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“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect…; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfit for action.”
Thucydides, 455-400BC

When we put this edition of RealTime to bed, the war against Iraq had just commenced and there was no early indication of which way it might go. Coalition governments were exercising the double bind of ‘Yes, oppose the war but support our troops’, the hyprocisy of calling for Iraq to stand by the rules of the Geneva convention for POWs while in flagrant breach of it, and the opportunism of invoking a new sovereignity for Iraq while planning to profit maximally from its restructure. And, as those polled in the West appeared to increasingly support the war (presumably unable to imagine its reversal and hoping for a quick finish), the spectres of the un-American, the un-Australian, the anti-war coward and the violent protester were being conjured. We hope, at the very least, that by the time you read these words that the bombing will have stopped and that we can unravel ourselves from the knots of government duplicity. It’s a lot to hope for.

One way to battle the distortion of language is to assault hypocrisy and propaganda with creativity. The massive international protests against the war were typified by a plethora of banners, cut outs, costumes and puppets with a rude vigour and wit not seen since the Yippees in the years of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Our Featured Artists in this edition are the anonymous makers of these images which appeared at the protest in Sydney on February 16 (p13).

As you’ll see, RealTime 54 is bookish, but not at all retiring. Our BOOK-ish feature celebrates the achievement of Australian authors writing on new media, film and cultural and psychological phenomena, for the most part in international imprints.

RealTime issue #54 April-May 2003 pg. 3

Dear Editors

I refer to Mick Broderick’s article in last month’s RealTime, “Screen culture: be alert, be alarmed” (OnScreen p15). Mr Broderick states that the AFC has “devolved many screen culture responsibilities onto state agencies, particularly those emanating from Victoria.”

The AFC has not devolved any of its responsibilities to state agencies. Where the AFC provides funding to events or activities that are now coordinated by a State agency, such as the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Victoria (ACMI), now coordinating the National Cinematheque, this is a funding partnership, not a devolution of responsibility. This partnership came about because the AFC wanted to save the national tour of the Cinematheque.

The funding that the AFC provided to ACMI for the National Cinematheque tour was not “earmarked for the AFI’s national exhibition program”, but was offered specifically to the AFI for the Cinematheque national tour. It was only offered to ACMI once the AFI decided not to run the tour. AFC screen culture funding is not generalist organisational funding, but is for specific programs and outcomes.

The AFC was aware of the very low audiences for the National Cinematheque achieved by the AFI and FTI in WA and the consequent decision by the FTI not to continue with the Cinematheque program. ACMI have reinstated the WA tour for this year and are confident that audiences will improve.

Mr Broderick states that “for nearly a decade the AFI has been suffering death by a thousand cuts.” This is not factual. The AFC’s funding of the AFI has steadily increased for the past decade, from an initial funding of $379,878 in 1979 to a peak of $1,000,734 in 1991 and throughout the 1990s averaging $871,147 annually. Fluctuations in AFI funding have been due to the AFI applying for different projects each year. In 1999, the AFI’s request to the AFC was for $994,400 representing 38.5% of the AFC’s screen culture budget.

In 1999, the AFC provided the AFI with $803,000 and gave the AFI 2 years notice that it would no longer support Research and Information and Distribution specifically. The AFC provided transitional funding for these services until 2002, thereby giving the AFI 2 years to pursue alternative strategies for funding them. This is not a picture of “death by a thousand cuts over a decade.”

Also to clarify, the AFC did not withdraw funding from the AFI’s exhibition infrastructure as stated by Deb Verhoeven in the article. AFC funding cuts to the AFI were for Research and Information and Distribution only. The AFC stated to the AFI and publicly that it would continue to fund Exhibition and the Awards. In 2000, the AFI received $157,000 for Exhibition, which increased in 2001 to $244,899. In 2002, the opportunity existed for the AFI to receive at least the same allocation for Exhibition as it had in 2001. However, the AFI chose not to continue with it’s exhibition program, including the Cinémathèque tour.

Since 2000, the AFC has increased its funding support to the AFI for the AFI Awards by 63%.

Yours faithfully,
Sabina Wynn
Manager Industry and Cultural Development
Australian Film Commission

Reply from Mick Broderick

Dear Editors

I’m heartened to learn from the AFC’s Sabina Wynn that ACMI have “reinstated” the WA Cinémathèque tour. Things were looking grim when I first contacted the AFC in late November of 2001, having learned that the Cinémathèque would not run in Perth the following year. At that time the AFC expressed concern at the loss of Perth from the national tour, but flicked the problem/explanation to the AFI and FTI. It is reassuring to see that the situation has now been salvaged.

In her letter Ms Wynn provides financial statistics in an attempt to refute my suggestion that the AFI was subjected to a series of cuts over the past decade. Curiously, though, her own figures clearly validate my assertion.

According to Ms Wynn the AFI’s “peak” funding was more than a million dollars just over a decade ago in 1991. Since then the funding decreased to just over $800,000 in 1999. But the consistently diminishing appropriation in real terms is further evidenced if one considers the diminishing dollar value from the 1991 peak in funding to what the AFI receives today. The metaphor I invoked spoke not to a massive pecuniary blow (which came later with the AFC’s withdrawal of support for Research & Information and Distribution) but a series of smaller funding attritions which left the AFI greatly compromised in its capacity to remain viable, except for running the annual national Awards. Regardless of the AFC’s motivation and rationale (some of which I’m deeply sympathetic to in this instance) the facts speak for themselves. Interested parties can visit the financial appendices of the AFC’s Annual Reports at the AFC website for details.

As for the issue of discriminating between “devolution” and the professed move to a “funding partnership”, I’ll leave the semantics of such euphemisms to the RealTime readers to adjudicate upon.

Dr Mick Broderick
Murdoch University

RealTime issue #54 April-May 2003 pg.

Yes, there is an ACMI

News has leaked from the tight ship that is Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) of a couple of exhibitions that might be well worth the journey for eager digital culture vultures outside Melbourne. But expect to be confronted.

Persistence of Vision (March 21-May 5) is the first part of ACMI’s major exhibition Remembrance + the Moving Image. Encompassing some 30 installations, the exhibition offers viewers a series of memory jogging experiences from a variety of vantage points: “eavesdropping on the anonymous lives and restless spirits that haunt the phonelines, televisions and sleepless nights of the city” (Jem Cohen, Black Hole Radio, US); “alone in a room with 9 naked figures…pale forms without identity or voice”(Gina Zcarnedki, Versifier, UK); playing visual detective to an eyeful of silent exchanges, glances and tiny clues gathered from home movie footage (Traces, Naomi Bishops and Richard Raber, UK).

Curator Ross Gibson (see his new book reviewed, p4) writes in the show’s press release, “Remembrance is about activating memory. When visitors encounter installations such as Ivan Sen’s Blood, Sadie Benning’s Jollies or Bill Viola’s The Passing, they will feel the artworks infiltrating their nervous systems, tangling with their moods…Visitors are encouraged to plunge into the imaginary worlds the works conjure: these works move through the visitor as the visitor moves amongst them, feeling the power of memory-in-action coursing through them.”

The impressive list of participating artists—a not at all predictable new media arts lineup—includes: Mona Hartoum (Lebanon/UK), Sue Ford (Australia), Geshe Sonam Thargye (Tibet/Australia), Alexander Sokurov (Russia), Andrea Lange (Norway), Joyce Hinterding (Australia), David Haines (Australia/UK), Scott Horscroft (Australia), Peter Forgacs (Hungary), Robert Arnold (US), Emily Weil (US), Frank Scheffer (Netherlands), Les LeVeque (US), Andrish Saint-Clare (Australia), Steve Reinker (Canada), Big hART (Australia), Chris Marker (France), Tehching Hsieh (Taiwan), Dennis del Favero (Australia), Kate Murphy (US), Bill Seaman (US), Debra Petrovich (Australia) and Mary Lucier (US).

Jeffrey Shaw

Place Urbanity, Jeffrey Shaw’s new interactive installation (read the interview with the artist in RT41, p18) surrounds the viewer in a large projected images of Melbourne suburbs and is also showing at ACMI. A robotic platform mounted with camera and video projector allows the visitor to rotate the projected image within a surrounding 9 metre diameter projection screen while they navigate virtual space. As the platform rotates, so does the projection, allowing the viewer to explore a 360 degree panorama. And as you immerse yourself in any of the 15 suburban locations—the predominantly Vietnamese strip of Victoria Street in Richmond, the Jewish community in Balaclava—you encounter a member of that community who tells you a joke. Shaw is the current Director for Visual Media at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. With another Australian new media artist, Dennis del Favero, he is heading up the new I-Cinema at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts, another significant new media venture. Watch these pages.

In an informal meeting last month, Victoria Lynn, Director of Creative Develpoment of ACMI, wowed the RealTime Editors with a preview of what the centre will spring on audiences over the next year and beyond. At long last, it looks like new media arts in its many manifestations, national and international, will reach the audiences it warrants in ACMI and beyond.

www.acmi.net.au

Electrofringe 03

October 1-6 will see the 6th Electrofringe in Newcastle NSW gathering together new media artists, sound and noise makers, gamers and activists for a hands on, all in talk-tech-play fest. Co-ordinators Gail Priest and Vicky Clare are now calling for expressions of interest from new media artists, curators, producers and people interetsed being state consultants. See www.electrofringe.net for more details.

RealTime issue #54 April-May 2003 pg.

There is no denying the self-confessed artistic ‘eclecticism’ of composer Irine Vela. Aside from working with the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre since its inception in 1987 and being a founding member of the Melbourne-based choral group Canto Coro, Vela is even credited on Phillip Brophy’s latest warping of cinema scores, Film Music (Sound Punch, 1997-2002). “With Head On [directed by Anna Kokkinos], Phillip and I worked together on a few things,” she explains, “I was the Greek music consultant for that, so maybe he has used some of those pieces—but I didn’t know that until now! If he has, I’m rapt!”

Vela is about to go into rehearsal for her second major operatic composition, 1975, which she describes as a kind of prologue to her successful 1996 production with the Melbourne Workers Theatre and Canto Coro, Little City. “If you put those 2 works beside each other, then you could say Little City is set in the near future,” Vela claims.

“What precedes Little City is this story of 1975, in which…the only political party that the disenfranchised and the vulnerable have in Australia [the Labor Party], dies in a sense. That is when the rights of the people and the visionary idea of what is possible in politics begin to erode. So then you get the situation one finds in Little City [composed during the height of the Thatcherite Liberal regime of Jeff Kennett in Victoria] where there is nothing. There are no health care services, there is no after-school program, there is nothing. And so people are spurred on to revolt. But 1975 is more character-based, while in Little City it was the choir itself [which represented the populace in general and the working classes in particular] which was the protagonist. 1975 will still have the force of the mass singing, but they are more like a traditional opera chorus…”

Vela notes that in composing her new political opera, she has been inspired by the popular US artist Leonard Bernstein, who drew upon jazz, American folk and popular idioms, as well as classical and romantic music. “I use anything that works for the dramatic and musical problems I encounter.”

1975 deals with the years 1972-5, in which Gough Whitlam led the ALP to victory in the national polls, only to be ignominiously ousted 3 years later; the whiff of scandal, incompetence and betrayal strong in the air. This has been a popular theatrical subject ever since David Williamson’s Don’s Party (1971). Vela’s take on these events is very different however.

Whitlam’s term in office signified Labor’s first national government after 20 years in opposition, and it is traditionally seen as “the high water mark of social democracy” and progressive government in Australia (Graeme Davison et al, eds, Oxford Companion to Australian History, 2001). However a growing number of contemporary commentators point out that, for all of the ALP’s high principles, it also initiated the policy of studious non-intervention and tacit support for Indonesia’s military occupation of East Timor.

Vela has therefore sketched a figure to embody this shift in Labor policy: the character of senior ALP member and mother, Paula. “She represents that part of the Labor party which you later see in Bob Hawke, who argued that we have to get pragmatic and do everything we can to ensure that our party gets into office. So we can’t be idealistic any more. We can’t be worried about workers and unions. We can’t ‘give over’ to them. We have to manage them.”

Vela characterises 1975 as a “popular opera,” partly to distinguish it from more didactic, Brechtian-influenced styles (including her own Little City). The character-based nature of the work means that ideology is explored through the old adage of “the personal is political.” Vela has “set 2 pieces of a requiem mass”—a choral form composed to honour the dead.

“The notion of the requiem is both literal and metaphorical here, expressing the genocide of East Timor as well as the grief and loss of Paula for her journalist son, who has died there. The piece begins with a burial in Indonesia and then we go back 3 years, and return again to the funeral at the end of the performance.” In this scene, the idealistic son, like Australia’s role in the East Timor invasion, is buried within political and emotional memory, thus giving the tragic tale of political disillusionment a palpable emotional charge.

The Melbourne Workers’ Theatre and Canto Coro, 1975, composer Irine Vela, director Wesley Enoch, musical director Peter Mousaferiadis, performers include Melita Jurisic, Cidalia Pires, Grant Smith, Lisa-Marie Charalambous, Jeanie Marsh, Michael Lindner, Jenny Vanderbilt, North Melbourne Town Hall, May 21-Jun 7.

RealTime issue #54 April-May 2003 pg. 42

There are several Melbourne companies whose relatively young membership is committed to that which eludes spoken language and generates novel onstage worlds. Aside from the Gertrude Stein Project, there is the Well Theatre, currently headed by Dario VaCirca (ex-5 Angry Men), Ben Cittadini, Wendy Stevens and Ania Reynolds. The most perversely engaging aspect of their inaugural production, One Night in the Well, is the excess and disparate quality of the performances. No specific company aesthetic has been established, so the show consists of 3 very different short works collared together and punctuated by a meal break.

The first piece is a tango mime, relating a doomed love affair between an artist and an Argentinian gangster’s moll. Tango dance theatre is not in itself novel, but it’s rare in Australia, and director VaCirca and choreographer Stevens have expanded the form by adding highly gestural choreographic asides (based on Auslan signing) and some beautifully produced video projection. However, the modest venue is unsuited to showing this eye candy at its best (the visuals are everyday objects given symbolic potency), and the performers have not fully mastered the quicksilver kicks of tango; though music from the accomplished live quintet helps ensure that this slightly raw curio entrances even in its current state.

The second piece is a kind of neo-Dadaist, Futurist or Fluxus performance game in which 2 endlessly curious, childlike figures play at gesticulating, moving, wriggling, playing a piano, poking and prodding each other. Performers Reynolds and Renato VaCirca have a predominantly musical background (though Renato’s movement has a touch of Butoh’s formlessness) and this short study is a jewel of surprises, gentle melancholy and quietly suspended musical and physical moments.

The third work is the most textually demanding, a bizarre solo performed by a constantly amazed, ripplingly mobile Dario VaCirca, while an equally strange monologue is read out and an abstract, largely electronic soundscape linked in, producing an effect that has much in common with the solos of theatre maker Angus Cerini. Dario’s movement has none of the choreographic forms or even rhythmic structures of what is normally described as dance. Sheer athleticism and an eternally vigilant focus shape the physicality. Similarly, his text has a disarming sense of the everyday that gradually spills over into a surreal, almost LSD-induced road trip in which our hero describes hitchhiking from central Australia over a radioactive River Styx, while a roadside concrete Big Lobster cracks the lid on his vehicle to claw him and force him to acknowledge an expanded sense of self.

It’s crazy, more than a bit silly, but wildly inventive and great fun. Moreover, the incongruity of seeing these works as part of a ‘unified’ program sparks some interesting reflections. Well Theatre has yet to arrive, wherever it’s going, but even this rough, careening manifestation is hugely engaging. Perhaps their biggest concern is whether in weeding out some of the stray elements, the company’s practice will remain so wonderfully surprising and novel.

Well Theatre, One Night in the Well, directors Dario VaCirca, Ben Cittadini, performers Willow Conway, Peat Moss, Ryan Schofield, Nik Garcia, Renato VaCirca, Dario VaCirca, projection Matt Gingold, Auslan signing/translation Mark Sandon, design Entelechy Industries, Carlton Courthouse, Melbourne, Jan 27-Feb 7

The Project

Brink’s latest work, The Rope Project, had the air of a trial—exemplified in the shape of its staging and exposition. Before an audience of representatives of the city-state of Adelaide, the players put their case. It was a case not only for the right to continue their project with the approval and advice of the demos, but a presentation of the nature of power and crime in the audience’s own picket-fenced backyard. The Rope Project was also a trial in the sense of being a try-out: the first public showing of several month’s work.

Director Sam Haren took the floor as orator, giving his introduction and interpretation. His subject was the representation of deviance on stage and film. His particular topos linked 3 sequences of multiple murders that occurred in Adelaide: the 7 girls at Truro in the 70s, the 5 boys in the parklands and beyond, and the gruesome discoveries still emerging from the Snowtown bank vault. They were preceded by the murder of Dr George Duncan in the River Torrens by 3 police officers, and connected by the figure of Bevan Von Einem as potential victim and witness, and subsequently killer.

The company, including designer Mary Moore, video and sound artists Sophie Hyde, Bryan Mason, Andrew Russ and Andrew Howard then demonstrated the exhibits and forensic events presented by the actors. The audience responded with their doubts, sarcasm, fears, contradictions and encouragement. It was an admirable vindication of the value of live theatre.

The Film

Brink’s project takes its title from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, itself adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s 1924 London stage play. Hitchcock changed the original characters—Oxford undergraduates and their professor—into 2 Manhattan penthouse peacocks, Phillip and Brandon (coded as homosexual by Hitchcock’s elegant direction of Farley Granger and the mise-en-scène of the apartment), and their mentor Rupert (James Stewart). They have just strangled their friend David in an acte gratuit, and are about to tease their guests and us by throwing a party. Hitchcock wanted to increase the tension by giving the Stewart role to the openly bisexual Cary Grant and Brandon to another gay actor, Montgomery Clift, who backed off. Even in Hamilton’s play, much of the public fascination was with the reverberations of the real Leopold/Loeb affair. Though Hamilton denied it, there were certainly striking similarities between his Nietzschean thrill-killers and the wealthy Chicago students who murdered a 14-year old boy. Hitchcock, on the other hand, certainly knew the connection. Several other powerful films have been made on the subject, notably Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion (1959). From prison, the convicted Nathan Leopold threatened to sue at the implication of a homosexual motive for the murder. Loeb was himself murdered in 1936. But it’s Hitchcock’s Rope that remains the archetypal dramatisation, not least because of its bold experiment with real time and a single location. In his version, with the camera changing rolls behind moveable furniture and apparently filming in one continuous take, the insolent killers serve their guests dinner on a chest containing the body.

Adelaide

It was Salman Rushdie, an Adelaide Festival guest, who first made global, in an article (published in 1984), the creepy feeling he experienced behind the facade of colonial buildings and bluestone suburbs in this Athens of the South. But it was the British tabloids’ characterisation of the city as the murder capital of the world that really had backpackers looking over their shoulders and Old Adelaide Families snuffling in their shiraz. Firstly, is it true? No, in both number or proportion it is ridiculous in comparison with cities such as Washington or Sao Paolo. But what about ‘weird’ murders? Brink’s audience was quick to respond: “Aren’t all murders weird?” No, it appeared, some were weirder than others. Because they were serial, for instance. Or, in this city at least, so many could be linked to homosexuality. But wasn’t that merely media sensationalism? In a place where the next most notable event is Woomera and the newspapers are the worst outside Rangoon, wouldn’t grisly horror stories about perverts make more people snap up the front page? Yes, but even if it’s only a myth, doesn’t that in itself say something about the city? Some questioners, like Myk Mykyta, father of one of the victims, wondered about the purpose of dragging it all up again—for the sake of mere sensationalism.

Lawyers in the audience pointed out the specious nature of the revised statements from murderers still in prison. Should they be countenanced? No, this was not Brink’s intention. But the whole creation of the “Family” [a term coined by Adelaide reporters for the Parklands murderers] served the interesting function of hinting that Adelaide’s rulers, judges, highest functionaries and identities were themselves a gang of secret killers. It’s this, I think, that the company must explore further. Don Dunstan created an Athens of the South all right. But had anyone considered what Periclean Athens was actually like? Even under reformed legislation, half its male population, including Sophocles, Aristophanes and most of its poets would be considered paedophiles. Had a member of the “Family”, perhaps in some hidden Chair of Classics, actually read The Greek Anthology [a famous collection of Hellenic poetry, including inter-male love poems, many of them pederastic]? The confusion surrounding the entire notion of history and deviance was enough to bring down Dunstan himself; even in a city where he was responsible for the decriminalisation of an act for which he was fatally vilified.

Brink’s situating of the origins of both myth and reality in the still reactionary media of the 3 periods is an act of tightrope walking. The choice of director or dramaturg is crucial. The company also needs to understand more clearly the language of cinema, particularly given the fact that Hitchcock is complicit with his killers, and must evolve a more sophisticated apparatus of switch-on/off points for actor, image and text. The company was trying a technique in which character and text were signified by switching on or off (a) an image, video morph or projection from which the actor emerged or disappeared, and (b) an accent. In this case all the actors used Jimmy Stewart’s voice to indicate the fictive murder of the film and their own voices to read various texts and newspapers describing the real murders in Adelaide. The audience suggested the technique be clarified. But even at this stage what we saw was a courageous and necessary piece of action.

The Rope Project, Brink Company, Inspace program, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, Feb 8.

In this feature report, the first of several on the marketing and touring of Australian artists to the world, we focus on 2 recent programs, artsaustralia berlin 2002 and the Biennale nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne, Paris. There are interviews with Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann, Artistic Director of the Zurich Festival and one of the instigators of artsaustralia berlin 2002, Karilyn Brown, Executive Director of the Australia Council’s Audience and Market Development Division as well as Gravity Feed and Tess de Quincey who both appeared in Val-de-Marne. Fiona Winning, Artistic Director of Performance Space talks about initiatives for touring and exchange in the hybrid performance scene. John Davis, General Manager of the Australian Music Centre (p12), details how the AMC works nationally and internationally with examples of recent developments including innovative exchange programs through the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC).

We also take a look from the other side of the picture. Laura Ginters from Sydney University’s Centre for Performance Studies gives a vivid account of recent theatre productions in Berlin and Vienna. German broadcaster Anke Schaefer takes a comparative look at the Melbourne theatre scene. Erin Brannigan reports on the Monaco Dance Forum. We also preview the forthcoming Magdalena Festival of women’s performance in Brisbane.

[Liza Lim in Moon Spirit Feasting] has achieved an overwhelmingly powerful and contemporary invocation of an old Chinese myth that neither sinks into rigid avant garde nor pop, but plays instead with both—one of the few examples of a successful hybridisation.
Bernd Feuchtner, Opernwelt, Aug 2002

Did you know…?

Acrobat were in Singapore, London and Genoa in October and November last year; the Sydney Theatre Company production of Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers played for 2 weeks at the culture shock! Commonwealth Games Cutural Festival in Manchester and did a 6 week tour of the UK in late 2002. Melbourne’s Kage Physical Theatre is off to Japan, where the Elision ensemble’s Liza Lim opera, Moon Spirit Feasting played mid last year before heading off to Berlin and Zurich. Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Oddities (Neil Thomas & Katy Bowman) have been in Zurich and this year goes to London, Oerol (off Holland), Ghent and again to the Zurich Festival. Dancer-choreographer Lucy Guerin’s producer, Cultural Pursuits, has just confirmed a 6-city US tour plus Ottawa, Canada. The list goes on and on.

A success story?

It all reads like a success story, but it’s more the case that it could be the beginning of one. To date it’s the result of hard work in preparing the way by numerous artists and companies, a very small group of industrious producers (including Wendy Blacklock, Justin Macdonell, Henry Boston, Marguerite Pepper, Barry Plews), and some very determined government agencies like the Australia Council’s Audience & Market Development Division and its Victorian State Government counterpart. As well there are individuals (presenters, producers, embassy staff) in Europe, Asia and North America who have taken to Australian work with a passion and whose labours on our behalf are as important as our own.

However, at every level there’s talk of under-resourcing and the challenges of distance (invariably the enormous costs of travel and freight), of difficult markets, of building networks, getting promotional strategies right and the need to form long term partnerships. High on the list of goals is continuity, getting past the one-off mentality that puts a show briefly on the map without charting the next stages of its journey.

Yet, despite the considerable odds, the drive to tour Australian arts to the world seems inexorable. For performers, there are new audiences and income, and the inspirations of exchange, for governments there are the benefits of cultural representation that also support trade and political alliances.

[Moon Spirit Feasting] is by turns mysterious, funny, aggressive, mystical, rude, expressive, obscene, in short uncompromising. Especially the mezzo soprano Melissa Madden-Gray…and baritone Orren Tanabe…let loose an explosive performance energy. Both their physical and vocal performances are acrobatic and virtuosic…The Elision ensemble presented the work outstandingly.
Tages-Anzeiger, Aug 24, 2002

Berlin: a new direction?

It’s 7 years since the Australia Council set up its dynamic and influential Audience and Market Development Division. Its Executive Director, Karilyn Brown, describes how AMD is currently reviewing its strategies, suggesting that the international marketing of Australian work needs to now enter a new phase.

One sign of a significant change in direction, and one which Brown discusses, is artsaustralia berlin 2002, a program that became part of the calendar of everyday Berlin arts activity for 6 months as opposed to the one-off events, festival participation and performing arts markets that have come to typify Australia’s venturing into the world at large.

The 6 month program included the Nigel Jamieson-Paul Grabowsky The Theft of Sita, William Yang’s Blood Links, the Sandy Evans Trio and The World According to James (trombonist James Greening’s band), Robyn Archer, Elision ensemble’s Moon Spirit Feasting, choreographer Phillip Adams and a selection of Australian films (through the Australian Film Commission). Also in Berlin as part of the program were dancer-choreographer Rosalind Crisp, performance poet Amanda Stewart, and authors Peter Carey, John Tranter, Sonya Hartnett, Phillip Gwynne and David Malouf. With the collaboration of numerous German partners, artsaustralia berlin 2002 was an arts export strategy of the Australia Council in partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade through the Australian International Cultural Council (Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer, Federal and State Arts Minsters and government arts agencies).

Why the push into Germany? It’s 9th among Australia’s major trading partners and is cited as the second largest market in the world for Australian Indigenous art. It’s also responsive, according to Maria Magdelena Schwaegermann, to Australian artistic innovations in cross-cultural and multimedia collaborations.

[The Theft of Sita] is a cultural critique proferred by the West in the theatrical forms of the Far East…Nigel Jamieson has the requisite chutzpah to reinterpret the morality play…as a political, comic and environmental thriller…a metaphysical bed of nails from which fakir Jamieson conjures up a sensual sensation.
Daniele Muscionoco, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Aug 28, 2002

Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann

For over a decade Schwaegermann, as Deputy Director of Berlin’s Hebbel-Theater, has been responsible for significant commissions and collaborations involving Robert Wilson and other leading international artists. Schwaegermann has visited Australia numerous times, attracted to the country’s distinctive cross-cultural, multimedia and collaborative performance works. She has played a key role in the touring of Australian works to Europe, the setting up of artsaustralia berlin 2002, and now presenting Australian work at the Zurich Festival of which she is the Artistic Director (2002-2004). RealTime phoned her in Zurich.

How did artsaustralia berlin 2002 go from your perspective?

I think altogether it was a very good beginning. If you follow the arts scene and the audience and the focus in the city, Australia “arrived.” It’s not easy to have a season over 6 months and to keep an interest in it. Altogether, Berlin is very curious about Australia. The productions were received very, very well and the immediate reaction was that the next literature festival in Berlin will have a big Australian focus. A lot of different institutions now are very keen to get Australian work.

There was a fantastic review of Moon Spirit Feasting in Opernwelt [the leading German opera magazine] by Bernd Feuchtner. It is really a top critique which understands the contemporary nature of this production, the hybrid form as a quality—a contemporary composition in combination with something that comes out of a street ritual and the meeting of different cultures.

Very positive. The ELISION ensemble with their installation Sonorous Bodies with artist Judith Wright and [koto player] Satsuki Odamura (in 2001) had already been very well received. Their Moon Spirit Feasting was also very well received [in 2002]. The Theft of Sita was the success. They also loved Robyn Archer’s concert and William Yang.

The best critiques! Moon Spirit Feasting was the big, big surprise: 3 nights, 700 people. And maybe every night 10 to 15 people left, which is nothing. The critics were more traditional. They had a bit more of a problem with the hybrid form. But the reaction from the audience was very good. Very controversial. Lots of discussion. The Theft of Sita had standing ovations. William Yang was packed full with 300 people every night. And the biggest success was Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman’s Museum of Modern Oddities.

Neil built up a little village with 4 houses. There’s a special thing here in Europe. These little parcels of land that you get, when you don’t have that much money, along the railway. And you have a little hut on it and you can plant your own vegetables and these little houses are a kind of symbol for the little people, having a garden and creating a little paradise. Neil set up a village and implanted the museum into these houses with 2 local artists. The Swiss are not really famous for being communicators. They are careful and they like to wait. But it was interesting that immediately they opened a dialogue with the artists. It was the place for a dialogue.

They got the material mainly from secondhand shops and this one chain of shops which has a social background. You bring something for nothing and they sell it and the income goes into a social bank. They found a lot of very typical Swiss materials and created installations, objects and stories that somehow connected to Australia and Switzerland. Like the story of a little boy in 1908 who dreamed of going to Australia. He understood it was underneath him and so he started to dig under his bed for 42 metres into the ground with a little spoon.

We are in negotiation first of all with Stalker with their new piece, Incognita, and Back to Back Theatre with Soft (RT52 p33). Soft is terrific. Now I’m really needing to get other people into the tour and it looks as if Berlin is interested, London is interested, Hamburg. Next is Acrobat with a new piece for the stage we have on the lake. That will be something very special. And then Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman will come back to create something new, a co-creation with Melbourne Festival. We are commissioning them to create a concept for a kind of club chill-out space…people are welcome to come in and there will be different kinds of landscapes, different climates created where you can choose whether you want to eat or play or just sit and talk. And it will maybe be the key space where the [festival] dialogues will be held. Not bad, eh?

After all your years at The Hebbel-Theater in Berlin, which you’re still associated with, are you happy in Zurich?

This is a dream. People are much more open-minded here and careful, whereas Berlin is such a hard market. Here they love the festival and everything sold out. We had 100,000 people within 2 and a half weeks and 32,000 tickets sold. Imagine. Every night sold out. And that’s wonderful and it’s very constructive. I have a 3 year contract and maybe we’ll extend it another 2 or 3 years. But you know, my focus is in Australia.

What I’ve also started to introduce is an interesting process I’ve been working on. I invited a German director, Uwe Mengel [who created Lifeline at the Melbourne Festival, RT 52 p4], to join the jury for an award we give here in the festival. He saw every performance. I wanted him to be introduced to the Zurich Festival to create a piece for this year. And he saw Moon Spirit Feasting with Melissa Madden-Gray and he chose to create a piece for her. This is what I like to do, to put people together.

Museum of Modern Oddities

MOMO are on a roll and with work that is not based on box office. Their Zurich Festival show (described above) is followed by not only a return visit with a new commission but also a show for LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre, now a year round program instead of a festival) at the Natural History Museum in London with Neil Thomas’ son, Miles, as a child curator, and appearances at festivals on Oerol (off Holland) and Ghent (in an old birdseed shop). Thomas’ other project, Urban Dream Capsule, with its collaborators living in shop windows, continues to attract international interest, says his producer, Perth-based Henry Boston. On Sunday February 16, ABC TV will premiere a film of the same artists in the 30 minute Heavenly Laundry—a bus ride with angels.

The success with which the ritual power of this ancient art is so effortlessly combined with the language and technology of today is miraculous…[In The Theft of Sita] Grabowksy’s music, with its natural fusion of jazz and gamelan forms is magnificent…a swinging groove with gestures for attention, bawdy commentary, impassioned citation and soundtrack-style illustration.
Der Tagesspiegel, Sept 7, 2002

Biennale Nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne

Tess de Quincey
De Quincey, a unique performer whose style and preoccupations have emanated from her training in Body Weather with Min Tanaka in Japan in the 80s, combines solo projects, a part time company (DeQuincey Co) and international projects (her Triple Alice series of responses to Central Australia). She has just returned from performing her solo work, Nerve 9 at the Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne Novembre Australien program. Director Michel Caserta selected De Quincey, Rosalind Crisp, Gravity Feed (all from Sydney, though Crisp is currently based in Europe) and Melbourne’s Chunky Move for his 2003 program. The Franco-Australian International Contemporary Dance Exchange 2002-2003 is a reciprocal touring program of contemporary dance involving the partnership of the Biennale, the Australia Council and the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts. The exchange was initated by Caserta after his visits to Australia supported by the DFAT Cultural Awards Scheme.

It was weird, Nerve 9 was not funded by the Dance Board and my company is now not supported by the Australia Council and there it was being promoted. It was picked up by Michel Caserta…I must say I was very happy with the experience. I was performing last (of the 4 Australian showings) and there was very clearly a sense that a feel had been created by the other 3, that people were coming on the basis of thinking, ‘this is fascinating because we’re seeing Australia from another angle….and each work is very different from the other, but there’s something that binds you together and it’s work that could never have been done in Europe, and it’s very fresh. I had the impression that Michel had put together a really interesting balance of work that worked well for Paris.

Absolutely. Particularly women came up after the show, even given the dense amount of English in the piece [Francesca da Rimini’s projected text, Amanda Stewart’s vocal score]. I asked them directly if this was problematic, they shrugged their shoulders and said, “Not at all. What I didn’t understand came through in the poetry of the delivery and the relationship between the tonality and the visual images made it comprehensible.” For me it was important to take the work to Paris because of its connection to Kristeva…but the French were just not interested. People don’t have a lot of worries about what they’re seeing, they respond directly to what they’re experiencing. It was such a relief to get such a sophisticated level of response. And the feeling that the program presented something totally different from the expectations of what exotic Australia is. I kept hearing that.

Paris felt a lot different—it was 6-7 years since I’d last been there—more pressured, harder, faster and at the same time I felt a little shift in where dance was lying, a much wider embrace than I’d experienced previously. I would have liked a formalised forum after the dances…there were unanswered questions.

It’s just harder…I am my own agent with some help from Performance Space. And not so many producers are travelling—10 years ago they’d hop on a train or plane. Now they don’t have the money to do it. We invited a lot to Paris, very few came.

Exchange, to my mind, is based to some degree on continuity…it’s got to keep rolling. We needed that extra person, like Gabriel Essar, to work on an engagement with process, an awareness of the body of work behind a show, not just the moment. Essar worked on the Olympics. He’s a business person who loves sport and dance and functions as a kind of informal agent for Ros [Crisp] and I since he went back to Paris…We got onto the subject of Central Australia—he’d been to Triple Alice—and as a result we might be able to get Digital Country up. It’s a cook-down of the 3 years laboratory work on Triple Alice, a 72 hour performance in a river bed, straddling the different aspects of the labs. This linked into the issue of what is going on in Australia and how this work is different.

I’d love De Quincey Co to tour. I’ve put together a repertoire with the company’s Cold Feet from 2000, a family friendly work, a public space work, making myself as accessible as possible [laughs]. And then a late night nightclub work dealing with deviancy, perversion, danger, eroticism. And Digital Country working out from the centre of Australia. I’m hoping that the first 2 are commercial enough so that we can live.

Athletic responses, an instinct for play, and eyes in the back of one’s head! These would be useful tools to benefit from Host, a spectacular trap, intelligent and malicious, laid by the Australian company Gravity Feed…[They] easily manage, successfully and without any concession, to weave a bond, artistic and human, between themselves and the public. This very beautiful stroke one owes to the tenacity of Michel Caserta, director of la Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne for the past 20 years, who dreamt of making a discovery of Australian dance.
Tosita Boisseau, Le Monde, Nov 24-25

Gravity Feed

Jeff Stein, like all his Gravity Feed collaborators is an ensemble member and has his own practice. The company has wanted to tour for a long time. He recalls: “In 1999 towards the end of the season of Tabernacle, we actually dug in our heels in and said, look we’re not going to make a new work until we finally tour. What’s the point in doing one-off seasons in Sydney again and again? Before this trip, it looked like well, that’s it, it’s never going to happen because of the challenges of touring a company like Gravity Feed. Thanks have to go to Michel Caserta because he virtually just went okay, we’re gonna do this. I’m not saying it wasn’t difficult. And thanks also to Marguerite Pepper for pushing it through too. She facilitates a lot of things.”

Stein describes the pleasure of getting to do Host again, with the huge cardboard structures the performers move—transforming the space and the movement of the audience—having to be re-designed in Paris and adapted to 2 unfamiliar spaces. “It was really a re-working of the show because they were different designs. It was actually very positive. We rehearsed in Sydney and we virtually got to Paris and then had to adapt.” Horst Keichle created the original sculptures and re-designed them for Paris, but couldn’t go at the last minute. Fortunately the day was saved by the arrival of William Woo from Visy in Australia.

The first venue for Host was Salles Jacques Brel in Fontenay-sous-Bois and the next the Théâtre Jean Vilar in Vitry-sur-Seine, virtually outer suburbs of Paris. Stein says “they’re both communist areas where big theatres have been built. They’re not considered part of Paris. Fontenay has a lot of housing estates. It was a nice community. There were things like free internet. The first place we went into was the bistro in the local town hall. Everyone came in from work at lunchtime to eat and we were invited. The chef not only cooked but he served and greeted everyone. He came to see the show and he cooked kangaroo for us. And I’ve never eaten kangaroo in my life. I go to France to eat kangaroo. He was so pleased and thanked us for the show. And people came from the community to see the show, not just from outside. It was a community event. The second venue was in Vitry, probably the worst area in the whole of greater Paris. It’s very poor and it’s an area with a lot of problems. Before we went there, we had no idea…you don’t really notice it. The show sold out in the end. And the last 2 nights in Fontenay sold out. We did 5 nights in both towns. It was great to run something in and move to a second venue. The second venue was even better. It was a bigger area where you could step back a little bit and gain some perspective. At first we thought it might be a problem, ‘cause you know, you don’t wanna let ‘em escape! But in the end it’s good for the audience to have a respite and make the decision to be drawn back in rather than always being in, in, in.”

Audience response was very positive, says Stein, and the post-show Q & A sessions were good, helped by having several French speakers in the company. Stein says he got into trouble for describing the French audience as more compliant than Australians when it came to negotiating space, reasoning that the more crowded nature of the Metro, for example, might make them so. “It came back to haunt us.” Most of the audience stayed for the discussion, “which you don’t normally find in Australia after a show. They stayed and they were genuinely interested.

“The great thing in Fontenay was that the general community came whereas in Australia we have, for want of a better word, a narrower audience. From this community we got all age groups, people who’d never seen this kind of work before. It was great that they really enjoyed what we do, eclectic as it is. I have a feeling that a general audience here in Australia given the opportunity would enjoy this work too. I understand why this narrowing happens but I don’t think it’s necessary. Our number 1 fan was Michel Caserta. We did 10 shows and I think he came to 7 of them…he was genuinely excited to be part of the show.”

Did any other producers or entrepreneurs come to see the show? It was difficult. We invited lots of people and previously through arts markets we’d tried to make connections and hoped that once we got there, people would come. But it’s like doing a show in Sydney. You invite people from other parts of Australia and they don’t necessarily turn up. The hope though is that once you’ve proven yourself, they see that you are actually viable.

[William Yang’s] Blood Links is geography transcended; it is background historiography and a lesson in philosophy, its relevance extending well beyond the personal sphere: it examines the significance of tradition and assimilation, of identity and ancestry in a world in which individuals value the unbounded ‘pursuit of happiness’ above all else and release themselves from their blood links as a result.
Daniela Muscionico, Neue Zürcher Zietung, Sept 2, 2002

Karilyn Brown

The Australia Council is over 30 years old, but the Audience and Market Development (AMD) Division is just in its 7th year. Karilyn Brown says, “When it started it was very much fast turnaround, people like Philip Rolfe and Ron Layne did a huge amount of work, but also created important long term strategies that we work from. But I think we’re at a really interesting point now…it’s time for us as a team to evaluate where we’re going. There are a couple of reasons why that’s important. The first is that AMD is not a grant funding agency. Our role is to broker and initiate and to add value and develop longer term strategies. Secondly, how do we ensure we’re at the crest of the wave? This requires the flexibility to carve out some new territory, see what works and what doesn’t…how can it be picked up in different ways by different organisations and agencies, these are the new directions we should be heading in.”

You’re in collaboration with the Theatre Board on the Playing the World program and with the Music board on International Pathways. How does this work?

It offers fast turnaround. Once ensembles, theatre groups, companies are invited—they need to be invited overseas by a festival or performing arts centre—they then can apply and between AMD and the Boards, we look at a number of key things. Is this the right work at the right time with the right company in the right region and venue? Does the company have the capacity and capability to deliver the work and to be able to follow up interest generated by the tour? We’ll look at the business and marketing strategies. More often than not we’ll be familiar with who’s inviting the companies and where they’re going, but if not we’ll seek more detail to see how it’ll work. And we’ll look at the pragmatic side. How much is it costing? Is the inviting organisation paying fees and ground transport, because the killer continues to be freight and travel. So our focus will be getting the product there. Once the work is there we’re increasingly demanding of international presenting partners to cover fees, accommodation and on the ground costs. This issue is not going to go away, but increasingly we see companies being invited overseas and the call isn’t on government funding.

Berlin for us is a very interesting model and one of the things we’re doing as part of our re-evaluation is trying to test different models of developing longer term outcomes for international market development. We are increasingly not inclined to go with the big bang, one-off event. We recognise that they have had a role, like the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) project in New York in 2001, but they have greater impact if they’re actually based on a whole matrix of relationships and projects, exchanges and dialogues that develop over a period of time. And then you can have a peak that brings with it quite a profile…but then it has to continue. What are you doing to consolidate the connections and the networks and the opportunities for the companies?

I suppose one of the key things is recognising the role that a government agency like the Australia Council has, because we don’t have the equivalent of a British Council or a Goethe Institut or an Alliance Français. We don’t have that kind of well-resourced cultural infrastructure that’s located out there internationally. Almost everything we do internationally has to be done in partnership with other organisations, with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), with presenting partners overseas, state government agencies and business partners because our resources can’t facilitate the outcomes that we need.

Therefore we have to look at the most appropriate models. The Berlin model was one, I have to say, that government partners struggled with a bit because it is long term, it’s about developing relationships with particular individuals and organisations, it taps into venues, but it’s not the high impact ‘Australia’s in town for a week’ model. And it doesn’t have the high profile opportunities consistently for the higher VIP delegations.

It was probably very similar to past models. It involved trade, education, it involved tourism, whereas BAM and Berlin were purely cultural activities. We are working with DFAT and the Australian International Cultural Council so that we can each have critical international roles, different objectives and strategies, but also ways to find the threads that link us…We want to be able to say to Austrade, we have a big program coming up in Japan, or wherever, in 2 years time, how can we work together to contribute to the long term outcomes—to force the boundaries a little as well, so that they start to see the value of longer term cultural engagement.

You can’t keep tapping into festivals around the world all the time. I’ve noticed that people say of a work, “It’s a classic festival show” and that’s when you start to think you don’t want Australian work always being positioned in festivals overseas with that kind of expectation. So we’re not coming up with little festival packages here and thinking where will we send them but rather we’re constantly developing the depth of knowledge and understanding of Australian art. There’s a huge spectrum of curiosity and interest and commitment to Australian art overseas, but the depth is not there for a lot of artforms and in a lot of regions. We bring people here, encouraging them to commission, to present work.

We have an increasing number of overseas people who are becoming very strong advocates for Australia. Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann moves from the Hebbel-Theater [Berlin] to the Zurich Festival. She programmed to high success an Australian program in 2002 and is looking to program more work for 2003. These people, when they move, take Australia with them. We want to have more of this, shifting away from the days when people would say “but we’ve brought this person out to Australia once already.”

Given the lack of an infrastucture like, say, the British Council, are there Australians overseas playing a role?

We have Market Development officers. Catherine Hunyor was in the pilot role in Tokyo for 12 months and fortunately she was so fantastic she was then offered a permanent postion with the Embassy and continues to play a very active cultural role. The Tokyo embassy is one of the most culturally active Australian embassies in the world. Because of the work that was starting to develop around Europe, post-Oympics, particularly in Germany and in Berlin…we appointed Margaret Hamilton to that position in Berlin. We’ve just extended her term to its third year, based at the Embassy, because of artsaustralia berlin 2002 and 2003, but also because her role is Germany-wide and she has performed an extraordinary job and we have received nothing but amazing praise from people who deal with her in Germany and in France.

In an ideal world, one of the long term strategies I would like to start working on is creating more of those positions and longer term. It’s not about compensating for DFAT’s complete cut back on its cultural relations branch—what 5 years ago was 40 people is now 4. They were public affairs positions, but the Market Development Officer role is not public affairs, it’s about brokering and positioning opportunities for Australian art. It could be done with partners like Austrade and Asialink.

In the performing arts they are absolutely critical. I don’t think in Australia we recognise the role that these people play, still existing on the smell of an oily rag. It’s not a lucrative business…you’re in it for the love of it. Their role has created some really significant outcomes. There are few newcomers but we’ve been looking, with the Theatre Board and others, at how to create some emerging producer roles. If we had the resources I’d see a role for a strong mentoring program and a training and development program, because one of the key issues around is the burnout of these sorts of roles and who then takes on the responsibility for these companies. Wendy Blacklock (Performing Lines) and Marguerite Pepper have mentored many people who move on into other areas because it’s not a financially viable area. Karen Rodgers is with Wendy as part of a 2 year pilot project. Most recently we’ve supported a person for 12 months to work with The Studio team at the Sydney Opera House. These people have to be involved in international work as part of their brief. The interest overseas is often in contemporary performance, contemporary dance, physical theatre and hybrid arts and these artists are not in a position to represent themselves, they are in desperate need of support from producers. If we lose one or 2 producers that’d be a very bad situation. Producing is a whole area we need to look at carefully: for market development, for international exchange, for infrastructure, for the future of the companies. [Especially contemporary dance companies] which need audience development strategies put in place in Australia, a firm base before they can even think about international developments. We’re working very closely with the Dance Board. Our priorities for the next 3 years are contemporary dance, new media arts and Indigenous music and dance…while continuing to work on the other areas.

What is the role of performing arts markets as Australian work becomes better known and in light of other approaches, for example commissions with overseas investors?

We went to Osaka, Tokyo, Cinars (Canada) focusing on Indigenous work, New York (APAP, Association of Performing Arts Presenters), focusing on contemporary dance, and we’re going to the Singapore Asian Arts Market mid-year. Then we’ll review them and see if any of them are appropriate markets for us to continue in. It will always be hard to find a balance between ‘export ready’ work (they see it, they can get it) and work in the early stages of development. How do we find other avenues outside the market context to expose Australian work on our soil? We could look at a recurrent music market. Dance? No, not yet, but we could use the next Melbourne Festival, which has a contemporary dance focus, and target 8 to 10 key international presenters. They’d see fully-fledged Australian works but also could be involved in choreographic discussions and so on. Markets are not terribly expensive until you start showcasing work overseas, so we need different models.

AMD spend about $2.4m on international activities, the Australian International Cultural Council has about $1m, and the states, particularly Victoria, and Austrade all contribute significant support to varying degrees. The Major Festivals Initiative has $750,000, but it is focused on national creation of work. The amount of money going into creating international markets is no more than 3 to 4 million dollars. The UK, US, France and Germany spend no less than $2m and usually $3-4m just on the Venice Biennale…We’ve been talking with the Confederation of Festivals about trying to focus additional resources on international collaborations—having the buy-in from presenting partners at the beginning of a work’s creation because of the quality and calibre of the artists involved. Then we don’t get into the situation where works like Cloudstreet, Crying Baby, The Theft of Sita are all done, go to 3 festivals and then there’s a gap. It’s a bit of a dream, but it would be fantastic if it could happen, as part of the planning process from the beginning, part of the funding process with international investment. Then presenters would be involved in the beginning and know that in 2 years time they’d be getting that work.

The power of exchange

I meet Fiona Winning (Artistic Director), at Performance Space on a steamy Sydney afternoon to discuss some hot topics, all with international ramifications for Australians working in the burgeoning hybrid arts field. We discuss the second of PS-PICA-ANAT’s Time_Space_Place hybrid performance workshops (see Williams and preview of TPS2), the PS-PICA Breathing Space development of a body of tourable Australian work in exchange with Bristol’s Arnolfini contemporary artspace (a venue that partly inspired the founding of PS), and, less certain at this stage but urgently needed, a touring consortium to take innovative work to Australian audiences.

Speaking about the Breathing Space initiative, Winning says “it began with the visit to Australia of Helen Cole who was the live art and dance programmer and is now Senior Producer at Arnolfini.” Winning describes Arnolfini’s Breathing Space program as being “about giving space and commissioning money to emerging and established artists to start new work. InBetween Time is a small festival, a platform for showing some of that work. As a curator Cole often challenges the artist, for example she encouraged Robert Pacitti [one of the Time_Space_Place mentors] now doing large scale works to go back to some of the early things he was doing solo. Cole also established partners in Manchester and Nottingham to show several works, not as a tour but programmed over the year. The artists learn from their first outing with their work and then develop it with these further showings. It’s an interesting model we don’t have here.

“Cole was looking for Australian partners, we kept in touch, and she came out again and we began working out how to collaborate over a long period.”

So the idea is for PICA and PS in partnership to establish an Australian Breathing Space program which supports the development of a group of works annually, presents them at least in Perth and Sydney and, later, in a joint touring program in Australia and Britain with a mix of Australian and British works. It was hoped that Brisbane’s Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts would be a partner, but that will now be a matter of wait-and-see after the surprising appointment of theatre director Andrew Ross—ex-Black Swan Theatre Company—as Artistic Director/CEO, replacing Zane Trow whose focus was on programming, commissioning and producing contemporary performance (see p 26 for Trow’s new venture).

For Winning the challenge of developing Breathing Space Australia is not just the availability of talent or works of quality to tour, but of funding models that don’t allow contemporay artspaces resources for commissioning:

“It’s instructive how things work in the UK. None of the Australian contemporary art centres have commissioning money in the way that UK centres can apply for it.”

Winning points also to the distances between Australian cities and a small population base from which to draw audiences as having to be factored in to touring, planning and funding.

The Breathing Space project comprises a number of stages, commencing with the recent showing at PS of 32,000 Points of Light (an evolving British work soon to be shown in its new motion simulator version at Arnolfini). In exchange, Arnolfini is to show the George P Khut-Wendy McPhee collaboration, Nightshift from February 14. Winning says, “Nightshift was not a commissioned work, it’s an artist initiative; this is an opportunity to show the work in a bigger context.”

The next stage is the development of an Australian body of work. As with the UK Breathing Space, a pool of commissioning funds would be ideal. However, says Winning, “We pitched to the Australia Council to see this as an important initiative to invest commissioning funds in…but they didn’t fund it. We thought it really fitted into the New Media Arts and Audience and Market Development Division plans for developing projects in the UK. It was also an across Council application, but the other boards didn’t have intiative money.”

How then do you develop a body of work without commissioning funds? “It’s all about artist initiatives funded by the Australia Council or the states. We will then offer them further support, include them in Breathing Space Australia and try to value add to their development. Our residency and PICA’s R&D programs will augment this. About 4 works will be shown by the end of this year. Some might already exist as first drafts or as works-in-progress.”

As for the makeup of a touring program, Winning says that the module will be a mix of long and short works, of live performance, installation, laboratory work and a talk event: “The whole program should be able to be shown in a weekend.”

Another stage brings some of the UK work to Australia in 2004 to be shown with Australian work. In 2005 Australian work will appear in Breathing Space UK. “It’s a long term strategy and we’ll keep talking to the New Media Arts Board and Audience and Market Development. The British Council are absolutely on board and extremely supportive of the UK work coming to Australia.”

Arnolfini are providing the fee that will take Nighshift to the UK and Performance Space is sending Winning, who will get to see the UK works, speak on a panel and use the opportunity, a few days later, to visit Glasgow for new territories, the annual festival of live arts, incorporating the National Review of Live Art. This year Australians Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham are presenting their acclaimed Morphia Series (RT52 p6) as well as teaching in the festival’s Winter School.

In RealTime 54 there’ll be more on the international marketing of Australian artists: interviews with artists and producers, a report on literaturWERKstatt, Dr Thomas Wohlfahrt’s innovative literary crossartform program, and a close look at the resources available to artists and presenters from the Australia Council.

The Monaco Dance Forum is not a festival, but a rambling, multi-faceted event encompassing a multimedia showcase (with performances, exhibitions, installations and workshops), a discrete dance screen festival, a trade show, forums and interviews (the latter recorded onsite for local television), performing art exhibitions, audition opportunities for young dancers, co-production pitching sessions, live performances and an international prize-giving ceremony—the Nijinsky Awards. The Chanel-sponsored event occurs on the beachfront in the shopping-mall sized Grimaldi Forum which contains endless rooms and several theatres. Lagerfeld designed the stage set for the awards and attended several performances and royalty and fur coats made many notable appearances throughout the 5 days.

Hosted by Jeanne Moreau and with presenters including Maurice Bejart and an incredibly healthy-looking Cyd Charisse, the awards were truly jaw-dropping. Not surprisingly but commendably, William Forsythe won best choreographer and from the podium had a subtle dig at the classical ballet-dominated nominations for best dancer. Other nominees included the White Oak Dance Project, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Akram Khan. With an international voting committee and squillions of artists cited (everyone from Darcey Bussell to Kate Champion), the concept of the awards was baffling. Most Predetermined Outcome: Princess Caroline and William Forsythe holed-up in the V.V.V.I.P room at the after-party.

Live dancing

Because the scale of the event was so overwhelming, I narrowed my focus to the Dance Screen events and evening performances, missing the performance showcases and multimedia showings that included Melbourne artists Cazerine Barry and Company in Space. I attended performances by Netherlands Dance Theatre, Rennie Harris, Akram Khan, Bill T Jones and Bangarra. As is to be expected, beyond the glamour, the actual programming lacked an overarching shape and attention to detail. The 2 performances in which the artists spent most of the time on the ground—Harris’ hip-hop show and Bangarra’s Corroboree—were presented on a raised stage with unraked seating. Bangarra’s audience balanced patiently on their seat backs, applauding enthusiastically despite their discomfort. As Barry commented, hearing the didgeridoo echoing through the basement venue of the monstrous Grimaldi Forum was thrilling. The medley they performed showed off dancers like Sidney Salter and Gina Rings, but I’m curious to see more of relative newcomer, Patrick Thaiday. The response to the company confirms that Stephen Page’s aesthetic resonates with large dance audiences perhaps exhausted by mathematical structures and hard-edged virtuosity.

Standard ‘class-act’ company, Netherlands Dance Theatre opened the performance season with a triple bill. Jiri Kylian’s Bella Figura is in the Australian Ballet’s repertoire but Kylian’s company showed up even more precision and lightness in the work. Kylian’s neo-classicism with its signature intricacy and swooning tone is emulated by ex-company dancers Paul Lightfoot, Sol Leon and Régina Van Berkel (who choreographed the other 2 works). Lightfoot and Leon’s Safe as Houses featured a revolving wall almost the width of the stage turning slowly on a central pivot which ‘magically’ shifted figures in and out of the space. Bill T Jones also featured in the main auditorium. At 50 he is still a commanding performer, speaking almost as much as he dances, improvising with style if not inventiveness. Jones remains political, commenting on the wealth of the festival and the political bully-tactics of the US, and won me over when he invited an over-excited audience member to join him in a very generous and careful pas de deux.

Harris’ Rome and Jewel, a hip-hop reworking of Romeo and Juliet featuring rival B-boy gangs, Monster Qs and the Caps, was too thin on movement and heavy on rapping and posturing and the ‘invisible’ female characters proved disturbing amid all that unleashed testosterone. Seeing Akram Khan’s Kaash again in a theatre slightly too small for the work didn’t detract from the compelling choreography. Bewildering speed and razor-sharp precision combine with Indian rhythms and an intricate working of the upper body, all boldly mapped across the square space of the stage. With scenography by acclaimed UK artist Anish Kapoor and a pounding score by Nitin Sawhney, this was the performance highlight for me.

IMZ Dance Screen 2002

IMZ Dance Screen has been running since 1990 at various locations. I attended the 1999 event in Cologne, Germany and this is its second year as part of the Monaco Dance Forum. IMZ Dance Screen included a videotheque with all 260 films in competition, special screenings, forums, pitching sessions and an awards ceremony. It also included a Forum for Festivals which featured presentations by dance screen curators and presenters from around the world: Argentina, Canada, Italy, New York and London. Each presenter discussed organisational and artistic aspects of their festivals and screened examples from their local filmmakers. A roundtable discussion lead to the establishment of a network of festivals, including Reeldance which I curated in 2000 and 2002. It will share information, programs and guest visits as well as plan forums for the various festivals where more presentations by individual curators will occur.

Dance Screen 2002 ended with its own awards ceremony. One of the judges was Vincent Paterson, choreographer of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal video and Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, making Paterson, along with Charisse, the sort of dance screen royalty you would expect to see in Monaco. Australian Sue Healey’s film Niche scored a nomination for ‘Screen Choreography not longer that 15 mins.’ This category was won by Minou, a magical short directed by UK filmmaker Magali Charrier, featuring a girl interacting with ‘animated’ objects in her home. Other winners included a stark and riveting ‘camera re-work’ of Moebius Strip by brilliant Spanish/UK choreographer Gilles Jobim, a sci-fi/fairy-tale featuring the remarkable Wayne McGregor, Chrysalis, and the wonderful documentary on Maya Deren screened at the Sydney Film Festival last year, In the Mirror of Maya Deren. The overall winner was The Dancer’s Body, a 3-part BBC series that I did not see, but which apparently “breaks new ground in creating a bridge between science and the performing arts.”

Most of my time was spent in the videotheque sifting through the unculled submissions, mainly the shorts. UK filmmaker Shelly Love has created 2 fascinating films with puppets, Little White Bird and Scratch. Since the remarkable puppet-dance sequence in Being John Malkovich, the possibilities for inanimate figures ‘moved to dance’ have increased and Love’s poetic and sometimes dark approach is intriguing. Another UK film, The World Turned Upside Down featured dancing dogs and in Rosemary Butcher’s Undercurrent a large woman was made ethereal by the process of shooting underwater.

Where novelty was combined with finely tuned aesthetics, the emphasis on physical performance was handled deftly in other films. New productions by Jan Fabre (The Warriors of Beauty) and Wim Vandekeybus (In Spite of Wishing and Wanting and Silver) feature compelling performances and the surprising situations and images we expect from both artists: a mouth covered in cockroaches, exploding pillows, men running through fields like horses. Wayne McGregor featured in another short, Horizone directed by Gillian Lacey, his spindly physique set against a desert/alien landscape which paralleled the sci-fi setting of Chrysalis. Measure directed Gaelen and Dayna Hanson is a neat film set in a corridor of an empty building. A man and woman perform to the soundtrack of their own feet, not tap or Irish but something blending the playfulness and precision of both. Divadlo, by Spanish director Guillem Morales, draws its aesthetic from Czech photographer Jan Saudek. Set in a brothel, the film is thick with sexuality of a theatrical kind with the polish of a music video. Australian submissions included Shaun Parker’s NO and Dianne Reid’s Luke and Reeldance finalists Arachne by Narelle Benjamin and Mathew Bergan, Frocks Off by Rosetta Cook, In Absentia by Margie Medlin and Sandra Parker and No Surrender by Richard James Allen.

Last year, Cornelia Niedermeyer (Theater der Zeit, January 2002) described Viennese theatre as a “geriatric institution”, populated by the elderly on both sides of the stage—and heavily reliant on the classics in its unadventurous programming. The “theatre miracle” that Vienna is supposed to be enjoying rests, she claims, on a small number of great productions at the Burgtheater, usually by visiting directors such as Peter Zadek and Luc Bondy who’ve made their mark (and indeed had their own theatres) in Berlin.

This Vienna/Berlin rivalry is nothing new, nor is the aging of both theatre-makers and their audiences in the German-speaking countries. And it is true, too, that some of the least interesting theatre I saw recently in both cities were classics produced at major theatres such as the Burgtheater in Vienna and Berlin’s famous Berliner Ensemble. At the same time, though, there is much going on in theatres in both cities that indicate a far from moribund scene.

Thus, while Schiller’s Maria Stuart at the Burgtheater (director Andrea Breth) failed to excite—a stately, static talkfest—a production of Beckett’s Happy Days at the Akademietheater was, conversely, a treat. It starred and was directed by 2 of the legendary actresses from Peter Stein’s glory days at the Berlin Schaubühne, Jutta Lampe and Edith Clever respectively: of pensionable age they may well be, but geriatic? Not in the slightest. Lampe was a very glamorous Winnie, her hair the blond of the sand pile she is buried in, her strapless evening dress the colour of the endless sky which floods the set’s backdrop. The production was beautifully lit—Winnie’s earthen mound transforming from golden sand to polluted dirt as the play progresses and she deteriorates and disappears before our eyes. Lampe, ill with the flu, was nevertheless captivating, her beautiful voice totally appealing in both senses of the word, embracing us and drawing us into the logic of her bizarre world.

Australians, incidentally are more than making their own mark in Vienna: at the Schauspielhaus Barrie Kosky had Paul Capsis in cabaret, Elena Kats-Chernin composed Maria Stuart for the Burg and Beverley Blankenship’s production of Phèdre, in a new and abbreviated verse translation by Simon Werle, was impressing audiences at the Volksbühne. This last was a totally satisfying exercise in elegant restraint, which demonstrated a profound understanding of the way (following Anne Ubersfeld) space is critically inscribed in the text.

George Tabori’s wickedly black farce, Mein Kampf, takes place in the men’s hostel in which the young Adolf Hitler lived when he first came to Vienna. Hitler is befriended by Schlomo Herzl, an itinerant Jewish bookseller, who looks after the newcomer, sometimes gently mocking, but never retaliating, even as the naïve and gormless youth transforms into the more ruthless and vicious personality we know.

This production actually took place in that very hostel, which is still operating, though there are plans to close it, relocate it even further from the city and—Sydneysiders will recognise this phenomenon—build new apartments on the site. Directors Tina Leisch and Hubis Kramar wanted to work with the residents before this happened. The cast is made up of both professional actors and the men whose home this is: they top and tail each scene with their own stories and experiences—and the production concludes with the rounding up and removal of these “undesirables.”

It was a slightly surreal experience to sit among both the destitute men and the affluent, middle class audience members slumming it for the evening. While the theatre-makers clearly were passionate about the nature of a society which pushes its poorest and most disenfranchised to its margins, well out of sight, and the repercussions this can have, I didn’t sense too much self-reflection going on in the audience.

And so on to Hitler’s other favourite capital city. Berlin: the city is broke, poor, in dire straits. This is the cry on everyone’s lips, especially those working in the cultural sphere. And while things are clearly worse than when I lived there 8 years ago with closures of theatres and diminishing subsidies, funding for the arts in Berlin alone (a city the same size as Sydney) is still around 10 times what the Australia Council spends nationally. But the subsidised theatres (and there are a lot of them) still have the money to think big—bigger than Australian companies can, with the exception of the occasional festival splurge. With permanent ensembles, casts of 18 are a possibility. And set designers can rebuild an entire theatre for a production.

The Schaubühne, run by a young and enthusiastic directorate, is pumping out some exciting work and developing international collaborations: following his Sydney successes with the Schaubühne’s resident writers David Gieselmann (Mister Kolpert) and Marius von Mayerburg (Fireface) Benedict Andrews will also be guest directing there this year.

The Schaubühne production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Push Up 1-3 was a revelation in translating across cultures. When it was workshopped and presented at the 2002 ANPC Conference in Canberra, the Australian actors were astonished to be told (by the play’s translator and original dramaturg) that this was, in fact, a comedy. This series of dialogues, interspersed with freezeframe monologues is set in the ruthless and dehumanising environment of the headquarters of a multinational corporation. Initially, to the Australian actors, it just seemed grim—the German production pushes it into the realm of semi-repressed hysteria, revelling in the grossness of physical excess and that uncomfortable zone where we laugh in uneasy recognition of our less attractive traits.

