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Morton Feldman’s music owes much to John Cage, who in turn owes much to Erik Satie. Feldman wrote For John Cage, for violin and piano, for his friend and mentor in 1982, a year after his extraordinary Triadic Memories for piano. Feldman’s later works tend be long, and For John Cage is well over an hour. They are also intensively notated-every detail of the music is exactly prescribed, including some wavering microtones for the violin, making them doubly challenging for the performer. There are many threads for the listener to unravel—structural form and detail and their development, nuances in the rendering, the meditative feel of the work and the tone and timbre of the instruments.

Stephen Whittington (PATU Director) and James Cuddeford (Australian String Quartet) gave an absorbing rendition of For John Cage. The music is based on sequences of irregularly repeated short phrases and patterns that change subtly as the piece progresses. Delicacy and nuance sustain the work and one quickly learns to listen for them. Lacking melodic development, the work could be entered almost at any point. Its delightful little twists and turns are teasing rather than dramatic. Instead of entering an emotional or analytical state, the listener relaxes into quiet joyousness, the music sustaining a unique level of awareness and a sense of gentle motion. It suggests the combination of form and time, like watching the creation of the abstract paintings that enchanted Feldman. The music is typically Feldman, rather than Cagean. Despite the lack of linear development, it’s highly complex. The listener may well be oblivious to the discomfort presumably experienced by Feldman in recording his ideas and by the musicians who deliver them.

By contrast, Cage’s homage to Feldman, Music for Piano No 3 for Morton Feldman (1953) consists of a few brief piano notes, the pianist’s right hand on the keyboard, the left on the strings, a kind of musical haiku that in one moment contains many subtle moods and tones. Cuddeford’s performance of Cage’s Chorales for Solo Violin (1978), a series of 9 short movements for solo violin based around carefully devised microtones, is engrossing, as is Whittington’s powerful rendering of The Seasons(1947), written during Cage’s exploration of chance and numbering schemes.

Whittington’s August 9 program included more works by Cage and some rarely heard composers influenced by Satie including William Duckworth, Peter Garland, Terry Jennings and Philip Corner. (Satie was also featured). Duckworth’s energetic Imaginary Dances (2000) inserts country blues idioms into postminimalist structures. In contrast with the late modernist, idealistic compositional sensibility of Cage and Feldman, Duckworth’s post-modernism combines contrasting musical styles and traditions. Whittington also performed his own Custom Made Valses, a tribute to painter, customs officer and composer Henri Rousseau, in which he alternately read texts on the artist’s enigmatic life and played works evoking his eccentricities.

Cuddeford is a prolific champion of contemporary music. At ACME’s November 5 concert, he gave us Pierre Boulez’s Anthemes for solo violin (1992), a comparatively approachable work (for Boulez) in which pizzicati and slurred notes engage conversationally. Cuddeford’s own sublime and engaging composition, Kodoku, for solo violin (2002), performed by ASQ leader Natsuko Yoshimoto and based on 32 overtones of A and E, perhaps owes something to Cage and Feldman.

In the cavernous St Peter’s Cathedral, after warming up with Shostakovich’s 1934 Cello Sonata, Gabriella Smart’s Soundstream Ensemble launched into Henryk Gorecki’s immensely challenging Lerchenmusik, recitatives and ariosos for clarinet, cello and piano (1984). Stark and austere, Lerchenmusik is more typical of Gorecki than his legendary gentler and more accessible 3rd Symphony. This well-played 40-minute work is based on repeated patterns of a few notes during which slow, quietly sonorous, prayerful passages alternate with intensely loud, dramatic moments. The wide-ranging dynamics and metre emphasise the spare melodic lines. Fragments quoted from Beethoven’s corresponding trio briefly punctuate the final movement, as if Gorecki is looking back with post-cathartic relief on European (musical) history.

For some reason, Adelaide’s contemporary music season is largely squashed into the second half of the year. It also included The Firm’s 7-concert season showcase of excellent, though sometimes conservative, new work. Craig Foltz, Sarah Pirrie and Erik Griswold brought Permanent Transit to PATU. And ACME’s sole concert also included Director David Harris’ new works. This year’s Adelaide’s contemporary music scene has grown in diversity and quality of performance.

Stephen Whittington, Performing Arts Technology Unit, University of Adelaide, Aug 9; with James Cuddeford, Nov 8; ACME New Music Company; ABC Studio 520, Nov 5. Soundstream; St Peter’s Cathedral; Oct 25.

RealTime issue #52 Dec-Jan 2002 pg. 39

The NOW now festival was first held in January 2002, growing out of the fortnightly concerts of improvisation at Space 3 Gallery in Redfern, Sydney. The festival and Melbourne’s Make It Up Club have recently received a grant from the Music Board of the Australia Council for MAKE IT NOW, a mobile festival including both Sydney and Melbourne improvised music festivals and 6 interstate tours of national artists over the course of 2003. In this edited interview RT talked with Clayton Thomas (festival co-director with Clare Cooper) about the ethos behind the of the NOW now festival and the growing interest in improvised music.

A scene is born

We couldn’t find a venue so we did a concert in a basement garage and the people who ran Space 3 said why don’t you come and do a concert next month at our gallery. And we [Matt Ottignon, Felix Bloxom and Clayton Thomas] did our little trio and 150 people came, which is pretty unheard of for a free jazz gig in Sydney. Then I went away for 3 months to New York and became involved in the free jazz community there. That really initiated a whole lot of ideas in terms of how easy it is to form a community just through effort and, hopefully, if what you’re doing is positive and has the right spiritual aims people will gravitate towards it. For a few months there it was a little too focussed on the people Clare and I knew but gradually it’s ballooned. In January this year, everyone knew about The NOW now festival—the jazz scene, the electronic music scene—and suddenly there’s 100 new musicians we didn’t know. An important part of it was to break down cliques. So we have jazz musicians playing with experimental noise artists…that’s happened before but not with the same kind of open energy…the impact is creating new music. There’s not really a doctrine. Well there is, but it’s not like an aesthetic doctrine. We’re pursuing what happens when you improvise. So one night it’ll sound like a free jazz gig, like the Ornette Coleman Trio, and for the next set it might sound like somebody rolling a truck down a hill. Next week these artists will be collaborating. It’s just been the most organic thing.

What’s on

First we have the return of Jim Denley who’s been in Belgium for most of the year. Cor Fuller is coming from Holland. He’s a piano player and electronic musician. Mike Cooper is coming from the UK and he is a dobro slide guitarist, Polynesian music specialist and improviser. We have a contingent from New Zealand—Jeff Henderson the baritone and alto saxophonist is coming with drummer Antony Donaldson, one of the elder statesmen of the free jazz scene in Wellington, and a bunch of younger musicians. From Melbourne we’ve got bassist David Tolley [part of the MAKE IT NOW initiative], saxophonist Tim O’Dwyer, percussionist Will Guthrie and Tasmanian guitarist Greg Kingston. The country’s great improvisers are going to be here and all of them are going to be collaborating with Sydney musicians. One of the highlights of the festival will be Mike Nock the pianist playing with Anthony Donaldson and David Tolley, like no piano trio anyone’s ever heard. They’ve all been wanting to play together for 20 years. Then we’ll go down to Melbourne. It’s a mobile festival with 6 tours throughout the year of musicians from around the country doing the Sydney-Melbourne-Canberra leg and maybe Adelaide if possible. It will involve musicians from everywhere.

Connections – Make It Up Club

I guess Make it Up Club is an identical situation to Space 3. They do a regular series of improvised music concerts and a community has formed around a venue. If there’s a venue that’s specifically oriented towards something then people will find out who’s involved and suddenly you’ve got a community. They’ve been doing it for a couple of years. Tim O’Dwyer was up here doing a tour a couple of years ago and we met and shared some musical visions and through him we’ve met a whole bunch of Melbourne-based musicians. Just basically through our activities a whole bunch of people have become involved, either they relate to the Tasmanian scene or the New Zealand scene. Jeff Henderson runs the Space in Wellington–the exact same model as ours. It basically functions because of his energy. Three years ago he said we’re going to have an improvised music scene and he played there every night for 8 months and slowly people and his band got a little following and more musicians turned up and now it’s a 7 day a week venue. And it’s the creative hub of Wellington. Just through that the Wellington International Jazz festival is probably one of the most progressive jazz festivals in the world–there’s a community that’s looking for great music. I’ve just come back from 3 weeks there and it was mind blowing. The high level of music and creative content in such a small town is like frightening. And it’s all because the space has kind of demanded that everyone play—so they’re all teaching each other.

Why now?

I think we’re living in a really complicated time with the threat of institutionalised decision making, Like America deciding that everything is open to attack. I think improvised music and improvising in general, and the freedom to bring to your ideas and expression and 100% of your energy to something, is really important. People are looking for that challenge: music as a model for life. It’s liberated and difficult and disciplined.

the NOW now festival, Space 3 Redfern Sydney, Jan 13-18, 2003. For full program details go to www.thenownow.net

RealTime issue #52 Dec-Jan 2002 pg. 39

Genesi

This interview with Romeo Castellucci, Artistic Director of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Theatre Company from Italy, and director of the company’s Melbourne Festival production, Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, was conducted shortly prior to the opening of the show. Castellucci’s original, unedited Italian text has been translated by Paolo Baracchi, with French translation by Baracchi and Marshall. Comments in brackets are by Jonathan Marshall. An excerpt from this interview first appeared in IN Press.

Introduction

An elderly, naked woman, possibly Eve (who has had a mastectomy), traverses a diagonal line towards the front of the stage and clumsily fondles some white thread. A monstrous spindle-machine starts behind her as her hair drops from her head and we realise that it is this which is being spun.

This is but one image from Romeo Castellucci’s staging of the Genesis myth–complete with elements from the Apocrypha (the non-official Bible) such as the Fall of Lucifer from highest angel to a hideous, deformed mimic of God who facilitates the chaos that underlies all of Creation. Like Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty tradition which the former-painter-turned-director is steeped in, the stuff of Castellucci’s theatre is stuff itself: matter, that which you and I swim in, yet which becomes strangely amorphous, slippery, weirdly sexual, deformed and impenetrable in his hands.

The story of God lovingly creating the universe, after which Man committed the first sin and was expelled from the Garden of Eden, is well known. Less familiar however is the mystic, Judaeo-Christian version found in Gnosticism, the Kabbala and Rosicrucianism. It is this version which Castellucci portrays through the use of sound, physical performance and massive, spectacular effects. Castellucci is tapping into the same traditions which served as the inspiration for artists such as Baudelaire, Antonin Artaud, Peter Brook (The Mahabarrata, Marat/Sade, etc), Carmello Bene, the master of Italian avant-garde cinema Pier Passolini, Jerzy Grotowski, the founder of the Japanese avant-garde dance form butoh Tatsumi Hijikata, and others.

In this darker version of Genesis, the act of Creation is not one of love, but a horrible mistake. The Kabbala for example talks of the universe being created when the sacred pots carrying the Word of God were dropped, exploding into millions of imperfect shards. The act of Creation is therefore a violent transgression against the laws of the universe–and hence all of Creation contains within it the seething chaos of a proto-universe just prior to the act of Creation itself. It is not Love which rules this universe, but Cruelty. It is not Man who sinned, but God. All of art, theatre and history therefore constitute a retelling of this initial act of primal violence, in which events like the Holocaust, September 11 and the destruction of Afghanistan are the norm, rather than the exception.

Castellucci’s essential thesis in Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep is that in the shift between an idea, a thought or our conception of any given thing, to its actual manifestation, something monstrous has taken place. We have violated cosmic law, become like God (or Lucifer) and tried to create something. Castellucci’s theatre is therefore one of cosmic dreams and nightmares, of temporal shifts and suspensions, such as the incredible second act set in Auschwitz, bathed in an unsettling yet warm, white glow, where literally nothing happens–as though the Holocaust has somehow killed time. Genesi strives to be very nearly, if not actually impossible to consciously understand, a work which one must apprehend, experience or perhaps merely endure. It exists in a radical, Dionysian realm beyond tragedy, beyond description and possibly beyond language itself. It is a work as complex as it is compelling, as bizarre as it is raucous. Operatically boosted by an incredible electroacoustic score by Lilith [Scott Gibbons], it shifts from dense screams to low, crunchy disturbance. It is a work as full of piety as it is full of sacrilege, as dense with allusive meanings as it is a deliberate staging of the absence or failure of meaning.

Why do you use the performers that you do? What is it that these performers offer that formally trained actors do not? Could you also tell me about the use of the body in your performances, and the choices that you have made in casting performers with various physical attributes? I am particularly interested in your casting of Cain.

In truth, every body is worthy of being on stage. For me there are no deformed bodies, but only bodies with different forms and different beauties, often with a type of beauty that we have forgotten. I believe that each body expresses something–any form of body. The age of an actor is important, as is how much actors weigh, how they twist their neck one way or the other, what their hands are like: these are all fundamental elements, much more interesting than the actor’s profession or professionality. Actors, in the moment when they let themselves be truly seen, are always the worthiest beings, and in this respect they represent the only possible form of performance. So, it is no longer a question of graceful or unpleasant, of professional or not, of fat or thin, of being a child or an old person. It is about sharing problems of art with these people. It is about interpretation, and not the presentation of reality. When one attempts to represent ‘reality’ on the stage, this always transforms the spectator into a voyeur. But here, in my theatre, performance is not about making a ‘theatre of truth’ or ‘social-theatre’, in the older sense.

Often, moreover, non-professionals attain an amazing ‘truth’ in their acting because they retain a capacity of surprise and a naturalness which many professionals have lost. The choice of actors is therefore based primarily upon the discovery of the beauty that is present within each of them and upon the necessities of the theatrical production. My theatre is open to all experiences and I always learn a lot in my work with the actors. I assign the characters and then I give the actors the freedom to act how they feel. I do not have a ‘method’ as such, but rather proceed according to the show, relying on the qualities and the gifts of each performer. For example, the actor who plays Adam in Genesi is a contortionist, and that makes him a perfect presence for this production. The actor who plays the role of Lucifer is a singer. We have worked on rhythm, on voice and with the sonorities of the Hebrew language. [Act I opens with Lucifer in Marie Curie’s laboratory, reciting from the Torah, accentuating various cutting, consonant sounds, as he traces characters from the text in the air. Adam later appears in Act I as part of a museuml tableau, in a glass case, a mounted crocodile suspended above him, violent electroacoustic cracking sounds accompanying his contortions.]

For the choice of the actor that plays Cain I have taken into consideration the fundamental fact that the fratricidal act had to be, in some way, innocent, infantile. For this reason I searched for an actor with one arm shorter than the other. The un-grown limb immediately suggests childhood, and the homicide becomes more complicated by adding to the violence of the act itself the ambiguity of a game that has, unfortunately for Cain himself, become definitive or irrevocable. The shorter arm bears witness to the fact that this is a game which, unlike all other games, cannot be started again, because its result has been fixed once and for all with this act that causes death, in the same way in which the arm has remained fixed in its childlike size. [In Act III, Cain embraces Abel about the neck with his withered arm and Abel collapses, dead, after which Cain gently attempts to coax the body back into life before he lies on top of his brother.]

Could you tell me a bit about the use of sound in the production? Why have you and Gibbons used the granular synthesis of images to generate sound, in which the digital mapping of various images from the history of visual art and iconography (the classical statue of “The Thorn-Puller”, Massaccio’s painting of “The Expulsion From Paradise”, etc), as well as turn of the century photography and science (Henry Fox Talbot’s early photography, Curie’s laboratory, Étienne-Jules Marey’s cinematic studies of motion, Francis Galton’s studies of atavistic racial physiognomy, X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA, etc) are transformed into sonic patterns? Can you really translate images into sound, or does this process in fact create something else, something perhaps more comparable to an unimagined sound or what French composer Pierre Schaeffer described as music for the “astonished ear”?

The sound is an integrative element within my shows. It has a body that is born out of its own dynamic, under the impulse of the alternation between din and silence. In general, the sound is not derived from any particular visual, sculptural or linguistic figure because it constitutes, in itself, a figure. The quality of a work may often be conveyed in a clearer fashion through the use of sound than by means of images. Sound opens perspectives and prepares the [scenographic or dramaturgical] field for creation. It is like a stream that carries forms. Scott Gibbons’ “granular” music transforms the sounds in such a way that they seem as they would, if they were perceived by the ear of an embryo.

Gibbons has developed sounds using a numerical technique called “granular synthesis” which he applied to various photographs I sent him every week from my home. Scott has been able to transform them into sound impulses. [In the program, Gibbons notes that this involved such transformations as “height mapped to pitch, color to stereo position, brightness to amplitude, etc”.] Some were anonymous photographs dating from the end of the 19th century, as well as some other things which I found in old manuals. Gibbons has thus been able to give voice to certain images which I felt were intimately connected with the show. From this, some scenes were born with sounds, and other sounds were born from certain scenes. Here too, it is one single emotional wave. There is no distinction made between these elements.

What is the role of text in your work? Do you think that your work is more eloquent than traditional, scripted, text-based theatre? It is has been suggested that most of the spoken words in Genesi are predominantly there to create musical effects, rather than to impart specific information, specific meanings, or to relate details of character and plot.

All of the scenic elements have the same importance. The process is comparable to the one employed in developing photographs. There is a dark room and a bath of acid. All the components of the image (colours, forms) emerge at the same time. The different elements are not placed in an hierarchy–simply because the human organism perceives emotional waves in a global fashion. For me, an initial text cannot prevail over the other elements, because then everything that comes afterwards would be an illustration, and illustrations only release a compensatory force which does not interest me.

Nevertheless my theatre is based upon the strongest of all possible relationships with the text and its words. This is a relation of struggle and antagonism. If the text remains an essentially literary product, then this means that the theatre has become nothing more than an illustration of this text or, at best, a recontextualisation of it. Within theatre itself however, the text must be definitely brought out of the literary container and allowed to transform itself into a literal, carnal power. Words are not essentially spiritual things. No, the word is first of all a muscular contraction, something physical. The word must be a body which it is possible to weigh, to illuminate. It is necessary for the word to have a body [even if only to be spoken]. In this way, the word is treated technically. It is treated exactly as every other element of the scene, each of which also has a body, just as the word does. And each time words are framed, this is only really possible within the dramaturgical frame. [Castellucci is implying that the embodied actions of theatre constitute a superior and more profound realisation of textual material than any other form.]

Would it be fair to describe Genesi as a Medieval Mystery play (the Medieval works depicting stories from the Bible and the Apocrypha) for the post-20th century world?

It is an evocative question, because the Middle Ages offer important suggestions–not, however, in the theoretical field of dramaturgy, but in the sense that this representation is neither born nor develops within the context of the ecclesiastical pedagogy which was typical of the Medieval theatre. Nor does this version of Genesis communicate the revealed truths of [religious] transcendence. Rather, this production remains totally within the immanence of the human condition, not transcending it, which situates this production particularly within the condition of the artist. The dramatic morphology on the other hand, although it remains distant from the action-followed-by-consequences structure of previous sacred representations, may nevertheless be said to have a certain connection to the Catholic model of spiritual ‘stations.’ Genesi too is effectively structured according to such thematic pictures. [The 14 Stations of the Cross are a series of devotional paintings or sculptures representing the Passion of Christ. The Stations mark His progression towards martyrdom and Transfiguration.]

You have stated that “Genesis scares me more than the Apocalypse” because it represents “the terror of endless possibility.” This would seem to draw heavily upon the writings of Antonin Artaud and Herbert Blau, as well as the Gnostic and Kabbalistic doctrines which Artaud himself was influenced by. Would you agree with the ideas usually associated with this cosmology? For example, Artaud contended that a terrifying chaos existed prior to Creation, and that this remained forever present, latent, or immanent within everyday existence. He argued that this “chaos” is the logical “double” of theatre. Is theatre’s highest aim and greatest virtue therefore that it can represent–or at least come close to representing–this chaos through live performance?

There is a tradition of Western theatre that is totally forgotten, cancelled, repressed: the tradition of pre-tragic theatre. And it is repressed precisely because it is a theatre that is closely linked to [the transformation of ideas, thoughts or ideal forms into] matter and hence with the anguish of matter itself. This form of theatre is linked moreover to a primal presence or power that is doubtless female. It is necessary to understand how the female aspect (in the mystery of the gestation of life and in the wardenship of the dead) is an aspect that is also involved in artistic expression, which has in turn found in this female component a relation with real life. This ‘female force’ runs from birth to burial.

If the great domain of open possibilities belongs to God, the fact that certain possibilities are joined together and made to happen must therefore belong–according to some Kabbalistic traditions–to the weight of the body itself. God must transform Himself into something “of the flesh” so as to be able to manifest possibilities that would otherwise remain unrealised within an inconsistent world. It is possible [according to these traditions] to experience possibilities through the invocation of material, carnal elements, and, through a conjunctions of these, to experiment with them.

Theatre is not something that must be ‘recognised’: “I-go-to-the-theatre-to-recognise-the-Shakespeare-studies-that-I-have-completed”. It is not [or should not] be like that. Theatre is rather a journey through the unknown, towards the unknown. What myself and those of a similar mind have tried to do over the years has been to hold high the scandal of the stage and to keep it constantly vibrating. Even the word “theatre” itself has to be continually re-invented, because it is a word that has completely lost its radical meaning. The stage is in fact a place of alienation, and nothing must be done to anaesthetise this alienation. The ‘problem’ of the author, of the text, of the tradition of narrative theatre has always been, in actuality, an attempt to solve this ‘problem’ by filling in the scandal which theatrical creation represents with various discourses, by forcing the actor–and therefore the actor’s body–to become nothing more than a repeater of these elements, diminishing the energy of the stage itself.

In this regard, I believe that the thought of Antonin Artaud is of fundamental importance for the whole consciousness of Western form. It plunges the problem of form [as in what form should an idea, thought, or aesthetic act take once made manifest within the material universe] into a bath of violence that re-awakens that which supports a true theatre. It is then that form becomes spirit. One is, in fact, here talking about the alchemy of transformation, of the transmigration of one form into another. There is of course an aspect of Catholicism which influences, and inheres within this type of theatre, which is connected to the moment during the Eucharist when the Host is transformed into the Body of Christ. This Eucharistic fact also is an idea that we find within Artaud: this idea of transforming a body, of donating a body, of cutting a body to pieces, of liberating a body from its organs: these are all elements that derive from such a Christian conception.

The terror that you were alluding to from the Beginning derives from the fact that one no longer recognises language [at this moment when one encounters the chaos], and this causes terror. One no longer recognises that which connects us to each other within the human community [that which allows us to communicate, to think and to express ourselves]… Words become disconnected from the things we know and precipitate within this undifferentiated state. But only from there can “your” true language be born again.

Do you think that these type of ideas have taken on a particular relevance in the light of 20th century events like the Holocaust, and indeed more recent events such as the Yugoslav Wars, September 11 and the decimation of Afghanistan?

The events that you have recalled, the massacres, the genocides, the disasters that humankind has experienced in its recent history, constitute an abyss which is necessarily connected with the experience of Creation. During Creation, it is the Word of God that creates; in these events however, there is His silence. The theatre is called upon to comprehend the heights and the abysses of human experience–but not through illustration, nor by means of the production of information. The experience of abomination is too deep to be consumed on the surface [or through such superficial means as by the representation of mere appearances]. It is necessary now that we should all begin to consider the term “tragedy” so as to collectively rethink the destiny of humanity. The theatre is called upon to address this task through the radicality of its form, which is that of a living art.

Following on from this, would you agree that all creative acts constitute an act of violence, or at least a violation of the taboo against creation? I have in mind here your suggestion that the fallen angel Lucifer is the first artist with whom humanity can identify.

Naturally, the theme of Genesis highlights the problem of the Beginning. At the Beginning each artist knows that the empty stage is an open sea of possibilities. This is also what constitutes the ‘terror of the scene.’ This is not–as far as I am concerned, in any case–a terror or fear of emptiness per se, but rather a terror of fullness: there is too much world. Quantity submerges us. Matter is obscure. Therefore, every time the artist elaborates upon this chaos so as to make something come out of it, one reconnects these possibilities. Lines and constellations are then created… by parthenogenesis, almost independently of one’s personality. With respect to the Beginning and the End, it is evident that theatre has in itself, ontologically, within its deep textures, this problem of the Beginning and the End–because they are co-penetrated. Theatre is a corporeal art par excellence which, by definition, when it “is really here”, in front of the spectator, it is also ending at the same time. Theatre is born at the same time as it dies, and vice versa.

What meaning does it now have to repeat those words which are the first words of Genesis itself and so are, indeed, the things themselves, the world itself? Are these words from Genesis the words which made the world happen, and so also those which have given rise to the stage? The only person who could bear the weight of these originating words is he who first spoke in a ‘double form’, he who first assumed the costume of another–namely Lucifer. Throughout the history of humanity, Lucifer has always made himself felt through disguises and costumes, assuming the words of someone else. He did this also at the Beginning, assuming the skin of the Serpent and the language of the Serpent. He duplicated for the first time the words of someone else, saying: “Is it really true, what God said?”, hence creating a form of mimesis, a form of duplication of language. He is indeed the first to work in the superabundance of language, to exploit the theatre as an energy, and hence also giving rise to art. Art finds in this originating nucleus its privileged relation to evil. Evil is moreover the extreme aspect of the freedom that God has conceded to all beings. Lucifer lives in the condition of his condemnation which is, quite precisely, to live in the region of non-being. In order to return to the state of being, Lucifer is forced to assume someone else’s disguise, someone else’s voice. Art becomes necessary when one is no longer in Paradise. In this sense, the only person who could endure the act of speaking again God’s words, let alone in their original language of Hebrew, was Lucifer.

In Genesi, Lucifer’s conference is held on a little table, in the study of Mme Curie, in a drawer of which is contained a little stone of radium. Radium is, among other things, a stone that emits a light of its own [Ital. luce]. Radium is therefore mysteriously close in etymology to the word “Lucifer.” The true radioactive nature of radium’s glow was not known at that time. It was nevertheless a light which penetrated bones; it had something evil about it. It was also however the light of knowledge, which one could relate to the games which art plays as well–this exposing of oneself continually for one’s own ends.

