this to the marketing departments of our publishers or gallery dealers or theatre boards. But the figures are persuasive. Number of human beings = 6 billion. Number of human beings ever alive = 100 billion. Writing for the dead is writing for the majority.

The dead are all around. Dead times and places return to life; the dead walk again. Gibson’s Seven Versions… is a riveting read, and another way of learning from, listening and writing to the dead. It’s a book that reminds us that artists and writers can’t change the world. They can give you an inkling of how and why and where things might change. They tell us how, by creating the imaginative space—the space of desire—we can reclaim in psychic terms what we’ve done to ourselves in the West.

Ross Gibson is currently Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Technology Sydney. He has curated the Remembrance program (Mar 21-Aug 31) for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where he was Creative Director until 2002.

Christos Tsiolkas
The Devil’s Playground
Currency Press & ScreenSound Australia, 2002
ISBN: 0868196711

Christos Tsiolkas’ introduction to film came while acting as a translator for his movie-fan Greek mother. But it didn’t take long for the precocious inner-city Melbourne boy to fix his tastes and branch out on his own, frequenting the inner-city art house circuit, under-age, undercapitalised but addicted to cinema.

He first saw Fred Schepisi’s The Devil’s Playground at the age of 12, during its 1978 theatrical release, and somewhere between the opening titles, water shots, Simon Burke, the wanking scene, Nick Tate, and Bruce Smeaton’s closing score—Tsiolkas’ life turned on its heel.

Tsiolkas’ entertaining account of his initial and subsequent viewings of this classic Australian film is the first release in a new series from Currency Press and ScreenSound Australia. At each sitting he sifts through the context of the experience, teasing out meaning and looking deeper and harder at exactly what went off in his head 24 years ago.

I don’t believe that past experiences can be recalled and remain true to the original—the act of remembering unavoidably alters recollections. We change history daily to form our own narratives and Tsiolkas’ book is as much about this as anything Schepisi intended. I don’t say this facetiously. To discover how The Devil’s Playground unfolded in the mind of 12-year Greek Australian boy, then a 20-year old gay man, then a 30-something professional writer, is to dip into another’s life in a very engaging way. It’s as truthful a reading of a film as I could hope for.

It begins in 1978 with Tsiolkas regularly trekking off to the movies with his mother, in a pact of mutual benefit. She gets a translator and regular movie companion, and he gets access to adult films and a newfound enthusiasm for Clark Gable. Then one summer’s day, lured by a trailer for The Devil’s Playground depicting boys having showers and a craggy Nick Tate, the young Tsiolkas enters the cinema on his own.

In the darkness, Tom Allen—a bed wetting, masturbatory, 13-year old schoolboy with a smile that will take him halfway around the world (played by Burke with such immediacy it’s almost documentary)—looks back at Tsiolkas. This is where it all changed. Movies, for Tsiolkas, would never again be limited to mere fantasy or entertainment. In the raw gaze levelled from one boy to the other, cinema was promoted from an interest to a passion and Tsiolkas experienced an elevated expectation of what it should deliver.

It’s now 1989 and Tsiolkas’ second viewing of The Devil’s Playground involves a dinner party conversation, a rented video and a cigarette afterwards. Was it as good as the first time? Well the focus has shifted. The boy is now a man, living with his lover and, having inherited some of his father’s political urgency and a raft of his own generation’s causes, taking on the world.

This time it’s the film’s adult priests that draw the 20-year old’s eye. Who are they? The film is set in 1957 in Victoria, so what do they think about the split in the ALP, the rise of the Democratic Labor Party, Doc Evatt and that prick, Bob Santamaria. Their silence is a void in the story.

The film is still good (even though it’s on video) but he thinks Schepisi’s 1978 film of Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith is better, harder, braver.

Tsiolkas’ third viewing happens on a cold day in 2000, back in a Melbourne cinema. He leaves troubled by Waite’s (Tom’s friend) lack of resolution in the final act but this is forgotten on overhearing a conversation between 2 young men who’ve also seen the film. Sitting in close proximity to Tsiolkas in the pub they dismiss The Devil’s Playground as plotless, private school rubbish. Tsiolkas has to fight an urge not to scream at them.

By this time Tsiolkas has seen his novel Loaded made into a movie [directed by Anna Kokkinos]. As an accomplished storyteller and an industry player, he knows enough to lament a national cinema that has fallen short of his expectations.

He began his journey with the wide-eyed Tom Allen. Has he now become the Teutonic Brother Victor? Tsiolkas refrains from calling the men in the pub “Lara Croft loving cock-suckers” and instead catches the tram home.

In conclusion, Tsiolkas writes the scenes he’s imagined into The Devil’s Playground over the years. This is my favourite part of the book, especially where Tom gets to fuck Nick Tate.

I sat through 3 years of cinema studies where every Thursday night we would gather for a screening of an important or significant film and discuss it afterwards. The human brain is a wonderful thing, weighing on average just over 2 pounds, wrinkled like a walnut, with the colour and consistency of porridge. Yet somehow the interactions of its ten billion cells produce all that we call the mind—our capacity to think, hope, believe, imagine and speak lyrically about films for longer than the time it took to watch them. In this task Christos Tsiolkas is funny, smart, insightful and occasionally crude (usually with Nick Tate in mind). I find myself turned on afresh to Padre Padrone, Pasolini, Pauline Kael, Iranian cinema, the evils of the DLP and most of all the potential of cinema to excite. Tsiolkas would make a great dinner-movie date but if he can’t make it, read the book and rent the video.

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of novels The Jesus Man and Loaded, adapted into the screenplay Head On. His plays include Dead Caucasians, and he edits the journal Refo with George Papaellinas.

Michael James Rowlands’ films, The Existentialist Cowboy’s Last Stand (also a book) and Flying Over Mother, were both nominated for AFI awards. He is the author of Ten Drawings of the Jungle, and his new work Life Advice for High Plains Drifters will be published by Cowboy Books in October.

The Australian Screen Classics series is edited by Jane Mills. Next are Adrian Martin on the Mad Max films and Louis Nowra on Walkabout.

Paul Carter
Repressed Spaces, The Poetics of Agoraphobia
Reaktion Books, London, 2002
ISBN: 1861891288

It is impossible to tell of all the issues (about living and making the world) that Paul Carter’s book Repressed Spaces, The Poetics of Agoraphobia approaches, but what he makes clear, in a twisting, turning, rising, falling way, through subtle attention, is that our thinking toward and building of public spaces is crucial to people’s sense of themselves and others in the world—their relationships with the outside of their lives, in terms of structures and subjects; the potential for meetings and unforeseen arrangements or groupings is endlessly effected by the concept of ‘the approach’ itself, or as Carter writes, “…the spatialisation of approaches.”

Carter seems to work/write ‘in the gap between 2 strides’, or in the suspended moment of the leap—a leap ashore, as in Maupassant’s La Mouche that brings about her miscarriage, or the jangled leaps, skips and jumps of Rilke’s man in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge trying to do the simple thing of walking on the city street, but with a worn will that can no longer keep agoraphobia at bay.

It could be that each of us is an agoraphobe, if not chronically, then from time to time, momentarily. Faced with the spaces made in our name (the public) we are paralysed by them, or convulsed, confused, repelled, afraid, and not by their chaos or undulations, but by their smooth geometries made for always moving ‘traffic.’ As street-walkers we twitch, inwardly, we stutter and stammer—we act as solitary singular crowds, as if dreaming of ‘the festival’, or ‘the march’—of the fact that urban spaces are where ‘people take to the streets’, and are places for encounter—where people show-off, walk, run, pause, act-up, etc.

Carter’s writing is like watching flashes of light, like driving in a car on a bright day through an avenue of trees; he moves like the agoraphobic, with a trembling, hovering gait, touching the surfaces of others’ writings about the agoraphobe like an impressionistic painter wanting to show the strange beauty and instability of the street, its abstract and infinite appearance—whether recognised or not. This making of the work comes about slowly, within the speedy mood, and is of a complex texture (psychoanalytic, philosophic, literary, cinematic, cultural, architectural) that slips between and across shades and tones of ‘agora’ (assembly and place of assembly); glances and glimmers accumulate, dissipate, and return like hauntings to ‘impress’ themselves a little sharper on the reader.

The agoraphobe, as she/he attempts to negotiate the built environment, makes the horror or danger (or even the painful pleasure) of ‘the street’ show itself (come alive)—whether as a real body moving in space, or as a photograph, painting, print, cartoon, or as writing (Rilke’s man on the street), or as architecture (“…the ‘blindingly intense light’ of the first void in the Berlin Jewish Museum was [says Daniel Libeskind, its architect] ‘inspired by the tale of a woman. Confined in a railway wagon, on her way to Auschwitz, she saw a light through the grating. That was all she could see. Maybe it was no more than lamps in a tunnel, but she believed it to be clouds, stars, sunshine’.”)

The agoraphobe’s (suffering) role in society is rich and crucial; essential, in a sense, to the shape of how things are, in their fleetingness, or in their persistence, like Freud’s (repressed) agoraphobia (not only a space, but a whole world; millions of words about why we are what we are). This gives Carter reason to revisit the Oedipus complex; Oedipus becomes the limping agoraphobe feeling his way in the dark, Hermes at his side; and Freud takes the whole journey to the end of the book, strolling and striding and making-up stories, sort of banging his stick on the ground so to speak.

What Carter does, as he ducks and weaves and plunges like so many of his agoraphobic examples, is draw you toward the amazing myriad possibilities of the surfaces of the street as witnessed by the agoraphobe, and as potentially there for the agoraphobe in us, if we follow-the-lead. Carter writes:

He shows the follower timely openings unnoticed before. The man in the street, relieved of the phantasmagoria of shop windows and the cinema of passing vehicles, attends to surfaces, textures, slopes and their coefficients of friction. …If the one following feels that he is moving as if in a trance or that he is blindfolded, it is all the better. In the blinding, as he becomes in touch with his surrounding, he measures space differently.

The straight geometries block our dreaming rather than opening out our need to dream—they regulate by the razed laws of our repressed convolutions, which restrict our possibilities to be otherwise, to be multiple and porous.

The idea that one is continually on the edge of falling, of being off-balance, of losing one’s footing out there on the street, the fact that it takes a great energy to be upright, to keep walking, to keep oneself out of the cracks and crevasses, away from the beautiful smashed windows and rusting grates, is unnerving. Carter cites Le Corbusier: “…one risks one’s life at every step. If you happened to slip, if sudden giddiness made you fall…” And yet it is the ragged edges of cracks and holes, their very details, that evoke the associations and threads (where time appears) that make urban spaces other than they seem; it’s these which can stop one’s headlong rush, and like Freud’s long winding night walks, thought might move, however slightly, toward “Benjamin’s ‘art of straying’.”

It’s hard to hold this book together; it’s a book which speaks an ‘agora’ condition, it is an assembly, it produces a dazzling, difficult space where one can trip into the gutter, or spend untimely time with a blue arrow on a footpath; it honours the suffering of the agoraphobe, the disorientation; the agora condition though opens up onto another orientation, another way to be with the world:

Agoraphobia, it seems, can be a characteristic of speaking and writing. Smoothing over discontinuities implies a dread of gaps opening up in the chain of logic, a fear perhaps of thinking and acting freely. This dread arises because those gaps are imagined as abysses or voids. But they are not: they are simply where the ground is rough, over-tracked, ambiguously delineated, humid or mist-streaked. It is a mistake to step over them without taking notice of what is there.

Paul Carter is Professorial Research Fellow at The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne and author of The Road to Botany Bay and The Lie of the Land.

Tofts, Jonson and Cavallaro eds, Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History

Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro eds
Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History
Power Publications, Sydney; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2000
ISBN 1864874910

In the words of senior editor Darren Tofts, “cyberculture has been a long time coming.” That’s the premise of this anthology, in which texts from philosophy, literature and computer science are reread as premonitions of our contemporary “becoming informatic.” The authors constitute a star-studded lineup of cybercultural theorists and commentators, with a substantial Australian contingent that reflects both the origins of this collection and the prominence of local thought in this scene. We have, to name a few, Evelyn Fox Keller, Gregory Ulmer, Margaret Wertheim and Mark Dery, as well as McKenzie Wark, Scott McQuire, Zoë Sofoulis and Damien Broderick.

The result is a very substantial volume in both quantity and quality, with 18 chapters, split into 4 sections. The first takes on cyborg subjectivity, AI and a-life; the second addresses virtuality and cyberspace; the final section turns to utopias, dystopias, and the future. The penultimate section is a collection of images and statements from high profile new media artists, which though perfectly readable (and good-looking), seems out of place. It’s poorly integrated with the surrounding arguments, and the material from the artists is not new or substantial. It might be that this section exists partly to acquit the support of the Australia Council and the AFC, who helped fund the project; still, it doesn’t work.

The wordy substance of the book, on the other hand, is engaging, challenging, and rewarding. Section One, I Robot: AI, A-life and Cyborgs, works through texts from sources as diverse as Mary Shelley, Alan Turing, and Philip K Dick, yet emerges with a multifaceted consensus on life and subjectivity as complex, dynamic, and machinic. Following N Katherine Hayles’ lead, this is the posthuman, according to cybercultural studies. Catherine Waldby’s account of Shelley’s Frankenstein sets aside the familiar “apocalyptic or phobic” readings to argue that this early 19th century tale is an examination of the confronting ethics of machinic life. Victor Frankenstein is faced not only with the horrifying, non-human autonomy of his creation, but by “his potential resemblance to an invention.” Rather than a fable on the perils of the technologies of life, the more fundamental issue is life as, somehow, technology: living being as machine. Waldby runs Donna Haraway’s cyborg alongside Frankenstein to suggest the productivity of a non-oppositional, connective, posthuman conception of the relations of subjects and objects, and the embracing of our shared, foundational “monstrosity.” This material machinics is historically grounded in Evelyn Fox Keller’s chapter on Norbert Weiner and Cybernetics, which in fact leads us through early biology and embryology, and the central problem of the organisation of the organism. Keller shows how cybernetics drew on the dynamic, organicist models of a biology that was entirely out of fashion in the postwar years of its emergence. Despite its limited successes at the time, the dynamic systems of second-order cybernetics are now very much in favour; and the organism now is, as Keller says, “a nonlinear, far-from-equilibrium system.” Machinic life and Haraway’s cyborg return in Zoë Sofoulis’ chapter, which makes a very clear survey of the impact of Haraway’s “Manifesto” in the humanities and the arts, while giving a useful gloss on this “cult text.”

Other subjectivities emerge here too, besides the ubiquitous cyborg. Elisabeth Wilson makes a close and very learned reading of Alan Turing, in person and text. She seeks to counter interpretations of Turing’s conceptions of machine intelligence as disembodied, asocial, and “emotionally puerile.” Instead, Turing emphasised imagination, surprise and affect, aspects which crystallise around the figure of the child, a self-forming subjectivity which is once again the focus of contemporary AI research (in particular that of Rodney Brooks and the MIT Robot Lab). A more radical departure from the material dynamics of the cyborg is Erik Davis’ opening chapter on Descartes’ Meditations. “Synthetic Meditations: Cogito in the Matrix” argues that despite Descartes now resembling a “punching bag”, assaulted from all sides for his dualistic model of subjectivity, the cogito, the incorporeal “I” who thinks, remains as a splinter, lodged in our cultural consciousness. Davis rereads Descartes to point out that the cogito is not only a reified “I”, but a procedure for reflexively interrogating the self, opening an “epistemological void” which has a particular currency. Davis’ argument escapes summation but it draws in The Matrix, Slavoj Zizek and mystical gnosticism, and ultimately returns us to the subject as “a void, a not-knowing.”

Most dazzling in this section however is a sprawling, audacious tract from Samuel J Umland and Karl Wessel, which takes as its source text Philip K Dick’s 1976 essay “Man, Android and Machine.” Setting excerpts from the essay against contemporary neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and AI, the authors show Dick’s prescience, but also make some striking and unsettling arguments. In short: that technoscience manifests a kind of autistic turn in human thought, biased towards objects, universal knowledge, specialisation and regularity; yet ironically the postmodern terrain that it has generated is illegible for the majority, with an evolved-in bias towards over-ascribing agency, and explanatory storytelling on that basis. This gap, they warn, may be apocalyptic.

In the section on virtual space the source texts are largely the usual suspects—Plato’s Cave, the Renaissance Ars Memoria, De Chardin’s noosphere, Gibson’s Neuromancer—though one of the most striking and enjoyable chapters is McKenzie Wark’s take on a lesser known source, Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt.” Wark uses Bradbury’s dark fable to propose a notion of the virtual as post-representational, the “too real”, a generative code engine which doesn’t mimic the real, but works on its own terms. While Wark makes a close reading, others use the texts as departure points for various trajectories, which ultimately destabilise the thematic of the section. Gregory Ulmer’s “Reality Tables: Virtual Furniture” leaves Plato behind early on in a dense and, for this reader, incoherent play on textual tables, language, literacy, and Elvis’ pelvis. Similarly Donald Theall springs off De Chardin and into his influence on McLuhan and especially James Joyce; Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari are also prominent. In another intricate paper Theall figures Joyce as a visionary of a polysemic “chaosmos” of media convergence, and the human becoming-machinic.

Australian philosopher John Sutton is more straightforward in setting the memory techniques of the Renaissance in the wider context of the exogram, or controlled, externalised and objective memory, and thus “the cognitive life of things.” Sutton’s ultimate argument is that a study of memory must ultimately acknowledge its cyborg-like transversality, its involvement in material things and lived time, as well as its interior spaces. Sutton references generously, providing an excellent resource for anyone with an interest in theories of memory. Scott McQuire sticks close, comparatively, to Gibson’s Neuromancer, and the crucial role of the modern metropolis (or in fact its luminous image) in anchoring Gibson’s overquoted coinage. Rather than a slippery non-place, this seminal cyberspace is in fact a way of grasping the informational reality which underpins the ungraspable excess of mega-urban experience: it offers the adept user the city as a legible “field of data.” McQuire is ultimately critical of Gibson’s return to the comfort of heroic, transcendent agency, in an era where the social relations that shape that agency are being radically altered by networked media technologies.

In the final section, a succession of past futures are examined, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, which Margaret Wertheim uses to mirror the 2 dominant versions of cyberspace utopia: the democratic virtual community (Rheingold and Esther Dyson), and the age of the “dot.com barons”, who are echoed by the technoscientific patriarchy ruling Bacon’s Atlantis. In a similar manner John Potts considers Marinetti’s hyperactive visions of a machine future, and sees them coming true in the non-place of cyberspace, which shares Marinetti’s ideals of speed, progress, intelligence, and anarchic individualism. In a more conventionally historical piece, Bruce Mazlish makes a fascinating study of Samuel Butler, in particular the projection of mechanical evolution in his Erewhon and other texts. Mazlish explains the genesis of these ideas through a detailed account of Butler’s connections with other intellects of his time, in particular Charles Darwin.

Finally this section turns towards more modern futures from Arthur C Clarke, Alvin Toffler, and Vernor Vinge. Russell Blackford gives a sympathetic account of Clarke’s influential futurism, and Australian sci-fi author Damien Broderick compresses his book on an accelerating technofuture he calls “the Spike” down to essay length (in the guise of a reading of Vernor Vinge’s notion of the “singularity”). Most contentious here is probably “futures studies” scholar Richard Slaughter, who tackles Toffler’s Future Shock, analyses its practical failings, and makes the case for futures studies as a discipline. Most striking in this context is his sidelining of cyberculture as a useful way to think about the future: he argues that it overplays technology, while tending towards nihilism. Of course nihilism can be fun, especially the clever, irony-soaked variety proffered by Mark Dery in the book’s retrofuturist “Coda”, which takes on that icon of the Jet Age, Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at New York’s JFK airport. For Dery this is a symbol of lost or failed futures, but it also suggests modern air travel as a metaphor for contemporary society—anxious, dangerous, and comprising a mixture of increasingly autonomous machines with all-too-fallible humans.

This collection is a considerable achievement. To be parochial for a moment, it will boost the already high profile of Australian thinkers in this area, and with MIT Press as a co-publisher it will be distributed widely. Yet while its editorial premise has been successful in amassing high quality material, I came away with one general reservation. The focus on “prefiguring” cyberculture is fine, yet what is too often taken for granted here is exactly what that “cyberculture” is. It seems to have coalesced around a handful of familiar tropes: the cyborg or machinic organism, cyberspace, the virtual, the posthuman, the future. The most interesting material here finds new ways through these notions, yet only very occasionally is there a glimpse of what cyberculture might be becoming, what its emergent properties are; and if cyberculture is, as Tofts argues, about a becoming informatic in the “perpetual present tense”, then this is a significant omission. I may be asking something that this volume never promised. In any case, more pragmatically, we must not allow cybercultural theory to divert our attention from the myriad actual cultural practices (gaming, browsing, blogging, SMSing…) which are technoculture itself.

Darren Tofts is Chair of Media Communications at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His publications include Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Interface Books, 1998). Writer and lecturer Annemarie Jonson’s book on Artificial Life is due to be published by Routledge in 2003. Alessio Cavallaro is Producer and Curator of New Media Projects at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne.

Andrew Murphie and John Potts
Culture and Technology
Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2003
ISBN: 0333929276

Over the past 5 years, the Federal government has released a number of key policy documents relating to Australia’s place in a global information economy. The Strategic Framework for the Information Economy is one important example. This document outlines the Federal Government’s vision of a “wired Australia” and paves the way for billions of dollars to be spent on infrastructure and services that the Government hopes will secure Australia’s place in the global information revolution. Unfortunately, what’s missing from many of these ‘visionary’ documents is any analysis of how the significant changes in our work and play wrought by new communications technologies impact on individuals and communities. The rhetoric of ‘revolution’ used by governments and policy advisors seems to suggest a profound and sudden shift in our relationship to technology, ignoring the effects that changes in technologies produced within and by culture have on cultural formations.

One key difficulty faced by analysts, critics, academics and the public when thinking through the relationship between culture and technology in our current circumstances is that it also seems to exceed the current moment. As critic Peter Lunenfeld says, we seem to be living in a state of future present. That is, the future appears to be alive in the present moment, happening simultaneously. We are always arriving too late. Every time we stop to learn a new version of the software, a new version is released that exceeds our knowledge of the first. While a great deal is written on the subject of culture and technology, there always seems to be more being written as we speak. Andrew Murphie and John Potts’ Culture and Technology comes as a timely incursion into this somewhat fluid and ephemeral field. Primarily a survey of key issues relating to culture and technology, this book operates as a kind of pause in the flow of information about information and new technologies, reminding us that much in the past is illuminating in relation to the present and the future.

Culture and Technology begins with several useful and clear definitions of its key themes—technology and technique, culture and the intersection between these. The authors then canvass a number of important theoretical frameworks. These are often contradictory and discontinuous, ranging from what the authors describe as the technologically deterministic approaches of Baudrillard and McLuhan, to the cultural materialism of Raymond Williams and on to Deleuze, Guattari and Virilio. The breadth of the frameworks allows the reader to get a sense of the very multidisciplinary nature of the field of inquiry.

Having established a ‘scene’ in which the discussion of culture and technology can occur, the authors then examine key topics. These include the relationship between art and technology; digital aesthetics; science fiction; the cyborg; artificial intelligence; war, commerce and the nation-state; and machine ecologies. Much of the material presented will be familiar to readers interested in any of these subjects. For example, the chapter on the body and technology, “Cyborgs: the Body, Information and Technology”, examines Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, Manual De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones and N Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, standard texts for anyone critically interested in the cyborg. What distinguishes Culture and Technology however is the straightforward manner in which the authors present these important ideas to the reader without simplifying what are often complex arguments. Though not overtly didactic in tone, the authors have produced an excellent textbook while still maintaining a scholarly and critical edge to their writing.

In the final chapter Murphie and Potts provide the most explicit sense of their position on the subject. While they ostensibly relate accounts of how we might live with the virtual in an increasingly networked society, their process of selection is telling and offers an almost unconscious invocation of how to read the book. Discussing Guattari’s machine ecologies, the authors note that the “regular way of differentiating between technologies and life is that technologies are ‘allopoietic’…[and that] living things are normally considered as ‘autopoietic’.” [The former are dependent systems, the latter autonomous. Eds] They go on to note that in Guattari’s formulation of the machinic assemblage, there is always a relation between these states. Like the internet, our communities, and even ourselves, “we…are all autopoietic and allopoietic machines.” As an assemblage, then, Culture and Technology is an autopoietic and allopoietic machine. It is a book that deals in a focused and lucid way with many complex ideas, however it’s also interactive in the sense of being woven together from ideas outside of itself.

Given the multidisciplinary nature of the material the authors explore, Culture and Technology should be very much at home on the required reading lists of courses in philosophy, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, new media and political economy. However, it’s a pity that it is, like much scholarly publishing today, overpriced. Potts’ and Murphie’s prose is clean and user-friendly, as all good code should be. As such, it should also provide the general reader with an accessible and intelligent introduction to these fields as they relate to culture and technology.

Andrew Murphie is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of New South Wales. John Potts is Senior Lecturer in Media at Macquarie University.

Geert Lovink
Uncanny Networks. Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002
ISBN: 0262122510

Have you ever been to a party where every conversation was interesting? Didn’t think so, but as host, Geert Lovink, the founder of Nettime, might just pull it off. Lovink’s latest book, Uncanny Networks, is a rollercoaster ride of discussion that ranges from art to politics, techno tribes to dotcom IPOs, radical politics to futuristic fantasy.

What’s even more intriguing about Lovink’s compendium is its geographic range. Although several interviews were conducted via e-mail, a stunning number were face to face experiences in various corners of the globe. (I’d love to see this guy’s frequent flier account.) Lovink leaps from Sydney to Linz, Finland to Kassel, Taiwan to Amsterdam, powerfully linking the virtual to the actual with serious discussions about political and cultural scenarios in Los Angeles, Taiwan, Albania, Bulgaria, India and other parts of the world. This is almost a Lonely Planet guide for media thinkers and practitioners.

Naturally, as with any party, not every conversation will be to your taste. In fact there are a few that are rather dull, but even those have high points, if only by raising issues to disagree with. Writer Susan George describes herself as “alarmist” and proves it when she says, “For the first time in history, we do not have much time ahead of us.” In his introduction to a rather laborious discourse on cinema and politics in which Slavoj Zizek goes so far as to compare David Lynch with Leni Riefenstahl, Lovink accurately points out that Zizek “seemed to be criticising film without ever having seen one.”

Lovink rather cheekily introduces his book by conducting an interview with himself and asking the intriguing question, “Wouldn’t time be better spent writing original pieces? You are not a journalist. Shouldn’t a media theorist stick to theory?” That actually sounds like a question a journalist would ask, but it’s difficult to imagine any journalist as well-read, curious and intelligent as Geert Lovink.