A stunning guest production from the Belgian company Het Toneelhuis also featured at the Schaubühne. L King of Pain, Luk Perceval’s massively truncated version of King Lear, concentrates exclusively on the family dynamics of the piece—hence, presumably the set design (Katrin Brack): one enormous tree with exposed roots in an otherwise gigantic, stripped stage space. Lear wants to relinquish the burden of power and with his band of rabble-rousing knights, spend the kids’ inheritance. It was an anarchic, chaotic and breathtaking performance, especially from Thomas Thieme as the violent, inappropriately affectionate, Alzheimers’-delusional father/ruler. (I noted, however, that the German sense of humour did fail here—an icy silence followed this joke: “What’s the high point of recycling? A German eating pork.”) And here’s another international difference—it was performed in Flemish, French and German with no surtitles.

Also at the Schaubühne was Tankred Dorst’s Merlin oder das wüste Land (Merlin or the desolate country), a retelling of part of the King Arthur legend, directed by Bernhard Kosminski. What was striking about this performance (apart from the 18 performers plus live musicians) was the imaginative and powerful set (Florian Etti). The audience was seated in an L-shape around a 3 storey, 14-sided hollow metal column, perhaps 15 metres in diameter, with gangways into the audience and ladders connecting the floors. A central platform (Arthur’s round table) in the internal shaft functioned as an elevator, raising and lowering the flat playing space. It was an exercise in stamina for the actors as they ranged across all the possible playing spaces this design offered.

Elsewhere in Berlin independent practitioners have found a home at the Sophiensäle. It’s run along the lines of Sydney’s Performance Space, producing and supporting independent artists, which makes it unique in Germany. Artistic Director Amelie Deuflhard has especially encouraged one young group, Nico and the Navigators, whose members trained in the visual arts, but are developing their own brand of physical theatre—not a commonly recognised form in Germany. Despite its unfamiliarity, their work is nonetheless attracting a following there and their production, Der Familienrat (The Family Council), is an adroit look at family relations, assisted by a clever, manipulable set (Oliver Proske) which progressively reveals and conceals spaces, stairs and compartments which the actors use to surprise and engage their audience.

One of the anticipated highlights of my stay was Heiner Müller’s acclaimed production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui at the Berliner Ensemble—still in repertoire 7 years after Müller’s death and still with the stunning Martin Wuttke (who won actor of the year for his portrayal) in the title role. But times change, as do ensembles, artistic directors and, indeed, the reputation of even illustrious companies. Wuttke is no longer a company member, having moved on to Frank Castorf’s Volksbühne after Claus Peymann, long term Artistic Director of the Burgtheater, took up the directorship of the Berliner Ensemble. And at the last moment Wuttke was unable to perform—he was deep in last minute rehearsals around the corner at the Volksbühne for the premiere of Der Idiot, Castorf’s third epic adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel (following Demons and The Insulted and Injured).

Those at the Berliner Ensemble (distinctly unimpressed by Wuttke’s unavailability) served up instead a performance of Lessing’s 18th century morality play, Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), directed by Peymann. A production intended to be both political and topical in its message of tolerance between Christians, Jews and Muslims, it was nevertheless a pedestrian, mannered and mind-numbingly literal (down to colour coding by costume: blue for Muslims, red for Christians etc) production. I rather suspect it was intended to introduce school children to a classic of the stage they ‘should’ know—but in effect was more likely to drive them from the theatre forever. And as an example of the “political theatre” Peymann promised to bring to the Berliner Ensemble, I expect it’s set the theatre’s founder spinning in his grave.

While I had to make do with a video of Arturo Ui, all was forgiven when I had the chance to see Der Idiot. Castorf is widely held to be one of the most exciting directors working in Germany and the Volksbühne was definitely the favourite stage of the young theatre enthusiasts I met in Berlin. Der Idiot was 6 hours long with one 20-minute interval—and totally riveting, even in the really boring bits.

The company had, in the leadup to the new theatre season, announced its departure from Berlin for “Neustadt”…and “Newtown” was what was, in fact, constructed in the stage and auditorium of the theatre: an entire town with cafes, pubs, apartment blocks, a motel and hairdresser and so on. The audience was seated on a huge revolve on the former stage, on 3 storey scaffolding which looked, intentionally, rather like the reverse of a film set. An extraordinary design by Bert Neumann.

The 16 actors performed throughout the town and the audience swivelled to follow the actors. But not all the time. A crew of video camera operators filmed all the action and this was fed, live, on about a dozen monitors visible to the audience. Although sometimes the actors played directly in front of the audience, often they didn’t. Sometimes we caught glimpses of them between the curtains of a flat, 2 levels up, sometimes they were in the hairdresser’s which we could only see from the outside. This made for a weird, totally compelling viewing experience which simultaneously made you literally rethink how you look at performance and what it is to be a spectator. A Verfremdungseffekt as Brecht could never have anticipated. What do you watch? The actor or the screen? What if you can’t see the actor—but can still hear them? Do you stare at the fluorescent sign outside the hairdresser’s, or do you succumb to the voyeuristic and ambivalent pleasures of the small screen? And after an hour in the hairdresser’s, it dawns on you afresh just how boring bad video can be. By this stage you’re desperate for that elusive, much debated, whatever-it-is that live presence delivers and mediatised performance cannot.

The actors too had fun with this conceit: a collection of some of the best in the country, they could play effortlessly with genres: mainstage German theatre acting directly to the audience? No problem. Soap opera acting for the camera inside a flat over a dinner with tensions running high? Sure. Self-conscious ‘I’m pretending the cameras aren’t there and there’s no one watching’; Big Brother moments when the “live action” is elsewhere? Why not?

The company’s dramaturg Carl Hegemann, exhilarated after the first 2 performances, told me that it was worth it—go all out with one production and live (modestly) with the financial consequences for the rest of the year (modest being a relative term, of course!). I agree; so, are there any Australian festival directors out there with huge vision—and a budget to match—to bring this masterpiece across the world?

Laura Ginters was the recipient of a Goethe Institut scholarship for cultural workers which funded her stay in Berlin.

I’ve often wondered why no Australian festival director has yet ventured a festival of work exclusively from the women of the world. We’ve had Ecstasy, Earth, Air and Water, The Sacred, Islands, Bach. Why not the Feminine? It could be called This, That and The Other. Researchers would flock. Theories posited in cold lecture halls, oeuvres hatched in mirrored studios would find audiences to match. Collective imaginings would see the light of day. Would half the sky fall in? Intrepid souls itching to find out are packing their umbrellas for the Magdalena Australia Festival in Brisbane in April.

The Magdalena Project is an international network of women working in contemporary theatre. It was conceived in 1983 when Welsh performer-director Jill Greenhalgh wondered what it would be like if the women she’d admired performing key roles at the festival she was attending in Italy, had actually authored the works themselves rather than their male collaborators. The artists included Julia Varley from Denmark’s Teatret Odin who’d worked extensively with Eugenio Barba, and Geddy Aniksdale from Greenland Friteater in Norway. Together they devised a set of workshops and performances followed by a week of collaborations involving 30 women. Magdalena was born. Greenhalgh named it after Mary Magdalene, a powerful figure in the ancient Christian church before she was cast in the role of that fallen woman at the feet of Christ.

The collaborative effort failed but the workshops were a revelation and both generated questions and energy, which continue to fuel the project. In 1986 the British Council in Wales came on board with funding. Over the years Magdalena has been responsible for a range of festivals and conferences around themes such as performing words, raw visions from young practitioners, writing image-based theatre, voice, presence, the dynamic patterns of theatre groups, new dramaturgies. At the same time, they’ve tackled social issues such as motherhood and the creative process, theatre at the margins and, crucial in these dangerous times, effective artistic responses to states of political crisis. The Project was also responsible for touring artists like Denise Stoklos and commissions such as Deborah Levy’s erotic interrogatory text, The B File in 1991, which introduced me to Magdalena. In 1999 the 10 years of almost continuous funding ceased. The project endures with a regular newsletter and a website www.themagdalenaproject.com. And whenever women of like mind anywhere in the world are sufficiently fired up, a Magdalena event will materialise. Many Australian artists have participated in these festivals but this year, for the first time, with the assistance of a raft of financial partners, the festival comes to us.

Driving the event to be held at The Powerhouse in Brisbane is the performance triumvirate called sacredCOW (Julie Robson, Dawn Albinger, Scotia Monkovitch) who took a work in progress to last year’s Magdalena Festival in Colombia. In The Quivering they play 3 wayward Sirens moonlighting as waitresses in a halfway house for the dead. “We found death has a different weighting in Colombia…but after each performance we were approached by men and women who were touched to the core by our work”, says Albinger. The visit also gave the COWgirls a chance to meet the Magdalena organisers and to rehearse some of the logistics of bringing together artists from across Australia and around the world for the 10-day festival in Brisbane.

The Brisbane event reflects the Project’s ongoing aims of bringing together women who are authoring their own work, offering a platform for artists who are marginalised and exploring the nexus of theory and practice. It’s primarily a meeting of practitioners and the Brisbane organisers have done their best to include as many of the artists who submitted proposals as possible. Among the Australians coming are Margaret Cameron, Robin Laurie, Maude Davey, Lisa O’Neill, Stacy Callaghan, Sue Pilbeam, Vulcana Women’s Circus, Christine Johnston, Lucinda Shaw, RealTV, Handzon Theatre, Chapel of Change, Ollie Black and Danni Powell. Kooemba Jdarra is hosting the Indigenous component of the festival.

International artists confirmed include all 3 of Magdalena’s founders: Jill Greenhalgh; Geddy Aniiksdal who’ll bring her work Blue is the Smoke of War; and Julia Varley who will perform 2 pieces including The Dead Brother a work/demonstration about how performances are made at Odin Teatret. “It begins with the first steps, how the actor creates her own stage presence to the last step in which the text, through the form and precision of the actions acquires rhythms and density of meaning.” Julia will also present The Castle of Holstebro, which she co-wrote with Eugenio Barba.

Also on the confirmed list are Teatro La Mascara from Colombia, Felicette Chazerand from Belgium, Graciela Rodrigues (AMAR, Argentina) Josefina Baez (USA) Gilly Adams (BBC Wales) Teatro Nomad (Spain), Christina Castrillo (Argentina/Switzerland), Laxmi Chandrashekar (India) and 12 representatives from Magdalena Aotearoa.

Uhan Shii Theatre Company from Taiwan will perform My Journey which follows the life of a woman who has spent her life playing male roles in Taiwanese Opera. Uhan Shii is a company of primarily older performers-their youngest member is 40 and they often involve young children in the performances.

Avatar Body Collision will present a cyberperformance entitled swim delivered live on stage and screen by 4 globally distributed performers, 3 of whom appear via the internet using cross-platform chat applications ivisit and the Palace. The women in this group have backgrounds in performance, visual arts, information technology and hail from Aotearoa/NZ, UK and Finland.

The article we ran in RealTime (RT44 p 6) generated considerable interest in Dah Teatar from Belgrade, a company formed in 1991 “out of the need for profound experimental work.” Readers will be pleased to hear that Dah will be coming to Brisbane with their Cirque Macabre a work using the form of an obscure circus to deal with the theme of violence.

There’s also a terrific program of workshops including one on the interaction between space and performance run by Antonella Diana and Jadranka Andjelic from Dah Teatar; Margaret Cameron deals with space as perceptual, exploring non-psychological approaches to animating text. Cristina Castrillo & Bruna from Teatro Delle Radici play with The Language of Silence; Julie Varley concentrates on the singing and speaking voice and the relationship between text and action; Actor director Geddy Aniksdal and script editor for BBC Radio, Gilly Adams will run a generative writing workshop. Uhan Shii offer insights into Taiwanese Opera and local indigenous elders and artists hold a 3-day workshop on song, dance and storytelling. There’ll also be a forum each day.

In the globalised, post-feminist noughties, female experience is still a largely foreign country. If you’re looking for innovative and creative approaches to the terrain somewhere closer than Mars or Venus, Brisbane in April will be the place to be.

Magdalena Australia, International Festival for Women in Contemporary Theatre, April 6-16, 2003, Brisbane Powerhouse.

Melbourne is built on a grid. Once you trust this system of rectangles it is very hard to get lost. When you want to find your way in the city that is fine but when it comes to the arts, it becomes kind of strange. The Victorian Arts Centre (VAC), however, seems to fit very well into this grid. It’s a highly organized, neat and shiny venue, in which it is hard to get lost. Not in terms of finding your way to your seat, of course, there are signs, don’t worry. I mean in terms of getting lost in another world, the world of the imagination, of surprise.

“(Designer) John Truscott wanted the audience to enter a new world,” says the VAC tour guide. “He wanted us to leave our everyday life behind and—coming from a world full of concrete and steel—to enter the world of fantasy and illusion.” That’s why he chose crimson carpets, black glass ceilings and used brass wherever he could. “The brass is to commemorate the Gold Rush”, the tour guide goes on in an attempt to give deeper meaning to this “elegance.” Even the Aboriginal paintings have been chosen to match the walls. No chance of entering a new world here.

So how about getting lost in the VAC theatres, deep underground in the Yarra River bed? Both operas playing at the time had incredibly old-fashioned settings. Every expectation of a German audience of 100 years ago would have been well served by these productions. “Why on earth would you present such an old fashioned interpretation to an audience in a large cosmopolitan city in the year 2002?” I asked Stuart Maunder, the Artistic Director of Opera Australia. “Old fashioned? Oh, traditional would probably be a better word for it.” Old fashioned, traditional—take your pick. “The company isn’t subsidised to the extent that German theatres are. So when we do avant garde work, like we did last season with our Freischütz, the audience reacts very badly. They just do not want something that they think is denigrating the piece or (privileging) a director’s vision on top of the piece. They want to see what Strauss and Hofmannsthal actually intended when they wrote Der Rosenkavalier.” In my opinion, the nature of art is that it stays up-to-date over time and can be (I think even should be) interpreted according to the present. And Maunder agrees. “The pieces that people know more we tend to play around with a little more.” So why didn’t this apply to the Figaro directed by Neil Armfield? People must know Figaro! But Maunder just comes back to that “very traditional part of the audience” which he thinks the company must not disappoint because, as he explains, “we are dependent on box office for about 70 percent of our income.”

I felt the same reviewer loneliness in my heart when I saw Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company at the VAC. “That was a good laugh!” giggled the woman in the row in front of me when we got up to leave the theatre. Talking to other members of the audience I detected they were just happy to see Garry McDonald on stage who (in my eyes) tried hard to act like Max Price (a TV-host struggling for more audience) but didn’t get very far. There was not one single moment when I felt for him or believed in him. Jeremy Vincent, Marketing Director of the VAC says: “These stars have brought a television and film audience to the theatre, and also a younger audience.” Light entertainment and stars—is that what theatre should provide? “No,” says Julian Meyrick, the recently appointed Associate Director of the MTC (also director of 2 productions for The Melbourne Workers Theatre and author of See How It Runs, Nimrod & the New Wave, see page 34), “Theatre can make use of the high status it has by introducing quite sophisticated ideas to a very educated audience. And this status makes it possible for companies like MTC to do work that is quite testing and quite confronting some of the time.” Confronting? Does Laughter… fit this definition? “No,” he says, “but Laughter… was a Christmas show.” I just wished German politicians had been sitting with me hearing Meyrick talk. There is currently a debate in Germany about reducing subsidies and getting state theatres to rely more on box office. Here you see what happens—no sophisticated ideas at Christmas time!

With quite some joy I discovered Playbox Theatre in the CUB Malthouse. Finally, a much less settled atmosphere and an audience that seemed to me younger, not necessarily only in age but also in state of mind. I saw Rapture, a play by Joanna Murray-Smith, directed by Jenny Kemp, about the emptiness and loneliness that hide behind style, elegance and success. Even though her text told us exactly what to draw from the piece, I enjoyed the fact that the playwright tried to make us (members of the middle class) think about ourselves.

Most of the plays that Playbox present are surprises because they are world premieres. But one thing you can be sure of is that all these surprises will be purely Australian which is sad in a way. It would be interesting, I assume, for Australian work to dialogue with plays from around the world.

From Playbox I found my way out of the establishment. Picking up postcards here and talking to people there, I’m suddenly in the world of “cutting edge”, of “fringe” where somehow the grid doesn’t apply any more. You won’t find your way there if you don’t look for it. There is nothing in little tourist brochures like Melbourne Events. The cutting edge is only for people in the know.

Sitting with me in a fancy hotel bar next to the abandoned Preston and Northcote Community Hospital (the bar is where the mortuary used to be), actor Bruce Kerr says, “We aren’t necessarily after a tourist audience. But you can get all the information you need reading our newspapers.” And indeed, The Age quite loyally covers fringe theatre events. They had a very interesting article about the play I had just seen, The Teratology Project (review page 36), in which Kerr played a 168 year old man who wasn’t permitted to die. It was all about genetic science, birth, life and death, performed in the abandoned corridors of the hospital. A voice from the speakers invited us to “follow the white arrows to the open door.” We arrived in front of a counter where we had to give something of ourselves—a hair, a nail, some spit or earwax. The sample was put into a plastic bag and then carefully examined by a very scientific looking doctor. We were then split into 3 groups according to our samples (which wasn’t true but still made us shiver) and led through the operating theatres.

It took director Susie Dee 4 years to put this performance on the hospital-stage. “It is really hard for independent companies to get ongoing funding, it is a real struggle,” she says. The Teratology Project is the second show from a collective of artists calling themselves The Institute of Complex Entertainment (ICE) whose goal lies in “creating theatre outside the traditional venues, that challenges our audience both in form and content.” Their commitment is to work that is “framed by the strong but simple premise that an audience is not a ‘passive mass’ sitting in the dark of an auditorium, but a dynamic collection of individuals.” I appreciate this approach. This work just wouldn’t happen if Melbourne artists didn’t keep the faith and if they weren’t ready to put not only all their creative energy, but also their own money, into their productions.

I also saw Double Entendre at La Mama Theatre and found great actors performing 2 pieces by the Australian playwright Raimondo Cortese. In these stories, people meet for the first time, get into deep conversation, but don’t find what they’re looking for. There is no remedy for their loneliness and no end to their struggle for love. This time we are not given answers (whereas The Teratology Project was very explicit, just like Rapture). For once we weren’t handed morality with the ticket.

Then I had what I’d call “a good laugh” at Chapel off Chapel, seeing Molière’s Love is the Best Doctor directed by Allison Wall. What fun it can be when nothing meets your expectations and the poor daughter for example, who is to be cured, is for once not a sweet, pretty, silently weeping girl, but a stocky young woman wearing yellow plaits and big black boots under her skirt, sobbing angrily and screaming around.

At the Storeroom in North Fitzroy to see Kaidan I enter a completely designed space with candles and banners throughout. “Kaidan” is Japanese for “haunted tales” and the producer and artistic director of the show, 25-year old Anniene Stockton, wanted the space to be decorated accordingly. “I changed the theatre”, she says, “because I feel theatre is not about sitting down in a room and being shown something. It is much more about having an experience, being able to communicate with another human being. Technology has allowed us to come closer, yet as human beings we are so much further apart.” It works. People don’t run off to their cars when the show is over. They stay and talk. Anniene has worked with a creative team of 35 people and they all get profit share from the box office. Nobody here seems to be doing anything for the money.

In Germany there are many independent theatre groups struggling for funding just as they do here. The difference is that audiences don’t have to go to the fringe if they want “cutting edge.” The big theatres are quite proud when they have an artistic director who in Melbourne would surely be considered a “risk taker.” That is true for Thomas Ostermeier, for example, who became known for cutting edge work at the Baracke, the smaller, experimental theatre attached to the Schaubühne, one of Berlin’s most prestigious theatres. Ostermeier is now Artistic Director of the Schaubühne and The Baracke has disappeared for financial reasons. But other German cities still subsidize not only their state theatres but also these smaller, experimental stages.

Talking to lots of people, I am still not convinced that Australian audiences are really such mainstream lovers. I think if the big theatre and opera companies took some new approaches and presented work that is more than the expected light entertainment, they could be successful. It is just a matter of time and any transition process involves risk. Theatre should be interesting and innovative. It should make us think. It shouldn’t degenerate into just another turn-on-turn-off event. It should creep under our skins.

PS: Melbournian’s hunger for light entertainment may be stronger than I imagined—I’ve just read that 40 million dollars is to be spent on a giant ferris wheel based on the London Eye to become an internationally recognisable landmark for Melbourne. Maybe it is time to accept the inevitable.

Note: Germany has over 150 subsidised state and city theatres mostly subsidised by cities. German households spend 0.3% of their budgets on culture, 20% of which goes to theatre. How it’s spent varies city to city. In Munich the Munchner Kammerspiel are subsidised with 20m Euros (40m AUD) per annum and rely on only 7.5% of their income from box office. The Thalia Theatre in Hamburg gets 15.5m Euro per annum, but makes 30% income from ticket sales. Because of the state of the German economy most public funding bodies have not increased funding for a decade, meanwhile costs continue to rise and theatre companies spend 80% of their budgets on wages and related costs, which means that there is less and less money for new productions. There have also been funding cuts. Ulrich Khuons, Artistic Director of the Thalia Theatre argues that “in a time of globalisation arts help maintain the profile of a city. Pure economic thinking aside, we need places of excitement and of disturbance and to create these places is what theatre is about.”

John Davis has been the General Manager of the Australian Music Centre for 7 years. As a well-travelled, hard-working Vice President of the International Association of Music Centres (the AMC is one of its 43 members) and Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) he has been participating in national and international strategies crucial to the development of contemporary music and the documenting and dissemination of the work of Australian composers. Now at the end of both his Vice Presidential terms, although still the Australian representative, Davis is looking forward to feeling a little less split between national and international pressures, but in this interview points to the ever increasing value of the community of music centres. I asked this congenial and much admired manager of an enterprising organisation that achieves much beyond its immediate role of documentor and disseminator about his personal association with music and how it took him to his current position.

I intended to be a composer from the time I was 13. I was a performer for a long time on piano and prior to that, saxophone and other brass instruments when I was younger. I failed first year music at Sydney University in 1975, ran away to New Zealand, got involved in jazz, came back to Australia and spent about a decade, mainly on the South Coast of New South Wales, just doing piano bar gigs and whatever. And then I reached a point where I needed more creative challenges and went back to university at Wollongong when Creative Arts was set up in the mid 80s. As a result I did a lot of Australian music study there and then managed to score a job as a junior sales assistant at the Australian Music Centre in 1989 on Broadway in a pokey little office. The commercial activities of the centre were only 2 or 3 years old at that stage and a lot of my work was making up catalogues of what was for sale, selling scores from the library basically. There were one or 2 CDs available with Australian works, stacks of cassettes and LPs. By the early 90s that exploded and we set up our shop in 1993 and by 1995 there were 2,500 titles across all genres of Australian music, not just the classical area. The whole scene has changed significantly in the time I’ve been here.

In 1995 the General Manager, Cathy Brown Watt, left for the Major Organisations Board of the Australia Council. I was the Sales Manager and became then, as I still am, General Manager. I’ve been through 3 changes of location, from Broadway to the Argyle Centre [in The Rocks]and then to The Arts Exchange [also in the Rocks] in 2000. This last move has been most significant given the long term security of tenure with the NSW Ministry of the Arts as landlord and the space, which is a huge luxury, allowing us to do all sorts of things and provide a facility for others to do things here.

I don’t play any more, which frightens me more than anything. I will get back to it at some stage. That I’m not actually writing is not so important because there’s so much stuff that passes through here that I take backroom pleasure in observing. And what is more satisfying is to see someone else’s creative development and to play a facilitating role in that.

It’s how some people perceive the centre and it is one aspect of it. But what we do first and foremost is document the work of Australian composers. In the AMC’s early years that was a very broad and open thing—anyone who called themselves a composer could lodge material here—and then by the mid 80s it became more defined—formally representing composers applying for that status. Over the last decade that’s been broadened into other areas of art music making. There are all sorts of challenges in doing that because it’s fine if you have a composer putting dots on paper because it’s a physical manifestation of a work that a library can handle easily as opposed, say, to the work of a sound artist whose work exists in other media. There are ways to collect and catalogue these, for example, a web page as artwork, but you may not be able to sell that item. However, it’s the broader issue of representation in the centre’s collection that’s more important than sales. There are improvisors, jazz composers, real time composers in a range of formats—we like our systems to be challenged.

It does. It’s interesting too in how it reflects how artists think about their work. Dots-on-paper composers tend to understand the concept of their work being housed in an archive or a living collection like ours. Artists who work solely in live performance understand documenting through recording, generally commercially released, but in terms of other ways or forms—whatever’s scribbled down, whatever’s recorded in the preparation for the performance—they’re not necessarily sensitive. It’s a musicological issue: for example, the early sketches of a Peter Sculthorpe work or his correspondence with someone over the development of a commission and the resulting work, they’re all interesting form a musicological point of view.

Yes, but not of archival material: we don’t take on that role because there are the state libraries and the National Library, which recently accepted, for instance, all the Sculthorpe correspondence and papers. Ours is a living collection. We don’t have originals, we have good quality master copies of paper-based material which we are licensed to reproduce for sale, to give it a life.

The 3 things that drive our strategic plan are: documenting work by Australian composers; providing access to those materials, giving them a life, a function, a level of utility and offering a range of services that complement these. These may be professional development opportunities for composers, like ACOF, the Australian Composers Orchestral Forum, which we partner with Symphony Australia. It might be our awards [APRA-Australian Music Centre Classical Music Awards; administration of the Paul Lowin Prizes], our publications [including Sounds Australia] or recordings (we have our own record label, Vox Australis). The positioning statement of the AMC, Connecting the World with Australian Music, is about the Centre being a reference point: a majority of our enquiries are referred on to other people, they’re after the roadmap as it were. We get 5,000 to 6,000 library enquiries a year. For sales enquiries—CDs, educational materials—there was a calculation done in 1998-99 where it was estimated we deal with 25,000 interactions per year. It’s a lot for an organisation whose core activity is really that of a library.

Is the AMC looked on as a peak organisation or a service organisation? Are you expected to be politically active on behalf of artists?

There are as many expectations as there are people. Older composers—the centre was established in 1973—sometimes see us as falling short because we’re not a manager-agent-publisher. It’s a difficult expectation to deal with because the centre is a signpost to materials. If someone’s looking for repertoire to perform, for example we don’t say, “Here’s Peter Sculthorpe, or here’s our Top Ten Composers.” We have 400 composers represented in this collection and the number continues to grow; and there are 20,000 items. A handful of composers are represented by commercial publishers who take on that role and get the gigs. Our task is to identify areas of repertoire or musical activity that would suit a particular need. If performers are coming to us, we take the trouble to find out what their musical tastes are, what kind of context they perform in, what their subscription base is, what kind of audience they perform to. Then we point them in a general direction, empower them to make their own decisions—“Here’s a body of repertoire. Here are 25 composers whose work may be of interest to you.” They can borrow material, try it out, come in here and listen. And we encourage them to provide us with feedback to help refine their needs. It’s not a one-off relationship. We encourage them to be more articulate about what they want because often they don’t know. They know what they don’t want. Five staff look after library and sales, including the 20% of enquiries from international sources.

We’re provided with budget for some international promotions from APRA, the Australasian Performing Rights Association, and more recently some term-specific funding from the Australia Council for an international project. With these we’re able to send out materials to people who’ve approached us or we seek out those who’ve expressed an interest in showcasing Australian talent, but in the same way, finding out their taste, what they want. It’s a process of mapping the landscape.

Ten to 15% are composers, 10-15% performers, 55% from the education sector and, beyond that, interested individuals, other people involved in the arts, organisations, institutions, libraries who plug into our resources. There are 9 elected board members and another co-opted 6 with specific skills (legal, accounting etc). Of the 9, there are 4 composers—the largest number we’ve had—and there are performers, people from the education sector, administrators from the new music scene. It’s quite well balanced and they offer the organisation great support.

Would the AMC act on behalf of its members over, say, funding issues? I’m thinking about the role of the NAVA [National Association for the Visual Arts] in urging and shaping the Myer Report.

If there was that imperative from the membership, of course. However, music making is such a diverse world, even within particular genres—choirs, jazz, sound artists—it’s difficult to see issues that are big enough to have a common incentive. The arts community as a whole has found it difficult to lobby broadly because of specific interest groups that exist. One part of me yearns for that cohesive sense of purpose, but I don’t begrudge its absence because it provides other kinds of challenges and roles that I find fulfilling. I’d like the AMC to stay open to communicating in any direction at all.

You’ve had a close association with the International Association of Music Information Centres [IAMIC] and the International Society of Contemporary Music [ISCM].

I still attend IAMIC meetings as the representative of Australia, but I was on the Board for the last 3 years as Vice President. We expanded the Board from 4 to 6 members to make it more representative of the 43 centres. It’s a place where knowledge and expertise are shared. There are lots of exchanges and collaborations emerging out of those relationships. But it’s not a forum for promoting your own stuff: it’s a place to share experiences and compare different political, economic and artistic contexts that you can measure yourself against. But it’s also a community that as whole has a lot of potential: the resources, the data held by these centres around the world is vital for new music in a very real way.

ISCM is more about the presentation of music. Its annual World Music Day festivals are truly international showcases of what’s happening in music of all styles.

Does IAMIC’s work result in cultural exchange then, as opposed to marketing?

In actuality we do of course promote Australian work, but there are cultural differences. It’s not how the Swedes might do it. They work with huge budgets, they’re part of the performing rights society in Sweden and they’ll put on a huge gig in New York for Swedish Music, hire the venue, engage the performers and spend millions of US dollars. We just don’t have the resources or infrastructure to do that sort of thing. Each centre varies from the others. It’s more about exchange, about seeing how things are done elsewhere and what might be adapted for your own context. IAMIC is emerging as an international community in the best sense. For example, there’s a big internet project called Music Navigator emerging out of IAMIC with European Union funding. A core group of European MIC members are developing a search engine to search across all the centres’ databases. It’s a long way from happening but once realised it will be an amazing tool. Our ISCM activities are more proactive about promoting the presentation of Australian work.

The online service MusicAustralia has been launched in prototype format [www.musicaustralia.org].

It’s a new service jointly developed by the National Library and ScreenSound Australia and content partners including the Australia Music Centre. You’ll be able to locate contemporary and heritage music—recordings, digitised sheet music and resources from a range of organisations via a single web interface. For example, you can view the digital score [from composers using computer notation software] and listen to the integrated MIDI file of Ann Carr-Boyd’s Moonbeams Kiss the Sea or Raffaello Marcellino’s The Lottery in Babylon. And you can interact with scores.

We’re digitising our entire collection over the next 10 years, incorporating it into our usual work processes. When we make a sale we scan the material and store it as an electronic file. The copyright has been worked out for storing it here, not for rendering it online yet—that’s further down the track. Our imperative will be to render online so people can peruse the work but not download. For works already in digital formats it’ll just be a matter of the licensing arrangements being resolved.

We’re funded by the Music Board of the Australia Council as a Key Organisation on Triennial Funding and that makes up a bit more than 40% of our total income. We receive another 3-4% from APRA and about one and a half percent from the NSW Ministry for the Arts. That’s about 45% subsidy with the rest from sales and membership income. There are huge challenges in trying to survive with that kind of balance and it’s been that way since the early to mid 90s when there was a significant cut in funding from the Australia Council that precipitated the development of a different kind of business model and more reliance on other income. We’ve had the advantage of developing this model while other organisations have been facing it only in recent years. On the other hand it’s a model that requires constant review and revision and makes an organisation particularly vulnerable, as vulnerable as some of the larger presenting organisations with their reliance on box office. You have no idea of how the hell you’re going to go from year to year, to climb that mountain, but somehow it all comes together. Membership is constant but sales are another matter, the mix can vary—for example music retailing is declining and we don’t have the capital to invest in stock.

We get fantastic support from APRA [Australian Performing Rights Association]. The APRA-Australian Music Centre Classical Music Awards look like they’ll be on-going. It’s an important relationship giving the centre a brand name, a public face which is otherwise so difficult to achieve as a service organisation working behind the scenes. The international activities we’re involved in, the materials we send out around the world to performers and broadcasters, these encourage the performances which yield the royalties that flow back through APRA to Australian composers, our constituents.

Another partner is the ABC through Classic FM, through The Listening Room and some major projects including the Australian Adlib Project. This is now continuing in collaboration with the National Library and additional funds from the Australia Council for Jon Rose to collect more “vernacular music.” It’s a documentary process really complementary to what we do here and addresses the issues of collecting material, something we can’t do but we can partner. In the same way, Ros Bandt’s sound artist website is also complementary. We also welcome opportunities for input into Australia Council projects of the Music Board and the Audience & Market Development Division. There are many more relationships, all of which are vital for the Centre. It’s our job.

You mentioned IAMIC projects—how do they work in terms of exchange and resources?

One is a repertoire exchange, starting with Ireland who have expressed interest in some meaningful interaction. This is using what’s there, not seeking new funding or building new infrastructure. We’re looking at an Australian ensemble and an Irish ensemble sharing repertoire, ensembles with similar aesthetics, and looking towards co-commissions and exchange commissions and later towards touring opportunities. It’s about starting at a core point of what’s there and what crosses over.

Another interesting project evolving at the moment is a trans-Tasman composer residency exchange. There aren’t a lot of musical bridges across the Tasman or other creative bridges either for that matter. New Zealand’s Music Centre, Sounz, has some funds from Creative New Zealand for a composer to come to Australia to be hosted by a performing organisation here. The composer will come here for a couple of months and a commission and a performance will evolve with a similar arrangement for an Australian composer to go to New Zealand. We’re taking a lot of care over commonality and compatibility. This is another project that plugs into what’s already there. ‘We’ve got 2 sheep, you’ve got 2 sheep, how can we make a flock?’

For more information about the Australian Music Centre, visit www.amcoz.com.au and for a guided tour of the pilot site of MusicAustralia go to www.musicaustralia.org.

Dorothy Napangardi, Sandhills of Mina Mina 2002, synthetic polymer paint on linen 152 x 152 cms, Private collection, Sydney

There are a number of ways in which the paintings of Dorothy Napangardi, although superficially similar, directly contradict and subvert the modernist implication of the grid, and in so doing confront the viewer with cultural difference. Her works are narrative-based, mimetically tracing the movements and activities of the Women Ancestors as they dance their way through spinifex and over sandhills. They also repeat nature and the natural formations of the environment and as such deal very much with the ‘real’ as opposed to the ‘abstract.’ Whilst contemporary they nevertheless draw upon age-old tradition and cultural knowledge as well as a complex and articulated religion.

From the catalogue essay “Form and content” by Vivienne Webb, Dancing Up Country, The art of Dorothy Napangardi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Image and text reproduced with permission.

Dorothy Napangardi is a Warlpiri woman from the area around Mina Mina, a significant site located near Lake Mackay in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory. She now lives and works in Alice Springs.

Dancing Up Country, The art of Dorothy Napangardi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, presented in association with the 2003 Sydney Festival until March 9. The exhibition then tours courtesy of Asialink to the National Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam, April-June, and to the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, August-October.

Strange things are happening out west. As the federal government strengthens its preparedness to wage war against Iraq and escalates its national public information campaign alerting Australians to be ever vigilant against domestic terrorism, West Australia seems to be bearing the brunt of defence commitments with a corresponding shrinkage of cultural resources in the screen area. Perth-based SAS troops have had leave cancelled and US Navy jets will fly bombing sorties north of the state capital, dropping shells within kilometres of the fishing village and summer holiday destination of Lancellin.

The massive nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its numerous escorts, which moored off Fremantle in the week before Christmas, has returned “indefinitely”, no doubt teeming with undisclosed Weapons of Mass Destruction. But with it comes over 6,000 personnel, millions of greenbacks for the local economy and political assurances of heightened national security as a result of the visits. It all seems a strategic pact of Faustian proportions.

And here’s the rub. While there has been discussion and dissension over the American alliance and the potential for aiding and abetting unilateral attacks, the ongoing mandatory detention of asylum seekers and the heightened powers of domestic and international intelligence agencies, little commentary has been directed at the cost to taxpayers and how these unanticipated federal spending initiatives are to be funded. The answer, it would seem, is the stealthy removal of cultural expenditure under the pretext of a federal arts economy drive.

Around the same time as the nuclear navy visits to Perth, Arts Minister Richard Alston ordered an inquiry into the top 15 cultural institutions—a decision reluctantly admitted to under Parliamentary questioning in the Senate. The rationale for Alston’s review is to find ‘greater efficiencies’ and to see if taxpayers are getting ‘value for their money.’ It’s a hoary old chestnut, and a political pretext of grand transparency. Within hours Greens Senator Bob Brown was decrying Alston’s ploy as a secret “arts tax” to pay for the anticipated war on Iraq and scandalous ongoing refugee incarcerations. Labor’s shadow arts spokesman Bob McMullan was more muted, though equally fearful that the exercise was one of “stripping funds from the cultural institutions and hoping no-one will notice.”

In many ways Alston’s rhetoric of additional public accountability rings false—what of government appointed board members, Senator, or mandatory government audits, or biennial external and/or internal reviews, agency annual reports to Parliament and annual Senate Appropriations hearings…? Given the cyclical and exhaustive accounting these institutions already must undertake, with the added assurance that in many instances the Minister may himself intervene and direct the agency, it appears as McMullan insinuated that “the review is really a cost-cutting exercise that will pay no heed to achieving cultural goals.”

After 8 years of the conservative Coalition’s governance, no-one should be surprised by Alston’s move, particularly at a time when the returned government is riding high in the opinion polls during its early to mid-term run. But unlike earlier cultural reviews such as the Mansfield enquiry into the ABC and the Gonski review of the film sector, with their ‘independent’ chairs, it would seem that the Minister himself will be in the driving seat with no sign of sustained criticism from the Opposition.

Nevertheless, Alston’s review, with its predetermined budget savings, is merely the logical extension of nearly a decade of Coalition reorientation, if not marginalisation, of cultural subvention. A case in point is the near erasure of the ‘National’ Cinematheque.

After a brief flourish, Perth is now entering its second year without a Cinematheque program. For cultural enthusiasts in ‘the world’s most isolated city’ this is an appalling state of affairs. One year (2001) there was a program, in the following there was not. The Fremantle based Film and Television Institute (FTI), which previously coordinated the local programming with the Melbourne Cinematheque, also exhibited the program at its funky, though somewhat decrepit cinema. Audiences fluctuated considerably from screening to screening, but without a marketing budget or dedicated PR staffer, promoting the Fremantle screenings was largely the responsibility of Brigitta Hupfel (now an FTI board member) who saw the still largely untapped tertiary student market as a major potential audience.

But how could these Perth screenings fail and the future programs be pulled with little more than a whimper of criticism? Like the Rashomon rape/homicide, it depends on your perspective. According to the AFC, funds were literally doubled in the year the Perth program was axed by the FTI. Former AFI chief Deb Verhoeven and Melbourne Cinematheque President/programmer Adrian Miles respond that, while technically correct, the increase came at the demise of ancillary funding for administrative and other exhibition infrastructure which the AFI could previously sustain within general overheads. For nearly a decade the AFI has been suffering death by a thousand cuts. It is symptomatic of government pressure that the AFC has devolved many screen culture responsibilities onto state agencies, particularly those emanating from Victoria. Yet Screenwest says that assisting the WA component of the Cinematheque complies with its advertised brief to support screen activities but they weren’t approached, since FTI felt that their principal sponsors, AFC and Screenwest, would consider this double dipping.

Regardless, the lacklustre show of bums on seats greatly figured in the FTI decision to drop the program. Like other state-based screen organisations, FTI has refocussed its output increasingly onto training, with fewer resources available for cultural activities. It’s a sign of the times—federal dollars for training, development and production, while screen ‘culture’ withers. Indeed, the counter argument, rarely heard today, is that government subsidy of the arts supports cultural outputs not considered commercially viable. This rationale underpins most political subvention. Hence Perth’s very isolation makes it an ideal candidate for special federal treatment, not mere parity with other states.

There is some light on the horizon, however. In 2001-02 Victoria’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) received AFC funds previously earmarked for the AFI’s national exhibition program. ACMI’s Lisa Pieroni is keen to develop a National Cinematheque program this year—including Perth—based on a model that offers components from the extensive and self-sustaining Melbourne program. Pieroni is confident that by April enough of the core Cinematheque material, complemented by short specialist programs of Alliance Français, Goethe Institut and Screensound, will attract interest in Tasmania, ACT and WA. Here’s hoping.

Overall, though, transposing the government’s own official agitprop, those committed to the screen culture sector should now be not just alert, but alarmed.

Documentary filmmakers are emerging as a distinct character type in popular culture. In society’s continual search for heroes, the documentarian has done badly. Last year in Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Rapture the documentarian was a female, a failure, incompetent, righteous and untalented. The popular English mockumentary series People Like Us featured Roy Mallard (Chris Langham)—the man who bumbled every story and interview he attempted to cover. In many ways the documentarian has taken over the tarnished image of the writer as a poverty-stricken, egocentric, patron-seeking whinger. Move aside Woody Allen, Robert Flaherty’s descendants have come to claim your role.

So what do the documentary makers have to say in their own defence? Do they deserve their tainted image? I spoke to guests of the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) which will be held this year at Byron Bay.

Sherine Salama

Sherine Salama, recent AFI winner, rejects the anti-heroic image: “I think of myself less as a ‘documentary filmmaker’ and more as the person who has made Australia Has No Winter and A Wedding in Ramallah. Rather than any thought of forging a ‘career,’ there was a lot of personal history, chance, idealism and practical expediency that led me to embark on each film. In each case there were stories that reflected themes in my own life such as cultural dislocation and inter-generational conflict, stories that couldn’t be contained by journalism—the career I had forged. In different circumstances I might have chosen to write a novel or a play, but having been exposed to powerful documentaries that struck a chord with me—[Dennis] O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours, David and Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer’s Grey Gardens—documentary seemed an appropriate outlet for my creative urges.”

When I ask who the documentarian is, she says, “I don’t feel the need to construct a character—I think I am pretty transparent. The fact is, if I wasn’t myself, I wouldn’t meet the people who appear in my films, and gain their trust.”

But Salama is not naïve: “At times I also included [the interaction between the subject and myself in A Wedding in Ramallah] because not to do so would be dishonest. I don’t believe in the observational filmmaking that pretends the filmmaker doesn’t exist, that his or her presence isn’t felt. I was therefore quite happy to include Mariam’s comment to Sinora about me—’What a slut this woman is’—although I was advised to remove it.

Maybe the documentarian’s tainted image stems from including those awkward relationships with their characters in their films. You can’t discuss the image, especially [the documentarian’s] appearance in their own films, without mentioning O’Rourke who made The Good Woman of Bangkok and Cannibal Tours—an inspiration to Salama. In his book The Filmmaker and the Prostitute O’Rourke says, “…for it to work, the filming process must be an ordeal of contact with perceived reality—I must place myself within the flux of what I am attempting to film” and “the film includes a character—’the filmmaker’—who reflects me and others of my race and class, gender and profession, but who is not me….”

Unlike Salama, O’Rourke constructs a character or stereotype for himself. We may see him on screen, but we will not ‘know’ the man by the end of the film, though I imagine he hopes we’ll ‘know’ the other characters, his subjects. His intention is, in part, to rail against the image of the documentarian as cultural hero, a knight in shining camera armour. But to do so, he invents a fictional O’Rourke.

Wim Wenders

Does Wim Wenders agree with O’Rourke’s move against the heroic documentarian? Wenders makes both fiction films, for example Paris Texas and documentaries like The Buena Vista Social Club. I asked him what the documentarian would be like if he wrote such a character into a film.

Wenders speculated that, “I would write him or her into my script as some sort of detective, in the best sense of that profession: a searcher of truth, against all of his or her own interests, unconditional in his/her approach.”

I wonder if he’s being polite, as he is about to spend 3 days with documentarians at AIDC. And I’m not sure I agree—documentarians are endlessly searching for story and artifice in the real world, not Truth. They are also endlessly including their own selves and interests in the work, whether as blatantly as O’Rourke, or less overtly like Salama; they have too much at stake in the film—money, reputation etc. Because I believe that documentarians search for story I asked he what relationship he saw between fiction and documentary storytelling.

Wenders replied, “I’m not interested in ‘pure fiction.’ My films are all partly documentary, especially the fictional ones. In the course of a fictional film you always get into situations that you could never have dreamed of when you were sitting behind your typewriter working on the script. I love it when the truth of a situation just carries you far away from what you had first envisioned. And the truth can be so much stranger than fiction…On the other hand, making a documentary, you have to be aware of the fact that you might be witnessing a story, and that that story might sweep you away. Before you know it you’re in the middle of the river with the little boat that is your movie and all that’s left for you to do is not have it sink.”

There it is: he speaks of truth when talking about fiction and story when talking about documentary.

Donata Wenders

Wender’s partner, Donata, also a conference guest, works in the related field of still photography. Unfazed by the word ‘Truth’ which seems to haunt documentarians she says, “I see myself as someone who is trying to learn more and to be a more loving observer. I am not a journalist, and ‘lying’ is not an issue for me. I find cropping legitimate, for example, as I am not interested in ugly surroundings. Which does not mean that I would replace them with a Photoshopped image! That does not make sense for me. I could never produce with Photoshop what I am looking for: the hope of that person, the gentleness, the trust, the self-forgotten attitude…I am looking for a glimpse of the inner mood of a person, his or her attitude towards life, moments that have more to do with the expression of the heart of that person.”

No all-embracing truth, or constructed fiction, just fragments of an ever-changing world. Maybe it isn’t the interface with the real world that brings about documentarians’ struggle with Truth, maybe it’s the search for story.

Wim Wenders says, “editing a documentary is a much more complicated business than editing a feature film. To find the logic of images, and to provide them with a coherent form, all that’s much harder than on a feature.” And he views his camera differently from Donata: “The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing.”

A story

Now it’s time to tell a story, make you suffer the interference of my contact with perceived reality, because writing is also a weapon against the tragedy of things. As I write, pelicans wander around their little island as confused as me on the shore. It is 4:05pm and the sky is pink-black. There is no more day—the smoke from the fires in Canberra has put out the sun. Ash is everywhere, even in the sea. And the radio urges me to preserve my freedom by dobbing in my Middle-Eastern neighbours.

The documentarian or the writer could take these fragments and form a story (or find the truth). But it is the half-artist, half-journalist who reminds us of our suspect behaviour and breaks though the cloud of smoke we call society to see that purple has become pink in the red haze. There is some dignity in this role. It is unique. As German writer Albrecht Goes says, “People have forgotten. And things must indeed be forgotten, for how could anyone who cannot forget live? But from time to time there must be someone there who remembers.”

Australian International Documentary Conference, Byron Bay, Feb 16-20, to be followed by the Byron Bay Film Festival

Endgames

One of the curious dimensions of the Sydney Festival’s Beckett celebrations (an academic talkfest, live productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Town Hall addresses from JM Coetzee, Herbert Blau and Luce Irigaray, and 19 commissioned films of Beckett plays) was the possibility of comparing live and filmed performances of Godot and Endgame. I saw both versions of the latter. Endgame is certainly my favourite Beckett, his too, and reckoned to be the greatest of the 20th century by Beckett director and scholar Blau. Both film and stage production had much to recommend, though the film outstripped the Sydney Theatre Company version, directed by Benedict Andrews, in getting the powerplay between the play’s principals, Hamm and Clov, knottily and rhythmically right.

Before pursuing these comparisons, a little about the dispute between Edward Beckett, executor of his uncle’s estate, and Neil Armfield, director of Belvoir Company B’s production of Waiting for Godot over the use of music (composer Alan John), particularly the addition of a song in Latin sung by the Boy. The story goes that Beckett left the theatre during the opening night curtain call and threatened to close the show for breach of contract. Armfield offered to drop the consonants in the song, the contract was closely scrutinised, no breach sighted, the show went on. Armfield, however, delivered a broadside at the Beckett symposium, defending theatre-making as a collaborative venture and querying the sacredness of classic texts.

With well-known classics of a 100 or more years of age, we’re not surprised if bits go missing, as long as they’re not what we regard as vital. With lesser known classics who would know what’s been cut? But if the plays were written only some 50 years ago, as in Beckett’s case, and copyright still holds and there’s an estate actively policing productions of the work, what’s to be done?

Towards the end of the Beckett film event, the producers of the series, Alan Moloney and Michael Colgan (Artistic Director, Dublin’s Gate Theatre Company) appeared on the State Theatre stage with session host, literary critic Don Anderson, pondering the significance of the stoush. Anderson clearly thought it a pity that the terms of the argument had become so reductive (“Waiting for Beckett jnr. ‘Bugger that for a joke’”, read a front page story header in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jan 10), while Colgan, an admirer of Armfield’s directing, thought the consequences potentially dire, with an ever more vigilant Edward Beckett taking a fresh look at the wording of all his contracts. In a letter to the SMH editor, Stephen Sewell defended the rights of playwrights.

Such is the power of the Beckett estate that the making of the films required the writing of a set of protocols so that each film director knew the limits of their interpretative freedom. Edward Beckett approved all the directors’ treatments: Colgan thought him more flexible than usual because of the change of medium. The producers had to choose their directors carefully in the first place: Neil Jordan missed out on Endgame because he wanted to insert a cutaway to the punt scene of Hamm’s recollections. He got, instead, Not I, where we see Julianne Moore briskly settle into a wooden armchair with a tight headrest winged against each ear before cutting to her quickfire monologue with some 4 cameras in extreme closeup on Moore’s mouth and, we were told, filmed in one take—a claim for theatrical integrity? Almost every film was done by the book, and exceptions to stage directions carefully monitored, though mostly allowed. Colgan had initially negotiated not with Edward Beckett, but with another figure in the estate whom he suspected thought these films were all to be recordings of stage productions. Colgan did not disabuse him. Asked if there was a time after which the plays will need to be radically reinterpreted and stage directions ignored or revised, Alan Moloney thought 50 years. After all he said, the World War II and post-war horrors that informed Beckett’s life and his plays are still, for many, within living memory—we are still living in Beckett’s time. Moloney is heard to muse over the end credits of the ‘making of…’ documentary screened on SBS, that Happy Days might one day be set in a hairdressing salon.

Play

Just as a musical score can be variously interpreted without ignoring notes or tempos the variety of the films reveal there was plenty of room for interpretative freedom, not that anyone got particularly adventurous, Anthony The English Patient Minghella aside perhaps. The producers certainly thought his film of Play the most effective experiment of the set. Instead of 3 of the living dead, their heads sticking out of urns, running over and over the trivialities of an affair that ruined their lives, Minghella places them in a ghastly, swirling fog purgatory, an infinite cemetery populated by many more of the rotting tormented. While the image remains unsettling it nonetheless assumes a horror film literalness that a sparely staged version would not.

The odd thing is that Minghella has framed his approach as calculatedly experimental—in the very manner of experimental film. For all the slickness of the image, the film itself breaks, flares, scratches. Camera pans lurch, often with a speed complementing the astonishing drive of the vocal delivery Beckett required. So watching is as demanding as listening. Exciting at the time but on second viewing all too over-determined.

Krapp’s Last Tape

Producer Colgan was of the opinion that naturalising some of Beckett’s abstract stage imagery was inevitable for film. What, he asked, would be the point of filming Krapp at his desk, with his tape-recorder, as if in an otherwise empty space—“film demands furniture.” It’s debatable. In the much shorter Ohio Impromptu, Jeremy Irons plays a man at a table reading to a duplicate self in an empty space which only transforms into colour and detail at the very end after one of the pair has evaporated. In Atom Egoyan’s rendition of Krapp’s Last Tape, brilliantly performed by John Hurt, Krapp is given a complete office-cum-workshop space, tightly framed and mostly shot from the front, but infinitely detailed. It works but only because the naturalism of setting and characterisation is so tightly framed—Hurt works from a set of recurrent expressions and gestures as the framing of the office space steadily narrows. The blue light from outside and the rain running down the window that give the room a richly hued gloom (pure Egoyan) are closed off by a lowered blind and Krapp successively turns off all but one of the lights in his room. Even more focussing is Egoyan’s restraint in editing. The first section of the play up until Krapp pushes the tapes off his desk is done in one glorious mobile shot. Edits thereafter are more frequent, but there are not many.

For performance and filmmaking acuity this was the best of the films. The balance between performed writing-for-the-stage and acting-for-film seemed just right against the theatricality of some of the other films. As did the steady intensification of Krapp’s regret as he listens to a former self get it all so wrong, even though we are denied most of the cosy clues of identification and sympathy that most theatre and film are still in love with. As Hurt, interviewed in the documentary, makes clear, it’s about empathy—you grow to understand and feel for Krapp, but you don’t have to like him. Hurt is of course a film and stage actor, Egoyan is a fine director of film actors, and Hurt was also directed by the late film director Karel Reisz in the production of Krapp’s Last Tape for the Gate Theatre prior to the making of the film.

Waiting for Godot

If you like your Godot warm, funny, finely nuanced and delivered with the lilting poetry of the Irish brogue, then this film is for you. Undisguisedly shot in a big sound studio (a former turkey factory apparently) and with a theatrical look, the lighting and set nonetheless convey the oppressive gloom of a dim twilight and an eerie night in what looks like an abandoned slate quarry. I enjoyed every moment of this film, reliving some of the anxieties and bewilderment I experienced when witnessing productions in the 1960s. I felt for the first time Vladimir’s desperation in Act II, telling the Boy to remember seeing himself and Estragon. I’d recalled the expression as resigned or confused, but here it hurt. For the most part though I did feel I was in a familiar place. The sheer strangeness, fright even, of my first sighting of the play had gone and director Michael Lindsay Hogg had not invented it anew. It seemed like it must have been a very short walk from the theatre to the soundstage for the actors.

Happy Days

Patricia I Heard the Mermaids Singing Rozema, on the other hand, went for a theatrical take on an actual desert location in her film of Happy Days. Winnie is buried up to her waist and then her neck in a very real Tenerife desert. It’s an awesome wasteland, sunny and beach-like at first glance, but, then the camera takes in the whole massive bowl of the landscape, a grim and forbidding place with no sign of life other than Winnie and the barely-there Willie from whom she craves response. Rosaleen Linehan as Winnie is an Irish performer who creates an obtuse, lyrical chatterer and conveys nonetheless a certain sensuality and a will to live. It’s a great performance on the big screen in a film with only a few, bracing shifts of shooting angle. Happy Days is a very effective if sometimes curious hybrid of the cinematic and the theatrical.

Some of the films feel artificial or stagey despite some hard work at transposition, others offer a refreshing surprise because they include some Beckett experienced for the first time, especially Rough for Theatre I and II. Both are shot in a luminescent black and white with fine actors. Rough for Theatre 1 (director Katie Mitchell), about 2 insurance assessors (Timothy Spall is superb as one) absurdly going over the moral scoresheet of a man poised on a window ledge as if about to suicide, has the kind of detail and gross humour you expect of some of Beckett’s peers from Theatre of the Absurd and even the likes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Endgame: on film

Playwright Conor The Weir McPherson’s film of Endgame is marvellously acted by Michael Gambon as Hamm and David Thewlis as Clov, a finely balanced pair of opposites, equally powerful, trapped in a relationship of pragmatic and psychological dependency. Unlike Waiting for Godot, where you could imagine an Act 3 and an Act 4 in which things would be much the same, if a little worse each time, Endgame has the sense if not the evidence of irreversible change. By the end, Hamm’s parents Nag and Nell are dead in their rubbish bins, Clov’s desire to leave has been activated by spying life outside the house in the otherwise dead landscape (with its post-apocalypse suggestiveness), and even if he can’t leave (we never see him go) things cannot be the same. The film realises a dynamic between the 2 men on a performative borderline between naturalism and the grotesque, and with a driven sense of inevitability, even if irresolvable: a grim tension indeed. My complaint about the film is that, unlike Egoyan and Rozema, McPherson or his editor has an itchy finger compounded by his cinematographer offering us every conceivable angle on the room. The constant reverse field shooting of the taut dialogues between Hamm and Clov loses some of the play’s immediacy, while the editing and shooting otherwise sit too much on the side of conventional cinema for such a strange play. But nothing could spoil the performances.

Endgame: on stage

Benedict Andrew’s Endgame is surprisingly respectful. Things don’t seem that way as we are ushered into a tiny theatre within Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2, a black room with the textured walls of a tired bedsit, white sheets strung across the front of the tiny performing area and our individual seats seemingly selected from the less salubrious of secondhand shops. As a claustrophobic blackout gives way to dull light, the sheets/curtains are lowered to reveal Hamm, also sheeted, in his armchair. Clov enters, the wiry Matthew Whittet, physically a fine, nervy Clov, his gaunt face a blustery red, his wild hair requiring an occasional obsessive preening, his limp a rude impediment. He has also enough of the clown in him to sit comfortably in the Beckett universe—he’s playful (making a ghost of himself as he takes the sheet off Hamm), objects defeat him (the curtains on the 2 windows on the world) and he’s slow to learn (forever scraping his telescope across the wall as he aims at the window). Relative to Thewlis’ impatient, businesslike, eager-to-leave Clov in the film, Whittet’s Clov is slow, and so are the rhythms of Andrews’ production. That shouldn’t necessarily be a problem but becomes so when, almost as soon as they dialogue you sense that Hamm and Clov are out of sync, that the give and take and the gags are not going to happen, and that the vocal weight lies resolutely with Jacek Koman’s richly intoned Hamm. There’s a gasp from the audience when Hamm is first revealed: it’s the usual look, like a run-down Edwardian gent in his smoking room wearing his “stiff toque”, but we can see the blood running down his cheeks from his damaged eyes and there’s something that suggests, as someone nearby mutters, ‘Mullah.’ Koman almost sings his lines (Clov parodies his stretched vowels) and makes poetry of the speeches about blindness and about the artist-engraver who sees only ashes, not the loveliness of the world (a moment curiously almost lost by Gambon in the film). Whittet cannot match Koman nor ably pair him in their exchanges. As Herbert Blau insisted at the Sydney Town Hall event, Clov needs to be as strong in his own way as Hamm.

If Koman and Whittet are an oddly cast couple they are still conceivably from the same ailing planet. However, Peter Carroll and Lynne Murphy, as good as they are as Nag and Nell in their rubbish bins (if rather tame compared with their film counterparts), would seem to come from a different production, directed, I imagine, by Neil Armfield with Max Cullen as Hamm and Geoffrey Rush (if available) as Clov. If Andrew’s Endgame didn’t hold together, nor yield the bold directing we’ve come to expect of him, there was still much to savour: the appalling sense of a space at the end of time, the un-maudlin power of the poetry of the Absurd, and the clowning, conscious and not, that insinuates itself into the midst of incipient despair.

The relationship between stage plays and their film adaptations has long been an unhappy one. However, the set of filmed Beckett plays screened at the Sydney Festival and broadcast on SBS are more than substitutes for works we rarely get to see on stage. With varying degrees of success they are primarily filmic experiences, often showing how flexible Beckett’s writing can be and testing the inventiveness of filmmakers. It’s interesting to note that many of the directors are writers themselves, of stage plays or screenplays. The films also more often than not reveal how much room there is for interpretation without getting too far away from the wishes of the late, great man. But will it be 50 years before truly revelatory interpretations of Beckett bestride the stage, or the laptop or the playstation?

Beckett on Film, Sydney Festival, State Theatre, Jan 10-12; Samuel Beckett, Endgame, director Benedict Andrews, design Ralph Myers, lighting Nick Schlieper, costumes Fiona Crombie; Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Festival, Wharf 2, opened Jan 2

In October and November 2002, the word got around. Film producer Peter Sainsbury had made an incisive and provocative statement about what constitutes visionary filmmaking and what constraints are continually thwarting it in Australia. His paper was delivered to the 2002 Australian Screen Directors Association (ASDA) Conference and a number of people suggested that it deserved a wider audience. Here it is then, a rarity in this country, a sustained argument on behalf of visionary filmmaking. In Part 1 Sainsbury establishes his criteria for vision, using recent overseas films as examples. In Part 2, in RealTime 54, he looks at recent Australian feature films and the hindrances to vision that filmmakers face. The Editors.

Part 1: Beyond pragmatism— visionary cinema

To start with, we are not going to accept the complacent idea that a director’s vision is necessarily important, just because a director is a director. Some visions are more important than others. Vision and persistence are not enough if and when they fall short of the visionary. I am going to defend the visionary as a necessary, if pretentious ideal, and consider the visionary aspects of contemporary Australian cinema, their place in the market and the financing structures that do or do not encourage them.

So first, we should define what we mean by visionary. I shall try to do this by reference to 3 imported films screened in Sydney [in 2002]. It is not my intention to give full accounts of any of these films, but rather take from each, by way of illustration, something that is important to a definition of the visionary.

The invisible machinations of desire

In The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke, we discover something we are not familiar with in Australian cinema. We find a contradictory heroine, a person who is inconsistent, a woman whose psychology takes her to the heights of sophisticated artistic achievement and to the depths of vindictiveness and self-abasement, one who dominates others expertly yet who becomes a hapless victim. She is near middle-aged, sleeps beside her mother, fakes menstruation by drawing blood with a razor blade and experiences sex, up to the point where she makes the dreadful mistake of revealing her secret compulsions, only by vicarious means. She is both sympathetic and not; a woman who finds no redemption but loses everything. She is a tragic figure, undone and destroyed by the vulnerability that leaves her open to male sexual revenge. To witness her journey is to learn of the frightening destructiveness of desire.

And desire is the important term here, because desire springs from that which we do not know about ourselves. This makes the realm of desire a privileged terrain when it comes to visionary creative work. In other words, the visionary filmmaker is obsessed with that which lies beyond or somewhere other than in the familiar appearance of things. Psychological realism, with its insistence on emotional behavior stemming from clear causes with logical effects and devoid of paradox, is simply inadequate to portray the chaotic, contradictory and essentially secret, even invisible machinations of desire and therefore of much human behavior. The way the heroine of Haneke’s film acts is both literal and symbolic. She is rooted in a terrible personal dilemma while her story suggests the entire, fateful fear and vengeance that perverse desire can arouse. She is a tragic figure in a world where the tragedy of blind narcissism has replaced the tragedy of blind fate.

Visionary cinema seems to open up what was not previously contemplated. Perhaps this greater dimension of meaning is one that Jane Campion sacrificed when she gave a happy ending to her piano player in the form of a tin finger, a tamed Harvey Keitel and a white picket fence.

The dark playfulness that illuminates confusion

My second example is David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and I have included it because it throws into sharp relief the role of playfulness in visionary filmmaking. Lynch is perhaps the most obviously visionary of contemporary filmmakers in the accepted sense of the term. His work sits in an essentially bizarre terrain, where conventional social behavior and logical cause and effect are displaced, and even satirised, to facilitate an investigation of human identity. Just as the monstrously perverse and violent antagonist represents the dark side of the hero’s psyche in Blue Velvet, and the hero transforms into a fantasy version of himself and back again in Lost Highway, so in Mulholland Drive one character both possesses and is possessed by another. In this later film, however, Lynch places his characters in the dream factory itself, and is able to play with filmic conventions across the narrative, the visual and the aural. He is able to satirise the world of film financing, to play with notions of performance and to construct elaborate jokes around the suspension of disbelief. Nor is he afraid of pastiche, or of moving from high seriousness to pure kitsch, or of spinning yarns that turn out to be red herrings or of flipping us through transformations of meaning by means of an elusive symbol. He can be provocatively bewildering as well as delightfully funny.

In fact, these continually surprising strategies are all essential components of the Lynch vision. He works with a complex rearrangement of aural and visual signs and meanings. Watching his films, we witness a concerted deployment of much that is magical in cinema. Like Lewis Carroll, his subject is imagination itself. His work is visionary because it demands that we reconsider, or see in a transforming new light, something about ourselves and the world we inhabit that we would otherwise take for granted. This something, this measure of everyday certainty, Lynch reveals to be fragile, transitory and paradoxical. His logic undermines common sense, certainty and the predictable. Such are the dynamics of desire and identity. He is externalising the hidden and cannot do so using linear narrative, realism or by character or plot driven genre filmmaking where the singularity and unambiguousness of identity are required conditions. Those who resist Lynch’s vision usually dismiss him as a pretentious show off, confusing us for the mere sake of it. Those who love his work find in it the dark playfulness that illuminates confusion.

Enlightening the political universe

The third film also opens up the perceptions of its audience but in a radically different way. I have not met anyone else who saw this film during its brief Sydney season, but for me it was visionary because it enlightened the political universe we inhabit in a direct and magically honest way. This was Raoul Peck’s Lumumba, the story of an obscure man who became the first head of state of the newly decolonised Belgian Congo in the 1960’s, and how he was subsequently deceived and betrayed, destroyed and murdered. This story is of mythic proportions, with mythic dimensions. The poles of national idealism and international cynicism it portrays go a long way to defining the ‘realpolitik’ of the modern age. The tensions between the private man and the public figure, between hope and despair, between ally and enemy, between third world and developed world are all lucidly illustrated by means of an understated but confident visual style and a dynamic narrative construction. This film enlightened a whole moral universe within about 100 minutes of persistent vision.