Could you tell me about the evocation of time within Genesi? You have suggested for example that both historic acts of violence–and indeed their representation in the theatre–are only possible because of a “foetal amnesia” in which we forget the history of violence which this production is itself designed to depict. The Holocaust therefore repeats the murder of Able by Cain, just as the sacrifice of Christ repeats Abraham’s sacrifice of the lamb, or Marie Curie’s discovery of radium repeats the discovery of the Tree of Knowledge, and the actions of humanity repeat the sins of Lucifer (pride, creation, the desire to become like God, etc).

This would seem to suggest that both the content and the style of Genesi are designed to create a very strange sense of time and temporality–or possibly a state in which time does not seem to pass at all. You have yourself described this as a “state of suspension” which “annuls time.”

How is this achieved and is what I have described above what you are in fact trying to convey?

This question of time in the theatre refers to the experience of another time which theatre founds. I mean the flowing of time. I am not referring to a chronology, but to the quality of time itself. The final lapis of this alchemy which defines theatre is time itself. All of the transformations which I was suggesting before are not designed to do anything other than to modify time, to inaugurate another time. [Lapis is Latin for a smooth stone, as in lapis-lazuli, an ingredient for many alchemical preparations.]

Theatre is, by its nature, an operation performed upon time. Dramaturgy can be defined as the art of modifying the flow of time. Time constitutes a material for the theatre worker, just as colour is for the painter or marble is for the sculptor. Time is a primary raw material to be worked, to be developed according to its dynamics, to be dilated or–on the contrary–to be condensed. This show embraces different qualities of time, which are proper to each of the 3 acts, yet without placing them into any kind of dialectic per se.

The first is derived from Bere_it [first Hebrew word of the section of the Torah dealing with Genesis, meaning: “In the Beginning”]. It corresponds to a reality outside of time. The Creation occurs before the invention of time. The initial relationship of God with the Elements occurs in the obscurity of the darkness and in the absence of time. The second act, which has the name of a town, Auschwitz, precipitates the action into a historical time. The last act, Abel and Cain, evokes a mythical time. These 3 approaches revolve around the fundamentally intertwined themes of creation and destruction. The dramaturgical work therefore consists in making visible [through the action of the stage] the differences which these temporal structures effect upon one’s perception of the flow of time.

The first part ideally unfolds outside of time, and this is rendered symbolically by the obscurity that reigns upon the stage. But Genesis is also a frenzied act which is accomplished amongst the chaos. The stage starts to quake: one sees apparitions of lightning, lateral entrances, entrances from high and from below [several objects are flow in and off stage, including a clear tank of bubbling water, which may represent the unleashed power of radium and Creation], rotations, cacophonic machines that suddenly begin to shake [there are at least 2 of these: the first a flattened, bucking, metallic insect, which the program describes as “Something bronze that is writing”; the second an unadorned mechanical armature at the side of the stage which intermittently applauds the action], bodies that burn, cords which stretch across stage [literally in the case of Eve’s hair], objects that fall from the air, and ground that [literally] swells, which breathes… As if God was surprised by what he was doing in the process of creating.

The flow of time then becomes mechanical, fragmented. [At this point a naked black man appears and plants two carrots into a mound of soil; the Avenging Angel Gabriel appears and grasps the handle of sword suspended in the air, whose blade is aflame; etc.]

Auschwitz, on the contrary, evokes a sense of extermination–even of time. A time which relates to a historical moment seems suspended, swathed in the wadding of a nursery and the unctuous melodies of Luis Mariano. [Act II is set in an open white space where children play at serious, often symbolic games. One enters on a toy train, for example, a yellow star on the back of his jacket, and takes down a series of rubber, human organs suspended above the stage, placing them into the carriages, before departing.]

Abel and Cain however returns to the original homicide. Here, time becomes music. Cain is the first man to face the dramatic duel between the 2 fundamental polarities of human action: the Beginning and the End [ie this first act of human violence nevertheless contains within it the End of all things and hence serves as the final tableau in Castellucci’s exposition of Genesis]. The essential problem of the Creator, of artists, is their permanent confrontation with the void, with chaos. Each act of Creation presupposes a prior act of destruction. Creation becomes then a re-creation, and each phase which precedes this re-creation must be a systematic destruction of all acquired habits [if it is to be true act of novel creation]. It is therefore necessary to destroy the habits associated with words. The same holds true for the word “Creation” itself. It is a word which no longer means anything, as is also the case with the words “stage” or “scene.” These are words whose meaning has been forgotten, falling into oblivion, into inertia. The first task of the artist is to destroy this “tiredness” of words, to re-awaken their sense.

It is also necessary to destroy the habit of acts. It should never be a matter of habit to perform a show. Each time one performs a show, presenting it to view, it must be a scandal of reality. Each performance is a threat or provocation, a suspension of reality, a fissure in the real. The word “creation” is too strong a term if one reads it in the light of reality. One must rather read it as evoking this sense of re-creation.

It is this way that the act of creation and Genesis may be brought together. The only Genesis that I can conceive starts from the idea of this crisis of creation. I can only capture and hold onto such images as might, at least in my opinion, interest someone like God–a marvellous and unique God. The figure of the artist moreover is only extreme within the context of the monotheistic religions–and this is because it is within these religions that the price of shame is greatest. The artist, as creator, has a special relationship with God and the Book of Genesis because it is this Book that puts onto the stage the essence of artistic work or creation. The artist himself can only therefore be a Re-creator. The most violent aspect of this relationship which the artist entertains with this God (who is, above all, the only true Creator) is his capacity to be exposed to ridicule. Each artist is in effect a little Creator or God, but the artist’s creation is ridiculous when placed alongside the work of God. It is a false artefact.

I am not saying however that artists must measure themselves against God. To compare oneself to God is not only impossible, but, in the strict sense of the term, it is unthinkable. God is born incessantly–I tell you this above all as an artist, and there is nothing mystical about this. My show, Genesi, is not only a representation of the biblical Genesis, but it is a Genesis which brings to the world (using the stage) my rhetorical pretensions to remake the world. It puts onto the stage the most vulgar aspect of my being–namely that of the artist who wants to steal from God the last and most important of the Sephiroth. This is the secret of Polchinello too: to steal from God. [The Sephiroth are the 10 mystic attributes identified in the Kabbala as they key to the communion between the Finite with the Infinite. Polchinello was mischievous peasant character, highly disrespectful of his social betters, from 17th century French marionette theatre. Punch is a later, English derivation.]

In short, Genesis frightens me much more than the Apocalypse. The terror of pure possibility is there in this sea open to all possibilities. And there I lose myself in form. The Angel of Art is Lucifer. He is the first Being who puts on and assumes the costume and the clothes of another in order to Be. He has duplicated language and has translated it. The art of transformation is for him alone. He comes from the region of Non-being. The only way for him to return to the zone of Being is to write the name of another with his voice, with his body–and this is what the theatre is. This zone of Non-being is the genital condition of each act of creation. It allows the destruction which is necessary to ward off and avert all superstitions. [Castellucci is highlighting the paradoxical nature of the Judaeo-Christian mystical tradition he is heir to. If one communes with the divine by becoming like God, one also comes to doubt in the unique power of the divine. This is the condition of the director too.]

–

The author would like to thank the staff of the 2002 Melbourne Festival–especially Andi Moore and Ally Catterick–for making this interview possible and for providing translation services.

RealTime issue #52 Dec-Jan 2002 pg. web

Crickets clack and distant babies cry, the room is quietly dense with tropical night sounds. Five huge 19th century cameras almost fill the small gallery space for the performance installation, Troppo Obscura: they look the real thing, bulky, long-legged, wide-eyed. They are fantastic reconstructions, one is even winged, and they incorporate authentic components, but also come with earphones attached. Beneath one, oddly, a pair of legs in tights is visible. When I look into the view-finder I don’t see the room; instead I’m seduced by the articulate gesturing of dancing fingers, the gently elegant moves of a crowned head and the beckoning of brilliantly bright eyes that pierce with such face to face proximity. It’s as if I have my own camera and am shooting in extreme closeup a court dancer from Java or Bali. Forced to move on by keen queuers, I squint into another camera to see old black and white footage, perhaps from the 20s, of village life and court dancing, children at play in water, the eruption of a volcano and the disturbing recurrence of the image of a westerner gazing sternly at me as he stands by his own camera.

Looking into the winged camera I see more film of engrossing traditional dance. I hear, however, contemporary Australian female voices intimately recorded, chatting, sometimes raucously and wickedly, about relationships they’ve had with Indonesian men, the pleasures and compromises. In another camera, I witness recent footage of an old woman sitting cross-legged, gesturing with a dancerly expressiveness as she tells the story of her first husband, a policeman who wouldn’t let her dance, and the second who was “stupid but obliging.” Her characterful eagerness and dancing hands counterpoint the horrors that spring from her lips of grim privations and dying children.

From above another camera rises the upper torso of a young man (Teik-Kim Pok), a red flower tucked behind his ear. He peers obsessively into a hand mirror. A peep into the machine reveals a different kind of dancing: a kitschy, naked, western blonde ‘tattooed’ on the boy’s belly gyrates to Bob Marley’s “No woman, no cry” and Garuda Airline airport announcements, making for a nicely droll postcolonial mix.

The piece de resistance of this already absorbing Troppo Obscura is a large projection onto one wall of the gallery, It’s a film in silent movie mode of the work’s creator, Monica Wulff (encountered also as the dancer in the camera), appearing as an Edwardian woman in white hat and long dress who plays with Indonesian masks and dance gestures and whose clothes disappear layer by layer and piece by piece. For all her adoption of an exotic otherness, a piece of old peep show trickery reveals her to be very real, naked and white, until the film reverses and dresses her again. Sam James’ filming is another example of the artist's virtuosity (as witnessed in Julie Ann Long’s Miss XL) and his ability to perfectly complement and expand his collaborators’ visions.

Troppo Obscura is a marvellous visual, aural and dance creation, a performance installation that not only seduces with its immediate magic but leaves you wanting to see more of the remarkable archival film that Wulff found in the Netherlands and to know more of the lives overheard. The installation’s wit and inventiveness evokes and subverts a world of photographic colonialism with more than enough contemporary hints that post does not mean past or finished, and that the orientalisms of dance and music that sprang primarily from the 19th and early 20th centuries are still with us as we struggle to nurture meaningful cross-cultural hybrids.

Monica Wulff devised the installation and performed (dedicatedly, her head in a box for hours at a time), Hedi Hariyanto from Indonesia created the wonderful objects, Sam James the video, RealTime’s Gail Priest the embracing ambient and other recordings, and Deborah Pollard was a very active artistic consultant. Troppo Obscura deserves to be seen more widely.

Carnivale & The Institute for International Studies, UTS, Troppo Obscura, Performance Space, Sydney, Oct 10-19

RealTime issue #52 Dec-Jan 2002 pg. web

What kind of work does an artist produce when she spends a great deal of her time immersed in a landscape and culture imbued by the world’s oldest stone structures–megalithic buildings from Malta’s Temple Period, 3600—2500 BC? Maree Azzopardi, like other Maltese descendents living in Sydney brings with her a rich heritage. As well, she draws on the influences of Vermeer, Catholic iconography, Islamic mosaics and the advantages of new media technology. Her latest show exhibits a range of both colour and black and white photographs and digitized paintings on stretched canvases.

Azzopardi's images focus on domestic interiors, but she creates a sense of space suggesting intimate temples. She places the female nude in settings with props symbolic of rituals that order life: baptism, the partaking of wine and bread in communion, and the cleansing and shrouding of the dead body. What is eerily subversive is that while the images appear at first romantic, and even nostalgic, there is a distinct absence of signs of life. The beautiful basin and the turquoise water jug do not appear to actually hold any water. Is the reclining female dead? The limp feet on the cold floor by the fallen jug suggest that there may have been a hanging. The lone figure, standing in a basin, holding onto a shroud suggests a final ritual. What story is Azzopardi telling?

Azzopardi’s previous and most celebrated body of work, her Chrysalis series, comprise a series of photographs of HIV patients, both in the process of dying and post-mortem, when she was artist-in-residence at St Vincent’s Public Hospital, Sydney, 1995. It seems that the artist is preoccupied with this ambiguous space, the delicate balance between life and death. The images in this show are less confronting seeming staged, set in a distant place and the female figure anonymous.

There is as well is an odd juxtaposition between these otherwise warm interiors with photographs of sculpted cherubs with their arms raised in joy. Perhaps Azzopardi wishes to convey a sense of triumph, even ecstasy over the sense of loss implied–as in Catholic portrayals of martyred saints? Meanwhile, the viewer is sated with the rich sensuality of Azzopardi’s materials, palette and preoccupation with pattern, light and touches of the Baroque.

Maree Azzopardi, Celeste, curator Jonathan Turner, Michael Carr Art Dealer, Sydney, Nov 5—24

A drunk, gesticulating with his beer bottle, repeatedly yells “Fuck the…what the…?” at the big pulsing screen with its speedy mix of pre-recorded and live feeds. Only occasionally he takes rare notice of the dagsters who slo-mo swarm about him on their hour long, voguing weave through a contemplative audience stretched out on the grass beneath stars blurred by bushfire haze. Some are like picknickers with their eskies and kids, some in proud Gay Games team clusters. Others are bypassers, more than momentarily seduced by these odd sirens who look less a danger to the audience than to themselves in their obsessive-compulsive staggerings and bizarre fashion model posturings on wire mesh podia that they drag about with them. The drunk is on the edge of the crowd, barely heard, but a security guard hovers, iterating, “I told you, no swearing”, as four-letter abuse words slide across the screens and leap from the argumentative exchanges that envelope us in Barbara Clare’s engrossing dance club musical score. “What?” the drunk rallies, his sense of justice wounded, “But this…this’s homos!!” The guard looms, the drunk retreats into his bottle.

You can slip in and out of Shiver, as it moves close by and into the distance, the gaggle of performers followed by video cameras, photographers and the manipulators of portable lighting, like a media pageant or a fashion shoot. Or you switch to the screen, or shut your eyes and go with the music. Whatever, it does have a curious grip, sending even the odd shiver up the spine as the performers surround you, whispering with the soundtrack, “I’m alright. Are you alright?”, hanging over you with a curiously langorous urgency like half out-of-it Kings Cross junkies caught between the pleasures of the last hit and the need for the next. They are almost stylish in their ragbag collection of wigs, high-high heels and dense makeup, for all the world drag queens. But the duration of the performance and the proximity to the performers allows you to fix on these faces to do your own bit of obsessing about what’s under the makeup, what’s glimpsed beneath the clothes, what’s behind the voices. Four of them are women, but the longest-legged, a most elegant if uncertain mover, says someone afterwards, “is a boy.” You can still be surprised, even at this late date. Two of the group are counter-tenors in long blonde wigs. They often frame the action, moving slowly through the crowd, the meeting of their long locks providing a curiously ritualistic climax to an inexplicable, often hypnotic event. The pre-recorded video makes much of their tresses. The 4 who dance vary their formula slightly track to track, performing with conviction (sometimes on the edge of parody), regrouping, slowly forming exotic tableaux vivant, and loping to the stage (a walk reminiscent of the latest horsey ambulations of fashion models, the soundtrack complementing it with solo neighing) where they briefly line up to make a stage act.

I can imagine Shiver making a greater impact in a dance club–where it would be another, if subversive, part of the overall ambience–rather than in a city park on a balmy evening where it is entirely responsible for creating the requisite atmosphere and where its audience can only observe and are unlikely to move move. Nor is its duration and minimalist variation right for theatre spaces, unlike the earlier parts of the trilogy. Nonetheless, the furious drive of the live editing of the intersecting double video projections pitted against the slower, possessed movements of the performers, the quality calibre of the sound system and the in-yer-ear realism of the vocal recording, and the conviction of the performers make for a sometimes engrossing and curiously memorable experience. But what exactly was the experience? While the multimedia dimension of the show had a thoroughly contemporary feel (the projection of gnomic texts aside), the rest was like virtual reality display in a museum visit: not to say that its protagonists were stuffed, on the contrary, but they read like the detritus of glam rockery and 80s new romanticism, prisoners of the cliches of cross-dressing, but with fervour still, over and above an air of pathos and faded brilliance.

Choreographer Lucy Guerin has established a reputation for herself as a master of minimalistic abstraction with works like Heavy (1998), which dealt with sleep states. Her dance has a kind of devilish funk; of bodies turning into and out of themselves according to a subliminal logic which can nevertheless be very affective. Guerin has also explored explicitly dramatic scenarios through her work–notably with The Ends of Things (2000), which followed a series of endings initiated by an introverted, shy man. Her latest production, Melt, is in some sense a return to her earlier, somewhat more abstract approach, using, as she says: “the relationship between temperature and temperament as a starting point for the movement.”

Guerin explains that she is “rebelling somewhat” against the linear, narrative ambience she adhered to for The Ends of Things. “I felt like that show really made sense. It was closely structured and it didn’t have any lose ends. In terms of what was going on, everything was there for a purpose and a reason.” The sense of some kind of implicit logic unfolding within the choreography has always been a strong element within Guerin’s work, of dancers aligning themselves to each other according to rules scored in the physics of planetary bodies or some other unseen force.

She does however observe that, “often I find that when I’m making a work, I craft a number of sections. Once they are put together though, this other amazing thing might happen. So it’s really not just about those elements being strung together, but that they make up a greater whole–especially in terms of the tone or mood of the piece. And that’s really exciting, to find something that I wasn’t expecting unfolding within the studio. So I’ve left a bit more room for that in this production.” For all of the apparent precision and geometric logic of Guerin’s choreography, it remains rich in evoking the sense that something more has been set into play, shifting from deadpan comedy to weirdly affective distance, gentle rhythms and more. There is always room for audiences to bring their own concerns and feelings to the work and so interpret it in their own fashion.

Guerin observes that this has influenced her in her selection of music (composed for Melt by sparse, atmospheric glitch-funk master Franc Tetaz). “I have tended to choose that kind of music because it allows the emotionality of the dance to influence it,” she explains, “rather than the other way around. If you present an audience with something sparse and simple, then they will bring their own emotions to it. That’s not to say that I don’t want to direct what those emotions might be. Personally though, I find that if I am bombarded with overtly dramatic or hysterical dancing or music, it leaves me as an audience member with nothing to do. I can acknowledge what the dance is about, but that’s all really. Whereas if something is more subtle, I can go looking.” Guerin may therefore use ideas like states of temperature or sleeping as an inspiration for her choreography, but her work cannot be simply reduced to such references. It has the same kind of richness which one can find in some of Kraftwerk’s music, Mondrian’s painting, or the clipped dialogue of film noir.

Guerin’s style lies unambiguously within the realm of contemporary dance, drawing on the post-World War II styles sometimes classified as postmodernist. Her choreography nevertheless has the sharp, minimalistic precision and the attention to clean lines which was the defining characteristic of influential New York City Ballet choreographer: neo-classicist George Balanchine. I suggest to her that there is therefore some kinship between her work and that of Balanchine’s successors, such as NYC Ballet choreographer Christopher Weeldon (whose Mercurial Manoeuvrers featured in the recent Australian Ballet trilogy United). Although Lucy points out that “I haven’t actually seen a lot of Balanchine myself,” she nevertheless concedes that she is also: “very interested in purity of form and in starting from a very clear, structural idea, and Balanchine’s work does have a very clear style or overall aesthetic. Even so, my work doesn’t really look anything like his.”

The body shapes which Lucy herself tends to focus upon have much more in common with the pointed articulations and spiky dynamism found in the work of companies like Gideon Obarzanek’s Chunky Move or Philip Adams’ balletlab (with both of whom Guerin and several of her dancers have collaborated). “In Melt, I’m working with a lot of very intricate hand movements and finger details,” she explains. “I always have looked at that in my choreography”–as with her commission for Chunky Move’s Bodyparts (1999). “I’m interested in how joints and bones intersect, and fingers are very good for that kind of exploration. So there is a lot of connecting of fingers to elbows, to knees and to each other to form these lattices.” Although Guerin tends to eschew the break-dance influences found within Obarzanek’s work, her dancers can nevertheless be found on occasion tying themselves into intricate origami on the ground.

Even so, Guerin’s own choreography has a more lingering, almost photographic style of pausing and rhythm than either Obarzanek or Adams–a quality which she explains helps to create “a certain tension” in the movement and the emotional dynamics produced by it. The extremely fast, aggressive shifts which one can observe in the movement crafted by her peers–”that random, crazy sort of chaos,” as she describes it–is not a feature of her own style. “I enjoy watching that kind of material,” she observes, “but generally things in my own choreography are more well-defined. When I work on that kind of stuff myself in the studio … it’s just not me!” Like thawing ice, Guerin’s crystalline choreography proceeds at its own pace.

Philipa Rothfield’s response to Melt appears in this online edition of RealTime.

The middle class, male mid-life crisis is at the dead heart of this new opera from playwright and novelist Joanna Murray-Smith and composer Paul Grabowsky. The friends Edward and Roger no longer love and admire themselves, and their wives’ affections and care for them are no solace. We learn little of these men’s lives, personalities and feelings, and even less about the other characters in Love in the Age of Therapy. The bland wives, Alice and Grace, only become interesting in Act II when new loves take them from their husbands and they are allowed to indulge in romance, lust, hypocrisy and, in the case of Grace the therapist, seriously unethical behaviour. Edward and Alice’s daughter Rebecca, loved by Rory, a radical young poet, and adored by her godfather Roger, is barely realised at all. Rory only adds up to the cliches he mouths, sounding more like someone from the 1970s than the first decade of the 21st century, an indication of how just out of touch this work is.

But all is not lost. Many passable and sometimes good operas have been written to execrable libretti. In this case Grabowksy’s rampant and fluent polystylism (which he calls “avant lounge”) kickstarts the heart of the work and engenders distinctive voices and hints at possibly complex personalities, and the singers rise to the occasion. While the text relies enormously on abstraction and aphorising (nothing Wildean to report, I’m afraid), the music is richly textured, highly animated and framed with a moody, cosmopolitan jazziness. There’s care not to mock characters or to simply parody musical styles. When, a la Puccini, George sings his love to Rebecca, there’s pathos but not bathos, and great commitment in the singing; or when Edward, pressured by Alice, has his first session with Grace, the music is an anxious, restrained, steely shimmer that refuses to dramatise what is already evident. However, the angular, wobbly bebop trumpeting that follows is a bold move that lifts into the open the tension surrounding Edward’s potential release. The music of Love in the Age of Therapy is energising, the sometimes jazz-based phrasing of the libretto undoing the awkwardness and banalities of everyday dialogue (few composers past Britten have managed this) or Murray-Smith’s dogged impulse to aphorise–”Marriage is the art of irony”; “We forfeit the wilderness of passion/For the white picket fence of affection”; Alice: “How do you teach a child what love is?” Edward: “Love them well./Eventually they will recognise the truth/Of its absence”; and so on and on.

There is one other character in this opera, Henry. He lives on the street wearing an old greatcoat and with his possessions in a supermarket trolley. He’s an ironic observer of the lives of the well-to-do middle class: exactly how he sees into their lives is not entered into. He’s a mere device performed with a gruff and engaging physical vigour and musical mock-baroque verve. He’s funny, some of his observations are acerbic, but why is he there at all? The pretensions of the characters are already gently undercut by everything they themselves say. Henry has little to add. There’s also something terribly old-fashioned, cliched, even offensive, about this fantasy of the insightful outsider (homeless or savant or mad).

Halfway into Act II, the work becomes more interesting, even engaging, thanks to the accleration of plot, the intensification of the comedy of sudden reversals (Lyndon Terracini as the irascible Edward showing fine comic mettle), the acuity of Richard Greager’s realisation of Roger and the rapid interplay of sung lines. I felt a lightening of the burden of the ponderous unfolding of Act I. Judiciously edited, Love in the Age of Therapy could make a better, long one act opera.

Also ponderous, Dan Potra’s set represents a monumental middle class bunker (at odds with the several references to the, surely metaphorical, white picket fences in the libretto), appropriately stark and vacuous. Its walls and windows double as screens revealing shots of traffic, skylines and trees. It’s all nicely done but, a few moments suggesting subjective states aside, achieves very little beyond setting mood and background (a predictable mainstream response to the potential of new media).

Love in the Age of Therapy is a cosy bourgeois entertainment, its judgment of its subjects just too kind. There is nothing unfamiliar in their world–they never encounter the likes of Henry. The strangers they meet are themselves until they renew their lives by shuffling relationships: Edward pairs with therapist, Grace (wife of Roger), Alice (wife of Edward) with her daughter’s Rory, daughter Rebecca with her godfather, Roger. One of Henry’s few worthwhile barbs is a comment on the middle class confidence with which they’ve done all this, “This bunch could reorder the seasons/Given half a chance!” Other lines, like “Whoever thought swinging went out in the 70s/Had better think again” are less bracing.

In her introductory note in the program, Joanna Murray-Smith writes that “contemporary culture has diminished the glory and elegance of love, of true love”, but Love in the Age of Therapy itself does little for love other than to intone the word at every turn. The opera facilely abandons all old loves en masse for new. Yes, the characters get another chance at life, but is this enough, especially for a comedy that self-consciously wears Shakespeare and Mozart on its sleeve? There is nothing here to suggest the disturbing complexities of the same playwright’s Nightfall. Musically, Love in the Age of Therapy is a treat, assured, beautifully and distinctively orchestrated even if its many referencings occasionally threaten to overwhelm the sense of a singular and memorable voice that wittily and dramatically fuses and juxtaposes disparate musical languages. If nothing else, Love in the Age of Therapy has given Paul Grabowsky the opportunity to ably compose for dialogue after working on the one man opera, The Mercenary.

While the deer on our cover may signal Xmas, he’s actually with us because Greg Fullerton’s drawing has been staring at us in the RealTime office with those deep, dark eyes for most of the year on the card announcing the winners of the 2002 City of Hobart Art Prize where Missing (Deer in Scotland) was Highly Commended (judges Peter Timms, Benjamin Gennochio, Grace Cochrane). We’ve grown very attached to this deer and thought we’d share him with you. The artist aptly describes the lines in his drawing as frenetic and the antlers as almost like trees: it’s this organic quality which appeals to us, as well as admirable fusion of cartoony vigour and something more serious.

Greg Fullerton is currently based in Melbourne, though he’s lived in many places and was Visiting Artist at the Edinburgh Print Workshop in 2000 when he created Missing (Deer in Scotland) as an anonymous intervention, protesting the diminution of the deer population, printing it in poster format and sticking it on trees and buildings in Scotland, Ireland and Germany. He describes Missing (Deer in Scotland) as “a protest, satirical, and a bit personal.” Part of the personal is Fullerton’s great admiration for Joseph Beuys, artist and interventionist, in whose adventurous life and work the stag magically figures.