Of course the answer is that interviews are by nature far more reader-friendly than the average essay. They also allow what Lovink describes as “the beauty of digital discord” to shine through. This is most obvious in the discussions with Mark Dery, Mike Davis, Paulina Borsook and McKenzie Wark. Dery, as always, delivers a blistering diatribe, suggesting that “we take a flamethrower to Newt Gingrich cum Alvin Toffler style laissez-faire futurism” and takes down Douglas Rushkoff, Arthur Kroker and John Perry Barlow while he’s at it. This is a particularly lively encounter that takes no prisoners.

Wark on a “third class”—the intellectuals and theorists who “qualify and interpret the actions of the others”—takes a fresh look at the role of academics in contemporary society (though if Wark trots out his old “we no longer have roots, we have aerials” quote once more I’ll strangle him); Davis on gated communities, and Borsook on the new economy are all riveting reads. Sadly, the Borsook discussion seems a tad dated: let’s face it, talking about Wired magazine is, well, tired—especially when the fate of dotcom boom publications like Red Herring and The Industry Standard are so much more intriguing. Borsook’s observations on the pollutants created from Silicon Valley output are sobering reading.

To a certain degree, being ‘dated’ is inevitable. Lovink began his interviews in the early 1990s, and between 1995 and 2000 posted many on Nettime. Despite their vintage, they give us a snapshot of specific periods and modes of thought, some highly prescient.

Beyond the Western style thinkers interrogated here, Lovink’s compendium is refreshing for giving equal space to other cultures. The interview with Ravi Sundaram is jam-packed with insightful information on historical and contemporary culture in India. Similarly Toshiya Ueno on Japanese subcultures, Finland’s Marita Liula on “art in the age of the mobile phone” and Kuan-Hsing Chen on contemporary media in Taiwan are full of first hand observations from cultures that tend to be sidelined in contemporary media studies. Sadly, this is the fate of many figures collected in Uncanny Networks. Lovink observes in his own interview: “I don’t think I have selected any interview partners because of their alleged subcultural, pop theory ‘celebrity’ status. I only wish they had it…The scenes these people are operating in are small, in fact way too small if you compare them to the hypergrowth of the IT sector as a whole.”

But Lovink’s selection is refreshing for this reason alone. Although there are high profile names here, Mike Davis, Arthur Kroker, Mark Dery and Gayatri Spivak, for example, Lovink has avoided the usual futurist figures; no Virilio or Baudrillard or Gibson or Sterling (although any of those would have been preferable to Kroker).

As Bruce Sterling says in his blurb, “If you want to know what media theory will say five years from now, then read Uncanny Networks to see what Geert Lovink said five years ago.” This is a dizzying ride, not always successful, but the odd clunkers make the more powerful discussions all the more delightful. If I have one major, and horrified, criticism of Uncanny Networks, it is the absence of an index—a major and silly oversight for a book so dense with references.

Uncanny Networks appears almost simultaneously with another MIT tome, Prefiguring Cyberculture. An Intellectual History, edited by Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro (see page 7). Together these books will give any aspiring media theorist and cultural commentator almost too much food for thought—if that were possible.

Geert Lovink is a founder of Nettime and fibreculture listservs. His previous book is Dark Fiber. Tracking Critical Internet Culture (The MIT Press, 2002).

Adrian Mackenzie
Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed
Continuum, New York/London, 2002
ISBN: 0826458831

Joanna Zylinska ed.
The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age
Continuum, New York/London, 2002
ISBN: 0826459021

It’s at least 20 years since Stelarc first claimed the body obsolete. The phrase belongs to an ongoing experiment in discourse, a way of writing that is actually the transcription of the artist’s talk, a form of thinking aloud. As an accompaniment to his performance work, Stelarc has produced a running commentary, a spontaneous poetics of remarkably succinct and cogent sound bytes. Somehow, though, amid all the improvisatory richness of Stelarc’s talk, this phrase about the obsolete body has stuck, like some misaligned spool in the machine of cultural conversation, so that every track gets fed back through it, including those he continues to introduce himself.

Adrian Mackenzie takes this phrase from the 1997 CD on which Stelarc’s Ping Body performance is archived, and takes it as a warning light in his approach to the analysis of that work. Mackenzie, author of Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed is especially interested in the temporal aspects of the work. The term “transductions” is taken from French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, for whom it denotes a process of emergence and propagation. Thus, writes Mackenzie, a transductive approach in criticism promises “a more nuanced grasp of how living and non-living processes differentiate and develop.”

Ping Body (“ping” being a measure of the time it takes for a message on the net to reach its destination and return) provides a focus for considering the relative speeds and delays in a process of human-technical involvement whose complexity is belied by the collapsing of bios and technos. This is a subtle and potentially revealing way to approach Stelarc’s work, but Mackenzie puts his own commentary under stress by taking the obsolete body dictum as a summary of what Stelarc sets out to demonstrate, thus assuming a need to write in defence of the body. Mackenzie takes elaborate routes through the arguments of Heidegger and Virilio to circumvent the traps of simplification and flatness in our understanding of human-technological relations. A better acquaintance with Stelarc’s work and the talk that accompanies it might have helped dispel the anxiety about such traps, and enabled the discussion to take new directions, over less embroiled terrain.

Certainly Stelarc likes to issue dicta, and he has been entirely unapologetic about his most controversial statement. But in the context of an extensive oeuvre, unfolding over 2 and a half decades, he’s maintained an edge of provocation that never settles into dogma, even though some of his statements may sound like it. It is important to remember that his commentary is also a performance, and that he is prone to making statements like, “the more and more performances I do, the less and less I think I have a mind of my own—nor any mind at all in the traditional metaphysical sense.” Stelarc says this in an interview with Joanna Zylinska and Gary Hall for The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. Edited by Zylinska, this collection of writings focuses on the work of Stelarc and Orlan [the French performance artist who has undergone a series of cosmetic surgery procedures referencing classic figures of female beauty. Eds]. In conversation, Stelarc tends to move away from the topic of technology, turning direct questions about it around to discuss specific technical difficulties, such as how it’s possible to grow muscle cells in a laboratory but not muscle fibre.

If Stelarc’s work remains relevant as a cultural practice, this is because it can help move us away from the rather obsessive and now stale dialogues about technology in the abstract that were so fashionable in the early 90s. Surely all this talk about obsolete bodies is becoming obsolete. It is not a conversation likely to produce useful insights at a time when we are being taken to war, not steered by abstract technology but via the good old traditional route of the propaganda campaign, in which twisted arguments and spun rhetorics are deployed as the first weapons of mass destruction. When “the question concerning technology” is whether the water supply is going to be restored, or how you are going to be able to rebuild your house from a heap of rubble, the discussion needs to be on a different footing. The most resonant questions raised in Stelarc’s work are those concerning the human being and its communicative operations.

Contributor Edward Scheer places himself in dialogue with Stelarc in his essay “Stelarc’s E-motions.” Scheer pushes the exploration of how emotion functions interactively and what this has to do with motion. “What moves us?” asks Scheer. He considers Stelarc’s interactions with the unmotivated choreography of the avatar in relation to Karen Finley’s overtly abreactive performances. Both, he writes, “are driven to perform rituals that transcribe the crisis of time, embody it and make it liveable.” In this process, the avatar will have to learn from its human models, drawing from the modelling work on emotion performed by 19th century researchers like Darwin, Delsarte and Duchenne de Boulogne.

Another refreshing shift from the habitual focus on the future-orientation of Stelarc’s work is provided by contributors Meredith Jones and Zoë Sofia, who are interested in “the varied ways in which people of European cultures have inhabited and owned bodies” from the Middle Ages to the present. Stelarc and Orlan, they emphasise, are engaged in carnal practices that necessarily involve the witnessing of pain, but this need not imply masochism. It may be more relevant to see their performances in relation to medieval views about the relationship between extreme carnal practices and the embodiment of higher values. These “higher values” have to do with ways of challenging incarnation itself, as a moribund condition, and with the revelation of the body as at once “cavernous and infinitely extended.”

Zylinska offers a complementary account of the 2 artists’ work as an opening up of the body that raises “issues of hospitality and welcome, of embracing incalculable difference.” The prosthetic relationship can thus be seen as a radical negotiation between self and other, that requires “otherwise complacent selves” to face up to the unspeakable and be challenged in their self-knowledge and self-sufficiency. This makes particular sense in terms of Stelarc’s ironic references to the imagery and terminology of paranoia. (Increasingly, he talks tongue-in-cheek about aliens, parasites and doubles.) In these times of paranoid nationalism, the urgent ground for investigation lies here, surely, in questions about boundaries—corporeal, metaphysical and political—and strategies for avoiding violently hysterical measures of self protection.

Adrian Mackenzie is a Researcher in Information Cultures, Department of Computing, Lancaster University. Joanna Zylinska is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of Surrey Roehampton, and author of On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime.

Madeline Gins & Arakawa
Architectural Body
University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2002
ISBN: 081731168

In Architectural Body, the latest book from the think tank of Madeline Gins and Arakawa, the authors bring their 35-year collaboration to the subject of sustaining and improving life. Abandoning their initial practices of painting and poetry, they now work on numerous sites of production including gallery and museum installations, site-specific works, houses, small communities and cities.

Architectural Body sets out the stakes of sustainability. For the authors this means coordinating every “scale of action”—from the smallest noticing of things to the co-construction of the body and environment. To accomplish sustainability we must figure out what we are capable of and put all our resources in service of the body. The book contextualises architecture that enables “all that a person can rally to the cause of being a person.” Arakawa and Gins concur our most important puzzle is how we are connected to the reservoir of regenerative possibility; the rest is technique.

Their books often appear in tandem with built environment projects: Reversible Destiny accompanied their 1997 retrospective at the Soho Guggenheim in New York and The Mechanism of Meaning charted the 15-year exhibition trajectory of that living-puzzle. (A series of installation-painting-objects made as cognitive perceptual puzzles, critiquing those puzzles found in psychology departments by highlighting the paradoxes and contradictions in our linguistic, perceptual and physical understanding.) Architectural Body addresses the critical, practical and theoretical aspects of their work and is concurrent with several projects: the Bioscleave house in East Hampton, New York, a Reversible Destiny Eco-housing community and a proposal for the Museum of the Living Body in New York City.

Arakawa and Gins’ assertion is straightforward: we cannot study the organism separate from its surrounds. This approach to “what operates as the world” is the basis of research that will help us to understand “how a re-envisioned architecture will stimulate a re-configured person.” The book’s premise is to make available a notion of daily research by providing procedures, hypotheses and scenarios that lead to observation, learning and potential reconfiguration (transformation).

In the first pages they outline the challenge, describing an “ethics crisis” that tests the logic of our resolve as living beings by suggesting that mortality is not an essential condition of our species. For if we remain open to all possibilities as a condition of our research, then we cannot allow “some categories of events to have special treatment, even mortality.” They argue for an ethic that would consider mortality unethical because it requires our compliance and sets an absolute limit on possibility. This has led them to rewrite Maurice Blanchot’s dictum “writing so as not to die” to read as a practice of personal choice, “we have decided not to die.” They push this line of inquiry along its logic-crushing trajectory, constantly questioning the disembodiment that enforces a separation between person and environment as well as body and mind.

The architectural body is not a specialist project. It focuses on a perceptual approach to attention, decision and action. This is a transdisciplinary approach which does not reduce the terms of one discourse or experience to that of another and always works “on-site where living happens.” As a result, the architectural body as a practice will have resonance with practitioners of all kinds—from writers, artists and architects to live-art performers, collaborative artists and practitioners of community and cultural development. Arakawa and Gins’ “landing sites” and “coordinology” are readily usable by anyone because they are not prescriptions for making, but procedures to enable new connections and relationships.

There are many historical affinities with Arakawa and Gins’ work—most notably William James’ radical empiricism where experience is the direct basis of knowing, Merleau-Ponty’s bodily oriented phenomenology of perception, and James J Gibson’s ecological approach to perception—as well as others who extend the study of person beyond the isolated mechanisms examined in their respective fields. Their extensive applicability is evident in the range of people who write on their work, including Jean-François Lyotard (philosophy), Arthur Danto (art theory), Italo Calvino (writing), Hans-Georg Gadamer (hermeneutics) and George Lakoff (linguistics). Arakawa and Gins’ work represents one of the most important contemporary research practices precisely because it is one of the few that addresses convergence and complexity across the arts and sciences on the “scales of action” relevant to human experience.

Many contemporary projects are focused on disassembling culturally inherited systems and structures. They are as important as they are widespread. What makes Arakawa and Gins’ project different is their goal of reassembly, because a terrible historical problem arises after everything has been dismantled: on what plan, model or concept is reassembly carried out? Architectural Body does not provide the answer—that is, the image of an outcome—but offers a mode of inquiry, a constant questioning from the point of view of the organism-person focused by “tactically posed surrounds.” This constitutes “daily research through architecture” that begins with our inclination to notice, specify and search the use of features in the environment. To put the body back into living history is to form a relationship with the environment that allows us to observe, learn and reconfigure (transform) the persistent and habitual world we have inherited.

Reading this book is a visceral experience, as the procedures discussed are meant to be used by the body. You laugh, you are puzzled, you don’t cry, but as a reader you do feel the roller coaster of thinking and feeling enacted on the pages. As with good novels, you are transported to other situations and places, but unlike most novels you bring your body with you and it all happens where you are—not in some utopian “elsewhere.” Although Architectural Body is published in a “poetics” series, it extends its discussion well beyond “making” in poetry to all domains of activity, inviting everyone to become a researcher and practitioner of the realisation of living.

Terry Flew
New Media. An Introduction
Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN: 0195508599

Terry Flew manages to reinvent the much derided term, ‘new media’, in his recent work, New Media. An Introduction, propelling the reader into the maelstrom of manifestations, evidence and issues that are the contemporary technology of things computer-mediated (CMT), or related to information and communications technology (ICT). If RealTime readers have associated ‘new media’ with the ‘hybrid arts’, then New Media. An Introduction provides a flue for disavowal. As Flew gives little, if any, acknowledgement of the ‘unstructured’ research performed over the last decade, new media then is what business, government and tertiary education have invented from scratch.

Flew’s survey of literature and websites, with expert discussion, explores and analyzes the impact of recent digital technologies on society. Presented from an Australian perspective, it addresses structural issues in an OECD if not international context, cyberspace and real politik. The scope is far broader than an industry study, combining the informational and analytical needs of education, government and ‘the general reader.’

Chapter design and a consistent presentational style in each of the 9 sections combine overview with detail. Once the reader grows familiar with this series of files, highly compressed in content, created out of the convergence (or collision) of established academic empirical disciplines (whether social and political history/science, economics, philosophy, cultural studies, etc), then the density of the text becomes ‘weightless.’ It becomes the point from which to conduct further investigation using suggested websites or the large bibliography of some 200 other titles on the subject.

This will be an invaluable reader for undergraduates and postgraduates contemplating a future with the ‘creative industries’ (like new media, a term full of redundant meaning but timely arrival). British Prime Minister, Tony Blair is curiously foregrounded here, credited with establishing the term, but it’s not acknowledged that Blair’s many meetings with Paul Keating (whose Creative Nation policy document of 1994 surprised everyone with its scope) played a significant role in the invention of New Labor and its success at the British polls in 1997.

If ‘creative industries’ are the postmodern version of the arts and industry of the last century (extending the realm of ‘the creative’ beyond cultural industries to acknowledge ‘the creative act’ as an essential component of other fields of entrepreneurship, for example, commercial sound design and CD production in music studies), will there be sufficient resources for the unstructured production of ideas and critical spaces afforded by exchanges based on the less tangible and the ineffable?

Dr Terry Flew is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the Queensland University of Technology and largely responsible for establishing the world’s first Creative Industries Faculty.

It seems obvious, if there are 17 million people in Australia and 500 million in the UK, the proportion of culture vultures in Europe must represent audiences that Australian ensembles working exclusively in Australia can only dream of. Demand is there, talent is here. The only thing standing in the way is the price of an airline ticket. What are you waiting for? Get out your credit card, pack your bags, let’s go on tour!

But while everyone’s doing it, for some arts organisations international touring is an intrinsic part of their strategy for survival. Take for example 4 classical music organisations, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, The Song Company, Synergy Percussion and Elision. Their artistic agendas and audiences differ, but touring is a key part of all their annual programs.

The ACO and The Song Company

The Australian Chamber Orchestra calls itself “Australia’s most travelled cultural organisation.” Since its inception in 1975 it has toured frequently throughout Europe, Asia, North and South America and the Pacific. In 2002, as a result of the Nugent report, the orchestra was reclassified, along with Circus Oz and Sydney Dance Company, as an ‘international’ touring organisation. With this new categorisation came kudos, funding and strings: the company was to present no less than 20% of all performances overseas.

For General Manager of the ACO, Bill Gillespie, that quota has been quite a challenge. On a practical level, the company is committed to limiting the amount of time players spend away from home to 3 weeks at a time. However, the fixed costs of getting the orchestra to Europe means they need to pack as much as possible into those 3 weeks to make it worth leaving home. Simultaneously, they must balance overseas work with their domestic commitments; namely a loyal subscription base in 9 population centres across Australia.

The new funding classification has also driven an expansion of the subscription series across the Tasman. “New Zealand counts as an overseas destination, which helps our quota,” says Gillespie. The orchestra is trialing concerts in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch for 2 of their subscription concerts.

Gillespie sees many advantages to the touring model, not least for the musicians: “The players love it. It makes life more interesting. It is intrinsic to the company.” More importantly, a company operating at the level of the ACO must travel, “not just to compare against the best in the world, but to participate.”

This view is echoed by Roland Peelman, Artistic Director of The Song Company. “Simply put, audiences [outside Australia] are larger—there’s more room for diversity. The alternative [to international touring] is you become complacent, bored or stale.”

So, international touring brings kudos, artistic challenge and boosts musicians’ morale. Gillespie and Peelman say it also makes financial sense. Both ensembles employ their musicians full-time, so artists’ fees are already covered in annual running costs. If the flights and accommodation can be covered, the rest is gravy. Peelman says, “A tour that breaks even is not really good enough. Bringing money home—that is what we strive for.”

Both ensembles perform repertoire that qualifies them for some mainstream and therefore well-paid classical music gigs. Invitations from the Wigmore Hall or Amsterdam Concertgebouw generate healthy fees, which make it economically viable for the groups to be represented by an agent. It’s no guarantee of work, but it all helps overcome the huge barriers Australians face in organising tours 10,000 miles from home.

The bottom line for both The Song Company and the ACO is that Australia is not big enough to support the scale of their organisations. While both Peelman and Gillespie emphasise the sheer hard work of international touring, they also conclude that it is indispensable. Peelman says, “The reality is we are a fulltime ensemble. There are not enough concerts we can do in Sydney to stay alive.” And Gillespie says, “There’s not enough audience in any one area. Even Sydney and Melbourne are not sufficient.”

International touring spreads the burden of the fixed costs and, hopefully, generates additional revenue through substantial fees and government funding.

Synergy

But what of the part-time, non-mainstream groups, the new music ensembles that do not fit the Wigmore Hall mould? Can the same strategic model apply to ensembles that struggle to fill a concert hall 3 times a year in Australia?

Synergy Percussion and Elision, like the ACO and The Song Company, have received significant funding to develop their international touring strategy. Both are critically acclaimed ensembles with strong artistic agendas, and heavily committed to overseas touring. But they are also playing to niche audiences and offering their core group of players work on a project-by-project basis.

For Greg Johns, Manager of Synergy, the primary motivation for international tours is not financial, but personal: “It’s the interaction, meeting others who are struggling to keep the flame alive. It’s always a struggle, so it’s good for morale to meet with others and artistically very inspirational…the motivation for touring is more to do with getting the unique Australian voice out into the international market, and getting Australian composers out there. It essentially doesn’t make money. It’s more to do with proactive interaction with international community.”

Like everyone I spoke to, Johns emphasises 2 keys to building an international touring strategy: being good, and being there. Synergy, he explains, sits comfortably among European ensembles in terms of artistic excellence, with a unique sound not found there. “Everyone says what Synergy does is really different. It’s the concept of ensemble playing…not just muscular technique.”

The ensemble finds most of its opportunities at specialist festivals—percussion and/or new music—and these are the best places to network for future opportunities. “Percussionists are pretty unique in that they like to gather together as a unified body…They have a lot of percussion festivals—there’s a community aspect, a tremendous camaraderie,” Johns says. The process of securing gigs sounds less like a strategy than an organic development.

Elision

Daryl Buckley, founder and Artistic Director of Elision, calls the process “serendipity…I liken it to throwing stones into water—the ripples interact in a completely unpredictable way.” However, it’s clear that for Elision, unlike Synergy, serendipity is a highly strategic process.

The Elision Ensemble was founded in Melbourne in 1989 and is now based at the Judith Wright Arts Centre in Brisbane. But geographies are irrelevant because the ensemble performs regularly all over the world. In 2002 they staged concerts in Perth, Brisbane and Paris and also presented Liza Lim’s opera, Yue Ling Jie in Berlin, Zurich and Saitama, Japan. For a part-time new music ensemble with one full-time artistic director/administrator, the scope of its activity is huge.

Of the ensembles I surveyed, Elision is the only one that makes no distinction between its domestic and international agenda. Not even the “international touring organisation”, ACO, operates with such blatant and cheerful disregard for political boundaries.

Buckley says, “Art doesn’t recognise geographical borders. Why impose them?…In order for Australian performing ensembles to reach the standards of highly funded European ensembles, with access to rich cultural resources, the only way to compete is to focus work on aesthetics, to have a consistent artistic direction and look at dissolving the notion of domestic and international as 2 separate things.”

Extending that logic, the notion of distinguishing between ‘Australian’ and ‘foreign’ artists and creators is equally irrelevant. Hence Buckley’s decision, early on, not to seek funding from the Australia Council alone, but to concentrate instead on developing relationships with overseas artists, audiences and agencies. “Even before Elision toured we had a strong presence in Italy and particularly Milan. We commissioned 15-16 major Italian composers. We accessed strong assistance for frequent international travel from the Arts Council of Canada, Arts Council of Great Britain and other international agencies supportive of work by their nationals in Australia.”

In effect they turned the mercantile model on its head by investing in partnerships with overseas artists rather than imposing an existing Australian product on an unenlightened Europe. Buckley says, “Integral to this was to produce high quality performances, which could then be broadcast on classical radio stations. When people went back to various festivals and lectures, it was a recording of Elision being played. With the publishers, Elision was being mentioned frequently.”

So while Elision was not in a position to fly a representative around the world to generate gigs, it was already making its presence felt through impressive recordings and creative partnerships. Partnerships are key, not only for financial and administrative security, but for long term benefits, Buckley says. “Co-production is a principal strategy. You have a virtual office in Europe, access to funding and forward planning. You can be part of other people’s histories.”

But, support from within Australia is equally critical. Buckley says, “The Audience and Market Development unit of the Australia Council has been absolutely pivotal to recent Elision sucesses in Europe and North-East Asia. Their support has enabled crucial and direct face to face negotiations on major contracts and the international realisation of Elision activity in highly competitive and constantly changing environments.”

Elision is just back from Berlin, giving concerts with the Norwegian ensemble, Cikada, and presenting Dark Matter, a major work/installation by UK composer Richard Barrett and Norwegian artist Per Inge Bjørlo [premiered Brisbane 2001]. But even as the notes ring out, Buckley is throwing more stones and watching more ripples develop. Has this Australian artist cracked the tyranny of distance once and for all?

One suspects Buckley’s visionary strategy would not work for everyone. “It’s mad, constant production,” he says, with a crazy glint in his eye. “Insane. We are the Australian new music group.” Such conviction is infectious, but also rare. And while the group is increasingly in demand, will its expansion be limited by the stamina of its artistic director?

This is the second of RealTime’s reports on the international marketing of Australia’s performing arts. The first can be found in RT 53, Feb-March 2003. Our next report in the series will survey the work of Australia’s performing arts producers.

The photographs on these pages were taken at the protest held in Sydney on Sunday February 16 against the then impending war against Iraq. All photographs are by Moz except Bush pull out, by Isabel McIntosh. Moz is a Sydney-based photographer who is a regular contributor to www.indymedia.org and operates www.moz.net.nz. A committed environmentalist, he creates cycle art and appears at street theatre events like Reclaim The Streets and Critical Mass.
Anti-war protests, 2003

Reader response to part one of “Visions, illusions and delusions”, film producer Peter Sainsbury’s address to the 2002 Australian Screen Directors Association [ASDA] Conference, was appreciative and passionate. A few said that Sainsbury’s account of the tensions between vision and pragmatism in filmmaking apply equally well to other artforms. In Part II, Sainsbury discusses recent Australian films, The Tracker, Lantana and Dirty Deeds, and defines what he sees as the constraints on visionary Australian filmmaking. Part I appeared in RT53

The priority of vision

I want [to discuss] a recently released Australian film, which is unusual for a number of reasons. The Tracker, written and directed by Rolf de Heer, is a beautifully structured and measured piece of filmmaking with a deceptively simple narrative line. What is achieved here is a truly elegiac account of the collision of Indigenous and European cultures and a magical insight into the nature of their difference. And of course to see that difference is to glimpse the possibility, at least, of reconciliation. To this extent, The Tracker is a visionary film reminding us how effective humour, irony and integrity can be in the face of murderous violence, and how racism is but a prison of the mind. The desire in play here is no less than the desire for freedom from that internal prison.

The Tracker also reminds us that the visionary is not necessarily complex or pretentious, though it is probably metaphorical. It also demonstrates that within a visionary enterprise all sorts of pragmatic decisions can be made to solve problems in reconciling intentions and resources. So long as the vision comes before and has priority over the choice of solutions, constructive solutions that enhance rather than detract from that vision can be found. But what’s particularly interesting about this film is that it reversed the 2 major terms of almost every Australian project development—the film was financed before the script was written. The Tracker was not so much invested in as commissioned.

I spoke to de Heer and executive producer Brigit Ikin about this process. When SBS Independent and the Adelaide Festival decided, with extraordinary bravura, to commission a number of films, the South Australian Government made its financial support conditional upon a South Australian director being among those chosen. De Heer took a gamble and declared that if the commissioning bodies wanted his film, for which he had a 10-page treatment, they would have to guarantee funding. He would then write the script and deliver the movie. Which is pretty much what happened.

Now this was a low budget production, less than $2m. And de Heer is a particular kind of operator within the industry and unique in many ways, having put years of work into becoming the filmmaker who could reverse the dominant process in this way and obviously he had a great story. But I don’t think the importance of the way in which his film was financed can be over estimated.

In this case a director’s vision was the driving force of the project, rather than the director or the writer having to prove his or her credentials with draft after draft of a script, each put through a number of arbitrarily designed tests, chasing deals around the world in an often fruitless and always pragmatic search, often entailing compromise after compromise, for a final deal to put to the FFC. This teaches us a lesson about the relationship and the difference between visions, illusions and delusions.

The values of funding bodies

I have argued the proposition before—that the films emerging from a given funding system largely reflect the values and processes at the heart of their funding organisations, whatever they may be, and that films produced in any given cultural zone in any given period reflect the diversity of the funding systems that existed then and there, or a lack of diversity as the case may be.