The centrality of desire

It would be a mistake, though, to define this film within the parameters of the political drama without recognising what it has in common with both The Piano Teacher and Mulholland Drive. This common theme is desire. Desire gives rise to the world of fantasy and in Lumumba what is at stake is not only the desire to be politically free but also the fantasy of the self-determining, self-knowing, and self-redeeming body politic. The mythic story in play here is of the aspirant idealist individual and the aspirant idealist nation as victims of the warring gods, in this case the gods of avarice and hegemony represented by the US and the Soviet Union, locked into a murderous rivalry for the hearts, minds and resources of the world. And as we know from all the classical examples, the victims of the gods are the victims of their own naivety, their own flaws and their own destiny. Above all, they are the victims of their own desire; their own craving for that which is and always will be elusive.

Commonality in difference

In certain ways these 3 films could not be more different. One is a relentless character study, one a fascinating conjuring trick and one a political parable. I want to make it clear that the visionary is not an exclusive category but an inclusive one. But I believe these films help define visionary film making by several qualities they have in common.

First is the strangely unearthly experience they offer their audience. They all appear to come together like some kind of immaculate conception on the screen. It is as if they were never scripted, and as if they could have taken only the form they did take and could exist only in the medium of cinema. In other words, they are entirely different from the novel, the stage play and from television in terms of the dialectic and the dynamic that they set up between screen and audience. They use the camera and the editing machine as well as the soundtrack to define narrative space and direction, movement, pace and variation. They have liberated themselves from the limitations of following actors around a set to catch a meaning largely and predominantly determined by dialogue.

Secondly, despite their entirely different narrative trajectories and subject matters, they appear fully realised. They are painstakingly constructed to seduce an audience into a set of curiosities, concerns and expectations and to play that audiences’ sensibilities along in all sorts of risky ways until the dramatic imperatives established in the beginning are paid off in the final images. Despite their tendency to enlarge the cinematic vocabulary and broaden its syntax, they are adept at generating catharsis. They have a powerful sense of narrative integrity and wherever they lie between the modern and the postmodern, they do not fail to deliver time honoured dramatic satisfactions.

Thirdly, like all good seducers, they do not attempt to explain themselves, being largely devoid of narrative exposition and of any attempt to explain character motivation outside what the character does. They take the risk of demanding that you come to them rather than choose a safer path by trying to make themselves clear in immediately accessible terms. And as in all good seductions, once you have had the experience on offer, you are likely to want it again. Each of these films leaves you with a sense of discovery, so that when the lights go up you might well wish for a repeat viewing, both to look more closely at how this sense of discovery was created and to enjoy it more. I saw each of these films twice in the cinema.

Fourthly, although set in specific times and places, and shot through with recognisable given circumstances, they use a highly sophisticated audio-visual language to take us into worlds and states of consciousness that were previously unfamiliar, and they burn themselves into your mind like the most vivid and enduring dream. They avail themselves of metaphor, symbol, allegory and myth as well as having a command of more literal narrative storytelling strategies. But most importantly, they invent, each for themselves, the necessary dialectic between narrative content and visual form. Herein lies their chief success and a critical attribute of visionary filmmaking. Rather than relying on any pervasive orthodoxy of craft in their conception, design or execution, visionary movies always have the capacity to surprise us, and it is in this that they fight their way onto our screens. Without their capacity to reinvent the world before our eyes, they would surely be buried by the competition of the less demanding, the more familiar and the more easily marketed.

Finally, I believe, nothing like any of these 3 films could have been made within the aesthetic world of Australian cinema. But I am not going to argue simply that Australian cinema is dull in contrast to gems of enlightenment from other countries. Far from it, for across world cinema these days there seem to be legions of dull movies and rather few visionary ones. Is this how it will always be in a world that demands much and gives little? Maybe so, but the whole idea of the visionary is idealistic. Perhaps, like the protagonist of a basic plot, we need to define our subject by giving it an antagonist. If the visionary is our protagonist in this thesis, how shall we begin to define our antagonist?

The uncertainty principle

Visionary movies exploit a central truth of the modern world; a difficult truth because it leads not only to a kind of moral relativism but also to a kind of personal relativism that can be deeply uncomfortable. But I believe it is unavoidable and of course in many circles it is nothing new. In many cultural dimensions, though not in many of the world’s film industries, it is itself almost taken for granted. Simply put, it says that there is no universal formula or matrix guaranteeing harmonious relationships on any level of human society. It says that this is true of sexual, political, economic and cultural relations. And it also says that, rather than coming only from the unique visions of the Michael Hanekes, David Lynchs and Raoul Pecks of the world, visionary movies defined as I am trying to define them also spring from this truth. It is more than a truth. It is a human condition. They take their inspiration from a conception of a surrounding reality that is by definition problematic, uncertain, and waiting to be reinvented from moment to moment.

It is from this demand that reality be re-defined from moment to moment that visionary movies legitimise their constant reinvention of the dialectic between narrative content and visual form. And the richly composite language of cinema is fabulously well-equipped to do exactly that. Visionary movies use the uniquely multi-faceted qualities of cinema to construct realities in which this difficult truth, and its complex implications, can be explored. Their use of mise en scene, and of narrative, is designed to open up what can be imagined only from a perspective governed by the uncertainty principle. They portray the essentially uncertain nature of human reality as both contradiction and dilemma, and exploit it in form and content and in terms that can be tragic as well as comic, entertaining and enlightening. But they are essentially revelatory.

If we are looking for an antagonist for our plot in which the visionary is protagonist, we could do worse than simply deploy its opposite. A cinema antagonistic to this truth about uncertain, unstable and invented realities is a cinema that trades on the belief that there are still guarantees about a universal human nature, that we can make rational and correct choices about our personal and social relationships and that we either know or can learn who we are. This cinema embodies belief in a knowable human nature and a stable social reality. It tries to dramatise lived experience as if that experience can depend upon a reliable relationship between cause and effect and it endorses a common sense perception of the world. Its paradigm is the story in which men and women make correct choices and decisions about each other, albeit deliciously romantic ones, leading to the promise of ongoing harmonious sexual and emotional relations. It believes in romantic love as a kind of magic wand. It has no truck whatsoever with the unpredictable and messy perversities of desire. My antagonist is, in a word, pragmatic.

The cinema of pragmatism

Let’s play for a moment with an opposition, even a conflict between the pragmatic and the visionary. In case we are in danger of getting bogged down in the abstract, we should take a survey of what pragmatic movies look like. And again we can avail ourselves of 3 imported movies, all recently seen in Sydney.

As it happens, all are built on stories set in contemporary England. They are About a Boy, Last Orders and Bend it Like Beckham. What do these films, directed by people with very different cultural backgrounds, have in common and why do they exemplify the pragmatic? About a Boy is a neatly constructed tale about a self-serving cad (a uniquely British type is the cad, nowadays playable only by Hugh Grant) who is converted to gregariousness and generosity by the emotional demands of a young boy. The film simply asks us, who could possibly remain selfish in defiance of the appeals of a child? And it answers, no one could. Needless to say, a happy ending was had by all. A comforting perspective on human nature is simply endorsed.

Fred Schepsi’s Last Orders is a more complex affair as its narrative moves between present time and various moments in the past, elucidating the relationships between a group of aging friends, one of whom has recently died. The drama is buried in an endless flow of expositional back story but that would not matter if the exposition aspired to unearth something that is generally invisible in such stories, some sub-text in these relationships that might disclose a surprising truth about them. What it does, in fact, is simply confirm clichéd values of friendship and loyalty while acknowledging the emotional strains of life’s travails. It is of course affectionate, sincere and very professionally executed, but very dull.

Bend it Like Beckham is a familiar if effective comedy that trades on the unlikely. In this case the genre is constructed around an Indian English girl who wants to succeed as a soccer player, and is calculated to milk the juice out of the sentimental and amusing contretemps that her determination, the family pressures, cultural differences and a touch of sexual rivalry provide. Again, we are invited to feel good about life, as all the difficulties every one has, be they friends, rivals, parents or lovers, are rather laboriously and predictably resolved.

The deep pragmatism of these plots, it seems to me, rests on their exploitation of tritely conceived emotional journeys, all of which are more or less predictable. They are trite because they have the narrowest possible implications, depending only on the vindication of the individual character. In other words, they lie smugly within a simplistic conception of human identity. Effectively, they define and commodify the emotional content of the human psyche, closing down both its potential and its problems. To this end, their pragmatism is further served by a careful observance of emotional boundaries that ensure against the disturbing, the paradoxical and anything that is not immediately understandable. They work for gratification rather than reflection and they work within the literal and the familiar rather than the symbolic and the surprising.

What is true of these films as narratives is also true of them as sign systems. All are extremely conservative in their use of what the persistence of vision offers by way of potential to redefine, re-envisage, or re-invent what constitutes the real world. In fact, they ensure the triumph of the taken-for-granted. The experience of watching a pragmatic film is to feel that the tools of cinema have been commandeered and enslaved by something that has come before they were applied, by something that demands a rigorous obedience and forbids all but the most minor show of independence. This something is, of course, the script. Pragmatic movies have been all but fully designed in advance of filming by their writers. Pragmatic filmmaking devotes itself to constructing the illusion that what has been written can also be seen. It has no further justification or purpose.

What struck me forcibly when watching these 3 films about England was the similarity to the experience of watching television. There was that same conformism, that same reliance on formulae and the predictable, that same safe and essentially depressing emotional range and mono-vocal control over the means of representation that is endemic to a medium primarily designed to bring audiences to advertisers. To a great extent, it seems, the ability of the cinema to survive and even prosper over what was once seen as the terminal danger of competition from television has entailed the colonisation of cinema by many of television’s imperatives.

Profitability and the visionary

I am talking my way into a problem here. The films I am sticking up for may be described as marginal. After all, though Lynch’s film earned itself a place in mainstream distribution channels in Australia and elsewhere, in Sydney The Piano Teacher and Lumumba were screened only at the Valhalla and/or the Chauvel arthouse cinemas. At the same time, the films I am disparaging must be deemed successful if success means reaching wider audiences and earning more money. So am I arguing that Australian cinema needs to be more esoteric, if visionary, and less pragmatic, if less popular?

I would first point out that an Australian film that had the critical success and prize-winning career of The Piano Teacher would be extremely rare. And an Australian film that ran in Paris cinemas as long as Haneke’s film has in Sydney (despite its inept disparagement by SBS’ The Movie Show) would be considered a minor triumph. Also, what is marginal in one country may not be in another. And further, it is hardly elitist to hope that what one sees in the cinema, leaving aside those products of the American cultural empire that dominate the box office around the world, should not be like staying home and watching TV.

I don’t believe it can be considered wrong, except in the most orthodox and conservative film industries, to allow that some filmmakers can and should be concerned with the use value of the cultural objects they produce before they are concerned with their exchange value. For if the ideal movie is one which is both visionary and popular, which is brilliantly enough conceived and executed to accrue a substantial exchange value as well as possessing appreciable use value (and maybe Mulholland Drive came close) it is very unlikely that such a film will be made within a cultural context and an industry structure that radically discourages visionary qualities.

I am not arguing some simple opposition between the high brow and the low brow, or some antiquated assertion of elitist over popular culture. Rather, that a film industry that does not have space or even much respect for the visionary will not produce internationally recognised movies of any lasting value. Further, I’d suggest a film industry that institutionalises pragmatism (as I will argue we have done) will not enjoy the rewards, one dimensional as they are, that a pragmatic approach can bring except very occasionally and almost by accident.

And it is not the case that the directors of these 3 British films lacked vision. On the contrary, a coherent sense of purpose is strongly evident in all, though the measured skills of Last Orders are a long way from the naïve constructs of Bend it Like Beckham. My reservations have to do with the need to insist on a distinction between vision and the visionary. I believe that a more or less pragmatic vision can apply only to what is there, needing to be said and done more or less in the same ways as they have been said and done before. The visionary, however, is what is required to make discoveries. A film culture which is radically skewed in favour of that which needs to be done over that which might be discovered (as I shall argue ours is) is one deprived of a mature sensibility. It is one in which the languages of cinema are only minimally understood and deployed. It is one in which only a limited class of things can be said. It is one in which neither pragmatically successful entertainment nor visionary revelation will occur. Only the unremarkable will survive and the industry will not flourish. This last point may sound paradoxical. If pragmatically made films can succeed financially, why wouldn’t a pragmatic industry also succeed, at least financially, and at least a fair amount of the time? In the second half of this paper, I will try to find an answer to this question.

Peter Sainsbury, “Visions, Illusions and Delusions,” ASDA Conference, The Persistence of Vision, Sept 2002. Reproduced with the kind permission of the writer and ASDA.

In RealTime #54, Peter Sainsbury discusses the Australian films The Tracker, Lantana and Dirty Deeds and the relationship between film funding strategies and creative outcomes.

Sydney Festival director Brett Sheehy’s decision to hit summertime Sydney with Samuel Beckett was just what the doctor ordered. Something spare to drown out the ‘drunk boats’ on Sydney Harbour; more complex than Nell Schofield’s Summer Edition on Radio National to sharpen the mind. Shades of grey to shut out the blaze of hellish light. Australians no longer recognising themselves (an increasingly prevalent phenomenon) dream for a while they live somewhere else—in “old Europe” where they still see sense, to speak in the old style. January in Sydney was positively Beckettian.

I arrived at the preview screening of Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without A Past at 1 minute past the hour and had to stumble in the dark to a seat in the last row. A barely subliminal noise scratched in my ears. The projectionist had to be Krapp.

The movie ran with the mood. After a savage beating by a street gang M (Markku Peltola) loses his memory and comes within a hair’s breadth of being given up for dead. I’ve heard this is usually a life-altering experience and it certainly is for M who escapes from the hospital to construct another version of himself altogether, from scratch. He wanders through familiar Kaurismäki territory—the bleak landscape of the outcast, railway yards and container homes on the cold outer reaches of Helsinki. In fact I realise this is now the only version of Helsinki in my imaginary. Fresh faced Finns in furs lazing on Alvar Aalto furniture were long ago supplanted by the charming dropouts and weirdos of Kaurismäki’s world. In this one, however, we encounter not so much the curious other as the all too familiar unemployed poor, the salt of the earth and the Salvation Army workers who minister to and are part of their community. And there’s Kaurismäki’s usual gifted band of musicians which in this case includes Annikki Tähti, one of the grand dames of Finnish popular music.

The narrative is more conventional than some of his other work, the dialogue delivered mostly deadpan in very measured style, by actors from his regular ensemble and lovingly filmed by Kaurismäki’s longtime collaborator, cinematographer Timo Salminen. The film doesn’t have quite the engulfing strangeness of Leningrad Cowboys or my all-time favourite, the black and white Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana but it has its moments—M and Irma sit silently, on a sofa with Hannibal the dog inside M’s shipping container home ,’just being,’ listening to rock ‘n roll on a jukebox salvaged from a dump. The film is full of such poignant moments as M encounters true love and friendship as well as the cold face of bureaucracy. All of these factors may account for the film’s “feelgood success” (as opposed to Kaurismäki’s usual “cult status”) touted in the publicity and the fact that it scooped the pool at Cannes last year. The Man Without a Past won the Grand Prix, Best Actress for Kati Outinen who plays Irma, The Ecumenical Award and Film of the Year awarded by the International Film Critics Circle.

Kaurismäki says: “My last film was black and white and silent, which clearly shows that I am a man of business. However, going forward on that road would demand skipping out the picture next. What would we have then; a shadow. So always ready for compromises, I decided to turn around and made this film here, which has loads of dialogue plus a variety of colours—not to mention other commercial values. I have to admit that deep in my subconscious, there might have been a hope that this step would make me seem normal, too. My social, economical and political views of the state of society, morality and love can hopefully be found from the film itself.” (Press notes.)

After the screening, making my dash to the Beckett Public Address to catch Herbert Blau on “The Vicissitudes of the Arts in the Science of Affliction” and Luce Irigaray on live video link from Paris I run through every kind of weather as “earth, wind, rain and fire lay siege to Sydney in 5 hours of meteorological madness” (SMH) and enter the Town Hall to the dry tones of JM Coetzee who stands below a photograph of Samuel Beckett who stands beside a couple of garbage bins. But then Blau delivers a deliriously dense oration interpolated with shards of Beckett; Irigaray weaves a blissful incantation on how to meet “ze uzzer” (including in oneself). Things are livening up!

When South Australian Labor Premier and Arts Minister Mike Rann took office in March 2002, central to his arts platform was the establishment of the Adelaide International Film Festival (AIFF). Soon after, former Adelaide Fringe Artistic Director Katrina Sedgwick was appointed as Director with only 8 months to program the March 2003 Festival.

The 2002 Adelaide Fringe, directed by Sedgwick, broke new ground in that film, digital media, interdisciplinary practice and sound featured prominently alongside traditional Fringe fare. After the success of the Fringe, Sedgwick approached the AIFF with a similar vision of expanded programming, including a mixture of media and practices. Taking a cue from the Fringe’s first screen program Shooting from the Hip, Sedgwick has broadly interpreted screen culture for the AIFF, including film, new media, computer gaming, music video and installation.

If the AIFF is received with the enthusiasm and passion Sedgwick brings to it, it’s bound to be successful. Launching the highlights in November 2002, she said, “If cinema was the art form of the 20th century what will the 21st century bring? Screen culture will continue to dominate our lives and culture but in what forms? The AIFF will be a celebration of the imagination, diversity and innovation of the screen and the artists and ideas behind this creative phenomena.”

With her emphasis on screen culture, Sedgwick has included diverse and innovative works which cross the many uses and interpretations of ‘screen.’ With events such as Mirrorball (the world’s hottest new music videos from the Edinburgh Film Festival) alongside a celebration of Hong Kong Cinema, video installation Ice Cube by Craig Walsh (Qld) and interactive gaming demonstrations, the program is a snapshot of Australian and international trends in screen innovation.

As an ‘international’ film festival, the program also aims to include broad cultural and geographic representation, with local, national and international guests descending on Adelaide’s East End for the week. The film component is strong, and coinciding with the SA Film Corporations’ 30th anniversary, several local productions are included. Rather than a nostalgic foray into past great SAFC films, Sedgwick has programmed recent shorts that reveal the SAFC as a leading body in digital media production. SA-based Rolf de Heer will present his unreleased feature The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (made before The Tracker) and 2 films by local directors Shane McNeill and Matthew Saville are also included.

Sedgwick details the challenges of staging a film festival in March: “Many producers aim to launch their films at Cannes in May, and it is difficult to obtain prints…” Despite this, she is delighted to have secured 45 Australian premieres of international features. Guests to the AIFF will include Iranian-Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi with his film Marooned in Iraq; Dominic Savage from the UK with Out of Control; American director Lourdes Portillo presenting Senorita Extraviada and Taiwanese Yee Chih-Yen, director of Blue Gate Crossing. These filmmakers and other AIFF guests will make public appearances in ‘Meet the Filmmaker’ sessions and other forums during the week.

A key component of the programming strategy is to make films and filmmakers accessible and visible to a wide audience. To encourage active engagement, there are free programs including forums, workshops and the outdoor Deckchair Cinema. The Animations for Kids program features short animated films from around the world for children of 8-12 years, curated by the Melbourne Animation Posse. As well, there will be hands-on computer animation workshops presented by Ngapartji Multimedia Centre and Come Out ‘03. A hip-hop program features New York documentary filmmaker Kevin Fitzgerald presenting New York Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme and Joey Garfield with Breath Control: The History of the Human Beatbox. A special event beatboxing night with Garfield will be held at the Late Night Festival Club in Rundle Street.

Sedgwick is keen to run interactive and gaming sessions alongside the features, shorts and documentaries. Central to this is the involvement of Los Angeles based C-level, a co-operative lab formed to share physical, social and technological resources. Artist Eddo Stern from C-level will be in Adelaide with the highly interactive Cockfight Arena, “in which volunteers from the audience will slip into feathered wings and helmets and then flap about in an arena with other dangerous faux fowl; wireless game controllers will translate, and exaggerate, their activities into images on large screens. The goal? To prompt “contemplation of violence, media and performance in the midst of ferocious, feathery mayhem” (Holly Willis, LA Weekly).

An all day forum on interactivity will be held on Friday March 7, plus screenings of digital and new media work curated by ACMI’s (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) Alessio Cavallaro. Special guest Mike Stubbs from the UK is presenting a compilation of international short video works spanning 25 years, to describe how video art emerged, formed its own culture and has subsequently transformed into the digital.

And to throw some schlock into the mix, the Sex, Death and Greed strand celebrates the ageing studio systems of the 1960s when filmmakers such as Seijun Suzuki, Dario Argento and Sergio Leone worked on the margins of the commercial film industry and threadbare genres, taking the studio system into a baroque and flamboyant phase. Rare screenings of iconic masterpieces Once Upon A Time in the West and The Good the Bad and the Ugly will be followed by spaghetti served to the enigmatic tunes of performance band The Ennio Morricone Experience. Philip Brophy will present a lecture “The Sound of Sex” and The Horror Sleepover, perhaps a film festival first, is an all night movie marathon starting at 11pm on Saturday March 1 (BYO sleeping bag).

And when it’s all over there’s a weekend of world music at WOMADELAIDE. Asked if she will be heading straight to Botanic Park at the end of the film festival, Sedgwick replies, “Of course. When it’s festival time in Adelaide you just keep going.”

Adelaide International Film Festival, Feb 28-Mar 7, Full AIFF screening program and timetable will be announced Feb 2003 www.adelaidefilmfestival.org,

During the 1990s, the digital storage medium of the CD-ROM became a platform for artistic experiments in interactive form and participation. Accompanied by a boisterous technophilic rhetoric proclaiming the promise of liberation from passive media consumption, desktop multimedia (followed swiftly by the internet’s plethora of personal publishing systems) promised the digital avant-garde a new set of tools to cut up and into prevailing commercial narrative forms, as well as cheap, global strategies for distribution. Interestingly in the late 1990s, the consumer availability of digital video cameras and more recently the viability of large scale digital video storage through the DVD-ROM did not capture artists’ imaginations in the same way. Admittedly the libertarian hype about digital media has worn thin and, in many cultural theory and production contexts, given way to a more measured and critical assessment of the ‘newness’ of forms made possible by digital production. Nevertheless, there are relatively few examples of rigorous artistic investigations into the formal, technical possibilities and aesthetic implications of digital video.

Linda Wallace’s eurovision video work, completed in 2001, is a notable exception. Confounding genre specification and therefore implicitly resisting relegation to either digital or time-based media, it boldly announces its status as a ‘linear version of an interactive’ project. And it is precisely this montaging of form that allows eurovision to become an exploration of how visual digital operations—slicing images into each other, pulling them through the grid of the screen transforming them into information, and their slippery layering—might impact upon the temporality of video. Of course video has itself been subjected to a thorough temporal shakedown over the last 30 years, not least by the experiments with corporeal rhythm and duration by Bill Viola, Gary Hill and others. But many of these experiments have taken place against the backdrop of either the dominance or postmodern fading of linear narrative as a mass media form. eurovision instead investigates the productive possibilities for narrative by both interrogating and invigorating it through an interplay with digital aesthetics. The outcome is a new and exhilarating direction for spatial and temporal montage that no longer sees digital artefacts as mere simulators of film, the photographic image or other analogue media, but ushers in the possibility of what new media critic Lev Manovich has termed “digital cinema” (L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

Where earlier computational experiments with narrativity, such as Peter Greenaway’s high definition video Prospero’s Books, failed to sustain narrative within the cumulative fragmentation of digital, visual layering, Wallace’s piece develops a kind of modular narrative that holds in place the splitting of the screen’s frame. eurovision is structured around 4 segments of songs sung by the Russian, Swedish, French and German entrants to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2000; each country’s contestant activating a different screen template for viewing a set of cinematic and photographic juxtaposed and sequential cut-ups comprising that sections’ module. Like a graphic mask that sits over the viewing plane, the screen is divided by blackness into smaller square and rectangular spaces that over time exchange their shape and scale and through which video and images stream at the viewer. Wallace was initially interested in imagining the piece for internet broadband delivery in which multiple streams of information could be delivered on the fly from a database of media stored on a server. (See Wallace’s artist’s statement: www.machinehunger.com.au/eurovision/statement.html.) But rather than some techno-utopian hankering after the promise of bigger and better, eurovision’s resulting linear meditation on the much proffered potentialities of speedier digital media gives viewers temporal distance from a world in which information incessantly streams at them.

The strategy of eurovision is not to substitute misinformation and chaos as a negative critique of the over-saturated and speed-obsessed arena of contemporary, global media consumption. Instead its formal experiments with the screen as a panel, almost an interface, distributes and resequences the internal coherence that the homogenisation of entities such as ‘the information age,’ cinematic narrative and European culture are presumed to possess. The vision of Europe we encounter in the video becomes increasingly situated historically and socially rather than remaining a singular, mythical entity suggested by a myopic European ‘vision.’ While the kitsch veneer of the performers and the consistently blithe pop melodies of the Eurovision song contest suggest a formula for a multicultural Europe, the filmic content playing through eurovision’s multiple screen frames, composed of cut-ups of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), offers us a darker sense of a more alienated and displaced Europe.

For an Australian audience the video straddles tensions between representations of European-ness: the Eurovision songs, perhaps a reminder of languages left behind in the process of migration or—to Anglo-Saxon Australians—sounds and cultures never heard; the subtitles of the French films—glimpses of an intellectual and arthouse cinema scene; the 1950s and 60s Russian space program footage in the smaller side frames challenging our familiarity with the US version. If the technical effect of multiplying and dividing the screen space displaces a unified viewing perspective, then so too do the disjunctive images of Europe offset any attempt we might make at constructing this culture as easily digestible and assimilable. Yet the remarkable achievement of eurovision is its sheer watchability. It elegantly realises just the right blend of fragmentation and repetition. The re-use of older media form and content has been a common feature of digital art and of digital media within advertising and popular culture. And yet this can lead to a kind of visual malaise in which the content of a piece is evacuated or else the audience’s affective response is caught up in admiring technical mimicry. Instead the cinema and television cut-ups in eurovision conjure memories of a nascent post-war European culture grasping at the beginnings of global and mass media culture; a culture out of which contemporary information cultures are born. The subtitles from Godard’s film replayed and multiplied across the screen and tempo of the video, speaking to us from the 1960s of the failure of communication are just as relevant for the state of global communications networks today.

The repetition and fragmentation of form and media in eurovision successfully holds the eye because it is not used as simple commentary on the repetitiveness or loss of meaning produced by digital culture. Instead the selection and replaying of only segments from the films or television footage indicate that the digital reiteration of other media can provide new ways of understanding forms such as narrative. Linda Wallace redeploys only subplots from the Bergman film revolving around the characters of the knave and the witch that deal with the way social groups produce outsiders. This focus on the space of the outside is taken up at a formal level by the video’s digital aesthetics, which investigate the production of narrative outside of a centralised coherence or structure. Against the expectation of a linear unfolding of plot driven by a single event or character, eurovision suggests narrative can be produced through techniques of recombination, moving the subplots or modules around, pulling them apart and fitting them back together again. Narrative can then be seen to rest not upon linearity and singular viewpoint but on the layering, combination and texturing that differently sequenced modules bring to events. It is here that works like eurovision offer us new and productive possibilities for digital video as it thoughtfully remediates the content, form and history of painting, graphics, photography, film and television.

“data [information] terra [earth] investigates not only the technological, but emotional, psychological and spiritual implications of the digital paradigm, and…delves into the advent and purposing of data mapping.”

Birds are filling the skies again

Feather numbers are up and up. Graph spikes in what the birdologists refer to as ‘incidents.’ Witness the parklife across from Sydney’s Central Station. Abundance of beak and claw, a near liquid blob of feathery life force gathered, feeding ravenously. Can’t even see the footpath. People watch nervously from a distance, awed by the spectacle, daring not to think what such a mass might be capable of. Whispers travel around the perimeter—a boy in there somewhere, 8 years old.

dLux blurbalish

futureScreen02 data*terra was the 5th annual dLux X=ploration of new media meets cultural theory and emerging sci-tech. “Investigating the mediation of data across technological, cultural and physical terrains,” the event boiled down to: Data Conspiracy, a live debate over dinner (no spectators); The All Star Data Mappers, a survey and exhibition of database voyeurs and network fetishists curated by John Tonkin; Terra Texts, commissioned essays by Sean Cubitt, Dr Ann Finnegan, Bill Hutchison and Mathew Warren (www.dlux.org.au); Interalia, live thematic audiovisual assaults at The Chocolate Factory, Surry Hills; and Desert Rain, a large scale installation by Blast Theory (UK) at Artspace.

The man on TV

He said there was a major earthquake in Tokyo, Japan. SBS coincidentally, had programmed for that night’s viewers a cautionary tale about the inevitability of The Big One that’d shake Tokyo far beyond its state-of-the-art emergency services. And so it was with added resonance that the fragile, interconnected nature of our global economic electronic was emphasised one sober late 90s evening. Sever the Tokyo tendrils and the world wakes to a depression.

Joining the dots

The All Star Data Mappers mostly consists of websites clickable from the dLux homepage, so visualisation and data mapping enthusiasts can explore this fine selection of provocative datamapping tools months after the exhibition’s end. For me the Oz-gong went to the Firmament software interface for a radio telescope by Mr Snow and Zina Kaye. Josh On’s now infamous TheyRule.net slices through the Fortune 100 company connections with an incredible visual succinctness and Minitasking.com highlights the distributed backbone of the popular peer to peer Gnutella filesharing network.

Virtual warfare

As a large scale and much hyped Virtual Reality environment and interactive art installation, I expected to engage with Desert Rain at Artspace as a boy. Not that I’d be grinning because I was getting free trigger finger in textured corridor practice, just that I expected more technology than necessary. Somewhere amidst the gee-whizardy, the novelty, the gimmickry, the sheer cost of it all, I expected I’d feel like the kid who notices that the emperor isn’t in fact wearing any clothes. Once the impressive infrastructural veneer was peeled away, would it reveal a lack of substance at the installation’s core?

Real warfare

“If they do it, it’s terrorism, if we do it, it’s fighting for freedom”, said the US Ambassador in Central America in the 1980s when asked to explain how US actions like the mining of Nicaragua’s harbours and bombing of airports differed from the acts of terrorism around the world that the US condemned. Since World War II, the US has dropped bombs on 23 countries including: Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, The Congo 1964, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999.

Veneer peeling

Artspace. Spanky, Nick Eye-fi, The Lalila Duo and a little boy. All of us in the raincoats provided. In separate fabric cubicles, wearing microphone headsets and staring at screens formed by water dripping from the ceiling in front of us. Projectors glare onto the other side of the water, providing an almost blurry, ghost-like image to navigate. Finding our way around is done by leaning left, right, forwards or backwards on the small platform beneath our feet and by talking to each other through our headsets when we come within range in the 3D space we’re watching. With the sound of the constantly raining screens, each other’s muffled headset banter and the polygon war playground shining in the glimmery mist, it’s hard for a boy not to be impressed. We each have 30 minutes to find our target characters and collectively get our butts to a particular exit. But what does it all mean?

Oil-soaked birds

“…real events lose their identity…when they become encrusted with the information which represents them…As consumers of mass media, we never experience the bare material event, but only the informational coating which renders it ‘sticky and unintelligible’ like the oil soaked bird.” (Paul Patton tackles Baudrillard on the Desert Rain flyer.)

Desert guts

So I’m in this 3D Pac-man game and I’ve found my sticky ‘target.’ Eerily silhouetted in front of the projector, a character approaches the water screen from behind, then walks straight through it and gives me information about my target. Actors as soldiers have instructed us on our mission, guiding us to the cubicle and over a large quantity of sand to a mock-motel room, where our team learnt via video-recorded interviews that each ‘target’ had experienced the Gulf War in an unorthodox manner. This physical integration of people into its virtual environment and the evocative aesthetics of the physical space distinguish Desert Rain from most war-based computer games. This is just as well because Desert Rain’s simplicity means it couldn’t compete as gameplay alone.

Breadcrumbs

Ritual and sacrifice are understandable responses to larger forces we don’t understand. Daily breadcrumb dumpings were now occurring to appease the flocks. Thing was, a kid had been trapped under one dumping and, when the birds fluttered away, he was no longer there, just a distraught mother hopelessly scanning the empty footpath for some trace. As she looked up, about to cry to the heavens, she fell to her knees rubbing her eyes—the birds were flying in formation in the shape of her boy.

Motion Blur 75%

Blast Theory’s goal is to blur the boundaries between real and virtual events, “especially with regard to the portrayal of warfare on television news, in Hollywood films and in computer games.” This ‘mixed reality’ approach succeeds in part, hampered by the extent to which you are shepherded through the process and your lack of capacity to do anything meaningful in the installation—explore a maze representing a Gulf War bunker, find character and find exit. The Gulf was a resonant and important theme, but I didn’t really gain any new insights into its real or virtual nature through the game options I explored that couldn’t have been expressed through a simple website or pamphlet. Nonetheless it was a highly engaging experience, and Blast Theory’s next work on the streets and online using satellite tracking and handheld technologies should build on this and possibly appear in futurescreen:03.

futureScreen02 data*terra, www.dlux.org.au/dataterra, Nov 15-Dec 7. Desert Rain, Blast Theory, Artspace, Sydney Nov 16-22, 2002. www.blasttheory.co.uk

What would you expect of an International Symposium on Electronic Art? It suggests Peter Stuyvesant—yout international passport to new media pleasure—sweeping views, gold jewellery and sophisticated fashion. A symposium is a formal intellectual presentation and/or a drinking party in the classical Greek style. Electronic art sounds a bit, well, nerdish, leaving you with…a Microsoft conference in an interactive chateau in Aspen?

ISEA 2002 was held in Nagoya, a regional centre 2 hours south of Tokyo. The official theme, Orai, loosely means traffic—comings and goings, contract and communication—and participants were encouraged to respond to this. The symposium’s program, which included exhibitions, academic presentations and performances, was located around a small harbour. Once the official port, it has been re-zoned as a public space, including an aquarium, small museums and a park. About 100 academic presentations were given across 4 days, and 57 installations were housed in 2 huge, disused shipping warehouses.

Kaoru Motomiya’s California lemon sings a song was a highlight of the exhibition. Lemons joined by wires to digital chips produced simple melodies generated by electrical currents from the fruit acid. The audience must kneel, remove the lids from coin-sized boxes on the floor and put their ears almost to the ground to hear the work. First installed at the Headland Arts Centre, California, the piece was made in the shape of a missile, at 1:1 scale, using the same number of lemons as people and dogs who worked in an adjoining former missile base. The missile was pointed at Japan, where the lemons were to be exported. In Japan this work built upon the strong atmosphere of the abandoned warehouses in which the exhibition was held.

Another highlight was Date and Time, a retrospective of Californian video artist Jim Campbell held in the Nagoya City Art Museum. Campbell’s work uses monitor-sized fields of LEDs, rather than monitors or projection, as the display stage of his video pieces. While this technique recalls pointillism, the grid is coarser, heightening the level of abstraction. In pieces such as Running, Falling the movement of a human within the frame becomes intriguingly ape-like, recalling the ambiguous humanity of the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The performance program favoured live sound/video presentations in the currently popular synchronised eye-candy style. Standing out from the crowd was Faustentechnology, a live audio/visual performance by Quebec duo Alain Thibault and Jan Breuleux. Their tight, minimal beat composition and video footage of abstracted land and cityscapes allowed for dynamic connections between the sounds and images, building on filmmaking techniques. Akiyo Tsubakihara and Yosuke Kawamura’s performance Ambiguous Senses/Misleading Feelings 2, also built upon established techniques, exploring video projection’s possibilities as a spotlight, highlighting small cropped squares of light on the dancer’s body.

Within the academic program, Alex Baghat’s presentation of the public-space noise works of Ultra-Red and Infernal Noise Brigade was engaging and well supported by documentary examples of the artwork. Shawn Decker’s brief talk illuminated his innovative sound installation practice, which employs low tech means in effective ways—using small motor and microprocessor units to trigger sound sculptures that display evolving group behaviours, and various resonators—such as metal buckets—acting as speakers. Decker’s work was inaudible amongst the soupy noise inside the exhibition space. Similarly compromised was Melinda Rackham’s engaging virtual space Empyrean and UK work, 32 000 Points of Light, a sound/video projection by Andy Gracie, Alex Bradley, Duncan Speakman, Matt Mawford and Jessica Marlow. The careful composition and otherwise seductive qualities of these soundtracks were also lost in the noisy setting.

Further serious problems existed—both with the local co-ordinating organisation, Media-Select, and the parent group who oversee the ongoing activities. ISEA is curated by committee, arguably allowing greater diversity and more artists who are less well-known into the program. This approach favours larger scale presentation, as a greater number of interests are represented. However, while a theme usually brings focus, in Nagoya the program was mediocre and half-baked. All the work in the exhibition suffered from overcrowding and most artists were disappointed by the result. By contrast the organisational style of the Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific (MAAP) resulted in a focused and dynamic event. Held recently in Beijing and curated by Kim Machan, MAAP was streets ahead of ISEA in its high standard of presentation, diverse works, artistic and intellectual rigour (see report in RT 54, April-May). Further, all the works in MAAP were operational and ready for public presentation, which could not be said of someworks in ISEA.

The massive number of installations, performances and presentations is an ongoing issue for ISEA and feedback from those who have experienced prior festivals indicates similar problems. Despite a huge production staff of committee members and volunteers there is simply too much, spread over too many venues. ISEA, contrary to its image, is poorly resourced—most artists sourced presentation costs independently. The million dollars necessary to properly mount ISEA’s ambitious program is not there.

More problematic, however, is ISEA’s context. Its original purpose to create international connections for artists in the emerging field of Electronic Art no longer seems relevant 14 years later. Roy Ascott, head of the CAII-Star post-doctoral research organization in the UK, suggested a name change from Electronic to Emergent Art, questioning the absence of work from bio-art, molecular and nano-technology, genetics, consciousness research and paranormal perception.

ISEA needs to shape up or ship out…but whaddya know—their next show is on a very big BOAT!—in the Baltic Sea, with the sharper figure of ex-ANAT Director Amanda McDonald Crowley at the helm as Executive Producer. Its organisational mechanism is already well underway.

ISEA 2002, 11th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Nagoya, Japan, Oct 27-31, 2002.

'There was always more in the world than men could see. The precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast, and a man…no harm to go slow, for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.'

140 years ago, when one could see Europe by train in a week, John Ruskin was distressed by the speed at which we viewed the world, overlooking simplicity, subtlety and detail. These days, when the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) community jets into a global locale to hold their weeklong biannual exhibition and symposium, the desire to go slow is again relevant.

In one of ISEA’s opening dialogues, Japanese media theorist Hiroshi Yoshioka echoed this sentiment emphasising the need for slowness, subtlety, and contemplation when viewing electronic arts. This seemed strange from my gaijin perspective of Japan’s furiously paced technological evolution—its constant production of smaller, faster, cuter things. But there is a new social and cultural movement emerging in Japan, promoting an environmentally friendly, symbiotic lifestyle and discouraging mass consumption and waste. It’s not quite the slacker generation, but organisations like Sloth Club (Namakemono), whose motto is Slow is Beautiful, are embracing slow food and helpful technology. With this cultural insight framing my mood, I sought out the mediated aesthetic of being.

Japanese artist Kaoru Motomiya’s elegant interactive sound installation, California lemon sings a song, a rocket shaped floor installation of Sunkist lemons and traditional Japanese cooking pots connected by copper wire, generates its own electricity, becoming a fruit acid battery. Viewers can smell fresh citrus and hear sounds of greeting card size musical devices when they open the pots. Motomiya says that when she considers electronic arts, she thinks about power generation, not only consumption. The lemons also provoke us to contemplate globalisation, as we fuel our bodies, our own electronic circulatory system, with produce exported from around the world. Nature and technology entwine.

Unfortunately, delicate work like this suffered in the Pier Warehouse Exhibition, where disparate installations were squashed together. The lack of discrete viewing and listening spaces was consistently a problem for my gallery-trained sensibilities. The subtly shifting soundscapes produced by navigating through Squidsoup’s (UK) Altzero multi-user-networked shockwave installation were swamped by surrounding works, as was US-based Beatriz Da Costa’s Cello. This normally well disciplined robotic cello player, which alters its movement and sound according to viewer feedback, reacted erratically to the almost market place cacophony and kept tuning the cello rather than playing through its repertoire.

Faring better, as it relied on touch sensors rather than sound, was Talking Tree, which postulates a posthuman relationship with nature, as Takeshi Inomata and Tsutomu Yamamoto (Japan) search for the intrinsic information on being via a piece of driftwood. Touching the exposed and vulnerable rings of the magnificent sawn-through Kiso River tree stump activates texts on the effects of the unmitigated destruction of the forests and images of the stump’s mountain origin, as a ghostly 20 metre animated tree shadow eerily sways to the sound of axes chopping into the trunk.

Our embodied relationship with technology was a recurring theme in the ISEA Symposium. Academic papers competed for listeners’ attention with the venue’s superb gold and silver flock wallpaper, mirrored ceilings, and intricate sculptural chandeliers. Slovenian artists Darij Kreuth and Davide Grassi spoke of incorporeal communication in networked virtual reality performance. In their production Brainscore, sensors are attached to the head of the performers who remain physically constrained, while their tracked eye movements and electrical pulses from brain waves control their avatars. The vaguely face-shaped avatars consume data from the internet resulting in slow changes to their form, colour, size and location. The changes in turn effect the eye movements and brain functions of the performers, providing a self-sustaining feedback loop between performers and software and generating a projected 3-dimensional choreography of colour, shape and sound for the audience. Boundaries of human and machine consciousness subtly merge.

Another unexpected delight was Jim Campbell’s (US) work, at an associated exhibition in Nagoya City Art Museum. Campbell’s unique style questions the subjective experience of technology. He creates a matrix of varying dimensions, for example 32×24 (768) pixels, out of LEDs on which simple black and white (or red) video images of a person walking across the screen are reproduced. The LED display transforms the visual information into a numerical code resulting in a hauntingly beautiful and simple mediation of analogue metamorphosed into digital. In other works he includes a sheet of diffusing plexiglass in front of the grid to produce a blurring effect, shifting the digital pixel image back to a continuous analogue film image. Simplicity is powerful.

So too in the Electronic Theatre with Patrick Lichty’s fabulous 8 bits or less, a short film on alien abduction. Shot on a Casio WristCam with music produced on Commodore 64, the work proved that lo-tech is every bit as compelling as high fidelity: intricately rendered realism. Slowness and subtlety were also the strength of Anne-Sarah Le Meur’s (France) animation Where It Wants To Appear/Suffer. Simple surfaces meet with slow movement; smooth or fibrous textures, subtle colour and minimal light give the impression of both microcosm and macrocosm. Animal, vegetable and mineral are condensed in underwater or intra-body environments.

Appear/Suffer is the first stage of a virtual environment project, Into the Hollow Of Darkness, based on the viewer’s desire to perceive, about which Le Meur spoke at the symposium. In large-scale projection she intends abstract visual sensation to produce a strange intimacy with the image. Nothing tangible is represented—everything rests upon the power of the images and the reciprocity of the power the viewer has over the images. Abstract representations move away from the viewers as they move towards them; the viewers gradually learn that by becoming passive, motionless, they can pause the forms, or “tame” them as Le Meur suggests. This slow dance of viewing the artwork gives the impression the forms are alive, even looking back at you. Slowness creates intimacy.

My meander through the exhibitions and conference presentations was refreshing, revealing works that seek to seduce rather than control the viewer, immersive and interactive on subtle levels, based on simple principles often backed by complex technology. ISEA aroused my desire for feeling, listening and slowness to provide a delightful respite from knowledge, action and speed. It’s nice to be reminded that contemplation is as valuable as manipulation.

ISEA, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts biannual exhibition and symposium, Nagoya, Japan, Oct 27-31.

We are yet to see what capital can become. So goes the ‘new economy’ mantra as its proponents lay claim to the future, which is synonymous with the ‘free market.’ Mastery of the latter supposedly determines the former. Bubble economies—exemplified most spectacularly with dotcom mania and the tech wreck in April 2000, which saw the crash of the NASDAQ—are perhaps one index of the future-present where the accumulation of profit precedes by capturing what is otherwise a continuous flow of information. Information flows are shaped by myriad forces that in themselves are immaterial and invisible, as they do not register in the flow of information itself. The condition of motion nevertheless indelibly inscribes information with a speculative potential, enabling it to be momentarily captured in the form of trading indices.

Michael Goldberg’s recent installation at Sydney’s Artspace—catchafallingknife.com—combines software interfaces peculiar to the information exchanges of day traders gathered around electronic cash flows afforded by the buying and selling of shares in Murdoch’s News Corporation. With $50,000 backing from an anonymous consortium of stock market speculators cobbled together from an online discussion list of day traders, Goldberg bought and sold News Corp shares during 3 weeks in October-November last year (for background to the installation see RT51).

Information flows are at once inside and outside the logic of commodification. The software design of market charts constitutes an interface between informational nodes and flows. The interface captures and contains—and indeed makes intelligible—what are otherwise quite out of control finance flows. But not totally out of control: finance flows, when understood as a self-organised system, occupy a tense space between absolute stability and total randomness. Too much emphasis upon either condition leaves the actor-network system open to collapse. Evolution or multiplication of the system depends on a constant movement or feedback loops between actors and networks, nodes and flows.

Referring to the early work of political installation artist Hans Haacke, Goldberg explains this process in terms of a “real time system”: “the artwork comprises a number of components and active agents combining to form a volatile yet stable system. Well, that may also serve as a concise description of the stock market…Whether or not the company’s books are in the black or in the red is of no concern—the trader plays a stock as it works its way up to its highs and plays it as the lows are plumbed as well. All that’s important is liquidity and movement. ‘Chance’ and ‘probability’ become the real adversaries and allies.” (Interview with Geert Lovink, www.catchafallingknife.com)

Trading or charting software can be understood as stabilising technical actors that gather information flows, codifying these in the form of “moving average histograms, stochastics, and momentum and volatility markers” (Goldberg). Such market indicators are then rearticulated or translated in the form of online chatrooms, financial news media and mobile phone links to stockbrokers, eventually culminating in the trade. In capturing and modelling finance flows, trading software expresses various regimes of quantification that enable a value-adding process through the exchange of information within the immediacy of an interactive real time system. Such a process is distinct from “ideal time,” in which “the aesthetic contemplation of beauty occurs in theoretical isolation from the temporal contingencies of value” (Ed Shanken, “Art in the Information Age”, www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/ InfoAge.html).

An affective dimension of aesthetics is registered in the excitement and rush of the trade; biochemical sensations in the body modulate the flow of information, and are expressed in the form of a trade. As Goldberg puts it in a report to the consortium halfway through the project after a series of poor trades based on a combination of ‘technical’ and ‘fundamental’ analysis: “It’s becoming clearer to me that in trading this stock one often has to defy logic and instead give in, coining a well-worn phrase, to irrational exuberance.” Here, the indeterminacy of affect subsists within the realm of the processual, where a continuum of relations defines the event of the trade. Yet paradoxically, such an affective dimension is coupled with an intensity of presence where each moment counts; the art of day trading is an economy of precision within a partially enclosed universe.

However, the borders of a processual system are also open to the needs and interests of external institutional realities. The node of the gallery presents what is otherwise a routine operation of a day trader as a minor event, one that registers the growing similarities between art and commerce. Interestingly, the event-space of the gallery expresses the regularity of day trading with a difference that submits to the spatio-temporal dependency news media has on the categories of ‘news worthiness.’

A finance reporter for Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper reports on Goldberg’s installation. Despite the press package, which details otherwise, the journalist attempts to associate Goldberg’s trading capital with an Australia Council grant (which financed the installation costs) as further evidence of the moral and political corruption among the ‘chattering classes.’ In this instance of populist rhetoric, the distinction between quality and tabloid newspapers is brought into question. The self-referentiality that defines organisation and production within the mediasphere prompts a journalist from Murdoch’s local Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, to submit copy on the event. Unlike the dismissive account in The Australian and the general absence of attention to the project by arts commentators, Goldberg notes how the Daily Telegraph report made front page of the Business section (rather than the News or Entertainment pages), in full colour, with his picture beside the banner headline “Profit rise lifts News.” The headline for Goldberg’s installation was smaller: “Murdoch media the latest canvas for artist trader.”

Here, the system of relations between art and commerce also indicates the importance that storytelling has in an age of information economies. Whether the price of stocks goes up or down, profit value is not shaped by the kind of political critique art might offer, but rather by the kind of spin a particular stock can generate. Goldberg’s installation discloses various operations peculiar to the aesthetics of day trading, clearly establishing a link between narrative, economy, time and risk, performance or routine practice and the mediating role of design and software aesthetics. catchafallingknife.com demonstrates that it is the latter—a theory of software—that still requires much critical attention. And unlike most players in the new economy, Goldberg’s installation was a model of accountability and transparency.

catchafallingknife.com, Michael Goldberg, Artspace, Sydney, Oct 17-Nov 19, 2002. www.catchafallingknife.com

Of all the arts-centres-on-riverbanks in Australia, Brisbane’s Southbank is one of the most distinctive with its string of performing arts venues, a museum, a major gallery, shops, restaurants, a rainforest garden, cafes, a very popular pool and artificial beach, university faculties (including music and visual arts) and, just a block back, a stylish shopping and eating strip replete with IMAX cinema. There’s also the nearby entertainment centre and exhibition halls. And there’s still room for more growth, which will include the new contemporary art home of the Queensland Art Gallery.

Millions of people go to Southbank every year, just passing through, promenading, having an after work drink, on their way for a swim or to see a show or enjoy a street market. This is a great potential audience for the very latest in public art, something that in Australia has been pretty much limited in the public imagination to sculptures, and a fair few controversies among them. Southbank Corporation, which manages the area, has appointed Zane Trow, formerly Artistic Director of The Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for Live Art, as its Director of Public Art. Selected by and working to a brief from the Public Art Advisory Committee (visual artist Jay Younger, Queensland College of the Arts, art theorist Rex Butler, University of Queensland, both from Brisbane, and Melbourne architectural reviewer and design consultant Joe Rollo), Trow has embraced this unique opportunity with his customary passion, planning a 3 year program, the first stage of which will be launched in April this year.

Trow explains, “South Bank Corporation Public Art Committee has developed a policy and I’m the implementation. It will be a mixture of research into permanent works and a time-based temporary installations program, a lot of which is focused around the Suncorp large screen. This is work that will be in the public domain. It’ll be free, sophisticated work with high level production values. There will be 2 or 3 temporary installations a year involving sound and image with performance and durational components for some of the time.”

Trow declares that there are already very good local new media artists working in the direction he wants to go and with whom he is eager to work—artists like Keith Armstrong and Lisa O’Neill of the transmute collective, Igneous (James Cunningham and Suzon Fuks) and Di Ball, as well as international artists he’d like to have working on Southbank. For local artists, says Trow, “it will certainly give them the opportunity to work on a large scale.”

Although he won’t launch his program until April, Trow offers a taste of things to come: he’s bringing UK DJ and sound artist Scanner back to Brisbane, this time to present his large screen performance-remix of the soundtrack of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville with his own score, to be presented late night, outdoors. The event will be accompanied by a impromptu sound/image performance from local artist Lawrence English, I/O 3 and improviser Mike Cooper.

Trow also offers an example of a major work he is pursuing with Elision, Australia’s premier new music ensemble, and, potentially, UK composer Richard Barrett (who collaborated on the company’s Dark Matter in 2001) and leading Australian new media artist, Justine Cooper.

“Allowing key artists to come together to work on a large scale and allowing them access to a large screen and a performative environment,” says Trow, “is unusual in Australia. While there are large screens in this country, a lot of them are tied to special projects for festivals, or for open air film programs, or occasionally in museums. There’ll be one in Melbourne’s Federation Square, which I’m sure ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) will put to good use…but it’s rare to allow artists really playing with performance installations to get their hands on a resource like that. It’s in situ, a very good one, it’s digital—so it can take a line straight out of a laptop or a DVD player—and it’s mobile. There are about 4 locations for it I’ve identified so far, including floating the screen on the river on a barge for a river-based installation. Having it as an asset is fantastic because you don’t have to go to a ridiculously expensive commercial hire company and ask how much it’s going to cost a day. You’ve actually got the thing and a team of people here who know how to use it.”

Trow’s 3 year program includes works he’ll be commissioning, “a couple in partnership with existing events and linking to the Millennium Arts Project.

“That project is a major capital investment by the state into a renovation of the Queensland Museum and the State Library and the development of the contemporary gallery of the Queensland Art Gallery. That gallery will open in 2005 and will be a great opportunity to work within the precinct on ideas of contemporary culture and public space. It all seems to me to be very pertinent to think about the relationship of the public domain with the Feds circling around the idea of charging for admission to gallery spaces…Clearly the philosophy here at Southbank is about protecting the public domain, having a space in the city that is purely about relaxation and recreation, and creating art happenings in it for the interest and amusement of the general public.”

Trow is pleased to be working with a committee that is “thinking away from the idea that art is good for you or educational…We seek to place contemporary and broadly radical art in public space. It might even be easier putting such innovative work in the public domain, rather than sticking it indoors in arts centres and charging. It’s an opportunity to practically engage with ideas of contemporary art and popular culture. That’s what excited me, the prospect of being able to reach out into those areas with artists playing with communications and ideas.”

There are other aspects to Trow’s vision: he wants to encourage sound artists in particular, especially given there’s a new sound system going into Southbank soon. As well, he’s eagerly developing partnerships with festivals (like the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music). The Public Art program will also represent the Corporation in connection with the Percent for Art scheme, which requires developers to allocate funds for artwork on their sites, and the Melbourne Street development which Beth Jackson, formerly of Griffith Artworks, is working on for Southbank, planning permanent artworks.

Trow is looking forward to “twisting up the whole idea of public art” and getting past the inhibiting bureaucratic vision of it that Rex Butler has critiqued so well. “There’s no assumption in our policy,” says Trow, “that Southbank should behave like anyone else…It’s not an arts organisation. It’s a state corporation set up to manage a public space and the thinking here is about public culture and how you can change with the times, dealing with public art, with the business community, with tertiary educational developments…the mix of people is unique. There is a lot of good thinking about activating the river and integrating the entire precinct.”

Glare is a term that has contradictory or polar meanings. Used as a verb, ‘to glare’ is to fix with a fierce or piercing stare. As a noun, the word takes on different connotations. The glare is a strong dazzling light, an oppressive light that shines with tawdry brilliance. In the former sense, the glare fixes; in the latter it undoes fixity and creates dispersion. Jay Younger’s survey exhibition, Glare, at the University of Queensland’s Art Museum, plays with these contradictions. The tension between the expressed ideological intentions of the artist and the work’s blinding exuberance makes this exhibition rewarding and fascinating.

Glare is not a retrospective, but provides the opportunity to view and review the artistic output of one of Queensland’s most significant contemporary artists. Younger has played a formidable role in the development of contemporary art in Brisbane over the past 2 decades, not just as an artist, but also an educator, curator and mover and shaker in the arts. The social and political consciousness that has enabled her to contribute so profoundly to the development of contemporary art in Queensland also provides the central impetus for her artwork.

This impetus is most apparent in Younger’s installation works of the early 90’s. For Glare, she recreated the grotesque installation work Gormandizer (1993). In a critique of the inflexible concrete structures of masculinist culture, the artist coated a cement mixer in pink sugar. In her hands, this object becomes a great gustatory machine, chewing and dribbling forth a rich mucous of glucose and faux jewels. Other significant installations from that period, Big Wig and Charger (1995) and Trance of the Swanky Lump (1997), are included in the exhibition as video documents.

Big Wig and Charger is the most breathtaking and ambitious of Younger’s installations. It involved 30 women who, in turn, took their place (heads protruding through a hole in the floor of the gallery) beneath an enormous suspended Marie Antoinette wig. While it’s difficult for documentation to capture the immediacy of such an event, Younger’s video creates a powerful narrative that heightens the drama and suspense of the work. In editing the footage, she cuts between scenes of the vulnerable heads of the women, the wig, an idling Valiant Charger in an adjoining car park, and a third space in which headless bodies dangle from scaffolding. Through her focus on the tension of the rope holding the wig aloft, Younger creates a sense of impending doom. In this video documentation and in her re-presentation of Trance of the Swanky Lump, Younger is a consummate storyteller.

Whilst the work in the survey spans the period between 1987 and 2002, it provides the artist with the opportunity to showcase her latest photographic work, the ‘tropical noir’ series Ulterior. Using the glitter and glitz of 70’s kitsch tropicana, Younger has created a pungent tropical noir setting as a backdrop against which to revisit some of the notorious underworld stories and characters of the Fitzgerald era. For Younger, Ulterior aims to break through the illusion that Queensland is a carefree tropical paradise, revealing corruption as a persistent holographic presence.

Stylistically, Ulterior appears to have its genesis in the series of cibachrome photographs, Combust (1991), conceived during an artist-in-residency in the Australia Council’s Verdaccio studio in Italy. In this earlier work, the message is direct and simply composed. In Combust II (1991), a sparkling green pineapple rocket blasts off Las Vegas-style, leaving a trail of pink stardust, whilst in Combust III (1991) the burning letters N O come careening to earth. In the tropical noir photographs, the message is more obtuse with each image highly decorative and crammed full of signifiers. There is a vaguely uneasy feeling of trouble in paradise, but these stirrings don’t seem to unsettle the status quo. It is so easy to get swept up in the decorous glitz and celebration of a place where it is ‘beautiful one day, perfect the next.’ The ‘troubling signifiers’ in the photographs (images of characters from the Fitzgerald Inquiry era) appear as Christmas baubles on an overblown palm tree rather than characters from notorious underworld stories. Perhaps this is Younger’s point, to confront Queensland’s ‘cultural and political amnesia.’ However, the danger is that this meaning does not carry beyond the specific context of post-Fitzgerald Queensland. The works themselves become emblems of decadence and excess rather than a critique of them.

The magnificent full colour monograph that accompanies the exhibition comes complete with commissioned essays by Beth Jackson and Juliana Engberg, and extensive theoretical explanations of the individual works. It establishes the socio-political context for Younger’s work. Here lies the dilemma at the heart of any discussion of this artist’s work. The explanations enable the viewer to trace the political and theoretical impulses underpinning each of the works. Yet the contextual framing provided by the catalogue text tends to be didactic, prescribing in advance how the work is to be read, rather than allowing it to speak on its own playful terms. For example, Big Wig and Charger, Gormandizer and Trance of the Swanky Lump are claimed to offer a feminist critique of masculinist culture. In a similar way, Ulterior critiques what Younger sees as the political amnesia of the post-Fitzgerald era. However, at the level of the material and the visceral, the works move beyond political critique. In this tension I am reminded of Drusilla Modjeska’s claim that “art takes us not into political argument, or not only, but towards the ‘inviolate enigma of otherness in things and in animate presences’” (Modjeska, D, Timepieces, Picador, Sydney, 2002). Jay Younger’s work may be critique, but through it we are moved beyond critique into a realm of visceral corporeal pleasure.

Glare, Jay Younger, installations 1987-2002, Art Museum, University of Queensland, Dec 7-Jan 18, 2002

In her video installation, Lineage of the Divine, Monika Tichacek weaves a complex and visually sumptuous narrative. The protagonist, New York personality Amanda Lepore, is trussed in a salmon-pink, 1950s tailored suit, blonde hair in a net, lips overripe and gleaming, feet squeezed into precarious high heels. The figure paces a room with small, delicate steps, arms crossed, striking a pose in full awareness of being on display. This fetishistic assertion of archetypal femininity raises suspicions about the ‘true’ gender of the figure: is this really a woman or is ‘she’ just acting out? The figure appears to scan the gallery space, which also screams feminine cliché with its walls of studded pink satin, recalling a padded cell as much as the frou-frou bedhead that might grace a girl’s suburban bedroom. The feminine symbolism is interrupted by unmistakably phallic antlers that protrude from the wall, reinforcing the fetishistic yet sexually ambiguous ambience. The antlers, cast in resin in various sizes, evoke a dangerous male sexuality, but also look like children’s sporting trophies.

Close-ups and slow pans fragment and confuse the viewer’s perspective of the figure and the room, although it eventually becomes clear that there are 2 almost indistinguishable personae. The central figure is contemplating another, who lies sleeping, attired in identical clothes and make-up—this is the artist herself. A panning shot reveals that the 2 are conjoined by their hair—a blonde switch that snakes around the room, like an umbilical cord. The first figure slowly comes to touch the other, takes the other’s head in her lap before kneading her face and waking her. All the movements are slow and deliberate, choreographed actions intended for public view not for intimate exchange. Under her pink suit the artist wears flesh-coloured prosthetic casings on her limbs and torso that appear to be attached by strings and hooks to her skin. The first figure pulls these, scratching between flesh and plastic as if to manipulate, or liberate, the other. This scene is underscored by a video image on the facing wall that depicts the artist in prosthetics almost entirely still, breathing shallowly as though in an effort to control pain. She appears compelled to witness the scene opposite, over which she has no control.

Tichacek’s tableau recalls Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, where the painter often expressed her sexually and culturally conflicted identity through the representation of physical pain, integrating the prosthetics she needed to contain her ravaged body into her compositions. In The Two Fridas, the artist represented herself as 2 women, separate but inseparable, sharing blood and holding hands, but riven by cultural contradictions (one wears indigenous Mexican garb, the other the high-collared lace of Spanish dress). Kahlo exquisitely aestheticised her pain and incapacity, her prosthetics and broken spine are as much a literal depiction of her experience as metaphors for her condition as a Mexican woman of a certain class. This aestheticisation, and extreme feminisation, of prosthetics, pain and incapacity, of dependence and strictured movement, also has a strong presence in Tichacek’s work, as does the metaphor of a divided self. Indeed, the symbolism in Lineage of the Divine crosses well into the bounds of overkill, though it is clear that this excess, this hysterical accumulation of charged signs, is very much the intention of the artist, as she forces us to confront the cultural phenomenon of femininity as well as the process of artistic creation. In seeking to articulate both art and sexual identity, the artist necessarily falls back on the language and gesture of cultural stereotypes. This sense of the need to speak with a borrowed tongue is echoed later in the video’s loose narrative, when the first figure lip syncs and shimmies a la Marilyn Monroe to Secret Love, Doris Day’s hit song that later became emblematic of closet lesbianism. The figure appears fated to perform this ritual of celebrity sexual tease; unable to speak her own language, she is forced to communicate through cliché.

However the overall effect of Tichacek’s installation is neither clichéd, nor a familiar exercise in parody and pastiche. Rather, what the artist has created is a seductively claustrophobic but moving evocation of the self-imposed strictures of identity, particularly but not exclusively, those of femininity and the artist. Like the central character in Bergman’s Persona, Tichacek’s protagonist discovers herself through and exploits her muse, is entirely beholden to and relies on her for her very survival, but rejects her, recovers the power of speech through her muse’s confessions but keeps her most intimate thoughts for others. She is one and the same person, but also entirely estranged from herself. Lineage of the Divine powerfully captures this complicity and estrangement between the authentic self and that reliant on cultural stereotype for realisation.

Lineage of the Divine, Monika Tichacek, part of group exhibition Cerebellum for Sydney Gay Games, curator Gary Carsley, The Performance Space, Sydney, Nov 2002. www.performancespace.com.au

Air Kiss’s glowing jumble of deep blue and red light globes dangle in clusters and loop along the walls. Heavy and lovely, lolly-coloured, mouth-shaped, they bloom from the top of columns and drape in strings across the space. Marshalled in corners, each gleaming bulb is linked by a series of wires that spread like secret commands. Yet while they seem to speak of fairs or parties, of Christmas trees and celebrations, beneath their ostensibly cheery appearance courses a vaguely disturbing energy. Contrary to initial impression, the globes are not necessarily celebratory: they could as easily belong to the corpse of a party freshly abandoned as to one waiting to happen.

Traditionally used as decoration, the coloured light globe here is transformed and elevated. As the sole constituent of the work, the globes do not decorate anything—there is nothing to decorate. They enhance nothing, and embellish only empty space. Thus we are welcomed to a floating world of appearances, of deceptive substantiality and ultimately hollow expression. Steven Carson treads a fine line, but successfully. Referring to a world in which style is favoured over substance, he neatly avoids the obvious pitfall of recreating such façadism.