To our readers, subscribers, advertisers, editorial team members, our many writers, funding bodies and the innovative artists whose works thrill and propel us, have a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year. See you in 2003!

Must be the season of the witch. October in Melbourne. Just before the magical or lacklustre work of the ‘leading creative artists’ installs itself into the major performance venues around town for the Melbourne International Festival, the Fringe and the fringe of the Fringe occupies the nether regions. It is as if the very spirit of theatre (I speak here only of theatre–though the Fringe gives expression to all art forms) spreads itself out into the warehouses and barns of the city and suburbs and energises them. The Fringe is a field of energy across the metropolis. The works and artists involved both feed and partake of the energy. Any one of them is somehow integral to, but less than the whole. What is truly amazing is the variety of works, performance spaces and audiences that weave the witch’s spell.

Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre is not strictly part of the Fringe, though they do have a play on during this period. Unlike the vagabonds, the fly-by-night groups, the one-off soloists and the duets that make up the bulk of the Fringe, Red Stitch has been around all year–though that is as long as they have been around and where they appeared from and how and why is a mystery. They are an actors’ group with no resident director, which sets them apart from most of the other groups that have emerged recently in Melbourne. This means that the focus in the choice of material seems to be to provide solid, meaty acting experiences for those in the cast. They put out the feelers for directors and have had almost as many as the number of plays they have mounted. Their commitment at the start of the year was to present 15 new shows in the first year. This is an enormous task for a non-subsidised group but they are keeping to their promise and by the time I saw their show in September they were up to their 10th–of which I have seen 4.

Psychopathia Sexualis by John Patrick Shanley is, if it is fair at this stage to so define them, a typical Red Stitch show–contemporary, urban, neurotic characters caught in a situation which confronts them sexually, socially, psychologically, a sort of black comic dark night of the soul. Except that on this occasion there isn’t much soul. The performances in Psychopathia Sexualis are relentlessly large; too large I think for a space as small as the company performs in and for an audience so close. It is as if the thinness of Shanley’s script draws from the performers the need to overcompensate, to give the audience the hit that they have come for, through the sheer weight of performance energy. At times this provides moments of delightful modern grotesquery but overall there is a sense of unnecessary expenditure of energy to little purpose. The fault lies not so much in the production as in the material chosen. Red Stitch is charting a path down the middle of Off-Broadway. I wonder if this path will lead them very far. They have their audience’s entertainment firmly in mind. But with actors as strong as these, a lot more thought could be given to the quality of the work chosen. They need to really get their teeth into something. From all reports, the following play, Howie, aims to do just that.

Red Stitch performs in a small space in St Kilda–a converted office or small factory, I presume. James Brennan and his company GoD BE IN MY MouTH choose even more marginalised spaces. Last year’s Piglet (the winner of the best Original Work in the 2001 Fringe) took place in Brennan’s inner suburban garage, converted for the occasion. The venue for this year’s The Glass Garden–upstairs in an old Bakery in West Melbourne–was so off-limits that we had to receive directions by phone (which adds to the mystery of course). The completely non-theatrical nature of the spaces suits Brennan’s work, which opens the door to the magical from within the fabric of the everyday. Brennan wrote, directed and took the central role in both works. They were vehicles for his fearless and unique performing talent. In him, the artist and the child fuse. He enters the world confronting him with all the awe, curiosity, fear, trust, joy and vulnerability of a young boy, but the edge of his performance style, its wit and its wisdom, are not simply childish. In Piglet, his guide and companion was a stuffed piglet toy. At the end of his pier, he caught in his net an entrancing, serpentine woman. He was duly entranced and transported into a Wonderland nightmare of cotton wool and fatness, where the woman became his adversary and the toy his sacrificial victim. Words cannot do justice to the sheer transformative power this show possessed. It was a gem, perfect in its pitch and exhilarating in its access to the creative spirit.

The Glass Garden is also about a journey. Confronted with the news that he has breast cancer, the journeyer leaves his job in a bookshop and is gradually drawn into a world without definition where, as he says, in his childlike attempt to understand it all, the signifiers and the signified do not match. The tree you are looking at may not be the same thing that I am looking at, may in fact not even be a tree. Again his seducers are women, mute but physically expressive. Here they are guides as well as seducers. Quite where we are left at the end of The Glass Garden is unclear. This is the first part of a trilogy. I could have done with some of the quality of verbal text that so enhanced Piglet. This one felt too dependent upon spacey movement, music and smoke. But when Parts 2 and 3 emerge, I’ll be there, ready for another disturbing dose of GBIMM witchery.

Finally, a group of Melbourne’s best improvisers (Impro Melbourne) presented 2 nights of long-form improvised Shakespeare. That’s right! One hour of spontaneous iambic pentameter, rhyming couplets to end the scenes, and in particular, a deep and witty understanding of how the unfolding structure of a Shakespeare play is the skeleton upon which any tragi-comic romance of lords and ladies can be hung. The night I went, the wittily suggested title from an audience member–Blind Venetian–set the group of 5 off into an intrigue of physical deformity, the transformational power of courageous love and the revelation that the princess’ physical ugliness was but a manifestation of her parents’ moral turpitude. It was apt that the highlight of a ‘high’ evening came when one of the actors mistakenly referred to the princess he was wooing by the name of a former lover. Then both ‘he’, the actor, and ‘he’, the character, were truly at one, engaged in an act of survival in iambic verse, while the audience and princess awaited with barely hidden hilarity the success of his endeavour. What we are witness to in theatre like this is the fallibility and criticality of every moment on stage and the sheer miracle that anything gets on at all in this raw laboratory for the power of the creative.

Psychopathia Sexualis, Red Stitch Actors Theatre, by John Patrick Shanley; director Janice Muller; Red Stitch Space, Sept; GoD BE IN MY MouTH, The Glass Garden, writer, director, performer James Brennan; music UBIN; with performers Patrick Brammall, Mia Hollingworth, Brooke Stamp; secret location, Sept 25-27; Impro Melbourne, Nights of Contemporary Theatre, improvised Shakespeare, directed by Kate Herbert, Carlton Courthouse, October.

Melbourne Fringe 2002 had a strong music and sound program. The Ennio Morricone Experience for example was presided over by new music champion and playful percussionist Graeme Leak and trumpeter cum smooth, Hispano-lounge raconteur Patrick Cronin (Texicali Rose), who enlisted seriously mugging bass-player Daniel Witton (Desoxy, Blue Grassy Knoll), orchestral percussionist David Hewitt and pianist/oboist Boris Conley.

A doyen of 20th century musical avant garde-ism, Morricone scored everything from The Mission to Once Upon a Time in America and the Mediterranean schlock fields of Spaghetti Westerns–most famously the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood trilogy. Although eccentric favourites like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly were featured, Morricone’s 1960s-pop title-songs were also resuscitated (sung with tongue-in-cheek passion by Witton). These were punctuated with games involving both abstract or eerie sound effects and directly representational ones (Witton sounded out a hiding gunslinger using baby Blundstones on sand, while Cronin strode about with aggressive, amplified-Cornflake-crunches as the Man With No Name).

Leak and Hewitt employed inventive instrumental transpositions to amplify the dry yet active humour of their creative interpretations. Leak’s trademark homemade “string-cans” appeared, as did a bowed-saw. The choreography of multiple instruments was often dazzling (Leak mastered an extended drum-kit, whistle, hand-bell, chimes, drum-pads, and vocal “hoo-hahs!”, all in 2 bars). Restrained comic understatement reigned throughout, paradoxically enhanced by Witton’s uniquely exaggerated facial expressions. Minor gestures and nuances thereby became highly charged, conveying the performers’ idiosyncratic characters through minimal means. It was like peering through glass into a 1960s recording booth at a group of eccentric musicians amusing themselves between takes.

Margaret Trail meanwhile voiced poetico-sonic musings on the alluring shadows that lie beneath our superficial culture. Four Nights in a Dark Room employed text, performance art, sonic-layering and free jazz in a fashion whose best known precedessor is Laurie Anderson (a sample of whom was hidden within the soundscape).

Lunar transformations, lycanthropy and wolf symbolism provided Trail’s thematic foci. In a closely measured yet remarkably unaffected style, she related tales of the unknown creeping into daily banalities. Trail eschewed the precise gestural vocabulary which underscored her earlier work, K’Ting! (2000), preferring here a simpler physical presence to support the evenly paused, rhythmically open, spoken-word and recorded text. We heard the story of a bizarre break-in, in which thieves stole her wolf recordings, and the subsequent police investigation, leading her friend to conclude: “We’re in a horror movie! This explains the full moon, the disappearance of your werewolf sounds and the unusually attractive police.”

Chris Lewis co-produced the dark, crinkly soundscapes sprinkled throughout Four Nights, at one point performing an impressive drum-kit-noise solo–an absorbing representation of the dialectic between control and disorder, meaningful allusions and meaningless chance which Four Rooms explored.

Eleventh Hour was Fringe’s dramatic highlight. The company mounted an inaugural season at a former church hall, with peeling walls rich in atmospheric drama. Unlike Melbourne’s actor-driven companies (Red Stitch, Hoist), or writers’ companies (Random Cow, Ranters), Eleventh Hour comes from the profoundly dramaturgical vision of two directors–William Henderson and Anne Thompson–overseeing sparse staging and restrained acting nevertheless deeply rooted in the texts’ rhythms and nuances.

The splicing of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape with Sarah Kane’s Crave into a single night was an invigorating experiment, but Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich was the more successful of the 2 evenings. Fear and Misery… was indeed the antithesis of Melbourne Workers’ Theatre’s Fever (see review). It was, by contrast, firmly located within a specific historical situation (Germany under the Third Reich) yet nevertheless eloquently conveyed the lessons this period offers today. In both Eleventh Hour shows, the company exemplified contemporary Brechtian performance: characters and emotions were strongly present on stage, yet without the suggestion of theatrical ‘illusion’, producing moving theatre which slipped between objectively (Brecht) and poetically (Beckett) depicting anguished human histories.

At one point Brian Lipson acted a playful commentator who spoke of “the Old” marching forward and presenting itself as “the New”, while the new itself was dressed down as the old. Abject surges of political rhetoric flourished in the face of obfuscation, historical amnesia and the lack of denunciation. Our silence and forgetfulness ensured our compliance. Who else but Brecht could today speak of the fascists’ rise as not the product of a collective, Satanic “madness”, but rather the reasoned collaboration of wealthy industrialists and ruthlessly efficient right wing populists, of the disenfranchisement of the workers within daily politics as being not only a cause of World War II but its lasting legacy?

It will take artists employing both the tools of the new and “the old” (Anthill, the APG, Brecht, socialism) to bring forth again these forgotten yet vital truths, as war’s simplistic drumhead floods our ears again.

The Ennio Morricone Experience, North Melbourne Town Hall, Sept 27-Oct13; Four Nights in a Dark Room, performer, deviser, composer Margaret Trail, performer/part-composer Chris Lewis, Erwin Rado Theatre, Oct 10-13; Because of the Increasing Disorder: Brecht, Beckett, Kane, alternating program of Krapp’s Last Tape/Crave and Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Eleventh Hour Theatre Co, co-directors/composers Anne Thompson, William Henderson; stage design Adrienne Chisholm; lighting Nik Pajanti; performers Brian Lipson, Tom Considine, Heather Bolton, David Tredinnick, Fiona Todd, Eleventh Hour Theatre, Sept 26-Oct 13.

Director Julian Meyrick’s program notes explain that the 4 stories in Melbourne Workers’ Theatre’s Fever constitute “possible” or “future…worlds”, reflecting contemporary politics “as in a magnifying mirror.” Political allegory is an underdeveloped form within Australian arts. Its theatrical master is John Romeril–our Swift–whose work is distinguished by a precision of metaphor; the bizarre mendacity both writers depict springs directly from specific political milestones.

Fever’s authors by contrast throw their net so wide that the plays often have no intelligible connection to political touchstones. Christos Tsiolkas, for example, sketches a blighted landscape where displaced inhabitants launch a civil war to unseat more recent homesteaders. The first indigene we meet is black, suggesting kinship with Australian Aborigines or black Zimbabweans, but he is later revealed to be Muslim, implying parallels with the Palestinians, the Lebanese or Turkish Cypriots. An additional conflict emerges however when he verbalises the sensual, homoerotic feelings he harbours for his former neighbour-turned-enemy. Further references to sexual mutilation and opposing forces on either riverbank draw comparisons with the Balkan wars. By throwing these disparate historical references together, Tsiolkas explicates nothing. To liken the Australian Aborigines to, for example, Muslim Kosovars is at best simplistic, and at worst a misleading conflation. Whatever point he intended to impart is overwhelmed by the poorly integrated points of reference which the narrative details evoke.

More successful was Andrew Bovell’s tale of an injured black rebel captured by a white homesteader and tied to a chair. An excellent dramatic 2-hander, the shifting power relations approached (though did not attain) those of the play Death and the Maiden or recent Keene/Taylor projects. As he sits, bound, the homesteader explains her love for her grandfather’s handcrafted chair–a symbol of the patriarch as a pioneer homebuilder. He however adds that the leather seats were in fact made from the hides of massacred Indigenous people.

This vividly conveys how different historical actors interpret the same symbol in radically opposed ways. The specific reference though is again less than ideal. While trophies such as skulls were commonly scavenged by Australian settlers, there is, to my knowledge, no recorded instance of whites producing objects from black corpses. This reference can only therefore be compared to the infamous lampshades made from Holocaust victims’ skin. These hateful relics are however ambivalent for other reasons. They are not only extremely rare, but also sometimes of dubious providence, becoming entangled in particular debates on authenticity, as well as the extent and even existence of a Nazi policy of extermination. Although the comparison of Australian settlement with the Holocaust has a rhetorical force, it is largely unjustified due to the predominantly non-systematic nature of mainland frontier war atrocities. Further, engaging in the necessary defence against Holocaust denial in the context of Australian race relations is unlikely to clarify issues. Bovell’s work is therefore theatrically astute, but politically problematic.

Similar dualities mar Melissa Reeves’ Absurdist Savant, dealing with a delightfully oversized infant (a plain-talking, smoking Rodney Afif, dressed in a giant baby-suit, interjecting: “But Mum, I’m evil!”) born to the daughter of a depressed group of Pinter-esque losers living in a blighted, country town. Though there are fine moments, the finale with Afif directly haranguing the audience reduces this strange, surreal work to crude agit-prop, likely to convince no one.

The gem is Patricia Cornelius’ Blunt. A group of women attired in slightly-dated, patterned dresses, lie listlessly upon sand-filled sacks, drearily illuminated by the gloaming as they moan in clipped, intercutting exclamations: “We’re fucked.” They watch the diseased river running through their barren lands–they too are barren, we learn–before one woman ventures into the ooze to claim an abandoned child (abruptly whisked onstage via a pram on a string). This is a post-apocalyptic version of the story of Moses, the male and female cast playing, in deadpan fashion, unsexed maids from a horribly polluted world where noone cares enough to even try to find a moral or political leader. The unsympathetic women inevitably become disquieted about their sister’s rediscovery of maternity as a political protest, stifling the child and any hope left, before they collectively sink back onto the heap, of which they have become a part.

In this case, the absence of specific cultural or political markers within Cornelius’ text renders it far more amenable to political readings: a metaphor for the loss of Australian political initiative and compassion, fear of the outsider and of change, and other general themes of which the play speaks eloquently and amusingly (shades of Ionescu’s Rhinoceros). While it is satisfying to see MWT continuing in the vein of Tower of Light (1999) to employ more abstract theatrical symbols than in Who’s Afraid of the Working Class (1998), Fever is an ailing venture which requires aggressive dramaturgical medication.

Fever, Melbourne Workers’ Theatre , director Julian Meyrick; actors David Adamson, Rodney Afif, Tony Briggs, Daniela Farinacci, Eugenia Fragos, LeRoy Parsons, Pauline Whyman; lighting Paul Jackson; set and costumes Louise McCarthy; sound David Franzke; music Irine Vela; Trades Hall, Melbourne Sept 18-Oct 5

Legs on the Wall’s latest creation, Runners Up, is full of the physical virtuosity and endurance we have come to expect from them, but is short of the distinctive organicism the company developed across various ensembles for over a decade and lacks the provocative inventiveness of the best in its recent seasons of short works for Belvoir St’s B Sharp series. It’s a show of bits and consequently a bit of a show, falling far short of the suggestiveness of its title. It seemed such a good idea–what is the impact on the runners up in a Australian sporting culture fixated increasingly on lone winners and less and less on team or on having done one’s best. Coming less than first is only a virtue in international competition when Australian sportcasters can’t be bothered telling us who the winner was, giving out Australian names and positions first. But Runners Up offers no coherent vision of what it means to lose (bitterness, denial, guilt, shame), beyond a generalised, vaguely satirical account of a culture where sport is pervasive and which the show mildly mocks and applauds. However, director Debra Batton’s program says it all, and too much: “Runners Up is not about losing. It draws equal inspiration from the play of the backyard, the competitive sports arenas and the circus and live theatre worlds, it questions the difference between theatre and sport, and celebrates our commonality; the body in action.”

Physical theatre has gotten better and better over the years in its dealings with language, but here stiff, unfunny pre-show voiceovers inadequately mimicking sportscaster lingo (long ago decimated by Roy & HG), and the litany of sadly past-use-by-date female athlete woes delivered mid-show in an unconvincing line-up, are proof that physical skill has to be matched with verbal felicity and aware writing, or else. Similarly, taking on film as a part of performance, and at a time when the interplay of virtual and real is reaching new levels of integration in the work of other artists (and in the sports arena!), needs to be addressed more seriously, otherwise it simply feels like fill.

Kind-of framing the show with a dextrous singing and dancing MC is another bad move, since all it can say is what has been said too often and without impact, that sport is just another form of showbiz. The conceit with the most potential for sustaining Runners Up is promptly and brilliantly established and then inadequately sustained. It’s about the sports watcher, at home with his TV, totally immersed in the action, feeling it in every muscle. The home viewer’s imaginative experience is made brilliantly visceral when he is joined on his suddenly mobile armchair by hurtling athletes who integrate him into their vertiginous acrobatics while his gaze stays fixed all the while on the TV screen. Actor Kerry Casey looks just right for the role, and though without quite the skills of his fellow Legs, is perfectly integrated into the action. The audience ache for more, but it’s gone, and nothing subsequently matches it: his strange little dances of participation merely opaque. What better way to work through the culture of win and lose than to lock onto the player-audience relationship and run with it. We almost had an on-stage surrogate! And how better to deal with the ways public attitude determines how sports men and women deal with coming less than first.

The final image of the performers as kids skidding and sliding on their bellies across the wet of lawn sprinklers is wondrously evocative of the innocent pleasures of playfulness that precede the law and order of competitive sport. However, like the earlier, tough headstand scene that exudes very real stress and competition, it gains little weight without a governing vision. Memorable moments, of which there were plenty, and great performers are not enough.

Legs on the Wall & The Studio, Runners Up, director Debra Iris Batton, design Kathryn Sprout, lighting Damien Cooper, composer Carl Polke, audio visuals Kristi Street, performers Claudia Alessi, Kerry Casey, Alexandra Harrison, Ingrid Kleinig, Rowan Marchingo, Kirk Page, Telford Scully; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, October 10-25

Pedro Calderón de la Barca's’s 17th century Spanish classic, Life is a Dream, is a play I read long ago and itched to direct. It's a remarkable work, sparely written, sharply imagistic, richly dialectical and, above all, curiously contemporary. A number of Australians directors had it on their wishlists in the 70s and 80s, but it’s rarely been done. Jean Pierre Mignon did it in Melbourne and now Benedict Andrews and Beatrix Christian have freely adapted it, without ever dimming its hermetic essence, for Andrews’ production for the Sydney Theatre Company.

Life is a Dream is the tale of a prince of the Polish court, Segismundo (Joe Manning), locked away from birth in a cave by his father, King Basilio (Frank Whitten), because of a prophecy that as a ruler he would wreak havoc and murder. That the adolescent does so on his release is the brutal pivot of the play's delirious spinning between the real and the fantastic, for the prince is drugged and convinced that his embrace of power has been a dream. The metaphysics of 'life as a dream' hover eerily over these plot machinations and the oedipal dynamic between prince and king provides another over-arching tension. An entwined secondary plot of a woman, Rosaura, fighting for her honour (the wonderful Paula Arundel, striking in masculine disguise and mezzo musicality) offers striking parallels with Segismundo's plight. She too is constrained by the power of others, by courtly and gender codes, she too is palpably dangerous. The king, caught between fear and compassion, between superstition and logic, has put not only the life of his son at risk (should he now have him executed for murder or locked away again?), but his whole kingdom, as the issue of inheritance threatens civil war and invasion.

Indeed it's the king as social scientist, working logically from a false premise and creating the very monster he lives in fear of, that links the play with our own times and with the body of work that Benedict Andrews has cogently built in his 2 years with the Sydney Theatre Company–a feat astonishing for its rarity and vision in Australian theatre.

Life is a Dream comprises another in the Andrews’ works for STC focussed on the bewildering complexities of the construction of human identity, the others being La Dispute, Attempts on Her Life and Mr Fireface and, in some respects, even the farce Mr Kolpert, where in an indifferent society identity and motivation are reduced to acts of violence that assume a relentless, consuming logic of their own. At a time when we are daily faced with issues of genetic engineering, bionics, robotics, race and ethnic cleansing (the final act of the Andrews-Christian The Three Sisters evokes the Serbian-Bosnian war), it is vital to be see works which continually pose questions (and frightening resolutions) about identity (as engineered, as fiction, as embedded in or beyond culture).

As in those other productions, the design here conjures a tightly framed world that one way or another suggests a laboratory (even as glittering as this one is, a marble-walled corporate office foyer with its huge central airconditioning vent). The effect in Andrew’s productions (regardless of the designer, but most effectively, as here, with Justin Kurzel) is often of peering into a horizontal slot or looking at a wide screen, a tightly focused view of the world, often with no point of obvious access or exit, correlating with unpredictable outcomes and moral confusion in a claustrophobic world that prefers containment.

That wisdom prevails in this grim fable is not due simply to optimism (in this case, the king deciding to again test rather than execute his son) but also the Kaspar Hauser-ish capacity of the deprived prince to understand and utter the essence of his plight (King: You repel me. Segismundo: You who made me, repel me.”). to catch the contradictions of courtiers and to recognise beauty when he sees it. Joe Manning plays Segismundo with the requisite mix of brutishness, flashes of psychotic power, moments of painful insight and tenderness. Outside Manning, Arundel and Whitten (the perfect, nervy embodiment of strength and doubt), the ensemble playing is neither quite as physically nor vocally taut nor as evenly cast as I’ve come to expect of Andrews, but the production is always vigorously paced, suspenseful and sensitive to the Calderon’s strange poetry and vision–a fine addition to the body of work Andrews has created for STC.

It's entirely appropriate then that Andrews’ production of Beckett's Endgame for the STC in the 2003 Sydney Festival will mark his exit from the company. He’ll later do the Brecht-Weill The Threepenny Opera for Company B at Belvoir Street. The rest of the 2003 STC program looks tame without Andrews. Along with Barrie Kosky, Michael Kantor and Jenny Kemp, Benedict Andrews is one of those rarities among Australian theatre directors, an artist with style (a hated term in this country but it's vitally about the honing and perfecting of an idiosyncratic theatrical language) and vision (a persistent and personal working through of a set of significant questions).

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream, adapted by Beatrix Christian & Benedict Andrews, director Benedict Andrews, design Justin Kurzel, costumes Fiona Crombie, lighting Mark Truebridge, sound design Max Lyandvert; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, opened Sept 5

It’s unusual, in the theatre or cinema, to encounter the dramatised life of an artist you might have heard of but whose work you’ve not experienced. It’s usually the other way around–the well known artist’s glory and travail travestied, little attempt made to convey the creative process and too much done to synch it with his or her assumed psychological progress. In this case, Sidetrack’s The Bookkeeper of Rua dos Dourados, we get a life of Portugal’s great modernist author, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1936), but on his own terms.

Pessoa is primarily represented by one of the many personae who populate his writings. In other words, this is no literal attempt to convey a life, but is an expression of it, drawing directly on the writer’s own fantasies as realised in the character of an intensely private bookkeeper who reckons the inner life to be richer than the public one. “Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything…”, “…the play I am watching is myself…How many people am I?” This is a man who revels in a tedious job for the oblivion it offers (“Am I ever awake?”), spies on his boring fellow workers and imagines remarkable things for them, is wary of the flesh (kissing is “slimy”), caustic about social life and gnomic about reality: “we are stories telling stories…nothing.”

His mother’s death when he is one year old, his father’s suicide when the boy is 3, and a flash of anger at the recollection of toys taken away, suggest the sources of his condition, but the play focuses on outcome not cause, celebrating the feverish inventiveness of a remarkable imagination that takes apart social habit and religion with a mix of aphoristic whimsy and epigrammatic, even Blakean verve. Scenes alternate between office and bedroom, with the bookkeeper’s dream-world soon consuming both, the office desk transformed into a pirate vessel which he commands with a sadistic, imperial drive. This has been “a night of sublime sensation” for him, but of the senses not touched but dreamt–the power and the pathos of living by the imagination alone. The bookkeeper crowns himself with a tiara and spins into the night.

Arky Michael plays Pessoa’s persona with a gruff directness, just enough of the poet, and an escalating obsessiveness, making the man’s apparent ordinariness frightening. Carlos Gomes’ direction is brisk and inventive with a carefully graded progression from the spoken poetry of interiority to the stage mechanics of a full blown fantasy. The Gomes-Don Mamouney collaboration on the script is the source of much of the production’s strength. Intrigued, now it’s time I read Pessoa for myself.

Sidetrack Performance Group, The Bookkeeper of Rua dos Dourados, adapted from the writings of Fernando Pessoa by Don Mamouney & Carlos Gomes; director, designer Carlos Gomes, music Hope Csutoros, performers Arky Michael, Adam Hatzimanolis, Georgina Naidu, Silvio Ofria; Sidetrack, Sydney, Aug 21-Sept 14

In dance-starved Sydney it was great to have Antistatic back on theboards of Performance Space with greedy audiences enjoying performances, installations and forums. This small but incisive festival of independent dance featuring performers from most states is a true rarity in this country. It’s the lack of such events that has prompted Robyn Archer to focus her 2003 Melbourne Festival on dance, so it was good to see her in the audience for both Antistatic dance programs and chatting with artists in the Performance Space courtyard.