I think this can be proven in the relationship between industry structures and movies made in the UK during the 1980s, in Germany in the 1970s, in France in the 1960s or under the American studio system in the 1950s. And you could certainly add to the weight of that proof what’s happened in Australia since the 1990s. Let’s look at the relationship between funding methods and creative outcomes in Australia.

An industry held hostage?

When film funding in Australia was effectively removed from the anarchy of deals driven by tax incentives toward the end of the 1980s, it was brought into the safe haven of the public service. What kind of safety is this and for whom was it provided? Sociologists know that bureaucratic imperatives place the safety of the funding agency and the unimpeachable position of its executives before all else. So it was and is in the Australian film industry. Film financing became hostage to the 3 principles of bureaucracy—prudence, objectivity and blamelessness.

Prudence and blamelessness were served by the building of a buffer between the bureaucratic funding decision and the result of that decision. This buffer was the market. FFC funding cannot be triggered unless the project in question has already attracted the imprimatur of the market through distribution deals, presales, distribution advances and equity investment in various combinations. When it does, the FFC may invest. The justification for this lies, of course, in the belief that films so financed will oblige committed distributors and sales agents to get them to an audience so that revenue will follow and top up the fund. And so that the films financed will have a self-justifying public profile. This is prudence. Where this formula fails to produce satisfactory results, the funding body cannot be faulted for the market had spoken and the rules had been followed. This is blamelessness.

A market or an audience?

Unfortunately, satisfactory results have been rare and are getting rarer. I believe this is because the market and the audience are not the same. A market is a display of produce. An audience is that which favours one product over another. A good distributor earns our respect by knowing how to pick a movie from the market place and sell it to an audience that he or she knows well, and may even have in some degree created. Very few, if any distributors and sales agents, however, know much about the process by which a script becomes a film, or even what it is about a script that would promise a memorable film. As a result they frequently find themselves less than pleased with the outcome of their commitment. They often find themselves handling a film they never would have picked, had it been a film rather than a script with some names attached, when they chose it. They often find themselves handling a film to which they cannot deliver an audience. And every time this happens, we are all in trouble. The major flaw in the safety mechanism between the bureaucratic decision and the resulting film is enormous. And it becomes self-perpetuating as well as self-defeating.

As any producer will tell you, it’s becoming harder to get the commitments that the rules of the game require because distributors too frequently find backing a script, rather than a film, a bad risk or at very best an additional risk. This applies not only to the domestic market attachment that every project needs but also to the international ones. And on the international level other difficulties arise. Key organisations in the marketplace can undergo sudden re-alignments as did Canal Plus [in 2001], or can simply disappear, as Film Four did [in 2002]. Other economic factors intrude such as the collapse of the European Pay-TV market…All of these factors make it less likely that sales agents will provide advances to any but the safest properties. Or to properties which appear to carry the safest bet. This, of course, usually means the most pragmatically conceived ones.

Objective criteria: one size fits all

The pressures of this situation give rise to a universal hope. Can there be a set of criteria by which some of this risk is mitigated? This is where objectivity comes in, or at least a kind of pseudo objectivity. When getting a movie financed is always a matter of cracking the market before the film is made, and never the other way around, the script becomes by far the most important consideration in the risk business and its value is increasingly measured by quasi-objective criteria. As such, it has to promise a degree of safety. It has to look and feel familiar. It has to cover all the bases in telling a conventionally intelligible story. It has to comply with certain given rules of the writer’s craft. And above all, it has to entirely determine the film that is made from it. Thus we are back in a cinema in which the job of the director is simply to translate the written into the visual, rather than using the written as a means to discovering the world which the written can only imply.

Most problematic, is that the same kinds of tests are applied to all projects seeking the support of public funds. We allow no variety in the relationships that might otherwise come between financial inputs and creative outcomes. It follows that there is little variety in the kinds of films we can make. Of course different stories will be told involving different story values with different sensibilities and different kinds of appeal. But these are narrow differences in the context of world cinema today. In Australia, markedly different kinds of filmmaking, markedly different uses of film language and markedly different visions of the world do not and will not flourish.

Thus, in the context in which an overwhelming majority of Australian films are made, the development of individual projects is a reductive rather than expansive creative process. The more clearly a given script complies with limited, quasi-objective criteria, the less likely the vision it carries will be questioned. In other words, we have institutionalised pragmatism. For very few of the qualities I have identified as having to do with the visionary can thrive under these conditions. That which may be disturbing; that which may be tragic; that which may be fascinatingly bewildering; that which may risk the pretentiousness of speaking in terms of desire, or of what we don’t know about ourselves, of that which is not literal, will all be considered marginal, esoteric and unduly risky. That which is playful or surreal in its use of the medium itself simply does not exist. It is almost as though the use of the human imagination as a means of escape from our fears, our habits and our everyday reality has been banned. And it’s almost as if (to borrow a pithy phrase of Mike Thornhill’s) the modern cinema has passed Australia by. And by modern cinema I don’t just mean that which comes into my own definition of the visionary, but any cinema that concerns itself with anything that lies beyond ordinary perceptions, as in popular films like Being John Malkovitch, The Sixth Sense and American Beauty as well as Mulholland Drive.

It is tempting to find something sweetly ironic in the fact that The Tracker, a film that speaks eloquently of the power we have to escape the prisons of our mind, was financed through a reversal of the usual process and all the damaging limitations that process puts on the imagination. But it is not as easy as that. The FFC and the AFC and the SAFC all assisted, in one way or another, to get de Heer’s film on screen. There is no way that the argument I am advancing here can be reduced to a simple ‘us and them’ critique of the funding bodies. In fact I should put it on record that when I have managed to satisfy the FFC’s criteria for investment I have enjoyed a great deal of help and support from its staff and have had, and am currently getting, a great deal of support, sometimes creative support, from both the NSW FTO and from the AFC. This is not an attack on these organisations, or on the people who work in them. One of whom I once was.

So long as the rules are applied…

These organisations are symptoms of the culture and society that created them, a society in which there exists an almost craven desire for consensus. It is a society in which pretentiousness is a cultural crime, so that we rarely dare speak of anything that is not literally self evident or comfortably in conformity with abiding and accepted Australian myths, or entirely dependent on taken for granted ideas about human motivation and individual identity. Above all, it is a culture in which an extraordinarily paternalistic form of liberalism rules our lives. It is one in which we are happy to allow a complex, risky and highly skilled activity to be managed within the prudent, blameless, pseudo-objective and counter-productive rules and parameters of the public service.

I was brought up against this phenomenon quite forcibly when, while working as Head of Film Development for the AFC, I enraged an audience of filmmakers by suggesting that they should not ask us bureaucrats to spell out for them how funding processes and priorities should be organised, but rather tell us. Not only was the audience nonplussed and angry, but my colleagues in the organisation were visibly embarrassed. It was as if I had delivered a calculated insult. In the pub after the meeting I felt like a leper in a foreign land. So I drove home and decided I would not seek a renewal of my contract. For that was the moment at which it became clear to me that what we most want from our funding bodies is a set of rules. We want guidelines, within which we can be defined, organised and managed. We want transparent mechanisms by which our creative endeavours can be blamelessly rejected or benignly accepted. Just so long as the rules are applied.

This seems a travesty of creative work, as much for those who work within funding bodies as for those who need to work with them. Throughout the processes of script development and production financing, funding body staff, executives and board members do of course make value judgements. But their roles as members of properly conducted bureaucracies preclude them from pro-active intervention. My own time at the AFC was a battle between my desire to seek out and support the creative work that I considered excellent and important, and my obligation to passively follow the rules of assessment and submit to the consensus of a committee. In fact, this usually entailed several committees. A committee of assessors, of my colleagues, of board members and the parallel committees of any other organisation needed to get a project financed. Despite my willingness to take responsibility for creative decisions and my naïve belief that this was what I was paid for, I was forever obliged not to; but rather, to submit to consensus. And as we all know, consensus coheres around what is familiar rather than what is not. The procedural rules encourage the ordinary.

Sometimes this obedience to established rules even seems perverse. However poorly our films are performing and however obviously market attachments mean nothing to the audience and however hard market attachments are to attract and however far the vicissitudes of international financing structures work against us, we agree when the bureaucrats protest that not only is it not their fault, but we wouldn’t want it any other way, would we? We wouldn’t want funding body executives to play God and decide what films should be made. No, we say. God forbid that anyone be held responsible for what goes wrong or fails to achieve what our delusions told us might be. And as soon as we collude with the lack of responsibility we allow our institutions, we have of course surrendered responsibility for ourselves. That means we will just have to live without the visionary, without what it might inject into our film culture, and without what it would do for us internationally. We’ll just keep chasing our pragmatic tales.

Chasing our pragmatic tales

This chasing of tales occurs as we conceive, develop, market and finance our projects and even as we execute them. A lot of the time, it’s not at all clear that this is what we’re doing. After all, the Australian industry contains a great deal of people with world class skills, despite their tendency to export themselves. Most of our films are models of technical and craft expertise and we often admire the performances turned in by Australian actors. When we deploy these considerable assets we do so with pleasure and confidence. But we delude ourselves if we think we can rely on these elements of our industry. Because there is no lasting value in doing something well if we discover nothing. Only the imaginative journey of discovery produces a successful cinema of lasting value, while the way we have structured our work militates against that journey being undertaken. As I have argued, we are hopelessly caught up in a pragmatic complicity with a cautious, conservative and consensus driven practice that we have imposed on ourselves, cementing it in place with rules, structures and processes that all but guarantee pragmatism and the superficiality it breeds.

Our creative relationships are often under developed, with producers, writers and directors working together in market-driven rather than discovery-driven enterprises. In doing so they are unlikely to discover what it is about each other that may or may not enhance the project. The project-by-project nature of the process and the fraught nature of life between projects denies us the time and space to discover what and with whom, best works as collaboration. Frequently, filmmaking teams come together in relationships of pure convenience, just because employment is on offer. The abiding ethos is that of getting the job done rather than discovering what is being done, why and how. We continue to rely on the taken for granted, skill driven aspects of our profession, badly neglecting the inner substance.

A job to be done

As a result, even our most widely praised and successful movies have something fundamental missing. When I saw Dirty Deeds, it had already lost its evening slots in city cinemas. At 5pm on a Saturday I was one of only a dozen people in the cinema. This seemed surprising for a film released with enormous publicity and a fair amount of critical endorsement only a few weeks previously. By the film’s end, I was no longer surprised.

An avowed attempt to make a commercial Australian movie, Dirty Deeds is in many ways a bravura piece of work, suffused with high production values and carried along by plenty of high octane yet ironic intrigue, action and cultural observation. But what is missing is a heart and soul. Nothing leads us to care about its characters. None of the incessant conflict causes a significant change in any of the characters nor provokes character-bending decisions. We may idly wonder what will happen next, but our curiosity is never heightened into a caring about anything. No amount of work by its actors can overcome the lack of anything more than the odd nod in the direction of character development. The film feels, for all its energy and skill, empty and gratuitous. If you are going to make a movie so obviously dependent on showmanship you need blockbuster resources. A car chase, a few beatings and shootings and a massacre of pigs doesn’t do the job, however acute the cinematography and the editing, however sharp the production design, however sophisticated the soundtrack. If you don’t have access to blockbuster resources, you have to dig deeper into the imagination and produce another set of entertainment values.

But pragmatism seems to have become a self-justifying ethos. Despite this film being a long time in development and the enormous commitment that went into getting it financed, it was always a job to be done rather than a truth to be discovered. It seems you can start with a pragmatic plan rather than an imaginative idea. You can slave away at a determined effort to establish yourself as something other than what has disparagingly been called a boutique filmmaker, and given the right mix of track record, credibility, collaborators and effort you can get over the financial line. Once there is confidence that the market is onside, you are able to do without what the audience desires. And this is never apparent until the audience withers and prematurely disappears. I don’t think I can overstate what damage this conflation of market and audience has done.

Success without vision

Sometimes pragmatism can be distressing. The Rabbit Proof Fence addresses an issue of fundamental and deeply troubling significance to Australians, but in a misguided fashion. Striving to create a credible story from a remarkable event, it was levered toward market endorsement by involving high profile creative collaborators. But in truth this was a vain attempt to give substance to a story of one dimensional characters, episodic encounters and almost negligible dramatic power. Only in a heart rending moment at the end of the film, when we hear from those whose experiences were used in the story, do we glimpse the deeply moving and important drama documentary struggling to emerge from inside the material. The bearing of witness and the power of testament have been forsaken, but for what? Not for the audience, but for the market.

Lantana has been much praised and much awarded and sold something like 10 million dollars worth of tickets at the domestic box office. I wish that either of the Australian features I have produced had sold half as many. With the exception of Adrian Martin, everyone seemed to like it. But despite the film’s success, I agree with Martin. The film really is glorified television, a middle class soap opera. In a cultural context where adult television of any interest comes with a foreign accent, it’s not surprising that Lantana got an audience. It obviously met the needs that most of its audience brought to it. But not everyone found that the prodigious work of its actors, its cinematographer, its editor and brilliant composer could overcome its dialogue driven, coincidence-riven narrative. Again, an opportunity seemed to have gone missing. Although praised for its adult themes and mature observations, Lantana seemed to be content with the most superficial investigations into its subject. It never crossed over into the visionary. It told us only what is already known and taken for granted in everyday discourse and in ordinary behaviour about the frailties of marriage. It never dared enter the more risky and demanding terrain of desire. Characters struggling with what they knew about themselves and each other were never more than that. What they did not know about themselves, the structure of their identities and the source of their compulsions, remained hidden and the importance of the film was to that extent reduced.

It’s important to say that my criticism of Lantana is not a criticism of this film’s success. It was a success we all in a sense needed. It’s more an attempt to demonstrate how half-baked is the discourse of ideas that runs through Australian filmmaking generally.

I hope my contribution to this conference has been more than negative. What I am offering is an imperfect but I believe important analysis of how mediocrity has been institutionalised. Only when we fully understand the relationship between what we do and how and why we do it can we hope to understand what kind of changes we need to make.

“Visions, Illusions and Delusions”, Peter Sainsbury; The Persistence of Vision: ASDA Conference, Sept 2002.

James Middleton has long been a resident of Tasmania’s more remote locations. The filmmaker initially moved to Tasmania’s Bruny Island after 1997 to write and research a screenplay on the Black War of the 1830s and has been coming and going ever since.

His short film Lunnawanna Kiss emerged from its primary setting of Bruny Island’s lighthouse, and a desire to make a light and joyful antidote to his initial research. The Black War project is still in the pipeline, as is a feature length screenplay of Lunnawanna Kiss called The Lightkeeper’s Wife.

In 2000, after Lunnawanna Kiss, Middleton researched his first documentary, Return to Port Davey, which he shot in 2001. The film premiered at Hobart’s State Cinema and Sydney’s Chauvel in February this year.

Middleton grew up in New Guinea and suggests his connection with Tasmania lies partly in the similarity between their mountains and cloud and weather patterns. Living on Bruny Island—a small island off a larger one—gives him a heightened sense of vulnerability to environmental factors. He also developed an acute awareness of water from catching ferries home, an experience that’s all the more potent for someone who did not see water until he was 7. Middleton’s first view of the ocean was a striking experience, which may explain the prevalence of water and nautical themes in his 2 Tasmanian films.

Set in 1931, the silent Lunnawanna Kiss is a story of a seemingly impossible affection between a local boy, Billy Shearwater, and the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, Elizabeth Cross. Working against them are their geographical isolation and her father’s distaste for Catholics. When a storm floods the roads, Billy must take the family to church by boat.

As Middleton intended, the film has a delicacy about it: the feathery, staccato violin and piano is in keeping with the silent film genre. There are the skimming glances; the couple’s wordless flight to kiss between gums and grasses; and perhaps even more delightfully intimate, the post-kiss smiles exchanged beneath hat-brims on their journey back to the lighthouse.

Lunnawanna Kiss, like Port Davey, is primarily concerned with the ways the environment effects our social worlds. In keeping with this, nature is often present as a still, enveloping protagonist effectively conveyed in the short’s main promotional shot: a dinghy with its prominent yet slight mast and the lighthouse keeper by its side on a small part of a water-mountain canvas. The vessel and its occupants cause only a ripple in the foreground of their immense setting.

The film evolved into its silent format through luck and instinct. Upon its ‘completion’, Middleton sensed there was something missing. The film had failed to attract support from the AFC or Arts Tasmania so he kept playing with it, finally doing an edit without dialogue. The important lesson he learned from this was to look for the essential truth in a project, even if dramatically different from your original intentions.

Introducing music in lieu of dialogue, Middleton was faced with several decisions about format and economics. He finally transferred the footage to Digital Beta, to do all the effects he wanted, then kine-ed it back to 35mm, with the generous help of SOS Digital. The kine was surprisingly good and most importantly allowed for a quality soundtrack. The resulting film has been shown at numerous festivals, received Exploding Cinema, Woodford and ASC awards and was Screen Tasmania’s first screened project.

The seed for Middleton’s most recent project, Return to Port Davey, came from organising the Lunnawanna Kiss shoot. He contacted Des Weyman about oysters for catering on set and they were still talking 2 hours later. Des’ ability to spin a good yarn and to evoke a fisherman’s life at Port Davey tweaked the filmmaker’s instinct for a good story.

Weyman had been a crayfisherman in the sheltered waters of Port Davey, on the southwest coast, and Middleton eventually persuaded him and 3 others—Mike, Monty and Clyde—to return to their old haunt and tell stories to the camera. The men recall a time when a haul of 2,000 cray was not unusual, and when regulations on sizing were introduced in the 1940s. The film is full of anecdotes shared between men (up to 50 years apart in age) who knew each other for decades in often harsh elements.

Mike recounts poking dreamily about a beach at the age of 14 and waking a Tasmanian devil. Fearing probable disembowelment, he made his terrified escape across soft sand that sucked his footsteps backwards. Mike’s account is deadpan and hilarious; as is his litany of bad smells in a time before iceboxes.

For many years Middleton considered documentary to be the poor cousin of drama, an opinion he has completely relinquished after experiencing the freedom of documentary making and discovering that people’s lives can be more fascinating than fiction. He believes that documentary is just another form of storytelling, with its own set of rules, constructing its own sort of truth.

Middleton incorporated into the documentary black and white stills from the 1920s and beautiful faded 8mm home-movie footage from the 50s. With ABC purchase of the Australian broadcasting rights came the condition of rigorous editing from 57 to 27 minutes. This was a difficult process, though he is happy with the result—a rich, authentic portrait of working lives in what he calls a “primal and epic” setting.

While James Middleton feels defined as an artist by the work he is making at the time, funding bodies often see things differently. Making work consistently about a place, and residing there for most of the year, does not guarantee support. He did not understand Screen Tasmania’s failure to fund the authentic Tasmanian stories conveyed in Port Davey and feels there should be more feedback to filmmakers about tenders, and the reasoning behind funding body decisions. When asked whether this essential aspect of filmmaking has become easier, Middleton marvels that it hasn’t. Despite ultimate support—by the ABC for Port Davey and Screen Tasmania for Lunnawanna Kiss—Middleton has never received production funding, only post-production; testimony to his tenacity.

Middleton has an ability to tell quiet, authentic stories; their power is perhaps hard to sell unseen. Hopefully this will change with a growing canon of recognised work. With The Lightkeeper’s Wife doing the rounds and another documentary idea at the ABC, he has a potentially busy and supported couple of years.

Our story so far: 4 years ago in a land called South Australia, there emerged an exciting new initiative to encourage emerging filmmakers—the Filmmaker of the Future (FOTF) prize and it involved giving all the development money to one lucky bugger. We now move forward to 2003. The FOTF award is an old initiative, the young filmmakers are still as emergent as they ever were, and the FOTF is now history.

The ZOOM! craft awards for short filmmaking have continued on a more modest basis, augmented by a Best Film Award, and ensconced in the Adelaide International Film Festival.

While the FOTF failed to launch anyone into the feature film firmament during its 3 years of existence, the presence of follow-up films by 2 of its 3 recipients showed that these filmmakers still had a future, even if it wasn’t The Future.

The best news among the films was the continued good work from Tamsyn Lewis and Shalom Almond, who took out the FOTF 2 years ago. Their follow-up, Brushstrokes, was the strongest film in the competition. The fact that it was the most expensive to produce seems encouraging to me. These young women have shown that they know how to find money and spend it so that it shows onscreen. This is an achievement that needs to be praised in an Australian cinema too full of moral victories that no one ever watches.

Admittedly, the film has a story from 1965 (should the emerging artist stay in Oz or leave for the Big Time in London?), but the resolution of this theme is handled with both force and intelligence. The filmmakers know how to work with professional actors, cinematographers and designers: a true sign of emergence.

Matthew Phipps, winner of the inaugural FOTF, scooped the pool with 4 awards (including Best Film) for Quarter Mile. Its narrative is staged across several planes, juxtaposing the romantic attachment of a man with an intellectual disability to a prostitute, with his fantasy reworking of events and a symbolic transformation of his desires to his favoured arena—the drag strip.

Alice Teasdale’s Still Life, awarded Best Screenplay, had a similar feel, as it centred on the bathos of its protagonist’s life. While very handsome, it’s another in a line of films about how deadly boring it is to work in an office. This is starting to look a bit elitist now (“I’m an artist, surely Centrelink can’t expect me to do this?”).

Jessica Asz’ Kylie Divine is also built around a rather generic story, this time concerning the misadventures of a young woman meeting her boyfriend’s parents. Throwing enthusiasm and well-crafted energy at the viewer, it manages to stave off our awareness that it lacks ambition. You can see the punchline coming a mile off, but somehow that adds to its charm.

Perhaps because the awards were positioned in the middle of a festival full of bold and diverse international films, I left ZOOM! with a renewed sense of the conservatism of local filmmaking. The previous issue of RealTime (53) contained the first half of Peter Sainsbury’s critique of a deeply internalised lack of daring in Australian cinema [see p15 for part 2]. For all the achievements of young local filmmakers shown at these awards, there was nothing to prove Sainsbury wrong. Perhaps the future belongs to those who can get their plot points in a row.

Finally, these occasions which try to reposition the makers of short films as “emergent filmmakers” are affairs of fleeting self-congratulation. It’s nice to eat the little spring rolls and see people you know get some acknowledgment, but it’s also a bit like trying to build the house from the roof down.

Emerging filmmakers will have little or nothing to emerge into, unless there is a sound industrial structure to sustain an industry. The first question isn’t “how do we get films made?” but rather “how do we create a sustainable distribution infrastructure so that a need for films exists?” Perhaps we should introduce arts administrators to people in the Australian Wool Board so they can have a conversation about a history of schemes that ignore demand and address only supply.

Arriving from the east coast in 2001, I was intrigued by several disparaging comments from local cineastes and filmmakers who suggested that it was often hard getting WA (read Perth) punters to attend screenings. After a few months it seemed to me that Perth had a cornucopia of screen activities in readily identifiable clusters all around the city. I’m not quite sure what yardstick the jaded critics had applied other than perhaps their own previous attempts to float and sustain festivals or screenings, but my early immersion in Perth’s film scene suggested a robust and vibrant sector.

Many of these extraordinary screenings take place throughout the long hot months from October to April, when climate is everything, consistently offering mild, rain-free evenings across the city and suburbs. There are outdoor screenings aplenty, many have become Perth institutions. In Kings Park, not far from the Botanic Gardens, a mixed program of contemporary films and classics has Crackerjack screening with Casablanca. On special nights, local bands (often jazz) accompany the screenings. It’s a program repeated with variation in other inner-city locales and suburban parks. For the annual Festival of Perth, the Lotteries Film Season shows international cinema outdoors at the UWA and northern suburbs Joondalup campuses of Edith Cowan University. Around Fremantle, regular summer screenings take place in a central public park. A few kilometres away in Spearwood’s Manning Park, the local council helped arrange an outdoor festival that ran over 3 months and screenings are planned for near the Swan River in East Fremantle.

In keeping with this al fresco exhibition practice, this year’s 16th WA Screen Awards gala evening was preceded by the Fremantle Outdoor Film Festival (FOFF), a 2-week program of screenings showcasing the state’s emerging and established filmmakers. Before staging the event, the Film and Television Institute (FTI) Marketing Manager Jon Cope looked for a new way to present the awards while building on the momentum from earlier incarnations. Cope’s marketing brief was to address the divergent and peripatetic history of the WASAs. “When they started they pretty much focussed on early career filmmakers. There were genre awards and craft awards and there was the WA Young Filmmaker of the Year award, which was the pinnacle of achievement. Over the years there have been different coordinators but there was no continuity, changing venues and style with expensive sit-down affairs.”

This year FTI deliberately set out to reposition the awards. Part of the strategy was to centre them around Fremantle, with the ceremony in the Town Hall and a post awards supper at the same venue where the industry and early career filmmakers would “have the opportunity to interact in the same room.” Also the previous year’s festival collaboration with Sunset Cinemas was retitled as the Fremantle Outdoor Film Festival, an FTI coordinated 2-week event which kicked-off with Tropfest and ended with the WASAs. The rationale, according to Cope, was to complement the single evening awards ceremony with a festival “to improve the accessibility of products coming out of early career filmmakers to the public.” The free opening night saw nearly 2000 attend Fremantle’s Princess May Park for Tropfest. “It was extraordinary,” says Cope. “People brought their kids, their dogs; it was a real family celebration, and that’s what we were after.” Similarly on consecutive Wednesday nights FOFF showcased the early career nominees in well patronised free screenings.

Somewhat disingenuously Cope admits “there’s the old adage that Freo people don’t travel north of the river,” adding with a laugh, “I guess I’ve sort of been relying on that to boost our audience.” Fortunately, Cope says Luna and Sunset Cinemas have been helpful and supportive. There hasn’t been a ruthless demarcation where FOFF has been regarded as a commercial competitor taking market share from established venues.

The awards night ran remarkably smoothly without the ostentatious razzle-dazzle associated with the national awards (AFI and IF). The welcoming address by FTI Chief Executive Graeme Sward was interrupted briefly when Sward removed his tuxedo jacket to reveal a second layer of clothing bearing the new Institute logo, launched that evening. This was no mean feat considering the sweltering temperature. The day’s 40+ degree heat and unusually high humidity no doubt dissuaded many from donning black tie or formal apparel. Yet as former WASA event director and current awards judge, Richard Sowada, said, “I thought the level of production was pretty good, pretty slick, and people are starting to embrace the sense of occasion. They made an effort, particularly the young people.”

However there is an undercurrent of dissent and some dissatisfaction within the film community over the judging criteria and rationale since it’s not always obvious why some films and filmmakers are eligible and others not. But the history of such ceremonies, as witnessed in the AFI Awards over the years, demonstrates competing interests from constituents, which frequently leads to changes in voting and awards criteria.