The periodic interruption of the otherwise silent space by an interval of tumultuous music functions to further heighten the viewer’s sense of alienation. All excitement and fanfare, the clamorous crash of bright, harsh, disco-brashness seems to herald some impending event which remains unrealised, its promise unfulfilled. Cut short as unexpectedly as it begins—and before the viewer’s heartbeat has time to calm—this sudden interruption causes the quiet space to reverberate. Its subsequent and abrupt termination results in a resounding disquiet, leaving the space as echoingly hollow as that superficial gesture of affection—as empty as an air kiss.

Such uncertainty enriches Carson’s exploration of the peripheral spaces of mainstream culture and his subsequent manifestation of these metaphorical spaces into literal space. In considering the sub-fields that exist within social life and creative activity, it is to these fringes that both the arts and gay communities—this work was part of the 2002 FEAST Festival—are often relegated. Air Kiss, with its edgy atmosphere of ambiguity, connotes nightclub, brothel and the back alleys of illicit deals and encounters. The sense of seedy glamour—an ambience evoked by its illumination in shades of make-out-room red and druggie-deterrent blue—makes it a place where such ‘alternative’ lives could-can-be lived.

Air Kiss, Steven Carson, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Nov 21-Dec 20 2002.

Friday nights in February in Canberra, The National Museum of Australia will be the place to be from 7.30pm till midnight as the Museum hosts Sky Lounge, a unique showcase of Australian and international animation, DJs, VJs, electronica, multimedia and graffiti art.

Sky Lounge gives young artists a chance to share their work in a spectacular venue with a national profile and provides young Canberra audiences with greater access to some cutting edge urban culture. It’s also an innovative venture for a museum more usually frequented by an older or family audience. Let’s hope it’s the first of many, with copycats in the form of other nocturnal events in museums and galleries across the country.

Each program combines live performances by some of Australia’s top electronic artists and DJs with animated films on the big and sky screens, projected art, multimedia interactives and graffiti.

Malcolm Turner (Animation Posse) has assembled No future, no past…only present, a collection of 50 animated films from young international filmmakers including work from the Amateur Developers Handbook; Tout Va Tres Bien, a unique take on 3D imaging from France’s Soo-Mi Sung; “cool music, cool tools and cool ideas” in S-Crash by Lindsay Cox and Victor Holder (Australia); Drawing the War, a kerbside view of urban warfare by Lena Merhej (Lebanon); and Pandorama “a camera-less film” by Nina Paley (US).

Visual artist, curator and writer David Sequiera has gathered his Future Projections from well-known as well as emerging multimedia artists. Images by Anne Zahalka, Mark Kimber, John Nicholson, Matthew Higgins, Mike Parr, Anne McDonald, Justin Andrews and David Stephenson will be projected onto the walls of the White Cube in the Garden of Australian Dreams. ANU’s Australian Centre for Arts and Technology is putting together an interactive artwork using multimedia created by students.

You can watch the walls of the White Cube further transformed by some of Canberra’s best graffiti artists (Sinch, Kiosk, Atune) whose work will morph and evolve over the 4 weeks of Sky Lounge. And if you’ve got a minute, you can design futuristic vehicles and buildings and see your creations come to life in a 3D theatre in Futureworld.

Seb Chan from the seminal Sub Bass Snarl curated the Hip Hop program which includes The New Pollutants from Adelaide specialising in “a mish-mash of 8-bit hiphop, beat-driven electronica, funk-laden breaks and dark-themed soundtracks for 80s computer games and film scores” and hiphop with “Australian flava” from Sydney’s The Herd.

Two other Sydney bands put in an appearance: Prop combine minimalism, jazz, funk, trance, dub, techno, classical and groove; Katalyst draw influences from hiphop, funk, soul, soundtracks and jazz. Local hiphop act Koolism is also on the bill along with Toby 1 from Adelaide, self-professed makers of “the laptop rock of the future, creating tracks and processing vocals and instruments in real time.” International guests include DJ Scanner and Tipper (UK) and Andrew Pekler (Germany).

The programs are organised into themes (Retro Future, February 7; Beauty, Feb 14; Hip Hop, Feb 21; and Abstract, Feb 28). The artists are different each night but every program has a mix of live electronic music, film and projection. So choose your vibe or go for the lot. After suffering all that smoke, Canberra deserves a Sky Lounge. RT

Narelle Autio’s series of 6 colour photographs, Faith, reveals the dual aspects of her theme—as blind people are led through Sydney streets by their guide dogs, light suddenly illuminates each scene as if uncannily choreographed from above. Autio’s work is part of PhotoTechnica’s She Saw, an exhibition of documentary photography, which contains both recent and older works from well-known and emerging women photographers.

Deep and dark, as if shot at twilight, and full of elongated shadows, the images in Faith contain sharp lines, cones or pinpoints of blazing light, which briefly illuminate the sometimes claustrophobic city settings. These moody cityscapes suggest the shadowed, or completely dark experience of moving through the chaos of the city with no, or limited sight. Some of her subjects, Autio says, can just make out bright casts of sunlight, or feeling the heat of a sudden shaft, will sometimes ask if she took a shot at that moment.

Faith—that the blind invest in the dogs who lead them on their regular routes—is central to these works but so is the examination of public and private space. Guide dogs require a clear box-shape around them to work, which means Autio had to keep well away from her subjects while working, in order not to confuse the dogs who’d grown familiar with her scent. Despite the often crowded settings there is a spaciousness in her composition: footpaths appear like welcome clearings in a crowded grove, train tracks stretch into the distance, suggesting other journeys.

Jackie Ranken photographs places from a great height, and virtually upside down. Ranken’s 8 silver gelatin prints of her home town of Goulburn were made during near-acrobatic manoeuvers in her father’s plane. Prohibited from acrobatic flying above the town, Ranken’s 74 year old dad has perfected the art of tipping his Tiger Moth’s wing to the ground without flipping it so his daughter can capture her evocative shots of the town’s geography. Including both manufactured and natural structures shot from the air, and therefore lacking horizon lines, these Urban Aerial Abstracts take a while to decipher visually. In this sense, like Autio, Ranken prompts us to consider what we take for granted in our ways of seeing, to become aware of how we scan a photograph, assuming we’ll rapidly discover its direct connection to the real.

In Ranken’s work, what looks like a series of boxy houses divided by roads turns out to be a graveyard bisected with paths and then, stepping back, a flag. The circular formations of rose gardens or dams look more like urban forms of crop circle, all their detail miniaturised and made strange; the overlapping roads of the Goulburn bypass become a marvellous spirograph that leads the eye around its curves.

Ranken’s approach lovingly transforms everyday structures into something new. The sweeping lines and textures here remind me of work by some Indigenous artists (Rover Thomas for example) where bold shapes describe features on a 2D landscape. The flatness of Ranken’s style gives the work an appealing abstraction in a show of mostly realist documentary photography.

Moving even further into the stratosphere is Spaced Out at the Australian Centre for Photography. Part of the Sydney Festival, this collection of international and local works examines both real and imagined deep space, space travel and humankind’s continual search for new territory, or life beyond the earth.

In the ACP foyer William Eakin’s series of pigment inkjet prints memorialise the Russian cosmonauts of the early years of space travel. Eakin’s (Canada) series includes space memorabilia—A US Moon Landing Badge and a Japanese collector card featuring cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Beside these are several sepia head shots of other Russian cosmonauts; in circular frames they look a little like Russian icon paintings, or faces peering from portholes in antiquated rockets, or from space helmets. These once famous men stare out from black backgrounds pocked with tiny white stars. Eakin’s work reminds us how quickly what was once revolutionary can pass into the frozen zone of kitsch.

Also referencing popular mythologies of space are Ronnie Van Hout’s inket prints in the gallery proper. Each print contains a suitably discomforting concept in the form of white lettering—ABDUCT, UFO, CREATURE, HYBRID—against differing, spookily green landscapes. The word STRANGER appears to melt, morph or pulse before your eyes, and though it’s a trick of the dim gallery light, this animated quality effectively evokes the sci-fi schlock cinema of the 50s which Melbourne-based Van Hout references. While the exhibition notes claim The artist’s work is “less about outer space than the caricaturing and dramatising of cold war insecurities” the oversized white lettering and the hilly backdrops in his MONSTER shot also suggest the mythical land where such films were created, reminding me of the HOLLYWOOD hills where silicon enhancement and Botox are spawning new forms of life but not as we know it.

Juxtaposed against David Malin’s astronomical imaging, South Australian Holly Wilson’s fabricated galaxies and starbursts look remarkably convincing. Reminding us that our fantasies of space are often at least visually linked to reality, Wilson conjures the pocked, rough, corroded surface of a blue planet, the white explosion of a starbirth, by manipulating chemicals on pieces of film.

I find I can only make sense of photographic scientist Malin’s brightly coloured images by imagining them as something closer to home. They make me think of our own deep spaces. A brightly coloured swirling galactic mass looks like something protozoic, something possibly internal; a crimson webby expanse appears more like the surface of the womb shot with a surgical camera than anything out there.

Russian Yuri Batourin turns the camera back to earth from space, revealing the blue curve of our planet, the white-flecked oceans that cover most of its surface. Cited in the notes as a “21st century version of snaps from the plane, the hotel, the conference centre,” Batourin’s work captures the kind of views most of us will never witness. However, a quick search on the Internet reveals that for the wealthy, space travel is now a possibility. For a mere $US20 million (plus 6-months to a year of training, possible nausea while aboard and backaches after landing) you can spend 8-days in the International Space Centre and souvenir your own shot from beyond our universe. Spaced Out makes me wonder how soon it will be before the moon, now colonised, photographed and souvenired; mapped, charted and traversed becomes simply another (expensive) suburb of Earth.

She Saw. Australian Women Documentary Photographers, curated by Karra Rees, Photo Technica, Chippendale, Jan 18-Feb 15

Spaced Out, curators Alasdair Foster & Reuben Keehan, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney Festival, Paddington, Jan 10-Feb 1

LOCATION: As a co-founder of Squatspace, the artist-run gallery that operated from the Broadway squats in Sydney in the 90s, Lucas Ihlein is a veteran negotiator of the use of public and private spaces. For the duration of their latest exhibition, BILATERAL, Ihlein and collaborator Jane Simon negotiated to live in the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) gallery in Adelaide. This challenges the dominant mode of exhibitions, where the artist simply installs the work and leaves, rarely taking an interest in its multiple effects and reinforcing the idea of art and the gallery as a kind of placeless, autonomous world. Although the work is a response to Adelaide, it brings other places into tension with the gallery: 3 exhibited works were made on the 1999 Artists Regional Exchange Project (ARX5) in Perth (dream narratives on typewriter rolls), Hong Kong (business cards with gnomic pseudo-proverbs in English, German and Cantonese) and Singapore (copies of a small booklet, My Typewriter Only Speaks English, featuring found and original images and texts).

MATERIAL: BILATERAL makes use of old and new writing/inscription technologies: nostalgic and playful, slow before fast, paying attention to everyday, seemingly inconsequential remainders. Rubber stamps, silk screen prints, stencilled letters and Letraset reference 60s and 70s network art practices, while contemporary technologies are used in refreshing, ordinary ways. A VCR suspended in a net throws an oblique projection of an aeroplane flight path over Sydney across 2 walls and above a bed. SMS messages form the basis of textpadpomes, for example, CAN’T READ/SCREEN CRACKED and POLAROID HAS GONE BUST SO STOCK UP ON FILM CAUSE THEY WON’T MAKE IT ANYMORE. As postcards these sell for $1 each—here in Adelaide there aren’t too many buyers. The touch-ability of the work and its invitation to participate is unusual and meets with resistance as well as engagement. A couple of people I ask think the sign “please buy” doesn’t mean what it says, that it’s some sort of trick, part of the ‘art.’ The use of discarded and found materials draws attention to the processes of making. The gallery becomes a workshop, or a sweatshop (I spend ages ironing T-shirts, others carefully/tediously stamp textpadpome postcards). Cheap white cotton T-shirts are stencilled with national stereotypes: ALL-DANES-ARE-HYPER-CONFORMIST-FASHION-VICTIMS; ALL AMERICANS ARE OBNOXIOUS; ALL AFGHANS ARE QUEUE JUMPERS. The blackboard invites guests/visitors to add more stereotypes eg south australians only have 4 types of love. Ihlein prints some of these during the exhibition, adding to the extensive collection.

INTER-ACTIONS: The work generates several special events and day to day interactions with gallery visitors which involve collaborators, ring-ins, and chance encounters. For instance, a screening of films about film (Samuel Beckett’s Film and Gustav Deutsch’s Film Ist) is introduced with a parodic discussion between local and interstate Beckett scholars (with EXPAT and EXPERT stencilled on their T-shirts) littered with false information, pretentious misreadings and spurious pseudo-debates. The screening is then ‘interrupted’ by a rare performance of AM Fine’s Piece for Fluxorchestra (1966)—24 performers recruited from local likely suspects. In the tiny Iris cinema (40 stuffed-tight leather seats) the work performs itself during the interval and is completed by unscripted interjections from a baby in the front row. In Event for Touristic Sites the exhibition takes to the streets during the Christmas Pageant, with Ihlein and collaborators bearing T-shirts stencilled with national stereotypings and armed with a digital video and Polaroid camera. Ihlein makes strategic use of local resources, from people to venues and events, in return making himself available to all and sundry, from dream researchers to community arts network meetings, to a local activist who also squatted in the gallery using it as a resource to make papier mâché guns.

IMMATERIAL: “The only 3d work I do is farming.” Artist statement. Contact letters fixed to the wall.

JUDGEMENT: The scattering of books and journals from the EAF library, along with Ihlein’s notes, work as a kind of open manuscript of work-in-progress showing sources and influences. The practice is performative and pedagogical, spontaneous and historical. From one of the typewriters:

6 crates filled with assorted reading materials ferdinand pessoa poems, ferrara poems, sausage roll 2.20 by simon barney, Dangerous Darwinism (‘i aint descended from no ape’), the chinese literary scene by Kai-Yu Hsu; Spine 3; Mafia for beginners; Audio on Wheels; The Australian Friday November 5th “free Trade Fight Against Terror” WTO in sysdney pic of a protestor (mid twenty sometting-backpack) being wrest hauled away by three police—one looking particularly peeved.”(sic.)

“To settle on private land without pretence or title” is one of the more archaic definitions of ‘squat.’ The works and events at the EAF are fuelled by Ihlein’s engagement with the everyday politics and practices of squatting on disused private properties. In turning the gallery into his own ‘borrowed’ personal space, interactions with local artists and writers, gallery visitors, students and staff become key elements of the ethics and aesthetics of the event: Ihlein offers coffee and biscuits to gallery visitors and makes himself continually available for questions and discussions. It could sound horribly worthy but somehow he brings a light, playful tone that sidesteps the moralising often associated with activist art practices. He says the whole experience of living in the gallery and interacting continually with visitors, often for hours at a time, though productive, is also profoundly disconcerting and exhausting. There is a major ambiguity in this gesture: on the one hand, Ihlein’s desire to be present and to monitor and intervene in audiences’ responses to the work could extend the notion of artistic control by manipulating the reading of the work. However, it also involves gestures of hospitality, generosity and vulnerability: a politics of networked exchange and encounter. Plans for future work include screenings of the Expanded Cinema [pioneering new media and multimedia] films of the late 60s and early 70s.

Lucas Ihlein, BILATERAL Residency and Exhibition, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Oct 25-Nov 16, 2002

We are 19 artists from around the country. We have entered ART CAMP—a hothouse in a cold place, an engagement with strange new processes and eccentric new people, shacking up in buildings so identical that they could only have been built by the military.

We are in Wagga Wagga. (So good they named it twice, a joke Andrew Morrish told at least twice every day. Only he could pull that off and still be funny.) We declare interests in hybridity and collaboration. Aided and abetted by 6 artist/facilitators, several project staff and a regular flow of visitors we pursue the game plan: operate in close quarters, exploit provided equipment and stir like crazy.

There’s a 20-minute walk from the accommodation to the studio spaces. Distance makes surprising things possible. There are conversations to be had, alliances to make, happenings to plot, dinner and drinks to contemplate, hangovers to nurse, people to meet and places to imagine. There wasn’t enough time in today’s workshop to debrief, to regroup, and to imagine beyond the scope of that last exercise. What happens next? Can anyone suggest what can be done with 3 balaclavas, 4 walkie-talkies, a couple of video cameras, and an explicit body or 2? Let’s make a show, quick and dirty. It’s not such a big ask, and there’s no pressure, but as she leant on the bar one night, co-curator Sarah Miller firmly requested a revolution. Our time starts now.

For the first week Melbourne dancer Ivan Thorley and I watch the late news every night, waiting for a declaration of war on Iraq, waiting for World War 3, wondering what will happen here in Wagga Wagga in response. Will this elite artist think-tank come up with an effective intervention strategy—a performative weapon of mass distraction?

Week 1: We get into workshop mode for a few days. Technical and technology workshops (hardware and software) and performance workshops offered in response to our developing interests. A grab bag of ideas, exercises and ordeals, introductions into the aesthetics and personalities of the facilitators—the exquisitely rambling improvisations of Morrish, the laconic wit and DIY approach to projection of Margie Medlin, and the strategically timed eccentric pronouncements and lateral speculations of Derek Kreckler with his ever present camera. In these early days we meet the other artist/inmates on the floor in a controlled environment, steered towards new options to stock up the performative toolbox.

The performance workshops asked difficult questions—interrogate everything you think you know. Why do you do what you do? You have 60 seconds. You’re not convincing enough. Why is what you do important? What would you die for? Face the provocation and terror of the impossible task and HAVE A RESPONSE. Face the fear and make it constructive; turn it into art. Get rid of all of that prepared statement, it’s rubbish. It doesn’t mean anything here and now. Be honest. Be real. What would you die for (how do I address this question in the performance act)? Find a better answer. You have 10 minutes. Your time starts now.

Under the interrogating eyes of Robert Pacitti, Helen Paris and Leslie Hill (RT51, p21) the first week’s workshops weren’t always pretty or fun. It was intense, and sometimes I wasn’t sure it was constructive to face these demons. What sustains us? Are we building a culture of sustainable practice? A different question, equally difficult to answer: are we building alliances here, or are we scoping out the competition?

This intensity needed an outlet. The night of the balaclavas—trouble that was itching to happen. We needed to slip out of the reach of the helpful guiding hands, go crazy and meet in the space that only madness makes possible. It was sweaty, wild and stupid and signalled a turning point in hybrid performance. At least I think that’s what the signal meant—there was no peripheral vision through the balaclava eyeholes, and the walkie-talkie people were speaking in code. Or maybe it was gibberish. There’s a fine line—is this a performance about stupidity, or are we just being stupid? In this late night drunken performance art event gone wrong I gathered a partial view of art making practices across the country. It was exciting, unexpected, and dangerous. This was new territory. The opposition was smart, organised and focused. They obviously know how to secure funding, how to play the game to win. They were up against the drunken individualists, few of whom were playing the same game. The diversion (a beautiful performance by Paul Gazzola) drew us far beyond the point of sense, to the place at the collapse of language; to the question—is this still a game? Meanwhile, saboteurs from the other team rearranged home base—a performance re-installation, an act of domestic deconstruction. An aside—what does it mean that we bonded through enacting a terrorist scenario? What stories were we telling ourselves about ourselves here? Were we filtering the zeitgeist so literally?

Week 2: There’s not much time—make as much as you can. Go crazy. Go beyond what is possible. And we did. This event was not product-orientated, but we had several nights of showings, sometimes 4 or 5 pieces of collaborative work per night. Overload. Breathless debriefs and late night alcohol-fuelled critiques. We needed to stop and reflect. (This was after all, a space outside of the production necessities that destroy the possibilities of reflection, a space for fuelling up, taking stock and projecting into the future, something we didn’t often allow ourselves time for). But with the results of 20 artist collaborations and experiments to experience, time for discussion outside of the informal was impossible. The hybrid practice we stopped talking about after the first few days finally arrived. No one saw it coming, but suddenly it was here—the difference engine was fuelled up and ready for a test drive. Is this hybrid performance—the point at which aesthetic difference is transformed from an obstacle to be surmounted into something important and necessary—difference as a site for investigation, difference as the engine that drives the work, that makes this investigation not just possible but vital? Is hybrid performance always this unexpected, this strange, this unnameable?

Suddenly the last drop of wine has left the bottle and it’s time to hit the long road home. One last shared meal at a restaurant for the condemned and we disperse across the country like a virus, taking with us the seeds for hundreds of potential projects, a network of future collaborators and a support network par excellence. I’m ready. I’m ready like I’ve never been to begin the serious work. We’ve just arrived at the important bit of the conversations. We’ve got past the first names, past the need for politeness. This is the juicy stuff. Something worth fighting for, and yes, if necessary, dying for. We’re still waiting for the war, and we’ll facilitate the revolution slowly. We’re stocking up new ammunition as I write. This is a beginning.

Time_Place_Space 1, Facilitators: curious.com (Leslie Hill and Helen Paris), Derek Kreckler, Margie Medlin, Andrew Morrish, Robert Pacitti; participants: Keith Armstrong, Steve Bull, Mick Byrne, Anna Davis, Leon Ewing, Ruth Fleishman, Brian Fuata, Paul Gazzola, Scott Howie, Catherine Jones, Kelli McCluskey, Russell Milledge, Jason Sweeney, Karen Therese, Ivan Thorley, Chi Vu, Julie Vulcan, David Williams, Rebecca Youdell; co-curators: Sarah Miller (PICA), Julianne Pierce (ANAT), Fiona Winning (Performance Space); Project Manager: Jacqueline Bosscher; Technical support: Simon Wise; Wagga Wagga, September 15-28, 2002 www.performancespace.com.au

red message service is a Hobart-based improvisation ensemble comprising is theatre ltd director Ryk Goddard and physical theatre performers Martin Coutts and Laura Purcell. The group creates a full-length improvisation performance—not theatre-sports games, but full-on physical theatre. They create lush, absurdist, minimalist performance in a self-organizing space while the ensemble is conversely configured by that space.

On a virtually bare stage 99 white balloons, inflated to the size of light bulbs, pulsate with eerie promise. Cradled in Coutts’ arms the balloon-bulbs are held in an ambivalence of capture, containment and embrace. There are no explanations or revelations. The performers co-exist in the space, insistently building images of association and dissociation through the interplay of movement, text, light and sound.

While running in slow motion the performers register amazement. Their quick-fire-language suggests, yet equally denies, explanation or revelation. Purcell engages in the erotic lunacy of tasting clouds on a rainy day—a movement and message for unstable times. The audience is denied any chance of tying the performers into the tired meaning systems of old codes.

Four strands of illuminated blue and red strips stretch across the space. The challenge for the performers is to find their own footsteps and negotiate the potential of each line. red message service responds by offering a user’s course guide, creating instances of intimate alliance and rupture via a domestic clothesline, a cable car to Mount Wellington and a line for carrying a digital global message.

red message service appropriates elements of life in the digital age, showing alternate possibilities for thought. Paradoxically, each improvised situation requires a semblance of resolution before generating the next response to that resolution, producing a continuous folding of reaction and response.

“Into each life some sweet rain must fall,” sings Billie Holiday while Coutts, Goddard and Purcell explore contemporary addiction to the banal promise of the 7 steps to happiness. The balloon-bulbs invite sensuous contact and the performers oblige, holding them against their lips in a scrabble of lust and squeaking.

The entanglements of human life recur throughout the performance. They erupt in Goddard’s dexterous self-gagging, Coutts’ percussive washing-machine stomp offset by the Washington Machine, Goddard’s self-demeaning inner voice, and Purcell’s ability to extend movement into potent dance statement. The performers cling to each other like static electricity before their 2 against 1 triangular pattern segues into childhood ostracism and bullying. The excluded becomes the excluding. Instantly the energy aligns differently, everything implodes and the configuration changes.

The laundry line is replaced by a folding of cloth. The performers sit with shrouds over their faces, accentuating their visible, yet invisible features. We gaze through the cloth to an outline of promise. red message service ensemble challenges the audience to create different thinking of and for themselves.

red message service, performers Ryk Goddard, Martyn Coutts, Laura Purcell; lighting design Jen Cramer; lighting operator Jody Kingston; sound Sarah Duffus; Backspace, Hobart, Nov 22-23

Listening to the plaudits from participants, the first Time_Place_Space hybrid performance workshop seems to have been a success, so much so that the second is announced to take place from Sept 21 to Oct 5. Time_Place_Space is a unique opportunity for Australia’s contemporary performance makers to test their ideas, visions and plans against those of their peers and mentors from home and abroad. The vital element, says co-curator and Performance Space Artistic Director Fiona Winning, is the 2 weeks of isolation that the workshop provides in a rural setting and without pressures of public showing and fast tracking. “We’ll be in Wagga Wagga again, hermetically sealed, enjoying a very potent time, honoring a precious opportunity but not being too ambitious about what can emerge. The model will be similar to 2002 with some artists overlapping and maybe one of the previous facilitators.” Winning and co-curator Sarah Miller (Artistic Director, PICA) are keen to get more experienced participating artists at all stages in their careers into the mix for 2003, “so that it’s not just the dynamic between facilitators and artists that’s at work but between artist and artist.”

Winning explains that “the focus of Time_Place_Space is on performance—hybrid performance. The live body is an essential part of everybody’s work, but some of the participants aren’t performers or performance makers but have a link with it through installation, film, design…”

The 3 overseas facilitators in the first Time_Place_Space were UK-based. Winning says that was incidental but admits “the appeal is of a strong live art community and practice in the UK. It’s diverse and interesting and has good teachers and facilitators.” She says there’ll be a broader international presence in future. The first to be announced for 2003 is a Time_Place_Space coup: Toronto-based artist Michelle Terran, a leader in collaborative digital performance and installation works with a focus on mediated relationships. As she writes in her artist’s statement this is about “the paradox of amplified intimacy to somebody who is far away, mediating or hybridizing spaces (physical and internet space, physical and screen space, public and private space, local and global space) and experiencing what happens in between.”

A visual artist who has moved into the digital, Terran describes her practice as involving “live performance/installations using technologies that address issues such as social networks, presence and the interplay between (media) spaces. My work covers live installations, online performance, telepresence, live art, video, networked collaboration, lab spaces, art and social play.” Terran’s vivid and playful work is informed, she writes, by gaming since “gaming is less about work as work and more about work as play. The artworks produced are less about physical manifestations and more about the language and rules involved in social interactions. A system is set up which then has the possibility of being activated, or played.” For example, the work titled _interference_interaction entails a game board mapped onto an city zone utilizing wireless cameras, video receivers connected to televisions found in local businesses and bicycles.

For images, yellow bicycles were rigged with wireless cameras and used by anybody entering the play space to record the path they take as they move through the area. Live video from the moving cameras was distributed over several monitors throughout the city zone. Video receivers were attached to television sets at local businesses, making it possible to view the action from inside a bar, gallery, furniture store, bank, coffee shop and/or restaurant. The cameras transmitting on the same frequency interfere with each other, causing live on-the-fly editing of the video on the monitors. Interference in flow between people and hardware and the effect of cross signals resulted in a continuous spatial-temporal state of change.

Another work, AFK was “a series of online performances involving sending a SMS message in front of ‘public’ webcams within the context of the local landscape.” Grrls Meet in Different Ways Now is described as an “ongoing online visual jam using hybrid mixes of ICQ, IVisit, Nato and KeyStroke” with a Norwegian collaborator. Examples of Terran’s works are documented at www.ubermatic.org/misha. The artist has an impressive curriculum vitae of Canadian and international residencies, commissions and collaborators, and has worked on a project similar to Time_Place_Space at Canada’s famous arts hothouse, Banff Centre for the Arts.

Time_Place_Space is an important initiative from Performance Space, PICA and the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council designed to support hybrid performance artists to develop their practice and particular works. RT

Time_Place_Space 2, curators Sarah Miller PICA, Fiona Winning; Performance Space and Julianne Pierce ANAT with the support of the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council. Wagga Wagga Sept 21-Oct 5, 2003. Expressions of interests are now being accepted www.performancespace.com.au

We have 2 companies to thank for giving Australian theatre an Australian accent, the Australian Performing Group (APG), or Pram Factory, in Melbourne and the Nimrod in Sydney. Together, they comprised the ‘New Wave’ of Australian theatre. Though both groups began early in the 70s, they are products of the 60s and share that decade’s concerns for uniting art and life and for pushing the boundaries of what could be said by challenging censorship. The brash and joyous vulgarity for which they are remembered was part of an attempt to define a distinctly Australian performing style.

These companies provided a nursery for many important Australian writers and performers. About 90% of the plays in the early Nimrod and the APG seasons were Australian. David Williamson, Jack Hibberd, John Romeril, Alex Buzo, Alma De Groen, Peter Kenna, Stephen Sewell and Louis Nowra are among the writers whose early careers were encouraged by those companies.

Despite their cultural importance, no substantial history of the APG has been published and only one exists for the Nimrod, Julian Meyrick’s See How It Runs (Currency Press, Sydney, 2002).

The Nimrod and the APG were founded by a generation of clever young guns in conscious opposition to the mainstream and Meyrick begins his history by examining the division between the generations and in their theatrical and wider cultural loyalties. As he tells it, there was an older Anglophile generation and a younger generation more influenced by nationalism and US-influenced youth culture. But, while he defines the lines very clearly, Meyrick is rightly suspicious of too neat a division and discovers blurred areas and crossovers. For instance, the popularity of new wave writers led to their being picked up by mainstream companies and many in the new wave happily accepted government subsidies.

Nimrod grew from Sydney University connections, principally between Ken Horler and John Bell and the availability of a cheap space, an old stable in Nimrod Street, Kings Cross, its first home. Later, the company moved to the old Cerebos salt factory in Surry Hills. (‘See How It Runs’ was the Cerebos motto.) Much larger than the Kings Cross premises, the new space afforded more performing areas, a main theatre, Upstairs, and a smaller space, Downstairs, as well as a foyer. The building is now the Belvoir Street Theatre. Finally, and disastrously, there was the move to the theatre complex at Sydney University, the Seymour Centre, in a misconcieved attempt to attract larger audiences.

Meyrick examines 3 productions to evoke the theatrical and wider cultural milieu at the birth of the Nimrod, Oedipus Rex, Hair and The Legend of King O’Malley. Allegedly epitomising the staid and backward-looking mainstream offerings of the time is the Old Tote’s pompous and ponderous production of Oedipus Rex, directed by the imported English high priest of high art, Sir Tyrone Guthrie. In the opposite corner was another import that demonstrated how theatre could replicate ‘life’ in its style as well as by what it represents. Hair had expressiveness, relevance and, seemingly, spontaneity. Michael Boddy, Bob Ellis and their collaborators took those ingredients and gave it a local, nationalist spin with the Old Tote’s homegrown The Legend of King O’Malley, the brashly confident foundation production of the Australian new wave. Audiences and critics greeted it enthusiastically. Its ‘rough’ staging, loosely structured narrative and presentational acting set the production style most associated with the Nimrod. Though there were darker offerings from directors such as Rex Cramphorn and Jim Sharman and interpretations of serious plays by Shepard, Bentley, Berkhoff and so on, the Nimrod keynote was fun. This is especially true of the 1970s’ productions, the decade bookended by Biggles and a rumbustious treatment of Goldoni’s The Venetian Twins.

Personality is obviously important to a theatre history and especially important to the Nimrod in the early years. In the absence of a guiding manifesto or obligations to subscribers and government agencies, programming was an ad hoc arrangement determined by the enthusiasms and availability of directors and performers. The outcome was eclecticism. Meyrick observes something like a 3-faceted aspect to the early Nimrod seasons at its Kings Cross home, new wave plays in ‘popular’ or realistic interpretations, revisionary interpretations of the classics and productions drawn from the international avant-garde. Under the loosened constraints of censorship, there seems to have been a preoccupation with sex running through the repertoire and a tendency towards breezy good feeling. With the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 and a partially concomitant nationalism, “Nimrod was ready to credit itself with something like the national equivalent of the Midas touch: everything it touched turned Australian.”

A successful combination of government subsidy and business sponsorship, including Rupert Murdoch’s, created sufficient funds for the company to move to bigger premises in Surry Hills. At this stage, there were 3 artistic directors, John Bell, Ken Horler and Richard Wherrett. Lillian Horler served as general manager until her resignation in 1976. Meyrick concludes at the end of a revealing description of the artistic leadership, “Wherrett needed Horler’s spark and Bell’s egotism as much as they needed his craft and diffidence.”

The late 70s and early 80s were not a happy time for the Nimrod. When the Old Tote collapsed in 1978, the Nimrod tried to become the state theatre company for NSW. Instead, the Sydney Theatre Company was created. There was an uncomfortable turnover of artistic directors and general managers, especially the rancorous departure of a founding figure, Ken Horler, at the end of 1979. Perhaps fun was under threat more generally too. In June, 1979, Luna Park was badly damaged in a fire that killed 5 boys.

David Williamson’s Celluloid Heroes opened the Nimrod’s second decade and in its self-absorption and inability to sustain a narrative drive Meyrick suggests a reflection and prognostication of the Nimrod’s troubles. One review of it was headed, “The Fun Just Petered Out” and the play went on to die a lingering death at the box office in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Though Nimrod fun survived in the small-scale shows Downstairs and in the foyer, things were definitely turning dark Upstairs. According to Meyrick’s analysis of the first 3 years of the 1980s, all the plays staged Upstairs, whatever their genre, were concerned with serious aspects of “conflict, breakdown and violence.” He also notes greater sexual modesty and cleaned up language. Pointing out the middle age of the major participants and their audiences, he observes, “Where once they may have sided with embattled, feisty, put-upon youth, they now reserved residual sympathy for guilty, implicated, anxious maturity.”

Meyrick’s story of the bumpy slide of Nimrod towards its folding in the mid ‘80s fuses trading deficits, distrust between management and staff, factionalism, staff control and then board control, rescues from bankruptcy and the disastrous move to the Seymour Centre. Meyrick handles the complexities in the painful dénouement of the Nimrod’s history as well as he depicts the company’s rise to triumph. Throughout, he effectively teases out the many strands that knot around the Nimrod without losing a sense that the intricacies are essential to the telling. The narrative is also well served by photographs, tables and chronologies.

See How It Runs is a disciplined, thorough and canny history, the outcome of assiduous work toward a well-deserved PhD and a very useful foundational treatment of the Nimrod. Now that that has been achieved, a lush and juicy, even gossipy, account would be nice. I hope someone is aiming at that by next Christmas.

Julian Meyrick, See How It Runs, Nimrod and the New Wave, Currency Press, Sydney, 2002.

Behind a duo of classic tiled pools is a backdrop of rolling hills with trees swaying in the breeze like a receptive audience. In the foreground is a kiddy-sized wading pool with a jade seahorse adorning its bottom. Behind is the diving and lap zone. Together, they echo the show’s theme, moving from small to large pool like the transition that underpins Stompin’ Youth’s latest project Joyride, the shift from child to young adult.

It’s dusk and the heady aroma of chlorine gets the memory working overtime—thongs, Speedos, lawns, Zinc, hanging out with nothing to do but preen, look bored, play up. The Launceston Swimming Centre becomes an ambient lounge with dj bluff’s blend of trance, house, hiphop, and something that suggests Olympic heroics. The mix moves from sensual to industrial, reflecting the show’s themes of adrenaline and the ever-present tension between conformity and individuality.

Young dancers evoke a hangin’ out vibe on the lawn. The group thickens and moves, at first minimally and then in slow unison—one or 2 bursting free.

The ensemble disperses, leaving 3 forlorn, ragged figures conjuring wind-up ballerinas in jewellery boxes; later, concentrated hand movements evoke drumming bears; both strong childhood images. Voiceovers hint at self-expression, being brave. The audience is presented with a montage of kids playing up—smoking, a bit of aggro shoving, building to the thrill of the joyride. Sharp, jerky movements; the bip of radar; the sound of something being singed—the atmosphere is edgy with a tinge of sexuality.

Finally in the water, li-los, flashlights, clean, sensual movement and the wondrous Bjork create a lovely sequence of play, swoon, splash and glide (and of course, the mandatory Esther Williams-inspired domino freefall)—the joys of being part of the group.

Each transition: from twilight to night; the group’s sprawling then shrinking into a tighter ensemble; movement from small to large pool; and edgy soundscape becoming soothing, supports the thematic binary between fitting in and the risks of self-expression.

Joyride is the first stage of a show called S.Y.N.C (Stompin’ Youth Nautical Crew) to be presented as part of the forthcoming Ten Days on the Island festival, training 24 young people from all over Tasmania, many of whom were new to performance. Luke George, Stompin’s co-Artistic Director sees S.Y.N.C. as a stand-alone show as well as the natural continuation of Joyride. The former will be more about clashes between the young and old and will feature more synchronized swimming as the show explores an older, more rigid form articulated in a new and funky way. S.Y.N.C. will tour 8 regional towns in Tasmania throughout the festival.

I leave Joyride appreciating a program that encourages young people to use and delight in their bodies so skillfully, the spirit generated by their work still palpable.

Joyride, Stompin’ Youth, choreographers Luke George, Bec Reid and Stompin’ Company, Launceston Swimming Centre, Dec 21-22 2002; S.Y.N.C. as part of Ten Days on the Island (see p44), March 28-Apr 5 www.tendaysontheisland.org

From the centre of a wide screen, images of telephone poles split and flip right to the edges of the performing space, rhythmically evoking the small markers of a long journey. The video invites memories of childhood trips from farm to city while the repeated sequences and the softly pulsing soundtrack echo the flashing centre-lines of the road, drawing the viewer across the distances between the 2 ‘centres’ of the Wide Open Road project.

Outback Theatre from Hay in the far west of NSW and PACT Youth Theatre in inner city Sydney worked together over several months with a strong creative team to make this powerful and elegant performance. The final workshops were held in a woolshed at Tupra station on the Hay Plains where the first presentation took place. Together the 2 groups created an imaginative landscape that encompassed the breadth of both city and country spaces while remaining strongly located in the present performance space. This is one of the few productions I have seen that has managed this difficult transition.

Perhaps some of the incongruities of the creative process helped. One of the participants described making theatre at one end of the woolshed while at the other end a mob of ewes were being artificially inseminated.

The training processes, held separately but at crucial stages together in both Sydney and Hay, produced a steady focus, an easy physical presence and a common sense of place and relationship to the performance material in the widely divergent group of performing personalities. The show’s montage style and intelligent construction accommodated a range of aesthetics within its theme of movement across place and time. The idea of direction, whether towards or away from the country/city or more abstractly into an ambiguous future was heightened by the ‘diary ‘ form of much of the verbal material—we are in someone’s journal, inside both a memory as well as a kind of present experience.

As we enter, a young woman searches the air for mobile phone contact, groups hang out on hay bales and sometimes we hear a voice calling ‘hello, hello’, reaching for an ‘elsewhere’ while the audience is captured very clearly in the here and now. The confident and present bodies of the performers create a milieu that is immediately transporting. Surrounding us are the opening segments of the soundscape of light rhythmic sounds, cut across with mobile interference, and the diverging and melding telephone poles.

A back wall of corrugated iron makes a wide horizon and a long streak of light running diagonally across the stage activates another plane. Seamless shifts of place and delicately orchestrated movement through song, simple actions and clear strong voices harmonising fill the performance area and bring an experience of the bush to the city. Perhaps in Tupra it may have seemed like the city going to the bush. It’s here (and there) in the imagination of the audience and performers. The dissolves are almost filmic as sounds of the wind cut across images of both city and country. The time is the present.

Samuel James’ camera is equally comfortable sweeping through urban space or hovering above some minute detail in a wide, “empty” landscape. The images neither illustrate nor explain the actions on stage but sometimes lead and sometimes follow the stage action. The depth of field in much of the camera work brings the breadth of the geography into the awkward length of The Studio space to help create beautifully seamless and sweeping transitions.

Sound and light echo the movement of the camera and create a space that exists in the sensibilities of the young performers, anchored in place through their lyrics, spoken text, the use of icons of the outback (Akubras, hay bales) along with key objects (mobile phones, handbags). These are almost incidental on stage, products of reverie and contemplation in the space itself, as itself, and not part of a pretend place.

Through collages of imagery, we learn more of the lives of these performers than would be possible in a conventional narrative. The structure of images creates constant movement in the physical staging—there’s a stillness that is never static; voices come from all corners.

While the video images are powerful, we are never allowed to forget the presence of the performers in the space. In one of the strongest transitions, the live voices of the performers ‘hanging out’ on stage evoke the sounds of outback space. An Akubra is discovered on the ‘roadway,’ an ironic light flashing on it. We become slowly aware of a tiny figure far away on the deep-red-to-blue horizon on the screen. He is wearing an Akubra ‘for real,’ walking slowly towards us and growing, like a mirage, becoming the farmer whose slow-mo walk declares his certainty in the place. He moves steadily forward till he walks larger-than-life off the top edge of the screen, leaving only the horizon of red earth against the soft blue of the sky. Maybe it’s my memory of my farmer father, but the image is one of the most evocative I have seen in a while, its effect heightened by the precision and humour of the return to the physical presence of the performers.

Thirty or so disparate personalities working across large distances have found a common performance language and created a dense and vivid work.

Wide Open Road, direction Regina Heilmann, co-direction Alicen Waugh (Outback Theatre), Chris Murphy (PACT), video Samuel James, sound Nik Wishart, lighting Shane Stevens; PACT Youth Theatre and Outback Theatre produced by The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Dec 4-7 2002

Directed by Susie Dee and written by Wayne Macauley, The Teratology Project demonstrates the power of context in presenting complex ideas. Delivered with ease and wit by great performers from the Institute of Complex Entertainment, the work was staged at the former Preston and Northcote Community Hospital. Teratology is the study of monsters, fashionable at the turn of the last century. The Teratology Project reveals science itself to be monstrous and vanity its champion.

After submitting a DNA sample on entering the hospital, the audience is divided into 3 groups. We wait in the ward where The Doctor (Brian Lipson) informally shows us some exhibits—pictures of cloned babies, a life-size cast of a cadaver. Then we are separated and move to the first room where the performer Maria Theodorakis waits. She tells us she is one of 4 sisters, all born to different women; she is the only one to whom their biological mother gave birth. We meet 3 of the sisters in 3 successive rooms, none similar, each reacting differently to their captivity. In the fourth room we encounter a body covered by a bloody sheet. The mother enters and explains that she has bred her ‘children’, 28 in all, to provide a supply of youthful exteriors. She has just lifted the face from the fourth clone and masked herself with it.

The doctor guides us through the corridors stalked by an ambiguous figure in a fashionably retro brown suit carrying a portable record player. We are left to wait in the autoclave room and told not to touch anything. In a fish tank is one dead mouse, which has made the whole room reek. We are then guided to a wardroom with a bed enclosed by curtains. The Doctor reveals an old man (Bruce Kerr), who at 168 years has been kept alive in a hospital bed connected to an external fish tank containing a pig’s heart. The old man tells us that he has lost all his memories. They have tried to implant some pleasant ones but none stick. All he can remember is a field of cows but he doesn’t know if it’s his memory. The man in the brown suit enters and plays a strange waltz on his record player. The old man gets out of bed and dances with Death—but the Doctor drags him back, reviving him again. Death wanders off down the corridors.

The Doctor then reveals a woman (Sally Hildyard) eating bananas and with the most enormously pregnant belly propped up before her. The Doctor inserts a lipstick camera into the belly and we are introduced to the child. Angus Cerrini plays a recalcitrant clone of Jesus Christ, conceived in a test tube from an ancient drop of blood on a sliver of the cross, and who at 32 years old continues to refuse to be born. The symbiotic relationship between mother and child is more erotic than maternal.

The whole audience is then gathered together. We watch Death and the old man waltz off together, Death finally triumphant. But the Doctor has a surprise. He tells us that his life’s work has been to destroy Death. He brings Death in strapped to a wheelchair and is about to kill him with a hypodermic needle when we are interrupted by a man, Etienne Grebot, in full French gumshoe regalia. He demands that the prisoner be read his rights and proceeds to argue the defence, producing pictures of cute babies as evidence that the final removal of Death also removes any hope of new life. Finally Death is released and waltzes with the Doctor in a last macabre number.

Institute of Complex Entertainment, The Teratology Project; writer Wayne Macauley; director Susie Dee; former Preston and Northcote Community Hospital, Melbourne, Nov 26-Dec 7, 2002

This is a show you’ll either love or hate depending on your expectations of physical theatre. There have been a number of subversive moments in the genre over the last decade with some key works by Legs on the Wall, The Party Line and others where physical theatre and contemporary performance merge to produce something beyond a parade of tricks. But there’s always a tendency to go back to circus roots for the sheer fun of it, pleasing the audience or re-energising before tackling the dark stuff once more. Brisbane’s Rock’n’Roll Circus do it both ways in their Rock’n’Roll Circus

Inspired by the Mozart-da Ponte opera, The Marriage of Figaro, an adaptation of Beaumarchais’ original play regarded as revolutionary for its brazenly comic critique of artistocratic power, Figaro Variations is what it says it is, a set of variations responding to themes from the opera and subsequent history. It does not reproduce the plot of the opera to any extent, except quite laterally and, occasionally, musically. Although a physical theatre work with not a little clowning and some striking displays of skill, this is no circus. In fact it shifts with determination from rude comedy to stark symbolism, from lively clowning to the distressed stillness of contemporary performance, from the complex and optimistic gaiety of Mozart to the mournfully ironic portrayal, in the music of Shostakovich, of revolution betrayed, and on to silence and reconciliation.

Act 1 is a world made up of routines and gags, visual piss jokes and of relationships, passions and tensions writ large. Cherubino’s dancerly swooning on a very tall pole is brutally interrupted by the Count, a langorous, red-nosed testicle-fondling clown (plenty of ball jokes and juggling), who brings his servant right down to earth. A sustained sequence where he rides his bicycle in a perpetual circle while his servants leap on to shave and to dress him from top to bottom completes the Act 1 picture of casual power and subordination. The slipping between Mozart and a kind of ragtime in Act 1 gives way, after a protracted stillness and silence, to Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2 in Act 2 . Figaro is now a revolutionary hero and comedy gives way to images of increasing oppression—struggles, headlocks, dark feats of strength, of threatening knife juggling and dangerous imbalance. In Act 3, Forgiveness, stark images (a gasping Cherubino descending on a red rope looks like something from Francis Bacon), reversals physical and emotional, and final unions slowly unfold in elegaic elegance—too ponderous and too still at times for the good of the work’s overall dynamic, but you can see what director Yaron Lifschitz is getting at. Such restraint in physical theatre is rare.

The whole concept of Figaro Variations is a bold one and not easy to pull off. It’s not always easy to follow the show even if you know the opera’s characters. Given those physical theatre audience expectations and the movement from fun to increasing abstraction, stillness and seriousness, Rock’n’Roll Circus takes a substantial risk—of being accused of pretentiousness (not helped by the title) and confusing its audience. If the audience were palpably bemused the night I saw the performance at The Powerhouse, they were nonetheless attentive and appreciative. Ably directed and engagingly performed physically and musically, and a confident step forward from the company’s last major work, Tango, Figaro Variations is to be applauded for the risks taken, the seriousness ventured.

Figaro Variations, Rock’n’Roll Circus, director Yaron Liftschitz, musical director Paul Hankinson, music Mozart, Shostakovich and Hankinson, costumes Anna Illic, lighting Jason Organ, choreographer Nathan Tight; Brisbane Powerhouse, Nov 29 – Dec 7

Adopt a codename. Fill out the identification form. Sign the disclaimer. Then get on the bus.

That was the drill for the audience of 22 passengers as they arrived at Artrage’s Breadbox gallery for the PVI Collective’s latest crossover performance extravaganza, TTS: ROUTE 65. And you don’t argue with an enormous, pissed-off looking bouncer named Daddy.

A tour-de-force, TTS: ROUTE 65 was a unique bus tour of Perth, taking the audience to various ‘strategic’ points around the city where they alighted to be confronted with cleverly-layered monologues and performances that were dynamic, absurd, confronting and thought-provoking. TTS furthered the Collective’s continuing investigation into how everyday life is mediated, interrupted, monitored and messed with by technology, surveillance and the mass media, with a new focus on the much-hyped phenomenon of ‘terror.’ As the microcosmic renderings of local spaces and sites in TTS unravelled and Perth was slowly scrutinised and pulled apart, connections to the macrocosm of global Western culture (and paranoia) became evident.

Discourses of terrorism and tourism crashed head on (with some pop history and market research) in the monologues delivered by our deadpan, hilarious and terrifying on-board ‘guides.’ These explications merged mythologies, potentialities and public representations of each site from their strategic weak points and tactical significance to their aesthetic values and visitor statistics. The mixture of meticulously researched fact, outrageous lies and lucidly imagined fiction challenged the audience to unravel an impossibly layered, tangled web of ideas and narratives, revealing the gaps and inconsistencies in the ways we understand and exist in our immediate environment.

Meanwhile, under the cover of night, we were passing through a city growing stranger and less familiar and loaded with shadowy facts and shady figures. Performers chased, serenaded and moved around us, while passers-by looked delighted and confused. By the time we were waved off the bus at Parliament House and herded past a series of wildly gesturing figures with masks and almost-legible profiles attached to their chests, reboarding within a 2 minute time limit, it became even more apparent that PVI is less interested in acts of terror than in the cultural machine that drives our understandings and representations of such phenomena.

The seamless fusion of methodical, astute research and conceptual rigour with equally compelling and challenging performances continues to be PVI’s strength. Core performers Kate Neylon, Chris Williams and James McCluskey as usual delivered intelligent (sometimes literally), commanding and—especially in McCluskey’s case—extraordinarily athletic performances. For TTS, they were joined by Jackson Castiglione (who did a spine-chilling job as our first, ever-so-slightly deranged tour guide—cue nightmares of kindly yet distant men with bloodied teeth) and a strange, chorus-like ensemble of performers who appeared and disappeared in several guises throughout the tour. Melbourne-based electronic outfit Pretty Boy Crossover’s soundtrack was by turns atmospheric and absurd. This expanded line-up and collaborative approach resulted in the most resolved PVI performance in recent memory.

Given the increasing obsession with ‘terror’ in popular Western culture, particularly those strange sound bytes and television commercials which have popped up in the Australian media, hazily warning us to “stay alert” and “look out for anything unusual,” TTS was an intelligent and welcome intervention, delivered to a highly appreciative, if slightly shaken, audience.

TTS: ROUTE 65, PVI Collective, devisors Kelli and James McCluskey, Steve Bull, Chris Williams, Katherine Neylon, Christina Lee, Jackson Castiglione, music and soundscapes Jason Sweeney aka Pretty Boy Crossover, Artrage, Dec 5-8, 10-14, 2002

Once regarded as a short term pop phenomenon, hiphop has multiplied into communities across the world and a multi-million dollar industry that powers on, showing no sign of fading. As with anything on this cultural scale and complexity and its association with race and dignity, power and defiance, controversy is ever present. There are moments however when hiphop opens up to debate and analysis. In Sydney the time is ripe with the Eminem movie 8 Mile currently showing, the imminent release of Mike Broomfield’s documentary, Biggie and Tupac (about the murders of US hiphop rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher ‘the notorious B.I.G.’ Wallace in 1996), a new show at Performance Space by local exponent and hiphop teacher Morgan Lewis in April, and a season of works by UK break-dancer Benji Reid at the Sydney Opera House’s The Studio in March. Hiphop is a popular artform—in some bodies more artful than others.

The award-winning Reid, who has toured the world with Soul II Soul, will combine his “body-popping, b-boy style and poetic text” in 3 works at The Studio over 5 nights in March after running workshops with young dancers from Sydney’s western suburbs.

After taking up dance to combat school bullies, Reid quickly became skilled at robot dancing and break-dancing, trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance then joined a Scottish company and TAG Dance Theatre where he combined text with movement. Later he worked with Soul II Soul, featured in pop videos and studied mime with the David Glass Ensemble. In 1996 he won the European body-popping championship and came second in the World Dance Championships Manchester-based Reid’s current work samples texts from Kung-Fu films and cartoons and features the illusionary movement of body-popping. He will perform The Holiday with Jim Parris on double bass, The Pugilist about a retiring boxer and his ring-side confidante and Style 4 Free, a slapstick, improvised work inspired by jazz with text and muffled beats. RT

The Fondue Set have rocketed to semi-stardom almost overnight in Sydney, moving from small beginnings in local pubs to well received showings in Anstistatic at Performance Space and Dance Tracks#4 with Endorphin at the Opera House Studio and now they’re about to become the glistening stars of their own first full-length show at Sydney’s Seymour Centre. So, who are these 3 young dancers, Elizabeth Ryan, Emma Saunders and Jane McKernan? Are they really just facile twits, heterosexual stereotypes in red tulle and boob-tubes who just want to pick up men and have fun?

Starting out

Emma: Jane and I met at Omeo Dance Studio, and I thought Jane was a bit of alright, I liked her skirt, and her brain too, that was okay. Elizabeth and I were at uni together and I thought she was a bit of alright too, so I put us all in a room together. I thought, if it works it works, and if not, well…After that it became very clear that it was the 3 of us making the work. We’re really fortunate, and I feel privileged that we’re still happy to work together. We try to look after that.

Jane: Firstly we wanted to make dance that all our friends would love to see, which wasn’t about the audience having to be there on time, because my friends never turn up on time. We thought about performing in pubs, and went bar crawling.

Emma: The 3 of us had plenty to deal with, spending a lot of time dancing around, being idiots, having a good time, drinking a lot of beer, actually getting to know each other. That’s a major part of what we do: our work really does reflect our lives, and that is its spirit.

Jane: We have friends in bands, so we thought to use bands as a model: wanting to make something, but you do it with your friends and it’s very local and easy to make and a lot of people come and see it because it’s about socialising. The themes for the shows came out of that.

Emma: What interests us most is when the movement communicates something, where it’s meaningful. That’s what we struggle for. Modelling the group on the bands took the seriousness out of the process—although people see our stuff as not so serious, it was clearly there in our approach to crafting work and it couldn’t have been that funny without that seriousness.

Elizabeth: Yesterday, we had a photo shoot and that became this big performance in itself, being specific about how you’re moving, or how your face is moving. That ‘look’, that discipline about how you’re doing that ‘look’ is much more dancing than acting.

The mini-manifesto

Emma: There’s joy in having our mates enjoy it as well and we clearly began with wanting our audience to have a good time. Now we realise there’s a power in that audience and we can begin to play on it a bit. We deny ourselves nothing really. As long as it has real meaning, then we’re happy. And us being happy is probably the main thing.

Jane: We’re actually much more aware of what we do than we were 2 years ago, so that this new work is coming more out of that awareness.

Elizabeth: We also think more about what the audience might have come to expect, and we want to play with that. If people expect to laugh, do we give them that, or do we give them something that is slightly different, something not so funny?

Blue moves

Emma: The ending of the last show [Blue Moves, Antistatic 2002] was a bit different from what we usually do [“from frenetic comedy…to slow motion ugly humour…to the dark pathos of attempted seemliness”, RT 52, p24], and that reflects where we’re heading. The new one has the same name because we’re working with some of the same material.

Elizabeth: There were lots of ideas that we didn’t get around to performing, that were just on bits of paper. [At Antistatic] it was all pretty fresh, a case of just putting it out there to see what happened. Now we want to expand on that material, to look at the richness that’s there.

Jane: There are also new ideas. Our other shows, Evening Magic and Soft Cheese, were in the same mould: girls on a night out, and Blue Moves still has that element. But now we’re thinking about what happens to the girl on her way home. Lots of people are working in that area—spookiness, horror or thriller—we’ve seen the work of Cindy Sherman and Vanessa Beecroft, the woman alone or woman as object. Almost any B-grade film has an element of sexism there, women being victims. We’ve already set up our characters as fun-loving girls, so we want to look at other facets of that. What’s our responsibility to those girls, what’s their power, their intelligence? And how are people seeing that?

Emma: We’re moving away from our own experience, looking further afield. We’ve set up our own archetypes, a mix of a lot of ideas and now we’re trying to break them open, to see what they are. We’re questioning the idea of a victim, a woman on her own—she’s either a helpless victim, or a helpful victim. She’s not sure. That victim lets us begin to look at who’s in power here, to subvert those roles. She’s on her own journey here and she quite likes it. The woman is more than one archetype.

Jane: What kind of sexuality are we portraying? It’s obvious that we’re heterosexual and that we want to pick up men, but are we talking about this absent man thing all the time, or that girls who are wearing very little are saying fuck me, or just enjoying what they’re wearing?

Emma: We’re also clearing up some archetypes, really focussing on them, taking to an extreme everything that we’ve been setting up, so those archetypes get a bit thicker and a little more artificial. This gives us room to come in as normal individuals, even if we’re dressed up.

Jane: I became uneasy about putting out these crass images of women all the time and also wanted to take more responsibility for who The Fondue Set is by saying, ‘We recognise that you might think these women are foolish, but we’re also saying that we, Emma, Jane and Elizabeth, are women, and these are our experiences.’

The 3-way thing

Jane: As individuals, Elizabeth and I probably aren’t as outgoing as Emma, but the dynamic in the everyday process is much more collaborative.

Elizabeth: Inevitably you get a 3-way thing. One person has an idea, and that gets tried out by all of us, and we each bring whatever we bring to that idea.

Jane: It’s going to be interesting now, because we’ll be working with other people: a set designer, Imogen Ross, and a dramaturg. [The Fondue Set recently did some intensive work with UK dancer-choreographer Wendy Houstoun.] Our ideas need to become stronger so we know what we’re presenting to other people. And I’m not sure how much of a hold we really have on it either. People will see stuff that we don’t see, because we don’t necessarily view ourselves in the same way as others do.

Elizabeth: We’re looking at that in terms of, say, layering up with costumes and makeup. You’ve got all these do-dads and tulle and wigs and necklaces. Is that more revealing or does it hide more?

Eleanor: It sounds likes its all good, all a celebration of women and being who you are, choosing to reveal things or not. Is there anything you wouldn’t care to reveal?

Jane: Actually the construction of The Fondue Set almost protects us from doing bad theatre, because it all gets written into the script and becomes part of the material. Someone described Blue Moves as a reference to all those gang rapes that were occurring. I got worried that people thought that’s what we were saying: women are asking for it if they wear these tiny dresses. So there are always mixed messages. While we’re trying to be empowering, saying you can wear whatever you want, there’s the opposite happening: actually you can’t run very fast if you’re wearing high heels. It’s easy for someone to totally misread what you’re doing. So that makes it scary.

Emma: In Blue Moves there was a section where we struggled about what we meant. Elizabeth had a kind of character, but Jane and I weren’t sure. So we made that uncertainty a part of it. We were quite happy to reveal that we’re not sure, so it’s not so slick, not so tight.

Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders are graduates of the Dance Department at UWS (Nepean) and Jane McKernan of QUT. Elizabeth travelled and performed in Scotland and studied dance as meditation in India. Both Emma and Jane have worked with Rosalind Crisp. All 3 are regular contributors to Sydney’s burgeoning impro scene and have performed in collaborations with other local dance artists. Jane has also been successfully pursuing a solo career (see review of Mobile States, p.41).

Blue Moves, The Fondue Set, One Extra Dance, Seymour Theatre Centre, Mar 6-8, 13-15, 2003 www.oneextra.org.au

Of late we’ve seen a number of interesting projects bringing audiences into closer interaction with artists and at the same time attempt to solve the problem of inadequate support for meaningful development of new work. Australian Dance Theatre’s 2002 IGNITION project was a good example. And in another innovative SA venture, the Adelaide Festival Centre (AFCT) has launched In-Space, a project involving new audiences even more directly in the developing work of contemporary artists.

Unlike current programming structures where audiences only see finished products (and often not so well-finished), In-Space provides opportunities for audiences to communicate with artists through stages of the works in progress. The engagement between artists and audiences is a primary function of the program, not simply an auxiliary ‘value add’ activity. As well as participating in forums and interacting with artists during work in development, participants will also be involved in ongoing dialogue with artists and the AFCT through a website (www.inspace.com.au), interactive online workshops and regular e-newsletters.

The aim is for audiences to share in and contribute to the artistic process. Armed with detailed information on artists’ goals for developing or completing a work, the hope is that a deeper level of understanding of artistic processes, a greater appreciation and connection with the works and with the artists, as well as with the AFCT as a venue will be realised.

The AFCT will provide the structure (through venues, administrative, production and artistic support) for artists to present their work at different stages of its development cycle.

The first In-Space project of the year was Ingrid Voorendt’s Time She Stopped in January performed over 2 nights by the multi-skilled Astrid Pill. In the interview above, Ingrid Voorendt talks about the work whose further development was jointly supported by Arts SA and the AFCT program. Voorendt says, “The In-Space program has given us a rare opportunity to rework, develop and refine Time She Stopped. While retaining the original essence of the work and its raw appeal, the impact of having Zoë Barry on board creating a live and recorded score [was] huge.”

February 8 sees Brink Theatre’s The Rope Project in its first airing in the form of a theatrical seminar. The project takes as its starting point the text of Rope, written as a play by Patrick Hamilton in 1929, and adapted into a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s film in 1948. The original play tells the story of 2 Manhattan socialites who set themselves the intellectual challenge of committing the perfect murder.

Brink Director, Sam Haren says: “We will splice and juxtapose Adelaide’s dark history with the story of Rope, creating a metaphorically ‘forensic reconstruction’ of those real and fictional events in order to examine the connections, similarities and differences between them. At the same time we will develop a unique performance style for the work, investigating dance and contemporary performance techniques as well as fusing the language of cinema, that has editing and camera movement, with live performance”.

The forum will examine the ideas behind The Rope Project, its themes of masculinity, sexuality and violence as well as the thriller medium and Brink’s ongoing interest in the interconnection between filmed and live performance and the translation from one to the other. RT

Forthcoming In-Space projects include Gorge, 3 nights, 3 new writers, 6 performance companies and a fish tank; a physical theatre event on May 13-17; and Kate Champion’s Face to Face. Read more about In-Space activities in RealTime 54.

Growing up Greek-Australian in the suburbs of Adelaide did not give Christos Linou much social cachet. Never mind that Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, migrants are rarely credited with the achievements of their forebears. Not anticipating the middle-class nature of dance (an irony since most dancers are poor), he was nevertheless impelled to study at the Centre for Performing Arts in Adelaide. It took the encouragement of Jo Scoglio (formerly of Australian Dance Theatre) for Linou to feel entitled to choreograph work. Fifteen years later, he now relishes his role as a director in theatre, opera, performance, film and dance.

In 1989, Constantine Koukias, Artistic Director of IHOS Opera, saw Linou perform a “mad night” of film, spoken text, live music and dance. This led to several collaborations including Days and Nights with Christ (1997), performed in Hobart and Sydney. In that work, a counter-tenor hung upside down on a crucifix, over a mountain of salt. The imagery was not unlike that in Linou’s Fiddle de Die (1998) which had him up a ladder, suspended and slightly unsafe in a work on AIDS and drug addiction. Linou also makes experimental films, sometimes projecting them onto the walls for his performance pieces.

Having spent time at community centres in his youth, Linou insists that the work he has made in such contexts is contemporary art. In 2000 he received Australia Council support for a choreographic residency at Footscray Community Arts Centre. His question, posed through the lens of cross-cultural dance, was whether it was possible to develop a national dance form that Australia could call its own. His short answer—no. Merging Chinese, Greek, Irish and Eastern European circular dance formations within abstracted gestures of contemporary dance, seeded a framework for a possible identifiable Australian dance which Linou imagines is a few generations away.

Linou’s continuing interest in political and social issues is evident in ongoing collaborations with visual artist Robert Mangion. Their work began in 1999 with a life drawing class run by Mangion in which Linou performed slow-motion Butoh, trance and ritual dances with suspended projectors that generated images by Mangion, Man Ray, Picasso, Duchamp and Dubuffet. Their idea was to challenge themselves and the class, educating one another about crossing boundaries between visual art and performance. Their current project, Intertextual Bodies, works with the abrasive possibilities of disruption.

Linou and Mangion have created a number of Melbourne-based city actions. Linou calls this work in public spaces an “aesthetic protest,” though one of its strengths is its inability to be clearly identified. For example, The Act of Being Inside Out was staged on the concrete forecourt of the County Court of Victoria. After establishing a pathway from the court’s front door to the pavement, Mangion wrapped and safety-pinned Linou in a black cloth, rolling him along the ground. Fully expecting to be arrested, Linou was the temporary object of intense security interest. Then he was ignored. A resident alcoholic offered helpful advice throughout, while some passing junkies mimed a kick to his immobile body. Placing himself in a position of abject vulnerability, Linou refers to those bodies most at risk from the administration of justice.