The range of participating artists and the variety of work, including new media, turned out to be impressive. The integration of Mobile States#1 (works by young artists curated and toured by Performance Space and Perth’s PICA) into the program gave valuable attention to emerging forces. A daily yoga class and a choice of workshops in improvisation (Andrew Morrish), voice (Carolyn Connors) and working with projected images (Wendy Houstoun) complemented the sense of community developed over the course of the festival.

Installations included 2 works by John Utans; the sensuous IMMERSED, and the screen poem, on second thoughts. Chunky Move’s physically interactive new media installation, Closer (RT#51 p23), generated some sweat and a bit of heat from those who were technologically under-whelmed or grumpy at the very idea of tossing a woman around on a screen. It’s a bit like walking into a gym that specialises in Pilates but in which the reformers are vertical—big leather quilted pads torso-high on stands and facing various directions in a room dominated by a screen where a dancer (Nicole Johnston) waits to be activated by you pushing or hurling yourself against the pads. Your action also triggers sounds, so you compose and choreograph at once. It’s not a finely nuanced system as yet, so you don’t get to feel that your creativity is being fully realised, however it looks and sounds good. As you fall onto the pads, so the dancer twists and turns and falls through space, and you can orchestrate quite a lot of activity using repeated movements and darting between pads (though the further you go the less certain you are of what you’re achieving). Sharing the action with a couple of other participants is better. This early contribution to the growing field of audience-centred performance is variously frustrating and engaging, but I suspect that’s the way it’s going to be for a while, but worth the wait. By the way, a scary bonus for the persistent player was a quick zoom into the mouth and down into the guts of the onscreen dancer and out again.

In the dance programs there were a number of impressive works. For me the most memorable were Eleanor Brickhill’s Waiting to Breathe Out and The Fondue Set’s Blue Moves. This was my second experience of Waiting to Breathe Out with its strange states of being and unseen presences. The Fondue Set (Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan) has the ability to move from frenetic comedy (a ritualised battle to get a drink at a crowded bar) into the slow motion ugly humour of a falling-down-drunk dance and on to the dark pathos of attempted seemliness, revealing a winning capacity for complexity supported by precise timing and great presence.

As well as throwing myself into Chunky Move’s Closer, I participated in Carolyn Connors’ week long voice workshop. I’m not a dancer but have watched with interest the increasing number of dancers speaking as part of their performances. Dancers work in disciplined and deeply trained ways with their bodies but often much less so with the voice, which they sometimes fail to see as part of the body. Connors’ approach was to restrict movement over the first few days in order to focus on the voice. As the week progressed, body and voice became more interrelated, largely through improvisation with a set of rules which entailed awareness of breathing, voice preparedness (in the pause before the voice emerges) and techniques (harmonics and multiphonics) that alerted us to rich vocal possibilities. While the workshop stopped short of dealing with prepared text (a whole other workshop) it did reveal the serious groundwork required to speak effectively in dance. KG

Antistatic 2002, Closer, Chunky Move, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, visual & interactive design Peter Hennessey, composer/sound designer Darren Verhagen, dancer Nicole Johnston, cinematographer Cordelia Beresford, Performance Space, Sept 25-Oct 5

the ghosts of old buildings are haunting parking lots
in the city of good neighbours that history forgot.
Ani de Franco, subdivision, 2001

By the time I had parked my car on someone’s manicured lawn, it was 8pm and in the distance the circa 1970s Rhodes Hotel had already begun its transformation from site of abandonment to spectral and terminal presence, snaking its various tendrils of sonic pulsation, red smoke and the blue glow of multiple TV sets into the night sky. Hundreds of shadowy figures accumulated on its balconies and stairwells, turning its secretive insides out.

The project Hotel6151, initiated and curated by Heather Webb, Christian de Vietri and Ben Riding, inhabited the entire Rhodes Hotel in South Perth on the week beginning Friday November 1. Its premise was ambitious on paper, but in reality it delivered one of the most inspirational installation and multimedia events in the history of Western Australian contemporary art practice. The new generation of artists represented amid the ‘guest’ list of over 50 participants showed the kind of resourceful, inventive and independent drive to produce a multi-levelled, complex experience that ran the gamut from immersive to truly terrifying.

I was among some 2,500 visitors that signed-in at the hotel lobby during the evening, ushered through its front doors by a baby-blue uniformed Tom Müller as concierge and 3 bell-hops into a throng of rapidly inebriating punters. Throughout its spaces artists had created works which drew on structural features, furniture and objects that still remained in the building prior to its imminent demolition. These included Dawn Gamblen’s paperclip chandelier, Bruce Slatter’s reconfigured dart-boards, Rick Vermey’s evacuation-based stairwell pastings and the collaborative work of Christian de Vietri and Ben Riding, employing 2 of the original Rhodes cleaners in the proper maintenance of a single room.

The Atlas Group’s smoking lounge and bar reduced the entire third-floor to a claustrophobic shoebox through the use of false walls lined with burgundy and gold flock-wallpaper. Its single elevator access provoked enough uneasiness to imagine the towering inferno as merely a stray match away. Working with similar repulsion/attraction dichotomies was Seddon Pepper’s Smoke and Mirrors that pumped smoke through an emptied room, allowing the air to clear just enough for visitors to make out their reflected images. Tess McNamara and Monique Powell further explored augmented space in their labyrinthine closet where its 2-way peekaboo dress-up room could only be accessed by crawling through and shifting piles of clothes.

Darker narratives of desertion and regret were pursued by Sarah Contos whose circa 1980s Miss Havisham hurled abuse, rancid cake and dining crockery at visitors whilst wallowing in a wine-stained wedding dress, repeatedly showing slides of her ersatz nuptials. Annabel Dixon’s re-presentation of a hotel-based porn film transposed to slide caught her visitors lingering within the seduction of inevitability, while Simon Pericich’s oasis fabricated from carpet and hotel junk could be peered at only through a hole in the door that vented the overpowering stench of hospital-grade loo blue.

Both Matt Hunt and Jarrod McKenna sought to locate the hotel trope within recent media representations of detention centres in Australia. Hunt’s work occupied a bedroom, its roof jacked up by industrial props, with the word TAMPA chiselled in reverse on its main wall, as if in time it could begin to reveal itself to other guests. Meanwhile McKenna set-up a conversation desk in the games room to offer the Rhodes as a possible site of refuge. Outside the venue, Kate McMillan’s trench played upon the tenuous relationship between digging a strategic hole, and finding oneself in active warfare. It is no accident that the hotel it stood to protect now lies in rubble.

Hotel6151, concept & curation Heather Webb, Christian de Vietri & Ben Riding, Rhodes Hotel, South Perth November 1-8

Jonathan Marshall
Although the festival’s aesthetic highpoint was Romeo Castellucci’s extraordinarily polymorphous, living tableau of the anguish generated when form becomes matter in Genesi, the theatre program’s political gut-kick was NYID (Not Yet It’s Difficult) Theatre Company’s K. NYID has a mixed performance history, but this is no criticism since Artistic Director David Pledger is not interested in mounting glossy, fetishised theatrical product to funnel into the maw of the international festival circuit. He is concerned with using the stage as a laboratory for ideas and practices (as in NYID’s remarkable collaboration with Gekidan Kaitaisha earlier this year). It was nevertheless gratifying to see NYID staging a show with the assurance and precision demonstrated in its until now most cohesive work Sports Edition (1997).

Marcuse and others have argued that we do not read cultural products, rather culture reads us. We are bathed in culture, even before our consciousness forms. How can one enunciate genuine political or moral alternatives when even the terms of what might constitute opposition lies already coded within political discourse and language? K was a compelling, fiercely satirical exploration of what these ideas might mean for today’s televisual, hyper-commercialised world.

K’s chief irony is the same as that of 1984—even in a world of incarceration, observation and policing, it is ultimately the individual who must accept and internalise repressive values for them to be fully effective within the wider social context. The stage was an open, anonymous studio, its margins sharply delineated by dark, mirrored screens across which were scanned the copyrighted products: LoveTM, EmpathyTM, Lung CancerTM, PoliticsTM. Beyond these boundaries sat the audience, entering the venue via a complex set of back passages, before being placed into this non-realm outside the performance space itself—a metaphor for contemporary political engagement if ever there was one. David Pledger maintained a precisely demarcated dramaturgy in which closed corridors of light marked out the main peripheral circuit. Along these corridors strode Luciano Martucci as the entrepreneurial impresario of political control and product development, while the middle of the stage acted as either a constricted centre (where K himself stood, confined), or a blown-out platform for vibrantly superficial, commercialised, televisual performance, streaming in all directions.

The show presented an horrific, Fellini-esque carnival of logical conundrums and double-talk: the empathetic torturer who insisted on ‘feeling your pain’ as he assaulted K, the televisual host made flesh of Vivienne Walsh, exhibiting a range of tics and wide, hyper-sexual, swinging-legged stances which made both Lara Croft and Hugo Weaving in The Matrix seem like plausible human beings. K was imprisoned, reprogrammed and let loose only to become even more intensely unfree, pedalling a cynical, deflated version of political disengagement and DemokracyTM. As long as the individual is not consulted about isolated political decisions (rather than electing “a representative”) and is unable to set the actual terms of debate, the ancient Athenian word ‘democracy’ remains brutally corrupted by the forces Pledger identifies. The madness K depicts is indeed no more incongruous than one in which private pharmaceutical companies patent our genes. As Pledger explained in his guise as ‘Company Man’: “You’ll really feel it when I fuck you up the arse! I am the Prophet/Profit!”

For another view of K see Keith Gallasch’s response at www.realtimearts.net
K, NYID Theatre Co, direction, design, text, performance David Pledger, design,production management Paul Jackson, lighting Shane Grant, dramaturgy Peter Eckersall, video & film Mark Atkin, Michael Williams, Paul Hosking; Melbourne Museum, Oct 23-Nov 2.

For 4 days, Brisbane’s Powerhouse offered free access to work by leading British performance artists selected from the annual National Review of Live Art’s roster of commissionees, artists-in-residence and programmed artists. For the background to this organisation and annual event established in 1983 and, since 1988, based in Glasgow, see RealTime 50, and for an account of the scale and range of this year’s NRLA, a more diverse field than performance art, see Edward Scheer’s “From ice-cream wars to retro-futurism” in RealTime 49, p27.
The NRLA contingent was lead by Nikki Millican, Artistic Director of the event since 1984. With her were Kira O’Reilly, Michael Mayhew, Richard Layzell and Robert Ayers, who all presented works, and Mary Brennan, a Glasgow journalist for The Herald and a great supporter of live art.

By all accounts the NRLA has played a key role in maintaining the traditions of performance art and helps some artists to make it central to their careers. The event is the largest of its kind and attracts interest throughout Europe and is well archived, with other work, at Nottingham Trent University. Audiences for NRLA are consistently large and, the visiting artists told us, the event is a popular one. On the downside, they regretted that there was no UK magazine consistently reporting and responding to live art. This is certainly odd given the form’s currency and the NRLA’s success. RealTime, with its strong focus on contemporary performance (though less so on performance art whose fortunes in Australia have been less evident) was regarded with admiration and envy, they said.

This 4 day, mini-NRLA provided a rare opportunity to glimpse aspects of UK performance art and to engage in several long open discussions about the work. On the final afternoon, a group of Brisbane artists from performance and dance gave brief presentations. They included performance artist Richard Oman, whose recent receipt of a government grant had been met with hostility by Brisbane’s Courier Mail.

Hopefully, this visit and its Perth equivalent will encourage future exchanges of UK and Australian artists, as Nikki Millican has already demonstrated she can organise and with great commitment. Millican, with Robyn Archer, through her 2002 Adelaide Festival, and with Australia Council support, curated a major choreographic workshop at the festival and managed the subsequent visit of some 30 Australian choreographers and dancers to Glasgow as part of New Moves (new territories). From that event, Millican invited Brisbane’s Lisa O’Neill and Melbourne’s Cazerine Barry to the following NRLA and has programmed Melbourne’s Helen Herbertson for 2003. The O’Neill and Barry works had been Powerhouse commissions. Powerhouse Artistic Director Zane Trow saw his hosting of the NRLA in Australia as contributing to a developing exchange of art and ideas. With the almost concurrent presence of Robert Pacitti and curious.com here for the Time_Space_Place workshop in Wagga Wagga (see RT#53), Blast Theory at Sydney’s Artspace (RT#51, p24), 32,000 point of light at Performance Space (Dec 6-14), and the recent visit of the Akram Khan Dance Company (who conducted a workshop in Western Sydney through UNSW), the connection between British and Australian contemporary art seems ripe for development. It offers more opportunities for redefinition of our perceptions of each other’s cultures than visits of the Royal Ballet or Royal Shakespeare Company.

Kira O’Reilly: Sssshh…Succour

Like breaking the surface tension of water
Kira O’Reilly sits naked on a white chair on a white towel. Her body is white, her hair black, cut in a Louise Brooks bob. The floor is covered with a fine layer of brightly lit white sand. Next to O’Reilly is another chair and towel. In the small gallery space the audience tightly frame the artist. From the 3 metal trays of packaged scalpels, medical tape and gauze in front of her on the floor she selects a hand mirror which she peers into, angling it to catch each of us eye to eye as a prelude to the work. Throughout the 40 minute performance the tempo is regular, more deliberate than matter-of-fact, a quiet ritual, as O’Reilly tapes her left leg from the ankle to top of the thigh in perfect circles and then with long lines down the leg, creating small rectangles of protruding flesh. She unpacks a scalpel and carefully slices a red diagonal across each space. Only here and there does the flesh release a trickle of blood, the rest glint in clean red parallel lines. O’Reilly’s head is lowered, focused on the task, hair across the eyes, the body accepting its own ministrations without resistance or visible reaction. The sheer symmetry of the grid and the colour that fills it, the artfulness and calm yield a strange contemplativeness as if we are witnessing a writing which is not immediately intelligible so much as deeply suggestive.

O’Reilly stops, but only momentarily before taking up new rolls of tape and this time creating these curious longitudes and lattitudes on the upper body, from above the pubic hairline to just above the breasts. Again she cuts shallowly, into abdomen, against ribs, into the breast, but only on the right side of the body (later she tells us she is saving the right leg and left torso for Perth’s Artrage the following week). She puts down the scalpel. She slowly removes the tape. She picks up the sheets of gauze, pressing them one by one gently against the skin to receive the thin lines of blood and lays them out on the sand. She is briefly still, her body a picture of living fine red lines and random dark trickles. She takes a towel and wipes herself down with a perfunctoriness that suprises some of the audience, blurring the lines, reddening the skin, a moment of mess, beauty smudged, erased (“Very real” someone says). She takes the mirror, looks steadily into it at us, then stands and leaves.
This is a very long, intense 40 minutes in which the mind autopilots on a number of unpredictable emotional and aesthetic trajectories of varying durations. Among many other associations (amidst the usual theoretical standbys surrounding some 40 years of performance art), the performer’s essential stillness evokes the life model, the taping of the body recalls the butcher’s preparation of a brisket with string (see the artist’s curious choice of ‘tenderised’ in the next paragraph), the bright whiteness and clinical equipment suggest the care and hygiene of the surgeon. As the blade cuts into the upper thigh or the breast, images of accidental cuts to one’s own flesh are triggered. However, most of all it feels as if it’s about the artist meticulously and skillfully at work, and for that reason is less disturbing than I’d anxiously anticipated, but is no less rich.

O’Reilly writes in the program notes that, “This action begins where words fail me…Using processes of measuring and cutting, the skin is (re)marked, like a text or a drawing, etching a history that can be followed on the surface of the skin, like a palimpsest. Tenderised, it brings sharply into focus a visual and visceral vocabulary that invokes notions of trauma (a wound) and stigma (a mark) towards a ‘spoiling’ and opening of the body to explore an alterity or otherness.”

O’Reilly is not telling what that trauma might be (if indeed it is specific) nor what is precisely entailed in “investigating the unruly and chaotic materiality of my substance and the disparate narratives within.” Queried by an audience member in a forum she displays no interest in psychoanalytic readings of her work and offers little or nothing in the way of autobiographical clues. A documentary on the NRLA has O’Reilly describing another of her works as “inspired by the 19th century idea of hysteria that women unleashed, mixed with my own life” and the “violent mysogynist texts written by my [novelist] father” and “act[ed} out on my body.” We catch a glimpse of another work where she has leeches attached to her back, drinking their fill and falling off, leaving 2 black holes, which Mary Brennan, the Glasgow reviewer (a rare and passionate appreciator of the whole gamut of live art) experienced as a range of intense associations. “Images washed through me: Man Ray’s woman as cello, various taboos and rituals, mediaeval history, stigmata, the audience drinking the spectacle, leech-like.” Brennan says that if she left an NRLA show “feeling alright, it wouldn’t be the NRLA.”

O’Reilly recalls her first motivation to perform arising from being impressed by seeing male artists “opening their bodies” and thinking why shouldn’t women do it. She doesn’t, she says, experience catharsis in executing the work: “It’s research. It will stop when it’s time to move on. It’s never the same.” She mentions that the work has carried over now into her drawings where she “cuts buildings.” She declares that “most body art is not sensationalist, it’s very responsible,” quipping that “if I wanted to push boundaries, I’d go to the gym.” As for what she experiences during the work, it’s fear, reverie, joy and, now, an interest in the look that passes between her and individual audience members. She likes the way they gaze back: “It’s like a camera, and I could see behind me.” This was the first time she’d used a mirror, having seen a fellow artist working with one.

It was interesting to hear that she’d wanted to perform not on sand but on sugar, liking the way that it drinks up blood and is edible (but there were logistical problems). We were curious about the second chair and towel: “That was for someone from the audience, if they chose to sit there. I don’t know what I would have done if they had.”
If O’Reilly’s performance was immaculately made and staged, her 3 male companions in NRLA Artistic Director Nikki Millican’s mini-program for Australia were purveyors of the more familiar informal mode of performance art. Michael Mayhew and Robert Ayers presented 3 hour pieces which were visually and verbally discursive but with a mysterious sense of purpose which we guessed at in our own comings and goings—to and from another performance, or a forum, or a lively and informative online discussion (led by QUT’s Brad Haseman) with Barry Smith, director of the enviable live art archive at Nottingham Trent University.

Keith Gallasch was a guest of the Brisbane Powerhouse for the NRLA season.
The National Revew of Live Art UK, curator Nikki Millican, Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, Oct 15-18

INTRODUCTION

Fiona Winning, Artistic Director, Performance Space opened this RealTime-Performance Space forum on touring:

Fiona Winning
Tonight, at this the 7th of the RealTime-Performance Space forums, I’m delighted to be co-facilitating with Rachael Swain from the Stalker and Marrugeku companies. We’re joined by many guests with a wealth of experience, from conceptualising work for touring to brokering relationships with presenters and festivals, to developing strategic initiatives to support touring, to promoting and managing tours and of course, to making it happen technically and artistically, dealing with the practical and cultural differences involved in getting the work on.

One of the reasons for planning tonight’s session is that many artists who work here at Performance Space and in the performance milieu along with presenters like Performance Space and PICA in Perth and the funding bodies have expressed a real concern about the immense artistic and economic investment in making new works from conceptualisation to rehearsal to production that are only shown for a week or 2. It doesn’t make good artistic or economic sense. And artists always want to have another crack at it–to apply what they’ve learned from their first audience in order to make and deepen the work. But audiences too are anxious to be able to see work from outside their own state.

Ironically, it’s sometimes more possible to get international tours up than it is to organise something interstate. So tonight’s forum is partly to map out some of the territory in this immensely complex area which encompasses regional, national and international touring to independent venues and cultural centres, inclusion in festival programming, even the odd Australia-themed festival. And then there are the issues for artists and companies who are self-managing or who are secure in relationships with agents or managers. Trying to navigate the maze of long paddocks, cyber paddocks, blue heelers (which I hadn’t heard of till I started researching this forum), Playing Australia and Arts on Tour.

We’ll concentrate tonight on national and international touring because that seems to be where the heat is for many of the artists who talk to us and we’d like to get to the point of talking strategies for addressing some of the issues that are raised tonight.

VISION & THE 3Cs of TOURING

Rachael Swain
I was asked to give an overview from the position of an artistic director of a company with a heavy touring schedule. I wanted to state from the outset that this is not an impartial position. I’m not going to talk at this stage about the nuts and bolts of touring but to pose some of those “nasty irrational artistic” type questions about touring. In keeping with the title of tonight’s session, The Secret Life of Touring, I thought I might share some of my secret thoughts about touring, as I’ve spent most of my adult life on tour. In Stalker’s long term touring life there have been performances and places that have been pivotal in the company’s creative life. Others have been among the most depressing and negative experiences I’ve had as a performer and director.

Both good and bad, these tours made enormous impression on the company’s direction and vision. There are performances I remember like Belgrade in 1993, on Elcho Island in 1996 and Caracas last year which had defining impact on the company’s future creative projects, which forged bonds within the touring ensemble and the host artistic communities and which still bear fruit. These tours had a deep impact on our body of work and I’m told are still remembered by audiences. And there were others. Ah yes, there were others. Performances which felt misplaced or lost on the audience or presented in ways which meant that the work was actually unreadable. And I think many of you here know that this is a desperately disillusioning experience. This is the first of my secret thoughts on touring. A company can feed its soul by touring but a company can also lose its soul to touring which may eventually lead to losing a company entirely. I think that this is something that almost happened to Stalker at times and I see it potentially happening to other Australian companies.

There are 3 C words that I find present in the best of my touring experiences–present at times when I’ve felt something great has happened between the audience and the performers. The first is Context. In what context are we placing our work? How do we contextualise where it comes from for foreign audiences, in urban or remote community Australian audiences. Is there any context for our work in the particular country that we’re talking about. The second is Community. Who are we creating our work for? Are we really reaching that community. In what form can exchange take place? The third word is Communion, a depth of shared experience where something occurs which touches and changes those present. This makes the work more than the sum of its parts, a profound exchange between an audience and a live performance.

When a performance is presented in a foreign context and each of these 3 factors has been considered, carefully produced and each is in play in a complex dialogue of exchange, there is the potential for something really great to happen. Live performance does not exist without an audience and an audience is not a neutral thing. An audience is forged by socio-political cultural and artistic climates lived out in an active way. When we tour our shows we bring our work into this context. In the dynamic field between the audience’s memory and perception and our work that thing called live performance takes place. Surely these are the issues which feed us as touring companies, that is companies that create work for audiences from numerous cultural and multicultural perspectives. It’s navigating these questions which is the essence of why particularly as artistic directors we want to tour our work in the first place. Or is it that we want to rush in, wave our flag, and rush out with a bit more cash to keep our struggling companies afloat? And I know these are difficult questions, especially when companies (and I include ours in this) often survive on earned income from international touring. So perhaps it’s not secretly but quietly I’d like to put on the table the idea of being selective in offering works to festivals or presenters who we feel have the vision and experience to contextualise our work. The producing issues and creative implications for touring go hand in hand. My last secret thought is that it’s a producing vision that is investigative, intelligent and risk-taking which is necessary to produce great touring work and to sustain the heart and soul of a company. Often this is put in place long before the nuts and bolts of a tour have been worked through.

THE ARTIST AS CONTEXT

FW
We might take that idea of a producing vision as a way of introducing Justin Macdonnell (Macdonnell Promotions), Marguerite Pepper (Marguerite Pepper Productions) and Wendy Blacklock (Performing Lines). We’re very interested in hearing from the 3 of you what you’re doing at the moment, and particularly where that producing vision comes in for you?

Marguerite Pepper
I am perceived as a commercial producer. MPP receives no government funding. For me, there is no work that we produce that hasn’t gone through an enormous amount of workshopping with the artist or ensemble involved about where those artists want to go. It’s about trying to sit with the company and think about the long term strategies, sometimes even before the work exists. With say, Gideon Obarzanek and Chunky Move, Gideon came to me and said I want to come home, to work in Australia I want to work with my dancers. And together we created a strategy whereby we created Chunky Move and that first tour of Bonehead which was sold before the work existed. And also with Garry Stewart and Thwack which has since become the Australian Dance Theatre. That was a long range strategy to try and find the money, the touring circuits nationally and very successfully now, internationally, for Garry’s work to evolve. And his current work, Birdbrain has toured very successfully to Galway, to Korea, throughout Australia, US and Canada to sold out seasons. That work took 6 years to get to that stage. So, for me it’s about working with the artist, contextualising the work and building strategies to tour.

I have to say that at MPP because we are not funded, we have to find other ways to tour as well. Tony Strachan might want to talk about Chrome who are currently in Japan en route to Singapore for a blatantly commercial gig. And the way that works for us is by putting the company into a context where they feel comfortable in evolving work and accumulating cash which can be put into developmental areas which they need. So Context, Community and Communion are critical. I do, however, also have to compromise because it is about survival. And we all make mistakes putting work into the wrong context. And for me, the artist comes first and it’s about finding a way for artists to find work. It’s about working with people you trust and building on their networks. The key issue is how we fund those long range strategies as the market becomes more sophisticated.

A LATIN AMERICAN VENTURE

Justin Macdonnell
I guess I approach it increasingly from the opposite end of the telescope. For us it’s all about international touring. We do very little domestic touring. In fact, we’ve just taken a policy decision to shed all of our Australian clients. We’re going to work exclusively in the import and export market and only in relation to the Latin American market which I’ve developed over the last 12 years. So, increasingly my approach has been rather to consider the market which in my case is the Latin American market, a very broad context although it has certain overarching features. We’re talking about 230 million people in a dozen countries, and to consider what work might be appropriate for that context rather than seeking to contextualise the work actively. Of course, the 2 go hand in hand. But for me the more interesting thing is to consider what happens there, what context the festivals, presenters, the circuits, the theatres can offer us and to consider what might be appropriate for them.