Local Australian Screen Directors Association (ASDA) head, academic and filmmaker Melanie Rodriga (Teesh & Trude), judged industry and early career sections. “There’s always been lively discussion and lively debate about the best format for the awards and how the awards are being judged.” But Rodriga recognises that competing voices will always lobby in their own interest.

As for perceptions that the WASAs are a strange, and perhaps incompatible mix of established and emerging talent, Cope is pragmatic. “It’s an evolving thing. We sent out a proposal to industry for comment and we’ve tried to respond.” One response to the client base was the inclusion of more documentaries in the screenings. “The industry understands…what we’re trying to do here and we’re trying to accommodate them,” says Cope. “There are 5 Outstanding Achievement Awards, so it’s not so competitive. We see the industry as working within a national context. The AFIs are the main awards for the WA industry. WASA is about encouraging early career filmmakers and showing their achievements.”

Regardless of any perceived shortcomings in the event’s identity or process, most seem to agree the unifying and celebratory focus of the WASAs is essential, particularly for an industry that’s so ephemeral. A case in point was filmmaker John Beaton’s recollection on receiving his Outstanding Contribution to the WA Screen Industry award. After his impressive CV was read, duly noting the odd jobs, gigs and teaching needed to sustain his career, Beaton echoed the industry advice he had heard many years ago. It’s important to prevail, despite the obstacles and adversity, to “just keep breathing…”

Given the record number of entries to this year’s WASA (160 including about 30 from established players), the pulse out west seems strong and vital.

16th WA Screen Awards, Fremantle Town Hall, Mar 8. Winners included: Early Career Genre Awards: Best Short Film, Francesca Strano, Jack; Best Documentary Production, Glen Stasiuk, The Forgotten; Best Animation/Mixed Media Production, The Davison Bros, Medusa; Best Experimental Production, Diana Ford, Edit; Early Career Craft Awards: Directing, Matty Limpus, Jack; Writing, Tim Maricic, John ‘Rocky’ Robinson—Roll With the Punches; Cinematography, Peter Finkle, Fixing a Hole; Sound Design, Christopher Trappe & Vincenzo Perrella, An Evening with Robert Valentine; Editing, Christopher Trappe, An Evening with Robert Valentine; Acting, Deanna Cooney, Men’s Room; Animation/Mixed Media, Timothy Merks, Mr Gough. Industry Awards: Outstanding Achievement Awards: Outstanding Television Series, Goolarri Media (Dot West & Joan Peters), The Mary G Show; Outstanding Screenplay, Vanessa Lomma, Teesh & Trude; Outstanding Editing, Frank Rijavec, A Million Acres a Year; Outstanding Cinematography, Torstein Dyrting, Gifted Thumbs, Alley Kat Productions; Outstanding Documentary Filmmaking, Alan Carter, The Accused. For a complete list of winners go to www.fti.asn.au

Let me get this straight, the talk of New York is Matthew Barney and George W Bush. A curious mix of hyper-masculinity perhaps, with Barney’s Cremaster Cycle (1994-2003) currently at the Guggenheim museum and Bush constantly playing on CNN. Anyhow, the picture is clear: men are in.

Except for the odd glimpse of Condoleezza Rice and Nicole Kidman: the talk is about the guys. A 20-something New York photographer, Ryan McGinley, is also in the mix due to his solo show at the Whitney which documents his friends doing the sex, drugs and bad kid trip à la Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. Luckily for McGinley, the controversy about his work is due to the word around Manhattan that his kiddy pics have had adult genitals (super-)imposed on them (you get the picture). Whether it’s true or not, McGinley’s work is in essence an affront to US moral guardians and Photoshop puritans, and as a consequence, generates much discussion. A welcome diversion from Barney’s particular brand of testicular phantasy and Bush’s war on terror. Or maybe it all adds up to the same thing.

I was in the US during late January/early February for screenings in New York and Chicago of Another Planet, a program of Australian video. The Video Data Bank invited me to curate and present the screening as part of their Conversations at the Edge series, which is billed as bringing to Chicago “media makers, critics, scholars and theorists in dialogue around the most provocative and daring works being produced in media today.” The program was first screened in New York, hence my interest in Manhattan gallery gossip. The 2 venues that screened Another Planet couldn’t have been more different. New York’s Robert Beck Memorial Cinema reminded me of the old London Filmmaker’s Co-op Cinema in Camden, but with better projection facilities and no evident leaks in the roof. The Chicago screening on the other hand, was in a state of the art cinema run by the Art Institute of Chicago.

For the Video Data Bank, staff and students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and some local video art fans, the diverse selection of Australian video in Another Planet was of great interest—even on a night with a -30Þ wind chill factor. While a range of Australian work from 1999 to 2002 was included, I was careful not to stitch together a survey of ‘seminal’ Australian video. Instead, I was interested in presenting a bastardised, glitched, self-reflexive and neo-materialist digital practice which countered the notion of the seminal, and was at odds with the generic and cyberish polish invested in much ‘new’ media art. After all, my interest is in the emerging gritty backlash to over purposed, under developed, high-end digital art.

Part ghost story, part pop video, Martine Corompt’s Spell on You was the perfect vehicle to open the show. Except for Philip Brophy’s video, Evaporated Music Part 1 (a-c), which amused audiences with its wry swipe at aging rock jocks, New York and Chicago audience interest lay in the work of Mandy Morgan, sue k, John Billan and Jennifer Sochackyj, who are all concerned with the symbiosis between photography, cinema and electronic art. The nexus between analogue and digital media was also present in Justine Cooper and Joey Stein’s video, Reduction, which contained all the hallmarks of 1970s performative split screen black and white video, but was shot on infra-red.

Ironically, the curatorial impulse that aimed to draw connections between old and new media underscored my learning curve as curator in this new world order of DVD. If you are going to show DVD in the United States remember that multi region DVD formatting and decks do not apply there. This seems to resonate with current world politics and could very easily link with Paul Virilio’s discussion of vision machines and polar inertia. I advise you to back yourself up with a variety of formats if you’re screening video internationally. Reports from the Rotterdam Film Festival described numerous DVD nightmares, and no-shows when discs didn’t play. This was not a problem at the New York screening, courtesy of an old-fashioned NTSC VHS tape, or at the Chicago cinema kitted up to screen multi region DVDs.

The Video Data Bank holds the major collection of artists and independent video in the United States. For a video art fiend like myself, accessing the VDB collection in Chicago was a phenomenal treat. I was shown the most radical video I’ve seen for some time—Walid Ra’ad/The Atlas Group’s Hostage, The Bachar Tapes (English Version), (2001). Ra’ad’s video narrates the story of Souheil Bachar, the sole Arabic hostage to be held in a Beirut cell with westerners Terry Anderson and Terry Waite in the mid 1980s. An exercise in deceit, conceit and the West’s fetishisation of ‘the Arab’, Hostage is confronting viewing in these politically murky times.

Interestingly, the video installation that most interested me in New York was produced by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky and exhibited at the Greene Street Gallery Artists’ Space. Simple in its presentation, but highly evocative, Shawky’s projection-based Sidi El Asphalt’s Mulid (2002) consisted of slowed down footage of people swaying in a mosque to the Cypress Hill track, (Rap) Superstar. Like Walid Ra’ad’s Hostage, the installation’s intellectual currency and ambivalence far outweighs the governing rhetoric of good versus evil. Maybe I was overly sensitive to the mainstream political diatribe, but anything could be considered intellectually invigorating when compared to a President who confused “Hitlerism” with fascism in his State of the Union address. However, what really surprised me in the US was not the fascist DVD systems, the mantra of war or the fascination with the iconic boys of the New York art scene. It was the prevalence of Joy Division in bars and artists’ video and digital work. So forget Bush, Barney and McGinley after all. They may not last. But Ian Curtis is back. Big time.

Another Planet, Australian video, Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, New York City, Feb 4; Gene Siskel Film Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, Feb 6

The 2003 exhibition program at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation began with a double bill, Francesca da Rimini and John Tonkin, whose work is aesthetically quite different. Where Tonkin’s practice is data mapping (slow time, clean graphics), da Rimini’s is hypermedia (fast time, cut and paste, samples and remixes). What they share is a desire to engage the viewer as participant in the work/play of making the world, though in quite different ways.

Both artists hail from Adelaide and have received Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowships enabling them to consistently develop their practices towards creating large, complex and ongoing projects. Their work continues to be highly influential in the discourses of new media art. Yet it has taken a long time for their work to be exhibited in the visual arts arena.

Net art/writing is da Rimini’s medium. Considered immaterial, net art (alongside other digital art practices), has little chance of entering the cultural discourses generated by galleries and museums that have yet to develop the resources necessary to archive electronic/digital art practices. Added to this difficulty is the fact that the visual arts are uncomfortable with media politics. Usually considered more ‘activist’ than art, didactic and lacking rigour, the praxis that engages with current issues is considered unfashionable and even modernist. Yet if you engage with net art it soon becomes apparent that this art makes a politics, poetics and aesthetics that sidesteps the critical discourse that is so fond of interpretation. It’s impossible and banal to interpret something constantly changing, whose terms of reference are borne from fragments, and whose materialisation is less knowable than the objects we so love to hold, own and trade upon. Net art demands an experiential engagement—where spacetime and body intersect. Perhaps this can be called e-motion, the re-turn of feeling with thinking intact.

da Rimini’s LOS DIAS Y LAS NOCHES DE LOS MUERTOS (the days and nights of the dead) (1998-present), is as fast and invasive as the forces of media saturated techno-capital. The work was triggered by an encounter with Ricardo Dominguez and the struggle of the Mexican Zapatistas with their powerful northern neighbour, USA, more than “a nation amongst nations.” LOS DIAS catalogues, with no archival claim, the excesses of global capitalism. It was made initially for the web. In her EAF talk da Rimini called it, “a container that is constantly changing.” In the EAF gallery, the one-to-one engagement of small screen and dial-up connection becomes one-to-many. Here it is generated from the in-house network and projected large in the back half of the gallery. You need emotional, physical and intellectual strength to stay beyond the initial ‘already known’ of the media saturated imagery (which includes the dead body of a boy killed by a member of the military sent to “quell” the G8 activists in Genoa, a plethora of terrible statements on the “art” of war, the sounds of men and women crying). It is a looped work—5 frames ‘house’ meta-refreshed html files with differently timed sequences. Bottom right turns over the architectural remainders of global capital’s move from the burbs of the west to offshore low rent, low pay, non-unionised labour. da Rimini calls it the “material hyper-decay of the industrial age.” That’s pretty succinct. Lounge chairs, headsets and, a low round white table littered with Space Dolls Zine, go someway toward making this hard work easier. At least there’s a soft landing. The excellent audio remix by Michael Grimm extends the work. I am bombarded by images and enveloped by multiple threads of sampled sound: stretched-pulled-slowed. The work uses the ICQ log as a fictional device to relay a series of statements—war cries from the cabinets of power. My favourite, a curious fragment from Microsoft, reads “tentative gestures ruin everything.” A poetic acknowledgment that poetics has the power to ruin.

There is no possibility of a singular subject here. Rather fractured selves, distributed selves as distributed texts. What remains is the unsayable, the thing that remains unlocatable. This un-nameable thing functions not in a psychoanalytic sense of loss or lack, but rather (I want to think) as the evolutionary obstacle that must be overcome. In this way it’s a call to action, a wake-up. How do we figure inscription in a hyper-tech world? On what rests my comfort and yours?

The theoretical (actual) disappearance of women as an ontological force is a persistent cipher in da Rimini’s work. The first line from Dominguez’ catalogue essay reads; “a spectre haunts capital—the spectre is women.” And the first line of “Softly from the ruins…” (in the Space Dolls Zine I’ve brought home) reads, “efemera> she breathes the uncertainty of her time.” There is an intuitive and pragmatic rigour to da Rimini’s thinking and making. Snippets of this and this and this make seemingly endless serialisations—lines that become bundles.

John Tonkin is a software artist—he uses the computer as a programming device. He works in the area of database visualisation of the small and inconsequential at the scale of the universal becoming cosmic. With Strange Weather he generates a visual aesthetic that makes beautiful patterns calculated from user input: the effects of the everyday things one performs mapped over “external indicators” garnered from the internet. Poetics and irony go hand in hand in this work. Tonkin’s background was in science before he came to art. He has a long-standing interest in the now quirky, but of his time, 19th century scientist, Cesare Lombroso. Tonkin writes in an email: “In The Political Criminal and Revolution Lombroso seeks to determine the causes of political unrest. His treatise encompasses not only physiognomy and racial stereotyping but other factors such as the ‘geological soil structure’, meteorological conditions such as ‘barometric oscillations’ and the percentage of young women menstruating. He seemed quite disinterested in the political and economic circumstances.”

Tonkin develops his work primarily for gallery installation, which gives him more control over the speed at which images appear than online versions allow. As the subtitle [ver 0.1, recruitment] suggests, this is the beta version of a longterm project. Data mapping is a practice on the rise in all sorts of economies—especially architectural, corporate and educational. The visualisation of abstract things—like statistics or the movement of capital is usually a prosaic affair. Strange Weather is more aesthetically akin to Asymptote’s Virtual New York Stock Exchange with added chance operations. Strange Weather wants to “elucidate and confound” by using the madness of information overload with the everyday motions individuals make—an absurd and connected notion. A Graphic User Interface designed with the familiarity of a browser window invites the user to register and begin their own editable database of “personal indicators.” When it’s actually connected to the web (here it isn’t—rather, as the title suggests, it is recruiting data entry bods), the personal indicators will form one database that will be mapped over another “harvested from the internet.”

What we see in the gallery is a potential work—the prototype you might take to a backer or a client (in this case, the gallery visitor). The transformation from personal data to pattern sets, otherwise called graphs, is visualised by ribbons of varying breadths, speeds and colours that undulate away from the viewer/user (or Bill Seaman’s “vuser”), forming troughs and peaks of variable dimensions. The ribbons don’t rush toward the usual Euclidian horizon—their paths cross, fold and touch. Eventually the user will be able to both upload and pull time-specific images, URLs and maps from the moving bands of data. Included amongst the sea of undulating ribbons (rhythms) will be other types of digital image maps; satellite photos, weather predictions et al. There’s another graph that looks for random subsets. Tonkin emails examples: “x: number of coffees; y: barometric pressure in Cairo; z: microsoft share price; radius: body temperature.” This 3 dimensional “graph” appears as a complex array of singular atoms—circulating around an unpinnable force. Like da Rimini’s work—here is the appearance of the unnamed and unlocatable.

John Tonkin has been working with mr snow (http://laudanum.net) learning java3d. Francesca da Rimini is living in Adelaide again after a long period away and collaborating with local Kuarna performer Stephen Goldsmith and Sydney-based performer Tess de Quincey.

Francesca da Rimini (http://www.sysx.org/gashgirl/), John Tonkin (http://www.johnt.org/strangeweather/), Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Feb 21-Mar 22.

The decision to introduce a Computer Gaming program into the Adelaide International Film Festival (AIFF) is intriguing. Modern games are definitely becoming more like movies—much money is spent creating or recreating a spectacle—but unfortunately most games fail to exhibit the narrative strength or originality that marks a good film. Most games these days, if they possess a plot at all, trot out tired clichés of revenge fantasies and fascistic domination of the landscape. This was all too apparent in lensflare 02, onedotzero’s contribution to the festival, which appeared to have been partly or wholly sponsored by SONY and other content companies. While a few of the games presented, like Sega’s Rez and Bitmap Brothers’ Z: Steel Soldiers, at least differed in their graphic styles, others such as Capcom’s Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny and Sierra’s Throne of Darkness did little to stir the genre from the artistic stagnation it seems to have fallen into.

The other events in the gaming program were presented by C-Level, a Los Angeles-based “co-operative public and private lab formed to share physical, social and technological resources.” The C-Level performances were intimately concerned with the nature of game violence and audience participation in it, although their attitude towards the phenomenon was closer to relaxed indulgence than disapproval.

Cockfight Arena puts 2 players in chicken headdresses and wings, in front of a large screen on which 2 cocks are placed against a backdrop of urban decay. Flapping of the wings generates lift for the players’ avian avatars, while pedals by the players’ feet are used to lash out with the blades. The use of these costumes, and the physical activity of moving the wings, introduces an almost tribal, totemic feel to proceedings, as if players are invoking the behaviour they wish to see on screen by acting it out in person. The gameplay is similar to Joust, the 1982 Williams Electronics arcade hit, although the chickens are proportionally larger than the Williams ostrich/stork, which means the resulting flight patterns are quite different. Audience members are able to place bets on players, and smoking and drinking are encouraged, evoking the decadent feel of a real back-alley cockfight.

The second work presented by C-Level was Tekken Torture Tournament, an extension of the Playstation game Tekken 3 (Namco, 1998), and the result is, quite literally, shocking. Players have electrodes strapped to their right arms which deliver electric shocks as their on-screen alter ego is pummelled. The inability to move one’s button-pressing hand at various points during the game, due to its being clenched in momentary pain, changes the ebb and flow of the in-game violence. People fight differently when they actually feel pain, something worth remembering in this age of Nintendo wars.

Cockfight Arena and Tekken Torture Tournament reveal a desire to mix the real and the virtual, to raise the stakes for game players by commingling the world on-screen with physical actions and consequences. While the end results are not serious—losing a game does not mean losing your head, the fate suffered by your feathered friend in Cockfight Arena and the physical involvement definitely heightens your awareness of the game and makes the experience much more involving.

Both C-Level events were attended by a predominantly male audience. This could be due to the context in which they were exhibited; in a nightclub, rather than a gallery. Videos from previous performances in Los Angeles, Houston and Tel Aviv showed a more balanced gender mix. Questions during the C-Level forum revealed concerns from the local audience about the focus on violence. It could be that C-Level’s interest in gaming violence (and the choice of site) worked against the group.

The inclusion of C-Level and onedotzero in the AIFF broadens the program and explores cultural issues in a field that will become more important to filmmakers in future years. Multinational companies are developing content for film and games, and digital techniques are increasingly used in the creation of cinema. We can only hope that filmmakers and artists become more comfortable working within the peculiar constraints of computer gaming, and in doing so help move the field on from its technologically advanced but ethically and artistically stunted state.

Lensflare 02, onedotzero, www.onedotzero.com; Cockfight Arena, Tekken Torture Tournament, C-Level, http://c-level.org/, Computer Gaming Program, Adelaide International Film Festival, Church, The Nightclub, Adelaide, Mar 3-5

It is salutary to reflect on the selection of an Australian Army interactive DVD as the cutting edge product—an emblem of excellence across the national multimedia industry—in the recent Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association (AIMIA) Awards.

The awards are the annual litmus test for defining how digital media is being taken up; by which industry, and by which market. This year’s event was held at the Australian Technology Park (ATP), the site of the old Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Redfern, Sydney. A cooperative venture between the New South Wales Government, stakeholder universities, TAFE NSW and a team of international information technology companies, ATP now houses organisations whose primary focus is technological research and development along with services including fibre-optic cabling, LANs , WANs and a supercomputing centre (ac3).

We can rest assured that our troops are going to the US-lead war with Iraq with state-of-the-art, digitally enhanced training. The Australian Army Training Centre (Sydney) took out the 10th Anniversary of the AIMIA 2002 Award for the prestigious Best of the Best Title and Best Education and Reference Title for their simulated combat DVD, Sergeant Offensive Operation. Much to the amusement of award presenter Adam Spencer, from ABC Radio’s Triple J, these awards were worlds away from the 1998 educational/entertainment winner, the Bananas In Pyjamas CD-ROM.

Clearly Sergeant Offensive Operation is no arcade game. In The Australian (Adrian Lynch, IT News, Feb 11), Captain Sharyn Fewster, commanding officer of the Army’s Sydney Training Technology Centre, said: “The …package forms part of the sergeant promotion course to prepare army corporals for promotion to the rank of sergeant. It also trains corporals to participate in offensive operations at the rank of sergeant…Large amounts of virtual reality have been incorporated in the training module so the student corporal can access vital information…The user has access to two critical pieces of virtual equipment: a Knowledge Visor and a Personal Communication System.”

Previous AIMIA award winners, Massive Interactive (Treasures of Ancient Greece, www.phm.gov.au/ancient_greek_ olympics/, 2000) won Highly Commended for Best of the Best with The Pattern Book (www.patternbook.nsw. gov.au) developed with the Department of Urban Affairs and Planning and the NSW Government Architect. At a launch by NSW Premier Bob Carr, The Pattern Book was declared “a practical resource that will be used across the State to help raise the standard of residential flat design in the new century.”

Over the past 10 years, the AIMIA awards for interactive media were more in line with experimentation and the work of nonconformist producers. In 1998, for example, Best Educational Multimedia/Online Product was the Real Wild Child, Australian Rock CD-ROM and Best Site or Title produced by a Student, and the Apple PC for individual innovation was Megan Heyward’s I Am A Singer CD-ROM.

In the contemporary landscape, interactive media seem to have increasingly become organs of the state, a return to their origins in surveillance technology, national planning and entertainment.

Graphite2003, the first regional Australasian and South East Asian conference on technical developments in and artistic uses of computer graphic and interactive techniques, was held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in February. Organised as parallel streams of technical papers, exhibitions and screenings, there seemed few opportunities for discussion between the art and technology camps. However 3 cultural panels addressed this and things became interesting when artists, theorists and technologists interacted.

The first of these sessions, organised by Kelli Dipple, dealt with Sustainable Communications—Lag, Interruption and Collapse, familiar to all who work in online and networked environments. Interestingly the audience was evenly divided between those wishing to embrace technical difficulties like lag as an inherent emergent rhythm of the internet, integral to any new media experience, and those who could not wait for technological upgrades to provide seamless real-time processing of the virtual experience. Keith Armstrong (QUT), John McCormick (Company in Space) and Johannes Birringer (online from Ohio State University) addressed issues of the presentation and delivery of artistic content and how it is affected by network infrastructure for streaming media, video conferencing and chat interfaces.

Besides Graphics chaired by Stephen Barrass (CSIRO) offered insights into the use of multisensory rather than predominantly visual interfaces for human/computer interaction. Recalling the “smellorama” of John Waters’ movies, Barrass proposed a “feelorama” in the form of the Haptic Snuffbox project (featured in Graphite 2003’s accompanying exhibition) in which he and Matt Adcock used a haptic user interface, a feedback pen rather than a mouse, to relay every bump and surface irregularity of the screen image, thus generating a sense of digital touch. Drew Whitehouse (ANU Vizlab) focused on why adults are reticent to engage in interactive environments, using the example of his interactive work for kids of all ages at the National Museum of Australia, and Alan Dorin (Monash) addressed the use of different visual forms, like empty and negative space in digital imaging, to create uniquely digital aesthetics, rather than those relying on cinematic conventions. This highly entertaining panel proposed real solutions in producing hybrid and sensory interface forms.

As I was a member of the third panel, Technological Cultural Interaction, an overview is provided here by artist and Conference Co-chair Ian Gwilt: “MIT Media Lab’s Saoirse Higgins’ panel swept into a sleepy Graphite on the morning after the conference dinner. Like the arrival of the travelling circus the peripatetic showmen amazed the audience with images of wonder and awe with Richard Brown (VCA) referring to notions of alchemy and the ‘magic’ of the interactive experience. His user responsive interfaces, [producing an] intuitive, playful experience, were an example of what can be achieved when art/technology and content work hand in hand. Melinda Rackham’s multi-user 3-dimensional Empyrean space provided a metaphysical meeting place where we could engage with other out-of-body explorers in a sublime digital aesthetic that retained some of the sensual fluidity of the real world—exploring notions of the corporeal experience and social engagement in a virtual space. Catriona Macaulay (University of Dundee) questioned whether developers listen to the needs of consumers, and if consumers really know what they want anyway in terms of cutting edge technology. In this digital chicken and egg scenario, who decides on the outcomes for technology, society and visual culture and how are such decisions made? The ‘quality of experience’ rather than ‘goal oriented tasks’ was an overriding issue that linked panel members and audience. This was definitely a case of the journey being more important than the destination—be it down path, pixel or both.”

The panels identified some major problems in content delivery for artists working in the often uneasy fissure between art and technology. These issues were also explored in the diverse digital genres exhibited at SPAN galleries. Work ranged from Phillip George’s subtle Whitewater digital print, which evolved from an image file over 10 years, to interactive online works like Adrian Miles’ Video blog::vog video diary. There was a proliferation of cute creatures—Robin Pettard and Troy Innocent’s plastic constructions and the simple yet playfully engaging touch sensitive installation Shifting Nature from Cheang Lin Yew, Yeoh Guan Hong and Liew San Yen, where tiny projected artificial-life type critters responded in swarming patterns to audience hands. Likewise in Jennifer Seevinck’s Sticky Traffic, real-time rendered toy insects and wobbly tactile 3D surfaces visually responded to the sound of traffic outside the gallery.

A Singapore street scene was transposed into the Melbourne exhibition space in Paul Lincoln’s Dislocation, an Augmented Reality (AR) work that illustrated a key theme of the conference. AR differs from virtual reality because the viewer sees a digital image overlaid onto the real world. Here underlying assumptions between art and technology divide, as AR research doesn’t necessarily question what is real or virtual, whereas an artist may think that we exist in simultaneous layers of virtuality—that nothing is really real. As in many AR applications, the technology is interesting, however Lincoln’s content (video images of a woman, a small girl and an old woman all eating dinner) was not particularly engaging. Technology is only as good as the concepts it carries, an overwhelming reason why more artists should be resident in research labs.

Content abounded however in the electronic theatre, which showcased computer-generated moving image works ranging from film, architectural animation and software demos to biomedical visualisations. Antonia Fredman’s sophisticated Amateur Developer’s Handbook took an hilarious look at property development for the enthusiastic beginner, while Mike Daly’s binary was a beautiful physiological exploration of a woman bodily intertwined with technology. Anna Tow commented on the current Australian social and political climate with Pending, a dark comedy about hope and identity concerning the mandatory detention of asylum seekers.

Contextually interesting was Steven Stahlberg’s Strange—an animated segment featuring the seductive, synthetic singer, Rhayne. Virtual women of improbable proportions often accompanied by phallic objects would, in an art context, be read as ironic, however there was no hint of irony here. This 42-second animation was realized on Maya in 3 weeks by one animator whose focus was speed and processing power rather than content and cultural representation. In practical terms, the desirability of siren Rhayne, an Idoru or virtual pop celebrity, is not predicated on whether she is real or generated but on her effect, whether she can entertain the end user.

Stelarc’s keynote address introduced his Prosthetic Head. The project links the Alice artificial intelligence software, modified by his personal data, with VRML animation resembling himself to produce a web-based talking head that interacts by answering (typed) questions from users. The technology is not cutting-edge or particularly new, but the cult of Stelarc’s body-augmenting celebrity makes this fascinating. The friendly virtual head is not an intimate other—it will be projected in darkened gallery spaces, 3 metres high, dominating the viewer. Always larger-than-life, Stelarc has finally swapped his biological body, his wetware, for hardware.