Further actions, planned for the Stock Exchange, the Immigration Museum, the steps of Parliament and Flinders Street station, are variously titled The Act of Site Intervention, The Act of Subversive Ritual, and The Act of Refusing to Dance. Though lacking in obvious entertainment value, such works still need to gain the attention of passers-by. In one event Mangion posed as a decoy, tripping over Linou’s body and dropping a sheaf of papers. People stopped to help, then found that Mangion had disappeared. For Linou and Mangion, these acts take studio space into the public sphere.

Not all city spaces are alike, nor are they constant over time. Public and institutional perceptions of safety, security and threat are currently in flux. It will be interesting to watch these future acts and the kinds of bodies they put under construction. While Christos Linou calls these “social scientific-art experiments,” they are also civic interventions of an uncertain kind. Inasmuch as they are experimental, their outcome is unknown. Linou feels mature enough now to be, in Buddhist terms, empty-minded and open to the possibilities provoked by these works.

Sometimes it’s nice to be seduced. In The Morning After, the Night Before, performer and choreographer Shannon Bott invites the audience to a collective assignation, from a soap box in the foyer of Performance Space—a charming kind of spruik—her body and voice advertising an open ingenuousness with a touch of taut sleaze. She has a remarkable face, dewy and bold, like her initial invitation full of cliché and innuendo and she works with sentiments expressed in the worst women’s magazines which we love to deride but recognise enough to raise an embarrassed giggle. She invites us to meet her inside the theatre, to participate in her illusions of wide-eyed love and naked lust. She tells us stories: The Princess and the Pea, the one about the bartender and several other guys who end up in her living room. The work sets out to illuminate this fusion: a cockeyed sentimentality both mawkish and unavoidably human and Bott’s vocal and facial expressions take us a long way. Her energy is joyful and buoyant like a cocker spaniel puppy, with dance material that is choreographically uncluttered and rhythmically foursquare. Yet I found myself wanting those clichés about relationships to go somewhere really illuminating—but maybe that’s what illusion is about—constant expectation doomed to fall just short of transcendence.

Jane McKernan’s I Was Here takes us to a different place altogether, not quite so amusing, probing a woman’s lapses of consciousness, trying to make visible that moment where awareness slips insensibly into void, a place of simultaneous degradation and release. Under a blue light, she dances, drained of colour, but held fast by a suffocating disco beat. Another figure lies mostly unnoticed, with her back to us, fallen and very still; on the other side of the stage a video shows a perpetually falling man, about to slip out of the screen but never quite disappearing. At times McKernan shifts her weight, totters, slides, falls. On the ground in skirt, stilettos and ankle socks, she is both a hopeless drunk and an unselfconscious child, a helpless scrap of humanity trying feebly to regain her feet, but so unaware of her own struggle she maintains an unexpected kind of dignity.

Nalina Wait’s improvised KYU circumscribes another kind of territory, with a sparkling clarity and complexity that makes the work look simple. She defines her dimensions and trajectories across a progressively illuminated diagonal, a well-used and effective design, an increasing corridor of light lengthening as if she’s pushing its far boundary with her body. After stretching to the farthest point, the energy draws her back like a retreating wave, leaving the wash of light. Her limbs are articulate and neat, the lines of her body sharp and clear, sometimes expressing mere quivers of sensibility, but there is a sense of progression and development which surpasses the simplicity of the score. The rhythms of her movement are complex, unexpected and pleasingly uneven.

Naida Chinner devised and performed Once Bitten (directed by Ingrid Voorendt), a work with a similar theme to Bott’s—a battle between romanticism and cynicism—but the place she takes us is a bit less glitzy, much less glamorous and definitely more squishy. It probably had to go last on the program because of the squashed tomatoes on stage at the end—way too difficult to clean up in a hurry. The movement is chunky and full-bodied. Being succulent and organic rather than textbook material, the choreography serves the dance well. Tomatoes, ripe and juicy but with a soft and easily broken skin, are used as a symbol of all the horrible things that love can do. Does anyone survive intact being stepped over, fallen on repeatedly, chewed up and swallowed, squashed, thrown, picked up and dropped? Chinner’s world becomes progressively littered with broken, leaky flesh to the unforgettable strains of Roy Orbison’s Love Hurts.

Mobile States 2: The Morning After, the Night Before, performer Shannon Bott, choreographers Shannon Bott & Sue Peacock (WA); I Was Here, choreographer and performer Jane McKernan (NSW); KYU, improvisation Nalina Wait (NSW); Once Bitten, choreographer and performer Naida Chinner, director Ingrid Voorendt (SA); producers, PICA & Performance Space; Performance Space, Sydney, Nov 20, 2002

It’s hard, amidst the incendiary alarm of Canberra, to settle down to write. I imagine the ceiling catching fire, the intolerable heat, getting the children out in time. Of course, for many, this is not an act of imagination: I feel a strange guilt queuing at the shops beside a couple who have lost everything, their clothes still charred, their bodies carrying the stories of what’s been lost.

To see, to have seen a performance in these circumstances—particularly one about landscape and identity, soil and soul—puts pressure on the work’s tone and meaning; perhaps all theatre events, to be deeply of relevance and value, need to match and meet this pressure, meet circumstance. We are already asked to see more than enough. Sometimes, in performance, we are asked to see too little. The endurance of seeing too little is sometimes as difficult as viewing too much.

In Constructed Realities we are led, ostensibly, inside-out, through the theatre’s back-end and bowels. The question “What is it to be Australian?” is answered in images ranging from mounds of ochred soil, to a tea party, city buildings, squares of grass, an immigrant’s remembered garden. Verbal answers are also given via videoed interviews: young faces cite coast-hugging cities, blank interiors. “My country’s soul is a stranger”, writes the quoted poet. I wish the work that follows would seriously critique the lack of depth in these replies.

This is a work at once so resolutely anthropocentric (consider the 95% of the bush reserve’s animals that died) yet sets up the human subject as mere outline: ballgowns, suitcoats, shadows chalked on the floor. We are not singing up the land here, nor digging into our psyches; we may follow in a dancer’s footprints as we promenade behind her, but the parameters are as strictly drawn as the tidy wooden bevels holding in the sand. A dancer’s grief at the burnt-out shell of her house is played like a model walking benignly through some strange decor. And though we are sprayed with water simulating a rainshower, the timing of our sensory experience is strictly limited and controlled. We walk past, through and around vignettes that are not given the chance to grab us, touch us, envelop or confront; this is landscape, like a zoo, behind bars.

This would not be so troublesome, perhaps, if not for the aspirations indicated by the program quotes by Stephanie Radok, Randolph Stow and most problematically, David Tacey, whose Edge of the Sacred is a highly-regarded tome that pleas for White Australia to stop ignoring both the landscape and its own unconscious. In Constructed Realities ideas of edge and interior are maintained rather than challenged, much as the answers given by interviewees reflect on the fun of the shore and the “too big” question of the inside.

I find another paragraph in Tacey, one not so useful to the choreographer’s goal:

‘Australian settlers have to feel unsettled; that is the beginning of our maturation process and the seed of real cultural wisdom. It is only by feeling unsettled that we begin to feel the psychic gap between society and nature, between our rational conscious attitudes and our more elemental…forces.’

This signals disruption, syncopation, arrhythmia, at the very least, surprise; instead we are given evenness, regulated viewing time and all too often the coy steadiness of a model’s smile.

There is no punctum where the unconscious or landscape really penetrates, activates, transforms (bodies, words), assaults, disappoints. The attractive dancerliness to most of the actions, a consistent separation of voiceover and action and the fact that the landscape is implicitly feminine (an all-female cast, except one male on video) need serious interrogation. I desperately want something fresh in this work: soil-mounds and taped interviews are already well known and indeed superlatively executed in both the National Gallery and the Museum. Of all places, why be imitative of something so well done in the city’s permanent, long-standing exhibits? It doesn’t make sense. What are the real questions being asked here?

That said, the piece is gently, if not deeply, evocative of simpler and more obvious aspects of landscape, with some pleasing and technically skilled sequences that cohere into an even-toned, unified aesthetic. But that is not the cry of my “strange soul” (Stow) trying to know itself anew, particularly not in this city, in these times.

Constructed Realities, New performance work/promenade theatre; concept, choreography and direction Clare Dyson, lighting Mark Dyson, landscape geologist Steve Hill, performers Avril Huddy, Katie Joel, Tammy Meeuwissen, Lisa Faalafi and Fez Faanana, lightbox Susan Lincoln, writer Gordon White, sound Kimmo Vernonnen, costume Bianca Seville & Loraine Meeuwissen; Canberra Theatre Centre, Jan 9-11, 15-18

Take the stairs to the top of the old Salvation Army Citadel. At the third floor, 3 doors open onto a narrow landing. Opposite, a small twisting staircase spirals up into the darkness. Even at midday this passage requires an electric light. At the top is a small square room, your traditional artist’s garret. But the artist in this garret is not struggling to find her muse: Rachael Dease works here.

Dease’ latest work, The Scoundrel Becomes an Outcast, which she performs (piano and vocals) with the Schvendes Ensemble, premiered in the restored finery of the Old Midland Town Hall in October last year for the Artrage festival. The Scoundrel reflects her recent departure from predominantly chamber music oriented work. A “song cycle”, composed of 12 interwoven sections, it illustrates Dease’s recent explorations into jazz, blues and country and western. The slide guitar work of Schvendes Ensemble member Jonathan Brain lent a haunting tenor to the melancholy of the penultimate minutes. Dease says, “You throw something like a slide guitar in and you just can’t escape it. And it was played brilliantly; it certainly wasn’t played in traditional style…There is no way the other performers can escape how they are going to react when there is an explosion of lap steel.”

At 53 minutes this is more than twice the length of her longest piece pseudopop-for-fragile-insomniacs. The creation of The Scoundrel marks a maturing of Dease’ sense of authorship and compositional control. How did this occur? “It’s really hard as a director [of Schvendes Ensemble] and as a composer to work with a group of people and keep giving them what you want them to play when you know that they know their instruments a lot better than you do. Respecting them as musicians is a pretty big thing…I mean it was pretty controlled to a certain extent, what they actually did, but they did have a lot of freedom, more freedom than they would have in another group. I think their playing reflected that.”

Her use of controlled improvisation in The Scoundrel has resulted in “…playing that was a lot more emotive, organic…Quite a lot (of the Ensemble) are jazz musicians…they all received the same sheets so everyone knew what everyone else had…all of a sudden I was using, basically, jazz charts instead of classical scoring…and the Ensemble interpreted that in a completely different way and they played differently.”

When I remark that the second performance, at PICA, was noticeably different from the first, Dease smiles. “I wouldn’t have it any other way…I don’t know if I could get up at the moment and perform the same piece exactly the same way.”

Dease looks about the room, smiles, then laughs, “Maybe I lack discipline. I really like that element of rock music and jazz and blues. It would almost be a disappointment if performers from those genres got up and performed something exactly the same way that you heard them play it last time.” Surprise and spontaneity are part of Dease’ directorship of Schvendes Ensemble. Above the table where we are talking is Club Zho’s annual new music award (a Zhoey Award) to Dease and the Ensemble for “consistently rehearsing for major performances at the last moment.” This is not a lack of professionalism, it’s just logistics. In the case of The Scoundrel Dease says, “It was hard to get 7 musicians in the one place for a 3 hour rehearsal [late in the year].”

Before a full house in the theatrical space of the Old Midland Town Hall, in a glow of sidelight and bathed in the backwash from the video projection behind them, Dease and Schvendes Ensemble constructed The Scoundrel for the first time in its entirety.

“Because I work with Tristen Parr, the cellist…he knew the pieces. We worked together on them beforehand so [his] being in the string section was pretty concrete. He was able to lead. When we were performing I was directing Tristen and he was able to bring the string section in and out. And the string quartet reacted to his playing…Also Jonathan Brain, the guitarist and I had worked through some of the songs before. So it wasn’t completely blind, Definitely the whole show was unfolding before our eyes. It was the most enjoyable show I’ve ever done.”

Two weeks later The Scoundrel was performed at PICA which, she says was “…extremely enjoyable. I think in some ways the music was better. I think in both shows what was really amazing was the way the musicians fed off each other and what they were given. And they were able to explore genres like I had.

“The good thing about the Midland performance, about the Ensemble not really knowing the piece from go to whoa, was that they were really, really on the ball. There was no room for just sitting back and so they were thinking really hard about what they were going to do. The second time they were more relaxed and less worried, they knew how the piece was going to unfold and could therefore experiment a lot more but they were still very much on the ball.”

Dease is so pleased with the PICA performance that she has thrown out months of studio recordings in favour of that performance for the CD release of The Scoundrel.

Given the combination of her compositional talents, working methodology and the diversity and depth of ability of Schvendes Ensemble Dease says, “It’s hard not to get a unique sound.”

The Scoundrel Becomes an Outcast, Rachael Dease and Schvendes Ensemble, Artrage, old Midland Townhall, Perth, Oct 25

Constantine Koukias, composer and Artistic Director of IHOS Music Theatre, has a thing for big sheds. It’s one reason for his repeated staging of epic scale operas. His Hobart based company is currently gearing up for its production of Tesla, Lightning in his Hands, an opera with 51 performers, which opens the Ten Days on the Island festival on March 28. Commissioned by the West Australian Opera the work was originally performed in a developmental stage by IHOS Music Laboratory in Hobart in 2000 (RT 41, Feb-March 2001).

Nikola Tesla, the opera’s protagonist, invented the Alternating Current (AC) electrical system all modern cities use today. On the surface he’s a little known, vastly under-credited figure, though, Koukias has been surprised to learn how many people have come across his brilliant and colourful subject, either through science-based study, practising a trade that evolved from Tesla’s discoveries, or simply through wide reading. Because of this we can expect a fair quota of engineers, science boffins and sparkies in the audience alongside IHOS devotees.

Tasmania’s biennial Ten Days… festival celebrates island cultures from around the world, so audiences attending Tesla will be even more varied than usual. With this in mind, Koukias has tried to create something for everyone while remaining true to his vision. There are what he calls the ‘blockbuster elements’, including an ingenious representation of Niagara Falls using ‘lots of sand’; and the scale of the production, alone, will draw some who might otherwise give opera a miss.

There is plenty to keep them occupied, not least a large Tesla Coil on leave from Scienceworks in Melbourne. This mechanism—or high frequency step-up converter, to be precise—creates voltage that comes off its top as a corona, after striking the Faraday Cage that encloses it. The result is effectively a bolt of lightning.

Organisations such as Telstra have long emulated this model to test their telecommunications systems in the event of actual lightning. The Coil takes 2 people 7 days to set up, and in charge of this highly specialist process will be Telstra’s retired head physicist—the aptly named Dr Lightning.

The potential impact of the lightning generated in the show is widespread and must be regulated closely. The Marine Board will be notified just before the Coil performs its magic, as radars might be sent haywire. It’s not surprising, then, that pacemakers and other internal magnetic devices could be affected. Because of this Tesla is contemporary in more than style—it bears a health warning referring people with any form of electric, mechanical, magnetic or metallic implant or prosthetic to an information line before purchasing tickets. The level of noise or thunder generated by the Tesla Coil alone could interfere with any of these devices, causing medical complications.

When I met Koukias, he spoke with the clarity of a screenwriter who has whittled his story down to its bones and finally to one simple idea: Nikola Tesla dreamed of giving free energy to the world. It is this desire which influences many events in his life: the long-term struggle with Thomas Edison who swindled him out of patents and money; his alliance with George Westinghouse on projects including the Niagara hydroelectric plant and phased AC electricity; and ultimately the seizure of his life’s work by the FBI.

Tesla invented fluorescent bulbs and speedometers for cars. He discovered X-rays and the basis for radios, stereos and computers—in all, the foundations for most of modern industry and technology. Yet some of Tesla’s inventions are wrongly attributed to Edison in the Smithsonian Institute and patents are still being turned over to his estate.

Tesla’s character is as extraordinary as his inventions: more comfortable in the company of pigeons than women, he named his main 2 (of 30) secretaries Miss 1 and Miss 2. His affection for feathered vermin is all the more surprising given his terror of dirt. He was a close friend of Mark Twain and himself a beautiful writer.

The opera’s design is elemental—all sand, (a ream of) paper, (gothic quantities of) dry ice, steel (generators), (a flock of) pigeons and, of course, lightning. Yet for all of its ‘blockbuster’ volume, scale and explosiveness, Tesla has a minimalism about it, reminiscent of Koukias’ first opera Days and Nights with Christ. The music often reflects this simplicity, holding the audience in a loop of one-word choruses; at one point, savouring and playing with the word ‘electricity.’

In a venue the size of a few urban warehouses, the audience’s focus must be deftly managed. This is done via directive lighting and the selective use of speakers—with the audience seated either side of the action, as if at a tennis match.

Clusters of glowing light bulbs held forth like a chalice or host at high mass, cages, typewriters, lockers and lamp-lit desks carrying Van der graff generators recreate an intense and surreal laboratory. Haunting images of Tesla’s inventions, including the electric chair, are projected throughout and the Niagara Falls project becomes a gorgeous conclusion to the first act—with the Falls projected onto a stream of falling sand, through which the chorus exits. In the spirit of Tesla, the work is innovative in both sound and set design.

What Koukias likes about big sheds is that things can seem so close, or really far away—creating a cinematic distance. But most of all, the sound is beautiful. Think of the resonance of a cathedral sermon or hymn, even for the unconverted. Music has to be written specifically for large spaces. Crisp and succinct doesn’t work, so Koukias has gone with a lyrical and melodious approach, wed with a chamber ensemble that includes bassoon, oboe and theremin—a nice counterbalance to the deliberate harshness of other aspects of Tesla’s soundscape. The composer has used Tesla’s own writing for some of the opera’s lyrics, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony is alluded to given the composer’s close friendship with Tesla.

What was it about a mad pigeon-loving inventor that inspired a composer to construct one of his famously big operas? Lightning was probably the starting point, Koukias suggests, and that famous photo of Tesla sitting at his desk, oblivious, while the Tesla Coil sets off its spectacular explosions behind him. These lead Koukias to the sad and heightened story that so lends itself to opera.

Tesla. Lightning in his Hands, IHOS Music Theatre, music & director Constantine Koukias, technical director Werner Ihlenfeld, conductor Jean-Louis Forestier, production design Maria Kunda, sound Greg Gurr, artist in light Hugh McSpedden, lighting Damian Fuller, costumes Feruu Seljuk; Ten Days on the Island, Princes Wharf No. 1 Shed, Castray Esplanade, Hobart, Mar 28-Apr 1 www.tendaysontheisland.org

Adviser to the Artistic Program, Robyn Archer, and Executive Producer, Elizabeth Walsh, have rounded up another bunch of unique and often quirky talents from islands around the world for the second Ten Days on the Islandfestival. Again much of the island, its artists and general populace, will be in reach of the festival as works by locals and internationals are presented in Hobart, Launceston and 36 towns across Tasmania. Islands represented in the 2003 festival include New Zealand, the Faroe Islands, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Re?union Island, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Sicily, the Greek Islands, Manhattan & Staten Islands and Venice.

Tasmanian companies in the festival are IHOS Opera (see above), Stompin Youth Dance Company (see p35) and TasDance, who will premiere new works by Nathalie Weir and Phillip Adams. Terrapin are bringing back their much admired The Dark at the Top of the Stairs puppet show for adults. The Tiny Topfea- tures magic, clowning and eccentric cabaret. Playwright Scott Rankin, like film star Errol Flynn, was born in Tasmania. Rankin’s new one woman, multimedia play, Beasty Grrrlis about a South Sea Island descendant of Flynn played by Paula Arundel. Leading Australian singers and choir directors, Mara and Llew Kiek, will conduct community choirs from across the state with 300 performers in Choral Island. From the big island to the north come Circus Oz with its magnificent new 1400- seat Big Top, playing in Campbell Town, in the heart of the island, and WA’s Deckchair Theatre with a show about a sig- nificant island a little further north again, Mavis Goes to Timor. The Royal New Zealand Ballet will present UK-based cho- reographer, Javier de Frutos’ Milagros, set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. De Frutos unsettled Sydney locals a few years back at the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras with some striking work.

From islands much further afield come the Cuban band Los Tres de la Habana, who kick off the festival at free outdoor parties in Hobart and Launceston. Guy Klucevsek, one of the world’s greatest accordion players (a star of Archer’s 1998 Adelaide Festival) will give concerts around the island and also perform with master puppeteer Dan Hurlin in award-winning The Heart of the Andes, a must-see. Also on the impressive program are singer Franc?oise Guimbert from the Re?union islands, the ensemble Al Qantarah performing medieval music from Sicily.

Jacques Martial performs Martinique- born Aimee Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. New Zealand’s large scale street puppets, Urban Safari, looking at times like like fun versions of the creations from Walking with Dinosaurs.

There’s much more, of course: exhibi- tions, installations, community and food events, all ensuring that Ten Days on the Islandadds up a thematic and cultural totali- ty that should be the envy of other Australian festivals. RT

In a very brief skip through Berlin a couple of years ago I picked up a postcard for a dance work with this title. The phrase has haunted me ever since. And I’ve been thinking about the temporal a lot lately in the otherworldly post-Christmas zone where time seems to expand with the heat. So the 2nd NOW now festival of spontaneous music was like a sonic manifestation of my present state of mind.

For 6 nights the gloriously dilapidated oversized loungeroom of Space 3 was home to myriad explorations of music composed in the moment, produced by all manner of sources from your more conventional woodwind, piano, double bass and harp to penis gourd, computer, sampler, amplified pane of glass and dead chicken. The results of these explorations ranged from youthful indulgence to mind-expanding brilliance.

The festival opened with an undisputed master of Australian improvisation, Jim Denley. Starting with his bass flute in pieces, he gently ground the bits together, sometimes blowing into the mouth piece. He moved through woodwind instruments filling the transitions with mouthmusic, creating an imitation of digital decimation so faithful that I looked for the hidden computer. Even the squeaky floorboard was integrated. Denley is at the point where he barely needs his tools: alone he is a finely tuned instrument, a kind of sonic chameleon. Drawing all the pieces together (both compositionally and of his bass flute), he concludes with a haunting suite of dual tones and whispers that are so engaging even the traffic racing up Cleveland Street stops to listen.

The second act of the evening introduced some of the New Zealand contingent with Anthony Donaldson on percussion, Darren Hannah on double bass, Maree Thom on accordion and locals Daniel the wizard on violin and Neill Duncan on sax and little instruments. This had more of the sound I expected, a kind of consensual chaos. Waves of impulses flowing through each musician, were interpreted, sent out and reinterpreted, a growing feedback loop. These musicians employed a whole bodied listening, every cell alert to the next possibility, every gesture integral to the sourcing of the sound. This summoning was also evident in the exploration by Melbourne’s David Tolley on double bass and Dur-e Dara on percussion. They seemed to be working in 2 different sonic territories, Tolley utilising sustain and space, Dara filling all the gaps with a seemingly endless collection of percussion, bells, buckets, chains and glockenspiel—looking like she was whipping up a culinary storm (she is in fact a restaurateur). My initial desire was for her to pare back, provide more space and explore things for longer, but her methods were cumulative, so by the time the cymbals tied to a stand crashed to the floor, the 2 approaches had achieved an agitated union.

My desire for space was sated by the combo of Reuben Derrick on woodwind, Richard Johnson (ACT) on gourdophone (more specifically penis gourd) played like a reed instrument, Johnny Marks on a fantastically ancient analogue synth that lit up and Peter Blamey on feedback loop and mixing desk. Beautifully subdued, the sustained electronic ping and crackle and the warmth of the quiet reeds was surprisingly symbiotic. Blamey and Marks provided background texture, underpinning the analogue mobility of reed players. They never managed to move the piece to the next level, but for one sublime moment they all came together in a swathe of sustained tones, where the sense of time was manifest, each molecule of the moment felt fully. That made the evening for me.

This trance like atmosphere was maintained by the final ensemble. Having just met each other when they walked on stage, Belinda Woods (Melbourne) on flute, Chris Burke on tenor sax, Matt Earl on emptied sampler, April Fonti on cello and Amanda Stewart on vocals created a ‘right moody’ piece. With a beautifully layered textural palette it seemed that everyone was making each other’s sounds—the cello breathy like a sax, the sampler scratchy like the cello, guttural barks and hacks providing a baseline. Stewart’s vocal summonings and Fonti’s sparse and sensitive playing wove around each other, thankfully emerging from the sometimes overly fussy flute and sax to float like sonic incantations.

The second evening began with the incredible Chris Abrahams on piano. With phantom fingers he called forth torrents of notes, overtones outringing the fundamentals—was he hammering, plucking, how many hands does he have? An anomaly in the pattern emerges, is integrated and the pattern mutates. Then he stopped dead and it felt like your soul had been ripped out through your ears. Just for a second, and then the cascade continued. It was amazing and frightening in its complexity and beauty.

The evening also featured the masters of electronic improvisation with a set by Torben Tilly, Robbie Avenaim and Oren Ambarchi on multiple electronics. Spacious and subtle, with infinitesimal shifts they created a kind of sonic wormhole: I try to grasp it, but it slides in and around me like air, I can’t pin it down. Ambarchi appeared again in Scott Horscroft’s all-star version of Chug-R-Chug, along with Chris Abrahams, Clayton Thomas, David Aston and Scott Barr. The musicians play one note which Horscroft processes, conducting and moulding the tones into a mesmeric symphony that was almost weepingly gorgeous. Thanks to a computer crash, it ended with a wrench instead of the more predictable denouement.

An earthy contrast was provided by the ensemble of Will Guthrie (Melb) on percussion, Jeff Henderson (NZ) on sax, Tim O’Dwyer (Melb) on clarinet, Clayton Thomas on double bass and Adam Sussman on electronics. No subtle background texture for Sussman (of Stasis Duo), he ripped the time-space continuum with blasts of fuzz and static, mostly pushing the energy for the better, allowing Thomas to go hell-for-leather in praying mantis fashion on bass, all rhythm and percussion. Guthrie’s contribution suffered for the timbral similarity of his miked percussion and Sussman’s electronics, not to mention the sheer volume that actually had the PA speakers glowing with overload. Though loud and chaotic, the players all seemed to be in the same territory, interpreting the same moment, aware of the piece as a whole.

Unfortunately not something that could be said for the earlier ensemble of Matt and Aron Ottignon, Cameron Deyell, Tom Callwood and Felix Bloxsom, relying on more of a jazz sensibility and suffering from a kind of youthful enthusiasm that railroaded awareness. (Just because you have 3 instruments doesn’t mean you have to play them all.)

The only other appearance of exuberance over-riding subtlety was the trio of Matt Clare and Martin Kay on alto sax and Josh Green (Tas) on percussion on Friday 17. The sax players wound themselves so tightly around each other that there was no place for the percussionist, who eventually (though, it seemed, cheerfully) sat down and just watched the boys blow.

Also on the slightly dominant side was Greg Kingston (Tasmania) on guitar with Tim O’Dwyer on woodwinds and Will Guthrie on percussion. Kingston seemed to channel some inner demon, all twitches and agitation. The ultimate showman, he rummaged through his bag of tricks to produce a transistor radio or a Barbie doll which he placed on the pick-ups of the guitar; even towelling himself off became part of the piece. He provided an excellent introduction to the final act of the Friday night, a strictly noise affair including Lucas Abela on his amped and effected pane of glass, and Nylstoch, a mysterious man in a very ugly mask playing a tapeloop through a crucified chicken. The sound, well it was loud enough to make a window leap out of its frame. Not that all of Friday night was show and bluster. There was also a gentle and extensive exploration by Stasis Duo boys gone analogue on well-worn guitar and percussion, Jim Denley and Jeff Henderson on woodwinds and reeds, and festival co-curator Clare Cooper on harp. This was completely absorbing in its thoroughness.

When I interviewed Clayton Thomas about the NOW now (RT51), I was a little sceptical of his almost religious fervour. But immersed in 3 nights of the festival I realise it is hard to avoid. Each night I dreamt the event afterwards—the atmospheres, the processes and tactics. Improvising is a valiant and foolish attempt to capture each moment, feel each slice of time as it passes over and through you. To do it right you have to surrender completely to the whims and vengeance of the temporal as many of the ensembles in the NOW now festival succeeded in doing for, well, fleeting moments, once registered, already gone. So the chase and the mantra goes on—jetz ist jetz ist jetz…

the NOW now festival , curators Clare Cooper, Clayton Thomas, Space 3 Redfern, Jan 13-18

Fortnightly spontaneous music nights continue at Space 3 from Feb 3. www.theNOWnow.net

How old were you when you had your first cup of coffee? This rhetorical question establishes the territory performed by IHOS Opera Laboratory. Five young men walk on stage and sit behind school desks. Sean Bacon’s video images of coffee froth spiraling and melding in a green cup provide a striking visual backdrop. Each performer tastes his cup of coffee—a metaphor for the addiction to lyrics of pop music. Devised by Sally Rees and Matt Warren, Pop explores the potency of seemingly inconsequential pop songs to imbue memory with a snatch of melody or words years after the song’s hit status has passed. “In my head the song goes on forever” exists as a measure of time and a trigger for memory. “Not a trace of doubt in my mind” from Neil Diamond’s I’m a Believer plays on a suspended cassette player. The line is incessantly repeated even after the player is destroyed.

The performers’ incantation of the words “verse” and “chorus” provides a humorous take on the pop song’s formulaic structure and a clock counts down the song’s length. Sound and video operator Stefan Morton screens talking head images of pop stars onto the school desk lids. Their songs leave a residue of pop a-cappella in the mind.

A Lizard Between her Breasts explores fragments of 3 tragedies by Lorca. It is an intense piece of music theatre composed by Raffaele Marcellino, directed by Anna Messariti and designed by Michael Bates. Impressively performed by the IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Lizard is set in the archetypal territory of a village community where life is harsh, moral codes are contradictory, and the hour of blood is never far away.

Lizard opens with a wedding procession. Two trumpets sound and the bride enters trailing an avenue of tulle. The deliberate tearing of the bride’s gown dramatically changes the mood. The whispering and hatred commence. This is the province of old, dark bloodlines. We can already anticipate the trials of the human condition—the wife’s barrenness, the husband’s mistress, hypocrisy, misery, rejection and the affirmation of a child. The husband is like a lizard basking in the sun.

Central to the power of this production is Michael Bates’ use of 3 backlit screens where the poses of the main characters are seen in silhouette, visually enhancing the narrative. Video sequences are projected onto the rock wall of the Peacock Theatre. The hem of a bridal gown drags over rock. A man and a woman joyfully run through a forest.

The work of Dmitri Ac on guitar, percussionist Ben Smart and the tight vocal response of the IMTL soloists and chorus are also integral to the power of the production. Despite heavy Catholic imagery such as anguished hand-wringing, the crown of thorns, stigmata on the mistress’s palms and the bride’s entrails drawn from her wedding frock in the final scene, Lizard is accomplished and exciting music theatre.

IHOS Opera Laboratory, Pop, directors Sally Rees, Matt Warren, designer Sally Rees, composer Matt Warren, video production Sean Bacon; A Lizard Between Her Breasts, director Anna Messariti, musicians Dmitri Ac and Ben Smart, composer Raffaele Marcellino, design & production Michael Bates, costume Sandra Alcor. For both productions: lighting Don & Reuben Hopkins, sound & video Stefan Morton, movement Jindra Rosendorf; Peacock Theatre, Hobart, Dec 12-15

Andrée Greenwell occupies a special place in the musical culture of Australia. Her distinctive compositions sit uniquely at the nexus of folk, opera, pop, jazz and avant garde trajectories. Her new show, Dreaming Transportation, Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson, is an inspired, 16-strong song cycle for 5 singers and 7 musicians. Given that the work is about women living in prisons, in towns and on the land in early 19th century Australia, it’s not surprising that UK folk music in its various modes is the dominant stylistic strand, sometimes plainly so but often more complexly composed as well as counterpointed dramatically by instrumental scoring that is vigorously of our own time.

The songs often work by juxtaposition, a relatively simple, sexy folk-like melody, for example, is followed by David Hewitt’s taut, deep drumming introducing Deborah Conway’s impassioned song to a rapist that swings into cabaret (with accordion accompaniment) without ever losing its folk rock impulse. Text and music offer quite an emotional journey in which women suffer prison (sometimes going mad) and emerge from it seeking livelihoods; an adventurous independent woman fights for and wins land; in a drought, a voice “hope(s) for a less desolate tomorrow”; and in a marvellous diary, a mother of 12 (“members of my little jury”) writes “My heart is a town.” Women write of missing their homes in Britain, their lovers and husbands (with a fine sensuality), and, in a grim litany, of missing their identity.

Just as Greenwell found an ideal writing partner for the earlier Laquiem in Kathleen Mary Fallon, so she has chosen wisely again. Jordie Albiston’s Botany Bay Document-A Poetic History of the Women of Botany Bay (Black Pepper Press 1996 nla) takes the letters and other writings of a range of women from early settlement and arranges them on the page into an embracing poetry, true to the women but also Albiston’s own poetic voice. Greenwell’s settings of a selection of these is achieved with deceptive ease, such is the match of words and music.

Dreaming Transportation is a multimedia work with slide and video projections, documentary touches and bits of acting, but the best thing about it is the music. In this Greenwell is served very well by her singers. Sopranos Christine Douglas and Miriam Allan not only provide an operatic lyricism and intensity (and a sublime duet) but also occasional portraits of the upper classes. Actor-singers Amie McKenna and Justine Clark offer simpler but emotionally rich voices and are especially adroit in the folk idiom. Deborah Conway fuses folk and her own brand of pop-charged energy bringing an extra weight to the show. That such voices can co-exist in the same space is a testament to the totality that Greenwell has created.

Theatrically however Dreaming Transportation is an uneasy totality, held together by the music but otherwise threatening to fragment. Essentially the show is a series of songs in concert format (the composer asks the audience not to applaud until the end of the show). There’s no through-narrative, which is fine, it is after all a collection of portraits. Sometimes songs are supported by visual imagery. Sometimes they are bridged by spoken text or brief, acted scenes. The singers are simply costumed and, for the most part, enter and leave casually. They are framed by a semi-circle of musicians. All of this is superficially satisfactory, but various inconsistencies and failures to follow through rob the show of the power it could and should have. The most striking of these is in the visual material.

Dreaming Transportation begins strongly and immersively on the 3 tall screens behind the musicians, with camera shots of a late 18th century ship filmed close to its timbers, the mast and the water flowing past. The strength of this kind of imagery and the later film of a body being punished (in Parramatta’s infamous Female Factory), of a head shaven and then, powerfully, of different parts of the body (hands, lungs, feet) is that it is evocative rather than simply illustrative and that it has a consistency of visual style. Other images projected in the show were doggedly literal (slides of cartoons of Newgate prison), or pointless (Sydney forming over 200 years on the banks of its harbour) or, like some of the interpolated text (lists of facts which thankfully seemed to run out), ploddingly documentary. The overall effect was of pickings from a ragbag of imagery, an educational cut and paste. Andrée Greenwell is an accomplished filmmaker—someone should commission her and her collaborators to visually through-compose Dreaming Transportation.

Part of Laquiem’s power was that it exploited the concert format. Greenwell’s decision in the new work to costume her 5 singers in early 19th century style dresses pushes the performance into an uneasy place between concert and theatre. Perhaps it would have been better to stay away from costume, especially since at one point the non-costumed Greenwell steps away from her conducting position and sings centre stage. As for the theatricality of the piece, sometimes it’s deft, funny and moving, sometimes cutely illustrative. Again, there’s insufficient consistency of vision. As well, any text added outside of Albiston’s contribution to the songs should be given to her to adapt in the spirit of her poetry, if it’s needed at all.

What was consistent was the audience’s rapturous response to the music, if in some doubt about other elements of the work. Greenwell-Albiston should have a winner on their hands. The show is being recorded by ABC Radio this week and hopefully ABC Enterprises will have the wisdom to see that a CD of Dreaming Transportation could sell, such is the calibre of Greenwell’s superior tune writing, its excellent scoring for a small group of virtuosic musicians and, not least, the presence of Deborah Conway. Dreaming Transportation needs another stage of development and then it should be ripe for touring, everywhere.

Dreaming Transportation, composer & artistic director Andrée Greenwell, poet & librettist Jordie Albiston, staging director Christopher Ryan, dramaturg Francesca Smith, digital artist & set designer Katerina Stratos, video artist Toby Oliver, costumes Jenny Irwin, lighting Sydney Bouhaniche; consultant producer Anna Messariti. Sydney Festival, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Jan 22-25

The Melbourne Electronic Music Festival has come up with something visually unique—a film festival celebrating electronic music around the world. Not only that, the festival will feature Midnight in Melbourne, Australia’s first documentary on the local drum and bass scene. Directed by Mark Bakaitis, the 40 minute film features interviews with DJs and promoters, a soundtrack of local and international artists with live performances from local and overseas acts including Grooverider, Optical
and Ed Rush.

Electronic music-based documentaries, film clips and shorts from around the world will be screened at at E2-E4, North Melbourne. The program includes:
Ulkomaat (Foreign Lands), a 4 minute “grey road movie” from a Finnish electronic lo- fi lounge producer and video artist Samuli Alapuranen; Pump up the Volume, a 4-part history of UK house music directed by Carl Hindmarch (120 minutes); S-Crashabout the neighbourhood perils of a rehearsing DJ directed by Melbournians Lindsay Cox and Victor Holder (3 minutes), and the 2 hour Hang the DJ, “a disc-jockumentary” from Canada (directors Marco and Mauro La Villa).

The annual MEMF includes workshops, conferences and exhibitions on arts asso- ciated with electronic music and culminates in a free outdoor event at the week’s end- MEMF Sound Off.

Melbourne Electronic Music Festival: various locations, February 9-16; MEMF Film
Festival, E2-E4, 170 Abbotsford St, Nth Melbourne, Feb 12-14, 9.10pm nightly

You open the first edition of RealTime for 2003 in anxious times. Australia is actively complicit with the USA in premeditating murder, a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, a brutal move contrary to the fragile but sometimes effective restraints developed in the wake of World War II.

Infinitely less publicised is the free trade agreement our federal government is negotiating with the USA, and which poses another kind of threat to Australian integrity.

This edition of RealTime features the work of artists, producers, government agencies and overseas partners in marketing and touring of the Australian performing arts. Consistent outcomes are very hard to achieve, but the determination of all those involved and the many successes in recent years suggest that a dream is on the edge of being realised.

All of this assumes that while we build international demand the supply side of the picture is safe. However, the example of New Zealand’s decimated domestic TV drama production under the terms of their free trade agreement is frightening.

On January 15, a host of Australian cultural organisations banding together as the Australian Coalition for Cultural Diversity (ACCD) and representing artists and companies in theatre, film, music, dance, television, libraries, museums, literature, book publishing, and visual and multimedia arts called on the Howard Government to support Australian culture in the forthcoming free trade negotiations with the USA. ACCD will be officially launched in February 2003. Some of the member organisations are Arts Law Centre of Australia, Ausdance, Australian Guild of Screen Composers, Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association, Australian Screen Directors Association, Australian Society of Authors, Australian Writers Guild, Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance, Museums Australia, Music Council of Australia, National Association for the Visual Arts, and Screen Producers Association of Australia.

ACCD has made a submission to the Department of Foreign Affairs Office for Trade Negotiations urging the Government “to negotiate a broad exemption for cultural industries, to allow it to continue supporting and fostering Australian cultural expression unfettered by the constraints of a trade agreement.”

Dick Letts, Chair of the Music Council of Australia and spokesperson for ACCD writes: “We believe that pressure will be applied by the US in forthcoming negotiations to restrict Australia’s freedom to act in support of its cultural policy objectives. The US Trade Representative, for instance, has been openly critical of measures such as Australian content rules for television as barriers to free trade. But while this is one of the most immediate issues at stake one must also bear in mind the potential impact of trade commitments on the whole range of cultural expression, and the extent to which such commitments could limit the Government’s ability to support Australia’s cultural industries in the future.”

Ian David, President of the Australian Writers Guild, is quoted by ACCD as saying, “To some this may just be about trade, commerce and access to markets. To us it’s about our heritage, our identity, our livelihood. What will be unique about being Australian if our songs, stories, pictures and ideas are crushed under the weight of a boot made somewhere else?”

The ACCD notes that the USA already has it pretty good in this country: “Australian government support for culture is open, measured and does not pose any real threat to the ability of the USA to sell its cultural products and services in Australia.” But as we well know, the fundamentalists of freedom prefer it for themselves, not others.

RealTime 54 (April/May) is titled BOOKish and will feature reviews of a wave of new Australian books about performance, digital arts and cultural issues. RT

An extraordinary collaboration between 2 major players in Tasmania’s contemporary cultural scene, is theatre ltd and CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania), White Trash Medium Rare is a fusion of several art forms, a vehicle for some of the most ingenious and original artists working in the state. As well as attending performances, audiences could view illuminating open rehearsals and explore the set as an installation.

The performance asks what it is to be white and Anglo-Australian in the 21st century. Its extended title is “If Australia is the lucky country, how come we always cheat at sport?…A night of laughter to make you celebrate and question the place where you live.” Director Ryk Goddard leads a troupe of 8 performers as well as sound artists, dancers, actors, physical performers and visual artists working in hybrid technologies in a show devised by members of the is theatre company.

The audience enters the performance space to be interviewed and videoed before being seated. The space is the CAST gallery, dexterously converted with tiered seating along 2 walls and projection screens at either end, one serving as an entry point through which the performers access the ‘stage.’ Above the performance space is a grid from which athletic and acrobatic physical performance is woven into the show.

White Trash Medium Rare is a unique theatrical experience, a full-on onslaught of iconic Australian projected images, instantly recognisable and often amusing, evocative soundscapes, daredevil physicality and seamless vignettes portraying white Australians, including, movingly, the experience of post-World War 2 immigrants. Performers morph, frequently before our eyes, into archetypes and stereotypes of the white Australian experience, exploring the realities and quirks that make it what it is, accompanied by the fusion of media and artforms that characterise the piece.

The work is essentially unscripted and never the same 2 nights in a row. Working with so many different and skilled artists makes it “impossible to speak with one voice” about the show’s theme, says Goddard and no one voice can represent any group experience in this era. The result is a series of interpretations and experiences of what it means to be Australian. It rejoices in the fact that there is no singular, uniform version of living in this country, but many different and intricate ones.

One of is theatre ltd’s intentions is that the audience find the work as amusing, alarming, provoking and novel as the company found devising the work and examining white Australian selfhood and existence. They have achieved their aim of leaving viewers “thinking differently about how we live in this country” (Goddard).

White Trash Medium Rare, director Ryk Goddard; is theatre ltd and CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania), CAST gallery, installation Oct 2-27, performances Oct 10-26, 2002

Time She Stopped is the second one-woman show directed by Adelaide choreographer Ingrid Voorendt. Astrid Pill performed the piece in January this year at Adelaide’s Space Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s innovative In-Space program. Naida Chinner featured in the 2002 work, Once Bitten, seen in the Mobile States program for emerging dance artists see in Perth and Sydney (see p 41).

On directing one woman works, Voorendt says, “I’ve known the performers I’ve directed as friends and…I’ve worked with [them] for quite some time. I can’t imagine entering into something like this with someone I didn’t know or didn’t have a connection with…The thing with Astrid and Naida is we are excited and curious about the same sort of things and we trust each other implicitly.”

I assumed Voorendt elicited material from each performer and then arranged it, but she views the works as “conversations” in which her own experiences, thoughts and feelings are present with those of Pill and Chinner. “I begin rehearsal by brainstorming with the performer using all sorts of questions and tasks. The beauty of working with someone like Astrid is that she will go home with a question or task and come up with performance ‘treats’ for me the next day and she is brave and imaginative about form. Astrid doesn’t censor. She allows herself to play and does the judging later. That’s a real skill. We collect texts and songs and movement ideas and end up with a thick pile of material. Then I get to arrange it. I love structuring material. I approach that in a very choreographic way. I’ve learned through various experiences about a more narrative approach but I come from a completely different place. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I guess it’s montage. A turning point in my process was a piece I made based on my sister’s writing. This was the first time I had worked with text and I began to focus on creating images rather than making sequences. ”

Voorendt loves images that appear strange but are true, and journeys that lead you to surprising places. She found her way into dance theatre instinctively; then discovered her way of working was being explored in Australia and overseas. She began dancing at 16 and soon became inspired by the Graham technique. After completing a BA in dance at Adelaide University she returned home to New Zealand and spent a year “in depression and self-doubt about her chances and her body and ability.” As a way forward she returned to South Australia and worked in Whyalla teaching dance to young people. There, she began collaborating with theatre director James Winter writing performances and experimenting with ways to “get people dancing.” To do this she had to relinquish the “teaching phrases” model of dance instruction. She invited Sally Chance, then Artistic Director of Restless Dance Company, to run workshops with people with disabilities in the community. Chance then asked Voorendt to lead workshops with the Restless dancers.

When Voorendt saw the Restless show, Sex Juggling she “absolutely lost [her] head over it…[I]t affirmed what I had hoped and wanted to believe, that you didn’t have to have the perfect dancer’s body or look or technique to be able to move people.” After seeing some of her devised work, Chance then asked Voorendt to direct the company where she says she found her niche. “I’m not interested in myself as a performer. I’m not interested in my body and my phrases. I like moving and other people might find my movement interesting but I’m much more interested in other people’s movement. [The work with] Restless was a confirmation of the way of working I had been developing in Whyalla without having a context for what I was doing. Then I went back to University and wrote a paper on collaborative processes discussing the work of Restless Dance Company, DV8, Ballet C de la B, Pina Bausch. I wrote about facilitation and directing and [it] helped…clarify what…I was doing and where I was going. I love responding to other people’s ideas. I like to pass their material through my head rather than have a piece coming only from me. I’ve always known that I didn’t want to be formulaic as a director. What keeps me on my toes is working with different people.

Time She Stopped was devised with and performed by Astrid Pill, an astounding contemporary performer. Strikingly present and equally skilled as a singer, dancer and actor, she seems able to swap medium or genre without blinking. In Time She Stopped she danced rolled up in a rug, danced with a rug, sang the rollicking blues number, Black Coffee, told stories against herself, dreamed, pondered, explained stain removal in great detail, let her hair down and danced with wild abandon in a party frock, raged against past lovers, dismembered gingerbread representations with originality and fury, exploded into speech or song or dance, pulled herself together, drank and drank red wine and sang a bittersweet, haunting song by Grieg to end. I was spellbound.

Time She Stopped also featured skilled musician Zoë Barry who has a history of interesting collaborations with dance and theatre people. Barry shadowed Pill’s performance—marooned on her own carpet square, she played cello, sat or lay lost in thought, sang snippets of songs and gave us a full rendition of the haunting ballad, 26 years. Her performance was a stripped back, skeletal version of Pill’s but her cello produced rich veins of music that underscored Pill’s emotional states and singing.

Time She Stopped is a treatise on the woman home alone at the end of an affair. Like much contemporary dance theatre in form, it features a montage of events with an associative logic: carpet stains, love stains, salt the stain, salt the wound, blot out stains, block out memories, pour, drink, break the wine glass, break with the past etc. The work is threaded with stories of one woman’s unsuccessful attempts to ‘be beige’, to ‘fit in and go unnoticed.’ Although frailty and despair are present in the central image and feelings confessed, I was struck by the sheer force and vibrancy of Pill’s performance. It reminded me of footage of Jackson Pollock’s action painting: abandoned yet focussed.

The work doesn’t add up or arrive at a point—its focus seems to be the pleasure of the ride—familiar, absurd, poignant, disturbing, astonishing. Voorendt described discovering the classic Harold and Maude and her work contains the angst of the likes of Donnie Darko and American Beauty, films that seem to capture the contemporary conundrum of ‘innocence’, meeting ‘desire for love’ meeting ‘not belonging.’ Sometimes you get closer to the way life feels through bizarre and/or startling images and stories that don’t add up. This work does just that.

Time She Stopped, performer Astrid Pill, devised and directed by Ingrid Voorendt, music Zoë Barry, lighting design Gaelle Mellis & Geoff Cobham, design Louise Dunn, lighting and production Ben Shaw, Inspace, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Jan 17

Romeo Castelluci’s Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep arrived in Melbourne at the end of a bleak week for world theatre.

Early this year I wrote an article for RealTime on theatre as Terror (RT 47 p4). Now, as the year grinds down, we have seen, in the Moscow Chechen crisis, terror in the theatre itself. A 2-act drama of pure horror. The prologue was innocence itself—a musical romance entitled North-East. Interval, one imagines: the relaxed chatter, coffee, wine, Kream-Betweens, with little expectation of the change about to happen. “After an intermission, theatregoers headed back to their seats for Act II…Suddenly, masked attackers in battle dress burst into the building. Some fired into the air, while others raced onto the stage shouting, ‘We are Chechens!’ and ‘We are at war here!’” (Time, Nov 4). What was it like, that terrifying point of transition from pretence to reality? How long did it take for the realisation to dawn that this was not a ‘reality effect’ but ‘reality’ itself, intruding into the space of make-believe? It was reported by one of the hostages that members of the audience applauded the violent spectacle of the unexpected entrances.

The dreadfully protracted First Act was played out between the always already desperate Chechen terrorist fighters and the might of State Terror. In that battle, the audience-turned-participants (‘hostages’) had no chance. They would always be sacrificial victims in an unresolvable plot. Meanwhile, the State forces, due to dominate the bloody final Act, were rehearsing their role in another theatre. “For days they had been secretly practising at the Meridian Theatre on nearby Profsouznaya Street. Plainclothes policemen had been deployed to guard the perimeter and keep curious onlookers away” (The Weekly Telegraph, October 30). The final Act was triggered, like a classical movie, by a child: “‘Mummy, I don’t know what to do anymore’, he shouted. Then he threw a bottle at a Chechen woman guarding him and fled toward the exit” (Weekly Telegraph). The shot fired at him by the terrorist was the signal for the state troops to burst in through the walls and the sewers—preceded of course by the deadly nerve gas.

In the end the theatre was full of dead and dying bodies—the end of a Shakespearian tragedy, “littered with bodies of dead and unconscious hostages” (Weekly Telegraph). There is a press photo of a Chechen woman, dead in one of the theatre seats, slumped easily, as if she has fallen asleep during a bad play. “Take up the bodies,” says Fortinbras. “Such a sight as this/Becomes the field but here shows much amiss.” Amen to that.

It is the lasting power of Genesi that its response to the “destiny of the inhabitants of the world” (Castelluci, festival program) is so tough-minded, so terrifyingly lyrical, so unpredictably indirect in its creativity and so openly and quietly scandalised by the tragic consequences of the original act of creation.

The beginning is simple enough. In the dark, the sound of the word in the theatre, the chatter of voices, as if a replay of the hum of voices that fills the auditorium as an audience settles. The chatter builds in intensity as the lights reveal a group of men and women in 19th century formal attire, gathered at the back of the stage, listening to an orator on a podium—an original act of theatre. From here theatre’s problems begin. What should happen next if on this empty stage of possibilities anything can happen? The theatre director/writer’s challenge is in essence no different to that of the god of Adam. “In the beginning was the word.” Well yes, we’ve had that, now what?

Divine creation unleashes the problem of possibilities. It creates an open sea of possibilities. That is terrifying. Castelluci, festival program.

And so before us unfolds in Part 1 a roll call of images that seek not to tell the tale of the Book of Genesis but to track its path anew. A naked man squeezes through a tiny gap in the scrim to enter the front area of the stage—what is that gap: the gates of Eden, the eye of the needle, the mouth of the womb, the stage door? Images may resonate with familiarity (a burning sword, a circle twirling, something revealed from the sand) but they are revealed not as sequential events in a narrative history of the spirit but as if all already there—truly revealed, all of them, it only takes the power of the light to bring them to our consciousness. The theatre mechanism at work is the layers of scrim with which the stage is filled, like veils to protect us from the terror of too much reality. We are given glimpses of the horror of juxtapositions we do not want to see: a man (a contortionist)—Adam?—coming alive in a glass cabinet, whilst next to him in another glass cabinet a horse’s head is crushed in a vice and across the stage 2 mechanical sheep fuck. Conception, birth and death in a triptych of image and noise. I broke out in a sweat.

The intervals felt, at first, intrusive, unnecessary. We have learned from Moscow that intervals can be catastrophic. Both Parts 2 and 3 involved huge shifts of focus and style. What they lacked of Part 1’s rich tapestry of image and sound they made up for in sustained intensity and conceptual daring. In Part 2, 5 children, trapped in a world of white, practice the signs, the symbols, the attitudes and the deadly games of the adults, witnessed in embryo in Part 1. The visuals are entirely uninflected, only the soundtrack maintains the emotional intensity. I was reminded of Francis Fergusson’s discussion of young animals utilising their ‘histrionic sensibility’ to prepare for the serious stalking and murder of the jungle. It is a place of sleep and dream, of silence (“The word ‘infans’ means to be out of language”); a place where a child in a bunny suit plays out the lament of lost life. Only finally, after a child (like a terrorist?) screams incomprehensibly at us from the stage, do we witness the showers (of Auschwitz horror) and the flickering of the camera light of the old documentary.

In Part 3, the group of children is reduced to a pair of men (Cain and Abel?) and then finally to one existentially lonely man (Cain) and the dead body of his victim, whilst huge dogs roam the stage, sublimely uninterested in the stupidity of human violence, sniffing out the scent of death, eating up the flesh that lies around.

It is a devastating sequence. The first act of murder, so quiet, so protracted, so definitive. How many such acts have happened in the real world since? How many bodies have lain on stages in theatre’s futile attempt to reflect the stupidity back to the world? And now finally (post-Moscow) how can we tell the 2 apart?

Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, creator & director Romeo Castelluci; music Scott Gibbons; State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Oct 27

Robyn Archer’s first Melbourne Festival, Text, lived up to expectations in its bold choice of works engaging with language in playscripts, performance and dance texts, new media and improvisation. It also offered Genesi and Fire, Fire, works where text counted for little, but the words spoken about them for much. Romeo Castelluci’s Genesi was the festival highlight and an exhilarating, sometimes daunting visual and aural challenge for many. Fire, Fire got many hot under the collar over its less than intimate placement as awkward spectacle at the State Theatre, or, conversely, indignant that the show should be anywhere but there at the centre of the festival. Reinvigorated by the 2002 Adelaide Festival, issues of whose art, whose festival and what place excellence look set to be with us for years to come, not just as debate but as core consideration for the programming of festivals. It’s interesting then to note that Archer and her team have managed to secure an additional $4m Victorian State Government funding for her next festival: $3m for international works and $1m to expand the festival’s community arts development program. Presumably that means Archer will still have this year’s level of funding to make Australian content the greater part of the festival once again, which was one of the several reasons why this was such a very good festival.

On these pages Richard Murphet, Philipa Rothfield, Jonathan Marshall and I review a small selection from the extensive festival program. Some performances, like Kate Champion’s Same, same…But Different and Sandy Evan’s Testimony have already been reviewed and praised in RealTime and were enthusiastically received in Melbourne. You can read about Back to Back Theatre’s Soft, one of the hits of the festival, on page 33. Reviews of the Opera Australia’s Love in the Age of Therapy and Chamber Made Opera’s Motherland and a second review of NYID’s K appear on our website. KG

Lifeline

Lifeline is a marvel of non-digital interactivity. As you approach the Victorian Arts Centre’s BlackBox you are surprised to see a shop window jutting forth beside the entrance. In it is the body of a young woman lying face down, dark blood seeping from a wound to her head. It’s a real body in a black dress against a white floor. Like those dodgy fashion ads from the last decade of models splayed and made up like murder victims, this image is both stylish and disturbing. Inside BlackBox are 4 elegant, circular, open-ended booths, each holding someone who knew the victim, one of them possibly the murderer. Each of them sits on a chair waiting to be asked about the circumstances of and the motive for the crime.

The audience is eager, crowding in, moving from booth to booth, quizzing the performers, some seeking simple answers, some probing, perhaps pushing the dextrous performers to their improvisatory limits (though a silence can handily read like refusal or emotional distress) or into John Howard-style evasion: “I’m not getting into hypotheticals.” The audience is also improvising, drawing from an arsenal of interrogatory tactics learned from TV courtoom and detective shows, mystery novels and popular psychology. Some are persistent and only appear to leave when they have exhausted their line of questioning, others humbly turn-take, patiently picking up their thread when they find space, some work like teams. Some are kind, some are blunt, most are respectful. Some want to know everything, and clearly enjoy the probing, in search of the truth and testing the performers’ skills. Others are more easily satisfied once they know who the murderer is. You can discover that in a few minutes, but you want confirmation and motive.

That’s what Lifeline is mostly about, not who dunnit, but the web of relationships and complex desires and frustrations that have created a murderer. She is culpable, but without this particular set of circumstances she might never have killed. As the 4 people tell interlocking and conflicting stories (not as plain narratives but as answers to questions) about the dead woman, themselves and each other, you construct a picture of a volatile situation and enjoy the texture of revelation. The process is more interesting than the story, though that has its pleasures.

Lifeline was created by German festival guest Uwe Mengel with local actors absorbing his scenario and improvising to it under his direction. Vanessa Case, Ming-Zhu Hii, Hamish Michael and Eva Parkin give impressive performances, with a calm that bespeaks trauma, with flashes of anger, moments of distraction and tearfulness: no easy task for 2 hours of audience comings and goings. The 4 confessionals designed by Monash University Architecture course students (Amelia Attrill, Ellen Pan, Lucilla Smith) house the interrogation admirably, yielding a strong sense of isolation and of the emotional distance between those being quizzed, the grimness of the situation countered with the brightly coloured interiors and nicely textured exteriors of an increasing number of modern government facilities. Kathleen Murphy does a good, still dead body. As another of the festival’s explorations of very intimate theatre-going, Lifeline proved an intriguing success on a number of levels, most of all in offering a place for its audience to improvise.

Lifeline, created & directed by Uwe Mengel; BlackBox, Victorian Arts Centre, Oct 18-22.

As the great Bill Irwin is to clowning, so Ronnie Burkett is to puppeteering. In a brilliant blend of traditional narrative and postmodern interruption via a puppet show within a puppet show, Burkett sustains the conventions and craft of his art and wryly and often uproariously takes them and his audience apart. The story, a homage to the Nazi-persecuted puppeteers of 30s Czechoslovakia, is dense with dialogue, movement and costume changes (differently attired marionettes for the same characters; there are 8 Tinkas). The marionettes populate a carousel which comprises the rotating set and which Burkett also inhabits, his hands and legs visible, his face not really lit until later in the show when he comes face to face with characters from both worlds he has generated. Even within the framework of convention Burkett takes gentle and affecting liberties, the barely knee-high marionettes resting against one of his legs as if he were a piece of furniture, or the setting of characters either side of him and out of his reach as he delivers the dialogue with turns of his head. Burkett does all the voices.

In the totalitarian regime of the Common Good, the old puppeteer Stefan stages his popular but increasingly policed Franz and Schnitzel show. Carl, his rebellious apprentice, takes these characters into a proscribed underground cabaret world, producing a rich comic power play between the domineering Franz and the put-upon, gentle Schnitzel, and much acerbic political commentary, thereby dooming himself to imprisonment and death. His ally is his sister, Tinka, and his enemy is Fipsi, a fellow puppeteer who runs with the Common Good and in turn appropriates Franz and Schnitzel for the state’s humourless ends. The great, inventive leap that Burkett makes is to portray Carl’s Franz and Schnitzel as contemporaneous with us, inhabiting a totally different time and space from the 1930s resonances of the main plot and its period costuming.

The audience quickly adjust to this sleight of hand and the pleasure too of Burkett’s company as he appears first as Carl at work with Franz and Schnitzel and subsequently addresses us directly as himself, quipping about everything from Archer’s avant garde festival (“Bea Arthur?”), to a classically difficult Saturday night audience the day before (“all married to their cousins”), Melbourne-Sydney tensions, gay politics, S&M and George Bush as God. Meanwhile Schnitzel wants out (“I want a mike in my wig and a battery pack on my arse”). Franz derides his ambition: “Do you want to end up as a Muppet with someone’s hand up your arse?” Crudely and sometimes subtly paralleling Carl and Tinka’s tragedy, the comics jibe about left and right wing politics, freedom and power. Schnitzel senses something more than Franz is manipulating him. “What is up there?” he cries and scales the curtain to come face to face with Burkett. Of manipulators and the manipulated, John Howard too makes an appearance as Howard the Bear, Schnitzel’s toy companion—allowing for a string of puppet-of-the-US jokes (Burkett is Canadian).

Schnitzel’s identity crisis, and his curiosity as to whether or not he’s a sentient being, resolves anxiously “in a nasty thought.” Typical of Burkett’s play with our emotions (this a puppet show for adults in which we are prompted to feel and behave like children), the seriousness or sentimentality of the moment is often brutally undercut. Here, Schnitzel looks out at us and confesses that “the nasty thought was…that I was just like you.” Pathos, postmodern banter, satire and a dash of metaphysics are kept finely balanced, and nothing undercuts Carl’s refusal to compromise and his impending death, another moment where creator and marionette come painfully face to face.

Listen out for the Radio National recording of the interview Robyn Archer did with the affable, jocular and loquacious Burkett in the Spiegeltent. It’s very revealing about his origins as an artist, puppetry in North America, the scale of his work and timeframe (6 months a year in the studio, then tour), government funding traps, the role of repertoire, and his other puppet-free lives as actor and playwright. As in performance, he’s a deft improviser and joker—about choosing a career path, he quipped, “If I’d known about Puppetry of the Penis, I could have merged my 2 great interests.”

Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, Tinka’s New Dress, created & performed by Ronnie Burkett, music, sound design Cathy Nosaty, lighting Leo Wieser, Brain Kerby, George Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, Oct 17-27.

Space is constantly and magically reconfigured in The Light Room, a reverie of recollection and projection, a theatre of sublime simultaneities and hectoring distractions, of remarkable transparency and numbing opacity. Light, images, sounds and bodies are captured and refracted on and through the glass walls of a room as abstract as it is palpable, a hard-edged modernist construction made fluidly contemporary by all that flows through it. Curiously, however, it is the word that dominates; sounds, images, singer and dancers come and go but the words flow on and on, ritually intoned throughout, demanding but increasingly losing our attention. There is, similarly, a superfluity of images (some quite inexplicable), as if produced in fear of a visual vacuum. The Light Room can create astonishing spaces, evocations of the entwining of biography and architecture, but it has yet to resolve its own performative time and space. None of this is suprising for a work of such ambition and collaborative complexity (RT 50 p21-22) in its first realisation; hopefully its creators now have an adequate distance from the work to enable them to edit and open it out.

“This could be a planetarium”, says writer-performer Margaret Cameron early on. She’s right. The very space where a table or a chest of drawers is mined for its associated memories, or litanies of everyday objects recited or their images projected tumbling through space, can transform into something cosmic: a glass jetty reaching into the stars, resonating with the analogy between sea and outer space heard in the text. Along this jetty in 2 key scenes, dancer Ros Warby moves, curling down and curving up, standing on one leg, reaching as if for transcendance. At the end of the work, she calmly surveys the universe from the end of the jetty (her view of it projected on the huge screen behind) before walking into lines of light and the stars, no mere fade, but absorption.

The constant sense of transformation is amplified by the passage of spoken text into song, aural parallels (the wrap-around wash of flowing water), the tenor (Alan Widdowson) bending and curving a huge grid of light, the pulsing mutations of the music, and the way images, once seen, live on in other spaces as miniatures or distant reflections. The orchestration of the often beautiful filmed and computer-animated images, text and movement is masterly, dense and competitive though it sometimes becomes. Memory and the spaces we inhabit, from the domestic room to the stars are, like The Light Room itself, fluid and resonating with each other, suggesting a deep interconnectedness. In this planetarium of the memory, as in that of the stars, we can be awed or defeated by sheer volume. This makes the scene in which projections of a Renaissance library fill the room a reminder that the book is a form of memory. The Renaissance also prized architecture as a memnonic for life. (Incidentally, it would be nice if the substantial quotation, beginning “In my child’s eye..”, from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, the great theorist of architecture, space and memory, was acknowledged.)