I think the process is the same as Marguerite and Rachael are talking about but it’s looked at from a different point of view because I’ve made this area something of a specialty. We’ve just done our 80th tour to Latin America in 12 years, touring things large and small. Increasingly, the thing that most interests me is the opportunity to do a mixture of work in a single context. For example, at the Cervantino Festival in Mexico we had 6 Australian performing arts entities, 2 from New Zealand, a visual arts exhibition, a film program, 2 novelists and a couple of historians dealing with aspects of Australian society and reflections in and through Mexican history and society going on at the same time. For me, that was a particularly rich context in which to operate in a very beautiful city in a very interesting part of Mexico, to think about the kinds of things that would be appropriate and the mixture of artists and artforms that might be appropriate to stimulate discussion, to get interesting responses. I should add that all of this was accompanied by what seemed at times like an endless series of workshops giving opportunities for exchange between artists, Australian and Mexican in particular but others too. We’re doing similar things in Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Brazil in the next 12 months.

JM
Sydney Dance Company, Stalker, Strange Fruit, Don Burrows, Roger Woodward, Richard Walley and Two Tribes, an Aboriginal funk hip hop band from Western Australia. We also had an exhibition by Australian landscape artist, Mandy Martin, a film program, David Malouf, Nicholas Jose and 2 historians, one from Latrobe and another from Canberra University.

THE NATIONAL-INTERNATIONAL NEXUS

Wendy Blacklock
Unlike Justin and Marguerite, Performing Lines is funded on a triennial basis by the Theatre Board of the Australia Council. That doesn’t really stop us from believing that we can also do things like contemporary dance if we’re lucky enough to receive a special grant or a project grant from the Dance Board. We’ve never wanted to be seen as a company that deals with only one particular kind of work. So we’ve always had a quite varied program. As we’re funded by the Theatre Board, it’s funding to tour in Australia. When we first started there was no Playing Australia and so the tours that we did were very limited because we had to fund all the accommodation, freight and airfares. With the advent of Playing Australia which we’ve been lucky enough to get funding from over the last few years, tours have become much longer because we can financially support those places which can’t afford to buy the show.

For those of you who don’t know the system of touring within Australia, we use a combination of selling off the product, doing a split of the funds needed, or actually financing the whole thing ourselves. So it’s meant that in many cases that we’re able to mount longer tours. When we first started I felt that because we were a national company it was important to do a tour with a company and then move on to help another one. I realised this was not sensible because it needed, in many cases, a showcase one year to get the company out of its home state, to allow it to be seen by venue managers, to gain interest for it. The following year, we might do a national tour and then a year after that, an international tour.

I started touring in 1982 with an Aboriginal show that went to a theatre festival in Denver Colorado. But the first 10 years it was only Aboriginal work that I actually toured overseas to festivals, and during the Bicentennial. Now we’re finding a lot of Australian work is being invited to festivals overseas. This year, we’ve got 6 productions going to 13 countries. Some of them are one-person shows (like William Yang) and others like The Theft of Sita we’ve got 25 puppeteers and musicians tottering around the world.

WB
No. What has happened is that because of the [Australia Council's] Performing Arts Markets and the number of people who are coming to Australia and seeing the work, our network grows and grows. You send a company and you make friends with the people and then they say what else do you have in Australia? We’re not an agent, or a manager. And so if anybody asks, we’re extremely happy to suggest anybody that we know of who might be of interest. And we build. We find we’re going back to the same places. But, as you know, festival directors all talk among themselves. Performing Lines is not funded to do the international work but the international work is feeding the Australian work back home. I’ve never discussed this with the Theatre Board. They seem to be quite happy that we continue to get the product overseas. And it seems to me very sensible if that’s the only place you can make money. You certainly can’t make money in Australia. Last year, because of one season in Germany we paid the entire deficit for an Australian tour of Nikki Heywood’s Burn Sonata which was quite a controversial show, quite difficult, limited audiences. But it was good to know that we’d made enough on something else be able to support that work.

RS
Marguerite and Justin, is it the same issue for you? You make money on the international tours and not the national ones?

JM
It’s certainly my perception. I don’t do much within the country. But to take Marrugeku as an example, we could never have got Crying Baby off the ground or capitalised had we relied on the domestic market. Indeed, we probably wouldn’t even have tried to do the show in the first instance. The only way that show has broken in is through income earned internationally.

Participant
Our company has survived on domestic, intrastate, national (and international) touring. Whatever fees we can earn anywhere go back to help the artists keep the work in repertoire and on the road. For me it’s about keeping artists employed and finding a match in the marketplace where we can all get paid.

WB
I should explain, we have artists who we assist because they have no administrative infrastructure–people like William Yang with his slide show/ performances. If William makes some money in one place, we save it as a backstop for him when freight runs over or there’s a problem somewhere else. So that’s William’s money. A show like The Theft of Sita which was funded by the [Federal Government's] Major Festivals Initiative so we didn’t have to pay any money to get it up, has been very successful, but it is not a show that is going to continue on for a long time. We’ve produced 5 of William’s shows and he keeps on doing them. But the people in The Theft of Sita are all freelance artists and with 25 of them it’s very hard to get them all together. So, I didn’t anticipate that they would continue touring. If they make money, it goes back to helping another company.

A NATIONAL PROBLEM

Annette Tesoriero
Are there other issues besides population and distance that affect the potential to make money on tours in Australia?

MP
I think it depends on the level of the touring circuit. In Australia, the delivery mechanism into Playing Australia is venue driven and incredibly sophisticated. So there's this “cyber paddock, long paddock, blue heelers”…There’s a whole kind of level of getting your product up on the web, having the product assessed by all the venues who then decide on what they want to tour, that going through a selection process to a short list, the short list going to a forum called Long Paddock where everyone sits around and gets presentations from producers. Short list, short list, do your Playing Australia application. Bid for it. I think this year there was $6 million worth of applications of which $2 million got up. And I’m sure Wendy had more than one in there. I got one up. Wendy got one up. The whole Made to Move contemporary dance circuit funded Sydney Dance, Bangarra and Phillip Adams. In previous years, it’s had at least 5 companies.

So what is happening in the major touring mechanism in Australia, because that system is venue driven, the decisions are made by the venues on a product basis, the decision-making process has become middle class, middle brow. There’s nobody driving another agenda that’s about getting these venues to take more experimental work, other than the festival circuit which at the moment in Australia is not looking terribly healthy for many Australian companies doing performance-based work.

INTERNATIONAL TOURING: WHO PAYS?
WB
And the international festivals are prepared to pay more than the Australian festivals.

MP
But it costs you more to get there. Unless you have the privilege of having long range strategies and you’ve got your Arts Market showcase and are part of whatever the new strategy is at the Australia Council, you need money to get there. So is it cheaper to do a tour of Australia or is it cheaper to do a tour overseas? You have to rationalise this. I’ve just been through it with ADT. Yes they’ve done their first international tour. Yes, it sold out. What did that tour cost the company? It cost them a lot. Now they can afford to do it because they have close to a million dollars a year and that first tour is about creating the profile and infrastructure to give them a touring circuit for the next 3 years which they will have. But for us as independent artists, managers and producers, it costs a lot to tour overseas. A lot of international festivals won’t pay international airfares. They expect the Australian government to chip in. And the Australia Council can’t assist everyone who wants to set up an international tour. Every first international tour loses money, unless you’re a major artist.

JM
It depends on why you’re doing it in the first place. You may well make a strategic decision that it is in your interest to do this for exposure, for length of run and you’re prepared to invest an amount of money to do it within the country or internationally. Equally, it might be a completely idle activity and I would say about 40% of international touring from this country or any other is done for reasons of vanity and little else. It contributes little to their economic base, only marginally to their exposure. And I think of some of those tours to some of the more glamorous parts of the world by some of our larger companies.

So I think there are all kinds of reasons people do things. Not all of them are as transparent as we might hope. However, when there are good reasons that contribute to the economic basis of the organisation, that contribute to exposure or its opportunity to exchange or develop its artistic profile or enrich its own activity then I think the best thing to do is to make sure somebody else is paying for the whole thing. And that leads me to ask not only why you are doing it but why there? Why that particular place. It does seem to me that there’s a lot of very curious touring that goes on to places which never in a fit are going to pay you enough to justify the activity, whether it’s somehow artificially subsidised or not. We have a terrible tendency to give things away to societies that can well afford to pay for them. We subsidise tours and other kinds of activities that could pay if we were operating on any rational exchange basis.

WB
I’m interested in what you’re saying because I’m finding that more and more, the festivals that we’re going to are paying the airfares, the freight…

WB
There are a few new ones this year and I’ve just said to them I’m sorry, if you want this show, we haven’t got the money and we’re not going to ask the Australia Council, so they’re paying.

THE INDEPENDENT ARTIST TOURS

FW
Amanda Stewart is an artist who has travelled a lot independently in Europe and the US, but also with the company Machine for Making Sense

Amanda Stewart
There’s a massive discrepancy in the fees between here and overseas. It can be something like 10 or 20 times the amount. In the wealthy European countries, there are so many layers to the arts infrastructure there, I don’t see how we can catch up. I don’t know if it’s still the case, it’s one of those cliched things you hear that the artsbudget of Frankfurt is equivalent to the budget of the Australia Council. Even their commercial spaces are government funded so there’ll be a tier of gigs. I work in the music area and I’m also working lots of different niches which is how I manage to survive. I find that the money that’s available…a whole lot of touring has been able to occur. Unless you get in the loop…It’s like here, if you’ve got contacts… you know, someone comes to see your show and says hey, come and work with me. And unless you can invest 5 or 8 years of establishing those contacts, then go away for a couple of years and come back and then you’ll have enough groundwork…

MP
One of the reasons for touring is that you’re making contacts and extending your own networks. So if you’re an artist with aspirations to learn about yourself and about your own community, then being exposed in another community is actually a really good challenge. Justin has invested many years for nothing in creating what is now a very successful circuit. You have to start somewhere and try and position yourself somewhere. If you’re going to go and perform if, say, Berlin’s the first staging post, you choose Berlin because you know the right people are going to be there to serve as a springboard..

AS
It’s a desperate scramble for gigs. People not returning faxes and emails and you end up slitting your wrists because you met them last year and they’re not responding…

FW
“Follow the bouncing ball”, as you described it to me. And you’re also self-managing which is also a fairly intense proposition as an artist, I imagine.

AS
We’ve had a few low key people helping in Europe. I think it's what you were saying about finding someone that you fit in with… I think what you want from an agent is new contacts. Okay you can have 15% commission from one of my contacts if you come up with the goods. Several times, mainly in the context of Machine for Making Sense we’ve done that, and end up just getting one pissy little gig at $500 each. Meanwhile they’ve taken 15% commission of our $5000 gig. So depending on the context, I’m very careful about that. I think working as a solo performer it’s much easier to put yourself in different niches and you can get different sorts of work. Travelling a whole theatre production which is something I know Nigel Kellaway has done, that’s just mind boggling, the logistics and costs.

MANDATORY TOURING
FW
Nigel Kellaway is the director of The opera Project who have done their most recent Australian tour, The Berlioz: Our Vampires Ourselves, involving venues which are not on the official venue circuit, although Brisbane’s Powerhouse increasingly is. The production also went to Salamanca Arts Centre in Hobart and was to go to PICA in Perth till that was cancelled.

NK
For The opera Project and for other companies I’ve worked with, touring is not just important, it’s mandatory. Quite a number of years ago, I would always do a 3 week season in Performance Space. Now I’m doing 2 week seasons. And I see a lot of seasons that go up for 4 nights. Bump in Monday, open Wednesday/Thursday, close Sunday. I don’t think you ever get a show right first time. There’s no way it can be finished particularly if you’re only doing 4 nights. Now you’re not going to get another season in Sydney or your home base so you have to go out and find another audience. And those audiences are very important. For example I toured a lot in Perth over about 11 years; I would have played 7 or 8 works at PICA and obviously you develop an audience. But that’s not always the case. You’re often touring to places you haven’t been before and this is suddenly putting your work out to an audience that has a completely different history of theatre watching. They’re going to compare what you have to say, they’re going to put your work into an entirely new context of other work they’ve seen. And that’s very important.

Fiona asked me to talk about the practicalities of touring with Playing Australia funding. Very briefly, The opera Project is a self-managing organisation. Because of the various roles that I play in the company (general manager, artistic director, performer and tour manager), I’ve actually had to wait for venues to come shopping to me. Probably if I was better set up I would be out there hunting and I’ve been talking to Wendy recently and she’s very aware that I’d like to get the company’s work out. I was approached by Rosemary Miller at Salamanca Arts Centre for The Berlioz which was made 4 years ago. She went into partnership with Zane Trow (Brisbane Powerhouse) and Sarah Miller (PICA) and put forward an application which covered basically the re-mount costs, our touring costs (freight and airfares) and also a guarantee against loss. So, obviously the producing theatres are going to try and put their projected box office figures up as high as possible (while still being acceptable). Those organisations then have to be able to front–and these are not festivals with festival budgets. They have funding from state and federal levels. They have to come up with the fee that I need to take the company and obviously, their theatre costs, advertising and so on. As it happened, PICA had to pull out of the deal because they didn’t have that base money. The amount that Playing Australia gives doesn’t pay for a work to go up. It pays a proportion. Playing Australia will take on applications from particular companies. You can apply as long as you’ve got 3 venues. So it’s really a choice of whether the venues are going to make the application for you or whether you do the hard work yourself. I know which way I’d prefer–for the venues to do the actual application on our behalf.

Rachael Swain
We convinced Playing Australia once to fund a tour of a work of ours that was presented free in remote Aboriginal communities throughout Arnhem Land. In that case there was no box office and there weren’t any venues. So they were flexible enough to take that on board although they do have a hideous application form.

Marguerite Pepper
I’ve just got funding for REM’s Kookaburra That Stole The Moon, an orchestral work for children for 16 venues over 3 weeks. They’re paying airfares and freight, accommodation and per diems. I plan to challenge them with Jon Rose’s next project which is playing with the fences of Australia where there is no audience except for the sheep. But it is called Playing Australia so they should live up to their name.

NK
Would I be so silly? Absolutely not, that’s why I’ve approached Performing Lines, although as Wendy says, she doesn’t sell work as such, but I will take assistance from absolutely anybody.

PROBLEMS WITH PLAYING AUSTRALIA

Wendy Blacklock
What worries me is that if you look at Playing Australia they had so many applications and were able to fund so few, there is very little new work. I had 2 applications in and one was something that I thought I should do because I thought my charter is to take work to regional areas. So it’s much more middle of the road. They funded that. They didn’t fund the one that really needs it which is the groundbreaking, the more difficult, the work that’s done here at Performance Space. And that to me is a real problem. I despair about this work. Who’s going to support it if Playing Australia isn’t?

FW
There’s been a lot of talk about venues and the circuits and that mostly doesn’t include Performance Space or PICA and it’s only just beginning to include Brisbane Powerhouse because they have a larger budget.

WB
For years I’ve toured works to PICA, to Dancehouse, to Tasmania, to Performance Space that have been supported by Playing Australia. Now, there has to be some lobbying done about the new work. Otherwise, it will all be middle of the road. They say we must support work that can go to the regions but the work that some do is not necessarily ready to go to the regions.

MP
There’s so much product up on that website that most venues have no idea unless someone’s funding the regionals to come in an see the work or they’ve got an aggressive producer like me on the phone saying this is a fabulous show and we can deliver and it’s relatively cheap. If anything comes out of this forum, it should be the long term planning and how that’s funded. When Playing Australia round was announced last time, I was so disappointed. I was very grateful that one of my projects got up. But it’s so predictable. The touring opera company. The touring ballet company. The touring Sydney Dance Company. The touring 4 or 5 major theatre companies, Circus Oz. I mean, I wouldn’t want to decide because the competition’s so great. Legs on the Wall, Flying Fruitfly Circus didn’t get up. 100% of the innovative work didn’t get up. And I think, fine for there to be a venue driven model. Great that the venues are getting high quality work at massive prices from the Sydney Dance Company, or Sydney Theatre Company but where is the developmental circuit? Because without that they might as well forget about it.

I think that a developmental circuit needs to be driven by a committee of artists and alternative venues who can get together and say allocate $200,000 a year to a developmental circuit, whatever that means in the eyes of that constituency. In the regional venues there’s an enormous fear about presenting contemporary dance because they believe there’s no audience. How do you break down that barrier? You’ve got to work collaboratively with those venues about ways they can come on board and take the risk. Because if they’re not starting to conceptualise how they can present work that’s outside the mainstream. In 10 years time they’ll be touring Run For Your Wife.

NK
It’s also a question of what they might be presenting in the context of what’s available within their own state. Rosemary Miller (Salamanca) and Zane Trow (Brisbane Powerhouse) have been having some discussions over the past few months. They’re making selections themselves as artistic directors of their organisations. What a difference it would make if I knew that I was going in to make work here at Performance Space knowing that it was almost secured that in 2 years time it was going to go touring. It would make me approach the work in such a different way.

For venues, instead of saying let’s look and see what’s available now, Playing Australia applications are due, rather, look at particular groups and say it would be good or useful for say Hobart to see not just one work of, for instance, The opera Project but more as there is not another company in Hobart making work quite like it. To say, okay we’re going to invest in this and in 2 years we’ll bring you back with your next work. Now I’m not exactly sure what that work is going to be but I know there’s a future for it. So there are alternatives. So in a way, a company becomes almost part of a venue's residency program and part of their audience over a number of years.

QUARANTINING FUNDS FOR THE INNOVATORS

Justin Macdonnell
Has anyone ever asked Playing Australia whether they were prepared to quarantine some money? They did it for Made to Move. Maybe the first simple step would be to ask the question.

THE CHALLENGE OF DISTANCE
FW
Gregory Nash from Ausdance NSW, I noticed you nodding about the developmental circuit. I know you’ve been here for 10 months so I’m not quite sure how you’re looking at touring here in terms of your job here. But I know in Europe you had a lot of experience with the dance networks there. Would you like to comment on the situation here.

GN
I will, very briefly, because I think this discussion of the Australian context is very interesting. An expression I’ve heard a lot since I’ve been here is “the tyranny of distance” and when I worked at the British Council in London we could very easily broker relationships between Belgian and British dance companies because it’s only 2 hours away. And there’s so much dialogue and so much discourse between potential promoters or festivals or whatever. It’s much harder here. I still have to get some sense of the scale of the country. Hearing Nigel talk about Perth and Brisbane, thousands of kilometres away from each other, it’s very hard to get those close sorts of synergies going. Ausdance hasn’t been a producing organisation but for people looking at it from outside the country it’s a remarkable organisation because it’s a network of offices in nearly every state and territory (unfortunately Tasmania is no longer included). And you would have thought that that network would have been used to curate and develop some new work but it hasn’t. So it’s a wonderful model in terms of a network representing an artform. But it’s been so introspective in its history and so focussed on education that it hasn’t actually developed any new work. So the board of Ausdance NSW has identified that an absolute priority is support and infrastructural development for creation and presentation. Whether that model will develop and whether it’s taken on in other states and territories I don’t know. I hope it is because what I’m hearing from colleagues in the UK and Europe is that they would love to be presenting contemporary dance from Australia but they know the usual players–the Gideon Obarzanek’s and the Bangarras. Garry Stewart and ADT has been a surprise and that’s new and they’re getting their heads around that. But actually there’s real scope for a mixed program of shorter pieces by innovative Australian choreographers that could potentially tour nationally and internationally. But somebody has to work with the major festival directors. And I hope we’ll be doing that.

SOME PRACTICALITIES: A SMALL CAR

RS
Tony Strachan has a long history of touring with the street theatre company, Chrome and others.

Tony Strachan
I was asked to talk about some of the practicalities of touring. With a company such as Chrome, we’re not taking any box office so we’re relying on festival organisations around the world to have enough budget to employ us for a certain time during the festival or some sort of series of events within a precinct of a city. One consideration is that the production is very sturdy, that it can actually go into many different types of places and adapt to them. In our case we aim for a no fuss production where everything can fit into a car, a small car at that, and that you can stay within the luggage limits on aircraft. This makes us very mobile, easy and quick to move.The other issue is the trust between artists and management. We’re with MPP and have been for many years. And another is the adaptability factor.I remember when we were in New Orleans at an education conference some years ago, the show was dying in the bum, as they say. After the first show, we ran off to the dressing room and quickly found a way to make it work in the second part of our program. We were then judged by the people who saw us to have been a great success. But it could very easily have gone the other way.

In order to ensure that the context is right for the work you’re doing, it’s important to gather intelligence on the place or the festival. It’s important to arrive early and reconnoitre in our case because we adapt our work to physical space. And also you need to allow time to make any changes to the piece to fit it in. We try to incorporate pertinent threads of the place or the people into the work or in the case of Japan where we’ve just been, to actually use the language. Half the show is in Japanese which always amazes the Japanese.

Some of the things I’ve learned since I started touring as a young fella back in the 70s and 80s: to say no if you’re going to look stupid; to be more assertive with your basic physical logistical and scheduling requirements; and to listen to what the client really wants for their event. Perhaps they want a more performative show that stands on its own. Or they might want a more interactive approach. You have to listen carefully to what they say and try and respond.

RS
Are there other artists who can add to Tony’s comments? And perhaps there’s one thing that you do now that’s different from when you first started touring?

Amanda Stewart
I try not to do really bad schedules. If you push yourselves too hard, you can destroy the group.

NK
Put a deadline on the producing theatre to send really detailed plans of the theatre and tell them that they can’t get them by the deadline, there’s a very good chance that it’s not going to happen.

FW
Speaking of practicalities, we have Simon Wise, Mark Mitchell and Neil Simpson in the house. Amongst their many collective skills, these guys have also toured enormously around the country. Neil’s also on the Performing Arts Touring Committee of the NSW Ministry for the Arts. Perhaps you can answer Rachael’s question, Neil.

Neil Simpson
I just don’t share hotel rooms. No, I don’t know that I do anything differently really. I usually come on board very early in the piece, often as a collaborator as well on the work. For me that’s the benefit to the artists I’m working with and to the tour on the whole. I often have a good understanding from the very base of the making of the work. It’s more like the whole project leaves home, if you like. But I don’t think I’d do anything different–I could probably get paid better.

THE COSTS

NS
Probably! In the scale of things. I think in terms of individual project-based work which a lot of people in this room have been dealing with, is if it’s touring again then invariably there’s a huge time lag between the season and the tour. Invariably there are cast changes and so on. From the NSW Touring Committee’s point of view, we know that Playing Australia provides only travel and accommodations costs. No wages. So getting money upfront to re-mount a work is a huge difficulty. There are no funds for that.

NK
Basically you’ve got to write it into your fees. So on paper, your fees look very big but in fact they’re only saying that they’re paying for one week of the show whereas in fact they’re paying for 3 weeks of salary to remount the thing when you haven’t done it for 4 years. It’s the only thing you can do.

JM
I must say, I’m finding increasingly those kinds of loadings are knocking people out of consideration. Producers simply won’t wear it.

JM
The more you can amortise the costs of those things the better. And again, it depends on why you’re doing it in the first place and how much you’re prepared to invest in the process. I think companies might just have to look at wearing some of that cost themselves.

WB
Yes but some of the people here are project funded. They’re not companies. They haven’t got anything to fall back on.

JM
It’s a conundrum but sometimes 3 into 2 won’t go and if that’s the case, it just won’t get up.

NO TWO VENUES THE SAME

Simon Wise
I don’t think I’d change much of what I’ve done. I’d just have done it much more often and fall into holes much less often I hope. The main thing that’s frustrated me a lot over the years is that different places work very differently. Different venues aren’t the same as the original one. A lot of companies I’ve toured with are essentially putting things into a space. They’re usually quite flexible and it’s a matter of re-making the work for the space. Other companies have a piece of work that they want to reproduce and essentially push it into the venue. They want to make it the same as it was originally regardless. That’s been the biggest stumbling block I’ve come across regularly. This space isn’t the same shape as that space and these people are actually quite different from the ones you’ve played to, the crew has quite a different style of working. People who are not able to either very carefully select venues which are very close to the original or be flexible and re-work the piece to match the new venue will have problems. I’ve encountered this a lot and it’s a big problem and very hard to resolve.

RS
It’s similar to the point that Nigel has raised about the amount of resource that’s invested in that part of the process, be it site checking or remounting. It’s the kind of money that has to be spent to get a piece of work looking good in a festival, not just buying the show.

SW
A lot of it isn’t to do with money. A lot of it is to do with the gap between the expectation of the people who created it and other parts of the tour which are to do with the venue and bringing them in or whatever. You can often see this is going to be different and it’s often very hard to persuade people of that.

RS
I always go to whatever festival or country it is and check the site and meet the festival people, meet the publicity department, talk about their agendas and our company agendas, look at the venue. I spend 3 days looking at sites.

SW
Even half a day is really helpful if it’s a month in advance but that’s not always possible.

Terese Casu
Safety hasn’t come up. I come from a long history of touring physical theatre works and when you’re on the road you need, as Tony Strachan says, to say no or to really stand your ground about the time it takes to bump into a theatre. I’ve dealt with broken necks and people whose careers have just stopped because in a touring situation people have not taken into account appropriate safety levels. That’s something that I think Australians who are touring physical theatre all the time are learning.

THE MYSTERY OF SELECTION CRITERIA

Mark Mitchell
I like touring. The thing I’m most curious about is the process or the dialogues that go on around how a particular work is chosen in Australia. Whether it’s say artistic directors or the theme or idea of a festival overseas, whether they see a wide range of Australian works and select things that suit that festival. Because often they have a theme or a base concept. Or whether it’s the other way, whether it’s the agencies here, whether we have to promote and sell and interest them and they’ll simply choose a work and make it fit in. What is that two-way thing? How “Australian” it has to be or what is their concept of “Australian”? Or do they want something that’s “international” and that changes everything. Do the agencies here have to constantly offer a wide range of things to those artistic directors, or is it about aggressive marketing on the part of companies here?

RS
Ron Layne (Audience & Market Development, Australia Council) this sounds like your moment.

Ron Layne
Well, I don’t know. It’s probably a question better put to the agencies represented here. In a sense it’s a combination of all of those. It is about assertive marketing. If you’re representing a particular production or an artist then that’s your job but in the case of the Australia Council, it’s also our responsibility to ensure that new work, emerging artists are exposed internationally. That’s part of the challenge for us at the moment. We’ve begun to do some of that and there’s still an awfully long way to go. Most recently, for example, with RealTime we’ve produced a number of publications (In Repertoire: Music Theatre, Contemporary Dance, Contemporary Performance and Australia’s Indigenous Arts). Really, for us that’s just the first step. We then have to ensure that the information is disseminated effectively, strategically, that it’s updated. One of the new projects for us is to take the information that we’ve developed and take it to another level where we can continue to provide that information to overseas presenters and producers. I agree with Rachael about the 3 Cs. But I think it’s also about what Justin and others have talked about, the economics and good planning and networking and good information.