Also dealing with bodily immersion, Melbourne’s Metraform screened their Virtual Reality work, Ecstasis, where groups of 4 must cooperate by choosing aligned visual perspectives to navigate the experiential environment. Ecstasis explored notions of ecstasy through a “negotiated betweenness” as ribbon-like avatars flirted and danced with each other while moving through the sensuous organic and digital imagery.

But the real impact was felt when emerging from the enclosed spaces of virtual interaction into the huge Melbourne Peace Rally. I was reminded that differences of perspective, whether cultural, technical, philosophical or artistic require respect and cooperation. Be at Graphite2004 in Singapore—the technology will be there, we could use it together.

Graphite2003, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, Feb 11-14

My first impression of Rotterdam and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival was a mesmerising liquid architecture display of green pixelated images and text, moving and mutating over the surface of a 50-storey building. I later discovered that this was not part of DEAF03 as I’d first assumed but simply an impressive Dutch Telecom site abstracting segments from current news headlines. The DEAF03 opening was close by though, along an abandoned dockland inside Pakhuis Las Palmas, one of the biggest, coldest and most technologically equipped warehouse spaces I have ever visited.

The buzz of new media celebrity warmed me up as I excitedly squeezed my way past Lev Manovich, Sadie Plant and other members of the new media art elite to get my complimentary glass of pink champagne at the bar. In the centre of a packed wooden amphitheatre, its top rows consisting of giant bunk beds complete with fluffy cushions, the director of V2, Alex Adriaansens, tried to make himself heard over the lively crowd: “DEAF03 Data Knitting, from Wunderkammer to Metadata, will focus on the conditions of our information and knowledge-based society and the role of the media therein. It will specifically explore the ways in which information is gathered, ordered and made accessible through databases and archives.”

As I listened I looked around the impressive space containing over 20 plasma monitors connected to various roaming video camera operators, 5 large video projection screens, countless computer terminals and a 30-foot inflatable plastic jumping tube (and this was just the workshop room!). With a list of partners and supporters that most Australian festival directors could only dream of, DEAF is a huge, multifaceted and technologically sophisticated production which has a growing audience of over 10,000 visitors to each festival.

Warmed by the free flowing champagne and never one to turn down a free ride, I jumped on the bus to see a preview of Whisper, an interactive, performative installation by Thecla Schiphorst and Susan Kozel (Canada) in a theatre on the other side of town. We were ushered onto a white vinyl surface where different atmospheric sounds could be heard by moving into various zones. These emanated from beautiful clear perspex sound domes that isolated you in your own private waterfall of sound. Beside this was a standard looking clothing rack, on which hung 6 strange bulging white robes. Schiphorst and Kozel each put one on and described how sensors in the robes measured your breath and heartbeat and how this bodily data was represented by your own personal heiroglyph on the garment via LED display panels. Whisper, they explained, was an acronym for Wearable, Handheld, Intimate, Sensory, Personal, Expectant, Responsive System. Unfortunately we were then told Whisper was not functioning due to the common and boring problem of “a server being down.” Not to be deterred, I drank more champagne and decided to come back tomorrow to see the rest of the festival. I was not disappointed.

The main DEAF03 exhibition consisted of 20, mostly large scale, interactive artworks housed in a fashionably dark and cold warehouse space. Interestingly, one of the most powerfully charged works was also one of the few that was not interactive. Ingo Gunther’s Worldprocessor, a series of more than 50 illuminated thematic globes made between 1988 and 2003 were technologically simple yet highly evocative sculptures that illustrated and dramatised global trends, statistics and flows. Gunther refers to the Worldprocessor as a “data jacket for the common globe.” Admitting that his works are instantly out of date and always incorrect, he bravely tackles issues such as the culturally biased interpretations of data sets and the challenges of representing complex global issues. One particularly memorable globe visualised how the wealth of particular companies related to the wealth (GNP) of particular countries and continents. One horrifying comparison was that the US store Walmart is economically the size of Africa.

A more personal and poetic globe-based work was The Globe Jungle Project by Yashiro Suzuki (Japan). This magical spinning installation was part of a larger project in Japan to encourage more interaction between young and old through the redesign of city parks. Video images of children playing on the globe-shaped jungle gym by day were re-projected onto the globe at night and could only be seen by spinning the globe so the bars became like a screen. As with quite a few works in DEAF03, The Globe Jungle Project approached the theme of data knitting and digital archives via metaphors of memory.

Pockets Full of Memories by George Legrady (Hungary) also explored notions of collective memory. Visitors were invited to scan any object they had and to fill out a digital questionnaire. The object would then be added to a constantly growing and changing database along with its assigned properties. A projected map of macro-relations was constructed from these micro-personal interactions using a self-organising map algorithm that positioned objects of similar descriptions near each other.

Deciding I needed some bodily stimulation I headed for Stahl Stenslie’s (Norway) Erotogod which was standing tall in the darkness like some futuristic altar to the god of technology. An imposing steel structure, it looked like a chrome wave with an inverted pyramid made of white latex projection screens on its peak. The work was constantly surrounded by hordes of eager visitors. I watched as each person was led up the Erotogod ramp by an attendant and then asked to kneel and straddle a flexible metal paddle seat facing the 3 large screens. While the ‘user’ (who was looking more and more like the ‘human sacrifice’) was kneeling in this slightly humiliating position, the attendant fitted them with a glittering, padded ‘suit’ that looked scarily like a reject costume from an 80s Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The ‘victim/user’ was left on the altar while texts and images were generated on the 3 semi-opaque screens and deep vibrating sounds emanated from 16 speakers placed around the work.

Although initially put off by the 80s spacesuit, I decided to tackle the Erotogod myself. As the suit was fastened between my legs and around my chest and arms the attendant explained that it was full of many sensors and that I should touch myself to trigger different images, sounds and texts from The Koran, The Talmud and The Bible. As I was left alone and feeling quite silly, a new aspect of the work quickly became obvious to me. By touching yourself through the suit, waves of different vibrations emanated through the suit and into your body. I was so distracted by these intense vibrations I hardly noticed the scripts from the sacred texts that were appearing around me. After what was a pleasantly exhilarating, multi-sensory 5 minutes, I left the work looking slightly flushed. Erotogod says Stenslie, “is a futuristic media altar linking auto-erotic touching to stories of Creation; a sensory fusing of religions.” Quite a sensation from one of the early founders of Cybersex (Stenslie built a full-body, tele-tactile communication system in 1993).

Another extreme work but on the other end of the sensory scale was PainStation by Volke Morawe and Tillman Reiff (Denmark). Think prehistoric PlayStation with an extra incentive to win. PainStation is based on the early video game Pong, but in an interesting twist, if you miss the ball in PainStation you actually get hurt. The PainStation module is constructed like an early video arcade game, the crucial difference being the addition of a surface where players must constantly press their left hand. This is the PEU or Pain Execution Unit. When either player misses the ball during the game the PEU is activated and can attack your hand with extreme heat, electrical shocks or lashes of a painful whip. The first player who lifts their hand in this situation is the loser. PainStation was nearly always surrounded by a crowd of young people challenging each other to pain duels. A somewhat simple idea, PainStation was nonetheless engaging and perhaps relevant given the new generation of children developing repetitive strain injuries because of early addictions to computer games.

There were many interesting works such as Zgodlocator by Herwig Weiser, Synthia by Lynn Hershman, Web of Life by Jeffrey Shaw, Poetry Machine_1.5 by David Link and PoliceState by Jonah Brucker-Cohen that I’d have liked to discuss if I had the space [We’ll try to provide it in the next edition. Eds]. The festival’s 2-day Symposium, Information Is Alive, with speakers including Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi and Arjun Appadurai was an interdisciplinary feast for the brain, as were the numerous performances, workshops and seminars held throughout the festival. The DEAF03 website, http://deaf.v2.nlis a journey in itself with enough documentary material to keep you busy for hours.

DEAF03, Dutch Electronic Art Festival. Data Knitting, organised by V2-Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Feb 25-Mar 9

'In Autumn, the ripe season, the Multi-Media Digital Art Museum of China Millenium Monument opens its door for the first time for the ‘multi-media art’, this immature friend. Perhaps, its charm just lies in juvenility. Innovation, brave exploration, and undiminished passion are eternally the attitude and existing style of this newly emerging force. As the undertaker of this exhibition, we warmly welcome the new friend here and will support its development.'

Wang Jiangi, Director, Art Museum, China Millennium Monument, MAAP 2002 catalogue.

I feel that I should state my position up front. I turned 50 last October and (if you don’t count fleeting visits to New Zealand and New Guinea in the 70s) had never been overseas. I also come from Brisvegas and have been actively involved in the Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific (MAAP) Festival over the years as a board member, volunteer, contributor and advisor. So, as I stepped onto the plane in Sydney after a long night at the Primavera artists’ party at the MCA, I was, in the words of Big Kev, EXCITED…VERY EXCITED! I was heading to China for MAAP Beijing; I was a young new media artist trapped in an old woman’s body; and I would soon be the only blonde in Tiananmen Square.

In her catalogue introduction, MAAP Director Kim Machan outlines the importance of MAAP in “showcasing the work of the region’s major new media practitioners, creating new networks, introducing the artists and their work to audiences, and increasing cultural contact and understanding through the experience of new media arts.” Although always built on a strong commitment to new media art in the Asia Pacific, MAAP No. 5 was the first foray out of Australia and into the region, enabling collaborative partnerships between itself and organisations such as The Central Academy of Fine Arts, The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument, The China International Exhibitions Agency and the Australian Embassy in Beijing.

MAAP Beijing featured a wide range of artworks from the Asia Pacific region. Perhaps more significantly, it provided an opportunity for Chinese artists to exhibit their works locally, some for the first time. The accompanying forums, which included presentations by Alex Galloway from Rhizome (US), Julianne Pierce from Australia Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and Pi Li from Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts, provided new regional networks for Chinese artists, academics and students. The importance of this event was highlighted with the coverage on CCTV, the official Chinese television station. How refreshing it was to be sitting in the foyer of our hotel sipping local beer while interviews with new media artists were screened on the large television monitors.

The thematic title, Moist, resulted in a plethora of interpretations. The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument is a grand structure and in the bowels of this enormous sundial is a circular corridor with gallery space on both sides: The China Art Museum. Here MAAP was divided into 3 components: individual installations by artists from Australia, China, Japan, India and Korea; curated screening programs by the Australian Centre for Moving Image, dLux Media Arts, Experimenta Media Arts and Johan Pinappal’s Contemporay Indian Video. There was also a CD-ROM and net art program by MAAP, ANAT and Art Center Nabi. The configuration of the museum allowed separate spaces for many installations and provided areas for banks of computers to view the online component. The pièce de résistance technically speaking was a lecture theatre with a giant, curved 31-metre video wall of 56 programmable monitors. This wall was hotly sought after by artists wishing to see their work writ huge, but the format suited some better than others.

Web of life (2002)—a collaboration between Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw and ZKM in Germany—was visually impressive on such a scale. Viewers placed their hands onto a sculptural component which mapped their lifelines and sent the information through a network to 5 other locations, the resulting image changing according to the person’s ‘vibe.’ The resulting images were sometimes formulaic and my travelmate IMA’s David Broker, was horrified to find that his handprint generated a new age dolphin scenario. Another successful creation for the large screen was Zhang Peili’s Broadcasting at the same time (2002) in which each of the 56 monitors broadcast news readers from different countries announcing, “Good morning, this is the news.” This work perfectly illustrated the homogeneity of the world and its presentation of ‘media humanity.’ While Justine Cooper’s Moist (2002) was created for this wall screen, I thought it did not have the same impact. A video created from bodily fluids magnified many times, it attempted a massive scale shift which resulted in a blotchy, grainy, abstracted image lost in the translation.

Some Australian works were familiar to me—Patricia Piccinini’s Swell (2000), David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s The Levitation Grounds (2000-2002), John Tonkin’s Personal Eugenics (2001) and Craig Walsh’s, Perspective (2002). They looked great in this setting and were well received, as were installations by Ian Haig (Excelsior 3000, 2001) and Iain Mott (Close, 2001). Gong Xin Wang is a MAAP favourite, and his new work was a highlight. Titled Red Gate, it consisted of 4 screens positioned to form a room with openings to enter the space. On each screen was the projection of a large door which opened to reveal glimpses of old and new China before the door slammed shut. The uncanny sound of this constant slamming could be heard while experiencing other works, reminding you where you were and what you hadn’t seen.

The screening program comprised old favourites from artists like Peter Callas, Justine Cooper, Vikki Wilson and Jon McCormack interspersed with more recent works presented to a new and appreciative audience. The CD-ROM and net art component was also extremely varied, with old and new works available for consumption. MAAP’s excursion into Beijing highlighted its importance in the region. It will travel to Singapore before returning to Brisbane in 2005.

MAAP, Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific Festival, The Art Museum of China Millenium Monument, Beijing, Oct 20-Nov 3. www.maap.org.au

In RealTime 51 and 52, I discussed the impact of the world wide web and new media technologies on contemporary Indigenous artists and their work, with particular reference to questions of appropriation. After surveying some recent educational initiatives in the area, notably a successful workshop of the National Indigenous School in New Media Arts (NISNMA) in Adelaide in 2002, I looked at the work of the inimitable Rea and rising stars Jenny Fraser and Christian Thompson.

Leading Wiradjuri conceptual and multimedia artist Brook Andrew is probably best known for his provocatively titled 1996 series Sexy and Dangerous, in which he critiques stereotypes of male indigeneity. Andrew figures prominently in the vanguard of artists challenging colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial assumptions.

It’s mainly white men, self-cast as the true cultural heroes who have historically produced visions of Australia as a ‘nation.’ Andrew frequently deploys Indigenous masculine figures and icons in his work—for example, spears, boomerangs, shields—expressing his artistic vision via the language of pure spectacle, using words from his own and other languages, and re-imaging the Indigenous body as sexy, not savage. By these means he successfully critiques the limitations of narrow imaginings of Australia, past and present, and its position in the world.

Andrew achieves this by combining web-based projects, drawing and installation with judicious use of the written word, performance art, installation, digital photography, video, sound effects and especially neon, for which he has a passion. In an email interview, Andrew writes, “…neon…is a striking colourful medium that for some reason is really successful in human sell-sell culture. it’s beautiful. have u seen the neon heart by Czech artist Jiri David, installed over Prague Castle?”

Andrew exhibits in many Australian galleries, public places and spaces, including the forecourt of Sydney International Airport which features wilbing (to fly). At the walama (to return) forecourt are 22 animated neon boomerangs made from aluminium and high-tension wire. Often his exhibits are the culmination of painstaking historical research, for example, into the specific ceremonial clan designs on particular boomerangs or shields, or the minutiae of carved spears.

In many works Andrew deploys words, sentences or fragments from Indigenous languages, specifically Wiradjuri, Ngarrindjeri and, more recently, Sindhi (a Pakistani dialect) and Hindi as an implicit critique of the imposed, colonising language of English. Language has been a significant instrument of empire, resulting in the suppression of many Australian voices. Sometimes the artist teases his audience with his use of Wiradjuri text. In one case, he writes, audience members misread a Wiradjuri expression as “‘get fucked’, whereas the text actually reads “you don’t share.” (The neon artwork says “buunji nginduugirr AMERICA.” “Buunji” means ‘bludge’ and “nginduugirr” means ‘you’ in the collective sense.) He writes: “it’s the ambiguity and cheekiness of some of my work which i like…”

Often, in ironic, po-mo mode, Andrew refashions ‘traditional’ Indigenous weaponry in postmodern garb, simultaneously mounting a biting social commentary on the cannabilistic consumption of Indigenous art and identity by contemporary capitalism and the advertising industry. Examples of this include his neon boomerangs and massive phallic spears (Seven Spears) created from Australian timbers, LED lighting and bronze for the Arts Program at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. There is always a sense that even his most playful work is deadly serious. As Andrew writes, “…life is politics…i say, we are not innocent people here in the west. we are all complicit with [those in power]. Take, for example, John Howard’s message about anti-terrorism being to ‘preserve our way of life’.”

Describing himself as a conceptual artist, Andrew is drawn to the new technologies (as well as neon) partly because of their surface appeal and seductiveness. At the same time he cleverly deploys capitalism’s and the advertising industry’s own techniques, media and stereotypic imagery, as weaponry against them, commenting on contemporary global and local cultures by borrowing from their own language and grammar.

The sources of Andrew’s artistic eclecticism become apparent when he cites his most important influences: “fred williams: his paintings drop me in the middle of those imaginative landscapes…tracey moffatt: for her guts in artistic navigation in dealing with an at times bitter and jealous aboriginal art world and at times a gutless and parochial australian art scene. i’m not talking about her ‘super star fame’; i’m talking about her ability to survive as an artist…louise bourgeois: her installations transport the mind and body to breathing high with short breaths…andy warhol: because i love to hate the obvious nature of his comments […] & curators and arts lovers who genuinely love art for the sake of it, not because they think they understand it.”

Andrew cites a currently untitled work-in-progress as his career highlight. It involves large neon text works that combine installation and audience participation: “It’s a large spiral red, white and blue neon that is also a cone shape…5m in cone length and 2.5m diameter…and it spins horizontally within an internally mirrored room. Outsiders can see inside the cone. The piece is a performance interactive piece where an audience member (with hospital style white tunic) enters a dark labyrinth. This takes them to 2 ‘workers’ who are covered head to toe in white chemical style suits. Their heads are also protected. The audience member is strapped to a horizontal morgue-style bench and then is slid into the spiralling neon. Indoctrination takes place. Then the audience member is removed to a white bright room and then exited.”

Like many of his works, this one relies on collaboration: “i do use new media mostly through collaborations… like working with the tin sign writers in new delhi…[during an Asialink residency]…i think collaboration is a wonderful way for artists to get outside their own medium.”

He is currently working on, “a new body of work i’ve created through an australia council fellowship which is re-imaging the blak body in a dark enchanted scary forest. the series is called kalar midday—people can guess what it means—i don’t like to give away too many secrets when it comes to my use of language. one of the series has made it into the art gallery of NSW inaugural australian photographic art prize to be opened in a few weeks.”

Essentially, digital new media is a sharp instrument that is easily blunted—but not in this artist’s hands. In his visual arts practice, Brook Andrew is concerned with questions of how a more socially and morally just society might be achieved; how one might address social inequalities and reflect alternative epistemologies and ways of being-in-the-world. The effect of his work is a significant challenge to dominant and oppressive ways of thinking, some would say a politicisation and indigenisation of western history. He achieves this not through being didactic or ‘preachy’ in his approach. Sassy, bold, cheeky, and impudent, Andrew’s work, while politically committed and often hard hitting in its political message, exists in a third space that doesn’t rule out the carnivalesque, the camp, the popular and even sometimes, the garish. Instead it means having a lot of fun and above all, having the guts to stand out as different: “i think artists just spit out what we can when trying to make sense of something either personal or public, aesthetic or political etc. i think the most pressing problem in the world at this moment is a disease which has always cursed humanity, this is the disease of superiority, ignorance and greed. humans are a culture of sheep. i can’t even wear a fish-net shirt in sydney without death looks for god’s sake!”

Coming from Nicholas Jones, this seemingly innocent question struck terror in my soul. Jones carves books. A book to Jones is not a respected repository of knowledge, it is a raw substance ready to be transformed into a 3-dimensional work of art—a thing in itself. Using a scalpel (his father was a surgeon), Jones cuts through the raw pages to expose the stippled texture of the print. It’s a craft that Jones has largely invented for himself.

Jones was resident in a program called Open Bench, staged so the public could witness the theatre of craft process. Visitors could be seen pleading with Jones to save certain books that were lined up for his scalpel. Now he’d come into my office to “borrow” a dictionary.

Reducing books to their physical substance has the consequence of objectifying words as things to be possessed rather than shared. In a literal fashion, Jones is threatening what appears to be happening linguistically around the country. A word is being systematically removed from our official lexicon. That word is ‘craft.’

In titles of courses, exhibitions and magazines the word ‘craft’ has mysteriously disappeared. In its place is the much more happening word, ‘design.’ To an extent, this seems to be a natural evolution—design is the provision of objects for personal use in ways that reflect contemporary scale of manufacturing; design is simply an opportunity to capitalise on good craft. Isn’t ‘design’ just an updated form of ‘craft’?

But one suspects a sleight of hand. Take the case of a recent name change at the National Gallery of Victoria. With its move into Federation Square, the prestigious triennial prize exhibition titled Cicely & Colin Rigg Craft Award was renamed the Cicely & Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award. It’s a neo-modern title for an ultra-contemporary building. But it doesn’t quite fit. In fact, designers themselves were excluded from the original selection process. Calling what is produced by weavers, textile printers and artists who featured in the exhibition ‘design’ takes our attention away from the process of construction. We are led instead to think about function, style, networks and product. The expressive capacity of these works is disabled.

Why is this happening? Some might see it as a sign of the creeping commercialisation of our cultural institutions. ‘Design’ provides a cover by which resources can be channelled away from the ‘drain’ of culture into the ‘investment’ of business. More apocalyptically, it may be seen as part of the escapist consumer culture that is seeking to transcend the physical world, whether through speed, screen or 4 wheel drives. This kind of ‘design’ is the ever-expanding monoculture of global elites. Don’t get me wrong. As far as monocultures go, design is wonderfully exciting—but it is perfectly able to stand in its own Nike runners without government assistance.

Whatever the reasons for the design push, it is for many a matter of concern. While arts funding has remained relatively true to its cultural mission, there is always the threat of commercial imperative.

But panic would be the wrong response. It is within exactly this kind of adversity that the craft ethic flourishes. In New South Wales, the Craft Advocacy Group has been militating against the decline of services for craft practitioners. In Victoria, anonymous missives called ‘squirts’ have been circulating with enigmatic demands such as “10% for craft.” But these ventures have limited success. While fuelled with a defiant spirit, such attempts sometimes become too absorbed in a righteous opposition and miss the opportunity to win minds as well as hearts. They play to the stereotype of craft as a reactionary movement, initiated by those clinging to the 1970s.

The fact is that craft is growing in new directions. In addition to the core of dedicated professional craft practitioners who maintain the skills and creativity of their medium, there are new energies coalescing around the applied arts. Craft has been embraced by the emergent ‘no logo’ generation, sceptical of the pre-packaged meaning of branded objects. Clothes are deliberately badly made—hems are skewed, sewing is wonky and edges are frayed. Hand-made is a sign of liberation. In Melbourne, the Stitches & Bitches nightclub knitting circle has become a legendary way for women to exert their gender in a testy environment.

In the new ‘hand-made’ push, craft is more about expression than skill. In the case of ceramics, a new generation has eschewed traditional pottery skills such as wheel-throwing and developed new forms of idiosyncratic expression. Sydney ceramicist Nicole Lister uses casting to give disposable objects a solid form. Melbourne ‘mud-maker’ David Ray gives the suburban table a Dresden-like ornateness. These makers shadow consumer culture, giving it a meaningfulness it would otherwise lack. Some go so far outside traditional skills that they end up inventing new crafts themselves, like Jones. The fascination with making will continue even in the absence of tradition.

The place of craft in the context of visual arts is also evolving. As a material art, craft becomes pivotal in the dialectic between the screen-based practice of artists like Susan Norrie and Patricia Piccinini, and the physical expression of painting or sculpture. These days painting has more in common with ceramics than it does with the ubiquitous video installation. Already in England, ‘craft’ has become a code for reaction against the celebrity YBAs famous more for their lifestyles than their art.

In the case of photography, the digital processes have inherited the mission of reproduction, leaving the darkroom with the alchemic remnants. We are beginning to see crossovers between craft and darkroom photography. Janie Matthews uses darkroom-like processes to print rust. Kirsten Haydon has produced a wonderful bridge printed on a grid of old metal slide containers. As the emergence of photography led to impressionism in painting, so the introduction of PhotoShop is generating a new craft of photography.

This does not put craft at odds with the digital world. Collaborations where the physical process of making incorporates the digital in a more intimate form are beginning to emerge. Also emerging is the use of craft as a lingua franca between indigenous and modern worlds. Contemporary visual art and design takes us further away from where we are. In Australia, the moral responsibility of place has been passed on to Aboriginal culture, leaving global classes the freedom to belong elsewhere. Your average minimalist urban living room is beautifully offset by the rough edges of an Indigenous basket. This ‘enlightened’ regard is merely another version of primitivism, where the remote culture is made exotic and dialogue avoided. It realises the ironic bargain invoked after the fall of apartheid: “You can have the crown, but we’ll keep the jewels.”

By contrast, craft is one of the few opportunities for reciprocal exchange between Aboriginal and Balanda (non-indigenous) people. The ever-growing Alice Springs Beanie Festival demonstrates how the humble craft object can bridge cultural divides. This festival has inspired others, such as the Melbourne Scarf Festival, which includes workshops in Islamic scarf-wearing.

So, even if they have stolen the ‘craft’ word, it’s only a matter of time before we find it again. The ‘design’ word is becoming so over-used that it is losing any reference beyond a short-term political kudos. The new ‘craft’ will be discovered as harbinger of a future utopia beyond the screen, promising a new existence of responsibility and enjoyment—a place they call the ‘real world.’

Stick-thin, willowy figures emerging stark black from the white radiance and intense heat of midsummer, like Lowry’s matchstick Londoners suddenly stripped of their winter clothing and transplanted to the Australian desert. This is the mental image I have of British sculptor Anthony Gormley’s Inside Australia, currently installed on a remote salt lake, several kilometres outside the nearest town and appoximately 750kms east of Perth. It is only an imagining because I haven’t seen the work—I couldn’t afford the cost of travelling to the site. Inside Australia was certainly the main game for Perth International Arts Festival publicity, and a grand parting gesture from Festival Director Sean Doran. Enigmatic, distant, and beyond the reach of most, Inside Australia was an expensive project to realise ($650,000) and obvious questions have been raised about the relevance or appropriateness of a British sculptor creating work for a landscape inside Australia. However, the work was a hit with those mostly from outside the metro area. The community of Menzies is rallying support to retain the work permanently.

Patricia Piccinini’s MCA Travelling Exhibition Call of the Wild aside, the rest of the visual arts events registered as mere blips in the festival program. The decline in numbers of high-profile international art stars this year, however, allowed local work to shine through. Two curatorial projects focussing on marginalised practices and local histories in WA emerged as the most important exhibitions to be staged in recent years: The Gay Museum, curated by artist and historian Jo Darbyshire; and South West Central: Indigenous Art from South Western Australia 1833-2002, curated by Brenda L Croft with Janda Gooding for the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

In The Gay Museum Darbyshire used the design logic of contemporary museums by splitting the exhibition into sub-headings including, STEREOTYPES, INVISIBILITY, UNNATURAL PASSIONS, AIDS, BEATS, WOMEN’S LIBERATION, VICE, DRAG and CHANGE. Street language, colloquialisms, slang and insults were intermingled with the language of taxonomy, provenance and arcane museum-speak to discuss the fluid histories of gay, lesbian and transgender activity in WA over the past 100 years. This borderless approach to language was carried into the presentation of collected material in traditional museum cases. Darbyshire gathered costumes, photographs, quotes, magazines, videos, club and personal memorabilia from members of Perth’s gay and lesbian community and married these with clothing, artefacts, newspaper articles, wildlife and mineral specimens from museum and library collections. The placement of objects created often humorous (and painful) visual and symbolic narratives from these disparate and multiple sources. Through her appropriation and re-contextualisation, Darbyshire identified the absence of a strong material history, and the manifest tendency of a community towards “self-censorship” as a survival tactic.