The Light Room is an impressive work-in-progress, building on many talents. The dancers are their idiosyncratic selves. Michael Whaites provides a fluent dance of semaphoring as Margaret Cameron rummages through imagined drawers discovering even the first memories of sounds. Whaites and Rebecca Hilton tangle in a fast duet with sudden reversals of power, seemingly taking up the struggle for equilibrium evinced in the text. Ros Warby’s idiosyncrasies and sense of interiority are best at exemplifying interaction with the space and its transformations. Cameron, always a fine writer, provides some excellent text, even if it inclines too much to abstraction and its frequency and tonal insistency mean that we rarely get time to sit back and absorb it. I look forward to a more lucid Light Room.

Company in Space, The Light Room, concept, direction Hellen Sky, interactivity design & VR environments John McCormick, text & dramaturgy Margaret Cameron, Hellen Sky with performers, sound design & composition David Chesworth, sound spatialisation Nigel Frayne, image & light design Margie Medlin, architectural design Tom Kovac, VR worlds & animation Marhsall White, spatial design Simon Barley, costumes Leon Salom; Australia Gallery, Museum of Melbourne, Oct 15-26

Helen Herbertson’s Morphia Series is a work in miniature. An audience of 12 is driven to a mystery location then offered an edible object which is more artwork than food; after washing it down with a floral dessert wine they are seated in the darkest of spaces.

The unknown nature of the location and its hidden interior leave us at the edge of the visible. Eyes adjust to the blackness as a woman emerges from a clouded box. The cube is illuminated as if by daylight. A yellow light shines around a figure whose outline is in shadow. She performs an infinitesimal roll along her spine. Her ribcage incrementally shifts sideways. Gunfire sounds a rat-a-tat-tat to her Tai-Chi style shifts in weight. Hand gestures shoo an invisible insect. The box is flooded in red, awash in sea sounds. At one point, the seating for the 12 observers shunts forward jerkily like a ghost train. Losing our bearings, we are exposed to ourselves, in close proximity to a body now naked. She scrabbles into the sand, searching for some buried memory, evoking old sores, settling old scores.

Morphia is a female version of Morpheus, the son of the god of dreams. But it feels less like a dream than a poetry reading consisting of bodily writings, haiku maybe. Ben Cobham’s set design and lighting are integral to the work, producing a fine sense of perspective. The cube is small, seen at a distance in a well of darkness. Each section has its own lighting and soundscape. Thus the box and its body are able to create different tones. At the end of Morphia Series, the jury are driven home, left to deliberate if not concur.

Morphia Series, choreographer, performer Helen Herbertson, artistic collaboration Ben Cobham; Oct 29-Nov 9

To review Helen Herbertson and Trevor Patrick side by side seems right. Both dance alone in works that are also collaborative, both operate with a clarity and finesse that suggests a coming of age. Like Morphia, Cinnabar Field is also concerned with memory but disrupted by an urgency and passion of autobiographical dimensions. In the first half Trevor Patrick dances in a succession of delineated, lit squares, moving along the Great Wall of North Melbourne constructed in wood by Ben Cobham. Patrick moves through these beautiful articulations accompanied by spoken lists of the everyday relating to his youth (including meals eaten). The evocation of a rural childhood is palpable, the dancing fluid, precise and polished. Toward the end of this passage, questions of identity arise. Sex, the desire to be otherwise, is spoken, forming a pivot, a hinge between a life coloured by memory and one which is less amenable to order.

While thus far the dancer has rendered himself visible through dance and words, dressed in white shirt and black pants, now a figure in a black dress and wig appears, emerging through a gap in the wall. This is no less Trevor Patrick than the boy who ate lamb chops and potatoes. Hartley Newnham stands nearby, singing to a series of Patrick’s entrances and exits, sandwiched between images of and moments in movement.

The face is a crucial aspect of subjectivity. It is hard to see Patrick’s face in his dress and wig. Without a face, things become less clear, less secure. The black high heels typify the precarious nature of this dance. Performed without losing balance, another kind of vertigo is played out. Rather than evoking memory, this is a rendition of the present. I left Cinnabar Field with questions about the meaning of the last half, wanting to fill in the gap, while knowing that without it, there would have been no room for such a dance to emerge.

Cinnabar Field, choreographer, performer Trevor Patrick, musician Hartley Newnham, design Ben Cobham, sound Livia Ruzic, composition Luke Tierney, lighting Jen Hector; North Melbourne Town Hall, Oct 24-27.

The 2002 Melbourne Festival opened with Fire, Fire, Burning Bright (Marnem, Marnem Dililib Benuwarrenji), a 2-act presentation from the recently formed Neminuwarlin Performance Group from the east of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The first act was a fascinating contemporary mix of stylised pantomime and everyday ‘non-performance’, narrating the poisoning and murder of black seasonal workers early in the 20th century by a white station owner as retribution for the killing of a bullock. The second was the dance cycle (initiated after World War I) which inspired Fire, Fire…, relating the spirits’ journey from their burning corpses, up the local hills, across country of other Koori peoples and then to the coast near the Port George Mission where many Kimberley people later moved.

The 2 acts were distinct in form and content and the reason they were collared together remained unclear. Indigenous people watching the original dances would have been familiar with the broad history of the massacre: the dances are largely unconcerned with questions of cause and character. Rather, they were a densely coded form of spiritual mourning, the Kimberley people using their language and mythos to make sense of events such as the effect of white settlement on geographic mobility and economic relations. The production did away with the patronising assumption that Indigenous culture is ‘ancient and unchanging.’

The abstract, iconic language of Kimberley Aboriginal forms was particularly alluring. Woorranggoo—standards of coloured wool stretched over crossed sticks—were gently rotated during one sequence, then later used in a stabbing motion or held high behind the back, evoking flames, the sunset into which the spirits first moved, and the rifles which the Aborigines were bemused to see shouldered by white soldiers departing for the Front.

By playing their former bosses in whiteface, the black stockmen added a particularly intriguing, Brechtian sense of performative inversion. These ‘whitefellas’ offered only torrents of abuse to their black employees, while another more sympathetic gubba who fed the hungry spirits later reflected: “Who were those men, that I gave fish to?” Whites never truly saw or talked to black Australians. Moreover the black authors perceived a far more multicultural bush than is generally recognised, an itinerant Afghan and a Chinese man both warning the men not to return to their vengeful boss. The repetitive action of Act I placed it firmly within the realm of mythic time—but it was no less historic for this.

Ultimately though, there were too many repetitions and the continuous, successive performance of both acts was too taxing for theatre audiences. Indigenous song cycles often run all day and although it was interesting to settle into another sense of time, the production was eminently unsuited to the tightly focused attention of Western theatrical presentation. Unnecessarily literal bush sound effects and projections and endless interruptions for explication further sapped the performance of theatrical power, giving it a static quality akin to museum display. Fellow gubba critics I spoke to consistently acknowledged this, but few were prepared to publicly critique a Koori performance. The simple addition of a meal break or alternating night performances of the 2 acts might have countered some of these dramaturgical weaknesses.

Fire, Fire, Burning Bright (Marnem, Marnem, Dililib Benuwarrenji, Neminuwarlin Performance Group, writer-director Andrish Saint-Claire with Peggy Patrick and cast, associate director, designer Tony Oliver, lighting Philip Lethlean, audio-visual design Chris Knowles; State Theatre, Oct 17-20.

Mil Quintientos Metros Sobre El Nivel De Jack (155 metres above the level of Jack)

Lights on! A man, holding an aged woman to him falls backwards into a bathtub with a mighty splash. If that’s not surprising enough, he’s dressed in black underwater swimming gear, goggles and all. The surtitles above the grubby tiles of the bathroom are as lateral as this Spanish language Argentinian play’s opening image, but we’re soon piecing together an abrupt but fascinating tale of a wife and her son grieving for a drowned husband. Instead of abhorring murderous water they have taken to it, a sublime act of death-wishing identification perhaps. Whatever, the bathroom is central to their lives, especially the mother. It’s also where they socialise. The son brings his reticent girlfriend and her neurotic teenage son (traumatised by his father’s abandoning exit on a ship) to visit. Before long they are all wedged into the tub (the boy horrified, resisting but finally accomodating), a situation whose grievous totality cannot prevail, as if the absurdity of it all has freed them. The 2 sons exit as if bonded as new father and son. The incisive brevity of scenes, a certain lack of affect in the playing alongside sudden outbursts and reveries, and a refusal to explain, make for as nice a companion piece to Beckett’s Endgame as anything I’ve seen about the inability to move on, and a tad more literal, and hopeful. (Wasn’t the Wilson-Glass version of that play to be staged in water?)

Mil Quintientos Metros Sobre El Nivel De Jack, written and directed by Frederico Leon, a co-production with the Teatro San Martin; Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, Oct 25-Nov 2

US-based pianist/performer Margaret Leng Tan wisely divided her substantial recital with a long interval. The first suite was performed almost entirely on toy piano: essentially a clunky, key-operated xylophone with limited notes. Although the pieces were diverse, the instrument’s small range transformed the evening into an extended Steve Reich-like event. The metallic notes had a weirdly percussive, hard-edged sustain which accumulated and hung about in gently piercing sheets long after each note was first sounded, while the jarring movements of the hammer mechanism added another scraping sonic element. In a lovely Dada percussion sketch by Jerome Kitzke, The Animist Child (1994), Tan played what she described as “the contents of my New York kitchen” (except the specified tuna tins, since she does not eat tuna), in which discretely sonic events, just barely out of time with each other, realised some other, hidden time—God’s perhaps.

The second suite consisted of more expansive, delicate works for prepared, bowed or plucked piano. Aside from some more sonically dense moments (notably within Somei Satoh’s Cosmic Womb, 1975), much of this section was characterised by the highly gestural quality of much post-World War II/post-John Cage music: single notes, harsh and soft and short, gentle flows, all lightly dispersed within a wide temporal field, suspended, clashing or gently coalescing. A classic (albeit dated) example closed the recital, with Cage’s score for a short 1950 MOMA film profiling Alexander Calder’s abstract, metal, hanging sculptures. It had a light, almost decomposed-orchestra feel and a gentle Cagean humour.

Tan’s work with Cage in his final years has generated the slightly disconcerting accolade of “most convincing interpreter of Cage’s music” (can one be a leading interpreter of compositions designed to thwart single interpretation?). Her performance of mostly post-Cage material however proved that the deceased avant-gardist’s ideas remain fresh and pliable. My favourite was Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real (1990), in which a blurred, tonal recording (actually the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever) was played back through a gently steaming teapot. Tan shaped the tone by lifting the lid and one could actually see the sound.

If Umberto Eco is right, there is no way that we can say “I love you,” without cultural overload. How then to address Goethe’s landmark of German romanticism, the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther? Poor Werther falls in love with a young woman who ultimately rejects him. How could this be when, on their first meeting, she quotes a poet whom he also admires? Having burst into tears at this sign of their mutual destiny, Werther is literary witness to his emotional deterioration.

There are countless adaptations of ill-fated, romantic tragedy. When Peter Brook decided to mount Bizet’s opera, Carmen, he claimed that it was a layered work consisting of 2 stories: one he considered central, the other a manifestation of Bizet’s social milieu. Brook chose to pare away the Parisian narrative to make theatre with the underlying drama. Belgian director Michael Laub went the other way with Total Masala Slammer. Apparently fond of playing with multiple genres (musical, soap opera, theatre, dance) and inspired by the ballads of Bollywood, Laub added complex Indian cultural dimensions to this project.

The cocktail called the Alabama slammer is spoken of in different American accents. There is disagreement about its ingredients, some of which are not grown locally. It’s a nice metaphor for the hybrid mixture of elements in Total Masala Slammer which draws on both Western and Indian traditions to render the Goethe text. Versions of the tale are read, sung or suggested. Other versions of other tales are also played out, for example, much of the Indian dance performed classically refers to elements of the epic, Mahabharata.

Players sit on chairs and benches and watch their fellow performers, while a video screen signals and translates the use of narrative. The many short pieces include: reading and singing from Goethe’s text in English and German; a series of Classical Indian dances performed by men or women, largely Kathak in style, to live tabla music; Indian singing to pre-recorded music; a soloist in a red sequinned dress using voice and movement; a trio of “modern” dancers performing phrase material; and 2 Indian actors ironically acting out love scenes between an ardent suitor and an uninterested starlet. Both actors refer to scripts: “We’ll make love like foreigners.”

According to Christiane Kühl’s program notes, Taub’s guiding principle is that “depth comes about purely through chance.” As chance would have it, the juxtaposition of myriad styles and traditions is no recipe for success. While the Indian dancing is exquisite, the first half is a bit like channel surfing. In the second half the Indian and Western teams mix it up more, creating an interesting focus, especially in the performers’ ability to adopt the styles of other traditions.

Laub is purportedly interested in the slim line between fiction and realism. If not pure fiction, there is little sense of the real here either. Moments perhaps: a woman in a zippered sari imitates Bollywood accents on her Walkman, casually reading from a dog-eared copy of Goethe; or videotapes from auditions conducted in India. The back wall is covered with layers of coloured silk. Each layer successively falls, finally revealing a bare wall.

Young Werther’s moment has come. Women run across the stage in and out of period costume. A Hawaiian-Indian dream sequence wafts from left to right. The pistol is pulled out. But no, one of the Indian dancers models Werther’s period dress on an imaginary catwalk. Death is deferred. In fact, I can’t even remember whether he shot himself. I suppose he did. That’s bad isn’t it? Is that because I have seen too much death on TV? Or is it because Total Masala Slammer is always outside Werther’s tragedy? Eco might be right that the expression of love is hackneyed but is love also hackneyed? And what of tragedy?

Total Masala Slammer was pretty much critically slammed in Melbourne. I can see why. Taking a punt on the concept that depth is created from chance is risky, especially when cross-cultural elements are added. In a way Michael Laub’s right though. It’s not possible to control the creation of stunning theatre, theatre that rents the fabric of fiction. Unfortunately, the groundwork didn’t seem to be there. Was it the structure, cultural dichotomies, the rehearsal process? Or perhaps Laub didn’t want to touch us, but rather to stay within the irony of a work he subtitled Heartbreak no.5.

Total Masala Slammer, Remote Control Productions, Hebbel-Theatre, Berlin, directed by Michael Laub, Indian crew led by Kumudini Lakhia & Sunayana Hazarilal; State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Oct 31-Nov 2

In one of the festival’s series of intimate performances, this one with audience and actors sharing the stage of the Playhouse, performers from Canada’s STO Union and Candid Stammer Theatre sit at a large ring of a table with us, narrating, interviewing, staging simple enactments and a dance in the centre of the circle. A century, the 20th, in the life of a family flickers by, the years are announced (or not, many don’t get a look in, either suggestive subtext chasms or empty times). A sentence commenced in one year is completed in the next (as if it took that long for something to be worked through), a spare dialogue crosses several years, or an emotional eruption represents a whole year. Characters come and go, strange events and synchronicities leap out of the ordinary, as in a Paul Auster novel, and actors play generation after generation—the co-author and actor Nadia Ross relieved, she tells us, when she finally gets to play herself instead of her forebears.

The century for this family is scattered with curious encounters and sometimes startling revelations brought on by war, sundry separations, the birth of idiosyncratic twins, the murder of one in 1947 by fellow workers hostile to a lesbian, interracial relations and the increasing domestic isolation of that century. There is the sense, in all these intense sketches and fragments of realities, of an often atypical family struggling with typical yearnings, especially love and happiness. The first courtship, 1901, has the grandfather-to-be describing love as that which allows one “to endure, to be more”, but we see how hard that will be to realise in the face of religion, insanity, capitalist fantasies, unconventional sexual proclivities, mediums and strange visions (one twin’s fantasy that her mouth is a black hole which reflects the world). The conclusion of the performance entails a desire to see life as simple, but everything we have witnessed in 100 years at just over one hour says no. Low key, quietly intense performances and the intimacy of the actors’ presence, the refusal to fill in the narrational gaps, and the way north American performers hymn their delivery all make for a poetic evocation of a century at once terribly familiar and utterly strange.

Recent Experiences, STO Union & Candid Stammer Theatre, written & directed by Nadia Ross, Jacob Wren, set design Paulk Mezei, lighting Steve Lucas; Playhouse stage, Oct 22-27

The Artrage festival has long held a crucial position in the arts landscape of WA offering one of relatively few opportunities for a diverse range of local arts practitioners (particularly younger ones) to initiate project-based works that are highly experimental, contemporary and sometimes risky. (See RT51 for an interview with Artistic Director Marcus Canning.)

One of the key aspects of Artrage 2002 was the strategy of excursions into new spaces, a new network of festival locations ranging from suburban Midland to inner city Northbridge—notably in the park across the road from the new Artrage Breadbox gallery/ Blackbox performance space venues. While this involved a degree of struggle and chaos — freak strong winds, rain, street shenanigans and over-policing—this intermingling of art’n’life was ultimately a welcome initiative. The conversion of the park into Moongarden thrust the festival into the public realm with the Strut & Fret performers on their circus rig (especially Shenzo Gregorio’s stunt violin antics), tree-bound trapeze with the E OI collective and the tongue in cheek playfulness of the Lunar Circus.

The MoonGarden was also the site for The Golden Dawn Project, a performance installation based on the Kabalistic pattern of the Sefirot (Tree of Life) devised by the Eater Presents Collective. Despite opaque arcane references and noise spilling in from outside, this work allowed viewers autonomy in navigating their own meditative journeys. Another engaging project in MoonGarden was Sussio Porsborg’s Life Suit, a shipping container housing 4 sewing machine stations, the deceptively sweat-shop aesthetic concealing a model for participatory democracy—’the wearer principal.’ People were able to sign up to learn all the necessary sewing skills for each to construct their own ‘life suit’, customizing themselves a calico ‘toile’ from a generic pattern. Keen participants threw themselves into hours of life-suit labour realizing the project’s potential as a committed and engaging experiment.

A key interventionist work, however, suffered a severe case of untimeliness. In the wake of the sad toll of the Bali bombings, it seemed a hypersensitive moment for the presentation of the PVI Collective’s satiric scrutiny of the form and language of security—anxiety and terror-angst in Terrorist Training School. (This traveling bus tour of Perth’s nether regions has been briefly deferred both out of respect and in response to the need for clearing space around these burning-issues-of-the-moment…stay tuned.) A key spatial intervention was Hotel 6151, for me the hands down highlight of the festival. Here nearly 50 artists operated in collaboration with conveners Christian de Vietri, Ben Riding and Heather Webb to bring 6 floors of a doomed-to-demolition hotel site into being as a dense and exploratory journey, a multisensory aesthetic engagement (see Bec Dean’s online report). On the theme of spatial intervention, a guest of the festival was Parisian street artist Space Invader, whose notorious arcade game pixel-images have infiltrated many urban sites internationally. A map of local ‘invasions’ revealed a welcome interference with the beige hegemony of Perth’s spatial politics. Space Invader’s work featured in conjunction with the MonoCulture group exhibition curated by Mark McPherson. This sophisticated collection of street-wise graphic works made a strong showing at the Breadbox Gallery.

The satellite events based in outlying Midland also extended the scope of the Artrage program (even down to the curious travelogue series of G Arden Gnome photos featured on Midland trains). I arrived at the opening, Firestarter…The Art Feast, post-carnage, with only the departing crowd and the remains of smouldering book piles, cooling spit-roast carcasses and trolleys of aging tidbits testifying to a strange, pungent night’s extravaganza. The premiere performance of Rachel Dease’s the scoundrel is made an outcast with the Schvendes Ensemble offered a rewardingly languid ambience within an intimately refined soundspace—a haunting vocal presence with rich strings and wayward jazz percussion elements.

The Urban Anxiety exhibition utilized a defunct Midland bank site, offering an examination of the makeshift economies and nomadic survival strategies of the disenfranchised. Curated by Kate McMillan, the show brought together thoughtful works reflecting textures of human detritus through traces and allusions: photographic documents, including Ric Spenser’s large prints of alleyway flotsam, Edit Oderbolz’s miniature spatial propositions and scale manipulations, and McMillan’s image of the urban shanty home of Japanese internal economic refugees. These were complemented by Raquel Ormella’s generic laundry tote bag lettering, S T A Y, as iconic motifs for restless displacement, and Matt Hunt’s illusion game of partitioned rooms brimming with mounds of coloured popcorn, later revealed to be propped up with cardboard (playing on the first world-third world polarities of maize as-currency/as-nutrition/as-junkfood).

Another intriguing gambit into alternate space occurred in the voyeuristic pleasures of Peep-In Death, housed in the upper floor of the Risque Erotica premises. With works compartmentalized into booths and requiring the authentic insertion of $1 or $2 for each viewing, Peep-In Death presented the staged ‘death-of-the-artist’ as peepshow amusement, featuring the works of a series of artists grouped as Arti-Choke (Ainsley Canning, Maya Catts, Sohan Hayes, Cat Hope, Sedon Pepper, Simon Perecich, Tanya V, Karl Ford, Petro Vouris). This offered such deliciously macabre performance moments as the meat-corseted martyr grinding hearts into a mincer while gazing at poster-boy photo (Tanya V); and the superb fish-eyed view into an immaculate white tiled toilet replete with a white-suited-fleshy-dome-hatted figure doing the ‘shakin’ shaman’ dance, summoning the spirits of Onan to a hilarious bluegrass hoe-down soundtrack (Canning); or the flaky video fate of scratching to death (Hayes) amongst other near-death experiences. Similarly The Tall Concrete Project, presented by /G.B.Kjub’Ed/, offered an innovative dance work sited on a city car park rooftop, featuring digital animation and electronic soundtrack drawn from the sounds of the carpark itself.

The sprawling program offered some excitingly fresh contexts for works despite the inherent hazard of becoming diffuse. As well as the projects already mentioned, representing a select slice of the larger works undertaken for Artrage, there were many other notable often smaller works contributing to the overall experience. These included the oscillating laser-gridded Clownhead (Richie Kuhaupt, Geoffrey Drake-Brockman); the candy encrusted MoonGarden folly, Ginger Bread House (Sarah Contos); the photographic street presence of Museum (Alin Huma) and Line of Sight (Tony Nathan); the dense construction of 11,000+ text-bricks in Bookmaze (Poets of the Machine, Ganz & Blum); the confessional voyeurism interactivity of The Booth (Jen Jamieson); and the activist art workshops and forums of Beyond Border Panic with Deborah Kelly.

Max Lyandvert is keen to talk about the ideas that drive his vision for his new work for the 2003 Sydney Festival, Close Your Little Eyes, but not so eager to give away details about what his audience will experience in the theatre. At the end of the interview he offers a few intriguing clues. There will be chairs: chairs you can’t sit in; chairs that have had lives; chairs from many places. The audience will be moved around a little. There will be projections. Things will happen above and below. A string quartet will play from the 4 corners of The Studio. Singer-performer Melissa Madden Gray will fly. Her voice will be processed: “she’s partly based on Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.” Clearly this is a work that will reorient its audience’s notion of theatre as part of Lyandvert’s agenda to have them join him in re-thinking our cultural heritage.

Publicised as “a homage to the suffering of innocent children in time of war”, this work for a choir of 16 children, female singer and string quartet, finds its particular impetus in how we think about the Holocaust. The show is not a performance about that event, but for Lyandvert it is central to how we deal with the unspeakable, how it is represented and remembered…or forgotten.

Composer and director Lyandvert has been a musician all his life. However, the desire to become a theatre director and to synthesize that role with his particular musical aspirations and philosophical concerns has been realised through an interesting set of associations and events. Close Your Little Eyes represents the first stage of that synthesis.

Lyandvert was born in Russia and migrated here with his family when he was 6. Although bored with piano lessons as child and, he admits, too lazy, he nonetheless gravitated to fellow musicians at school. The focus in his teenage years was at first on rock music but with improvisation becoming a dominating interest. Lyandvert grew up with musician friends Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim: “In a way we taught each other music…Through the extremes we saw that rock and jazz were connected…We took in Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and the whole world of free jazz…and Cage…and we formed the What is music festival.”

However, a chance development had long before opened another, intially non-musical path for Lyandvert. “A friend was doing an acting course at the old Drama Studio in Darlinhurst and I picked up a flyer about a one year diploma director’s course. Because I’d been overseas I had most of that year to kill before I could get into university. I got passionately involved and did much more than required. Soon after I started a company with some of the actors I had befriended and we did really weird work, Grotowski-inspired, Artaud-inspired experimental stuff. We even did a show called Theatre of Cruelty in 1989. A number of directors like Neil Armfield, Lech Makiewicz and Rodney Fisher came to see it. In 1993 I was directing a play at Downstairs Belvoir for Makiewicz’s company, Auto da Fe, a version of Dostoevskys’s Notes from the Underground. Rodney was directing a version of The Idiot at the Crossroads Theatre as a cooperative venture and he asked me to be his assistant director. A week before we opened he had a brainwave about all this underscoring he wanted, all the way through the production with loops of contemporary music by Gorecki, Reich, Glass, Pärt. I said, “I’m a musician, I can help you with this. I haven’t got much to do as assistant director.” It all went well: Lyandvert had commenced a succesful career in sound design especially with Fisher, then Legs on the Wall, Kate Champion, Benedict Andrews and others.

However, sound designing and composing for theatre was “becoming obsessively a career…and stressful” for Lyandvert, “and I started getting a little frustrated that my directing was taking a back seat.” As important as his directing impulses were there was also a feeling of unfinished business with regards to his music. “I went to New York for 6 months for mostly musical reasons. I got to know Shelly Hirsch, hung out at the Knitting Factory It was then that I discovered the Wooster Group and Richard Foreman and other work. It had a double effect. It rekindled a desire to compose but, more than that, now I was seeing performance fused with other artforms in an unconventional way. It rekindled my hunger for directing. I wanted to direct works that I conceived. New York opened me to Heiner Goebbels and Heiner Muller, Wilson and Glass and music theatre where music is a core element rather than background…”

Lyandvert found himself especially attracted to the work of Richard Foreman. His excellent production of Foreman’s My Head was a Sledghammer at Belvoir St Downstairs (2001) achieved some of Lyandvert’s dreams for a synthesis of his work, though he was still working with someone else’s script. While working on …Sledghammer, Lyandvert started a Masters Degree at the School of Theatre, Film & Dance at UNSW. His studies, he says, are integral to the work he is doing now and for the next few years. Some key inspiration has come from the Stefan Heim novel, The King David Report, a satire on East German censorship that, at the same time, speculates on the origins of the Bible and how we establish cultural fundamentals, in this case the Judeo-Christian tradition that pervades Western life.

At the same time Lyandvert was taken by artists like Romeo Castelluci (see page 4), Daniel Liebeskind (the architect of Berlin’s Jewish Museum) and the composer Olivier Messiaen, all of whom respond to received culture very personally but also very systematically. Of Castelluci he says, “He takes theosophical knowledge and uses it as a structure through which he can express his concepts-—through a sound, through a light, the use of the Kabbalah and it will be consistent with his floorplan, movement and everything else in his production.” Inspired by these and other artists, Lyandvert is creating a trilogy of 3 works, “not connected in a narrative way and not all are performances”, designed to be presented eventually in the course of one day. Part 1 will be about the establishing of our culture, Part 2 about representation and Part 3 about faith. Close Your Little Eyes is part 2 and will be seen ahead of the other works in its Sydney Festival premiere.

Although it deals with difficult material, Lyandvert says that Close Your Little Eyes will not be an occasion for despair. “Like Castelluci’s Genesi or walking through Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, you don’t feel that you’ve seen Auschwitz. You walk out believing that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. There is hope, as hard as it is to nail it down.” Not surprisingly then it excites Lyandvert that his work is premiering in a festival celebrating on stage, in film and in conference, the works of Samuel Beckett with Lyandvert himself working on the sound design for Benedict Andrews’ production of Endgame for the Sydney Theatre Company.

Sydney Festival 2003, Close Your Little Eyes director, composer Max Lyandvert, performers Melissa Madden Gray, FourPlay, Sydney Children’s Choir, designer Gabriela Tylesova, lighting Mark Pennington; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 20-25, 2003

The photographs of Rebecca Ann Hobbs border on the unknown and the unsaid. Suck Roar (2001) is a series of 7 self-portraits in which Hobbs pictures herself with a range of creatures from different species. The photographs have been digitally manipulated to intensify their colour thus imitating the hand-colouring of another era, and though they are inkjet prints, when they are exhibited they are framed with great formality. Each highly staged photograph sets up a relationship and suggests some communication between a human and another species—birds, possums, a dog, a squid, a stuffed fox, snails and a spider. The relationships become increasingly strange and attenuated. Hobbs began the series planning to picture herself as a homeless person, but the imagery of cross-species relationships took over with all its metaphoric potential of investigating and depicting hierarchies of eroticism and power. In the title of the series, Suck refers to the feminine element, while Roar refers to the animal element. In each photograph Hobbs appears in the centre wearing carefully chosen old clothes with a stylish awkwardness. It is almost as if she has restaged documentary photographs of an isolated weird scientist in the 50s or earlier, caught on a Freudian threshold of misunderstanding.

Stephanie Radok
Reproduced with permission from the 2003 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships catalogue (University of South Australia)
Rebecca Anne Hobbs (Victoria) is one of 7 Samstag Scholars announced in November who will take up their scholarships in 2003. The other recipients are Samantha Small (South Australia), John Meade, Callum Morton (Victoria), Maria Kontis (NSW), Anke Kindle (Tasmania) and Simon Pericich (WA). Thanks to the generous bequest of Gordon Samstag and the scholarships established in 1992, each artist will receive 12 months living allowance of US$28,000 as well as travel expenses and the cost of institutional study fees in the US or elsewhere outside of Australia.

Townsville-born Rebecca Ann Hobbs graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) degree in Photography from the Victorian College of Arts in 2002. In 2001 she won a National Gallery of Victoria Trustee Award, a Proud Friends of the VCA Acquisition Prize, and was runner up for the Photo Technica New Australian Photo-Artist, Australian Centre for Photography. Hobbs had 2 solo shows in 2002: Suck Roar, CCP Melbourne, and To April Love May, Linden-St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne.

Hossein Valamanesh, Longing, Belonging, courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney

Moving from the safe boundary of my home I unwittingly undergo extreme border disorder. I am lost, but I keep going, hopeful. I take all the wrong roads ending up going north. I want to go south. I swerve to the far right. Pulling up in no-man’s land I attract the attention of the toll attendant. I ask the good-looking Pakistani working the border post, “Can I do a U-turn on the Harbour Bridge?” He looks around and furtively suggests, “as long as you do it quickly and no one sees you. Be careful!” Borders are artificial and arbitrary. It is only through transgressing the boundaries that we learn them and how to avoid them. Borders are there to be broken. There is no need to panic if you do it quickly.

Borderpanic sought to bring together artists, media makers, activists and thinkers who question geopolitical and metaphorical borders. It was an exploration of cultural and intellectual responses to the current border crisis and refugee dread. The idea was to examine the increasing symptoms of ‘borderpanic’ and to investigate possibilities of resistances to the increasingly permissible racist discourses and manufactured security hysteria. The project was to document responses to the depravity of government policy and the new racism and act as a catalyst for ongoing transnational social, cultural and artistic resistances.

Curators Deborah Kelly and Zina Kaye explained that the term ‘borderpanic’ is a description of the “tangled pathology of anxieties peaking after Tampa and following the escape of 70 people from Villawood Detention Centre in July 2001 and, of course, the brilliantly engineered extrapolation of this ‘hysteria’ in the federal government’s 2001 re-election campaign.” Suvendrini Perera makes the important observation that this has also entailed the gendering and sexualising of borderpanic with a focus on ‘the right kind of maternity’. Since October 2002 borderpanic has mutated into an alarmist Code 3 security psychosis based on ‘credible intelligence’ of al-Qaeda on Australian soil.

Connections are constantly being formed in government discourse between incomparable issues such as asylum seekers and ‘9/11’; JI and the infiltration of terrorists masquerading as Indonesian refugees; chadors and bombs; suspicious activity and the ubiquitous al-Qaeda. Although these associations appear ridiculous, through repetition they are gaining a strange popular legitimacy. In response, the Borderpanic project sought to unravel these wag-the-dog connections by drawing together a broad range of activities, responses, exhibitions, talks, performances and people to challenge the prevailing dominant discourse.

In the current political context it is the job of artists and cultural workers to do something, but what is to be done and why do you do what you do? Participants in the Tactical Media Lab (TML) which was part of the Boderpanic event claimed a variety of motivations: “I do art because I am scared,” “I desire to challenge displacement and disillusionment”, “I don’t want to witness fellow human beings behind razor wire”, “I am working through successful-migrant guilt”, “I want to get people to talk and think about what they are doing”, “I want to create something for tomorrow”, “I do what I do because there is no point doing anything else”… In these admissions few asserted that they were activists. Rather there was a longing to be active. Borderpanic offered a forum, bringing artists together to counter the disgust with government policy felt in isolation. As a creative meeting process the Tactical Media Lab was extremely effective. The concept originated from a series of conferences and festivals organised in Amsterdam since 1993 under the title Next Five Minutes. The Sydney TML is one of a chain of such events that are taking place in different parts of the world (www.n5m4.org).

TMLs are creative colloquiums with no leader or set objectives, but myriad ideas and incredible organisational demands. They avoid the Chekhovian dread of grand ideas by focusing on small-scale, practically achievable projects. These involve ways of working with old and new information technologies to produce easy, accessible, low cost forms of social intervention and communication practices. Lead by the dynamic Alissar Chidiac, the Sydney TML generated 5 creative clusters focused on Media Jamming, Cultural Actions and strategies for the WTO protest, Public Mischief and Performance.

Artists shared their techniques and achievements in speaking to a wider community and challenging the prevailing hysteria and Islamaphobia. Cultural workers reported on what alternative processes were going on in their states. There is a surprising amount of grassroots activity and connectedness between church groups, such as the Aboriginal Catholic Centre, and refugees. Serafina Maiorano pointed out that “activism is occurring in many forms—from the streets, to the church halls, to the picnic areas of our suburban and city squares, to academia, to the galleries, to people’s homes and online.” These responses are the unique cultural statements and practices of people challenging the status quo, educating others and making do within the available resources of their immediate communities without fanfare. The TML was an occasion to share these moments of resistance, as the border between activists and artists gently faded outside the confines of institutional imperatives.

Some of the ideas that came out of the Media Jamming cluster cannot be discussed publicly. However the general focus was on strategies that included: producing alternative statistics; creative, fictive rewrites of Government Policy; tackling talkback radio; pursuing media hacking opportunities; extending ideas like Mickie Quick’s Refugee Island street-sign alteration kits; and creating a culture-jamming network. Participants were adamant that art can create change, but there was an equally strong awareness of the limitations of preaching to the converted. It was clear too that traditional forms are no longer as effective as media jamming and cultural pranks. The customary form of theatre, for example, lacks tactical culture jamming’s jagged immediacy, the diversity and breadth of its audience reach and its mingling in the everyday. Subsequently, I saw Citizen X at Sidetrack Theatre. This was an overly earnest production playing to small sympathetic houses. Its ideas would not cross over into the mainstream, whereas events such as No One is Illegal’s Rethinking global eviction action placed more than 200 chairs at the front of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs in Melbourne. There was the welcome mat for Sculpture by the Sea with “Go Away” printed on it, and there have been various street theatre protests. All appear to be far more appropriate, democratic and effective as national actions.

Borderpanic had a strong global focus with a number of informal international guests. The German activist group, Kein Mensch ist illegal, demonstrated that the power of art in challenging corporate and government actions remains robust. Deportation.Class is an online and travelling poster competition that drew attention to Lufthansa being used for the deportation of asylum seekers whilst allegedly making huge profits from it. Lufthansa attempted legal action and tried closing the exhibition, claiming enormous losses from the campaign. But internet providers from all over the world have offered to mirror the exhibition (www.deportation-alliance.com).

At the Borderpanic symposium Nikos Papastergiadis contextualised some of the artworks at the Performance Space exhibition. He discussed Hossein Valamanesh’s 1997 installation Longing/Belonging in terms of Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire. The vacillation about what being-at-home means is characterised in the photographic image of a Persian carpet in an outback clearing with a campfire burning at its centre. This symbol of a domestic gathering place in another space appears uncannily homely in the rug’s woven geometry integrating into the spidery arms of the eucalypts. As Valamanesh claims, “where one belongs or what our longings are is not that clear cut.” The fire does not destroy the carpet, but purifies and fuses it to the landscape. The image is symptomatic of the longing for home that is constantly changing, transforming fire into light through a process of idealisation.

Another speaker, Julian Burnside QC, made a convincing argument against the current regime of border protection based on the idealisation of Australian national character, accusing the Howard government of “betraying our ordinary human decency and stealing our reputation as a decent and generous people.” He detailed the illegality of the scandalous ‘Pacific Solution’ that debauched the sovereignty of island states and denied basic rights to the asylum seekers. He provided a stinging criticism of the amateurish, politicised Refugee Review Tribunal with its assumption of guilt, perversion of facts and inability to lead inquiries, illustrating this with a gut-wrenching account of horrendous injustice done to a child. He argued passionately that the concept of border protection is not relevant because asylum seekers do not threaten our way of life. In contrast, the government’s reaction to the Tampa crisis and refugees in general “turns Australia into a place where we no longer want to live.” However this commonsense appeal to national pride was justifiably challenged with a reminder that it is dangerous to fight overt nationalism with nationalistic appeals to “core values.”

Meditating on the theory of borders, Ghassan Hage paralleled Burnside’s argument in suggesting that borders are a mechanism for defining ourselves—they are designed to stop the disintegration of what they protect and we have to live up to that image. Hage reasoned that borders protect the ‘good life’, but they also can lead to claustrophobia that destroys this life by preventing communication with the outside world. “We lose touch with the good life that we are protecting and become attached to the defensive mechanism. In that moment we lose touch with what it means to care. We have transferred care into worry about everything and this has become pathological. Relax a little! But somehow we cannot relax. The nation is meant to look after its citizens, but what happens when it stops caring about all of its citizens—worrying replaces caring.”

The focus of the Borderpanic project constantly oscillated between, on the one hand, what we can do to challenge government actions by raising awareness of the refugee issues and, on the other, our focus on ourselves in this action. There was an important reminder that the artwork and interventions are not about activists, but about refugees. As activists we need to challenge the notion of helping refugees. So often it is not we who help them, but they help us to rediscover ourselves, our lost courage and fading generosity. As Deborah Kelly sentiently stated, “Borderpanic is not enough, it’s not a solution or even a proposal. The point is, it’s worth starting somewhere. How are we to participate in the history we are standing in?”

Borderpanic, curators Deborah Kelly, Zina Kaye, project initiated by Performance Space, co-produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art. Sep 6-22

With the launching of The Projectionist Australian filmmaker Michael Bates is able to put to screen his most elaborate and finely produced piece of work so far. This captivating exploration of a projectionist’s final night is the latest in a line of exciting and award winning short films, including Etecetera in Paper Jam (1993) and Famed (2001), that utilise the process of pixilation, or ‘human animation.’

Pixilation animates human bodies in the same way that puppets or drawings are worked on in stop motion animation. It is a painstaking and time-consuming process, with the actors having to move extremely slowly. Bates explains: “The actors are photographed one frame at a time. The camera exposes a frame. The actor takes a step forward and resumes their pose. Another frame is taken and so on and so on. Instead of allowing the camera to run at normal speed (24 frames a second), it is stopped every 24th of a second to allow a change in the scene, the movement of an object or of an actor between frames.”

The effects are startling, creating a surreal and fantasy-like appearance without the use of any digital technologies or after effects. Actors seem to glide or fly through the settings, and backgrounds are saturated with intense colours and shadows.

The technique is intrinsically connected to the skills and abilities of the performers, therefore Bates works with experienced movers. “People need to have skills at being able to change tempo, knowing every part of the movement they’re creating, which elements need to be slowed down or sped up. Russell Garbutt [who plays the projectionist of the title in the new film] has a great deal of experience working in physical performance.” Garbutt, Julian Cope and Carlos Russell worked with the group Etcetera and appeared in Etcetera in Paper Jam, where the 3 are virtually held hostage in a corporate office, stalked by a psychotic photocopier and other office paraphernalia.

Bate’s history as a filmmaker goes back to working professionally as an animator for studios such as Hanna Barbera in traditional 2D cell animation. In 2001, he spent a year at the Australian Film and Television School workshopping his technique of ‘human animation’ for his Masters Degree. “I needed that whole year to fully explore, test and workshop; and that was revolutionary. I knew that when I went into the film school I didn’t simply just want to make a film, I wanted to explore the technical installation. I knew it would be complex in terms of the way it was going to be shot, the cinematography, execution, process, in terms of the kind of ‘look’ we were hoping for, I ran a series of workshops where I had a number of actors come in. I then created the short film Famed.” Famed went on to win the Sydney Critics Circle Award for Best Animation (2001) and the Kodak-Australia Award for Best Cinematography in a Student Film (2002).

Despite the level of control inherent in most forms of animation, the attributes of pixilation often lie with elements of chance and accident, especially when it comes to nature. Bates explains, “Part of the appeal of live action animation and what gives it such an edginess and feel, is the fact that it is incredibly risky! Because it’s so slow to shoot, you can’t see the end results in an [on location] video monitor. Watching the rushes is extremely exciting, you get such a buzz! For example one of the scenes in The Projectionist took 23 minutes to shoot, and we couldn’t go for a second take because it included the sunrise. It’s the final image you see in the film.” With pixilation, the environment is more than just a background to the action, at times having a life of its own: “You end up with inanimate objects coming to life…there’s an energy that fills every image and it comes through in the colour saturation as well. And to a degree humans become more robotic and more lifeless…I think particularly in Famed you see the crossover…and that lends an alien quality to the film.”

Bate’s affinity with music is apparent in all his films just as sound plays an integral part, creating a rhythm for the action as well as guiding the story. The technical process means that sound can never be recorded at the same time as the live action. So how does Bates work on his scores? “I have a great love for classical music, soundtracks and film scores. I think to a large degree I am often thinking music and hearing music. Walking through life I hear music, it is there all the time. Sometimes I’ll use music to assist me in creating the images and to get a sense of the rhythm. For example, for Etcetera Insurance (1998) it was a piece by Dvorak, so I knew I had to really hit the button to get the kind of imagery that would accompany it: the rhythm and pace, not so much of every scene but of every shot. In Etcetera Paper Jam the music was ‘written in’ afterwards, but the music I had in mind when dreaming of the film is nothing like the music you hear.”

This kind of inspiration can be seen in The Projectionist where Sergei Rachmaninov’s The Isle Of The Dead creates a haunting and melancholic backdrop to the story. “I don’t know what came first, the music or the concept, but I do know that the Rachmaninov and the original artwork [Arnold Bocklin’s painting of the same name that inspired the composer] connected strongly with the story for me. I was always fascinated by the idea of projection, Jungian projection, the theory that we are constantly projecting ideas and impressions about people onto them…So I was fascinated with that and the idea of someone who had passed through life, seen and done a great many things and has certainly suffered, but that his life is invisible to anyone else but himself.” In the film the projectionist leaves the cinema where he works and mentally projects images from his past onto the cityscape.

These ideas were developed even further with producer Anna Messariti, performer Russell Garbutt and production designer Jennie Tate. “We wanted to make sure there was something solid there, even if people don’t necessarily follow the story from A to Z. They would get a sense of the projectionist’s personal history through the attention to detail. Jennie was asking me many questions throughout the filming, such as, ‘The man who appears in the door is a violinist, why is he a violinist?’ and I would say, ‘The violinist is part of the ensemble where the projectionist played the piano, the violinist played the violin, and the projectionist saw the love of his life on the dance floor.’ We had to think about those things very, very carefully and much of the imagery is drawn from dark corners and brought out into the light.”

Literally and figuratively, Bates’s use of the hidden and dark corners of Sydney, especially round The Rocks area, is astounding. “I actually love the fact that these places are decaying. I think it’s absolutely fascinating and I still believe to a large degree that because of development they are killing the Rock’s ghosts. There’s no law against killing ghosts.”

Categorising Bates’s work as animation hardly does it justice given the range of techniques involved. It certainly sustains the spirit of experimental filmmaking in a remarkable way.

“There’s a great sense of community in Brisbane, which is of course directly related to its size,” says Sarah-Jane Woulahan, one half of the successful production company Squareyed Films. Since scooping the pools at the all-important Queensland New Filmmaker Awards with Stanley Ovation PI, Woulahan and partner Sean Gilligan have embarked on innovative personal projects including activist documentaries and videoclips for the bands George and Silverchair. They’re passionate advocates of the positive aspects of Brisbane’s small-town mentality: “almost all the filmmakers here know each other and you can feel the community getting stronger and more independent and confident as the months go by.”

“Brisbane is a small place and it’s pretty easy to keep track of what everyone is up to, so there’s a sense of us all being in the same boat,” agrees Anthony Mullins, whose 6-part documentary series The Show recently screened on ABC TV and whose absurdist short STOP was the only Australian film at Cannes 2000. This sense of community, Mullins says, “might come from the fact that no one is opening Swiss bank accounts on the money they make in the independent drama/doco business here.”

Most emerging Brisbane film/video-makers cite the city’s low production and living costs as critical factors in their work. It’s hard to find a new filmmaker discussing the ‘paid professional’ side of the craft. On the contrary, many of Brisbane’s budding media makers are refugees from professional stints on the Gold Coast where ‘hired gun’ work is plentiful, if not always creatively or emotionally satisfying. Gilligan attributes the initial impetus to set up Squareyed to a stint on “US slave labour camps at the Movie World Studios, churning out mediocre fare…I just wasn’t satisfied with being a cog in the machine.”

Others share this ideology of choosing to remain on the margins of industrial production, in exchange for creative freedom and practice. “It’s really important for me to be doing what I love,” says Tina Blakeney, award-winning experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist, “and that means honouring my creativity, doing the projects that stimulate and challenge me artistically…If that means working 3 jobs, working nights to produce something the funding bodies don’t like or don’t think will sell, well, stiff shit—I’ll find a way.”

Historically, this romantic sense of antagonism toward institutional film bodies tends to characterise self-conscious independent production and it’s particularly pronounced in Brisbane where, despite a burgeoning state-funded sector, much innovative and diverse production emerges from outside institutional boundaries.

Squareyed warn against the ‘culture of dependence’ that inevitably results from “filmmakers who are taught to construct stories that suit defined funding guidelines”, rather than pursue unique personal visions. They’re critical of the creative vacuum that they see resulting from too many Queensland filmmakers going through the ‘sausage machine’: “the filmmaker constructs their personal tale in order to be successful and in the process creates something that is untrue and unrepresentative of them as an artist.” Squareyed particularly rail against the way that strings-attached funding often disempowers individual filmmakers.

They describe a disturbing picture of interference with funded productions, the installation of interstate and foreign ‘professional’ talent at the expense of local filmmakers learning their craft, interventions with stories including last-minute script changes and consequently, creatively bankrupt, hollow productions and makers. “What has been left by the wayside is creative collaboration and instinct, experimentation, initiative, learning through mistakes, trust, responsibility—everything that is important to the filmmaking process.”

That wayside detritus finds a natural home in the independent sector where the rejection of hegemonies is not only standard operational procedure but the motor for experimentation and innovation. Brisbane’s thriving independent media culture, facilitated by activist and grassroots organisations like indymedia, active.org and ecojammer, is witnessing an explosion of creative collaborations: happenings, installations, talks, screenings and events. The legacy of systemic repression, Brisbane media makers’ unapologetically anarchic, anti-institutional approach has led to powerful cross-fertilisations of talent and ideas; recent examples include the popular multimedia arts festival Straight out of Brisbane. Successful experimental screen nights featuring works such as Pixel Soup by Sean Healy and Jesse Sullivan and Brat Jam, a video zine by Jesse Sullivan and Thea Baumann, show that Brisbane audiences are hungry for original, challenging local fare.

Not all the up and coming Queensland film talent insists on self-marginalisation. Many new Queensland filmmakers have benefited from institutional support, including Anthony Mullins, who credits Pacific Film and Television Commission project support for his start in filmmaking, and teaching opportunities at Griffith University for enabling his continued development. The romantic image of the lone artist up against the establishment isn’t applicable to other emerging talents, like the Spierig brothers, whose career has benefited from institutional and industrial assistance; specifically, mentorship from commercial production elder Dick Marks. After many successful shorts and commercials, the brothers have embarked on their most ambitious venture: the self-funded zombie-genre feature Undead, for which they are currently in the process of securing international distribution.

Particularly in a town as interconnected as Brisbane, there are plenty of bruised ego stories. However, many argue that the operation, character and mood of film production here is what contributes to the success of Brisbane’s emerging filmmakers. Independent writer/director Stuart Mannion, another key figure in Brisbane music clip production, says “Brisbane sets are close-knit affairs—a lot of people are happy to work for free or in return for you helping them out, most people multiskill and there’s a real sense of the network, of working together, that isn’t as obvious in the bigger cities.” Squareyed have benefited from “extraordinary support” from industry partners who have “continually backed our projects, supporting high risk ventures” scorned by funding bodies, such as the successful The Irving Hand Prophecy.

Despite the opposition to “organisations whose priority is favourable press for politicians and giving grants to mediocre American producers who see our state like a Mexican backlot,” many new Queensland film/video makers are reaping benefits from relations with funding bodies. Others are carving out niches in the independent world, however all benefit from the tight, powerful networks of this small town. Woulahan and Gilligan are unrepentant about their decision to pursue personally challenging projects over profits: “Safety pays well but destroys the soul. We’d rather do what we do our way and be a part of strengthening and developing our community, to help Brisbane become known as Australia’s capital for independent filmmakers—filmmakers who are working for the love and progression of their art rather than searching for the next dollar.”

An aged projectionist leaves an empty cinema for a long walk home, perhaps his last, late at night. The streets are empty, but they are also full—of memories, many of them painful, cumulatively suggesting the life and losses of a refugee. These are realised as silhouetted, moving figures at windows or richly textured images of people, including younger versions of the projectionist himself, flickering on the walls of buildings and tunnels. He never stops to look at them. Some appear though to see him: they are puzzled, or reach out, or slam a door. But we sense he is aware of them: they are, literally, projections of his past, and the sounds that accompany them come from that same distant but still urgently alive space. As he makes his way through the old part of his city the images grow in frequency and sometimes monstrously in scale. The narrative of his past is not told or explained, it is suggested rather by our interpreting of the images—family and school scenes, labour, militarisation, flight. But if these images can only be read impressionistically, the film is much more precisely and sublimely about the act of remembrance as a kind of haunting, in which one place and time is projected onto another.

Michael Bates’ 20 minute film is made with an animator’s precision, drawing on skills honed in earlier works. This is not hand-drawn animation and it is certainly not digital. The performers and the locations are real and the projections are on-site. However, Bates pixilates the movement of his characters (see interview p13), so that they have the presence of animated figures. In Etcetera in Paper Jam the outcome is comic, reminiscent of the movies of Chaplin or Keaton. In The Projectionist however pixilation is used to more serious effect, amplifying the age of the protagonist and the doggedness and sometime hesitancy of his passage through the city in contrast with the more fluid images of persons remembered, and also with the speed of clouds or a passing train, reinforcing the sense of the projectionist inhabiting another temporal space.

As sombre as all this is, Bates’ night-time world is full of colour and incandescent moments from the very beginning when we are caught in the projector’s glare through to an abandoned factory that sparks into life, the glow of the Harbour Bridge, the ghostly fireworks on old buildings, and the rows and rows of lit windows that evaporate leaving a huge, blank, brick wall, emptied of life. As the old man walks, another wall transforms into a plain across which refugees trudge and the woman who recurs in his fantasies stops and turns to us. Strangest of all is an image of the same woman in an arched doorway, as if viewed from above. She is clothed, but lying in water, serene, even sensual. She looks towards us and reaches out—but the projectionist has moved on. As he walks through a tunnel, ghostly doors are opened or slammed shut by briefly glimpsed figures. The decimation of his former life is graphically portrayed when images of his beloved, of the playing of a piano and of the act of writing burst into flame—film on fire. As the projectionist’s grim reverie leaves him he emerges into bright daylight and a broad postmodern boulevard along which he trudges, isolated and out of place.

Rachmaninov’s tone poem, The Isle of the Dead, plays for the course of the film, with Bates’ choreographing his action and emotional peaks and nuances to the music, in itself no mean feat. The film’s production design (sparely and effectively realised by Jennie Tate) suggests the 30s and 40s, a period when Rachmaninov’s brand of late romanticism held sway. It’s a conservative choice but given our subjective position (seeing what the projectionist recalls) and the totality of the composition, it suggests perhaps that this is the kind of music the projectionist knows, has even played as images of piano and violin flicker by. Paul Charlier’s edgy sound design, with its female whispers, distant sounds of homely companionship, escalating rows, the grinding spark of oxy-acetylene torches, the barking of dogs we never see and a vivid storm, is finely orchestrated with the Rachmaninov.

For Sydney-siders increasingly used to seeing their city as backdrop to Hollywood and now Bollywood movies, The Projectionist is a radical alternative, a loving evocation, rather than exploitation, of The Rocks area below Sydney Harbour Bridge. The projectionist’s sadness parallel’s our own as this elderly part of Sydney dissolves into tourist enclave and new residential developments. Bates uses locations in other parts of the city (the State Theatre as the cinema, an abandoned powerhouse), but his tight tonal framing yields a consistent sense of place.

The Projectionist is finely realised at every level, the film a tribute to its maker and his collaborators’ persistence with carefully developed and tested, labour intensive techniques at a time when digital technology offers shortcuts. A digital version of The Projectionist, however, could not achieve the look and intensity of this film’s romantic realism, of real film projected against real walls and buildings in a very real place. Its achievement is to evoke a singular subjectivity, working psychologically and metaphorically, absorbing us into the way memory operates, and with visual and aural acuity. It’s a short but thoroughly memorable experience.

The Projectionist, writer, director, editor Michael Bates, producer Anna Messariti, cinematographer Anthony Jennings, sound design Paul Charlier, production design Jennie Tate; Much Ado Films. Montreal Festival of World Cinema, 2002; Official Selection, 40th New York Film Festival 2002.

It might not be in the TV guides, and it might be hard to find on your TV, but community television is alive and suddenly much more healthy. After 8 years on temporary licences, broadcasting on a shoestring in centres around Australia, it has gained some security with new federal legislation allowing permanent licences, rewarding the commitment of volunteers and community groups all around Australia.

The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment Act (No 2) 2002 was developed after extensive consultation with the community television sector and the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (the umbrella body for all community radio and television). It will provide a new licensing framework, increase sponsorship levels and improve the corporate governance and accountability requirements of CTV licensees. The current spectrum will be available for CTV until the end of 2006 after which CTV broadcasting will go digital. The Australian Broadcasting Authority will allocate permanent licenses next year, at last giving CTV, says Communications Minister Richard Alston, “a certain and viable future.”

A hard road

CTV has been broadcasting, on a trial basis for 8 years, but its history goes back to the establishment of video access centres by the Whitlam government, which inspired the idea of community access television. Over the following 20 years the possibilities of cable, satellite and subscription television were explored, including some form of community access to the proposed models. When Pay TV finally arrived Optus re-broadcast Channel 31 in Melbourne and the Gold Coast until 2001. Channel 31 is now the only free-to-air channel not re-broadcast on Pay-TV. But Foxtel has plans to include a community channel once digital is introduced in 2006.

Currently CTV stations broadcast in every mainland capital, on UHV Channel 31 and in Lismore on Channel 68. It’s been a long hard road since the 1992 Broadcasting Services Act recognised community television. Community-based broadcasters delivering community, cultural and educational services through non-profit organisations, are considered the essential base from which to service disadvantaged and marginalised communities. However, in 1994, CTV applicants were allotted temporary narrowcasting licences to be renewed each year and Channel 31 was assigned for community use in the mainland capitals, Hobart, Bendigo, Lismore and Fremantle.

The centres have had a chequered history: both Sydney and Melbourne operations experienced financial difficulties (although both are now in good shape), Hobart relinquished its licence due to lack of funds, Bendigo lost its licence because it never got to air, and the Fremantle organisation dissolved. Adelaide’s ACE TV is under investigation by the ABA (for not having enough community access, or delivering a proper community service), but there are active and committed local groups waiting in the wings. Briz 31 in Brisbane and Access 31 in Perth are doing well, and Link TV in Lismore is back on air after a patchy history. Link has an active community that includes many film and videomakers in northern NSW and University of New England media students.

The government, which doesn’t provide any funding, has finally recognised that it costs 10 times as much to run TV as radio (it’s estimated to be at least $500,000 per year). Acknowledging the importance to CTV of sponsorship it will allow the broadcast of 7 minutes of sponsorship time in an hour, an increase on the previous 5 minutes. Sale of airtime is allowed, but there must be a balance between the revenue-raising requirements of the CTV sector and its community commitments. For instance Renaissance TV broadcasts on CTV in Sydney and Melbourne between 8am and 4pm daily. “This was a dead time for us”, Melbourne C31 Chair Ralph Mclean explains. “For those followers of Fishcam, it’s now shown from midnight to 8am, accompanied by independent Australian music.” Renaissance TV broadcasts specifically to older viewers, with programming made up of its own productions on such subjects as how to manage your finances and the bowls program, Jack and the Green Talk, as well as old black and white movies and TV material no-one else wants to re-broadcast. When the federal government sold its transmitters to commercial operators and the rents went up enormously, Renaissance loaned the CTV channels the money to cover the increases and to upgrade their transmitters, improving both quality and coverage. People could suddenly find Channel 31 on their TV, and viewer numbers have been improving substantially.

From Tiger TV to Songlines

Programs on CTV channels are quite eclectic, dependent on the programming groups and what they contribute. They range from arts-related programs to educational and training work, from short films and documentaries from local film and videomakers, student productions, contributions from many ethnic groups, to much more idiosyncratic fare from special interest groups. In Perth the range is from Flicktease, a movie news and reviews show, to a program that helps people who are doing up old cars. Melbourne has Tiger TV, a football show put together by the fans of the Richmond Football Club, Public Hangings, an art show in which the presenters go out into the streets looking for artists, and if they find any, take the camera into their studios to display their work on air. There’s the Koori music show, Songlines, a talent show, Jaanz Live, and Dawn’s Crack, a program of arts-related news and views put together by RMIT students—it recently won the Tony Staley Award for community access. “Because of the increasingly nationalised commercial networks”, explains Jan Macarthur, Policy Officer at the CBAA, “there’s much more of a role for Channel 31 in each centre to provide local news and interview programs, and they do.”

Access 31 in Perth commenced broadcasting in 1999. They were fortunate in that they could learn from the other channels, and set up a model that incorporated educational as well as community commitments. WA TAFE broadcasts its educational and training programs and student productions. They have a lot of volunteers from students to mature age helpers, and the state government has been supportive, providing some indirect funding through the broadcast of government announcements. Access 31 Station Manager Andrew Brine says, “In our business plan we have 2 areas of revenue: sponsorship from small and medium-sized businesses, and the sale of airtime to organisations who want permanent spots. We sell 20% of airtime to subsidise the 80% we give away to local community groups—and that works. And we program more than 20 hours a week of truly local content—that’s more than all the other free-to-air channels in Perth put together—and that’s what community TV is all about.”

Getting a licence

The Australian Broadcasting Authority plans to call for applications for permanent licences early next year, probably in February, and will provide a generous application period, probably conducting the process across Australia at one time. If there is more than one applicant for any licence, it will be granted on merit, either on the submission papers or in a hearing. When there is only one applicant, the ABA will have to be satisfied that the application meets all requirements of community access and corporate governance (applicants must be not-for-profit companies limited by guarantee and provide annual reports). The current 12-month temporary licences will be extended for a further 12 months in January, and the ABA hopes the application process will be completed by the end of the year, with the permanent licences in place for 2004.

Melbourne’s C31 Chair, Ralph Mclean, is a relatively recent convert to community television, and he says that working to put it into a healthy state is the hardest work he’s done in his life. “It’s even harder than the arts sector for complications and expense. You combine ego, creativity and finance, and it’s not easy—but this makes it worthwhile!”

Not since the 60s and 70s has Adelaide enjoyed the exhilaration, global contact and screen culture continuity that come with hosting an international film festival. In those days new Godards, Chabrols, Bergmans, Truffauts and Kurosawas appeared with thrilling regularity alongside films from the Hungarian and South American new waves that astonished eager audiences. The Adelaide Film Festival fell foul of internal wrangling and censorship and a valuable tradition was lost, quite in contrast to the provocations and longevity of the Adelaide Festival of Arts. Let’s hope that SA Premier Mike Wrann’s enthusiasm for this film festival is long-lived and that Artistic Director Katrina Sedgwick creates an identity that will differentiate it from the standard model and give due place to innovation and local content. Certainly the fact that it’s to be a biennial event creates interesting curatorial opportunities, not least the time to take in and round up some of the best films available and to engage with the digital impact on filmmaking and distribution. Sedgwick asks, “If cinema was the artform of the 20th century, what will the 21st century bring? Screen culture will continue to dominate our lives but in what forms?”

The 2003 program offers more than 80 films: features, documentaries, shorts, new media, music video, a celebration of Hong Kong Cinema, animation and computer gaming. Free forums will include local, national and international filmmakers, critics, industry representatives and patrons.

Winner of the best British Feature at the 2002 Edinburgh Film festival, Dominic Savage’s Out of Control (UK) is one of 8 international films premiering at the festival. Savage’s wholly improvised film explores peer pressure and poverty, following the lives of 4 boys on a South London housing estate. Another first screening in Australia will be the French film, Fellini: I’m a Big Liar, directed by Damian Pettigrew—an in-depth interview with Fellini plus contributions from friends and collaborators. Also premiering are: Christopher Roth’s award-winning Baader (Germany), an independent feature on urban terrorist Andreas Baader; and Abouna (Chad), the story of 2 young orphans by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. The program also includes Japanese experimentalist Suzuki Seijun’s Pistol Opera, a theatrically extravagant tale about a female assassin.

The Australian silent classic Kid Stakes will be accompanied by The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra; there’ll be a free Deckchair Cinema in the East Parklands; a Spaghetti Western retrospective and a kids’ animation program with workshops.

The Festival’s gala opening night marks the 30th Anniversary of the South Australian Film Corporation and will be followed by a party at Adelaide Town Hall featuring WOMAD guest stars The Temple Of Sound (UK). The full festival timetable will be announced in February 2003. RT

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) is finally open in Melbourne, and with it the only digital cinema projector in Australia. The intimate cinemas are magnificently equipped with big screens, enormous sound systems, high-backed seating and steeply raked auditoria so that everyone has an ideal relationship with the screens.

The initial screening program is aptly titled Digital Cinema and in December and January viewers can see a program curated by Claire Stewart.

The Indigent collective was established in the US in 1999 and inspired by the ideas of Dogme 95 and John Cassavetes. It was financed by the Independent Film Channel (IFC) to produce 10 low-budget digital feature films, 5 of which can be seen this month at ACMI. These include Tape which is set in a hotel room in Michigan and shot on 2 consumer-model digital cameras, and Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls, another hotel inspired drama. There are also films from the Danish Dogme clan, including lesser known features such as Mifune screening alongside The Idiots and Italian For Beginners.

The Garage Thrills program offers a selection of American films based on the DIY approach such as The Last Broadcast, a precursor to The Blair Witch Project and American Movie: The Making of Northwestern.

On the digital front, Resfest is an annual festival that showcases current digital creativity. Works screening from this year’s program includes Cinema Electronica, a collection of innovative music videos, and By Design, a selection of short films that, curiously, take their inspiration from the corporate world.

A highlight of this first ACMI season will be Digital Projections, showcasing 15 Australian-produced short fictions, animations, music videos and experimental work, including Ectoplasmic Fat Provider Baby by Ian Haig, Purgatory by Michael Frank, You and Me by Tina Gonsalves and Broken by Victoria Batchelor. RT

Digital Cinema, The ACMI Cinemas, Federation Square, Flinders St, Melbourne, Dec 5 2002-Jan 18 2003. www.acmi.net.au

Electrofringe 2002 to me is a kind of blur, induced, not as some may think by the fabulous local ginger beer, but by a kind of escalating atmospheric oscillation. Take a horde of people from across Australia with a smattering of international guests, all involved in new media arts in its many manifestations—sound, music, video, graphics, hypertext, net art, gaming—and get them lapping a block in Newcastle’s Civic centre for 5 days of workshops, forums, discussions, performances, demonstrations and exhibitions (and 6 other concurrent This is Not Art festivals) and gradually a kind of conceptual electromagnetic field develops. This charge induces a subtle but relentless interference-like speaker hum—from which I now try to extract the essence of Electrofringe and a smattering of Sound Summit events.