But I think that in some respects this discussion is suggesting that there’s a bit of a disjunction between the life cycle of a work and the funding mechanisms available. In the good old days there used to be a thing called a touring policy which I think has become somewhat fragmented in recent history. When you look around the world and see the ways other agencies deal with it, like the Canada Council, for example, they do it in a much more cohesive manner in terms of outreach activity. Whereas I guess for us there are several layers that you as artists and companies are having to deal with, not just within the Council but also outside it with the Department of Communications & Information Technology and Playing Australia for example.

WHERE WE ARE: MEETING THE DEMAND

RL
My reading of it is that we’re at a kind of watershed because we (and by we I mean not just the Australia Council but the Australian arts community) have put a lot of effort into increasing the profile of Australian contemporary arts overseas. And we’ve been quite successful in many respects. The next challenge for us is how to meet the demand. And I’m speaking internationally here. We’re beyond square one but we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of ensuring that Australian artists and companies have the depth of information and knowledge that they need in order to be able to take advantage of those opportunities. A lot of it is about networking and about personal relationships you develop with particular festival or venue directors overseas. That’s a critical aspect of it. So while we’ve been successful to a degree in supporting international touring through things like the Performing Arts Market and follow up touring, we’re now in a process of looking seriously at that and not just how effective that’s been but what is the next step.

There are a number of things that the Council is looking at. For example Audience and Market Development is working with the Music Board and now the Theatre Board on introducing quick response international touring funds that I hope will be much more responsive mechanisms. We’ll continue with the Performing Arts Market and the follow up touring program. We’re beginning to develop new ways of providing information to Australian artists as well as trying to expose new work and new artists overseas.

The point that everyone’s been making is about how do you develop the new work. It’s critically important that it is about being selective, about saying no. As much as it might be attractive to jump at the opportunity when it’s offered to you, to go to Mongolia or wherever, it may not be the most effective way of developing a touring circuit for your particular work. There are a number of challenges for the Australia Council in the international arena. I think the things that we need to improve are about ensuring that there’s better quality information about what opportunities exist, providing information and advice on international touring and planning of longer term strategies.

The other thing we haven’t really talked about much, and something we really have to act on, is about a new generation of independent producers. And also, what we do with overseas showcases. Somebody mentioned Heads Up and the New York project as examples. They’re vastly different really. In the past the Australia Council has worked with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade–we’re still working with them. But we’re now influenced less by that particular agenda and more by another one which is about exposing work and finding opportunities for work to be toured internationally. Heads Up was a fantastic project but essentially it was part of a Centenary of Federation celebration. So it does get into the flag waving thing and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as at the end of the day it’s about the artists and exposing Australian artists to international markets.

THE FUTURE

RL
But we also need to be thinking through, as we move incrementally forward, those overseas showcases. And we need to be thinking about emerging markets and what we all should do with established markets whether that be Europe or North America. That’s a process that we’ll be working through in the next 6-12 months, just thinking about how we identify other showcases and how we use them. Also thinking through the development of more appropriate funding mechanismss. And thinking also from an international point of view about the co-commissioning and co-production of work. For example, in the next Performing Arts Market in Adelaide we’ll allow some scope for, if you like, pitch sessions, taking the film production model and looking at ways in which there can be opportunities for a new work to be pitched both for national as well as international presenters and producers.

They’re just some of the things that we’re trying to do. This is a great forum for me to get a kind of reality check.

CONFLICTING AGENDAS

Gregory Nash
I’m curious to know what the political agendas are in a way, Ron, because to use the British Council as an example it’s separate from the Arts Council of England, which is the body which uses government money to fund work and separately from the Foreign Commonwealth Office which is the DFAT equivalent. So we were able to promote or encourage or expose the work of artists who weren’t necessarily funded or approved of by the mainstream government. I just wondered how much of a tension there is in this process.

RL
Well, that happens. We end up in that situation ourselves where in the Performing Arts Market, for example, there may well be work that is not being supported. So you’re in a situation of also trying to find ways of exposing work that has been funded in the past but is not currently being supported and what you do about that.

GN
We inevitably found that the European presenters were interested in the contemporary dance practitioners who weren’t being funded, who weren’t on the major national touring circuits, can’t get a gig in the UK but are working all the time in France and Germany.

THE PERFORMING ARTS MARKET

Andrew Morrish
I’m curious as to how many people apply to be in the Performing Arts Market and how many get in?

RL
I think there were about 100 applications in all. We’ve reduced the number of Spotlight programs because that was the feedback we had from people who attended the last Market that there were too many and it made it difficult for people to get to briefing sessions or to do business. I think we’ve got nearly 45 altogether and that includes 25 spotlights ie 25 minutes excerpts as well as some full length work in the Fringe and some in the Adelaide Festival which we’ll umbrella and promote to some extent. Because we are also very keen to continue to develop the Market, we’re looking at continuing the involvement of New Zealand–so Creative New Zealand will bring in 3 pieces as they did last time. We’ve also invited a couple of Asian companies which I think is critically important to see the Market.–obviously, the focus of it is Australia but to think of it regionally as well.

ONLINE MARKETING

Michael Cohen
Can I raise an issue which I think faces small companies. When you do manage to get a project grant and you get the project up and obviously you get $11 worth out of the $10 that you’re given, but how does a small company that’s not represented manages to sell the work on as well as having some room to develop the project further once it’s had that initial season. One thing that Theatre Kantanka’s been able to do through Audience & Market Development has been a co-operative marketing venture with other companies which I think was only a one-off. Are there any other strategies planned like that one? For emerging companies, I think it’s vital.

RL
I think we’ll review all of that. There’s a lot of value in a co-operative program, in encouraging those sorts of alliances. I guess we were simply caught up in an internal funding issue about how you take the dollars and spread them as far as you possibly can without being completely meaningless.

MC
I believe it was a one-off grant program which we found out from the back pages of some website. Gravity Feed, Erth and Theatre Kantanka applied for a co-operative arts marketing grant. We pitched an electronic marketing co-operative venture which we’re in the process of carrying out since June this year that will see things like joint website creation and electronic marketing avenues. It’s a drop in the ocean for something that needs a sustained approach.

RL
What we were trying to do there was to encourage alliances between organisations and I think we’ll reintroduce that at some point. One of the things that’s happening at the moment, as you’ll all be aware, is the enquiry into the Small to Medium Arts Sector. I hope things like that will be taken up there. That’s a pretty hot issue particularly for individuals and small groups.

RESEARCHING INTERNATIONAL MARKETS

JM
You mentioned research into international markets. How do you do that and where do you get your advice?

RL
That’s something we’re just beginning to really grapple with. In a lot of cases we’ve relied on individuals like yourself, Marguerite and Wendy, other producers like Barry Plews in Adelaide and Arts Projects Australia [Adelaide]. We’ve used information that’s come to us from the Performing Arts Markets. We’re relying more and more on setting up relationships with overseas agencies. There’s a new federation of international arts councils but we're also developing closer relationships with organisations in France and the UK. We’ve set up some initiatives in Japan, we put in what we called a Market Development Officer who’s now the Cultural Attache to the Australian Embassy. We have a project working in Berlin. If we could find the resources to continue to do work in some of those in critical places, we would see that as part of the information gathering we need to do as much as it’s about the relationships–essentially, having reciprocal relationships with other agencies where we swap information. I’m talking here not commercial in-confidence information, I’m talking about who’s doing what festival, what are they interested in.

MP
So in a way, this is replacing what used to be called the Cultural Attache at the Embassy?

RL
To some extent. That’s one element of it. The overseas agencies, the diplomatic posts, the overseas arts councils, working with DFAT, working with Austrade. So for example, when we come to the Performing Arts Market this time, the Australia Council will have a booth but we won’t just be about promoting our own programs. It’ll be shared with DFAT and Austrade. Essentially what we’re trying to do is provide practical advice and information to delegates both international and Australian and to particularly assist less experienced Australian delegates to navigate the market and do business there. So there are two ways we’re approaching it. The first, to use a much overused term is to “skill up” the arts community, to provide information and knowledge that increases the level of ability within the arts community and at the same time, we continue to expose Australian work internationally and try and institute appropriate funding mechanisms.

PLAYING AUSTRALIA: A MATTER OF TASTE

JM
The problem's not with Playing Australia. The problem is that no real effort has been made to educate the presenters, the people who are actually buying the product. Playing Australia was designed, if we’re going to dwell on Playing Australia, as a presenter-driven mechanism. That’s what it is and, in my opinion, it operates very efficiently along those lines. The problem is the taste of the presenters and the lack of effort that any of us has put in to try to expand their tastes. It’s not a question of money. The Australia Council or someone else might well wish to run some forums and that would be a question of money. That may not be a bad idea–or someone ought to get the presenters to see more interesting and more adventurous material and give them an opportunity to consider how that may relate in their context to their communities. But let’s not mistake the mechanism for the question of choice. And whether it be stand up comics or rock bands or contemporary performance, if they don’t get to know about the new then they’re going to buying the old, whether they’re the director of the most eminent festival on earth or running the Bulamakanka Performing Arts Centre.

Sue Broadway
I’ve engaged with the touring circuits in Australia in different ways over the last several years and one of the things I’ve noticed is that the engagement with whoever the local person is with getting the local community to come to the shows is an absolutely critical thing. In my regional touring I’ve been trying to do workshops and school shows as an audience development process to get people into the theatre show. And where that’s worked is when somebody in the venue got interested in the idea and put a whole lot of energy into persuading the local community that there was something worth going to see. That sort of aspect of audience development through some sort of seeding process with the community is essential.

Clare Grant
We think about taking work to the venues but is there any mechanism to get venue operators to come to see work.

MP
The Performing Arts Market is one way and that’s with select product. But just to give you an example from the last Market: at the beginning of my tenure with them, Australian Dance Theatre had not toured South Australia for a long time so there was no audience in regional SA for contemporary dance or for ADT although we did comprehensive surveys which showed that the brand name was still highly recognised, that 80% of people surveyed said yes, if there was an ADT show they’d come. So I put together a 3 part strategy. The first part was to bring all of the venue managers from the regions to Adelaide for the Arts Market. And we looked after them for 2 days. Country Arts SA helped pay for this. Money is an issue because regional venues are very under-resourced. They came to see Birdbrain as a work in progress, fell in love with it. We weren’t in fact talking about Birdbrain but about Garry Stewart’s previous work, Plastic Space. And the second part of the strategy was to take a road show to each of the venues where we did Garry's introduction, how you compose for contemporary dance, how the dancers train. Our rehearsal director spoke, how you work with a dramaturg in the context. We had the schools in during the day and subscribers in during the evening with a drink at the end. And then we took the show out. They sold more tickets than they’ve ever sold before on a contemporary dance tour. That was all about building trust with those presenters first and foremost. The company will repeat that strategy next year with Birdbrain. In NSW on the Touring Committee, we’ve all been quite keen to find ways to get regional presenters in–and it’s time and it’s money.

If you’re talking about the major venues Australia-wide like Orange and Newcastle and Geelong etc, they do have programming money and if there’s keen interest, they will travel to Melbourne or Sydney but with the smaller circuit, there’s one person running those venues. They’ve got no money and no time really. So we need some sort of co-ordinated effort to find a way to engage with those people. It’s personal engagement and it takes time and it’s continual. For the Sydney Opera House season of Birdbrain I got all of the regional presenters in NSW to come and see the show there or in Canberra. From that if the company wants to pick it up, there’s potentially a big tour. It’s requires personal engagement and it takes time. How many years did we talk about getting show reels to all the cultural attaches and trying to get Canberra to pay for it and update them twice a year?

JM
That’s something we haven’t talked much about. Hardly any of this happens without very substantial lead time, a colossal investment in forward planning. I don’t think I’ve done anything for years that hasn’t had a lead time of between 18 months to 2 years.

JM
The festival we’ve just done in Cervantino we started talking about with the Mexican authorities in 1991.

RS
And often, just in terms of networking, when festival presenters come and see your work they often won’t pick you up for a couple of years.

Terese Casu
In the very early days of Stalker touring, there was investment in deficit really. It was all about risk management.

RL
On that subject of regional audiences, that’s a very good point, there is something that we can begin to do. It won’t solve the problem, but, possibly, through an existing project we have running nationally, we may be able to begin to do some of what you’re talking about. It’s certainly something I’ll take back from this forum.

MP
Everything works in cycles and I think somehow the cycles have gone astray. You know, regional, national, international–it should all be a holistic fabric. Certainly I think for us as producers it’s become a natural extension that you create a work, you open it in your home town, you try and tour it regionally, invite people in, tour it again, get a showcase, tour it nationally, invite people in, tour it overseas. That’s your 5 years. And yet, somehow all the agencies aren’t….we’re not on the same cycle. We’re not ovulating at the same time.

SOME SOLUTIONS

John Baylis {Manager, Theatre Board, Australia Council]
In that context, can I just make an open invitation for people to give me ideas as I’ve suggested to some of you in the last month. Since the Theatre Board did a deal with Audience & Market Development to facilitate overseas touring, that seems like it will work quite well next year. But it leaves the Theatre Board with about $100,000 which it has traditionally used for national touring. Now that’s nothing and once you take international out of that program, it looks so bare. So I’m looking for new and interesting strategic ways to use that money. I welcome any ideas. Maybe the idea of trying to promote work more to people who run the venues, or whatever…feel free to ring me.

JM
It does seem that the under-resourcing of Australia’s contemporary spaces is a real problem. As the end user of what comes out of this process, the sad thing for me is that I am now increasingly going to other countries to source product for my market in Latin America because there simply isn’t what I need happening here that is export ready. There’s plenty of good stuff happening, but it isn’t ready for touring internationally.

SW
Certainly more than one one-week season in Sydney which is where funding finishes.

JM
Completely dispassionately, it seems to me that would be a really good starting point.

FW
There’s also your idea of approaching Playing Australia to section off some money

JM
Give it a whirl. It’s worth asking the question. Quarantine $200,000 for that purpose each year.

FW
That’s a crucial issue. The longer it takes to decide, the more expensive it makes the remounting of the work.

THE TROUBLE WITH MADE TO MOVE

WB
I spent several years arguing about Made to Move and saying that they needed PICA and Powerhouse and Performance Space as a small circuit for the emerging dance companies. And they wouldn’t buy it. Two years I tried.

MP
It was venue driven and the venues were Victorian Arts Centre, Adelaide Festival Centre Trust etc.

JM
Well, even if [those organisations] had done something at the level of their black boxes it would have been a start.

MP
Anyway there is no allocation for contemporary dance any more within Playing Australia. There is some scheme afoot which none of us is party to yet at the moment appointing some kind of facilitator or advocate.

EXIT

FW
I think this might be a good time to wind up. Thank you all for coming. It’s been fantastic to hear from this cross-section of people talking about this important issue. There are a couple of fabulous ideas which we need to follow up whether it’s as Australia Council, as Performance Space or as a lobby of individual artists and small companies. Please stay for a drink and let’s keep on talking.

Danielle Micich in Lindsay Vickery’s your sky is filled with billboards of the sky

One of the ways technology works in Western culture is to call attention to itself when new, for at that moment it has no social life. After a period of use most technological artefacts are normalised into everyday life and are no longer seen as technological at all.
Timothy D Dale, Strange Sounds, Music, Technology & Culture, Routledge, 2001

Technology is so interconnected with the production of sound and music it seems as necessary and unconscious as breath. From the earliest instrument-making through to digital recording, a feedback loop involving technological advancement and the pursuit of new sounds has been in constant play. Is the development of technology an artist-driven exploration or does the technology drive us to explore? Has the glut of new digital tools created a sonic lexicon of sameness? Have we missed something along the way? This survey looks at a collection of artists, by no means comprehensive, working with sound in various manifestations, and their relationship to technologies, both new and old.

Sounds/objects/space

In Sound Sculpture (Fine Arts Publishing, 2001, see RT49, p33), Ros Bandt gathers a selection of Australian artists working at the intersection of sound, sculpture and space. Much of the work in sound sculpture does not simply utilise emerging technologies, but is often at the forefront of developing them. Bandt herself developed the SSIIPP (Sound Sculpture Interactive Installation Performance Playback) system in the 80s which allows for 8 track playback triggered by movement sensors and used in Australia and internationally. One of Nigel Helyer’s latest works has seen him in residence at Lake Technology and then UNSW developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system—an immersive 3D sound environment using GPS (Global Positioning Satellite system) to create a sonic realm that responds to the positioning of the body within a specific landscape (RT50 p26). Investigating the sonority of electrical energy, Joyce Hinterding has developed the electrostatic sound system which, in combination with her magnificent aerials, can tap into atmospheric emissions and then be sonically manipulated and shaped. There is also the relational sonic/spatial investigations of Michael Graeve. Most recently he curated the Gating exhibition, involving visual and audio explorations of the “gating” technique. Artists like Rodney Berry, Iain Mott, David Haines, Ross Harley, John Drummond, Stelarc and others have also been involved in explorations of sound/object/space and in the adaptation of technology for aesthetic ends.

Lawrence English is a Brisbane-based artist working with sound in many forms. In his recent installation, Poles, at Brisbane Powerhouse during the REV festival, he used what he calls “virtual signification.” He describes the process as “taking virtual elements that represent an environment or area, such as photos, web documents, text and using…those segments of data, converting them via various sound applications …processing them further to create interesting textures and scapes or rhythms of some form…”

These manipulations are then reintroduced to the natural environment. “In some ways, it completes the loop between the digital and the organic, the virtual and the real.” He says that the need to stay portable has made him pare back his equipment and push the boundaries of the technology (laptop and software) to squeeze as much out of it as he can. He believes that one of the key challenges facing sound artists and musicians is “using the technology and driving it, not the reverse. It’s almost too easy to sit down with a few VST plug-ins and a sound editor and create something abstract and electronic sounding…I really feel it’s up to the user to inject some personality and character into the technology.”

Camilla Hannan works primarily in the area of installation and surround sound composition. She was one of the co-producers (along with Nat Bates and Bruce Mowson) of Liquid Architecture 3 in Melbourne this year (see RT50) which incorporated various modes of sound art—installations, a surround sound concert, live electronic music events, audio visual screenings and presentations with an emphasis on the investigation of ideas. Hannan states that “for many people concepts and ideas can be a lot more difficult to express than technical formulas. As a result, many sound practitioners hide behind technology in explaining their work. We wanted to encourage artists to look beyond the technical interface.” Her interests lie in “ideas of space both conceptually and compositionally” and her installation works use both ‘authentic’ sonic spatialisation (environmental recording using DAT and binaural microphones) and processed spatial structures, the finished product often ending up on DVD format. She sees collaboration and a sense of community, as can be found in the ((tRansMIT)) sound collective, as vital to the development of her work.

Phillip Samartzis is a sound artist, lecturer at RMIT and, recently, curator of Variable Resistance—10 hours of sound from Australia, an exhibition of Australian sound art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He sees the spatialisation of sound made possible by 5.1 DVD surround sound as a real development and challenge to sound art today. Artists have been working with customised versions of surround sound for the last 20 years, but the increasing availability of 5.1 technology has “allowed sound artists to stop just thinking in stereo and think more about how they can choreograph space with sound. It’s such an under explored area…considering that we’ve been listening to stereo for 40 or 50 years. What does it mean, those couple of speakers at the rear and that speaker at the front? We’re all discovering new ways of exploring, remixing balancing sonic gestures in space.”

Samartzis sees the greatest challenge to sound art is to make these explorations accessible to a wider audience. For him these adventures in surround sound are “one way of extending the cinematic experience by removing the image but still having that immersive, tactile…sonic experience.” In his own work he tends to invest time and money in the “transducer that’s at the coalface of the sonic phenomena”—the microphone—making environmental recordings that, through simple editing techniques and surround sound technology, can create “sophisticated renderings of environments and real spaces” and “hyperreal experiences.”

Julian Knowles, sound artist and lecturer in electronic music at University of Western Sydney sees that the recent affordability of 5.1 surround sound technology for both production and distribution provides the opportunity for artists who have already been working in surround sound to finally distribute their work for domestic listening. An international DVD release through Extreme Records of his spatial sound explorations is in the pipeline.

Sounds/visions/bodies

Andrée Greenwell is a composer who explores the area of music/sound and video/film. With her 1997 work The Medusa Head she worked with animator Paul Butler to make a richly textured episodic aria for video. Writing the score specifically for the video production, she was interested in fighting the “exploitative way” in which music is used in traditional screen narrative. Her desire is “to use music, and/or sound design to drive narrative. Or to have a very strong narrative input.” Recently she adapted her hour-long live performance Laquiem (libretto by Kathleen Mary Fallon) to a 6 minute film. With sound design by Scott Horscroft and mixed for Dolby stereo by Julian Knowles, this work achieves a stunning fusion of vision, music and sound design including an exquisite underwater sequence.

Greenwell says that she writes music in a “timbral way” leaving space for other elements and subverting the hierarchies so that “the music is working very much as sound design—the sound design and the music are equal.” Her approach to technology is matter of fact. “In a certain kind of territory it’s inevitable that there will be certain amounts of technology. I think you can hardly avoid it…I start with a concept and then figure out the best way to realise it.” Her next work takes her back to performance with a semi-documentary music theatre work, Dreaming Transportation, which will involve projections.

WA artist Lindsay Vickery has also been investigating the fusions and interactions of sound, video and body. He has been exploring the Yamaha Miburi Midi jumpsuit and its interplay with STEIM’s Image/ine software. The suit consists of flex sensors on the limbs, pressure sensor shoe inserts and handgrips. Vickery’s system has several triggering configurations, but basically uses Max/MSP (a software system for the patching together of other software components) to trigger sounds. The Image/ine software manipulates video footage in realtime, incorporating both prerecorded data and live feeds. In your sky is filled with billboards of the sky, developed for the REV festival, a dancer could manipulate both audio and video elements. Vickery has also used his system in skadada’s dance work Scan (2002) with images supplied by Tissue Culture and Art (Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary), audio samples by John Patterson with the choreography of John Burtt and Katie Lavers.

The integration of video and sound in realtime is also the preoccupation of Tesseract Research Laboratories, producers of Video Combustion, a large scale collaboration between VJs, sound artists and performers to create an immersive, improvisational multimedia environment. (RT50). Tesseract refer to the feedback loop of technology and artistic exploration: “We are investigating our areas of interest [live group performance and video jamming] whilst developing and exploring the technology to do so, which actually further develops our knowledge of the artistic preoccupations.” They have developed a network of hardware including “obsolete broadcast video matrix switchers and modified video mixers” and software which includes “group communication tools for developers and performers, and routing tools for live distribution of video and audio.”

The development of of the Max/MSP environment which Knowles describes as “a programming environment which allows the user to build instruments for processing audio, video and MIDI signals” along with other software such as nato 0.55+ and Jitter has allowed “image processing [to] be intimately connected to the audio processing by data flows from one to the other.” This can be seen in the work of Wade Marynowsky aka Spanky and also lalila.net who explored the live video/sound/performance matrix in Cycling Hildegarde as part of their residency at Performance Space in August this year. Knowles also sees the use of gaming tools—“using environments designed for games authoring and hacking them to make real time instruments”—as another avenue for development.

In the area of sound design in performance, one of the most innovative artists is Garry Bradbury. His sound scores for works such as Nikki Heywood’s Burn Sonata and Inland Sea seem to exist in their own space and yet also intersect, drive and support the performance. Most recently his massive and monstrous sound design for Benjamin Winspear’s Macbeth (Sydney Theatre Company) was for me the core of the work.

Bradbury says, “Though I have a love/hate relationship happening with my PC (or rather a kind of nauseating co-dependence), I find myself increasingly drawn to older technologies (I always have), player piano (new work in progress), turntables (ongoing Sanity Clause project with Ian Andrews), percussion (I feel like hitting something), and voice (I’m singing again after 15 years, as well as doing lots of text cut up).” Bradbury uses styles and technologies developed for live ‘pure’ audio to create interactive or relational sound scores for performance. Other sound artists working with performance are Liberty Kerr and Barbara Clare (magnusmusic), Darrin Verhagen and Boo Chapple. Tasmania-based sound designer Chapple, who is presently working on is theatre ltd’s White Trash Medium Rare, says of the feedback loop between technology and artistic concept: “New technologies in sound allow an exploration of sonic elements that do not exist outside of these technologies, thus, determining the world within which concepts, ideas and preoccupations can develop.”

Sounds and…well, sound

Mitchell Whitelaw calls it “inframedia audio”, a new zone in media space where sound is a “media artefact.” It is the manipulation of emissions of electronic signals—sometimes digital in origin but not always—actively avoiding “content” and leaning towards processes and improvisation. (Whitelaw, “Inframedia Audio”, ArtLink Vo1 21#3, 2001). In Sydney this kind of thinking is exemplified by impermanent.audio. Caleb K, producer of impermament. audio’s monthly evening of experimental audio moments defines it by what it’s not: “not beats…not background music…not dance music…it’s not multimedia…not narrative. It’s not very often loud.” The performance of this form creates “a sound object rather than a physical object—but the sound is physical itself—so we’ve still got a physicality going on, but instead of 100% relying on our eyes we let our ears to do it.”

Many artists are using computer-based digital technologies, like d.Haines, Vicki Browne, and Ai Yamamoto, but many others are resisting the upgrade trajectory or they’re rediscovering older technologies. Jasmine Guffond, half of Minit with Torben Tilly, has been led into sound art by her desire to explore “less conventional or traditional musical forms, structures, sounds and instrumentation. Our music-making process has involved a very limited range of technologies over the last 5 years which has allowed us to focus on certain ideas and musical forms without getting too distracted by new technology for technology’s sake.” Using a sampler, mixing desk and FX pedals, Minit create beautiful undulating soundscapes that incrementally shift through textures and spatial orientations. At the extreme end of the scale is Peter Blamey who requires only a mixing desk which he patches so it generates the sound he then sculpts. Philip Samartzis suggests that artists are rediscovering and reconfiguring these technologies “because of a different perceptual process, a different way of listening” that has developed from our new media immersions.