The first museum case, placed beneath the title SODOMY, provided a bold and unflinching entrance statement to the exhibition. It contained a Squid and Arca floating in formaldehyde, an antiquated Spirit Level, a Police Truncheon c. 1842-77, a 2001 Letter from Peter Foss (then Shadow Attorney General) and 2 Mirror Balls, specimens of pyrite, irondisulphate. The Letter, an official response to a community member lobbying the repeal of sodomy legislation contained 2 lines that were so unbelievable, I had to read them again (and again) to fully comprehend their meaning: “We do have a duty to recognise vulnerability and take reasonable measures to protect it. We do not consider it appropriate that law should permit sodomising of our young people.”

Even with the looming shadow of ignorance acknowledged as ever present, The Gay Museum was above all celebratory and profoundly moving. I was particularly intrigued to read about the 1940s murder-suicide of two ill-fated lesbian lovers on Perth’s foreshore, and their passion for motorbikes. News articles were presented beside a 1920s Harley Davidson and an enlarged photograph of one of Pride Festival’s immensely popular Dykes on Bikes who lead the parade down the Northbridge streets each year.

South West Central is such a significant survey of Nyoongar art from the South West of WA that it is impossible to do justice here to the work of its artists and curators. Fortunately there is an extensive catalogue including an interview with filmmaker and family archivist Steve Kinnane, curatorial essays and a map of the Nyoongar area. South West Central traces a history of practice from the first recorded representation made by an Aboriginal in contact with government officials in King George Sound, through the Carrolup tradition of painting, to contemporary works in digital media, photography, textiles, weaving, fashion design and painting by leading Nyoongar artists.

While I found the exhibition quite difficult to navigate, it was clear that design played a somewhat secondary role to the presentation of diverse works. Chris Pease’s Monnop (1999) re-presented an archival photograph held in the Battye Library of “one of the last Victoria Plains Natives” as a large-scale painting of strength and endurance. Lance Chad/Tjilyungoo’s searingly beautiful landscapes, including Morning (2000), shone from the walls like portals onto dawn and dusk in carefully observed light-filled scapes of gum trees, forests and clearings. The prints of Byron Pickett, Bevan Hayward/Pooaraar, Dianne Jones and Sandra Hill also emphasised the growing prominence of print media in contemporary Nyoongar practice. My favourite work was by the recently deceased Joyce Winsley, The Storyteller (1999), a small, half-reclining figure made of Guildford grass and cordiline, her fingers languidly pointing toward the earth.

Still on the theme of Australian landscapes, British-based artists Tim Maslen and Jennifer Mehra’s Phoenix at the Holmes à Court Gallery purported to deal with the positive, regenerative effects of fire. The result was a bitsy collection of collaged prints, drawings, resin casts of burnt logs and an oversized mobile of resin seeds floating from the gallery ceiling to the floor. Certainly this is a difficult subject to broach considering recent events, and I was reminded of this while travelling through the charred landscape to Jenny Watson’s Dolls House at the International Arts Space Kellerberrin (IASKA) 200kms from Perth. In the relative cool of IASKA, Watson’s 5 large-scale paintings on Belgian linen, especially Gulliver’s Drought (2003), symbolically evoked some of the scenes I’d passed. A blonde girl in a red skirt stands tall in a big, brown, barren landscape beside a cow no bigger than a puppy, a wilting flower in her hand.

Call of the Wild at the John Curtin Gallery presented several major works by Patricia Piccinini in super-slick, seamless fashion. While the video, Swell (2000-2002), was mesmeric and pristinely installed, and Breathing Room (2000) unbearably creepy in its vibrating, womb-like claustrophobia, the installation of photographic works felt somewhat overpowered by the exhibition design. Too many Dulux feature walls in ‘now’ colours swamped Protein lattice (1997) and the hilarious love story/operating theatre melodrama-in-pictures, Science Story (2001-2002). While Piccinini’s work invariably reproduces well in publications, the bogan in me was grateful for the opportunity to finally see the undulating curves of her Car Nuggets and Panelwork en masse in the very shiny flesh.

Perth International Arts Festival, Jan 25-Feb 17: Inside Australia, Anthony Gormley, Lake Ballard, Menzies, Jan 16-Mar 31; Call of the Wild, Patricia Piccinini, John Curtin Gallery, Jan 24-Apr 6; The Gay Museum, curator Jo Darbyshire, WA Museum, Jan 23-May 31; South West Central Indigenous Art from South Western Australia, Brenda L. Croft with Janda Gooding (curators), Art Gallery of Western Australia, Jan 30-Mar 30; Dolls House, Jenny Watson, International Arts Space Kellerberrin, Jan 20-Feb 24; Phoenix, Tim Maslen & Jennifer Mehra, The Holmes à Court Gallery, Feb 2-Mar 23

When Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn and his boys came gunning for ‘Bugs’ Moran and his gang in a downtown Chicago garage 74 years ago, a soliton wave of loud, strange virtual particles began to reverberate down through the years, eventually passing through Darwin in 2003. Riding the crest of this virtual white-cap were 2 gals, armed with chainsaws.

The Arafura Sea doesn’t witness many breakers, nor does the local art scene play host to many art divas from the South, but on St Valentine’s Day, Nat & Ali stormed into the height of the Wet Season with a retrospective and a series of media spots that had the whole town agog, and asking, seemingly in one voice (in typical Darwin posh-art speak): “Who the fuck are these two?”

Well, Nat & Ali are 2 Melbourne symbiotes with decades of work behind them (telescoped into a couple of years, naturally—who has time for decades of work?) and enough pages to tear from their journals to cover at least part of a couple of walls in the 24HR Art Gallery. On the other side of the gallery is part of their 2000 installation, A Face in the Life of Nat & Ali and in the centre sit Nat & Ali Jnrs, 2 ventriloquist dummies who often take part in the proceedings (although since Nat & Ali-in-the-flesh have left, Nat & Ali Jnrs’ participation has been minimal, except to present a Zen-like air of intense perturbation).

While the makeover of A Face in the Life of Nat & Ali is undoubtedly impressive (are Nat’s cheekbones really that high?), it’s the carefully composed journal pages arranged on the walls that have the punters most intrigued. Immediately noticeable is the fact that Nat & Ali’s journals make no clear distinction between the rockstars, internationally famous artists, television talk-show hosts and TV stars whose images checker the pages, and the images drawn from Nat & Ali’s own career and lives. No hierarchical arrangement of text or image, no narrative derived from the contiguous placement of page or element, no difference between the Nat and the Ali (to artificially separate them for a moment, until the magnetic field that unites them becomes too distorted and they are crashing back together like 2 horseshoe magnets, pole to pole) and the famous—just-because—who smile glibly from the pictures torn from women’s magazines and newspapers. It used to be the case that artists only became really famous after they were dead, but as Nat & Ali ruefully acknowledge, who the fuck wants to wait that long? We want fame and art now! And…maybe they’re the…same thing. Cool.

This simple raison d’etre, the making of Nat & Ali’s career as artists into the subject of the artwork itself—the old serpent eating its own tail schtick—has been done before of course and the cultural trajectory that leads from dandy to rock star has been equally well documented, but there is a poignancy to this show that is entirely absent from the Big Players of this game (Jeff Koons, Madonna etc). Above all, Nat & Ali seem to be championing something a little greater than themselves: the art scene itself. Nat & Ali’s The Art Bar, represented here by an audio CD created for the show, fetishises one of the central activities of the gallery scene—drinking—in an affectionate homage to all their friends (and future friends) who gather for this ritual. It’s a sometimes pretentious scene, for sure; and sometimes frustratingly dull, but when it works, when a small community of artists and gallery patrons starts to generate those complexity vibes, well, interesting things start to happen. Nat & Ali recognise this and their work seems to be a gesture towards assuring its continuation.

The laws of complexity are invoked in Nat & Ali’s journal collage where strange telegraphic messages are formed through the simple device of underlining various passages in texts cut from popular journals and newspapers. We read disconnected passages, words and phrases—sex advice, a bit of a write-up about a Nat & Ali exhibition, a TV star’s appearance at a charity—and one gradually gets the sense that Nat & Ali are not so much makers of their own artistic destiny as conduits and condensers for the myriad random messages and images of the contemporary cultural labyrinth. We observe that while The Best of is about Nat & Ali, Art Divas to the Masses, Nat & Ali themselves become shimmering ciphers for the entangled web of popular culture, media celebrity and the art dance that somehow still manages to keep us entertained.

Tasmania is often viewed as an environment particularly suited to artists and many interstate and international practitioners have chosen to relocate here. Their reasons range from the ease of networking, exhibition opportunities, the ‘clean, green image’ and a School of Art that, before cutbacks and closures, was regarded as one of Australia’s foremost.

All the artists in Hiding Places have moved from interstate and the show aims to reflect their responses to Tasmania’s physical and cultural environment and the impact of relocation on their work. Hiding Places “looks at ways in which we experience a ‘place’ where themes of disorientation, dislocation, artificiality, the subterranean and sublimity are referenced in all their complexity” (catalogue). Though this somewhat overstates the achievement, the works, in varied media, are innovative and thought provoking, providing a stimulating, memorable experience.

Entering the Carnegie Gallery, Hobart City Council’s contemporary artspace, the viewer is confronted with a balanced mix of installation, digital prints, photography and painting, sympathetically arranged within the space.

Maria MacDermott’s 2 very different pieces are “drawn from experience where nature takes [her] far…from petty cares…Repetitive processes [are] a means of distilling these recollections” (artist’s statement). While the idea of referencing nature (read Tasmanian wilderness) is tangential to the show’s theme, the works are strong. Moment from the lake of light is a giant floor-based light box of MDF, perspex, wax, acrylic and oils. Comprising 21 x 10 painted perspex panels, each is subtly different in tones of golds and browns; their swirling patterns evoke water as much as modernist patterning.

The purity of this strangely tactile work is echoed in MacDermott’s hypnotic wall-based installation of 16 small acrylics, Skeletal structures of loss. All are variations on tree-branch structures in a vast yet understated range of colours.

Sarah Elliott addresses dislocation and how culture is preserved within foreign environments. Her process of cutting and reconstituting patterning—in this case, wallpaper—evokes the home. Suspended perspex panels are covered with the blue flock of an elaborate wall covering or with background beige cutout elements, painstakingly adhered. This dissection does speak of “dislocation, stasis and loss” (artist’s statement). The piece is labour-intensive in execution and aesthetically striking.

Ben Booth’s sculptural installations metaphorically reference the lifeboat. Vicissitude is a large hollow sassafras and pine cocoon, seductively shaped and meticulously crafted. Unit is a vaguely boat-shaped construction made of dozens of small, sickly-blue pool siding panels.

The 3 medium scale oil paintings by Susan Robson, Pods of Memory, are quasi-abstract, alluring in lilacs and blue-greens. Her brushwork is vigorous and the deliberately repetitive works, with just discernible figurative elements taken from nature, are otherworldly and suggest “longing and the solitary…” (artist’s statement).

Kim Portlock’s night crossing series—12 digital prints—feature close-up elements of the human body; eerie orange body parts under green or black water. Most images in isolation would be unreadable, but in series their subject emerges. Again, the work only tenuously addresses the wider themes of Tasmania’s physical and cultural environment or of relocation, but the artist’s explanation about “alienation and the dissolution of losing oneself” can be read into the work.

I found the miniature-scale paintings by Waratah Lahy, Untitled 1-7, fascinating. Painted on flattened, sanded beer cans, with touches of their original logos retained, they document street scenes during a nationally significant event in Hobart, the funeral of the last surviving Anzac. The artist’s renditions of small moments of this occasion—policemen at-ease, floral tributes with an out-of-focus close-up face mimicking the photographic, a group of deftly rendered onlookers—are like quick paint sketches and capture her topic with a vibrancy and immediacy reminiscent of popular culture imagery. Lahy relocated from Canberra, however these seductive works do not particularly address a change of physical environment—they explore something universal.

The show is co-curated by 2 participants, Robson and Portlock; this is something generally frowned upon, but the overall standard of Hiding Places, its visual impact and rationale are strong enough to overcome suggestions of self-approbation.

Booth is also the latest member of the artist-run exhibition space, Inflight, the first such venture in Hobart for several years, aiming to facilitate both the presentation and discourses of innovative, experimental art. Housed in a former school in North Hobart and administered by 6 or 7 artists, its opening show in February did not live up to the hype, but it could be an initiative to watch.

Hiding Places, Ben Booth, Sarah Elliot, Waratah Lahy, Maria MacDermott, Kim Portlock & Susan Robson, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, Feb 7-Mar 9.

A group of elders from Sydney’s Palestinian community gathered recently to share their memories of Al Nakba (The Catastrophe) of 1948 when Palestinians were forced to leave their homeland. Inspired by their stories, a number of Arab Australian film, new media and visual artists (Sohail Dahdal, Fadia Abboud, Soraya Asmar, Maissa Alameddine), community workers (Alissar Chidiac, Antoinette Abboud) and activists (Rihab Charida, Nicole Barakat) are collaborating on an exhibition that will serve as “testimony to an organic process between the keepers of these memories and those of us who choose to engage,” says film-maker Sohail Dahdal.

In May, on the 55th anniversary of Al Nakba, the Performance Space gallery will become a space in which the sentiments of Al Nakba are voiced: “The feelings of 1948 may materialise through sounds, moving images, objects, aromas, sights and performance installations.”

As well as displaying artworks inspired by the storytelling day, the exhibition will house a collection of historic works and contemporary pieces including photography, street art, posters and sound pieces. “These creations will come together to communicate the survival and determination of the Palestinian people,” says Sohail.

You can listen to the stories of Mahmoud Youssef, Fouad Charida and Soliman Al-Hawani on www.iremember1948.org

Noel Tovey’s CV from 1953 to the present is really something to read and the following are just “some of his favourite productions.” Starting with Anthony and Cleopatra at the Princess in Melbourne, it ranges through musical comedy (Paint Your Wagon, The Music Man) and revue, detours into drama (Witness for the Prosecution), ballet and, inevitably, TV (Beauty and the Beast, Sunny Side Up). Making the necessary pilgrimage to the UK in the late 60s, Tovey lands no less than a principal dancer’s role with Saddler’s Wells Opera Ballet and an acting debut on the West End in Stella Adler’s production of Oh Dad, Poor Dad…” He sings, choreographs, creates musical staging with Diane Cilento, does Oh Calcutta in Paris and Hamburg and Charley’s Aunt on BBC2, teaches and co-founds London Theatre for Children, and ducks back to Australia in 1971 to direct Anything Goes. Meanwhile, he juggles performances in Butley and Henry IV, runs a gallery specialising in 20th Century decorative art and dabbles in the fashion scene.

In 1991 he returns to Australia and puts his considerable talents to work developing and implementing performing arts courses at Eora Aboriginal College in Sydney and, later, in Wagga Wagga and Darwin. In 1995 he directs The Aboriginal Protestors…, a controversial take on Heiner Müller that travels from Performance Space to the Weimar Arts Festival. Of late, he has been involved in the development of new plays by Indigenous writers; guest lecturing in Aboriginal art and in drama and movement; curating art exhibitions; lecturing on creative writing; designing and directing ceremonial events for the Adelaide Festival, Sydney Olympics and Mardi Gras and dashing off an autobiography to be published later this year.

Taking a closer look at “the formative years that set this life on its remarkable course”, Noel Tovey decided, while he was at it, to develop an excerpt from the autobiography into a narrated performance. Little Black Bastard premiered in March this year at the Carlton Courthouse Theatre, the same courthouse where 62 years before, the magistrate signed the papers that sent his father to gaol and Tovey and his sister and brothers to the Royal Park Welfare Depot.

Little Black Bastard, narrated by Noel Tovey, Darlinghurst Theatre, Sydney, 23 April-10 May.

Tim Newth and David McMicken are co-artistic directors of Tracks Inc, a contemporary performance and dance company known for its innovative, large scale outdoor performances and work with Indigenous communities. The company’s working methods have developed over a decade as a response to their home in the Northern Territory.

David It is the melding of the differences between 2 directors, our backgrounds, personal beliefs, working methods, and multiple artform skills base, that creates our unique working environment. We work with diverse communities, making human connections, ignoring boundaries of professional and amateur, community and other. We promote quality in output and experience. Sometimes we focus on individuals; sometimes on specific communities, on the rubbing points between cultures and the meeting points; sometimes on ourselves as artists.

Tim October 1995. I am informed that we have received funding from the Australia Council to produce and present Ngapa. This project involves a group of white and Indigenous artists travelling the rain storm Jukurrpa, a dreaming path about 2000 kms long which lies between Alice Springs and Darwin; then creating a performance from the journey. We arrive in the remote Aboriginal community of Lajamanu to meet with Freddy Jangala Patrick, who jointly conceived the project. On that same day he is flown sick to Katherine Hospital 600 kilometres away and later that week we are informed he has cancer.

Late October, I’m back in Darwin and a phone call from a family member advises Jangala is still keen to do the project and wants to start it now. The Australia Council moves quickly to release the money and we move the starting date forward. I arrange permits for the non-indigenous artists to travel across Aboriginal land, book 4WD transport, hire a satellite telephone, make arrangements with a helicopter company for an emergency air lift (if required due to accident, illness or snakebite), search out a gadget that will pinpoint our position in such a case, arrange sound equipment to record stories on the trip and liaise with the other Tracks artists to revise the schedule.

David Our methods reflect where we live. Although we are part of Australia, there are key differences: a culture spanning tropics to desert—a very arid time and a huge wet season; vast distances between population centres; 30% Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations with many language groups; a long history of pre-white trade with South East Asia.

Darwin Harbour is almost twice the size of Sydney Harbour but there is no beach culture, no surf here and the seas are home to crocodiles, box jellyfish and other tropical dangers. We are a major stepping stone into and from Asia—Dili is our closest capital city and Indonesia on our doorstep. We are constantly aware of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘multicultural’ issues.

Darwin has no tertiary performing arts training, no resultant graduates and no facilities for re-training. We do not have full-time employed professional performers.

We’re over 3000 kilometres from any large Australian population centre and acutely aware of an unusual phenomenon—the perceived distance between a Southern population centre and Darwin is greater than the distance between Darwin and down South.

Tim November, one week before we are due to leave, I have been feeling a strong need to speak to Jangala in person and instinctively make the 12-hour journey to Lajamanu. The night I arrive, he looks much sicker but his spirits are strong and I take him to visit 2 other old men who spend the evening singing into his cancer-swollen belly. I soon realise we won’t be leaving next week. Two weeks later, I am still in Lajamanu. During this time Jangala draws Ngapa dreaming designs with me and I record his stories of this country in the Warlpiri language. In broken English I also record his life story, how he travelled the country as a child with his family from one water hole to the next, the sacred sites of the Ngapa dreaming.

David As a result of different history and culture, our expressions also differ. Different ways of being have developed as a result of the Indigenous and South-East Asian links (people, trade, visits, family, food, etc). There is always something on the boil when you overlap the various cultural calendars.

Our current work practices have been researched and refined for over a decade leading to the discovery of many ‘truths.’ One core truth is that “the collective or community way of thinking as opposed to the individual, is an integral part of our culture.”

The Western construct places emphasis on independence and less on a need for social involvement. This often entails paying less attention to the meta-messages of communication—the levels that comment on relationships—focussing instead on information as the only level that counts. It is what allows us to secret ourselves away in a studio and to work independently, separately from the rest of the world (the stage becomes the intellect and the inner workings of the body).

Tim December. Jangala dies in Lajamanu on an open patch of ground surrounded by over 100 family members. His body simply stops working. I return to Lajamanu where a sorry camp is set up in the bush just outside the settlement and all the family are there. It is respectful not to speak until after sunset and at night the women paint themselves white and howl. We spend 2 weeks living like this, waiting for the appropriate people to travel from other communities to perform the major ceremonial business.

David As the world becomes more ‘global’, it is being matched with a new approach to community, evidenced by the increase and success of community banks or the proliferation of the new ‘virtual’ communities such as the multitude of e-chat groups. In his book, The Spike; How our lives are being transferred by rapidly advancing technologies, Damien Broderick states that the faster technology changes and the more global and singular the big interests become, the more important it is to truly encourage and celebrate diversity in all its forms. This is the role of artists and philosophers—to show the way forward.

Tim Steve, one of Jangala’s sons comes with me at Christmas time to visit my family just outside of Wangaratta in Victoria. It’s his first time out of the Territory.

Traditionally, when a person dies, your respect is shown by not mentioning their name and I am not sure now to negotiate with the community now. A water tank that the 2 of us had painted with dreaming designs is moved from the centre of the settlement. I am relieved to receive a message from the Lajamanu women saying they are now ready. Steve negotiates with the men as to who should be travelling with us.

Shortly after this, I get a letter from the Australia Council to say the money had been withdrawn due to the death of the key artist. In a Western individualistic way of thinking, if the key artist dies then the project cannot go on. In Aboriginal culture, there is collective ownership. It was just a matter of following the right protocols and waiting to be told who was the next right person or people. Even-tually, the money is reinstated.

David Our predominant process is collaboration and establishing relationships that highlight connections. In order to produce quality work, we work with the kind of experts a regular artist might not approach. For example, when doing a project about the young at risk or about mothers and daughters then it is these people who are the experts; how much dance training they have had is very much a secondary issue. The many realities of our situation, often seen by others as negatives (ie isolation, small population, vast distances between population centres, highest incidences of many social ills, unbearable weather, small Western-trained base, limited performance opportunities etc) we seize upon as opportunities.

Tim Late April. David and I finally head to Lajamanu to start the project, with an archivist following a few days later with the other vehicle. Three hours out of Lajamanu it starts to rain. The dirt road of dust and corrugations turns into a river. We are one of the last vehicles to make it in. Like everyone else we are stuck in Lajamanu for 2 weeks, the phone lines are down and the mail plane and food trucks can’t get through.

David It has been important for us to discard old ways of seeing and to learn from those who understand the differences.

Tim Mid-May. We head in to Lajamanu for another attempt—artists, archivist, 4WDs and gear including the magic satellite phone. It’s dark now and we are just a few kms out of the settlement when a car stops to tell us someone has just died and the people we plan to travel with are involved in the sorry business. It could take anything from a week to a month to complete.

The next day we are called in to have a meeting with the men. They are able to leave and want to get going without the women who are heavily involved in the sorry business. We meet with the women who are not able to talk, half naked and painted white, waving their hands and shaking their heads, trying to convince us not to leave. With the men in the background yelling “let’s get going”, we wait.

Over the next few days there are several community meetings. A ceremony takes place where we are required to provide tins of flour and blankets as payment and then the women are released early. Three days after our third attempt to begin the project, we are loaded up with men, women and equipment ready to go.

As we head out of the settlement, the men and women start to argue. Do we now take the soft sand road which means we will spend a lot of time digging ourselves out of being bogged, or do we travel through the stick country which means many punctured tyres? I guess the project has begun…

David Our processes challenge established Western methods. We place the new in the context of the old. We question the inexorable chasing of the new, the modern, and question who benefits from this. Where does old wisdom (as often held within traditional cultures) fit into the new?

The structuring of contemporary form often removes the artist from the community and creates a situation where they have to insist on deserving respect and earning a reputation. Then they are constantly chasing and building an audience, a market that will eventually come to an understanding and then continue to support the artist in their endeavour to “make new and innovative” art.

Who makes up the audience? Who is showing what and to whom? Imagined and imaginary—unidentifiable, dreamed, the great potential throng, an infinitude without faces, anonymous, the entire world, applauding and invisible? Or is it identifiable faces, watching everything, admiring, approving, owning?

This dialogue is an edited excerpt from a paper delivered at Groundswell, Regional Arts Australia’s national conference held in Albury-Wodonga, October 10-13, 2002 sponsored by the Commonwealth Regional Arts Fund and NSW Ministry for the Arts. This and other papers delivered at the conference are available on www.regionalartsnsw.com/groundswell. The paper is reproduced with the kind permission of Regional Arts NSW and the writers.

Patrick Thaiday first appeared with Bangarra Dance Theatre in Walkabout (2002) and his solo in Frances Rings’ piece for that work (Rations) was a standout performance. Having grown up in a culturally diverse family of traditional dancers, Thaiday’s technique—his speed, fluidity and grace—is impressive. I spoke to him at the beginning of rehearsals for Stephen Page’s new full-length work, Bush, which is inspired by Arnhem Land. Thaiday describes learning from his family, training at NAISDA and working within the culture of Bangarra Dance Theatre.

I’ve found out more about my background in the last couple of years, especially from my dad’s side of the family. He’s from Lifu in the South Sea Islands. I went away on one of the cultural camps with the NAISDA College up to Yam Island last year. My dad’s family is from there and I spoke to his brother or cousin-brother and he told me a bit about where the family came from which was great ‘cause my dad has passed away. My mother told me when I was 12 or 13 about my ancestors from her side. They originally came from Jamaica.

Definitely. I blame my mum and dad for that. [Both were] pretty much involved in traditional Torres Strait Island dancing.

It’s a gift I’ve been blessed with. My brothers and sisters dance as well. I was choreographing when I was about 14 and had my brothers and sisters, cousins and friends perform with me. That was contemporary dance but I’m also a traditional dancer. I never really had anyone teach me contemporary styles. It was all through watching different dancers who were in Mackay at the time. I did see a few performances by Theatre Arts Mackay, the dance school up there, and other mediums like television, video clips…this was the 80s. But with the traditional side of things, I had my family, my uncles, my father, they all taught me about my culture and our way of dancing.

Is choreography something you’d like to pursue or is it dancing that interests you most?

I’d like to do both. But I would like to steer towards choreography ‘cause I’m gettin’ on a bit! [Laughs]…It’s something I really enjoy.

You know, dance in its purest form for me would be traditional. To try and fuse the two, I didn’t really agree with it. But at NAISDA they deal with the mixture of both. It opened my eyes a bit. NAISDA has given me the strength and the courage to pursue a career in contemporary dance. And it’s what Bangarra’s all about—putting the two together. I still have a love for the jazz style. That’s something I want to look into more. Bangarra’s a stepping stone for me.

The dance you were exposed to at NAISDA, could you click into it fairly easily?

Actually, yeah. The teachers there were former students at the school and, being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, there were certain styles and techniques they would use in their choreography that I had witnessed in the traditional Aboriginal communities. After a while, it was like I was at home practicing traditional dances [but] in a different environment.