Earlids

The opening forum, Musician’s Journeys, with Anthony Pateras, Robin Fox, Adrian Bertram, Julian Knowles and Bruce Mowson was a highlight because it plunged straight into ideas, issues, visions—the conceptualisation of how and why artists work. Discussion began with each artist’s progression from a variety of backgrounds—classical music, sound engineering, bad guitar and super overdrive pedals—blossoming into a rich conversation. The (for some) well trodden territory of performativity and laptoppery, the focus on micro-gesture, the influence of improvisation in both acoustic and digital modes, the importance of defining contexts for sound art and music were all thrashed out, concluding with the spatial and physiolgical nature of sound and speculation from Pateras as to why we lack earlids. With exception of Bertram, the artists then gave us examples of their work: Pateras & Fox’s fast and frenetic multi-tooled, live effected car key jangling onslaught; Knowles’ solidly satisfying, all enveloping spatial audio; and Mowson’s unrelentingly minimal and perceptually disorienting looping. These fellas practice what they preach.

An interesting foil to this forum was Women in Electronic Music as part of Sound Summit. Day 3 and I had not seen many/any women on sound-based forums so I was eager to hear what Kate Crawford from B(if)tek, Kristen Erickson aka Kevin Blechdom, Riz Mazlen aka Neotropic, Sofie Loizou from Southern Outpost, Kaaren Overliese, and Ruby Grennan from Inertia distribution had to say. Disappointingly not a lot. When asked about the concepts behind their work, with the exception of Crawford and Loizou, they seemed appalled by the very idea. Neotropic declared, “I don’t believe in concepts.” Now I view sound art and music as inhabiting a similar terrain—based on concepts and investigations, but also guided by instinct and emotion. Perhaps these electronic music artists don’t consciously work from a conceptual base and that’s okay, but when Neotropic argued that, “Concepts are cold, I work from emotion”, I became perplexed. Why can’t working from emotion be a concept? What kind of paradigm is the either/or duality buying into? To my relief, in a later session where these women talked about production techniques they all were much more forthright and the examples of their work were impressive. Interestingly, Kevin Blechdom believes women can’t visualise and dream themselves as electronic musicians, because they see so few examples in the media. Maybe when planning for next year and the question arises “Do we still need a Women in Electronic Music forum?”, the answer will be no, because there will be far more women (and they are out there) integral to electronic music culture.

Eyecandy

The Visuals Worldwide forum brought together The Light Surgeons (UK), John Dekron (Germany), Kirsten Bradley aka Cicada and Cindi Drennan/Tesseract Laboratories to talk about visual performance/VJ-ing in both Australia and internationally. Light Surgeons use Super8 and 16mm film, slides and digital video to create highly layered works with a strong design aesthetic. Their promo video has stunning images from the very tools they use—close-ups of slide carousels, keyboards, film canisters and a beautiful shot of a scanner’s laser easing back and forth across the screen. Live at Hardware House (the Saturday night party organised by This is not Art) their work seems a bit too designed, too slick. At the same venue, John Dekron’s work, based around found and filmed footage mixed and effected in realtime has a more dynamic and dramatic quality with its chunky silhouettes and monochromes. Cindi Drennan talked about Video Combustion, an immersive audio visual event at Performance Space earlier this year (RT 50 p27) incorporating multiple-user jamming. This event was interesting not only for its scale but for attempting to find new contexts for visual performance out of the clubscene. (An excellent example in Electrofringe was Kirsten Bradley and Nick Ritar’s Birdcage situated by the railway line with live audio and visuals projected onto the walls of a warehouse off Hunter Street. The set with Cicada and notsusan’s delicate and minimal visuals of feathers, stones, and string, accompanied by Ben Frost’s almost painfully beautiful sound was a real highlight.)

The main debate that arose during the Visuals Worldwide forum was about the eyecandy issue. With so much happening visually is there anywhere left to go? Is there a space where less can be more? Is the continuing opposition to narrative hostile to linearity or to meaning in general? Has the technology changed but is still giving us the same old eyecandy (as some artists muttered)? Are artists really doing things that have not been done before? John Dekron admitted that potentials of the medium have barely been tapped making it all the more exciting an area to investigate.

Scalene (SoundSummit)—an international collaboration between 3 sets of sound and visual artists from just about everywhere—is based on the architecture of 3 cities, Manchester, Montreal and Sydney. The artists had to “sample” a building and then make 3 works within different parameters. Each video and sound piece was then swapped and remixed by one of the other groups. The results were made into a double CD (see www.realtimearts/earbash for Jean Poole’s review). Missing them at Hardware House I caught part of their set at Frigid in Sydney a week later. With beautifully constructed visuals and audio that seem to forge a real if not always harmonious interplay, Scalene add some interesting ideas to the narrative vs eyecandy debate.

Erotecha©

I love tech talk. I like letting it float around me, even if I have no idea what is being said, grabbing snatches that will hopefully become clear somewhere along the line. My mission for Electrofringe was to leave with some understanding of the mysteries of Max/MSP. Sitting through the Patcher workshop, where 6-7 artists attempted to network at least 6 different computers, all using patch-style software like Max/MSP, Reaktor, Nato, Jitter etc for realtime sound/video mass manipulation, including panning parameters, was satisfying on many levels. Massive and unpredictable, the workshop didn’t quite shed light, but suggested multiple possibilities. By the time I had tuned into a masterclass with Wade Marynowsky on his synaesthetic audio/video patching and felt my way through the magnanimous John Dekron’s session, the step by step process of creating a video patch with Max/MSP & Nato, which he later made available as freeware, the basic principles were beginning to sink in. This kind of hands on revelling in technology makes Electrofringe really engaging.

Erotecha of a different kind was found in the almost controversial Cam Girls forum hosted by Susan Hopkins author of Girl Heroes (Pluto Press). Cam Girls are young women (often girls) who have self-dedicated websites with live footage or ‘performances’, daily diary entries and wishlists where people can buy them things in return for their, well…just being. This phenomenon appears to be one of those glitches in popular media culture that finds its way into new media art and cultural theory—the argument being that these women are taking control of the media and their image and then exploiting both. Zofia Szeretlek is certainly a young woman in control, pushing her work beyond the facile towards an arts practice, with attempts at deconstructing her own image in ways not dissimilar to Cindy Sherman. On the whole it appears to be a practice almost too obvious to argue from a feminist perspective though a valiant attempt was made to create debate (with men the most vocal feminists in the room) but the general consensus was ambivalence—the defining factor coming down to matters of taste and substance.

Szeretlek was also part of the Public/Private Surveillance Strategies forum with Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski discussing paranoia and their Paranoid Poetry Generator. The PVI Collective showed excerpts from their A Watching Brief, a fascinating interplay between surveillance technology, reality TV and performance art. Disturbing but interesting was Jason Gee’s evolving work playing with the ideas of inverting/exposing/embracing/developing voyeurism; it’s based on a growing library of webcam portraits secretly captured from websites.

Polarities + –

The concluding event of the 5 day talk-teach-tech-fest was Mutant Electronica (a This Is Not Art event) at the Cambridge Hotel where the pull of the aforementioned magnetic field was at its strongest. With 3 rooms dedicated to different music/sound styles, the event was massive. Kevin Blechdom delivered her obsessively programmed, quirky electronic pop and innocent/obscene hysterical vocals (a performance that could only be topped by her karaoke version of Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song which I was privileged to witness back in Sydney). English maniac VVM tortured classic pop favourites from behind his pig mask and Toydeath performed their push-button heavy-death cuteness. There was so much it couldn’t be absorbed, creating a joyous though almost crushing force.

Maybe this force is a yield of the polarities of tech and concept. Electrofringe is full of satisfying tech talk and stimulating concepts in its forums, but the 2 were rarely discussed together. Is it possible to talk of concepts and technology simultaneously, in terms of each other? Sometimes the concept is the technology—let’s talk about that. Electrofringe is an indispensable event in the development of an ever expanding new media culture in Australia, bringing together established and emerging artists, bombarding them with stimuli, slamming them up against other This Is Not Art festivals like Sound Summit. Maybe a challenge for the next Electrofringe is to encourage this melding of tech and concept so we can talk smart and dirty at the same time.

Electrofringe 2002, managers Shannon O’Neill, Joni Taylor; Sound Summit, managers Seb Chan , Mark Pollard; This Is Not Art, manager Marcus Westbury; Newcastle, Oct 3 – 7.

Three international juries recently announced the nominations for the transmediale.03 media art awards. Berlin’s transmediale is one of Europe’s leading and most innovative new media art festivals.

Five projects were shortlisted in the two categories Image and Software, from about 900 entries. eurovision, an interactive video by Sydney-based new media artist and curator Linda Wallace was nominated for the Image Award. OnScreen asked Wallace to fill us in on the work.

“One idea I investigate is the compositional variety multiple streams could take into a single frame. The work is also to do with narrative, the logic of the repeat and notions of materiality in the digital environment. In terms of its subject matter, eurovision speaks to the kind of legacy left by global European cultural and science/technological media exports from the late 50s to the late 60s, as seen framed by Eurovision 2000.

“Each channel in eurovision is like a time machine: my time, when I shot the digital still images in Europe in 2000; the broadcast time of the Eurovision 2000 Song Contest; the 2 films I was using for tests (and ended up getting obsessed with, dissecting their narrative structure)—Bergman’s 1957 The Seventh Seal and Godard’s 1967 Two or Three Things I Know About Her—and the final element, Russian space technology images of the 50s/60s, from a television documentary aired in 2000.

“Each channel, each time machine media element, has its own unique materiality inside the digital equaliser. Deleuze and Guattari consider art to be a time machine, a machine for making thought travel, so here we have a multiplicity of time machines, working in concord.” RT

You enter an empty room to a cry, guttural, male, primal. It’s hard to know where it’s coming from. You stop. You move. Another cry. A chorus of cries, syllabic utterances. You sense you’re making the noise. It’s not that it is yours, but somehow you determine it. Now you play it, treading back and forth, scattering the triggering laser beams and alert to the row of holes in one wall, the constructivist, circular images behind glass that seem to correspondingly jerk into fracturing spins, reassembling themselves into unique concentric arrangements. They are almost the red and black of glowing coal, beautiful in stillness, wild in their agitation and accompanying vocal outbusts. (A closer look at them in action on the CD-ROM that comes with the catalogue reveals that the process of their transformation is wonderfully 3-dimensional.) On the other side of this wall there are more of these ‘portholes’ into some strange otherness. The cries, sighs, moans yield new syllables and grow densely choral, male and female.

In one corner of the room a plinth bears a Henry Moore-like sculpture, a horizontal limb, rising, bulbous at one end. A helpful man says, “It’s a theremin. Move your hand here to increase the pitch and here to alter the volume.” The compositional power of your presence is suddenly increased, as you create additional sound and seem to further manipulate the rumbling choir. “It’s better if there are at least 2 of you”, says the man as he leaves. I try to imagine this. On the other side of the wall of portholes hangs a brightly lit microphone. Apparently if you reproduce some of the vocabulary of cries you’ve heard into the microphone, another level of sound will be produced. Either it’s not working or I haven’t the mimic’s knack. Even so, I leave West Space gallery much taken with Poly-Articulate, its spooky play with modernist certainties, the excellent quality of the recorded sound, the manipulability of the finely articulated whole and the sense I had of being implicated in a newly articulated, but as yet unintelligible world.

Poly-Articulate, Justin Clemens (writer, poet), Chris Henschke (digital artist), John Meade (sculptor), Andrew Trevillian (typographer, designer); West Space, Melbourne, Oct 4-26

Sydney-based media artists Ross Gibson and Kate Richards began collaborating in 1997 on the suite of works, Life After WarTime (LAW). Based on Gibson’s extensive research into the crime scene photographic archive held at the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney (managed by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW), the first work in the suite was Crime Scene. This photographic print exhibition, with Chris Abrahams’ sound design computationally composed by Greg White, an additional database of images with Gibson’s research notes, plus an interactive oral history database of interviews with forensic detectives, ran for 12 months to popular and critical acclaim at the Justice and Police Museum. It is now touring regional NSW.

The parent project of LAW is a CD-ROM. Due for release in early 2003, LAW CD-ROM is a story engine with which users can construct an infinite array of narratives circulating around various characters and locations in a portside city immediately after World War 2. A small section of this work has had limited exposure in the form of an algorithmic story engine called Darkness Loiters.

Gibson and Richards have devised a live version of LAW in which they improvise storytelling using images and texts from the CD-ROM. Performed in a synaesthetic relationship with jazz minimalists The Necks, LAW Live with the Necks was performed at the 2002 Adelaide Fringe Festival. It premieres in Sydney at The Studio, Sydney Opera House on February 8 and 9, 2003. Gibson and Richards are also developing an immersive installation, The Bystander Field, based on the same material.

The suite of works was conceived as a series of interrogative responses to the data-based archive of crime images and Gibsons’ texts.

In the last issue of RealTime, I wrote about the capacity of the world wide web, digital media and other new technologies to transform the visual arts and artistic practice on a global scale. In particular, I examined a fascinating and timely website (www.mq.edu.au/house_of_aboriginality -expired) that focuses on the question of the appropriation or outright plundering of sacred Indigenous imagery and iconography (mostly for commercial purposes).

A growing number of Indigenous Australian artists are skilled practitioners in new technology. I will be discussing the work of 3 artists who are incorporating digital media into their work in innovative, though contrasting ways.

Rea, Jenny Fraser and Christian Bumbarra Thompson are all at different stages of their careers. Rea is currently completing a Master’s Degree in Science, Digital Imaging and Design at the Centre for Advanced Digital Applications (CADA) at New York University. In undertaking this study she aims to hone her present technical and digital skills and learn new ones to better realise future artistic projects. Writing from her base in New York, she states that she prefers technology-based art forms because of the challenges these present and because she actually conceives her projects in this form.

Rea’s interest in digital media can be traced back to her childhood in the small, predominantly Indigenous community of Coonabarabran, NSW where she was born into the Gamilaroi nation. “My mother first taught me and my siblings about our history by showing us her collection of black and white and sepia photographs that she kept in a biscuit tin covered with red roses. I carried these images in my memories until I went to art school. I then asked my mother if I could have the photos to work with. I began to create coloured photos from my black and white memories so that they would become more real to me. This is where computers came in.

“It was just the right time for me, and my ideas and the first year (1992) that access to digital processes became available to photography majors at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Once I realised how much I could do and that the ideas were limitless, [digital processing] became the main focus of creating and exploring new ideas.

“I also felt because it was so new no one could categorise it or me—it gave me the freedom and potential to be an artist, not a lesbian artist, not an Indigenous artist, not even a woman artist, but an artist. So it became the way I allowed myself to explore my medium and the content I was working with as something that was mine with no labels—all mine.

“Now that artists and theorists have begun to create labels and define the process and the medium, there is more of a focus on individual artists and their processes and styles. It was once called ‘digital photography’, then it became ‘digital processes,’ then ‘new media’, then ‘interdisciplinary practice’, now ‘new technologies’ and there will be a million more [labels] until another process comes along and shifts the focus…”

Rea is best known for the equally significant and impressive works Look who’s calling the kettle black (1992) and Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes… (1999), acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia. The 10 small prints comprising the 1992 work were created to acknowledge the suffering of stolen Indigenous girls forced to work as domestic servants for the colonisers. Rea was inspired by her grandmother to create these, adding a distressing coda: “Many of them never…found their way back home and died in custody. My grandmother was lucky—she found her way home.”

Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes… is a powerful and provoking installation comprising 5 images of gun targets superimposed over the artist, “…5 images of One Pound Jimmy [from an old postcard depicting a traditional Aborigine] with gun scopes on his body and 10 abstract glass heads that sit in front of each work on perspex plinths. The soundscape is of my mother singing hymns and me talking about my personal experiences of dealing with death, especially with dreaming my uncle’s death that happened a week later, the exact same way that I dreamed it—he died in custody.”

While it may be too early to predict the next chapter in Rea’s creative life, she is excited about returning home, applying her new skills and entering a new phase of her life and career. She aims to “…go back to my community and do more workshops and skills sharing so that together we can create work about our culture and community.”

Jenny Fraser, a young artist based in South East Queensland is studying for a Master of Communications at CQU on Indigenous New Media Arts. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and she has won numerous awards. Fraser is the founder of cyberTribe, an Indigenous Online Gallery (www.fineartforum.org/ Gallery/cybertribe.html – no longer live) and was part of the curatorial working group for conVerge—where art and science meet—at the 2002 Adelaide Biennial. Fraser’s works are intelligent and witty, with a wicked sense of humour that belies the seriousness of her approach. For example, her deeply iconic Faster Foods critiques the fast food industry and consumerism, references Australia’s choice of national symbolism and the QANTAS logo, and raises questions about the appropriateness of hoofed animals in Australia and this country’s entrenched eating habits. Because her image taps into so many existing representations of the kangaroo, both literal and metaphorical, it’s possible to read it on many levels, despite its surface simplicity. With Faster Foods Fraser has succeeded—very cleverly—in appropriating the appropriators.

When I asked Jenny Fraser whether she could identify special reasons why Indigenous artists might deploy new media in their artistic practice, or if this was simply a matter of personal preference, her response was “Why not?” (Touché!) New media is attractive because of its “instant” qualities, she writes, and she also enjoys the collaborative nature of working in this currently under-explored terrain.

Christian Bumbarra Thompson, Untitled (Marcia Langton), Blak Palace Series, Tiwi Jumper

Christian Bumburra Thompson is a Melbourne-based photographer, installation artist and curator with a background in sculpture doing a Masters in Fine Art History at Melbourne University (see cover RT#49, also RT#50 p4). Thompson describes his most recent work, Blak Palace, created for the Melbourne Fashion Festival, as his best. “I constructed 3 kitsch jumper designs from the 1980s…the Ayers Rock (Uluru) Jumper, Tiwi Island Jumper and the Kangaroo and Boomerang Jumper. I extended the sleeves to about 4 or 5 metres long and employed 1950s colour. I then took photographs of Indigenous arts workers, academics and curators wearing them. I think it was my most effective work because it combined…elements of performance and sculpture but also was [based on] quite a simple, tangible concept of iconic reclamation.”

Drawn to new media because of the hybrid approaches, forms and technologies with which he can engage, Thompson writes: “I think that it is consistent with our (Indigenous peoples’) artistic philosophies. Whether it is sand sculpture, or traditional cultural painting there has always been that element of experimentation. I can also relate to the ways in which new media can accommodate the performative.”

Like Rea and Jenny Fraser, Christian B Thompson regards his artistic work as inseparable from his political statements. It does not seem a coincidence that all 3 artists are advancing their skills via tertiary courses. New technologies are metamorphosing at such a dizzying rate that it’s incredibly difficult to keep up with new developments in the field.

These 3 cyber-navigators are among the vanguard of a small but growing band of explorer-pioneers in this expanding dominion. The Empire Strikes Back.

2002 got better and better for Sydney-based dancer and choreographer Dean Walsh. This indiosyncratic and provocative artist was awarded the prestigious Robert Helpmann Scholarship by the NSW Government, a development grant by the Australia Council, and he was declared Outstanding Male Performer at the recent Ausdance Awards for his role in the Australian Dance Theatre’s Age of Unbeauty. Walsh is also one of the choreographers selected for the Ausdance (NSW)-Sydney Dance Company Space for Ideas project.

The Helpmann Scholarship will enable Walsh to research and develop a work with DV8’s Lloyd Newson in London in early 2003, and to collaborate with Paul Selwyn-Norton, an independent choreographer and performer working between Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and Sydney. The Australia Council grant will contribute towards his work with Andrew Morrish on improvisational techniques and with animator/film maker Antoinette Starkeiwicz on an animation/live action version of Walsh’s Unspeakable Acts. Starkeiwicz’s animation is “very beautiful and unique,” says Walsh. “It suggests a moving expressionist painting.”

Dean Walsh has collaborated on 12 works with performance and dance companies over the last 10 years, most recently in Garry Stewart’s The Age of Unbeauty performed by ADT at the 2002 Adelaide Fringe Festival then at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House. He was choreographer for the Australian premier of Giordano’s Andrea Chenier for Opera Australia in 2001 and its restaging for the South Australian State Opera Company. He has also made 16 solo works, 5 of which have toured nationally and internationally. He was part of the cLUB bENT tour to Britain in 1996 and the New Moves (new territories) international dance festival (Glasgow, 2000). In Sydney he has performed in cLUB bENT and Taboo Parlour (Performance Space, Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras) and in Independent Dance Collections between 1995 and 1999. His Retro Muscle-Song was part of the Mardi Gras Festival Foursome program in 2000 and was the genesis of Maternal Tattoo which he presented as part of his Flesh: Memo for the 2002 Gay Games Festival.

Dean Walsh’s diverse professional and personal experiences each inform the other. He began working life on the rooftops in the ‘burbs as a roofing plumber and now struts his stuff on stages around the world. From cLUB bENT performances that were more like flagrantly fleshy peep shows than high brow dance, Walsh has refined his up close’n’personal style to create works of visceral intensity and mathematical precision. From avant-garde to mainstream, peepshow to pomo, Dean Walsh owns it all.

What was Walsh’s early experience of dance? “Until the age of 20 I really didn’t know what dance was…I mean I knew that ballet existed because, when I was about 7 years old, my grandmother took me to see the The Royal Ballet Company movie of The Tales of Beatrix Potter. I remember sitting there stunned. It was one of those defining good memories.”

Another memorable performance during his childhood was a Disney on Parade extravaganza where the audience’s focus became split between the colourful action on stage and a severe storm building up outside. “The storm eventually ripped a massive hole in the tent ceiling creating a chaotic mass exodus. Larger than life Disney characters, like the Big Bad Wolf, were telling people to be calm only to have the kids scream even louder in terror!” Walsh says he wasn’t exposed to any “artsy dancey culture.” Meanwhile domestic reality was biting hard: “My background was one of disruption and high Richter scale violence and other more insidious abuse as an everyday way of life—one of those families marginalised by income where freedom of choice is cut back to the bare minimum. It was the kind of family life where insight comes from hard-lined reality, not through money and good education. It was an environment of continual fear and hate and emotional upheaval. I lived in a perpetual state of feeling unsafe and sometimes the threat of fatal violence would be heavy in the air!”

Walsh’s candour about his experiences carries through into his solo works which he sees as “shifting through many variations on interconnecting themes, mostly around notions of sexuality, gender, homophobic aggression and extremes in family life. But, having stated that, I think there’s also been a considerable focus on liberation.” He knows however that “a lot of people find straightforward talk about these issues hard to hear. My rebellion and frustration have come not only from my experience but also the ignorance I have sometimes felt in the dance community when I speak about depicting these themes. For me it’s a case of don’t worry, I’m not victimising myself on stage here, I’m fully empowered and energised by the knowledge that this material is loaded. This relationship I have with you as audience is precariously balanced. But that is exactly why theatre and dance can embody these themes so powerfully.”

Walsh describes his early life in lurid terms as something like The Days of Our Lives amplified 50 times with the colour and sound turned up full: “my heart pounding with fear, an adrenalin rush that has taken many years to even begin to learn to calm.” The first hint of stability happened at age 17 when his uncle invited him to join his roof waterproofing company for $40 a day. “There I was, half-a-labourer on the roofs of Sydney, trying to be as heterosexual and blokey as I could because these boys in the company were seriously homophobic! So I spent that period day-dreaming far across other roofs, looking for a future. Had someone told me then that I’d end up in dance, I might have given them a knuckle sandwich!”

How did Walsh move into dance? “After 3 years on roofs and various uninspiring jobs, I asked an older friend if she could suggest a way I might change my life’s direction. She took me to see the British company, Michael Clark and Co, at the Seymour Centre and I was like, wow, now that’s what I want to do! It was an epiphany and a real nod to the future! It was a work with lots of sexual naughtiness, fresh imagery and balletic precision to a thumping soundtrack by 80s UK Punk band The Fall. So 2 weeks later, in late 1987 at the age of 19, I went off and did a class with Margaret Chapple at the Bodenwieser Dance Centre in Sydney. With her incredibly thorough dance classes I was able to get ahead. Mind you, I was doing something like 17 classes a week in contemporary, ballet, jazz and yoga!”

What was Walsh’s first gig on a professional stage? “I applied to The Performance Space to choreograph a group work for the first of their Open Seasons in 1991—a naive and very dancerly little piece. I kind of got the idea that people thought it was well crafted but very prissy.” But Sarah Miller who was then Artistic Director pulled me aside and said, ‘Yes, okay, but tell you what, come back next year with a solo.’ I went back in 1992 with my first solo Subtle Jetlag.”

The theatrical rigour of The Performance Space was alluring to Walsh. “It became a space where I could finally put a voice to the unspeakable. So there I was, running around embodying male violence and stroppy old characters…one friend now recalls that I ‘reminded her of a policeman’ in my early work.”

In 1995 cLUB bENT arrived on the scene, a cabaret smorgasbord of flesh and fuck-you attitudes that has been imitated but never repeated. The imitations lack the nefarious nastiness, intellectual bite and pornographic style of the original. It was part of queer life that did not fit into the gay gym junkies and bean-counting board members who represented the Mardi Gras establishment. Walsh comments: “cLUB bENT was a great platform for investigating all that is queer in society and in dance. It epitomised the demimonde.”

Why was cLUB bENT such a powerful influence on Walsh’s work? “I had a touch of internalised homophobia and began to consider the possiblity that perhaps other gay men might harbour this same confusion, and that its roots were in intense paternal homophobia and sexual abuse. My blood father never let up on policing and belting out of me my every move that seemed effeminate to him. When I was 11, my step-father moved right in and saw my feminine side, coaxed it out of me and, through violence and the threat of it, discovered that he could have his way with me sexually. So on discovering that this happens to other males and that they felt as confused as me, I thought it was an empowering voice to put on stage.

“I came on in my birthday suit and a pair of high heels. I called it Hardware Part 1 for the plumber in me! I designed my body into drag-esque and fashion model posturing to a song about sirens and a manipulated live version of Marilyn’s My Heart Belongs to Daddy. The word ‘daddy’ was vocalised as a cough and a choke and at the very end I gutterally screamed ‘daddy’ before I repackaged my limbs calmly with a glowing smile.

“I wanted to make a piece that would push the audience to see beyond the naked male body, something we don’t see that much in public, and to witness the body passing through various stereotypical masculine and feminine states to reveal an interior emotional and pyschological pain. Being able to explore this subject matter on stage and test the edges of performance was very important to my growth as an artist and I owe a considerable amount of my present success to cLUB bENT and Performance Space.”

Walsh’s exploration of his personal plight and its wider ramifications has informed his solo work right up to and including its most complete statement to date, Flesh:Memo. However, working with other artists in performance and music theatre has contributed significantly not only to his performance capacities but also to his sense of form and the possibilities of collaboration.

In 1995 he appeared in Nikki Heywood’s Burn Sonata, a searing performance work, without words, about a dysfunctional family. “Working within a powerful group of mature performers and with a generous and talented director was empowering for me. It was a very powerful and physical work. The cast was made up of performers who work in various physical ways and we did daily 3 hour warmups using Min Tanaka’s Body Weather technique. This became the common physical ground that we employed within the work and on subsequent projects.

“Another director I’ve worked with a number of times and whose style and radical approach to theatre has assisted and influenced my own is Nigel Kellaway. I first worked with Nigel in 1994 with Sidetrack Performance Group on FRIGHT!!!. In 1997 Nigel and soprano Annette Tesoriero set up their company, The opera Project, and I performed in 2 works, The Berlioz and The Terror of Tosca. These works deconstructed opera on a small scale but with a large, very physical theatricality. With both Nikki and Nigel I learnt how to manipulate theatrical form and embody very different physical and vocal spaces on stage.

“Probably the most enjoyable and gay-friendly experience I’ve ever had on stage would be when Brian Carbee and I performed our collaborative work, Stretching It Wider, in 2001 for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. Brian instigated the concept and the project and was very receptive to my ideas. In the equivalent to 3 weeks rehearsal we had a full-evening show made out of friendship and a desire to tell it as it is.”

Do all the awards achieved this year signify a shift in direction for Dean Walsh? “I want to use this period to develop my performance practice and future solo and group works. This doesn’t mean that I plan to leave my queer-focused work behind me. These ideas will work their way into future work but they’ll be more informed by other processes and perspectives. I guess it’s about keeping true to what you believe to be your own creative strengths but also instigating shifts to set up challenges, something that has been very difficult out there in the independent arena without financial assistance.”

Looking ahead to working with Lloyd Newson, Walsh says, “I’m very interested in the ways in which he orchestrates the moving body to express so much, especially the unspeakable…DV8 was formed out of a desire to demonstrate how important aspects of the social realm could be powerfully presented through movement. I think the important thing is to not shy away from depicting the depth of the social experience; you know, dance for thinking adults.

“Lloyd has expressed interest in my work and I’ve asked him to act as a mentor of sorts. His primary focus is on content, without being literal, and its readability through fluid movement with an emphasis on release technique. I think his concerns are with the visual but also the emotional levels that can be depicted without the over-use of text or obvious dramatics…how it can effect an emotional space for the audience, and this really speaks to me.”

About his other collaborator for 2003, Paul Selwyn Norton, Walsh says, “He begins with content and crafts an almost geometrical abstraction within his various choreographic systems. This includes setting up improvisations directly associated with the various themes he’s presenting so that the dancers play a significant role in the discovery of the material. As an audience, you feel a solid theme beneath the immediate physical presentation.”

Of his own audience, Walsh says, “I like to leave space for people who may have experienced very little, if any, sophisticated dance. At the same time I present vocal or visual ideas that may confront or cause them to squirm in their seats, re-adjust their protective body language one minute and perhaps have a good, limbs-akimbo belly laugh the next. If someone comes up to me and confesses how much the performance spoke to them, and they tell me they’ve never seen dance before, and that they live at the edge of suburbia (where, by the way, life is truly abstract but emotions are very real), then I feel at my most gratified for doing what I’m doing! Same too for having academics or colleagues giving me the thumbs up or offering helpful criticism. But ultimately my work is directed from a real space in reference to my life…challenged or not by other people’s points of view.”

Barbara Karpinski is a journalist, playwright and film director. Her award-winning documentary, Night Trade, about love and war, screened at Chicago, Rio de Janeiro and Melbourne International Film Festivals.

Ada Byron Lovelace was the daughter of the romantic poet Lord Byron and a pure mathematician, Annabella Millbank. She is considered the mother of the digital revolution as she wrote the first computer software (for Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine”) some 200 years in advance of the hardware that is only now being developed to adequately utilise it. Ada also prophesied electronic music, artificial intelligence and a calculus of the nervous system. These prophecies are the theme of a dance work, Ada, as is the fact that the software named after her is both the code used by the US Defence Force to fly fighter jets and to control satellites and run nuclear reactors. So the destructive nature of this historical character’s namesake is also problematised.

Ada represents a yoking of Sarah Neville’s interest in the cyberfeminist investigations of Sadie Plant and VNS-Matrix to her own classically-trained background in dance. The work has undergone 4 previous developmental processes (3 in Adelaide, 1 in Brisbane) before this presentation playing at the end of a 5-week Fellowship at the Choreographic Centre. This version sustains a straightforward narrative on the life and character of Ada, mixing 19th century costume, dialogue and images of early calculus and maps of the human brain with a contemporary interactive technology, which in the long run aims to have performers controlling the sequence of sound and projections via their costumes as they perform. At present, a cyberdoll webcaster figure (Wendy McPhee) calls the shots whilst stop-start digital projection plays over bodies in an essentially conservative and hieroglyphic sequence of re-enactments between Ada (Elise May) and Babbage (Chris Ryan). Choreographically, Ada’s movement sequences are well-performed, with May exhibiting a fine, if traditional, technical ability, but do not extend the dance alphabet, rather, sustain what one would easily call to mind in assocation with bodies and computers.

The webcaster commands repeats and reverses of sequences. These are executed with great precision, but I’m not sure to what effect. These movements display the mechanics of structure and the discipline of obeisance to it. When I put my mind to it, after the event, I suppose they raise the question of whether the human mind determines patterns of interaction, or patterns of interaction condition the emotional mind; but the coolness of this production does not give any particular bite to this strategy in real time. Even more problematic for me is the “slightly futuristic” webcaster’s angular and restricted cyborg movement vocabulary: it’s hard to tell whether the limitations are of concept, direction or performer input. Certainly, McPhee presents as a much quirkier persona just seeing her walk by offstage. There is something particularly unhappy for me in this aspect, the webcaster’s blunt-cut wigged, barking, control-gun toting role recalling opening credits of early James Bond films (with a hint of S&M) and belie the feminist questionings to which I hope and feel the rest of the production aims.

Aesthetically, little catches the poetry of movement in the first sail-like lifting of the fabric canopy beneath which the performance then evolves. But maybe that is not the point. The presentation at this stage seems to me caught between aesthetics in a problematic yet highly stimulating way, raising particularly sticky questions about the dance-technology interface.

What we do see is the grace, restriction and precision (tensions between control and liberation) of the 19th century bodice, mirroring Ada’s struggle to be counted as a mathematician and be taken seriously as a woman. Interestingly, one of the problems of contemporary studies in artificial intelligence is how to replicate the creative waywardness of the human body and mind. The production attempts some of this in its narrative (Ada’s forwardness and her obsessive genius) and in the choreography around her hysterical fits and collapses (she eventually suffered death by cervical cancer). These collapse sequences are adequate, if but cyphers to a truly affective representation, failing to capture a sense of those overwrought nerves she sought to map out into calculus. Although Sarah Neville speaks of the work as “still (and after all) a tragedy of character,” the performance is curiously unmoving.

For all the work on character, we are left not with a particular character, but a generalised representation of “genius” (as per the narrative) and “collapse” (as per the falling movement). Surely in logging a calculus of the body there is not just the calculus of parts but the force and charge of overall patterns, and, as repeated often by “Ada”, her aspirations towards the cosmic or “sidereal”—which to me suggest a force or forces beyond our measurements—just as the interior of her own body could not finally be measured, but multiplied and divided itself away.

Still, one of the strongest aspects of the production is its subtle suggestion that the body can know, and dance in response to, its own mathematics. Neville’s idea of the “creative/destructive” nexus is also interesting: perhaps the idea of a calculus is implicitly destructive (and perhaps politically pertinent to consider in our time). The binary restricts impulse into opposition: if not one, then zero; if not zero, then one. To calculate is to act from a particular perspective that sees opposition as enemy, self as righteous. Perhaps to digitalise is to see “other” as authoritative, self as problematic, as was perhaps her own body (or as was perhaps “woman;” or as is perhaps dance). To find the choreography to reflect this quandary would be a great achievement. I wonder if this might be an aim of the production.

At this stage Ada is not yet adequately a “tragedy of character”, but this is not the main quandary I am left with. Should the cybercoat costume come to fully-workable fruition, what would be achieved in the end? The illusion of a performer in control of wayward elements, her own conscious director, self-actualising and responding to what she actualises as she goes? I find myself thinking: at some, any point, the performer could well ignore all her own directorial choices. And no-one in the audience would ever know.

Ada, choreographer Sarah Neville, performers Elise May, Wendy McPhee, Chris Ryan, sound design/score Nic Mollison, set design David Worrall, costume design Elise May, Summa Durie; wearable architecture Aaron Veryard, Elise May, vIdeo Matt Innes, programming Benn Woods, Talbet Fulthorpe; Choreographic Centre Canberra September 25-28, October 2-5

Dean Walsh is a sublime mover who’s not afraid to open his mouth; a dance artist with an impressive physicality and a provocative way with words. Moments from some of his past works—Toffee Apple (1994), Testos/Terrain (1997), Retro Muscle Song (1999) and Subtle Jetlag (2000)—resonated for me in this latest work Flesh: Memo. The stilettos are gone but the memories linger on.

Flesh: Memo is in 2 parts, the first (unspeakABLE: acts) dealing with the Father, the second with Mother. As the audience enters Dean Walsh dances in a shadowy corner, grooving in headphones, his movement loose then tightly coiled. We admire his naked torso and, at the same time, read the inner conflict written all over him, crawling under his skin. Walsh rants and raves, whispers and confides his memories of family, father, step-father, of unspeakable acts of sexual violence. At times grim and depressing, the story is also unabashedly personal and often moving. Walsh makes effortless transitions in performance style and energy. His relationship with his audience shifts as he moves from displays of feline ease, precision and speed to macho posturing and aggressive face to face outbursts. There is a terrific whispering sequence performed with a whistle in his mouth, a finely honed ‘fighting moves’ physical phrase and some startling leaps between pain and humour. (I note that Andrew Morrish is listed in the credits and wonder how much, if any, is improvised.)

A lip-synched rendition of Cat Stevens’ Morning has Broken (a Walsh family favourite) sees Dean swinging from the balcony. This echoes a scene I’d witnessed earlier in the evening at the opening of the Cerebellum exhibition at Performance Space: the incredible Leigh Bowery in a Charles Atlas film Teach, lip-synching Aretha Franklin’s Take a Look, with a pair of pouting plastic lips safety pinned to his cheeks.

Simon Wise’s lighting design conquers the bleakness of the concrete brick walls and gloomy performance pit of the Seymour Centre, subtly illuminating flesh against grim surroundings (a floor strewn with nails, a steel ladder, an ominous empty chair)—all in keeping with the dark memories being reworked. New media artist Rolando Ramos provides a landscape of domestic detail projected on floor, screen and wall. I’m caught between enjoying the video’s texture, colour and line and frustration at its lack of definition.

The second act, Maternal Tattoo opens with a soft, kinaesthetically languid floor sequence. This time Drew Crawford’s hypnotic score embraces and supports Walsh’s fluid limbs. Using Butoh-based physicality and evocative gestural language, Walsh again wears this story on his flesh for all to see. He sure knows how to play this audience.

Some of the most powerful moments occur in the final 10 minutes. As he pegs a load of dripping washing to a line crossing the space, Walsh tells us a story about Saturday afternoons when “all the violent men were out of the house” and the boy and his mother would turn the stereo up full blast and sing their hearts out. Wearing a sodden petticoat and lip-synching to I just don’t know what to do with myself, the dancer moves from a puddle on the floor, slipping, reaching out, into a beautifully articulated balletic sequence, finally dancing to an aria from Glück’s Orphée—a mesmerising body in motion, intensely self-absorbed but without narcissism.

Flesh: Memo, Sydney 2002 Gay Games with One Extra Dance, choreographed/written/performed by Dean Walsh; dramaturgy David Sheridan, Nikki Heywood; lighting Simon Wise; music Drew Crawford; new media Rolando Ramos; Downstairs Seymour Centre, Sydney, Nov 30-Dec 8

There’s plenty of static between the channels in the first of Antistatic’s 2 curated programs of short works by mostly emerging choreographers, fuzzing as it skips between a familiar aesthetic mix of the re-modernist, avant-grunge, retro and pomo. The styles segue between the boundaries of dance, physical theatre, multimedia and contemporary performance. This format works well, giving floorspace to performers working outside company structures and nudging along possible interstate touring models for contemporary work (here between PICA and Performance Space).

Simon Ellis, devisor and performer of the first work, Full, seems antipathetic toward modernist myths of progressive accruals. He uses as one of his motifs of resistance the voiceover of an old woman. It often strikes me that we think of older people as somehow belonging to the past, as not being in the present cultural moment, similar to the way anthropologists view so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. As if people(s) come adrift, like the old man lost in a boat, with Ellis incorporating from far up in the seating, the action of trying to start a motor. The piece is very ‘being and nothingness’, full of filmic after-images ghosting in corporeal memories and transitory states, light projections, smoky screens and inscriptions. The claustrophobia of the present is represented by Ellis’ spasmodic movements in the back corner of the floor, though I’m weary of the suit as shorthand for the cloned (and here quite chiselled and ‘modern’ in the ‘old’ sense) office worker. Overall the work seems both too ethereal and too mannered at once.

What is interesting is that the dancer’s body (while seamlessly attenuated within the work) isn’t necessarily primary. Nor is vision privileged especially. Full’s multimedia layering harnesses the technologisations of sound, in a way which becomes just as materially suggestive of the labour of the corporeal. In Jacqueline Grenfell’s sound design there’s real exhaustion in the sounds of Gestetner machines breathing their copies, it feels throughout as if something is going to give. “Full is an old woman with no space left to go. The work examines the internal world of an 87 year old woman who is uncertain whether she is ‘walking or being pushed’” (program note).

The Fondue Set (Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan and Elizabeth Ryan) are more idiomatic. Yet they come pre-figured, dressed in red, like Frumpus in heels (or perhaps the 3 Charmed sisters). We see them first at the courtyard bar, propped up against it, trying to get a drink. This is a gestural theatre endemically choreographed at bars throughout the city, their drunken lunges soon morphing into the guttural grunts of a form of karate. The Fondues return later with Blue Moves in the theatre: it’s cheesy and getting gloopier. During a stumbling act, all trembling red lips and intoxication, I glimpsed the little red punctum of a punctured knee. The first piece is succinctly abbreviated stand-up, the second piece suffers more from its logic of exhaustion, repeating itself to a slightly drawn out arbitrary standstill.

Helen Omand’s Rapt has a retro aesthetic, her set laid with artefacts from the 60s. It’s a dance theatre piece so visually heightened that the voice work is something of a shock. Her use of recorded material is more transporting, from fragments of Neil Diamond songs to the pop psychology of ‘how to build a magnetic personality’ on the record player. Omand’s analogue world seduces us and she seems to penetrate its affective level, without it turning into kitschy housewife camp. Hers is more an excavation of dusty histories, an homage to your mother—halcyon moments of modernity now lost, yet astoundingly recaptured (by someone too young to remember?).

The 2 dancers in Twosomely seem too inscribed by their dance training to really investigate the ideas set up by the piece. “There is a power in duality that arrives through tracing subtle differences between two individuals, whilst also acknowledging the sameness inherent in their core” (program note). Young and emerging out of a crate, the dancers lack the more dance degree zero form in which I’ve seen these same ideas exquisitely examined. Choreographed by Felicity Morgan, from Western Australia, the piece nevertheless stands out for its simply honed minimalism, gently steeped in the aesthetics of wrap around muslin pants and yogic flexibility.

Branch Nebula’s (Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters) Sentimental Reason is a more primal and incommensurable pas de deux. Lee Wilson is irritable, pouting and sullen, while the half harnessed Mirabelle Wouters canters around him. She starts to generate a real flow for the piece, using the equivalent of the metonymic in movement in her ‘becoming horse.’ A cross between Iggy Pop and Equus, Wilson’s masculinity eventually explodes into a frenetic mosh-pit-of-one movement followed by some buff aerial work. That Wouters then gets nekkid is predictably feral perhaps, but adds an incarnate sense of flesh. Their base chakra exploration of the psychosexual in physical theatre works towards the form’s potential for embodied performance, with neither the male or female (horse or human?) subsumed or captured by the other.

Antistatic, program 1, Blue Moves, The Fondue Set, Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan (NSW); Mobile States 1: Full, deviser, performer Simon Ellis, sound Jacqueline Grenfell (VIC); Rapt, performer Helen Omand (SA); Twosomely, choreographer Felicity Morgan (WA); Sentimental Reason, Branch Nebula, Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters (NSW); Performance Space, Sept 25-28

The second program of performances at the Antistatic dance event opens with some of the audience spilling into the theatre space, performing inadvertent social moves for others who’ve chosen the raked seating. In dimly lit tableaux in the space are pieces of furniture and intimate displays of photographs from a family collection. Emerging from the crowd or appearing in a distant window or on stage (depending on your perspective), performers Eleanor Brickhill and Jane McKernan are like odd party-goers, dressed for dancing who’ve forgotten why they came. Alternatively pulling focus, they slice through the crowd wildly or cut a path carefully, molding the surrounding space and time to suit their mood. Brickhill moves tentatively and curiously toward a mirror or edges across the stage, maintaining a held-breath kind of tension until she finally bursts into the space, disturbing the peace we have settled into. McKernan’s susceptible and surrendering gestures evoke other figures invisible to us, moving backwards as though repeatedly tapped on the shoulder, perched on a chair and tapping her feet as if waiting for her turn on the floor, reaching out with eyes closed to grasp something that keeps evading her. Intriguing and curious, Waiting to Breathe Out is nicely complemented by Rosie Dennis’ improvised staccato vocalising.

Michael Whaites’ Driving Me is clean, sharp and good-humoured. Carli Liembach’s images projected onto 2 screens and onto Whaites’ white coveralls evoke the sensation of movement through space, like footage shot from a moving vehicle. Trees, lights and road markings are abstracted to create symmetrical patterns unified by a linear thematic. Whaites’ playful movements are surprising, the fluidity and consistency of force creating a kinetic rhythm that you can ease right into. Sliding down a wall, squatting, moving into and embracing the space, using various planes of action between projector and screen, Whaites moves between detailed, broken up movement and larger sweeping themes.

Jeff Stein finishes the first half with a play on perception and physical discomfort in Mini-Me, a piece that pushes spectators to meet him halfway. A screen directly above the seating shows the performer in a cramped space, lighting cigarette after cigarette and setting them up in rows. The live video feed reveals Stein’s presence below us just as we detect the column of smoke rising through the seating structure. Smoky air and craning necks force the audience into a shared discomfort with the sweating Stein who now appears on screen in a new location. Though actually seated in the dark before us, we can only see the performer on the screen above with the aid of Denis Beaubois’ infrared camera. Stein alternates between sitting and staring blankly into the camera, sweating, panting and dancing/crashing around in the dark, all accompanied by Martin Ng’s hectic improvisations. Evoking Ishmael Houstoun-Jones’ In the Dark (Antistatic 1999), the focus shifts from visual to aural and sensorial creating a new kind of dance spectatorship evoked through a dislocation of presence and image.

During the break, Paul Gazzola’s installation Spin Solo in Gallery 1 entertains in the tradition of an ancient wind-up tin toy. Dressed in an Elvis suit and standing on a wooden disk that spins by means of a rope and motor, Gazzola’s dinky apparatus is as charming as his casual banter with the audience. Fielding questions about the work, Gazzola offers us a turn on his machine and then projects his own image into the space he had occupied while he has a rest (Spin Double). This DIY entertainment in an arcade style set-up has the kind of magic that only simple, comprehensible technology can.

Back in the theatre, Rakini Devi’s Claustrophobia #3 begins with cellist and composer Liberty Kerr seated centre-stage behind a scrim, performing simple gestural strokes on her instrument. When Rakini appears, she evokes an other-wordly, intensely feminine force as she moves incredibly slowly across the performance space. Kerr’s cello accompaniment adds an eerie quality, its dramatic swells creating a counter-point to Rakini’s steady action.

The final piece, Cazerine Barry’s House, presented here in excerpt, I have written about previously in RealTime: “Constant transformation is the outstanding element of the work…The visual aural and cultural sidetrips on this journey take full advantage of the mutability of virtual environments, while directly reflecting the central theme of the work, ‘a dislocated sense of home and place’, and the Australian dream of home ownership (RT46, p25). House works effectively in the space and tops off a night of well-crafted and mature work from NSW, Victoria and WA—a rare treat which emphasises the increasing need felt by dancers and audiences for the touring of independent dance.

Antistatic 2002, Program 2, Spin Solo and Spin Double installation by Paul Gazzola; Waiting to Breathe Out, deviser and performer Eleanor Brickhill, performer Jane McKernan, improvised text Rosie Dennis; Driving Me, choreographer, performer Michael Whaites, video artist Carli Liembach; Mini-Me devisor performer Jeff Stein, deviser video Denis Beaubois, sound Martin Ng; Claustrophobia #3, performer Rakini Devi, sound Liberty Kerr and Magnus, video imagery Nancy Jones; House choreographer, sound and video artist Cazerine Barry, associate director Rachel Spiers; Performance Space, Oct 3-5

Sue Healey and Louise Curham sit on the floor surrounded by Super-8 projectors. Their combined choreography of movements flicking the machines on and off translates into projections that, in turn, transform the gallery space into a colour box. Shona Erskine dances through a linear string sculpture in the centre of the room and to the precisely timed appearance of flickering moving images around the walls. Erskine’s delicate, exact and perfectly poised gestures tip-toe silently through the maze of material and illusory objects to the rhythms of the noisy machines.

Curham’s hand-painted and scratched films create primarily linear patterns that jump around the framing squares of light, dancing in counter-point to Erskine’s angular moves. At one point Erskine crouches in a ‘niche’ of the space, holding the room in suspense as the clattering projectors animate the space. A delicately and finely honed work evoking the magical transformations of proto-cinematic effects.

Antistatic 2002, Program 1, Niche #2, choreographer, Sue Healey, performer Shona Erskine, film artist Louise Curham, composer Darren Verhagen; Performance Space, Sept 25-28.

The promotional imagery from Lucy Guerin’s dance work Melt was quite dramatic, suggesting molten states, seismic shifts in movement and emotion and rapid change. Perhaps it was this that provoked the diverse opinions about the show—a work of 2 very different halves. Some people liked one and not the other. Such are the results of mixing expectation with revelation and the fact that Guerin’s recent works differ in appearance and emphasis regarding narrative, theme, timbre and use of space.

Part 1 of Melt was performed in a small square inside a larger space. Ros Warby and Stephanie Lake’s bodies were inscribed by the motion graphics of Michaela French and bathed in Franc Tetaz’ sound score. A duet, or a foursome perhaps, the result was a tightly interwoven, sensory compendium. Dressed in tight long skirts, Warby and Lake used inventive arm gestures. Lit simply by the projection itself, their movement was precisely executed to complement painterly backgrounds (cyber-Klee and Kandinsky) and right-angled, linear tracings. The result was a 3-D shadow puppetry that transgressed the flatness of projection. Warby and Lake were connected like Victorian love seats: one facing the front, the other to the back. Their bodies were centaur-like, grounded and circumscribed. Sometimes they were upstaged by their shadows and then their flesh would emerge in a rare display of facial expression. Sculpture was contrasted with speed. The molten theme in this part of the work arose from changes of quality, tempo and character, the compositional experimentation from spatial constraints, a dialogue between movement, projection and the faint imagery of emotion.

Part 2 included all 5 performers, traversing the larger space. The women were dressed in green tops, orange kilts and socks, the 2 men in subtler tones of grey. A spy-cool trio (Robinson, Mills and Kremerskothen) entered along the wall, settling in a corner. They worked nicely together, moving through material that was recognisably Guerin: a play on turnout, strength and length in the lower limbs, an archeology of ballet’s compass, an overlay of invention. Several relationships occurred among cameo performances by an able cast, creating momentary images. A circle dance wove around Warby, the centre of the dancers’ attention. An unwilling recipient, she crawled off sideways, vulnerable. Lake performed a balletic turn on her haunches. Eyes rotating slowly. There was a kind of neutrality to this quirkiness, a sense of time taken in its development, making room for little things to emerge. For example, I remember someone sitting down, just letting their legs sweep the ground. Nothing much. Unadorned yet unusually elaborated.

The squarish space of the Chunky Move Studio (beautifully converted) was covered over time in a broad sweep from a wall-hugging dance toward the back, down and across into the space. In the beginning of this section the corner became a dwelling of sorts. Later, other spots were inhabited rather than simply passed through. Because the dancers did not equally cover the room with their movements, there was an asymmetry about the use of space. There were also asymmetries of quality (for example Stephanie Lake did a series of introverted Lady Macbeth movements, while Mills and Kremerskothen were smooth swans, graceful and aerial). Some danced whilst others dwelt.

I emerged from Melt with a sense of creative patience; despite a great deal of dancing and collaboration, Lucy Guerin gave herself room to compose. Peel off the story, the theme, the sound and the fury and an evocative formation remains (distinctive, captivating, exploring movement, finding moments). The imagery and bodily composition of Melt were its imaginative aspects. When new movement material is found, this is the vision at work. Nothing big. It’s only the movement of bodies. That’s what I was left with at the end. A sense of quiet composition, of a sketchbook developed over time into a work.

Melt, Lucy Guerin Inc, choreography Lucy Guerin, dancers Kyle Kremerskothen, Stephanie Lake, Toby Mills, Phoebe Robinson, Ros Warby, motion graphics Michaela French, sound Franc Tetaz; Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, Sept 19-29

Sleep was performed for 3 nights as a movement/installation in the white space of the Canberra School of Art Gallery in September. It comprised a continuous soundscape by Mary Finsterer, video and projections by Dean Golja, an oversized roll-out mattress by Kate Murphy, and ideokinetic movement by Wendy Morrow (floor) and Trevor Patrick (suspended in a harness in the gap between 2 angled blank walls). Video and projections play across their bodies and the walls, and along the length of the room in front of the audience. Held together by tone and shifts of intensity rather than narrative, each element held equal weight for the work’s 25 minutes, making a democratic, subtle and open-ended psychic journey for the audience

He: hangs, suspended in a space between walls (where 2 walls fail to meet, or have just parted), an illumination from behind his body, from whence he’s come; his bony cheek rests against the vertical precipice, he contemplates the beginning or the end of his life. There are shuddering moments, moments more muscled than others; a glimpse of emotion cooking through to the surface, then dissipating, gone. Why does he sleep? Who does he sleep with? Is it this woman; himself? Is his body so alone, except for the surface of the winding sheet? The projected face turning against the longer wall, his momentary lover, or not? I fall, I fall. Babble beneath the white noise. What time, are we sleeping? White knights, sleeping-in, no time, (no) endgame.

She: jiggles, once. More, leans against the wall. Perhaps frustrated, perhaps emptying herself of the day, perhaps failing to gear up for another. Her dark curls more prominent than her legs. Where are her thighs? Where has she gone? There is no mattress here. A long-standing punitive. (What.) Slumping body. Sometimes I forget about her.

There are hints here of inter-relationship: between bodies, minds, twitches; strangers keeping their distance; lovers who that night forgot to nod and touch. Am I responsible for this shadow, passing, trying to come. My neurones dislocate and rewire. Is this world after all the more important, sifting, sorting, conditioning the more conscious one? Amongst all my comings, doings, namings…this is a piece (of dust, to which I will return) that is yet the confluence of all my streams (of thought and substance). Masterful, as is the petal pushing open the flower.

Sleep. A post-modern nocturne, direction, concept, movement Wendy Morrow, movement Trevor Patrick, visuals Dean Golja, sound Mary Finsterer, sculpture Kate Murphy; Canberra School of Art Gallery, Sept 19-21

An instigation, an investigation, a tool, a practice, a performance, a form in itself, a community—any of these terms can describe improvisation. Referring to a dance as ‘improvised’ merely suggests what it might be—some prefer not to use the word to describe their work because of its lack of specificity. Nevertheless, perhaps because of its impulsive and mysterious qualities, in Melbourne this year we’ve seen prolific use of improvisation by performers making it their own.

Adding to the diverse range of regular and one-off improvised performances available in Melbourne, the Cracking It Open series (informal showings at Dancehouse in April, July and October this year) presented solos mostly from the dance community. In its attempt to show and discuss, the series fell between performance and forum. Improvisers offered a short performance then variously pondered, acknowledged and opened up about their use of improvisation. The series highlighted an abundance of approaches and a rich display of dance aesthetics.

Peter Trotman’s improvisation moved very quickly from the simplicity of a man with a chair in an empty space to a persona colliding and converging with an unseen world. Like the protagonist of a suspense story, he held poignant stillnesses within interweaving narratives of movement, made tangential references to a catastrophic event and played with the patterning of movement and gesture. His responses were sometimes mercurial, sometimes skittish and unexpected. I enjoyed the irony of his prop—the chair that might have been responsible for the apparition but by the end provided a perverse safety. Trotman describes his improvisation as often dreamlike in its behaviour—visual not vision, an attempt to find the dance’s heart within emotional, aesthetic, compositional and structural layers. Inside this complexity he finds opportunities for deeper moments and rich detail, “…holding back and layering, rather than always looking for something new…takes you to places you don’t expect.”

Lynne Santos suggested the natural environment by exploring the qualities of animal movements. Interested in creating a sense of the animal rather than its pantomime, she offered a mesmerising combination of the lyrical and propulsive. In not mimicking any particular animal but surrendering to the more amorphous qualities of movement, she created a watchful mood and a ‘bodily state’ of vulnerability with instinctive physical power. This creation of a sense, a state or mood within the improvisation enables radical possibilities in performance.

Simon Ellis’ improvisational score was also concerned with bodily states. By isolating body parts and exploring their movement possibilities and patterns, he implied disembodiment and dislocation. Ellis chose not to impose a compositional structure, instead treating the improvisation as an investigation into movement. From this a larger picture can be produced and framed in different contexts. Once the ‘seeds’ of the improvisation are derived, collaborations with sound, text or video are used to inform a larger body of work. The improvisation’s spontaneity—the changeable ‘here and now’ quality—creates a fluid dialogue between the dance and its supporting media.

Ros Warby’s participation in Cracking It Open might also contribute to a larger body of work. In her “spontaneous composition”, Warby corrupted familiar dance motifs—the ballet 5th position for example—with decisive shapes and a swift dynamic. She contrasted the clean lines and broad inclusiveness of classical movement with a tightly focussed centering. Warby’s current practice is informed by years of dance experience and a profound education in improvisation (with Helen Herbertson, Russell Dumas, Deborah Hay and others). Dance’s primary drive—once considered simply (unconscious) instinct and impulse—is now more objectively viewed in terms of its intellectual, physical, emotional and psychological layers. Methodically combining, building and accumulating these layers with rigorous training moves the dance beyond a draft to a more consciously crafted work capable of pushing the form.

Also notable in Cracking It Open were performances by Tim Davey, Sally Smith and Suzanne Hurley. Davey’s pensive and articulate series of scores were interrupted by bursts of energetic, swinging and contorted movements. These included a range of movement motifs and progressions that were repeatedly revealed, then discarded. A film soundtrack (mainly in French) instigated movement possibilities and directions rather than driving the performance.

Smith staged an hilarious flirtation with her character—an opera singer/dancer straight from German Tanztheater. She swept about in a Baroque dress, spoke in gibberish German and led us through the hills and dales of ‘serious’ opera. She fluffed her moves and then, with true German grimness, reclaimed them. The inspiration for her improvisation came from the dress she wore, memories of her time in Germany and from playing with the idiosyncrasies of the language.

In the first showing of the series, Suzanne Hurley’s dance oscillated between the abstract and gestural. She punctuated smooth, coordinated and grounded movements with discordant gestures. Dancing in silence, Hurley experimented with the way movement through time creates musicality and rhythm. That the performance is the practice is central to her approach. “I haven’t sat for 6 months and considered what I’m about to do…I’ve practiced for 6 months in a performance arena…I expect people to be open, receptive and supportive of [my] choices…and what I appear to be…There is a fantastic sense of support within the community…[which] comes from the fact, I believe, that people are up there doing it as well.”

Building a community around improvisation in order to explore the form has been the focus for State of Flux (Martin Hughes, Janice Florence, Wendy Smith, Jacob Lehrer and David Corbet). United by the desire to make contact improvisation performable, they ask: how do you maintain a deeply embodied internal focus in dance while performing contact improvisation? How can you do this and relate to the audience? Their interest in meshing theatricality and choreography within contact improvisation prompts their experiments with states of movement—pedestrian, abstract, narrative—and gives their work an epic flavour. With Five Square Metres, they formed Conundrum 7 years ago to provide monthly performance opportunities for the improvisation community. Something of a legacy from Al Wunder’s substantial contribution, Conundrum hosts international practitioners and provides workshops, classes and jams and has diversified the dance community.

The Cracking It Open organisers also see the importance of building community—particularly for performers who use dance as their primary expression. In this spirit, they’re planning to continue the series next year.

For more on improvisation see Eleanor Brickill’s national survey in RT45 (p11, 2001) and Zsuzsanna Soboslay’s review of the final program in Precipice at the Choreographic Centre, Canberra in the online edition of RT51.

Cracking It Open, Peter Trotman, Lynne Santos, Simon Ellis, Ros Warby, Tim Davey, Sally Smith, Suzanne Hurley, Dancehouse, Melbourne, April, July, October.

It is not always easy explaining the difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘watching’ to a non-native speaker or child. Television is ‘watched’, although movies, no matter where they are, are ‘seen’; in a cinema you operatively ‘go to see’ a film, as you might go to see a performance, as opposed to just ‘going to’ a concert. Sometimes choosing from these differences is as confusing as deciding whether soup is either eaten or drunk—did I ‘see’ or ‘hear’ that concert I went to last night? When defining media, we have to sort out the relationship between context, the 5 senses and intellection. This may be true for all things perceived, but in the case of media, these basic human factors that transmit and support information are visibly in play—and at stake. While such distinctions as watching and seeing are elusively, perhaps even cunningly, embedded within our language, they have been shaped into persuasive axioms by Marshall McLuhan in juxtapositions like ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media; television for instance is cold and film hot, measured by the amount of input the viewer has to make. Whether you are an adherent or not, this is media doxa; what I would like to do here is begin a discussion about where we critically situate performance art projected over the internet.

From May 3 to 5 this year Mike Parr staged his performance Malevich at Artspace. He nailed his arm to the wall and stayed there with tape over his eyes, drinking, not eating, urinating onto the floor through his pants and deprived of all sensory stimulation short of the goings-on around him. The performance was broadcast over the web and in the first 24 hours alone received more than 250,000 hits. At any time, day or night, all you had to do was boot up your computer, log on to the internet, call up the address, and there he was, a few instants away from present time. He had already essayed something like this a year before. For Water from the mouth, 10 days x 24 hours, Parr sequestered himself in a room, again at Artspace, without food for the said duration. Thanks to webcam, anyone could witness this orgy of privation, at any time.

Performances such as these, which are dramatic in the way they both formalise and ritualise discomfort, as well as frame the scene of deprivation, have a distinctly different effect when they appear at home on the screen. What is most disturbing is the simultaneity of impotent deadness and uncomfortable proximity; the world wide web has on the one hand reduced this insane feat of bodily and psychological distension to the median level of cybernetic sameness, and on the other brings the performance so close to you and your living space that it invades it, infiltrates it. Just think: you can watch the body perform, and suffer, do whatever it is doing or not doing while you do the housework, talk to a friend, fix a bicycle, enjoy a bottle of vintage wine—or have sex. For the webcast performance, the cliche of being both everywhere and nowhere at once has never been so true.

Traditionally, performance art is about absolute presence. As an art form it can be extremely supple, capable of drawing from standard practices of painting and sculpture—including those age-old conventions of the pictorial tableau and the tableau vivant—while possibly availing itself of literature and music, and of course every form of theatre, from ancient to modern. Structurally and conceptually, performance art can be reduced to 2 often interrelating domains—improvisation and orchestration. History has seen the body reduced to a mere site of mechanistic forces, or on the other extreme elevated to hyper-sensory heights. One says that my body, however special it is to me personally, is still just matter, the other says that it is unrealistic to exclude subjectivity. But when the dynamic force, that presentness, of a performance is mediated via something like a screen, the differences tend to be flattened, the viewer becomes more of a voyeur, protected by distance, and the spectacle becomes more horror-cabinet, or more hysterical, or just innocuously cute.

The origin of performance art can be located in 1917 in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire, where Hugo Ball, his partner Emmy Hennings and several other notable Dadaists, spouted nonsense verse to accompany nonsense acts to protest the Great War and the preciousness of art in general: no more cute art in frames, no more static art that only makes the philistines richer. From its beginnings, then, a critical part of the content of performance art has been its ephemerality. Once performed, or in fact at any given moment during the performance, it can never be the same again.

This element of sovereign uniqueness brought the genre a specificity that seemed a natural and necessary strategy during the protest era of the late 60s and 70s. Gleaning from all kinds of foreign rituals, violent and conciliatory, performance art suited an artist with a political edge to the nth degree. A performance could not be bought by a goon in a suit. But photos could, and artists need to survive. Since the 70s a transition gradually took place where the photograph as mere record became a substantive genre, today exhibited alongside other forms of photography. This modification has vitiated, as well as invigorated performance art. Crucially, though, the assimilation of dynamic, unrepeatable performance art back into the market of static commodities spelled its critical death. While performativity is universally understood as a vital component of all artistic labour, and is characteristically transitional, anticipatory and impalpable, performance art is now very much a genre unto its own, with its own history and major exponents, and can no longer claim to be the rogue art form it once claimed to be.

Webcast performance forces the whole concept of presence to be rethought. Its closest relative is of course the web broadcast, where the idea is to present the events as they occur. The delay is something of an issue, though, with performance art. We might say that the hotness of the performed event as it once was, in all its dynamism and physicality, has become cool, distant and, in the manner of the idea of cool, inviolable. Gone is the possibility of disrupting the performer, to spit, to shout and to yell abuse. In traditional performance art the performer actively acts out him or herself, engendering a feedback that radicalises the role of subjectivity and self. That thrilling all-at-onceness of so many factors is magisterially displaced when projected over the internet.