This trend is also apparent at Small Black Box, a monthly sound event that takes place at Metro Arts in Brisbane. Greg Jenkins, sound artist in endophonic and one of the organisers of the event (along with Andrew Kettle and Scott Sinclair) says: “There’s a sort of hand-tooled aesthetic behind SBB, a lot of it’s down and dirty.” But there is also a mix between the use of older and cutting edge technology. On the same evening in June they had Liv Bennett who used 1/4 inch tape machines playing loops of varying lengths, some reaching into the audience, and then Adam Donovan who used hi-quality audio output devices and the German made visual tracking software eyecon to control the audio. Jenkins says of his own methodology “I deliberately limit what I use…because I simply don’t have enough time to learn everything that is out there and learn it to such an extent that I can be usefully creative with it.” Jenkins sees that, between Small Black Box and Lawrence English’s regular sound event fabrique at the Brisbane Powerhouse, the sound scene is thriving in Brisbane.

Sending sounds

Primarily, this survey has been about the influence of new media technology on the production of sound and music. Delivery and distribution have also been incredibly influenced by new media developments. MP3 technologies and streaming have revolutionised the global distribution of audio art and created communities across virtual borders. www.laudible.net and radioqualia have made Australian sound art available to a global community. South Australian artist eyespine has a complete net-based approach ranging from methods of delivery, streaming MP3s and access to hardcopy ordering, to the creation of a Shockwave-based interactive online mixing system (and he is one of many taking this approach). And of course traditional radio, such as ABC’s The Listening Room cannot be ignored as an important supporter, commissioner and disseminator of new media-based audio arts, supporting the likes of Colin Black, Sophea Lerner and Robert Iolini.

When I commenced the research for this article, I unwittingly set up a determinism/voluntarism polarity which, as with most dichotomies, has proven itself too inflexible to be of value. The reality is that people will continue to hunt for their sonic substances in the areas that are available to them, some old, some new. Perhaps it is best to approach new media with Heidegger’s view of technology—“not as a tool or machine, but rather a process, a dynamic of ‘revealing’.” The older media supply the foundations for the new and the new creates perceptual shifts and ways of reconfiguring the old. And the loop goes on…

Gail Priest is a sound designer for performance. In 2001/2 she was artist in residence at ABC Radio Performance & Features creating Music Theatre for Radio.

New Media Scan 2002

This edition of RealTime is mostly devoted to our annual survey of new media and multimedia arts. While this encompasses a wealth of recent and forthcoming work in all artforms it puts page space at a premium. Consequently you’ll need to turn to the web to find a number of reviews of recent shows (see page 47). You’ll also find in this edition our Prizes & Projections preview of the annual film industry Emirates AFI Awards.

More new media arts & issues in RT 52

New Media Scan 2002 flows over into the next edition of RealTime with Part 2 of both our new media performance survey and Christine Nicholls’ overview of the Indigenous new media arts scene. In a significant development RealTime will host fibreculture’s 2002 publication of essays and reviews. Last year they produced an impressive book, this year there’ll be a 24 page fibreculture insert in RT 52 (December-January). A limited run, stand-alone edition will be launched a few weeks before at fibreculture’s annual national conference at Sydney’s MCA (see page 18).

Dancing on a knife edge

The results of the last funding round of the Dance Board of the Australia Council confirmed just how appalling the situation has become for the small to medium dance sector, not least in New South Wales. Triennial funding has been put on hold as the Board meets to work out how to handle what is clearly a crisis. Meanwhile the report from Rupert Myer on the Federal Government’s inquiry into the contemporary visual arts has finally been released, recommending a raft of proposals including an additional $15m a year for artist grants and infrastructure support as well as tax concessions. The latter could have ramifications for all the arts. Now the hard work really begins in persuading the Federal Government and the States through the Cultural Ministers Council (and presumably in partnership with the Australia Council) to agree to the proposals, or to see if they realistically add up to sufficient support. We’ll look at the issues and developments in RT 52. KG

The great thing about new media art is the way in which it can draw on a whole range of inputs and sensibilities from multiple areas, resulting in works that can’t easily be broken down into one medium. This should produce weird, idiosyncratic and hard to define hybrids. However what seems be happening is that new media artists are producing work with themes that can be too easily categorised, compartmentalised and pigeon-holed, the inverse of much of the promise of new media arts as a shape shifting medium of hybridity.

Bio-technology, artificial life, the impact of technology on nature, surveillance, genetics, the nexus of science and art etc etc… Such topics are probably music to funding body ears and you can bet the next curated new media event you attend will have some poetic piece about the impact of technology on nature (yawn). While there is no doubt some interesting work is being done in these areas, I for one would genuinely like to see some new themes emerge in new media art beyond well established agendas.

Revenge of the nerds

There was a time in the mid 80s when artists fanatically quoted lots of French theory, mostly Baudrillard and the hyper-real. This was more than just art, it was art informed by the discourse of contemporary critical thought and Postmodernism. These days new media artists often talk about their work like those artists talked about theory, badging and validating what they do with cultural and social value with one word—science. It’s more than just art, it’s all about the convergence of art and science. I am all for taking new media into new and interesting terrain, but at times it seems that art-science collaborations are the only game in town (think, ConVerge and BEAP as recent examples. See pages Rackham and Jones).

Sure there’s a lot of weird shit going on in the real world of bio-technology like cloning and gene therapy, but real life is a hell of a lot freakier than most things new media artists come up with. When Stelarc grows some new internal organs from pig tissue, give me a call.

The nexus of art and science reaches its extreme in Artificial Life, so much of which takes itself far too literally. The notion of creating ‘worlds’ is always a bit problematic. All this mimicking of life-like behaviour hurts my brain. I failed science and maths at school so maybe I am missing something here. If you’re going to create life, don’t just illustrate reality as a technical demonstration or an illustration of your programming skills. Do something interesting with the concept. After all, reality is cheap real estate, it’s everywhere.

A safe bet

Recently I attended ACMI’s (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) presentation of visiting US artists Amy Youngs and Ken Rinaldo. Some of the work was really playful and interpreted Artificial Life in unusual and interesting ways. But then it hit me as their presentation unfolded, new media art often seems to implicitly be about informing and educating its audience of the important ‘issues’ at stake. This pedagogical tendency embraces the idea that art must be responsible and all about producing objects of virtue, from Bill Viola to local artists like Patricia Piccinini, or in critic Dave Hickey’s words, “Art that is good for you” (Air guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, Distributed Art Publishers, 1997).

After reading a bunch of statements by new media artists waxing lyrical my brain starts to hurt again. The argument that themes of biotechnology, synthetic nature, genetics etc are culturally significant and compelling ones is not the problem. What worries me is that new media artists are using basically prefabricated and already culturally validated themes to begin with, in other words, safe bets. It’s an exciting time for new media art, it can redefine the game, once it can get beyond the conventional modes of thinking about the inherent ‘goodness’ of art and realise that art doesn’t have to pay lip service to the ‘important issues’ or be socially redeeming to be interesting.

Please don’t call me a new media artist

These days the visual art crowd are picking up all manner of technology (that’s if they can get gallery assistants to turn on the power). The recent Biennale of Sydney had a variety of interesting works that could loosely be described as new media. They didn’t all plug into a wall, but many resulted from collaborative processes and often straddled myriad media forms, including digital animation, plasma screens and CD-ROM. Many would argue this is not ‘true’ new media, as it doesn’t connect with current discourses and research areas. So what? The looser and more open the definition of new media art the better.

New media art at various international institutions has finally come into its own within the parameters of the visual arts: San Francisco’s MOMA with its 101010 Art in Technological Times show of web work; the Whitney Biennial has a Net Art section and web art featured at the last Venice Biennale.

Meanwhile much new media art is locked into a very specific way of thinking about technology, art and its cultural value. This is odd for an area that is still developing. Exhibitions curated specifically around new media tend to ghettoise artists and artforms. Favourite international new media art events like Ars Electronica, ISEA and Siggraph embody the problem. Having participated in some of these events in the past, I am simply not interested in presenting work in such a narrow context. There’s also a conservative sensibility at such events which sees artists as more interested in the advances in technology than in advances in art (they are not the same thing).

Something wicked

Artists taking new media arts into exciting dimensions and beyond familiar territory include Vanessa Sowerwine with her installation Play with me (Next Wave, CCP). The work is an interactive video installation where the user, sitting inside a cubby house, controls the actions of an animated child. Adult bodies hunch over a screen and make the kid drink Drano or provoke a hissy when choosing the wrong response. With its freaky overtones, the user becomes implicated in the actions of the child. It is a refreshing angle on interactive art, perhaps a perverse and screwed up parody of Artificial Life.

US artist Charlie White’s highly memorable and totally mutant, digitally composited photographs depicting a haggard alien crashing parties in suburbia, could also be seen as a trashy version of Artificial Life, but with none of the baggage that is often associated with the area. While not strictly new media, but worth mentioning here, is Austrian experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold, known for his hyper-edited films such as Alone: Life wastes Andy Hardy (1998). Arnold’s work-in-progress involves developing software to erase actors from famous movies scenes, the inverse of the Hollywood wet dream of bringing actors back from the dead. Arnold plans to kill ‘em off once and for all.

With the Australian Centre for the Moving Image about to open in Melbourne, it’s a great time for the media arts in Australia. Hopefully ACMI can function as a showcase for this kind of work. While ACMI have clearly spent lots of money to keep the interior designers happy, I hope it has the vision to present not only the prestigious international movers and shakers, but also work that doesn’t easily slot into curatorial agendas—work that is problematic and hard to characterise; that’s new media art for me.

The world wide web, digital and other new technologies have the capacity to transform the visual arts and artistic practice on a global scale. This has already begun happening in this country and in other parts of the world. Consider Patricia Piccinini’s high profile in the international art world on the basis of her digitally modified creature-compositions. There is a rapidly growing literature responding to the utilization of new technologies in contemporary artistic practice, most of which enthusiastically embraces this phenomenon. Much of what is written borders upon evangelical in tone.

Like the globalization of capital, with which these new media are imbricated, technologies have the potential for positive and benign outcomes but also for less socially beneficial consequences. These new technologies certainly have the capacity to liberate—for instance, the www can inexpensively provide hitherto unknown artists with instant, large audiences for their work. Similarly, minority groups, for example Indigenous peoples all around the world, are able link up in ways that have not been possible in the past, thereby advancing their political, social and cultural agendas. But the same technology also has the capacity to facilitate theft of the intellectual property of others on an unprecedented scale. This has implications for art generally, and for Australian Indigenous art especially, because of its disproportionately high level of return to the Australian economy by comparison with other Australian art. The vulnerability of Indigenous art to copyright theft is exacerbated by the remote location of many of its practitioners.

“Borrowing” imagery from Indigenous art is not new. For years now, considerable numbers of non-Indigenous Australian visual artists, both professional and amateur, have been influenced or inspired by Indigenous Australian art, and have been incorporating Aboriginal imagery or motifs, media, colours or quasi-Aboriginal “styles” into their work. The same applies to (predominantly) non- Indigenous business people, especially those in the textile, clothing and floor covering industries. Usually the influence or appropriation stops short of the actual theft or straight-out copying of Indigenous imagery. Often the influence is as vague or generic as incorporating an Aboriginal ‘look’ into a work, by including quasi-Indigenous imagery into the designs of carpets, tiles, T-shirts or even bath mats or teatowels, resulting in an indeterminate ‘Indigenous’ influence that can not be attributed directly to any specific regional artistic tradition.

Throughout Indigenous Australia, particular designs, patterns, iconography and imagery are owned by Indigenous artists, and therefore subject to the strict rules of Indigenous intellectual copyright. Up until comparatively recently Indigenous art was considered by unscrupulous non-Indigenous business people as ripe for the pickings, and Indigenous artists had comparatively little legal recourse in the event that their sacred imagery was appropriated or stolen for commercial advantage.

Outright theft of Indigenous imagery iconography still occurs. The underlying motive for this is usually financial gain. In response to this situation, Vivien Johnson, working with a group of students of Indigenous art at Macquarie University, has assembled a website and CD-ROM broadly relating to this subject. These accompany and extend Johnson’s earlier catalogue, Copyrites: Aboriginal art in the age of reproductive technologies: Touring Exhibition 1996.

Initially one enters the House of Aboriginality online or via CD-ROM. The house has been constructed as a literal, and also in a sense, figurative domicile. One visits each of its rooms in turn (for example, the bathroom, lounge room, bedroom) encountering a plethora of Indigenous imagery and designs on bedclothes, bathroom décor, and even on objects like coasters and ashtrays, which the web design enables you to scrutinize more closely. The contents of the house exemplify the full gamut of appropriation of Indigenous imagery. The House of Aboriginality makes a powerful visual statement that strongly reinforces the pervasiveness of the practice of “borrowing” Indigenous imagery. It seems that no object is too banal, nothing inviolate, nothing that can’t be value-added via visual expressions of Indigeneity.

On the same website, there is also a good deal of hard information and excellent, accurate background material on comparatively recent court cases that have been fought and won by Indigenous artists whose imagery has been stolen and reproduced on, inter alia, banknotes, carpets and fabric. The work is educational, entertaining and really drives its point home. Vivien Johnson’s excellent research and the clarity of organization underpin the success of both website and CD-ROM. They would be particularly useful as resources to use in secondary schools as they cover a range of subjects, from the social sciences, to Legal Studies, Australian Studies and Indigenous Studies.

Indigenous Australian artists are themselves skilled practitioners of the new technologies, and now becoming increasingly comfortable working in new media. This in turn may eventually help to address the more negative practices highlighted by Vivien Johnson and her team. Artists who have been working in the area for some years now include the Warlpiri digital artist Simeon Ross Jupurrurla, Jenny Fraser, Christian Thompson, Jonathan Bottrell- Jones (who has just won a major NSW travelling grant), and Brenda L Croft. Most notable of all is the remarkable Rea, whose pioneering work in this area deserves an article of its own. Part 2 of this article (RT 52) will survey the work of these and other Indigenous new media artists.

This year, the second intensive workshop of the National Indigenous School in New Media Arts (NISNMA) is being held in Adelaide at the Ngapartji Multimedia Centre (Sept 23 – Oct 11). The school aims to provide an intensive learning environment for Australian Indigenous artists to acquire skills in new media and multimedia production, catering for a wide range of students from beginners to those with advanced skills in the new media.

In an email interview, overall organizer of the school, ANAT Director Julianne Pierce, described the long-term purpose and benefits of the projects as providing Indigenous artists with the skills to consolidate and advance their practice. By creating an environment that is responsive to artists’ needs, she says, the school will ensure that an optimal learning situation is achieved. Participants will learn skills that they will be able to develop, as well as gaining confidence in the practice of new media arts. However, the focus of the school is not only on technical skills, but also on the generation of ideas and interest in the field of new media arts.

Pierce goes on to explain that participants have quite different expectations regarding outcomes, ranging from a desire to tell Indigenous stories from a variety of global sources in innovative ways, to the telling of personal stories via emerging media forms. Some participants are motivated by the aim of networking and meeting with other Indigenous artists, or combining new media with traditional media such as printmaking and textile design.

The 3 week school covers areas including digital photography, building a website (html, Dreamweaver), graphics, video and sound for the web and webcasting. Sixteen Indigenous artists from all over Australia are participating in classes run by 5 instructors, some of whom are Indigenous, with expertise in a range of areas including Flash, computer animation and multimedia art.

It is expected that a similar school will be convened in 2 years time in Queensland. In addition, ANAT has recently embarked on a partnership with Tandanya to support new media arts practice and is looking at other potential partnerships to provide opportunities for professional development and for the creation of new work in what is an exciting new way of ensuring the continuity of the world’s oldest artistic tradition.

Vivien Johnson, The House of Aboriginality CD-ROM; Copyrites: Aboriginal art in the age of reproductive technologies: Touring Exhibition 1996, Catalogue National Indigenous Arts Advocacy Association and Macquarie University, Sydney.

I like the internet. I think Graham Meikle likes it too, perhaps for similar reasons: we can explore our favourite mudwrestling webcam sites, meet other fans, keep in touch. Graham’s position as author and mine as reviewer also imply a healthy respect for the expanded research methods the net allows, the online communities we can be part of, the e-mailing of stories at the last minute. This shared respect, I suspect, finds us both very curious about how the wrestling of public and private interests will shape the internet’s development.

Imagining Graham’s desk

Pens, paper, a Compaq (?) laptop, dictionary, thesaurus and a gleaming crystal ball sitting to one side into which Graham gazes periodically with an optimistic pragmatism, rather than tech-utopian drool. Above the desk a mirror—reflecting bookshelves creak-heavy with politics, postmodernism and the entire cyberculture canon. And a good deal of print-outs, because net-dissectors still like to underline words with a pen. From this very desk, Graham has conveniently chronicled the most famous political uses of the net in recent years, pored over interviews with many key outspoken online activists and authors, grouped the different shapes of net activism into useful categories, and offered some perspectives on ways the internet may continue to be developed in an open form. I’m thinking it’s a nice old wood.

Imagining Graham’s Internet

Some of its key features include openness, resource sharing, communication, conversation and collaboration. While these are features celebrated by the early digerati such as Howard Rheingold and John Barlow, Graham is careful to debunk ‘cyberhype’ during a quick tour of the net’s early years and evangelists. He maybe spends a little too much time translating the hyperbole around the net as ‘market boosterism’, but is sharper in critiquing ‘interactivity.’ Usefully, he outlines transmissional, registrational, consultational and conversational forms of interactivity, and proposes that Tim Berners Lee’s ‘intercreativity’—solving problems together—as a better challenge to aspire to. Throughout the book, an open, conversational, intercreative internet is described as a Version 1.0 internet. A Version 2.0 internet, Graham proposes, is one where we move to the closed system preferred by entrenched corporate interests, a broadcast rather than many-to-many model. By the way, the book is riddled with characters doing their utmost to steer us away from a version 2.0 internet; I fancy Graham’s down with numero uno.

Some of The Riddlers

An English couple being taken to court by McDonalds, launched the mcspotlight.org website in 1996. Dragged through the British legal system for distributing a critiquing pamphlet, they found with a website a way to match their wits rather than budget with the legal muscle of a multinational food giant. In subsequent years, millions of visitors viewed the original pamphlet and much supporting material, but as Graham reveals, it was the astute site development and understanding of online community and information navigation which made mcspotlight one of the more successful online political campaigns.

Future Active similarly traces many popular political campaigns such as the B92 radio station’s celebrated use of online radio to spread news during the Bosnian war. Much of the work is in documenting what happened as events unfolded and how the net was used, but this is supplemented with plenty of insightful quotes from both campaign organisers and relevant theorists. Graham diverges from the media theory pack a little though, by exploring ways some nastier groups have used the net.

Web Nasties

While careful to point out he doesn’t endorse, merely analyses, the net strategies of deathnet, godhatesfags.com and the North American Man Boy Love Association, I don’t understand why Graham didn’t use the same sort of caution in detailing his flirtations with the Labor Party, Liberal Party and One Nation websites. To his credit, he thoroughly exposes the major parties’ lack of engagement with their constituents online, speculating that it’s not that the major parties don’t get it—but that they don’t want it. Prefer they the broadcast or Version 2.0 model rather than a community-based model with lack of hierarchy or control. In contrast the web-Hansonites are shown to have embraced and harnessed the qualities of the internet effectively. Although One Nation sitemaster Scott Balson’s claim that “Hanson was the first cyber-politician on the internet,” is slightly dubious, their integration of e-mail lists and bulletin boards was apparently commendable.

Other Commendables

Veering into newer political territory, one of the book’s better sections links together the ‘free software’ movement, the growth of the indymedia online publishing centres, globalisation, and the role of 2 Sydneysiders in making this happen—Matthew Arnison on code and Gabrielle Kuiper. The free software and open publishing movements are becoming increasingly influential in many spheres and their development is well described here. With his encouraging tone and enthusiasm for the topic however, some chances for exploring the issues and difficulties currently being experienced by open publishers have been missed. This is my only problem too with the near closing pieces on ‘culture jamming’ and ‘tactical media.’ Fantastic coverage of interesting projects, people and events online, but scarcer on-the-ground is any critique of the limitations of their approaches.

The book for you?

Depends. Maybe you’re a sociology, communications, cultural studies, art or media theory student looking for a good, brisk overview of recent online skirmishes, blossomings, battles? Perhaps you’re interested in understanding more about our transforming society and ways the net is being tactically used? Maybe you don’t share the same bookmarks as frequent indymedia visitors, or the nettime/fibreculture/rhizome etc mailing list members?

For me?

I liked it, although much of the terrain was familiar. Wished occasionally for more criticisms of people being celebrated, but admired the collation, the crisp, want-to-communicate tone. A broader ‘media activism and the internet’ might have covered more artistic strategies online, MP3s and more software development. Like Naomi Klein’s No Logo, this is a fine book which may end up being in the right place at the right time.

Graham Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet , Pluto Press, Australia, 2002.

Michael Goldberg, Auriferous – The Gold Project, 2001, Bathurst Regional Gallery

By their very nature, 2 new shows at Sydney’s Artspace tell us that something strange is going on in the world of art. Distributive justice (also showing at Documenta11 in Germany) and catchafalling knife.com take us well outside the parameters of our usual gallery experiences, even in these halcyon new media days. In one the gallery-goer becomes a participant in an international polling of national attitudes to social justice, in the other we witness a share market trader-cum-artist gambling $50,000 of his anonymous sponsors’ very real money on Newscorp shares for 3 weeks. The seriousness of both works is immediately evident, but a sense of playfulness, of art cogently querying opinion and money making pervades. Both can be experienced in situ or online, though it’s the gallery which provides something more substantial, but is it art?

Distributive justice

I met the Croation artist Andreja Kuluncic, creator of Distributive justice, just before her show opened here. The project is multimedia and multidisciplinary. Kuluncic says that “it lives on the internet but comes into direct contact with people during big exhibitions like Documenta.” She calls the work “a social laboratory where the audience actively influence the content, the duration and the results of the project.” The open installation is an inviting forum—the curve of the furniture provides desktop space and room to sit at computers (where you play games) and monitors (watching interviewees from other showings talk about their share of ‘the common good’) or to read books, documents or a social economy map or to simply fill in questionnaires, to meet other people and the human guides to the work. “It’s not just a mouse and keyboard show, besides the galleries still do not accept virtual arts as true value…Web art pieces still encounter the resistance of curators.”

The show’s catalogue describes the virtual space of the work as an internet game “in which participants…freely distribute material and non-material goods, building a society that undergoes dynamic changes; several types of society emerge as a result.” The combination of online game, questionnaire results, recorded interviews, a newsletter, associated lectures and forums with philosophers and sociologists involved in the project, and statistical analyses, add up to an intriguing survey of intuitive and objective responses to the notion of social justice and its distribution in a nation. All of this is integrated on the web in a permanently open forum.

I ask Kuluncic about her artistic input into the work. “I am managing the project like a visual artist, trying to create the platform or the frame for other people to join. There are now around 15 people working with me: 7 people more or less continuously, though not every day—2 philosophers, a sociologist, web designers and a programmer. I talk with the designers…Sometimes it’s not easy, you have to fit the different ideas in. It’s like working as a film director. The concept is not so much visual as that art can open up barriers and make a good platform for discussion, to be somehow much more alive, near to real problems and life.”

Kuluncic describes the work’s travels: “The work has been to the Torino Biennale, Documenta and is on its way to Innsbruck (Austria), Berlin, and Minneapolis (Walker Museum), sometimes all of it, sometimes as in Sydney, just 2 or 3 parts. In the US I would like to add a new part. I don’t know what it is yet, something about how the US approaches global distribution. They have a big share in it compared with us in Croatia with 4 million people.”

Has the work been shown in Croatia? “We did the initial surveys and discussions there but the finished work will go to Croatia later. That’s the idea, the Croatians will be able to see the different models of social justice. This piece comes from Eastern Europe. My grandmother was born in a kingdom, then there was socialism under Tito, there was a war and now we have this wild capitalism…It’s not clear what kind of capitalism we are going to have. We want to raise this question to the people because they still don’t take enough part in political life. In socialism someone would care about everything for you, your flat, your education. Now it’s my flat, my education…but it’s not easy to resource and resolve this.” One thing that pleases Kuluncic is the arts funding from the Croation government and the city of Zagreb that has allowed a provocative work like Distributive justice to be realised, along with the international galleries and biennales showing it.

Distributive justice has the potential for provocation, but what kind? In the catalogue, Nevena Tudor comments: “There’s no so-called direct action that results in something visible, aggressive. It’s about the use of intellectual activism, establishing a network of relations to function as a platform every act can rely upon…The action is without provocation, the action that actually means contemplation: gaining space for contemplation.”

catchafallingknife.com

Michael Goldberg, Auriferous – The Gold Project, 2001, Bathurst Regional Gallery

Michael Goldberg is a Sydney-based artist and a former share market day trader who says, “I see stock as a living, breathing organism.” What grabbed you? I ask. “Greed!” he jokes. When did it start? “I was sucked in by the Telstra sales share and was a day trader for a while. I enjoyed the click of the button, the knife edge.” Goldberg researched candlestick charting which was originally created to monitor stock (“Rene Rivkin thinks it’s a joke”) and thought it looked very much like art making.

As for his role in his daily dealings and his appearance at Artspace, he is emphatic: “I am not being a stock trader. I’m playing one. I’m going to work like a day trader for 3 weeks at Artspace.” He adds, “I am not a performance artist.”

Of course, performance artists are usually themselves. Goldberg will be himself. Performance artists work in real time, and often see the sustained duration of that time as significant. Goldberg will respond to market movements, trading his sponsors’ $50,000 in Newscorp shares for 3 weeks. If it was his money the performance artist label might fit—the whole event could turn into a financially self-lacerating misadventure. Or it might turn a profit for his anonymous backers. “Catching a falling knife” is stock trader jargon for taking especially risky trades.

Goldberg initially put the idea out on the web, provoking responses like “You’re an artist, you’re mad”, until people realised he was serious. His backers declared a long held interest in being patrons of art. But, they asked, what are your skills as a trader? To prove himself he had to make some convincing market predictions. He did. The anonymous syndicate came good with the money. Goldberg himself will not make money out of the performance, which is the way he wants it. Australia Council funding will look after installation and other costs (he usually teaches at the Sydney College of Arts).