I like the dances that use props. The bow and arrow dance, kulap dance—that’s a traditional Torres Strait Island instrument that’s made out of shells or a seed, it’s like a rattler. I’ve learned so many different dances—not only from my dad’s island, Yam Island, which is the central island in the Torres Strait, but from Murray Island which is on the eastern side. There are different styles of dance on each of the islands. A lot of the dances are based on the lifestyle up there. We’ve got the ocean around us and a lot of the elders sing about the ocean and about hunting, gathering food.

You had 6 weeks on secondment to Leigh Warren & Dancers when you finished at NAISDA. How would you compare the way a company like that operates to Bangarra?

The standard of dance was oh-my-god! I felt really intimidated at first. I couldn’t pick up the movements—especially the ballet because I only got exposed to ballet when I went to NAISDA and I was like 29! But [experiencing] that sort of work and that style of dance and seeing the strength they had in their technique really pushed me to try harder.

I feel a lot more at home in Bangarra. The company is very sensitive and supportive of my needs on the cultural side of things. It has the involvement of the elders and they have input into Stephen’s choreography and production. I feel a lot safer at Bangarra and my biggest inspiration was here—Russell Page who has recently passed on—just watching him dance and seeing that he was diverse in his dance…

Being in Bangarra for me is more grounded and it answers a lot of questions I have about dance [and] my identity, where I’m from. Stephen incorporates all that in his productions. I love that. Whenever I dance about my culture, about my people, you know the traditional style of things, it makes me feel really proud of who I am. Stephen manages to bring that out of me.

It must be demanding having to learn so many other styles and to maintain your traditional technique as well.

It’s full of challenges for me. If I get too comfortable in myself, there’s no oomph to go forward.

It’s called Bush and there’s a traditional elder, Kathy Marika, from Yirrkala who’s giving cultural input into the production. And I’ve been lucky enough to learn a lot of the dances from Yirrkala. Kathy was teaching at NAISDA when I was there.

I first noticed you in Rations, the work Frances Rings choreographed for Walkabout last year.

That was my first work with Bangarra. I just loved working with Frances. She’s one of the senior dancers in the company and I look up to her…I didn’t know I was to be given a solo to do. I really loved the movements she used for Ash, the piece that I performed. She seemed to know a lot about my body and she helped me use that to the best of my ability.

It will be interesting to see what she does in the future. Stephen’s always been very open to encouraging other people within the company to experiment choreographically. He doesn’t seem to be intimidated by letting other artists have that space.

That’s true. He allows us to express the way that we feel through movement. Bangarra’s about sharing. He really builds up the rapport between the dancers and himself.

Which presumably gives you the confidence to say, “well maybe I could choreograph something for the company”?

He’s given us those opportunities in the past. I’d so love to choreograph here at this company. But I don’t know how long it’s gonna take for me to get to that level. Bit by bit.

You’ve obviously had a lifetime of experience with traditional dance. A lot of Australians don’t have that experience of dance as something with deep cultural meaning.

Traditional dance will always be…number one priority for me. Stephen’s managed to combine this with contemporary influences in a way that allows me and future generations to get out there and show the rest of this nation and this world what our culture is about. His dance tells stories of old times. He brings it together and carries it forth. And I believe there’s a strong culture here within Bangarra. It’s really a family thing.

You’ve talked about your desire to choreograph. Where do you see your future as a dancer?

I definitely hope to stay with Bangarra for a few more years. Then I’d like to go out and experience other styles of dance. I’m interested in the work that Albert David is doing—contemporary/ Torres Strait Island style of dancing. Maybe a bit further down the line I’d like to start my own company. I’m not so sure whether I want to get into the style that Stephen and Albert are into. I’ve always had a love for the jazz style of dance. But for the time being my heart is set on this.

Bush, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Optus Playhouse, Brisbane, May 21-24; Playhouse, Melbourne, Jun 12-21; Theatre Royal, Sydney, Jul 23-26. The Giz, Albert David and Dancers, Performance Space, Sydney April 9-13

The contention that our sense of self is not unified, but rather radically split and divided, has a long history in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy. After World War 2, this idea became particularly associated with theories about memory and sensation. Put simply, our concept of the self is an illusion which, upon closer examination, is revealed to consist of nothing more than a blizzard of free-floating sensations, memories, fragments and moments, a shattered pattern of pieces hanging in a corrosive sea of time—“like tears in the rain” as the replicants of Blade Runner tell us.

Though this is an evocative proposition, it has become a cliché of contemporary avant-garde art, underpinning operatic performances as varied as Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela, Company In Space’s The Light Room and the Philip Glass, Robert Wilson masterpiece Einstein on the Beach. The overwhelming mastery of the latter work especially means that it is a brave artist who draws upon such models today.

At first glance, choreographer Simon Ellis’ Indelible seems to rest on this much-tilled soil. Fragments of recalled memories are replayed as video and sound. Furtive resting-places are briefly established within the gallery, while the audience cautiously moves about, trying to capture these elusive moments. Smoky pools of light bounce off the white walls as the performers write on surfaces in a failed attempt to diarise their thoughts. Even the movement seems to come and go, to suggest and glance off firmer shapes and emotions, without actually capturing any entirely established world or event. It’s all shards and pieces, scraps and patches, in which even the possibility of actually seeing every moment of the performance is deliberately denied the audience in the absence of a stage, defined seating area or other formal certainty.

The effect is entirely consonant with the idea of the divided self, but somewhere something darker, more ecstatic and more imponderable occurs. Moments recur, touches and elements are evoked and return in a deferred sense, but a kind of gentle chaos intrudes. Where Jenny Kemp paints characters who finally become resolved to their expanded, multiple sense of self, Ellis produces something closer to a mnemonic auto-da-fé. The pieces represented are not so much knitted back together to form a collage as they are broken, erased and pushed even further into a propulsive, unarrested formlessness. With only the barest temporal and emotional rises, Ellis creates a sense of an increasing trajectory of shattering and division. The final image is of a woman dressed in white, prone, mouth open as water (white with the light upon it and the walls behind it) drips into her throat, an absent, almost sadomasochistically-consumed blankness written on her face and body. As one of the texts inscribed on the walls during the show reads: “She sat on the bank and drank oblivion of her former life.” What is left remains blurred even within the memories of the spectators.

Indelible, Choreography & video Simon Ellis, dramaturgy Tamara Saulmick, sound Lydia Teychenne, lighting Alycia Hevey, design/installation Elizabeth Boyce, costume Marion Boyce, performers Natalie Cursio, Suzannah Edwards, Marion Jenkins, West Space Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 1-15.

She moves like a sprite (imperceptibly quick) a signature traced in haste. The movement flows from her own body, though Swift, Fairytales of the Heart and Mind is about something more than the individual. Swift is an extension of Eve which was originally part of the trilogy, Solos, performed at the North Melbourne Town Hall in 2001. Swift opens with a new section, danced in red. It is full of human character. Ros Warby does not move with grace but uses her fine kinesthetic knowledge to shape something quite different.

In doing so, she brings a comic-tragic edge to the movement. Perhaps it is human to be ungainly. The foibles and sheer fallibility of this moving person generated laughter from some and pity from others. My own thoughts turned to Warby’s training in Alexander technique. I wondered whether the strong sense of character in the movement was meant to imply some kind of interiority. A sort of acting from the outside-in, where the dance suggests an internal state of being.

There is certainly an intensity to the movement. It is carried out with a quirkiness that is very particular to Warby but there is also an attempt to move beyond that into a realm of generality. Eve alluded to various archetypes of femininity. I presume that Swift attempts something similar. What do I feel when I watch this ‘woman’ dancing? There is a poignancy to her predicament, the suggestion that she is not fully in control, but has to find her way through the viscera of life.

Margie Medlin’s use of screen, film, projectors and light added wonderful depth and texture to the topography of Swift. That, and Helen Mountford’s truly exquisite cello, enabled the work to exceed itself. The variety of projections of movement (face and body on curved and flat surfaces) and the interpolation of sound allowed for a more variegated gaze upon what is otherwise a solo dance work.

The second part of Swift recalled familiar elaborations. A frilled hip oscillating waves in a most feminine manner. Arm gestures, facial transmogrification, created in the flesh and by virtual means. The detail made visible in Warby’s body, and its native sense of timing is pleasurable to watch.

There is a sense that Ros Warby is moving towards voice, face, character and thought, without abandoning dance/the body as her basic medium. Swift suggests something of a transformation to me, a movement between genres, on the way to finding something new. If Swift is a daughter of Eve, one wonders where she will go next.

Swift, Fairytales of the Heart and Mind, choreographer, dancer Ros Warby, composer, cellist Helen Mountfort, designer Margie Medlin, North Melbourne Town Hall Arts House, Feb 7-16.

In an occurrence so rare it could almost be called a ‘disturbance’, Sydney Dance Company is opening its doors, its dancers and its coffers to a new work involving new media collaborations and creative forces far beyond its usual range. Underland promises to be an auspicious disturbance by New York-based choreographer Stephen Petronio, with music by Nick Cave, and visual design and costumes by Ken Tabachnik and Tara Subkoff respectively. The other key collaborator in the work is Australian filmmaker and digital media artist Mike Daly whose role is to imagine and create the video visuals for the work.

Mike has an impressive list of screenings for his short films binary and in transit including festivals such as Clermont-Ferrand, Cameraimage and Electronica. These films, both of which favour movement and image over dialogue and foreground a relationship between the body and the digital, resulted in his selection for the project. He also provided SDC with some of his work that is, he says, “less final result oriented, not intended to have an audience and more about experimenting with process and form.” These experiments, along with his films and his discussions with Stephen Petronio revealed “similar concerns about working with these media and similar approaches to our processes.”

The creative process on Underland is currently occurring digitally across various continents and will soon come together for a 2-month intensive rehearsal period. “I brought this project over to Berlin because I was coming here anyway to attend the Berlinale Film Talent Campus and since Stephen and Ken are in New York, I’m just as remote from them in Sydney as I am anywhere.

“Being over here has been really inspiring. Almost everything seems to have its roots in concept and politics yet also seems to really care about aesthetic…It frustrates me when I attend Australian film and electronic arts festivals and the only issues being discussed are about technology or how people got their funding…Stephen, Ken and I discuss (often by email) concepts behind the work a lot and in great detail. All of us like to allow the process of creating something to be that of exploration so that to a certain degree you are working out what you are trying to achieve while you are achieving it.”

This approach, while familiar in dance, contemporary performance and visual arts is less common in filmmaking. “Within traditional filmmaking the high cost of production means that this way of working is often looked upon as being wasteful. Since everything must be worked out before shooting, it can make the process of actually creating the images and sounds a bit more like just executing something technical. This can be inhibitive as there is less opportunity to respond and make changes.”

So far the collaboration has been “a very open and free process, we all bring up ideas and there is no sense of power or ego being thrown around which I tend to find a lot on really commercial projects I have worked on. We discuss ideas and then I create images that work with those ideas.”

These ideas are certainly contemporary fascinations. Underland is based on concepts of the “post-post-human, post-war, post-apocalypse, post-civilisation…It all seems very relevant when you turn on the news night after night and see your country’s government locking up refugees and spinelessly supporting the world’s super-power in a war on a small country for the control of oil. One wonders if we are already post-civilisation, the most powerful people in the world racing to the apocalypse.”

The fascination with the post-apocalyptic is deeper than this current dash toward the end of civilisation for Australian and those observing us. It is a world frequently grafted onto the Australian terrain in, for example, the Mad Max films and the classic On the Beach.

But Underland is not just post-apocalyptic, it promises to be something of a seismic event itself. “One of the main themes we are using to explore the ideas behind Underland is disturbance—the occurrences that take place after one subject/force meets with another. What I like about this is that you realise that you are actually thinking about everything…environments, politics, relationships, psychology, everything. I find this thought very warming and feel it is in great opposition to George Bush and CNN’s obsession with trying to define the world as having polar opposites—most notably good and bad. I was pleased that Stephen is interested in exploring the complexities of subjects and occurrences rather than looking to classify them into categories.

“We are taking these ideas into our approach to the aesthetic, which is multi-layered and mostly seamless. So you are often looking at more than one image on top of another and almost never aware of any sort of temporal or spatial transition from one image to another…an image may take several minutes to appear or disappear. This approach revels in the complexity of images interacting with and disturbing other images.”

For example, “In one section we’ll be digitally capturing the motion of the dancers. We’ll then use that data to create 3D animations using fluid and particle simulations. So you will see the dancers moving on the stage and on the projected video you will see particles (such as dust) or fluid (under the surface level) moving in sync and in the same manner as the dancers, as if the dancers are dancing within the substance but are invisible.”

The working process of Underland also seems to be melding seamlessly, overlapping without spatial or temporal transitions as thoughts and images fly across continents and dancers prepare to fly, visibly or invisibly, across the stage. This disturbance promises to invigorate the collaborators, the dancers, Sydney Dance Company, and certainly the audiences who experience it.

Filmmaker and digital artist Mike Daly is a graduate of the Australian Film Television and Radio School. He has worked as a director, visual effects compositor and editor. He won an award to attend the 2002 Berlin Film Festival Talent Campus with filmmakers from 72 countries.

Underland, Sydney Dance Company, choreographer Stephen Petronio, music Nick Cave, visual design Ken Tabachnik, costumes Tara Subkoff, film Mike Daly; Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House, May 27-Jun 14; Optus Playhouse, QPAC, Brisbane, Jun 18-28; State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, Jul 3-12

Morganics might rap that “in the land of the mosh and the ecky, it’s hard to rocksteady”, but I doubt any forces of national resistance could ever impede his advance on the vanguard of hip hop’s ‘glocal’ culture. Last year he released a solo album, invisible forces…, as well as producing the album All You Mob! Recordings of young Aboriginal hip hop from around Australia, which includes the track Down River by the Wilcannia Mob (www.morganics.info). Down River exemplifies hip hop’s geographic focus, the 3 young boys rapping over sparse didge and beatboxing to celebrate and situate their experience of the everyday and local landscape. Morganics [Morgan Lewis] is also fresh from a bodypoppin’ underground tour of the US in 2002. His new hip hop theatre show, Crouching Bboy, Hidden Dreadlocks, opens at Sydney’s Performance Space in April.

It was about 2 years since the last Hot Banana Morgan show and I’d just done a series of workshops and the whole Wilcannia Mob stuff was welling up. I was home one night and—it’s really corny—but at 2am I woke up in a fever and I had all these ideas going round my head and so I just got up and went into my lounge room and wrote out 29 monologues in about 2 and a half hours and that’s pretty much going to be the show.

Yes, definitely. The show will reflect the character of people I’ve met in workshops around Australia. Like I did a project out at Long Bay Gaol, working with violent offenders down there as part of an anti-violence program—and talking to some of those guys and hanging out with them for 6 weeks and then bumping into them up at [Kings] Cross afterwards—it is just classic material and pretty amazing stuff I’ve been privy to. I’ve also travelled to the Pitjanjatjarra communities and Uluru and remote Aboriginal communities teaching hip hop, and from that I went to the States last year for 5 weeks performing—going to San Francisco and the Rock Steady Crew Anniversary in New York—just getting that sort of national/international perspective on it all and working with people from a lot of different backgrounds. A lot of people from pretty rough backgrounds generally. It definitely pulls some heartstrings from time to time. There are a lot of different little stories and stuff and I feel like they need to be told.

This show is going to be more specifically hip hop theatre—there’ll be more of a dedicated focus on the elements of hip hop-beatboxing, freestyling, breaking and stuff. I’m also hoping to take it to a hip hop theatre festival in New York in June. I attended it in Washington DC last year and it was really inspiring to see, so fingers crossed I’ll be able to tour this over there.

Is there a genre in the US called hip hop theatre as well as the forms that are exclusively associated with hip hop, like battles?

Yeah, it’s a festival organised by Danny Hock, who was out here and organised Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop for the Sydney Festival. It’s a pioneering thing, though it’s always what I’ve been doing from the get go I think—not very different from [the performance persona] Hot Banana Morgan.

So it’s a show reflecting on the different interactions that you’ve had working in community contexts and also performing as an MC?

Yeah, with the Wilcannia Mob thing there’s been a lot of bandwagon elements, a lot of people jumping on it and freaking out about it. It’s been a very interesting experience to go through that—so I’m going to have a whole section of just crazy questions that you get asked, emails that I get sent, things that people yell at you at gigs. To a degree it is quite autobiographical: in this one I might be talking about performing on the Gold Coast when a guy in the crowd tries to attack me because I’m from Sydney…A bouncer gets him in a headlock and smashes a beer glass all over me and clears the whole crowd out and I have to keep rapping. Then the crowd comes back and the show keeps going: so Aussie hip hop. The craziness of gigs—I’ve been touring a lot, not just doing the community workshops.

You’ve got community work, your own recordings and performances and now the hip hop theatre works across it and produces something in a different language?

I don’t find it that different—I did a gig on Sunday night at the Bat and Ball, a small pub on South Dowling Steet [Surry Hills, Sydney]. I was up for about 40 minutes, did about 5 or 6 songs, a lot of it I was just freestyling and talking to the audience; it is almost like stand-up. Hip hop is a very old tradition anyway—though with the show at Performance Space it’ll be nice to be able to stretch beyond the normal concentration span that you get at a hip hop gig and go into a bit more depth.

You obviously do a lot of work with people whose voices aren’t usually heard, even in hip hop—there’s been a sense that there’s an Anglo male voice in Australian hip hop that speaks with an Aussie accent…Do you think local hip hop is also speaking with Indigenous, Asian, Arabic and other accents?

Yeah, I don’t work with many white people when I do workshops. I did one workshop on [Sydney’s] northern beaches and it was weird because they were all so quiet, when I’d just been in Kempsey for 2 weeks going “shut up, shut up.” In the northern beaches I’m going, “Make some noise.”

Aussie hip hop is a predominantly white thing, you know I’m a white fella too. Though my next album will be a double CD, it will be my album and the sequel to All You Mob—with all the tracks done by Aboriginal MCs. I’m sitting on 60 tracks to choose from.

Oh yeah. Hip hop is traditionally male dominated like most music. Though I’ve got a great track by young women in Broken Hill called “Desert Sky,” done by young mums with some beautiful lyrics.

Hip hop originally came from the streets and is a voice of the people—people who can’t afford to get into a recording studio—but they are living extreme and interesting lives in their own way. It’s both political and also delightfully non-political—I’m not trying to push any agenda, just record what they want to say.

My biggest agenda to push is that I have to put my foot down and say I’m not going to record that if you sound totally American—you’re going to have to change it—I’m sorry I don’t want you talking about “niggers” if you’re a Koori.

Crouching Bboy, Hidden Dreadlocks, Morganics, Performance Space Studio, April 16-26 ; www.morganics.info

Nigel Kellaway, artistic director of The opera Project, begins listing some long-term relationships. Medea and Jason clocked up 10 years before ending with a bang. George and Martha dragged themselves onward kicking and screaming for 23 years in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Kellaway and Regina Heilmann have made performance together for 13 years, and in another night: medea opening at Performance Space in April, they playfully contemplate the often vicious games that only the intimate can play. They do this by staging themselves as fictions, and restaging these classic fictions as themselves, raising the stakes as only long-term collaborators can.

These are games for consenting adults. Perhaps they’ll play Are you gonna kill the kids tonight, honey? On paper this new work looks incredibly complicated, a clash of styles and performance demands. another night: medea interweaves 3 contrasting works based on the legend of Medea—Heiner Müller’s 1983 theatre texts Despoiled Shore, Medea: Material and Landscape with Argonauts, Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Louis Nicholas Clérambault’s early 18th century French solo cantata Medée. And yet Kellaway insists that the work is simple: “My work is very straightforward. It’s not complicated…It’s not difficult work at all. It’s celebratory work. It’s celebrating our culture, our history, and everything that we recognise, things that we know.”

In the beginning, at the centre of the work, there is Medea. Jason’s there too, but he definitely plays second fiddle to the ultimate bad mother. In this work, true to the slipperiness of gender in The opera Project’s work, Medea will be played, in one of her incarnations at least, by a bodybuilding tattooed Indonesian countertenor. The striking Peretta Anggerek is back, singing Clérambault’s Medée cantata, accompanied by a baroque trio on period instruments. This will be performed in French, with surtitles. The beautiful strangeness of Anggerek’s performance presence, for Kellaway, “…personifies what Medea was. Medea has been variously described as, well certainly as a foreigner, but also as a sorceress and there is something of the sorcerer in the countertenor voice, particularly in contemporary culture. It has magical powers.”

Unfortunately Anggerek won’t get to kill the kids. Clérambault’s cantata reads the story as a revenge tragedy, but finishes before Medea murders her children. Presumably, killing her partner’s new wife was enough revenge.

In the middle there’s George and Martha. No one has written about the middle years of Medea and Jason, years in which they raised a family. Most storytellers just want to skip to the bloody end. Few writers have plumbed the depths of middle-aged dysfunction as sensationally as Edward Albee in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Kellaway draws upon Albee’s masterpiece to sketch this absent middle ground, to articulate the intimate violence of the long term relationship, and to view these mythic figures, Medea and Jason, as a savagely dysfunctional couple. On a performance level, the meeting of this naturalistic classic with multiple readings of the Medea story forces a re-engagement not only with baroque music theatre and Greek tragedy, but also with naturalism. Kellaway aims to open audiences to new ways of listening both to music and to theatrical texts, staging meetings of clashing material in which strangeness is not erased but sublimated:

“[Regina] and I are not going to be just there trying to shout down the music. It has to be like chamber music, where the spoken voice and the material that we are doing has some marriage point with the music. And so you start looking at quite naturalistic text—dialogue as sets of recitatives and arias…It’s a fresh way of looking at naturalism, at naturalistic acting. The clash forces us to use different techniques, discover different reasons to say this text…The slippage between these modes of performance is a considerable negotiation for a performer. How do they actually talk to one another rather than just being jump cuts?”

The company’s most recent performance work was Entertaining Paradise, a darkly seductive take on the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. But Kellaway innocently insists, “I’m not a dark person.” The perception of him as The Prince of Darkness is simply “because I’ve always steered against doing feel-good, pretty work. I just don’t think that’s terribly potent. Sex and violence are the mainstay of theatre.” And he wants to keep his work on that potent edge, to keep it interesting. But he also wants to have fun: “Ten, 15 years ago, you wouldn’t dare play with these kinds of things—it would be a crime against art. I’m just getting older; I don’t care that much anymore. I want to have fun, and I want audiences to have fun. I guess I’m not nearly as snobbish as I used to be. There are less rules, I think, as you get older, a lot less rules.”

After the dark territory of Entertaining Paradise Kellaway says this new work is much more playful: “It’s much funnier. Ian and Myra were not bright. They didn’t have much sense of irony at all. But Nigel and [Regina] in this piece are much brighter, much quicker, much wittier, and in a way, nastier…They’ve had a number of years experience knowing how to rip strips off each other…but also how to maintain the relationship. And I think that’s the important thing—not every long-term relationship has to finish. Medea chooses to finish her relationship with Jason. That doesn’t always happen…[for us] there will always be another night.”

The restless ghosts of Medea and Jason, George and Martha will be moaning and rattling their chains as Kellaway, Heilmann and an all-star early music cast present a dark night of fun and games. Witness the thrilling spectacle of virtuosic performers taking on huge challenges. Be prepared for something rich and strange.

another night: medea, The opera Project, performers Nigel Kellaway, Regina Heilmann, countertenor Peretta Anggerek, pianist Michael Bell, harpsichord Nigel Ubrihien, baroque violin Margaret Howard, bass violin Catherine Tabrett, Performance Space, April 30-May 10.

The old Melbourne International Festival of Organ and Harpsichord changed its name a few years ago to Melbourne Autumn Music Festival and took on young virtuoso recorder player Genevieve Lacey as Artistic Director. Not surprisingly, contemporary performance works and installations have begun to creep into the program, along with some radical interpretations of early music repertoire.

Among the highlights of this year’s festival (May 2-11) will be performances by Australians Christopher Field, Paul Wright, Steve (Stelios) Adams, Marshall Maguire various Elision soloists and Genevieve Lacey herself. Scandinavian pipe and tabor duo ESK are among the international guests. There’s also a new series of lunchtime concerts by young artists playing a combination of recent and early music in the new BMW Edge auditorium in Federation Square.

One of the featured works sure to grab RealTime readers demonstrates MAMF’s new focus. Aelfgyva is a performance work for 2 actors and 3 musicians, a contemporary exploration of medieval material through the elements of text sound and music created with hurdy gurdy, harp and voice. Written and directed by Jane Woollard, Aelfgyva is the second part of a larger work, NEEDLESWORLD, exploring the Norman invasion of England.

With music/soundscape by Stevie Wishart and performed by Margaret Mills, Colin James, singer Carolyn Connors and harpist Natalia Mann, Aelfgyva is a meditative pilgrimage that follows the journey of an 11th century woman—one of 3 depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. Amanda Johson’s design plays with scale, incorporating oversized spools, needles and embroidery. The work uses the language and imagery of embroidery as well as a vocabulary of gestures constructed from the tapestry to explore “the way a cultural takeover was sewn into history.”

The endless mix of sound bytes—a music concrete of numbers, letters, call signs? A symphony of booming voices, jingles, ads, station IDs, news flashes on the hour, competitions…numbers to ring? You can hear them can’t you? all too clearly—and the midnight DJ whispering into your REM sleep; his music a soundtrack to your interior cinema; his voice seductive in the dark. There is the news too, the latest information and analysis…the traffic, voices from the world’s hotspots…the stockmarket, a riot in Seoul, a killing on the Paris Metro, sport, impresarios with noises to cover all the uneasy gaps…gardening tips for the season. You can hear these voices in your head, some distant as quasars, others so familiar they’ve become, for all intents and purposes, part of your extended family…talk-show hosts, bombastic and opinionated or concerned, inquiring…committed commentators ready to tackle life’s problems or assassinate your already strangled and gated voice at the other end of a line. You remember radio stories so compelling you were brought to tears.

This is the parallel universe opened up by the radio, but it might surprise you more if you stopped for a moment, stepped out of the noise, and really listened. Although entirely naturalised in the everyday world, the radio is much more than this non-stop rolling mega-mix of messengers loved and hated. It is more than the sum of its music, news, information, DJs, opinions and sadomasochism.

What else is the radio? What else ‘on’ the radio? What of the genuinely exploratory; what pleasures for the ears beyond the blinding, deafening lights of the more commercial and politically dominant media? What is there right now ‘on air’ that is compelling and yet might perform beyond the frames of information, light entertainment, therapy or even mass communication?

As if to answer these questions, independent radio producer Jackie Randles and the creative team behind Radio National’s audacious and exploratory The Night Air (Sundays 8.30pm), have stepped beyond Ultimo to bring radio to a live audience at the Sydney Opera House. In April, The Studio, best known for its innovative programming of contemporary musics and edgy performance, will host Audiotheque—a program of radio pieces and features, some from radio’s earliest days of experimentation and others from recent forays into what might be termed an ‘art of the radio.’ Audiotheque’s curators call it “cinema for the ears.”