The primal, fundamental interactivity of being consciously in the presence of an event changes into a different form of interactivity, having more in common with that of the telephone, because what you as a viewer are doing is ringing up the performance, ringing up that not-quantified presence. And what you get is some vague cybernetic echo. Until systems become more powerful in the future, the webcast animated image is of a figure (or whatever) whose movements at intervals shift slowly, stroboscopically, as the screen recalibrates. This visual reverb can be curiously poetic, and increases the isolated pathos of the performing figure, as the digital apparatus seems to convulse together (in reply to?) the movements of the performance artist.

Internet performance art is located mid-way between the telephone and television. In stock McLuhan, the former is hot, the latter cold. The telephone is still the most interactive instrument we know, few are capable of resisting its ring, and we are all guilty of staying on the telephone when there is no more left to say. Cool television is the most inscrutable medium in the world; it goes on and on regardless of what you do. You can have it on all day, and it chatters on aimlessly unperturbed. It does not need interaction in any form; it does not want thought. It relishes disengagement, pure vegetation.

So when Parr locks himself in a room for 10 days, or nails his arm to the wall, you are welcome to ‘phone in’, and the body dumbly replies by stating that is where it is, then and there. You are present to your own watching, and by booting up and hitting, you are part of the performance. What has changed is that once performance art wanted to restore ritual—pure integration and absolute interactivity—to the Western capitalist consciousness, and now the most widespread ritualisation the world has ever known is interacting via machines on the internet. Performance art over the internet must also deal with having already been surpassed by chat-rooms, which are more about the cheap thrill of interaction than actual communication.

As Parr’s recent performances have shown, the only way to counter the increasing spread of lobotomised drivel and ill-considered noise everywhere is not through horror but pathos. And these days, the realms of pathos are not just that of the inner, tortured plight of the subject, they have to be matched by the sometimes unthinkable terrible plight of others. By default or by necessity, internet performance art has the political body (and the body politic) insinuated into it like never before. Internet performance art has transformed surveillance and technological imprisonment into a genre that is as medieval as it is futuristic. It is no accident, then, that a performance like Parr’s Malevich, which deals with Australia’s current racial shame, incorporates a third party: there is the performer (the ersatz victim), there is you the sporadic, interactive voyeur, and there is the true victim, deprived of the luxuries of performing or interacting.

Adam Geczy is collaborating with Mike Parr on a series of performance-installations to tour nationally 2003-4.

Flesh winnow…I love the way that phrase rolls off my tongue. It’s languorous, sensual and playfully suggestive while also connoting a certain violence. Just as, of course, Marcel Duchamp would have demanded. The title of Barbara Campbell’s performance retrospective is after all in direct dialogue with the French prankster’s Fresh Widow, a delightful proto-conceptual object comprising a French window whose panes had been fitted with black leather with instructions that they be polished every day…

Campbell’s work, like Duchamp’s from whom she continues to derive inspiration, is full of subtle wit and intellectual play. Her performances are carefully orchestrated debates with art history, contemporary culture and gender politics. At the same time, they are beautifully wrought tableaux vivants, each element chosen for maximum visual effect and coherence.

Take The Midday Movie and the History of Australian Painting, performed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales amongst, naturally, the gallery’s Australian collection—not the icons of Australian identity, but some ‘lesser’ pieces from the 1920s and 30s portraying both family scenes and fantasy figures. The viewer enters this sun-filtered room to find the artist outstretched on the floor, a large, lopsided wicker basket (by Paul Saint) masking her face, a remote control in her hand. The white crochet of her dress melds seamlessly with the weave of the basket, catching the white of small marble sculptures on white plinths that share the gallery with her.

Suddenly, the reverential quiet of the art gallery is ruptured by the drone of an American movie on TV. The viewer is perplexed, torn between intensely watching the artist for signs of ‘performance’ and the seduction of the midday movie that will remain annoying background noise unless given full attention. Yet as the channel is about to go to a commercial break, the artist switches the remote to ‘mute’ and begins a muffled monologue that the viewer must strain to catch. Perfectly timed to begin and conclude in synch with the commercial break, the monologue is a history of iconic moments in Australian art, delivered with all the measured cadences and inflections—and tidbits of personal anecdote —that are the stock in trade of the professional tour guide. As soon as the commercial break/art history tour is over, the artist switches back to the next instalment of the midday movie, and again the viewer is thrown into conundrum: ‘Should I watch and enjoy?’ ‘Shouldn’t I be exercising my higher faculties here in the midst of fine art, and not giving over to trash TV?’ ‘What if I miss something?’

This is an exquisitely measured performance, economical in its elements, but fertile in its provocation of ideas and emotions. The key response is a preternatural awareness of time: the time in our everyday lives that we spend walking through a gallery, pondering the meaning of art, as against the time we sit transfixed in front of The Box; our changing perception of the rate of time passing depending on our level of intellectual activity and emotional engagement; the carefully manipulated duration of time-based media built as it is upon marketers’ consensus about the average attention span of 21st century Westerners; the parcelling up of time over which we have little or no control.

This evocation of a hierarchy of time also sets us thinking about that familiar cultural hierarchy that postmodernism claims to have disturbed, but that remains even as High Art incorporates elements of popular entertainment and mass media to hold its viewers’ attention. This irony is well handled in Campbell’s work; her performances betray a sophisticated awareness of the Catch-22 of contemporary art while affirming the importance of the artist still attempting to claim a position of critique and intellectual provocation. The high/low culture divide is also evoked in the performed art history monologues, which are pitched to a general audience in the tradition of popular understandings of art history as the story of individuals’ lives, of their talent and genius (here exclusively of male artists). Given the critical tradition from which Campbell’s practice emanates, this has a comic effect as much as causing us to ponder the irony inherent in contextualising contemporary art for a general audience.

Both art history as a discourse and spectatorship are also key elements of Inflorescent. In this performance, as in many of Campbell’s works, site is essential. Here, the artist performs in Sydney University’s Macleay Museum, a small, wood-panelled, vitrine-lined 19th century den that houses one of the most significant natural history collections in Australia. The viewer must walk past Indigenous artefacts and taxidermic specimens of Australian wildlife, some extinct, before arriving at a dimly lit, curtained chamber. Already, therefore, what we are to see is contextualised as exotic, rare, historically significant if perhaps also archaic. Gradually it becomes apparent that the artist is arranged Olympia-style on a chaise longue, languorously fanning her naked body, the only light emanating from fluorescent markings on her skin which ebb and flow according to the subtle waving of a fan. These markings could be tattoos, or even the veins pulsating through the artist’s body. Their frond-like arabesques and curves cause the body to resemble variegated leaves, so that the human comes in line with the vegetal in a kind of elemental sensuality. Anais Nin, in her notorious soft-porn stories The Delta of Venus, once described one of her most sexually attuned heroines as “purely a plant.”

The scene is captivating. As in The Midday Movie…, Campbell compels us to intensely scrutinise her, so that in that fixed moment of regard questions arise that take us outside the spectacle to our position as spectators, as voyeurs, as consumers of art. Similarly we become aware of the way our looking is prescribed by different conventions, of how so much of what we ‘see’ is actually not so much observation as confirmation of prior, assumed beliefs. This is particularly the case, Campbell reminds us, with a woman’s body, overexposed and overused in contemporary consumer culture as much as in the hallowed halls of Great Art for its connotative value. Campbell’s incarnation of these representational conventions, her making flesh of the ‘word’, brings them into sharp focus. Her admiration of her own body-text and her direct gaze at the spectators, as well as her very real-time presence, force a re-positioning of conventional practices of looking.

Also in the Macleay Museum is video documentation of the performance Cloche. Campbell is shot from the waist up against a black background, wearing a cream silk negligee, methodically clipping her head free of a white, beaded, skull-hugging cap. The soundtrack features the crisp tones of scissors snipping hair. The artist’s face is intent as she concentrates on the labour-intensive task of cutting off her own hair, painstakingly slowly, through the ‘crawlspace’ between the cap and her scalp to which it has been glued. The act has the air of self-mutilation, or even self-sacrifice—reminiscent of de Maupassant’s heroine who cut off her hair to buy her lover a gift—an act practiced with astounding restraint and sang froid. Campbell’s ‘crowning glory’ eventually falls in a damaged clump in her lap, the violent and fetishistic sexuality of disembodied hair cupped by the delicate purity of the beaded cap.

The retrospective Flesh Winnow offers us a singular opportunity to consolidate a body of work, that by its very nature as performance art, has remained diffuse and under-documented. This intense presentation of works made over a period of years is very useful for tracing the lines of research and investigation in Barbara Campbell’s oeuvre, and, accompanied as it is by a well-written and researched catalogue with essays on each of 5 key performances, provides a valuable testament to one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists.

Flesh Winnow: Barbara Campbell, Six Performances 1997-2001, presented by the University of Sydney, October 2002. The catalogue, Flesh Winnow: Barbara Campbell, is co-published by the Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney, and Power Publications, University of Sydney.

If there is a gala event on the national visual arts calendar, it has to be the opening of the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. For nearly a week, the events encompass artist talks, performances, symposia and the remarkable opening night party. The Queensland Art Gallery celebrates this major exhibition in style, with an infectious sense of generosity and bonhomie. It is with this spirit in mind that Pasifika Divas were programmed to perform on the opening weekend.

On a balmy September evening, 1,000 people crowd into the spacious QAG courtyard (an apparent legacy of Joh Bjelke-Peterson who insisted that the new gallery have an outdoor courtyard for parties). The guest list is a combination of artworld people and the general public—the gallery publicised the free event widely. Maori grandmothers brush up against Australia Council bureaucrats amidst the colourful ambience of party lights, bamboo huts and oversized paper flowers surrounding the central catwalk.

Hailing from Aotearoa New Zealand, Pasifika Divas is a collective of performers, dancers, musicians and DJ’s. Led by the Samoan chanteuse Buckwheat, the group combines traditional Islander culture with contemporary fashion, sounds and imagery. Probably more at home in a nightclub than in a gallery, the aim of the group is to highlight the talent of the glamorous fa’afafine. Familiar in Samoa, fa’afafine culture is “an intrinsic but largely under-recognised sector of the Pacific community. Fa’afafine translates as ‘like a woman’ in the Samoan language and denotes a complex gender identification” (Maud Page, Associate Curator, Contemporary Pacific Art, QAG).

The Pasifika Divas performance is very much centred on the persona of the fa’afafine and more broadly on the image of women in Islander culture. Comprising a series of vignettes, each Diva presents a short piece combining song, video graphics, dance or performance. Diva Shigeyuki Kihara is gentle and almost sombre in her dark Victorian attire, performing a Samoan maiden dance to a backdrop of historical images of Islander women in colonial dress. In contrast, Buckwheat adorned in what looks like a massive bouquet, performs to a Dana Bryant song about women at prayer on a steamy day in the Deep South. A video backdrop shows Samoan ladies in church, dressed in white, fanning themselves underneath straw hats. These contrasting images of historical and contemporary Islander life are both a celebration of the role of women and the influence and impact of colonisation and Christianity.

A Pasifika Divas performance is much more than drag, as it explores what it means for a man to be coded as ‘female’ and the representation of the ‘dusky maiden’ in the Western imagination. In a delightful and celebratory way, we are presented with ideas of transgression and ambiguity which boldly pronounce ‘we are here, we are loud and we are proud.’ In some respects, this performance seems out of place in the courtyard of QAG, the audience milling around and crowding around the bars seem somewhat perplexed with what is happening on the stage. However, it is this unfamiliarity which makes the presence of the Divas so pertinent. They are here to entertain, yet they do it at their own pace and within their own parameters. The audience most engaged are the Polynesian families, clapping, dancing and singing along with devilish smiles of enjoyment.

The presence of the Divas at APT adds depth to the underlying themes and directions of the exhibition, especially in relation to several participating artists. Lisa Reihana (who collaborates with the Divas) is presenting a series of large-scale photographs depicting mythic Maori female characters; Nalini Malini’s paintings and projections speak of Indian deities, sexuality and taboo; and even Yayoi Kusama’s Mirror/Infinity room, Soul under the moon 2002, conveys a sense of the liminal, or transgressive space. In this context, the programming of Pasifika Divas into the APT displays an astute curatorial process—on the surface the viewer is presented with a flamboyant carnival, but beneath this lies a critical and political intention to speak about mythology, sexuality, gender identification and colonisation.

At every major art event there is a usually a shining personality, at APT it’s Buckwheat. For the duration of the opening she is everywhere, 6 and a half feet tall (in heels), gigantic afro wig, dispensing thousands of air kisses. The fa’afafine had arrived in Brisbane, creating non-stop entertainment but always with a twist, a determination to be visible and dynamic and convey, in the words of QAG Director Doug Hall, “…a particular kind of Pacific humour, its subversive content dealing with what it might mean to be a Pacific Islander in 2002.”

The Pasifika Divas are Buckwheat, Lindah E, Sha-ne’ne’, Shigeyuki Kihara and Phylesha Brown-Acton. Performance conceived by Lisa Taouma.

Pasifika Divas, Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Sept 14, 2002-27 Jan 2003.

The artworks almost out-numbered the crowd for a change at the massive swansong exhibition for Melbourne’s celebrated and much-loved 1st Floor Artist and Writers Space, which shut its doors in November after 8 years. The final exhibition featured 49 works from artists associated with the gallery, an impressive collection of some of Melbourne’s top emerging and established contemporary artists.

A tiny oil on glass by David Jolly (Mt Hotham) hung beside a framed wallpaper panel, Sowa by David Noonan, next to a little untitled Tony Clark. Sharon Goodwin’s 2 decapitated Ronnies (Now it’s goodbye from me and it’s goodbye from him) looked down on Jacinta Schreuder’s Video stills while one of Kate Ellis’ (untitled) wax poodle paws pointed at David Rosetzky’s recent coloured pencil video still Everything.

It was a remarkable show not only in the number and calibre of artists involved, but also because it was a retrospective survey of 1st Floor’s art and it was all so different. The eclectic collection was an evocation of a certain critical lament that contemporary art’s field of practice has lost coherent direction, instead fanning into a multitude of ways and meanings, ever more individual and personal.

American critic Lane Relyea’s succinct statement is particularly relevant to 1st Floor: “We’d like to imagine our practices as unified by social rather than institutional or discursive forces. We don’t read postmodernist theory any more, and we don’t critique institutions, what we do is hang out.” (Relyea, ‘It’s the End Of Art Criticism as We Know It (And the Art World Feels Fine),’ lecture, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, October 10, 2001).

We certainly did a lot of hanging out at 1st Floor. In the absence of any one formal or stylistic trademark, the one characteristic that will identify 1st Floor’s project in the future is the scene that developed around the Fitzroy gallery. 1st Floor’s fortnightly openings quickly became a fashionable hang-out where artists and writers mixed with designers, architects and DJs. Criticised more than once as being ‘cliquey’, the scene was not a vacuous add-on, but rather strategically cultivated through an exhibition program which from the outset aimed to extend the definitions and audience for contemporary art.

Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces director Max Delany says, “I wouldn’t undervalue the critical or theoretical role it has played because in fact it was quite a sophisticated program that was certainly interested in formal practices and…in the politics of representation, but it was very much understanding of late 20th century practice.”

Opening in 1994, 1st Floor had an aggressive mission to put postmodern mantras into practice. Through collapsing binaries between art and life and bleeding boundaries between creative fields in exhibitions such as the yearly Fashion Festival which attracted hundreds of people, 1st Floor’s practitioners mined the ever-more visible space between art and culture that emerged in the late 20th century. Shows like 2000’s Mayonnaise where people could visit the gallery, read magazines and listen to records, encouraged viewers to examine the crossover between fashion, lifestyle and consumer culture through art.

“[The 1st Floor artists] were probably as much interested in the reception of art as they were [in] the production of art…they were interested in how art was perceived and understood by different audiences in different contexts and also how different people identify with cultural practice and position themselves culturally,” Delany says.

The successful courtship of wider audiences produced a sophisticated and hybrid creative sensibility that had not previously existed in Melbourne. As the gallery’s founding members and exhibiting artists’ practices continue to develop and are canonised through critique and private and museum collection, the wider cultural effects of hanging out and making the scene at 1st Floor will linger in the cultural fabric of inner city Melbourne. Many non-art projects—businesses, bars, fashion design—continue to crop up in the niche between art and mass culture carved out by the 1st Floor crowd who stood around smoking and drinking VB every second Wednesday.

While we may now take it for granted, it’s worth reflecting on the 8 years during which 1st Floor found and developed a real-live, new cultural space.

In part 2 of our ongoing survey of new media and multimedia performance and dance, the themes of Part 1 (RT#51) recur: the interplay of the past and possible futures. the integration of live and virtual performance, the generation of performance spaces, and a desire to escape the inflexibility of the conventional screen. Wojciech Pisarek adds to these themes the role of the digital animator as puppeteer in productions where live performers and animated figures co-exist. Teresa Crea and Samuel James address distance and the role new media has in diminishing but also exploring it, whether between countries, cultures and artists, or between city and rural youth in Australia, and generating new models of performance and collaboration. Since the publication of Part 1, Company in Space and NYID have mounted the productions anticipated (see pages 6 and 7) and Tess de Quincey & Co have performed Shiver for the Gay Games Festival (see www.realtimearts.net).

Wojciech Pisarek

Adelaide-based puppeteer and animator Wojciech Pisarek writes: “The subject of my PhD study is to examine coexistence of virtual and live actors in theatre performance and to develop a unique language of expression for acting avatars. To conduct my research I have created a low cost interactive computer system to create digital masks, using readily available 3D software. The virtual actor can be as simple as a cube or have all the complexity of the realistic image of a human being.

“As opposed to using a motion capture suit and facial tracking devices, in my research digital input hardware is based on puppetry—controlling devices—the human animator is connected with his character, a digital puppet, through electronic strings. Virtual actor motion and expressions are created or generated in real time by a digital animator in response to character emotions and stage action. In this sense, the animator acts as puppeteer for his digital character. A combination of mouse, joystick, keyboard, MIDI keyboard, MIDI pedals and digital gloves comprise virtual strings linking the 3D character with the animator.

“One outcome was Virtual Lives, at the Australian Performance Laboratory, Flinders University, the first Australian theatre performance where virtual actors animated in real time performed together with their live partners. The purpose of this creative development project was to see if digital characters created in front of the computers work in real theatre space and with live actors. Samuel Beckett’s Play was chosen for the production simply because in this ingenious piece of theatre only the heads of acting characters are visible.”

Kate Champion

Kate Champion is the creator of Same, same But Different (RT 47 page 6), a successful multimedia dance theatre work (Sydney & Melbourne Festivals 2002) that very effectively combines live performers with their virtual selves. Champion use a forestage wall of black, sliding surfaces that can receive images and also open to capture pockets of framed live movement (eg a series of falls or figures dancing). A large screen to the rear shows the whole company meeting itself in a frenzy of flirtation. For this production Champion worked with lighting designer Geoff Cobham, filmmaker Brigid Kitchin (who worked with Champion on About Face, RT44, p36) and projectionist Sydney Bouaniche (also a significant contributor in Michael Bates’ The Projectionist, see page 13 & 15).

Champion and collaborators (Force Majeur) are presently at work on the earliest stages of a new work with the working title ZOOM. She writes that she has “a keen interest in continuing to integrate video/film (multimedia) as a signature of our style. I think integration is possibly the key word. My main concern is with incorporating film in as physical a way as possible, ie as interaction with live performance where the media work in tandem thematically and physically.”

She emphasizes that this is a very different experience from showing the images in a cinema—in the theatre “the live element gains an almost magical effect that would not be possible without the images.” For Champion, “the most challenging task is striking a balance between the live and the projected [image which] can be so seductive and often consumes live bodies dancing in front of it.”

Champion described to us the challenges of creating this kind of work, revealing that story-boarding came as a breakthrough. Even so, the logistics of Same, same.. were sometimes restrictive: the order in which the set had to be operated was often locked in and images had less of their area exposed than hoped for. Not surprisingly, she’s attracted to the possibility of live editing in ZOOM. The set-in-concrete nature of film has also meant that cast members have had to maintain haircuts over a very long period (not always easy for freelancers) and when one performer was not available, re-shooting had to take place—a costly venture. For the filmmaker, she thinks, the process is not always exciting or creative given the large number of functional and logistical demands, let alone re-shoots.

For ZOOM, says Champion, “I would like to move away from flat, square screens and projection points. I want to experiment more with making moving images more ‘moveable’, and, as always, push the subtextual as subject matter that avails itself when the mediums interplay.” She feels that this approach will be less cinematic than Same, same… and will allow more sleight of hand. The virtual performers, she hopes, will be able “to move more, shrink, reappear, work with furniture.” Champion here recalls performing with the UK’s DV8 when they projected onto a steamed up perspex box and against veils of water.

para//elo

This Adelaide-based company with its Australian multicultural focus and radical approach to cultural globalisation, is very much a new media outfit. Artistic Director Teresa Crea and her collaborators have created multimedia works, some of them site specific, online raves (between young people in Italy and Australia) and conferences, and are now adding to their output solo and group works from a range of artists (including Jason Sweeney, see Stereopublic review).

The company’s current work is the distance project, which began as an online/web work, writes Crea, “involving European and Australian artists responding to the notion of distance and the sometimes strong emotions that this provokes in migrant cultures.” After exchanges for 8 months, the artists submitted short digital works (text, image/sound) which were curated online. “We are now looking at how to weave this content and the kind of ‘navigational flow’ that it offers into a live performance.”

For Crea it is the capacity of new media for community building that is paramount. “Now that we have all gotten over the first ‘evangelical’ response to technology, I think that reality is proving to be far more intriguing. Sometimes the simplest of exchanges are the most profound, for example the ability to set up a community of artists across the world to essentially do creative development and research…” The convergence of media and artistic practice through the collaboration of a wide range of practitioners is, Crea thinks, also significant: “this phenomenon (rather than what you do with the software/hardware) is what will really drive the development of a new aesthetic.”

Samuel James

Samuel James plays an increasingly significant role in contemporary performance, dance and youth theatre in Sydney. His elegant, inventive video work (for Julie Anne Long’s Miss XL), manipulation of projected images (for Monica Wulff’s Troppo Obscuro) and the transformation of spaces (PACT Youth Theatre’s Replicant Hotel) keep him in demand. His approach is uncluttered and very effective. In the recent Heartland for City Moon Vietnamese Australian Theatre and Powerhouse Youth Theatre, his evolving images glide above us along the length of a humble community hall ceiling in a prelude that meditatively lifts us out of ourselves, anticipating Heartland’s youthful and admirably intense contemplation of place and belonging.

James writes: “Both Heartland and Wide Open Road (Outback Theatre from Hay and Pact Youth Theatre from Sydney, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Dec 6-7) use video as an integral part of devising and performance. Both involve creating a unified performance work over long distances. Video helps this process greatly.

“For Heartland we took 3 field trips out of the metropolitan area, to the desert (Broken Hill), the farm (Albury) and beach (Kiama). A visual and sensory study of these places led to performance workshops in these sites with, initially, video acting as a documentary device, recording a real experience of performers and place. This material then went through a transition from experience and diary to performance. The combination of reality video and theatricality creates a new kind of theatrical realism.

“Wide Open Road is a collaboration between regional and urban youth theatres which combines the current experiences of young people living in South West NSW and Sydney. The process began with 30 second video postcards being sent by email, making introductions and trying to describe young people’s experiences of growing up in 2 very different environments. Bridging this distance through new media with brief compressed impressions (spoken word, drawings and short films) is an efficient and effective way of producing material for hybrid performance.” James points to how the pre-physical contact stages of building a work are different from in-house performance making because they engage with the very idea of distance. “New Media is in this case tangibly able to bring distant spaces and experiences into the theatre.”

He also thinks that “new media performance offers an alternative for filmmakers”, enabling them “to create work that doesn’t brainwash the audience with the hypnotising experience of 24 frames per second in the dark…As a real performer enters the space and upstages the film, the audience can make decisions about the material being presented. There are many more choices to be made in a live space.” He also thinks that “the proliferation of the video aesthetic…has stripped back the romanticised beauty of theatre and it means performance makers have to be more conscious about ideas first before images.”

Part 3 of this survey will appear in RealTime 53 (February-March 2003), featuring Cazerine Barry, IGNEOUS, Keith Armstrong and the transmute collective, Tess de Quincey & Co, Hill & Nash, and skadada. The work of Sarah Neville, the Adelaide-based dancer working with new media, is discussed on p27 of this edition.

Marcia Ferguson, Darren Riches, Mark Deans, Nicki Holland, Sonia Teuben, Rita Halabarec, Jim Russell, Soft, Back to Back Theatr

The number of artists with disabilities who are working professionally is noticeably on the increase, with individuals and companies playing not only in their home cities but also touring nationally and internationally. They participate in international festivals specifically focused on and celebrating the achievements of artists with disabilities. And now they are appearing in more broadly based international arts festivals. Such a company is Back to Back Theatre who enjoyed critical and popular acclaim for their recent Melbourne Festival production, Soft. In her survey of artists, companies, support networks and disability in the arts issues, Lalita McHenry begins with Back to Back Theatre, discerning in their work and aims some of the key concerns in the field.

Back to Back Theatre

Geelong-based Back to Back Theatre’s latest work, Soft, performed at the Melbourne Festival, tackles the practices of genetic engineering and the ideologies that fuel the motivation to correct differences, deemed anomalies, in human beings.

While most of Back to Back’s work hasn’t directly commented on disability, Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin says, “This play is really trying to analyse what it means to be human in the year 2002 and not what it was like to be human when Shakespeare wrote his plays. I feel like it’s a quest for new stories and new narratives and I think that what is happening to people with disabilities in regard to genetic technology is really pertinent for the rest of us as a community.”

Back to Back’s exploration takes place in a stage space shared by audience and actors for most of the performance—a delicate, tissue-like enclosure, a giant white bubble that comes alive (through sophisticated multimedia technologies) with colourful imagery of mutating cells and energy. We see and hear, however, from the inside out as if we, the audience, are not yet formed, not yet human. Wearing headphones that deliver exceptional sound quality provides an interesting dimension of temporality and layering to the complex existential realities of the drama.

The narrative interweaves contemporary and futuristic scenes that stage the quest for embodied perfection—a canine competition; a couple’s purchase of the ultimate motor vehicle; the tender and angst-ridden contemplations of the same couple over whether or not to abort a foetus with Down’s syndrome, all the while attended by medical practitioners who themselves embody (both actors and characters) the same genetic condition. This is a bold casting move that only works because these actors are well established in their craft and the company has numerous successful works behind it. The final scene involves the interrogation but eventual friendship between a forensic geneticist (presumably with police powers to eradicate the imperfect) and the last surviving human with Down’s. I found the ending clichéd in its over embellishment of the humanistic qualities of people with Down’s syndrome. Delivered with playful candour, it does nevertheless sustain the elements of a fine piece of art that evokes, rather than simply describes.

Back to Back, now in its 15th year, has a diverse repertoire of original work including Mental, Dog Farm, Back Scratch and Porn Star, which was made into a short film. The company has a full-time ensemble of 5 actors who, as its promotional material suggests, are people perceived as having an intellectual disability. The term “perceived” indicates the power relations involved in constructing the category of intellectual disability.

Gladwin says the deployment of the term ‘disability’ for the performers, “…serves as an effective marketing strategy as much as it hangs like a weight around their neck…maybe one day we won’t have to identify ourselves as a company with disabilities. But at the moment we probably get more mileage from it in terms of how the media read us, which is our access to the general population.”

For merit or pity?

Performances by Indigenous Choir and Elizabeth Navratil, a local stand-up comedian with cerebral palsy, opened the 5th National Performance Conference in Brisbane. American critic, theatre director and playwright Robert Brustein followed, delivering the Richard Wherrett Memorial Address. His argument focused on the familiar distinction between high art and popular culture. The former, he claimed, was suffering a serious demise in American society because of confusion between art and politics. The arts are called upon more and more to do the work of politics: “cultural institutions are being asked to validate themselves not through their creative contributions but on the basis of their community services.

“The most significant advance for solving America’s more urgent social needs has been to increase the cultural representation of minority groups. This kind of democratic representation often occurs without regard for quality, a policy that threatens to sacrifice hard won achievements for the sake of evangelical gestures.”

These controversial issues are particularly complex when applied to the area of disability in the arts. DADAA (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts, Australia), funded by the Australia Council, is the national peak arts and disability networking and advocacy body. Its member organisations include Access Arts (Queensland), Accessible Arts (New South Wales), Arts Access (Victoria), Arts in Action (South Australia), DADAA WA, Arts R Access (Launceston) and DADA ACT. All operate with a strong commitment to people with disabilities and those disadvantaged by their social conditions.

These organisations are committed to increasing access to the arts and facilitating art practice. They reflect a passionate belief that difference makes for an enriched and more vibrant community. Navratil, who has performed in numerous plays and tours regularly (most recently in Caca Courage, part of the 2002 High Beam Festival, hosted by Arts in Action) tells the conference that if not for Access Arts’ support, she would not be a performer today. It seems that art can only be apolitical when it does not need to struggle for cultural space. It’s timely to remember Cultural Studies theorist Stuart Hall’s dictum that popular culture is not about the ‘low’ stratum of aesthetic practice, but is rather “a social zone of contestation.”

While artistic practice can be politically concerned with ‘access,’ ‘social justice’ and ‘developing community’, artists with disabilities in the arts also want to produce work that has ‘artistic merit’. This is not to reinscribe the weary binaries of art/politics and high/popular culture, nor to suggest that political concerns are without artistic merit. At the level of funding, however, the distinctions between social justice and artistic merit derive from different motivations.

Performing more than disability

The 3 full-time ensembles, Back to Back Theatre (Geelong), Restless Dance Company (South Australia) and the Australian Theatre of the Deaf (NSW) want to be funded on the basis of the artistic merit and not out of considerations of social justice or equity with regard to disability. Restless is one of Australia’s leading youth dance companies, involving people with and without disability. Their most recent work In the Blood was performed at the High Beam Festival. Australian Theatre of the Deaf is the only professional company of deaf artists in Australia and is bilingual, offering a visual style accessible to both deaf and hearing audiences.

Scholar and performing artist Petra Kuppers writes that when people with disabilities perform they are often primarily seen not as performers but as disabled people (“Deconstructing Images: Performing Disability” Contemporary Theatre Review, 11, 2001). To avoid such reductive readings, many performers and companies believe that to be taken seriously as professional artists their work needs to be separated from disability issues, or at least, from the often didactic ways in which issues are represented.

Elizabeth Navratil says that forging a career as a professional actor outside the context of disability is an ongoing struggle. In an interview in another context, she said, “I can’t go on stage or appear in a movie where my disability is not seen.” Nevertheless she is adamant that she comes to the stage playing a character, “not a disabled person trying to portray particular truths about disability.”

These issues recurred throughout the National Performance Conference session “Performing Outside the Square”, with Tony Strachan (Artistic Director, Australian Theatre of the Deaf NSW), Sonia Teuben (Back to Back Theatre, Victoria), Sofya Gollan (film director, performer, NSW), Michael Russell (Access Arts Brisbane) and Kiersten Fishburn (Accessible Arts, NSW). Strachan declared that the Australian Theatre of the Deaf made strategic decisions to do ‘mainstream’ work in order to be taken seriously. While debate exists about how the language should be delivered in performance, Strachan says, “it is primarily gestural and visual,[but] they are not ‘deaf stories’.” He described how the company moved from being a theatre for the deaf to a theatre of the deaf, a shift that culminated in 1979 with the company becoming a professional entity.

Sofya Gollan, the first student with a hearing disability to be accepted into NIDA, spent 10 years with the Australian Theatre of the Deaf before turning to filmmaking. Gollan spoke about gaining entry into NIDA not as a result of fulfilling the ‘marginalised quota’ but on artistic merit. She grew up in a hearing family and early in her career positioned herself as an artist who wasn’t going to be pigeonholed as a deaf person performing issues about deafness.

Festivals

Disability in the performing arts cuts across mainstream and community arts contexts, encompassing solo performers, disability arts festivals and theatre and dance companies. Australia has a number of disability festivals including the High Beam festival in Adelaide, hosted by Arts in Action; Rewind in Perth, hosted by DADAA (WA), its 6th biennial festival to be held in November 2003; and the 2002 Paralympics arts festival (RT40 p11). Next year Access Arts hosts the 7th Asia Pacific Wataboshi Music Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse.

Several Australian artists have recently returned from international festivals. Back to Back were the first Australian company to be invited to the International Festival of Artists with Disabilities in Almagro, Spain, during which Mark Deans performed his solo production Cow. Brisbane-based dancer and co-director of Igneous Inc, James Cunningham, recently undertook a residency at Dance 4 in Nottingham and performed Body in Question at Visions 2002, the biennial festival of visual performance in Brighton UK. Dealing with Cunningham’s experiences in India where he retreated after paralysing his arm in a motorcycle accident, Body in Question explores how perceptions of the body differ from culture to culture. His experience made him realise “that the body and disability are not fixed but rather malleable and changeable.” Igneous is Cunningham’s multi-media performance group, whose other works, unrelated to disability, include Hands Project and Thanatonauts.

Jane Muras from Adelaide performed Bananas at the Paralympics arts festival (RT 40 p11), the Kickstart Festival in Canada last year and toured Sydney and Adelaide this year. Another notable performer, dancer-choreographer Marc Brew from Melbourne, worked with Infinity Dance Theatre in New York. His most recent works include Focus 4 (Lalita McHenry, RT 49 online, www.realtimearts.net) and Take a Seat With Me an autobiographical solo dance theatre performance.

Maturation

The diversity of solo and company work in dance and performance, the engagement with new media, the latest in sound and often radical design, and the proven quality of works that often tour, all suggest a wealth of talent and commitment and a strong sense of continuity in the disability arts arena. The sheer popularity of a show like Soft in the Melbourne Festival confirms that there is an audience for work that often takes audiences outside the usual range of their experiences. Work that tackles pertinent issues through a cultural imaginary more concerned with the production of new stories and actualities, and less with pinning down the ‘truth’ of disability, suggests a maturing of artistic vision and practice.

Soft, Back to Back Theatre, director Bruce Gladwin, devised and performed by Mark Deans, Rita Halabarec, Nicki Holland, Darren Riches, Sonia Teuben, Jim Russell, Marcia Ferguson, sound Hugh Covill, lighting Efterpi Soropos, animation Rhian Hinkley, set Chris Price, Dave Morison, costumes Shio Otani, dramaturgy Melissa Reeves, puppeteer Mark Cuthbertson; Melbourne Festival, Docklands, Oct 19-26.

Expanding Horizons, 5th National Performance Conference, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, Sept 20-22.

Kuo Pao Kun died at the age of 63, September 10, 2002. When a spirit such as his passes away, the soul of the world weeps. He was a multi-lingual writer, theatre director and teacher who had an innate ability to work deeply with people. As the artist Tan Swee Hien’s calligraphy said next to his coffin, “From the mountain cave comes a thunderous cloud.” He leaves a large legacy and a unique vision.

Born in Hebei in China in 1939, Pao Kun witnessed the Japanese invasion and the Peoples’ Liberation Armies takeover of Peijing (Beijing). As a boy in 1949 Pao Kun travelled to live with his father in Singapore. He came to Australia in 1959 to work as translator for Radio Australia. He matriculated from Melbourne University and studied at NIDA in 1963. When he returned to Singapore in 1965 with his wife Goh Lay Kuan, he set up a performing arts school, a theatre company, Theatre Practice, and later created the alternative theatre venue The Substation.

He mastered Chinese, English and Malay and became a well know dramatist, educator and cultural activist. In 1976 he was imprisoned by the Singaporean Government for 4 years for his writings and activities, but in 1990 the same government awarded him the Cultural Medallion. In 1996 the French Government conferred on him the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

His links to Australia were significant and many Australian writers, actors and directors have been influenced by both the man and his ideas. His theatre experiences in Australia and South East Asia helped shape his very particular worldview. He was able to live with the contractions, ambiguities and multiple connections of the east and the west and sit comfortably in both traditional and contemporary artistic practice. He did not identify with, or make academic comparisons but absorbed and fused them, continually standing on the threshold of something unknown and inspiring. Through him, so many of us in Australia were informed, challenged and able to access and find a deeper meaning in our association with Asia and Asian artists. He gave direction to our place in Asia.

He began writing in 1968 from a socio-political position; later his plays took on a deeply reflective and spiritual tone. The immensity of and the esteem for his work was apparent to me at the launch of his collected works, Images at the Margins: A collection of Kuo Kun’s Plays in May 2000—his plays were in production in Japan, Malaya, Indonesia and China. In the Middle East, Asia and the West he is one of Asia’s most important, most performed and most studied contemporary playwrights.

Pao Kun had an ability to discover and foster the potential of young Asian artists. Fifteen years ago he brought together many writers who at the time were unknown or unpopular. One was Gao Xing Jian who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the other, Danny Yung, became one of Hong Kong’s key arts and cultural planners. In Singapore there is not a major performing artist who has not at some time been influenced by the teachings or work of Pao Kun. When he died he was still involved in the Theatre Training Research Program (TTRP) aimed at finding a distinctly Asian contemporary acting methodology. Through his contribution Singapore has become a strategic cultural centre.

The man was clear, honest and compassionate, deeply and continually fascinated with people’s complexities. Commenting on his 4 years of solitary detention, he held no malice. He saw it as a furnacing process forcing him to look reality straight in the face; he said the purging effect was total and deep.

Pao Kun made culture manifest. He was a creator, a discoverer, a selector, an organiser, and a friendship weaver. The task of condensing his life into a few words is daunting: the nature of the man and size of his deeds defies words. I see him now in his sarong and white singlet, sitting, looking over the rim of his glasses, tilting his head and saying, “Why do you waste your time writing about me?”

Many people in Australia have loved this great man and will mourn his passing. The thunderous cloud remains. Wherever we are from, many will stand, face south and take a deep bow. “We miss ya already PK.”

In writing this I am indebted to A Centurial Role Model: remembering Kuo Pao Kun by Qui Yu (Shanghai), and Goh Lay Kuan and Chee Keng (TTRP Singapore). www.ppas.edu.sg

I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start.
Virginia Woolf

This statement not only encapsulates the strong residual ‘feel’ of Frank Company’s Doll 17, but also connotez Frank’s distinctive performance concerns. It simultaneously defines the task for the actor; the dilemma facing the characters; and designer John Nobb’s aesthetic referencing of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as much as Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

Pink, 50’s boudoir pink, was everywhere: scintillating in the costuming and the fake fur-lined wall denoting an arch female ‘interior’ from which exits and entrances took place via a revolving mirror door signifying an anterior reality, not a conventional ‘exterior.’ The audience was circumscribed by mythic time, witness to eternal recurrence rather than linear exposition. In Olive’s space, time was the enemy: “If I could hold back time…”, “It’s nothing to do with our time” and no realisation that “There’s a time for sowing and a time for reaping” as the Chorus had proposed. The clock was set at 3 minutes to midnight, and at the end struck 12 as if winding up for a repeat performance of this inverted Cinderella story.

Doll 17 styled itself as a theatrical fantasy based on Lawler’s classic Australian play from the 50s about 2 cane-cutters, Roo and Barney, who live it up in the lay-off season in Melbourne with their girlfriends, Roo’s ‘girl’ for 17 years, Olive, and a stand-in, Pearl, for Barney’s former partner who has opted for marriage instead of relying on the good times. Olive’s outraged refusal of Roo’s similar offer of marriage stood out in this performance with the shocking force of a mirror shattering, contrasted with Roo’s clearly demarcated descent into stupor and melancholy following the smashing of his dreams. Frank’s ironically bitter sweet production emerged as a dark triumph—as the ‘essential’ Doll. It had not gone in search of new interpretations. Not quite a fantasy, it imaginatively and skilfully re-membered the original in a torpedo-charged, wittily theatricalised version which maintained its theme of memory versus nostalgia, doubly so if you had encountered more naturalistic readings. Frank’s achievement was to reaffirm The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s ‘classic’ status.

This is in large part due to director Jaqui Carrol’s dramaturgy which indelibly conveyed the fragile emotions underlying the tawdrily fabricated recollections sustaining the protagonists. Strikingly, characters often fell asleep, creating an ambiguous mood that recalled Rilke: “We were thinking of something quite different, invisible, something we held at arms length from you and from ourselves, furtively, with vague anticipation, something for which both of us were in a way only pretexts. We were thinking of a soul, the soul of the doll” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Dolls, “On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel”). The Doll portrayed by Lisa O’Neill was “a device”, as Jaqui Carrol says, “to let the terror out.” The terror was realised in the whirring clockwork time of O’Neill’s lacquered, tour de force, mechanistic precision, an automaton almost out of control; a sideshow Doll embodying Roo’s gift to Olive each year; a pink tulle creation on point who can only repeat with fractured ferocity the sentimentalised jargon of popular love songs; the Doll with which Olive finally fuses. Like the ballerina in a musical box O’Neill’s Doll is artfully modulated between ‘thing’ (prop, set piece) and live performer.

Caroline Dunphy’s Olive inhabited her dollhouse world like an orchid of steel, precise, nuanced, brittle, perfect. Pearl too was presented with great elegance and control by Leah Shelton, never letting her equivocating role descend into fussiness. It was the men who seemed scorched. Roo’s classic lines rang with hollow portentousness when mouthed by the Chorus: “No more flying down out of the sun, no more eagles. This is the dust we’re in, and we’re going to walk through like everyone else for the rest of our life.” John Nobbs manfully realised Roo’s succumbing to gravity, while Conan Dunning evinced nuggetty integrity as his true-blue mate. The Chorus of 3 Kabuki-style prop manipulators egregiously mocked on.
Frank’s cross cultural performance style seemed more relaxed than usual and with its first engagement with colloquial speech succeeded in evoking a hedonistic 50s Australian suburbia run amok. This was especially so in the New Year’s Eve scene when inflatable plastic armchairs from Crazy Clark’s transformed into dodgem cars and there was a distinctly Pina Bausch touch in the choreography to Perez Prado’s Guaglioni, a mambo with a wicked undercurrent. Doll 17 was a big success at the Energex Brisbane Festival.

Doll 17, Frank Company, director Jaqui Carroll, designer John Nobbs, actors Conan Dunning, Caroline Dunphy, Ramsey Hatfield, John Nobbs, Lisa O’Neill, Emma Pursey, Leah Shelton, Meridah Waters; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Sept 18-28

In Colin Black’s The Ears Outside My Listening Room there is a piece about a city-jack-hammer percussion intercepted by reflective voices, string lines arhythmically mirroring the speech patterns. In one section there is a man’s voice I know. But who is it? There’s a soft intonation, an accent, a subtle huskiness…Voices are burned into my auditory memory rendering them unforgettable long after the names and faces have gone. It bugs me for days.

Ears Outside My Listening Room was created by Black during his 6 month residency with ABC Classic FM’s The Listening Room. The original inspiration came from a recording he had made of his grandfather. “He was talking about his life and he passed away a few years ago and you listen back to this tape, to his voice and in some way it preserves his character. That’s what I wanted to do with all these characters…create a patchwork sonic quilt, something to be passed between generations…the words and voices of the ghosts of tomorrow. Like fingerprints and DNA each of the voices was unique and my hope was that my work would help the detectives of tomorrow understand the spirit of their forefathers. I wanted to create a work that testified to how it feels to be Australian and to live now.”

The 50-minute work is made up of 18 tracks. Each piece is based on a series of interviews conducted by Black, often using ABC remote studios around Australia and ABC archives including Haywire from Triple J’s recordings of stories from young people in regional Australia and old broadcasts. Black has pieced together vignettes around themes—wishes, home, city, weather and sport. What emerges is a comprehensive work made of suggestion, mood and voiceprint character studies that gives a tangible, inclusive and unselfconscious impression of Australian-ness and its many voices. On another level, it highlights the fragility of people, technology and landscape. Black concentrates on “the sub themes of rivers and mortality and trying to preserve things.”

Compositionally the work is particularly interesting in its use of texts and voices as the starting point for the score. Black says, “I composed music around the voices in differing ways…what the people spoke about and how they spoke—the tone of how they said things set up the parameters.” Loops of speech are used as both melodic and rhythmic scores for the instrumentation to follow. The most striking example (and the hit single if there was to be one) is Tony, Kate and Lockette, a retelling of the moment when AFL player Tony Lockette kicked his 1300th goal and the crowd flooded the SCG. Deftly matching the announcer’s voice with a dance beat, the trebly string line sawing and hacking to the melody of the commentators screaming “Lockette! Lockette”, the piece conjures the spirit of the event (even for this dedicated sports cynic). This has a beautiful companion piece in the melancholic reflection of an old man speaking about listening to Donald Bradman playing cricket on the radio—musically conveyed by a slow string adagio.

When the text is used less figuratively, the effect is more atmospheric. Australian Summer Solstice is composed from processed voice samples, creating an audio haze and shimmer like a distant oasis glimpsed on a tarred road. These overlaid with the unfiltered voice of a 70-year old woman talking about her experiences farming the land. A similar effect is achieved in the beautifully abstract Why in which a child describes her love for her doll. The phrase “’cause she speaks” is processed and looped into a kind of pulsing mantra reflecting the childlike (and perhaps not so childlike) desire to bring life to things.

Reinforcing themes of mortality and preservation are the segues between tracks with Ben, a sound archivist simply talking about methods to assist with the hydrolysis of tapes, the preservation of vinyl, and most hauntingly, of being given tapes to digitise containing a recording of his mother as a teenager. These pieces are delicately overlaid with subtle tape hiss, fastforwards and reel noises.

Colin Black hopes that Ears Outside My Listening Room has a continuing life. “I think that people from other countries will find it fascinating, that difference in perspective on what they think is Australian and what they hear from these sort of pieces.” Summer Solstice has already been performed at the 32nd Festival Synthese Bourges 2002 in France and Literature Sound Barrier 2002 in Vienna. He also hopes “to see it incorporated with some visual element, whether it’s dance or visual—audio-visual in the old sense or the new sense of the word, a CD ROM or multimedia event.”

Ears Oustide My Listening Room concludes with The River, composed for vibraphone and the only work not based on vocal lines. The rippling repetition of Jeremy Barnett’s (of the group Prop) vibraphone merges into the concluding statement from the sound archivist about fast forwarding a tape and the air filling with a fine cloud of oxide from the disintegrating tape Ears Oustside My Listening Room is both a celebratory and a melancholic work about the fragility of existence. In its attempts to capture the essence of people and moments in time, it also highlights the desperate futility of trying to preserve what must one day turn to dust.

A cool spring evening wrapped itself around the Judith Wright Arts Centre in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley as the human traffic on Brunswick Street began increasing for the weekend. But it all seemed a thousand miles away from the centre’s insulated theatre space as we waited for the Australian premiere of Liza Lim’s composition, Machine for contacting the dead. Originally commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the piece was first performed in Paris in 2001 in conjunction with an archaeological exhibition of artifacts from the burial site of an ancient Chinese aristocrat. Included in the exhibition were numerous musical instruments found within the tomb and it is primarily these, and the imagined fate of the 21 royal concubines also interred, that inspired Lim’s composition.

However, before the main attraction, an appetiser: Elision’s Ben Marks performs Xenakis’ Keren for solo trombone. This is a demanding piece that uses a host of virtuoso techniques such as multiphonics and microtonality to push the timbral qualities of the instrument to extremes but is tempered with classical precision and deceptive restraint. Marks seems to have made this a signature piece and he approached it with confidence and skill. He shifted easily from muted ostinati to natural harmonics until the last guttural gliss that seemed to descend into the quietness of a tomb, paving the way for Lim’s piece.

In this performance, the ensemble for Machine for contacting the dead consists of 27 musicians drawn from Elision and The Queensland Orchestra with Franck Ollu, the French conductor who is currently involved with the Ensemble Modern Orchestra and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. As the composer explains during an introductory speech (complete with slideshow), she has grouped the orchestra into smaller clusters of instruments and each cluster is treated as an instrumental unit that plays to produce a new instrumental timbre. Without representing them directly, these “meta-instruments” evoke the spirit of the ancient Chinese artifacts dug from the tomb. The key to this is Lim’s metaphorical treatment of the original instrumental sounds—she is not attempting to recreate them but rather to veil them. In an accompanying article she describes the meta-instruments as dug from the ground in a ruined state, creaking and exhaling as they are played. What issues is not the sound of strings and brass but fragmented cries and susurrations as if the ensemble were a medium channeling the voices of the dead. At times bewildering and erotic these fragile and aggressive voices seem to emanate fitfully from the meta-instruments as they squawk and cry, inhale and exhale.

Though Lim’s introduction and accompanying essay outlines a very structured piece, this is not necessarily evident on the surface. The movements flow together and interference patterns echo across the work as the elements interact. I found myself wishing I could read the score as the piece unfolded to tease out the threads of mourning cloths or hear the laments of ancient lovers. This complex work owes some of its labyrinthine qualities to traditional Chinese territorialisations of space where a matrix of multiple pathways and gateways is explored. Instead of drawing from the Western idea of structural development and final revelation, Lim’s method allows glimpses of fragments, as if half seen through a passing doorway.

Rosanne Hunt’s cello and Carl Rosman’s bass clarinet were the focal points and lead voices in the performance: both musicians extracted strange and riveting sonorities that melted into the timbres of other instruments or were punctuated by haunting percussive sounds. But the high-point was a group lead by Mark Knoop who took to the skeletal body of the lidless piano with lengths of fishing line and by sawing at its strings produced a great, polyphonic, ritual cry of loss.

The most obvious comparison for this work is George Crumb’s Black Angels with its startling transformation of string timbres, otherworldly sonorities and darkly mystical inspiration. Lim seems to echo Crumb when she describes one section as “subterranean, ruined harp music”, but her aesthetic language is definitely generated from her own culturally and musically hybrid perspective.

As I emerged into the Valley’s lively revelry, my final impression of Machine for the contacting the dead was of a strange and complex work with a hauntingly poetic heart.

Liza Lim was awarded Best Composition by an Australian composer for her opera Moon Spirit Feasting at the 2002 APRA-Australian Music Centre Awards. Lim’s latest work will be premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Her essay on Machine for contacting the dead can be found at http://elision.org.au/repertoire/notes/19850.html

Raising the Dead: Keren for solo trombone, composer Iannis Xenakis; Machine for contacting the dead, composer Liza Lim; Elision ensemble and members of The Queensland Orchestra, conductor Franck Ollu; Judith Wright Arts Centre; Brisbane, Sept 6-7

Wednesday. Gotta start my RealTime article. Working title: The demise of New Music in Sydney, or possibly New Music is Dead. Where to begin?

Thursday. Still gotta start that article. Saved by a phone call from the Sydney Morning Herald asking me to attend a concert. Just Aark bills itself as “not quite classical, not quite pop, something a bit different.” Sounds like new music to me.

Friday. Tried to get to Lindy (the new Moya Henderson-Judith Rodriguez opera about the Lindy Chamberlain case) but the traffic on the Bridge was solid. Hopefully they were all going to the Opera House.

Saturday. Off to the Conservatorium for the Song Company’s Six Hermits. The 6 singers were joined by the Chinese Virtuosi, 5 musicians on traditional Chinese instruments, playing new commissions. Some of it I found totally unfathomable and some immediately fascinating. All of it I’d like to hear again.

Monday. Off to the New Music Network’s annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Memorial Address.

Never-ending challenges of inadequate funding, inappropriate venues and indifferent audiences—that’s the common perception of new music in Sydney. But a quick scan of the Sydney concert calendar in October 2002 suggests a buoyant, even heady environment: mainstream chamber music groups such as the Australia Ensemble and the Australian String Quartet have new, old, Australian and international repertoires. There are newbies: Aark Ensemble with their first concert, the Song Company with an extraordinary Chinese collaboration, and the Chinese National Orchestra touring a program of music all composed in the last 50 years and a piece by Australian Constantine Koukias. And as for the big end of town, cosy Musica Viva presents Ensemble Absolute, complete with sampler and backbeat and Opera Australia is finally giving the world premiere of a new Australian commission.

And yet, something’s missing in this feast of the new: what has happened to the black-clad, cash-strapped musicians of specialist ensembles such as the Seymour Group, Sydney Alpha Ensemble and austraLYSIS, who dominated new music in the 90s? It depends who you ask.

Mark Summerbell, artistic director of one of Sydney’s oldest dedicated new music ensembles, the Seymour Group, says, “I find it interesting…that Australia is in the grip of a massive drought and is swept with duststorms because it seems to be an analogy of almost biblical proportions to the other unspoken of drought, ie that which is occurring in the arts. Australia is a cultural wasteland at the moment, at least in the small to medium arts sector, especially in music.”

He cites the introduction of the Australia Council’s triennial funding as a defining moment for small to medium arts organisations. Implemented in 1997, the program gave a few companies guaranteed funding for 3 years, allowing them a degree of financial security. However, fewer, larger grants inevitably meant more competition and more artists turned away empty-handed. You were either in, or out.

Of the 12 founding members of the Sydney New Music Network (as it was known in 1997), only Synergy and the Song Company were granted triennial funding. Since then, austraLYSIS and ELISION have also been favoured. However, others continue to lurch from project to project or, in the case of Sydney Alpha Ensemble, have packed up and gone home.

Roland Peelman, Vice-President of the New Music Network and Artistic Director of the Song Company, is circumspect. Like Summerbell, he acknowledges the recent dearth of activity and the loss of some long-standing contributors. He agrees inadequate funding is an ongoing problem but identifies several other factors: “…the context for new music changes. And perceptions and attitudes continue to change. Pursuing a London Sinfonietta model…established in Europe in the 1970s, is not the way to go in a different culture 30 years later. It was a lofty ideal, but an outdated model. [The] new music scene is not the privilege of the old guard. Room has been made for new blood.”

Everyone agrees funding challenges are here to stay. Money is tight and will stay so in the current political climate, forcing artists across the spectrum to fund their activities in increasingly inventive ways. Traditional concerts, presented by an independent ensemble with its own core audience, are out. Collaborations and contracts are in.

This could mean hitching your overheads to a larger entity: the Seymour Group for example has a partnership with the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music and Elision has a similar arrangement with the University of Queensland. It could also mean programs are built around festival appearances (such as the Seymour Group’s Bach Project, part of the 2002 Gay Games, or Elision’s programs for Totally Huge and Agora). Indeed, many groups fund hometown activities, including ongoing artistic development, by seeking lucrative contract performances overseas, which pay fees in US dollars.

Sydney cannot support the diverse activity it once had. Whether it’s to follow the dollar, chase the audience or simply see the world, the groups surviving are those who are prepared to move. Roland Peelman alludes to this when he singles out two Brisbane-based ensembles, Elision and Topology, as successful models. “Elision has had to come to terms [with the domestic funding situation] and has evolved. It has very successfully reidentified itself as a relevant player on an international level and within [the] Asia Pacific context. It has incorporated improvisation and radical, innovative elements…backed up by serious thinking.”

ABC music broadcaster, Andrew Ford, observes that the 2002 glossy brochures from the major players (Sydney Symphony, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Musica Viva and Opera Australia) reveal a lively menu of commissions and 20th century standards among the mainstream repertoire. He writes, “there is every sign that most of our state orchestras are taking new and local music very seriously indeed” (Sydney Morning Herald, December 2001). A quick scan of concert programs in Sydney in October 2002 confirms this.

Peelman concurs; “Sometimes it can seem tokenistic, but overall they are quite genuine. For example, the SSO has harnessed the Synergy buzz; they have hired the Song Company. And it’s typical of the big players to harness ideas produced in smaller companies.”

Whether this is happenstance or a genuine trend remains to be seen, particularly with the imminent change in leadership at the SSO and the unfortunate slam-dunking of Simone Young at Opera Australia. Likewise, economic realities decree that choices of repertoire are likely to be more conservative and less relentlessly confronting. However, it seems the gap created by a decline in independently produced homegrown new music is being partially filled by major organisations.

So is it a case of new music is dead—long live new music? Certainly, in this funding climate semi-permanent ensembles presenting their own concert series are largely gone. Special events, projects, collaborations, festivals and informal happenings are the norm. However, the good news is that most agree the new model, while financially and personally draining, can work artistically. Musicians talk with pride about their excursions outside Sydney’s limited venues and of complex, intensive collaborations. Of Six Hermits Peelman says, “Projects like that change…our outlook and change the way we make music.”

And what of the newest players? On October 24 this year Sydney’s new group Aark Ensemble took to the stage with Just Aark. Founded by Jeremy Barnett, Matthew Bieniek and Paul Smith, Aark is a loose collective of mostly recent graduates from the Conservatorium, formed initially to make music but more importantly, to explore new modes of presentation. According to Bieniek the aim “…is not just to put concerts on. We want to build awareness and credentials. We want to get out of the music ghetto and try and embrace new audiences.”

To a hoary old arts journo it sounds suspiciously familiar: Just Aark? Just another student ensemble trying to reinvent the wheel? From the evidence of their concert, the jury is out: no radical experiments, but lively, challenging music for a surprisingly large and receptive audience. Despite a collaborative, everyone-gets-a-go approach, the energy and quality were consistently high and James Nightingale’s Bo for solo saxophone was spectacular: an affirmation of the power of new sounds to reach out and grab the senses.

Stereopublic is an ongoing series of public radio performances conducted by Jason Sweeney, greeting audiences throughout Australia and Canada from café windows, footpaths and at Newcastle’s Electrofringe festival. Stereopublic combines broadcast media, spoken word, music and sound art, prodding at the invisible shoreline of the public domain which is perennially refashioned by the wavering ownership of intellectual property, social orthodoxy and censorship.

Stereopublic’s return to Adelaide has taken place in collaboration with the performance and new media company Para//elo. Over 4 days during September and October in the Lion Arts complex of Adelaide’s West End, the latest iteration of Stereopublic’s ‘happenings’ heralds the first manifestation of POP (Para//elo Open Platform), an experimental artists-assistance program, launched this year.

On the day I chose to visit, the performance space was set up much like a radio station: DJ’s soundproof glass cubicle replete with computers, microphones, a minidisk player and a large television looping images of local waterways. Sweeney was perched cheerily in his booth, a converted ground floor window of the Para//elo offices, mixing tracks from what I gathered to be the Brit-pop melancholia of SlowDive and maybe some Depeche Mode. I waved but didn’t drop in, discovering later that I was free to do so. Watching the foot-traffic of university students, skaters and office staff, I was pleased and bemused at this short-range transmission of music, OK Computer-esque bot monologues and weather reports unfolding for a small and preoccupied audience.

Amidst the random, abrasive and sometimes banal radio, Sweeney dropped in some John Cage moments of silence. Commercially owned media spaces dread dead airtime that can cost them thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. This fear highlights the power of unstructured spaces in the commercial arena. Membership-based media activists Adbusters recently fought a legal battle for the right to bring 30 seconds of silence to mainstream American television. Remarkably they won, planting a small but potent message for millions of television viewers.

Staring at the television screen as Sweeney delivered a repertoire of found texts, I experienced a brief moment of audiovisual Zen. Watching handheld footage of flotsam as it swam over ripples in a shallow pool, pinned by a tendril to the rotting pillar of a small wooden bridge. I was captivated by a senseless contentment. It may have been a non-existent bird that I heard pipe up as the wind scuffled across the minidisk’s microphone…soundscapes snagged in a trek alongside nearby riverbanks.

The audible presence of unseen running water and bird calls is both enigmatic and pacifying, letting you know that your surroundings are fruitful and secure. Of course there is savage appeal in the technique of softening aesthetes’ ears, before yelling in them. Jason Sweeney toys with his audience by volleying them between meditation tape nature-sounds and a punk aesthetic of abrasive signal testing. As the stormwater reports and sardonic news readings progressed, I was alert enough to pick out some useful solutions for water run-off, discovering that it was National Water Week in the process.

Narrowcast media and public performance play an important part in the development of uncensored ‘do it yourself’ radio spaces, the content of which is driven by the audience and the performer alone. Stereopublic is gathering the strength and the wit to do this with increasing voracity. For the moment—and perhaps I’m missing the point—I don’t feel Stereopublic is publicly pervasive enough. I look forward to the refinement of visual materials that accompany Jason’s random radio outcastings and their synergy with each new performance location.

Stereopublic, Jason Sweeney, Para//elo, Lion Arts complex, Adelaide, Sept and Oct.

Beneath the noise and the corporate slurry, a self styled boy-band from Brisbane hunkers down amongst the vertical-linkages and value-propositions to bring us AMPidextrous Hearing at the Brisbane Powerhouse. The band, COMPOST, is a project-based collaboration (formed in 1997) between 5 composers from the Queensland Conservatorium: Damian Barbeler, Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste, Freeman McGrath and Toby Wren. Now dispersed across Australia, they get together once or twice a year to commission a new set of performers and put on a show.

In AMPidextrous Hearing Jaaniste has his turn as creative director. Underlying the project is the thesis that instrument design influences the practice of composing. COMPOST explore this idea over 2 nights by setting up duelling concerts: before and after electricity. On Night 1 it’s early instruments: recorder, oboe, lute/theorbo, viola da gamba and harpsichord. On Night 2 it’s the all-electric jazz rock combo: sax, guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. The scores are similar on both nights so the audible difference throughout the 2 concerts is mainly the instrumentation and playing styles, not the ‘music as text.’

The first night, preAmp, begins with Whisky by Wren. It starts with a simple 2 note recorder figure, goes to variations and the occasional let’s-all-join-in, until everyone is synched up. Generator by McGrath is next: flashes of humour and love’s mellow groove. I think of a happy Addams Family, Lurch at the keyboard.

The third piece of the night, by Jaaniste, is strictly from the recent isms; texture and what-listening-is rather than line and structure. A sound mass of trills from the harpsichord becomes overlayed with a quiet drone from the other instruments. Then silence. But somehow Jaaniste conducts across this silence to keep it active and expectant. This process is repeated 3 more times with slight variation (more so in the last section) to produce a sense of profound, desperately restrained fury. This is the highlight of the first night, on which the early instruments and the compositional intent seem perfectly suited.

Next comes Day’s Apology for Letter to Dead Girl. Martyn-Ellis impressively plays the fiendish-to-tune and beautiful to look at theorbo (think giraffe and lute). Low, 3-4 note chromatic figures sound like the plucking of deep piano strings. The last piece of the night is from Barbeler. Harpsichord clusters and interlocking lines (something across most of the pieces that evening).

Night 2, and plug in for postAMP. Warning signs plaster the theatre doors “This is going to be loud.” Now I’m a big fan of ethics in performance and don’t see why tissue damage should be a part of the audience experience, but it’s not all that loud after all and suits me fine. The stage is slightly different, darker, and with the performers set out in the traditional rock band format (sans singer).

Couldn’t start better than with Barbeler’s reworking of Generous music from the Night 1. Chords fade in and out, clicks and glitches, file readouts, samples from the previous night. Then it’s Freeman’s excellent Generation (a carbon-copy of Generator from the night before). If only progressive rock and jazz had gone legit so well.

Jaaniste’s Static was the treat of the previous night, now it’s the electro version. Subtle texture is lost as the harpsichord is replaced by a keyboard randomly cycling through the General Midi (GM) sounds that come bundled with every soundcard and keyboard on the market. Good, but not the standout of Night 1.

Day resurrects Dead Girl. Smarmy bossa nova on the guitar. Funny, and much like its previous incarnation, but this time the electrics carry the rolling rhythms in a way that the unamplified instruments could not.

Last is Wren, with Iceberg. Very slow build up. Gentle consistent drums punctuate the slab guitar, cold samples rummage about the space, meandering call and response across the instruments. Ice breaks and cymbals bow.

On the retro Night 1 the pieces by Barbeler, McGrath, Day and Wren don’t work for me in a big way. The musical language doesn’t really suit the instruments, maybe the lack of sustain in those old instruments can’t hold the larger structures together. Come the second night, though, and the complex writing of Barbeler, McGrath, Day and Wren exploits the amplification and sustain to the max. Great playing, great music. Jaaniste’s Static is quite different: perfectly suited to the harpsichord, with the early instruments rich and balanced in the drone. But the arid keyboard sounds of Jaaniste’s amplified version prove no match for the texture of the harpsichord.

So the boy-band from Brisbane is right. Before and after, pre and post. The physical counts with great ideas like these.

AMPidextrous Hearing, COMPOST, Damian Barbeler, Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste, Freeman McGrath, Toby Wren; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Sept 13, 14.