These works defy easy categorisation. Certain selections could be considered etudes, others follow the ‘acoustic-film’ tradition. To use radio jargon, some are ‘features’ distinguished by dealing with a reality (in the form of recorded actuality) that constantly glides towards fiction. Audiotheque also includes auteur works, less interested in the art of instruction or information than in creating and revealing distinct universes that can be intimately woven through and implicated with the real.

Listen to German filmmaker Hans Richter’s description of Walter Ruttmann’s first acoustic film—300 feet of optical sound-film montage broadcast as Wochenende (Weekend) in 1930 on Berlin radio: “There was no picture, just sound. It was the story of a weekend, from the moment the train leaves the city until the whispering lovers are separated by the approaching-home struggling crowd. It was a symphony of sound, speech-fragments and silence woven into a poem.” Few critics since seem to know of this unexposed film’s existence, which Richter believes is Ruttmann’s most inspired. It has never been ‘screened’ before in Australia.

In Weekend, hundreds of sound sources are woven together. Ruttmann understood that radio could offer a space par excellence for conjuring mental images. Thus this ‘film’ of a city ready to exchange the rigours of work time for the promised ‘time-out’ of the weekend, was arguably the first attempt to think and make radio in terms of filmic montage and authorship. (Ruttmann’s grafting of film techniques onto radio using optical sound film to montage produced a new moment in radio history, but also marked a lost opportunity. The technique, using the best available recording system, the Triergon process, was briefly used before 1933 but abandoned under the Nazis. Flesch and other young radio-film directors were arrested by the SS and Ruttmann left the brief weekend of his radio exploration forever.)

If we read this apparently ‘innocent’ piece only in relation to its form, and if we allow the many singular voices recorded here—children, workers, lovers chattering, singing, laughing, sighing, murmuring—to be tainted by an easy nostalgia, we risk suppressing other readings. We may hear in these hörbilder, these ‘sound pictures’ or portraits, the sonic death mask of daily life under the Nazis recorded in all its ‘innocence’ by Ruttmann.

The works in Audiotheque’s program lie somewhere between reality and fiction, and like documentary photography, carry an analogue imprint, or trace left by the real that punctures us. I can hear and feel a kind of wound opening in the (accidental?) juxtaposition of Weekend and Natalie Kestecher’s strangely unsettling contemporary German odyssey, The Silver Umbrella, about missed connections; a lost umbrella—did it ever exist?—a lost childhood, a lost father, and an unrecoverable body of work in the form of Hemingway’s mislaid manuscripts.

The radio feature has the ability to powerfully engage actuality, and yet it’s never stable. There is something at stake in these works that lie between documentary and fiction. There is what fiction makes of the real (storytelling, scenes, worlds, characters…) and then there is what reality does to these fictions—threading itself throughout, complicating our relationship as listeners and authors. This action of reality on fiction in The Night Air has the disturbing effect of raising the stakes for author and audience. Even if we are unsure of what’s real and what’s fabricated, like the narrator in The Silver Umbrella telling us of her father’s lost childhood, lost family, lost life during the unspeakable years of the Holocaust, the traces of the real—the actual voice of the narrator’s father stopped dead in his tracks—have all the power to disturb us. For me, they even have the effect of breaking the author’s hold over her own story. Kestecher’s autobiographical journey into loss and forgone opportunity offers us one trajectory at one end of the radio feature ‘film’s’ history.

Also on the Audiotheque program are: Roz Cheney and John Jacobs’ deceptively simple The Listening Room, a piece of contemporary concrete first broadcast on ABC FM’s The Listening Room and American raconteur Joe Frank’s story of an operation performed ‘in the dark.’ Riveting but real scary, Hawaii (excerpt) musters the power of storytelling, pure and simple with the voice and nothing else except a little thread of a tale. Then there’s Stan Zemanek from his 2UE talkback show reminding us of radio’s darker sadomasochistic aspects; German Ferdinand Kriwet’s remarkable journey through the ionosphere of radio in Hortext 16—3,400 recordings from around the world, 10,000 edits (and when Kriwet made this it was nothing but tape and razorblades). There’s a live performance from a Sydney institution, The Loop Orchestra—yes, tape machines on stage; Russell Stapleton’s Radio Alive or Dead, to remind you that there is something to all this talk about radio and death (why is it a recurring trope?). And to end, a composition of extraordinary beauty and sensitivity from an accomplished radio and audio artist on the theme of birth, death and rebirth: Sherre DeLys’ Jarman’s Garden. In the bleak expanse of shingle, facing a nuclear power station in Dungeness, Kent, artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman made a garden and final home. After his death, the garden remains to conjure its magic, returning it seems at last to the fishermen who live there—an epiphany in sound, with music by Sherre DeLys and Chris Abrahams. Writer Barbara Blackman will introduce this array of unexplored sonic constellations in a night sky ever illuminated by the spark of radio.

Audiotheque, presented by The Night Air, Radio National, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Apr 14.

In perspective…

This year’s 50th anniversary festival—the Festival of Fire—marks the end of Sean Doran’s 4-year reign as Director of the Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF). Not surprisingly, it has been a difficult period for the festival. Previous director, David Blenkinsop, had been in the job for 23 years and Doran sought to manage and promote a more dynamic artistic direction. In 2004, the Festival will have its first Australian director, Lindy Hume. The fact that Hume is young and female suggests not only a new confidence but also a new direction for future festivals.

Doran’s departure allows the distance required to put the programming of Blenkinsop and then General Manager, Henry Boston into clearer perspective. They provided many memorable performance moments. Think of Ballet C de la B, Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker and Maguy Marin; Ong Keng Sen’s adventurous Lear and Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota; the fabulous Royal de Lux and the ever inventive Vis à Vis. This regime also provided essential support for the establishment of the internationally acclaimed Marrugeku Company and underwrote 2 experimental/experiential music theatre works by Elision, as well as commissioning projects for the development of local theatre. Of course Blenkinsop had the advantage of time, experience and consequently depth on his side.

Doran was always keen to distinguish his role from his predecessor. While this has perhaps resulted in the loss of a strong contemporary dance, circus and street theatre presence, it has led to a greater emphasis on chamber music, opera and contemporary music. Doran’s focus was on what he calls “a festival of festivals.” This year’s festival included the Midland Festival Theatre; the weekend Jazz Festival in Fremantle; the Opera Festival in Mandurah, an international chamber music festival; the Lotteries Film Festival; the Writers’ Festival; The Johnnie Walker Watershed and Celestial City (aka Perth Cultural Centre). Punters have apparently greeted these new directions with enthusiasm; but it remains to be seen whether this more decentralised approach to festival activities will extend or fragment audiences.

Another Doran innovation was to provide programming across the state. Not a new festival concept per se, but the regions certainly received a higher profile under his leadership. The Goldfields was host to events such as Anthony Gormley’s sculpture, Inside Australia, at Lake Ballard northeast of Kalgoorlie. Programming in the Kimberley, Albany and the Great Southern and nearby regional centres meant that the dispersed population in WA’s ‘one third’ got a piece of the action. Doran tried to broaden the audience base through contemporary and world music programs at the Watershed. Laurie Anderson’s marvellous performance, Happiness, was a hit in this year’s program. While Irish born Doran knew little about Indigenous art when he arrived in WA, he increasingly embraced the presence of Aboriginal artists. An arts market style event with a gala opening at The Watershed which showcased musical acts, this year’s Indigenous Showcase was a stunningly successful event.

Doran’s interest in opera on a big scale brought us the truly wonderful Peony Pavilion in 2000. There is no doubt, however, over the years that big ticket numbers from shows such as this and Robert Wilson’s Dream Play, Romeo Castelluci’s Giulio Cesare and Deborah Warner’s The Angel Project, all undertaken by an inexperienced management, left a legacy of financial problems for Doran’s next 3 festivals.

It’s hoped that Hume will maintain support for local initiatives. An appropriate level of support for contemporary visual arts programming is long overdue. It would be wonderful to see her commit to developing work, perhaps through reinvigorated WA theatre commissions (a Blenkinsop initiative). This well-intentioned venture had appalling outcomes over its 2 years, but it did seek a means of putting real money into local theatre and performance. Perth-based theatre companies are included in the festival but without any financial assistance. This fuels an underlying tension between the perception of the festival as a funding body and as an organisation that curates its own program. Given this, it was fabulous to see local contemporary dance organisation STRUT present 2 programs this year. Five local choreographers/groups strutted their stuff to excellent houses at the Playhouse and PICA.

STRUT

The relative absence of ‘dance’ from the STRUT program was interesting. In Point of Entry Claudia Alessi used spoken word, circus skills, slides and puppetry; Kompany Kido’s Pivot and Enter drew on an eclectic mix of Aikido, contact improvisation and live and recorded video; Paul Gazolla’s work was a classic piece of performance art; while Paul O’Sullivan’s solo narrative and Shannon Bott’s So…do you come here often? drew a more theatrical bow.

This laudable hybridity brought several problems. A mixed bag of stylistic and generic references can sometimes muddy the integrity of individual works. This was most sharply felt in Claudia Alessi’s work, where a poor script and an earnestly dated thematic undermined the power of her physical presence. Despite input from 2 directors, the work suffered from a lack of dramaturgical clarity and an indiscriminate overabundance—a mixed bag of tricks.

On the other hand, while overly long and sometimes shambolic, Kompany Kido’s comedic framework allowed a succession of generic leaps, referencing cinema (particularly Chinese action films), slapstick and contemporary dance. Their appealing sense of the ridiculous and the ensemble’s generosity and enthusiasm meant the work was resoundingly applauded.

Gazolla’s Bird Talk #1-7 was a highly self-reflexive yet disciplined live art piece that bemused and even angered much of the audience. Gazolla presented a complex and funny treatise that mocked the idea of dance as a purely expressive medium. The work employed a series of ‘real-life’ moments (juxtaposed with sound and video), in which the artist impersonated, replaced or copied somebody or some thing else. The work moved from opaque to profound, ultimately suggesting it might be impossible for the artist to find a pure moment of originality. Gazolla was reduced to bouncing up and down on the spot, a choreography he tells us he discovered as a child. Dance is revealed as pure pleasure, neither an academic nor learned space, but rather a space of play.

Shannon Bott’s work was the most stylistically coherent of the STRUT program. So…Do You Come Here Often? drew on experimental (non-realist) theatre to create a cool gestural space referencing transitory bar-based relationships. Despite strong performances—particularly by actor Karen Roberts and dancer Rachel Whitworth—the work felt unresolved and its impressionistic but cool design stymied the piece’s potential to resonate beyond its clipped frame. However, it certainly deserves revisiting and developing.

Conversely, Paul O’Sullivan’s Shopping, fashion, travel and…Genocide risked didacticism in a passionate and witty exploration of current issues, ranging across Australia’s policy on refugees, the war in Iraq, consumerism and blind self-interest. This witty monologue was performed in O’Sullivan’s characteristic relaxed and loose-limbed mode. Scripted yet nonetheless improvisational, his performance avoided the self-righteousness that mars so much issue-based work. O’Sullivan has been invited to present this work at the 2004 Grahamstown Festival in South Africa, where its unabashed politic and humour are sure to resonate. The opportunity to extend the life of the work through touring should result in a tighter, more precise structure.

STRUT frees up independent dance artists to focus on artistic development by providing administrative and marketing support. For this great initiative to grow within the context of an international arts festival, more financial support and dramaturgical input are needed. Once more, we look to Lindy Hume to recognise and reward such deserving local initiatives.

Incognita

Stalker Theatre’s Incognita was one of the festival highlights. Located in the Australian outback and involving a small group of men and women isolated by distance and drought, its outdoor setting at the old Midland Railway Yards perfectly complemented the Australian Gothic style of Andrew Carter’s design. The serendipitous full moon rising on a stinking hot night made this a visceral and physical experience.

Incognita sparked heated debate and undeniably the show had some structural weaknesses. The opening scenes locate the work within recognisable visual and narrative traditions drawn from Australian theatre, cinema and literature (Randolph Stowe, Nick Enright, Karen Mainwaring, Tracey Moffatt). Unfortunately the strong narrative potential of these scenes (the stranger/outsider comes to town, sexual tension, rising temperatures…) is quickly abandoned as the piece drifts into a more impressionistic and dancerly work.

There are great risks in jettisoning such a strongly marked character-based narrative. Your audience has already entered into the narrative contract—they have begun to make connections, invest in story. Once character is abandoned, relationships become a matter of proximity. While the audience is certainly left with strong impressions from individual performances and scenes, the overall sense of the work is compromised. The development of an Australian vernacular choreography was compelling—however the absence of a strong script and rigorous dramaturgy diminished the work. On the drive home from Midland it struck the 2 of us that Incognita’s producers would benefit from looking at the ways American narrative dance and musical cinema have struggled in the 20th century to negotiate theatre, movement, song and story.

Three Tales

Steve Reich and Beryl Korot might also want to observe these traditions! Their Three Tales was actually 2 tales and one lecture. Both the first and second tale, “Hindenburg” and “Bikini,” drew on powerful black and white archival footage to underscore the tragic, ambiguous, even mythic story of technological advancement in the 20th century. In “Hindenburg”, the 1937 explosion and crash of the airship signals the end of a failed technology. “Bikini” presents the clash between the atomic bomb tests by the American Government and the people most immediately affected and generally ignored—those displaced from Bikini Atoll in the Solomon Islands. (These tests, carried out between 1946 and 1952, marked the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War.) In the third tale “Dolly” (after the cloned sheep), we are brought to the end of the 20th century and invited to explore a post-human, genetically warped future.

The performance meshes orchestra, large format video, and singers who act as a kind of chorus reflecting on the action on screen. While the music was haunting and insistent, the integration of digital video often undercut the power of the score. Lacking the grain and texture of film, the video was frequently overburdened with digital after-effects. While this made a point about the imbrication of technology and the image, the focus on digital ‘effect’ was at the cost of human ‘affect’; human tragedy—particularly in the Bikini Atoll story—was largely effaced.

While “Hindenburg” and “Bikini” relied on real historical events to provide coherence and force, the significance of human cloning and virtual reality is still under debate. This lessened the formal coherence of the last section of Three Tales. In “Dolly”, the potential for ambiguity present in the music (and a stated artistic ambition of the work) gives way to a one-dimensional and often morally hectoring tone, delivered in cut-up by edited ‘talking head’ scientists and religious leaders. In this context, the application of Reich’s familiar compositional elements to the spoken score diminished the work’s poetics and tragic resonance. In his program notes Reich describes the “double edged sword of the gains and losses of each new technology as it is incorporated into our lives;” however, in “Dolly” the subtext seemed less ambivalent and rather more apocalyptic and dogmatic.

Three Tales was constantly interesting, engaging and at times brilliant (if brutal). However, despite Reich and Korot’s mutual fascination with multiple registers and ambiguity, the sublimation of music to video ultimately closed down the work and left the audience with less space than is humanly needed.

Beasty Grrrl

Scott Rankin’s festival commission Beasty Grrrl, took the story of young Tasmanian Errol Flynn and tracked not so much his rise to Hollywood fame as his appalling record as abuser (alleged statutory rapist, paedophile, gun enthusiast, Nazi sympathiser and possibly spy for the Japanese). An unlikely parallel between Flynn and the extinct Tasmanian Thylacine sought to establish some sympathy for the actor who was the product of an abusive childhood. Solo performer Paula Arundell struggled with live sound and video mix in a hugely wordy monologue on a large and clunky set. Ultimately, neither the writer nor performer could summon up much sympathy or enthusiasm for the daredevil actor and star of 23 Hollywood movies.

On the fringe

Two Fringe Festival projects were arguably much more successful. The surprise hit (with capacity houses every night) was 18 year old Matthew Lutton’s production of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna, at the suffocatingly hot Rechabites Hall. This truly exciting theatre was presented with the kind of wit and artistic risktaking generally absent from many more highly resourced mainstage productions. Working with Associate Director Eamon Flack, Lutton elicited excellent performances from his actors and a dancerly chorus. Self-devised works in the past have shown that his instincts are good, and his influences avant-garde. This work clearly benefited from the structure imposed by Ionesco’s script.

Tony Osborne’s Rest in Silence at the Blue Room Theatre showcased his idiosyncratic and improvisatory performative style. While Osborne is a skilled and often very funny performer, this work would have benefited from extended development time. As with so much contemporary performance and theatre, the fundamental concept was let down by writing that skittered across the surface. This was a pity, as the stage, lighting and sound design created by Virginia Ward, Mike Nanning and Rob Muir respectively was extraordinary and impeccably integrated.

Exit

And so, as the sun set on another Perth International Arts Festival, we found ourselves driving with the windows down, wondering if summer was ever going to end. We took deep swigs on our water bottles and remarked on the almost universal misunderstanding about narrative and character and on that outmoded and pointless distinction between acting and performing. As we pulled into Kentucky Fried and took out our water pistols, we wondered why nobody wants to play the bad guy no more. It’s such fun.

“I’m not really a robber,” I told the woman as I pocketed the pistol and paid for the Bucket. “Honey,” she said, “this ain’t really a chicken.”

Perth International Arts Festival, Jan 25-Feb 17: Point of Entry, choreographer, performer Claudia Alessi; Pivot and Enter, Kompany Kido, choreographers Rob Griffin & Sete Tele; Bird Talk #1-7; choreographer, performer Paul Gazzola; Shopping, fashion, travel and…Genocide, choreographer, performer Paul O’Sullivan; Shott Dance Theatre, So… do you come here often?, director, choreographer Shannon Bott; 3 programs at Playhouse Theatre and PICA, Jan 29-Feb 8 25; Stalker Theatre Company, Incognita, conceived & co-directed by Rachael Swain; co-director: Koen Augustijnen, Midland Festival Theatre, Feb 9-16; Three Tales, composer Steve Reich, video Beryl Korot, Board Walk Theatre, Mandurah Performing Arts Centre, Feb 14 & 18; Beasty Grrrl, writer, director Scott Rankin, performer Paula Arundell, Regal Theatre, Feb 6-15; WA Fringe Festival: Thin Ice Productions, The Bald Prima Donna, writer Eugene Ionesco, director Matthew Lutton, Rechabites Hall; Rest in Silence, writer, performer Tony Osborne, Blue Room Theatre, Jan 29-Feb 8

Twenty-four hours drive north of Brisbane and 70km north west of Cairns, is Emerald End, homebase for interdisciplinary new media performance group Bonemap. As an urban individual it’s hard not to be fascinated by this choice of location; by the fact that you can drive that far north of Brisbane and still be on land, but more importantly by the implications and resonances of such remoteness for a contemporary arts practice. For Bonemap it’s the perfect situation for developing work that is interconnected, informed, and in itself an interpretive embodiment of place and environment.

Bonemap is Rebecca Youdell and Russell Milledge. Youdell is a choreographer and performer with a background in ballet, contemporary dance and movement practices such as Body Weather; Milledge, a new media designer and director, has a fine arts background. They formed Bonemap in 1999 to be a “hybrid mesh of live art, installation and new media.” Since its inception Bonemap has had residencies at Brisbane Powerhouse, The Australian Choreographic Centre, Tanks Arts Centre, Cairns and The Substation, Singapore 2001 (receiving the first interdisciplinary residency from the visual arts and performing arts panels of Asialink). Their work has appeared at festivals such as Experimentica 02 (Chapter Arts Centre, Wales), Worms Festival II (Plastique Kinetic Worms, Singapore), New Criteria (The Substation Singapore) and L’attitude 27.5 (Brisbane Powerhouse). They were also part of the first Time_Place_Space cross-disciplinary investigations at Charles Sturt University in 2002 (see RT 53). I met them in Brisbane where they’re working on their current investigation, Bridge Song.

Inspired by Brisbane’s legendary Story Bridge, this work is an exploration of interconnectedness, of the impact of the environment on flesh. Milledge describes it as an intimate work for solo musician, dancer and projection design. Much of Bonemap’s work has a site-specific outcome, but Bridge Song will take place in the Judith Wright Centre theatre. Milledge says this is a conscious move to develop a stronger audience base in Brisbane. However they have conducted extensive research on the bridge through site-based performative explorations, filming and sampling of the bridge and its environs. The work has grown from their urban/rural spatial dislocations and an investigation of architectural iconography. Milledge says, “the transition from a kind of remote rural working environment to an urban environment is about the different sense of space and it’s not something easily put into words. It’s a perceptive, cognitive thing. There’s an awareness developed in open space that’s compressed in an urban environment. One thing we were wanting to do was look at an urban location and overlay our perception of space.”

This layering of non-urban time/space perception and industrialised environment indicates an ongoing preoccupation with what Milledge and Youdell term ‘decentring.’ Working so far from the supposed creative hubs of urban environments means that they have been very active in encouraging an expansion of arts culture within the local community, both with Bonemap and through their involvement with Kick Arts in Cairns. It also offers more opportunities for cross-cultural pollination. Milledge says there is such “a diversity of cultural types in Northern Australia…there’s more reference to closer neighbours [in PNG and the Asia Pacific] that you don’t really get in southern cities…We like to collaborate with artists from those backgrounds. We want to engage with a practice that’s land based, grounded in the geography of where we are. It’s not about something that is imagined—that old Australian mythology of imagining the geography of another place.”

With Body Weather as foundation in both artists’ practice, it is not surprising that environment plays such a vital role in their work as site, in new media manipulations or as the basis for experiential body-memory choreography and improvisation. Bonemap has incorporated these elements into a notion of ecology that extends beyond simplistic notions of the natural environment, to incorporate a performance ecology. This is ecology as a “spatial reference” with inter-relationships and connectedness as the central principles. Milledge says, “Although we are seemingly based in this flesh-against-earth paradigm, we’re also interested in this imagining of ecology as virtual systems” which can come about through the relationship of live and mediated performance.

So how does the new media content function within this performance ecology? Youdell states, “It’s had different modes really. We have tended to create work that’s modular. There would be some cinematic component, as well as performative and some sort of exhibition. It’s been quite separate in the past so we’re just beginning to look at integrating this more closely in a performance context. You always see the performer in front of the screen and we’d like to go beyond that and integrate it.” Milledge adds that projection is “convenient and almost too easy. The idea of engaging with a remote location, like a marble mine or a lava tube is, obviously, that you can film that location and it can be transposed into a theatrical setting. I guess there [are] other ways at looking at the relationship between environments and performance which are to do with internal body nerve memory kind of stuff. There’s an incredibly obvious element to cinematic projection in performance, and I think the kinds of performer interaction with projection turns cold on an audience unless it’s the audience manipulating it in some way.”

The guiding principles of ecology and decentring also create a practice that is collaborative and interdisciplinary. The Bridge Song project will be an interplay between body, image and sound with Youdell and Milledge working with Brisbane-based musicians Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson (Clocked Out Duo). In 2004 they plan to continue a collaboration with improvisational musician Jim Denley and work with Singapore’s Lee Wen, who performed the Yellow Man at APT3 (Asia Pacific Triennial) in 2000 and Simon Whitehead from Wales, both of whom have “walking practices”—performative journeys through public spaces. Planned for the Brisbane Powerhouse, they envisage this work will be durationally oriented, though its form—theatre or media based or both—hangs enticingly in the air.

Bridge Song, Bonemap, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, Jun 12-14. www.bonemap.com

Based in Bankstown in Sydney’s west, Urban Theatre Projects has been a distinctive and highly purposeful venture, now rewarded for its courage and adventurousness with a prestigious Sidney Myer Group Award for $35,000.

Death Defying Theatre, UTP’s famous precursor, was formed in 1981 and in the 90s decided to create a base in the suburban west. Following the DDT directorship of Fiona Winning and, later, a triumvirate of Winning, Monica Barone and Gail Kelly, the appointment of ex-Sydney Front player John Baylis as Artistic Director in 1997 established a new name and firmly set the agenda for works that fused community collaborations with open-ended, experimental and often site-based approaches to performance.

The sites—railway stations, a prison, a variety club, residential streets, a town plaza—have provided not only performance and design challenges but also a means to work with communities and with a range of strategies for engaging audiences. You always leave home for a UTP show with an open mind. The company is equally at ease at Performance Space or in a warehouse adapted for performance, as in The Longest Night (2002).

The range of often unusual and surprising subject matter has been similarly impressive. In 1991, the company presented Cafe Hakawati, an Arabic community show in Auburn about the impact of the first Gulf War. Noroc (Performance Space, 1996) explored cultural difference in a dynamic news/talkshow format. In 2000, the company toured Alicia Talbot’s tough-minded show about homelessness, Cement Garage, through Sydney suburbs and developed the sequel, The Longest Night, for a 2002 Adelaide Festival commission. Brian Fuata’s solo performance, Fa’afafine (2001) lyrically explored cross gender sexuality from a migrant Samoan perspective. The company’s new show Mechanix (from April 2) is a spectacle of machinic and sculptural inventions performed in the Old Town Plaza, Bankstown.

Executive Producer Harley Stumm, who started out as administrator with the company in 1995, has been integral to the company’s life for 8 years, helping shape its conceptual development and programming. He’s proud of UTP’s sizeable list of productions and achievements, especially of its “politically contentious work, its queer work, the range from community-based to straight professional work, and all with a strong commitment to social justice and cultural diversity…”

On behalf of the company, Artistic Director Alicia Talbot and Stumm received the Sidney Myer Award for outstanding achievement in the Performing Arts from veteran actor Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell at the awards ceremony in Melbourne—yet another UTP cross cultural moment.

The Myer Awards, established in 1984, celebrate outstanding achievement by Australians in drama, dance, music, opera, circus and puppetry. Other recipients this year included Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre which (WA) won a $10,000 Indigenous Facilitator’s Prize and actor Aaron Pedersen (Wildside, Water Rats) won the Indigenous Individual Award.

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Author archive

But is it music?

Aesthetics and/or technique

The attractions of education

Ros Bandt, Silo Stories

Randy Hy Yau

Bernard Parmegiani

360º: Women in Sound

Dah Teatar

Cristina Castrillo and Margaret Cameron

Stace Callaghan

Julia Varley

New media performance

And more…

Vitalstatistix: Maude Davey

Playworks: Francesca Smith

The AFC-ScreenSound Australia integration

New OnScreen Commissioning Editor: Daniel Edwards

The Asian market

Japan

Berlin

Ruark Lewis & Rubato

Percussion paradise

Talking up music

Heiner Goebbels

Meredith Monk

Elision

Einojuhani Rautavaara

Serious jazz

To market, to market…

And a lot more…

Bobcat Dancing in Mt Isa

The QBFM legacy

William Barton

Dead Man Walking

The women’s pages

Dramaturgy and screenplay writing now

New editors

The ACO and The Song Company

Synergy

Elision

The priority of vision

The values of funding bodies

An industry held hostage?

A market or an audience?

Objective criteria: one size fits all

So long as the rules are applied…

Chasing our pragmatic tales

A job to be done

Success without vision

In perspective…

STRUT

Incognita

Three Tales

Beasty Grrrl

On the fringe

Exit

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