The installation at Artspace will be, he says, “virtual site specific, taking place in the cyber world of the stock market.” His focus will be on Newscorp shares only, “riding the stock like a horse. It’s a trading project, not investment. It’s very short term, minute by minute, In 2 to 5 minutes you can buy big chunks of Newscorp at any time, play it up or down. It demands absolute concentration…80% of share traders don’t make any money.”

Goldberg says he will become “an agent of risk and reward; my investors know the odds, they’re big gamblers who can afford it. The added value for them is the involvement in the arts.” He will report to them every day, which involves “a stressful accounting procedure, with public access via the project website.” In Artspace you’ll be able to see him at work (he’ll commute from home) in the mornings, trading (in the afternoons he will have his portable electronic trading system with him, clipped into his belt), posting charts, watching the Bloomberg channel.

I ask what if something major happens, a new Gulf War? Goldberg retorts, “People won on 9/11, bet on the stock going down.” At the time he posted a message suggesting that these winners donate some of their earnings to Red Cross.

As for art, “There’s an aesthetic in the markets, otherwise there is no point in doing this. Art has to emerge as in the Deleuzian rhizome…like an organism.” The candlestick chart patterns will build up. The Japanese names for the movements are lyrical and translate, for example, as ‘paper umbrella’ and ‘dragonfly’. “Each pattern represents a probability—it feels analogous to martial arts, where you look at the probability of moves and move with them.”

And, yes, Goldberg will be available to engage with the public, which reminds him of his last installation where he monitored gold share movements (there’s an open cut gold mine outside the city and the show at Bathurst Regional Gallery was part of the Auriferous project). He had to put up a disclaimer saying that he couldn’t offer investment advice. For that installation Goldberg commuted daily from Sydney, stopping off at the Stock Exchange. He then travelled by small aeroplane to Bathurst to his scaffolding roost in the gallery. There he was surrounded by mats he could fall onto if there was a big dip in the market. In this work he saw his art as portrayal of the “relocation of the value of gold from the dusty hinterland to the stock exchange.” The difference this time, he says, is that he’s very anxious, working with real money.

Distributive justice, Andrja Kuluncic and collaborators, Sept 19-Oct 12, www.distributive-justice.com; catchafallingknife.com, Michael Goldberg, Oct 17-Nov 9, www.catchafallingknife.com [expired]. Artspace, Sydney.

Simon Anders, Summer Holiday, shortlisted entry to the BORDERPANIC postcard competition in association with Avant Card

Conscious of the growing involvement of artists in political protest through their art and the utilisation of conventional and digital media technologies, RealTime’s editors approached media theorist McKenzie Wark to comment on where he sees Tactical Media fitting in the bigger picture of power and media.

For there to be such a thing as tactical media implies that there are also strategic and logistic media. These terms go together, and describe 3 different levels at which contestation can take place. If the tactical is local and contingent, the strategic involves planning and coordination. The logistic would then refer to systematic, global and long range organisations of forces.

Paul Virilio argues that in military affairs conflict has passed from dominance of the tactical to the strategic and on to the logistic. These days the whole planet is organised on the basis of a logistical ordering of production and communication. The casual way in which a war against Iraq can be talked up on the global stage, in a way convenient for the Republican Party in the United States in an election year, points to the underlying logistical militarisation of the whole of society. It is simply taken for granted that there is a force ever at the ready.

As Friedrich Kittler argues, the design and layout of the silicon chip bears the imprint of its military origins. The logistical principles of organisation can be found just as readily in the communication and media spinoffs from military organisation as in the war machine per se. We might speak of this society as a military entertainment complex, in which the same logistics apply to the traversing of the sky by bombs and by data.

The principles of this logistics are not complex, although their effects may be. Information has, since the telegraph, moved faster than people or things. The telephone, television, telecommunications, not to mention the radio, the internet and the cellphone, are all part of the unfolding of the key logistical principle–telesthesia, or perception at a distance.

Telesthesia makes it possible for information to move faster than people or things, and thus to become the means of organising the movement of people and things. This is what separates the American logistical empire of the air from its great predecesssor, the English strategic empire of the sea of the 18th century. The latter was not able to organise all that effectively at the logistical level, as it lacked the means of communication to marshal resources in depth and monitor events on a global scale in realtime.

The organisation of power is increasingly logistic, and yet the current rhetoric about alternative responses is about ‘tactical media’. This seems a strange state of affairs. Surely we should be talking about strategic media, even logistic media. It may be somewhat self defeating to think only on one of the possible levels of organisation for counter power.

It’s worth taking a look at what the rhetoric of tactical media is meant to achieve. It has become a popular term. Ironically, it is even mobilising strategic resources. Institutions are putting resources into it, supporting the beginnings of what could be a coordinated network of resources with some depth and continuity. From talking to people at various foundations here in New York, I get the impression that Tactical Media is turning into a handy way of classifying programs of experimental media that otherwise cut across accepted categories of activity.

One of the richest sources for the rhetorics of tactical media is Geert Lovink’s new book, Dark Fiber (MIT Press). As one of the original promoters of the term, Lovink has a subtle sense of just how it can be deployed to mobilise resources. It’s interesting just how much semantic freight Lovink tries to get this term to carry. Tactical media, he writes, is to “combine radical pragmatism and media activism with pleasurable forms of nihilism.” But it is also “into questioning every single aspect of life, with ‘the most radical gesture’.”

Tactical media plays with “the ambiguity of more or less isolated groups or individuals, caught in the liberal-democratic consensus, working outside the safety of the Party or Movement, in a multi-disciplinary environment full of mixed backgrounds and expectations.” It is also “about the art of getting access, hacking the power and disappearing at the right moment.” While “tactical media are opposition channels, finding their way to break out of the subcultural ghetto” it is also “a deliberately slippery term, a tool for creating ‘temporary consensus zones’ based on unexpected alliances.”

“What counts” with tactical media “are temporary connections between old and new, practice and theory, alternative and mainstream.” But it is also “a question of scale. How does a phrase on a wall turn into a global revolt?” Tactical media may intervene within a movement, but it may also link a movement to social groups. Or perhaps it is even a “virtual movement”, with no existence outside of its network expression. Then again, “perhaps we are just a diverse collection of weirdos, off topic by nature.”

What I find interesting about this collection of quotes from Dark Fiber is that the most tactical thing about tactical media is the rhetorical tactic of calling it tactical. It’s a way of short-circuiting the theoretical debates of the 70s and 80s, which put enormous emphasis on getting the theory of representation aspect of alternative media together, to the point that the practice of creating media was often strangled at birth by wranglings over the signifier.

Tactical media is a rhetoric for bypassing the theory of representation, if only to sneak up on it from behind. By claiming no strategic leverage for a particular subject doing the representing, or a certain methodology for doing the representing, or even any particular veracity for the representation, tactical media unblocks the flow of practice. But it does so at the expense, not so much of issues of representational strategy, as issues of communicational logistics.

At best, we could think of tactical media as a tactic of compromise on representation. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Try lots of different tactics. Borrow from art history, from media theory, think of it as a temporary activity which need not make overarching claims or defend its legitimacy. See what works. But the unresolved problem is how to ‘resource’ such a field of practice. How are resources to be allocated? How are networks to be sustained?

For all their diversity, rhetorics of tactical media tend to assume much the same analysis of the overall situation of what I am calling the military entertainment complex. There’s a background image of it as monolithic and pervasive. The tactical appeals as a way of getting into the cracks. The tactical is a ‘rhizome’, a ‘temporary autonomous zone’, an instance of the ‘multitude’. In other words, it seems to fit with the popular theories of the day.

The problem is that the popular theories of the day are not media theories. A media practice is being deduced from theories that for all their sophistication in other respects, tend to have somewhat simplistic views of media. Worse, they tend to see media as a mere add-on, rather than as a central object of concern. If we are indeed living in the shadow of the military entertainment complex, then the technics and techniques of telesthesia need to be organising principle of the theory.

I am not suggesting, however, that we need to get the theory right before anybody starts trying to make media. That would be to return to the old arguments about ‘representation’ that still haunt the more atavistic corners of the cultural studies establishment. Rather, it’s a question of doing theory and practice together. Perhaps we need tactical theories to go with the tactical media practices. Tactical media may derive some of its energy from simplistic theories of media, but it gets a lot more from immersion in issues, in working with technologies, in creating competences and skills among people, and so on. It’s a question of turning theoretical attention toward what tactical media workers are doing. An excellent example would be Graham Meikle’s new book, Future Active (Pluto Press), which does exactly that.

Some may object that in even speaking of media in these terms, I am buying into a militarised rhetoric. (I remember a book reviewer who objected to my use of the terms ‘culture wars’ and declared an intention to sit those wars out in the coffee shop.) The objection has some force. However, I don’t think one can so easily exempt oneself from what may be a systematic mobilisation of forces. I have certainly been more struck by this since moving to the United States. Even if one wanted to work in a way that refused the rhetorics and practices of conflict, one would need to think through just how such a practice might work in a militarised environment.

Tactical media has been a productive rhetoric, stimulating a lot of interesting new work. But like all rhetorics, eventually its coherence will blur, its energy will dissipate. There’s a job to do to make sure that it leaves something behind, in the archive, embedded in institutions, for those who come after.

Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, The MIT Press, 2002

The first Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP), directed by Paul Thomas, had an ambitious multi-threaded program encompassing 3 exhibitions, along with several conferences, forums and symposiums, seeking to both present electronic artworks and investigate their theoretical and philosophical aspects.

BEAP’s themes, including biotechnology, consciousness, locality, virtual reality, and alternate and experimental modes of projection sparked debate, with many artists and theorists at the CAiiA-STAR Consciousness Reframed Conference focusing on notions of reality and how interacting with electronic arts alters consciousness. But what does this actually mean in practice? Immersion, curated by Christopher Malcolm at the John Curtin Gallery, responds by showcasing electronic installations from both Australian artists and Internationals (mostly associated with CAiiA) whose practice deals with interaction, artificial intelligence, portals and alter-realties.

The main gallery was dominated by the elegantly simple Zero@Wavefunction: nanodreams and nitemares, a collaboration between Victoria Vesna and nanoscientist Jim Gimzewski (both USA). The artwork’s interactivity is based on the way a nanoscientist manipulates an individual molecule billions of times smaller than common human scale but projected on a massive scale. The viewer stands in front of a tonal projection casting a larger than life shadow which activates the software nano-molecules or buckyballs. These respond via sensors to the movement of your shadow, changing shape and direction so that you can manipulate the molecule through the interface of your body. The resultant human interaction is incredible: normally staid audiences lose their self-consciousness and jump, dance, and move their arms and bodies to shift and alter the projections in a truly immersive virtual shadow play.

On the opposite end of the scale of ethereality is Ken Rinaldo’s Autopoiesis where we are spatially engaged by 10 giant metallic and vine branch robotic arms or tentacles suspended from the ceiling, moving in response to gallery viewers and each other’s movements. The artwork/organism modifies its behaviour over time. It’s silent when the gallery is empty, however when one enters, the arms jump into action like synchronised swimmers, or Star Trek borgs communicating with each other via audible telephone tones. Rinaldo’s work also places our bodies in dialogue with what seems to be alien intelligence—bringing into focus the symbiotic relationship between biology and technology.

Nigel Helyer injected some contemporary political content with his subtly minimal sound installation Seed. The gallery audience utilises headphones attached to land mine detectors to hear the exoticised Arabic music emitted from small mines placed on mini Persian carpets. Other Australian works included Chromeskin, the result of a 3-year collaboration between west coast artists Richie Kuhaupt and Geoffrey Drake-Brockman, and Lynne Sanderson’s Somnolent Fantasies. Stelarc was well represented, from documentation of his 1970s skin piercing performances through to his current technologically augmented practice, with the sculptural metallic Exoskeletons of his performances on display—works that make it obvious that electronic arts have antecedents in performative art practice.

Skylab was another collaborative work, a 3D video installation by Biennale advisor David Carson with 3-D video artist Brian McClave (UK) and George Millward, a UK based atmospheric physicist and experimental electronic musician. Dealing with regional issues, it was viewed through 3D glasses, evoking a cosy retro cinematic feeling. The large-scale back projection created a mesmerising Turell-like space, where image and text free-floated with astronauts, combining NASA footage with local media snippets detailing the fear of space junk falling onto Perth.

Even more locally based was Screen, an exhibition of WA artists curated by Pauline Williams situated over 6 locations across the city, as well as tucked into a long corridor at John Curtin Gallery. This limited space on the way to the toilets was utilised to great advantage by Rebecca Dean, Paul Caporn and David Fussell with their blue lagoon video, performance and text installation, documenting love gone wrong against a background of idyllic palm-tree wallpaper scenes in individual toilet cubicles.

Screen also previewed the new CD-ROM (strangely categorised as an “interactive film”) from Perth producer Michelle Glaser (see RT48) and a talented production team. The psychoanalytic Dr Pancoast’s Cabinet de Curiosities has a 1920s illustrative aesthetic reminiscent of a medical textbook. The viewer is quickly engaged by exaggerated mouse movements, either pulling phallic-like objects or rubbing the mouse furiously to move to new screens, find more information, or stimulate sex organs. Via this voyeuristic screen frottage we enter the doctor’s intimate arena of naïve erotica viewed via keyholes and peep shows. His phantasies immerse his patient, a certain Miss Smith, in a carnivalesque atmosphere of exquisite caricatures and evocative soundscapes. It feels nicely naughty, and again on the collaborative thread, is best viewed with a friend.

BEAP was not without teething problems. The geography of Perth and the scattered locations of events, as well as the CAiiA conference being held in 2 venues, meant a lack of cohesion, some confusion, and hours of daily travelling for conference delegates. Additionally, the restrictive opening hours of John Curtin Gallery meant it could not accommodate the large audience for the major drawcards, Canadian Char Davies’ Osmose and Ephémère, the best-known Immersive Virtual Environment works available today. These ground breaking breath-navigated, individual head-mounted display worlds from the mid 1990s rarely travel because of the expense and the logistics of their installation. Simply extending gallery hours, or at least opening on Saturday, would have made them more accessible to both local and visiting audiences.

Then there was the glaring divide between the space and resources allocated to installation and screen-based work. BEAP Director Paul Thomas’ belief that net.art doesn’t belong in a gallery meant this medium was not well represented. This was unfortunately demonstrated by the staging of Robert Nideffer’s (USA) online proxy.com and creepycomics.com as a short series of slides projected high in a tiny room. Proxy.com (http://www.nideffer.net/homey.html) is a great online work, however it takes time for individual set-up and to acquire the skills to play. I highly recommend viewing it online as it immerses you in a world of electronic characterisations and interactions. However it was a poor curatorial choice in this context, as it does not lend itself to casual gallery viewing, which many other online interactive pieces are specifically designed to do.

Overall BEAP was a very successful event celebrating electronic arts and developments in science, technology and philosophy. It did bridge the ambiguous spaces between the audience and the artwork, providing alternate modes of interaction and engagement. As well, the focus on interaction is a timely reminder that, as galleries and museums start to acquire electronic works, they are best valued by their shared experiential potential rather than as discrete objects. By coming to terms with its staging problems and omissions BEAP in 2004 should be an event to look forward to.

What is art doing in the biology lab, the genetics lab? Bio-technology is the future and artists want a say in it. This is art as philosophy, as investigation, not as decoration. The works in BIOFEEL and the symposium The Aesthetics of Care, part of the Biennale of Eletronic Art Perth (BEAP) offered a window on the world of the laboratory, an attempt to expose contemporary social and technological issues to the public in formats that might stimulate new thinking. The artists in BIOFEEL argue that the issues exposed by genetic manipulation and animal experimentation for commercial and medical purposes are matters that should not be left solely to scientists and entrepreneurs.

BIOFEEL

BIOFEEL was curated by SymbioticA, an artist-run space in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, Unversity of Western Australia. It was established to “act as a porous membrane in which art and bio-medical sciences and technologies could mingle” (Oron Catts, BEAP Catalogue). The group researches the potential for artistic creativity in biological science, providing a laboratory environment for artistic production and offering residencies that support interdisciplinary work and critical interaction to explore and present new pathways in our biological future. Among the projects run by SymbioticA are tissue culture and bio-cybernetic studies.

You will remember the ear that seemed to be growing out of the back of a rat (Patricia Piccinini made multiple photo-composites of it accompanying photographic models). It was made through “tissue engineering” and then surgically installed into the rat where it continued to live. In tissue engineering a scaffold of degradable biopolymer is built in the shape of the organ to be engineered and then the living cells that will become that “semi-living” object are seeded into it. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr carry out their tissue engineering work in bio-reactors set up in a small laboratory in the gallery. You can look in through the small portholes of this bio-containment facility and watch the artists ‘feeding’ their cell-cultures. They presented the results of 2 works in documentation and micro-sculptural objects. Worry Dolls, “objects” to tell your worries to, are tiny constructs of bio-scaffold and surgical suture grown over with skin, muscle and bone cells. Their forms are imprecise and unique, glutinous looking and vaguely humanoid. Once grown they are fixed in formalin and shown in small sample jars, here in a hanging spiral or to be examined through a magnifying lens. Pigs Wings explores the chimera, a hybridisation of animal forms (pigs might fly!). Also grown on a bio-polymer scaffold, this time the cells (pig bone tissue) take the form of wings, bird, bat and pterosaur. Once grown, they too, are presented in documentation and as beautiful objects. I liked best the 3 paradigm versions embedded in ostrich eggshells in glowing coloured light.

MEART – the semi living artist is an internet mediated collaboration between a culture of embryonic rat neurons growing on a Multi-Electrode Array of silicon (at Georgia Tech in Atlanta) and a pair of elegant robot arms set up as a plotter in the gallery. Sites of activity in the neural array drive the pens back and forth across a sheet of paper. There was said to be a feedback from the gallery to the neurons, so that they might learn, but its operation was not at all clear. The project has obvious relevance to artificial intelligence and the development of the cyborg, but endlessly, tediously drawn lines from the robot arm plotter pens make for something like abstract expressionism done by an obsessive compulsive Jackson Pollock. The only beauty in the project was the pair of robot arms built in Perth by Phil Gamblen.

Marta de Menezes’ studio is the biological laboratory. Her work takes on the techniques of micro-biology: microscope and magnetic resonance imaging, fluorescent dye marking, and brings us inside the body or the cell. Her Functional Portraits involves a video projection of a woman’s head onto which a series of transverse functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging [fMRI] slices of her brain are superimposed. This travels from her face to the back of her head as she carries out an activity that is representative, attempting a portrait of both the person and her brain. Proteic Portrait is a digital image, printed onto canvas, of the 3-dimensional conformation of a protein formed by mapping the letters in the subject’s full name (which, being Portuguese, is very long) onto the one-letter codes for the 20 amino acids that make up proteins. 21 small pictures of the stringy stick figure-like molecular arrangements and the details of the coding make up the print.

Of the other works in BIOFEEL I will mention only Rearming the Spineless Opuntia. Amy Youngs’ wonderfully shy small cactus grows in a conical blue pot resting in a quadrapod supporting a motor and a pair of ultrasonic sensors. As you walk over to look at the piece sitting in the corner of the gallery the motor switches on and it draws up its pair of copper shells that act as an armour for this defenceless hybrid. The most accomplished work in the exhibition, and the most humorous in the way it defeats one’s attempts at close examination.

Aesthetics of Care

To what extent are the ethics of care towards humans and animals (and the planet as a whole) relevant to the kinds of problems traditionally associated with art? Here, where art is an experimental medium, exploring many areas drawn from science and new technology, why should we not engage with the problems brought to society by bio-medical technologies? If the future is to remain ours (not simply rented to us by Microsoft and Monsanto) then we must grapple with the modern eugenics of selecting special gene sequences from the supermarket shelf.

Lawyer Lori Andrews, brought from the US to give the keynote speech at Aesthetics of Care, is right on top of her material. Obviously knowledgeable about all the ethical and legal issues she gave a talk that showed a depth of knowledge of art engaging with bio-tech that put all of us to shame.

Stuart Bunt, cofounder and scientific leader of the SymbioticA group, spoke about the ethics and licensing principles used for research on live animals and enquired how appropriate the application of these principles might be to art. As he pointed out, biological materials have always been used in art but recent work using live animals raises issues of how we judge the value of the creatures and the ethics of our relations to them. KD Thornton surveyed the use of animals in art, mentioning Eduardo Kacs Alba and Chinese expatriate artist Xu Bing’s animal performance installations among other works.

Many other artists spoke but ultimately the symposium was a rather confused affair that left me feeling that, though there were some useful presentations, by the time the forum arrived in the evening so many issues had become conflated that it really ended up discussing nothing. Crossovers between questions of the ethics of animal use in laboratories and the effects of genetic manipulation on people (both directly and through food and medicine) followed upon one another willy-nilly without any attempt to draw out the serious distinctions between the two.

It’s not unusual, while strolling around the arts precinct at Southbank in Melbourne, to be assaulted by the sometimes ear-shattering efforts of aspirant divas. Many of the students from the nearby Victorian College of the Arts use the tourist precinct as a place to busk their wares in exchange for much needed public funding. However, when the sounds are found to emanate from a businessman with a briefcase attempting to shatter the various objects of Stephen Barrass’ Op Shop installation by singing in a public place, it is surprising, and delightful.

Barass’ installation is part of the Experimenta’s Prototype exhibition featuring 13 predominantly Australian, new media installations and digital works along with 6 short videos and animations displayed on a DVD jukebox. A richly eclectic collection, the exhibition itself exceeds the catergorisation implied by its title. The term ‘prototype’ seems to suggest that these works represent a mere stage along the way to a more justifiable (and scientific) ‘somewhere else.’ But this is more a function of the necessity of framing funding applications for exhibitions in terms of the greater good. As Ian Haig argues (p5), there is an inherent danger in badging and validitating new media art within the discursive frameworks of science and technology. To be fair to Experimenta, though, one can only imagine with what consternation a funding application would be met if it claimed to be setting out to exhibit works that are, as Haig prefers, quirky, perverse, weird and very good fun!

But this is precisely the territory that Prototype explores. Take, for example, the ultra-cool installation Burn Out 200—Part II The Game. Ben Morieson’s Daytona-inspired installation is the continuation of a performance project that began with a spectacular event held at Melbourne’s Docklands in which local drag racers, choreographed by the artist, created a drawing in burnt rubber that was then photographed aerially. In Part II–The Game, participants sit in a car console, familiar to anyone who has played car racing games at Timezone, and can select 3 cars with which to do burnouts. The pictures created by the user are then archived (for possible inclusion in the artist’s gallery) and are printed at the rear of the console for the user to take with them. Morieson’s argument that “the game mimics the rhetoric of super-charged emotion and spontaneity associated with modernist painting” may have been lost on the queues of young guys lining up to have a go but it certainly didn’t detract from their obvious enthusiasm for the work.

Barrass’ Op Shop was also popular. Using a microphone placed in front of a video-projected virtual environment that depicts floor to ceiling bric-a-brac, participants are invited to use their voices to smash the objects on the screen. While I was there, a small crowd formed around the microphone and there was some competition to see who could cause the most damage. Each new breakage was met with cheers and high 5s all round. You gotta admire an artwork that makes people feel like that.

Finished with testing your driving skills or your vocal range, you can try to get a couple of uppity Canadian girls to invite you to a party. Talk Nice, by Canadian artist Elizabeth Vander Zaag, uses Speak and Yell (SAY) software to analyse the pitch of user’s voice as they engage in conversation with 2 onscreen teenagers who attempt to teach the user to ‘talk nice.’ Talking nice means mimicking their Valley Girl intonations and phrasings as they run you through a series of questions like, “If you were offered drugs at a party, what would you do?” Astute 12-year-old participant Lucy was promptly issued an invitation when she responded, “I’d ask you what to do”. The invitation, however, was subsequently withdrawn when Lucy refused to ignore someone who wasn’t part of the girls’ social set. I felt like I was back in high school! Incidentally, despite numerous attempts, I never cracked it for an invite.

The in-ya-face interactions of these exhibits contrasts nicely with works like Richard Brown’s Mimetic Starfish, Chris Henschke’s Tonal Field Navigator, Jane Crappsley’s Untitled Drawing in Space and Martin Walch’s Over Written, Under Written. Each of these continues the inventive use of interface that characterises many of the exhibits in Prototype, but in subtler ways. In Mimetic Starfish, for instance, the user caresses a projected starfish controlled by neural net technology and gesture sensing, and the starfish responds to the speed and force of the user’s interaction by extending or withdrawing its tentacles. Henschke’s Tonal Field Navigator rewards the user’s intervention, through the placement of their hand in a projected hologram, with a shifting, immersive visual and aural landscape.

That’s if you can get the sound of screaming rabbits out of your ears! The squeals that emanate from Pet Sounds, by Isobel Knowles and Haima Marriot, come from 2 seemingly innocuous stuffed rabbits. As you squeeze the adorable little animals, they emit strangely synthetic yowling noises. The more you hug and squeeze them, the more they howl. It sounds as though you are causing them great anguish but it is really hard to stop doing it. It’s like being at a perverse kind of petting farm.

There are other works, like Iain Mott and Marc Raszewski’s Sound Mapping installation, Simon Norton’s Testimony: A Story Machine, Bruce Mowson’s Flesh Antenna and a number of videos and animations that deserve to be mentioned but space doesn’t permit. What should be said, however, is that it’s gratifying to see such a breadth and scope in these works, such a sense of playfulness and joyousness. If works like these can be produced and brought together in exhibitions like Prototype under a funding regime oppressed by the short sighted and utilitarian policies of the current Federal Government, then there really is hope for a vision of new media arts that is more than worthy; it’s actually fun!

Experimenta, Prototype, Interact 2002 Asia Pacific Multimedia Festival, BlackBox, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, Sept 5-21

Newcastle’s This Is Not Art festival grows in scale and reputation by the year and so does its new media-driven Electrofringe, now in its 5th year. The list of artists, workshop directors and panel participants is phenomenal and almost belies its ‘fringe’ title in sheer numbers and in the presence of many well-known practitioners side by side with seasoned rebels and activists.

“Everybody is part of a workshop or a session, it’s not just a party”, says coordinator Joni Taylor, “and the parties are where the performances mainly happen. For example, the Lalila group will work with 20 volunteers with cameras filming a car chase and will mix it live Saturday night at the Cambridge Hotel.”

Taylor is Electrofringe festival coordinator with Shannon O’Neill. Her first experience of the event was “as a punter and, seeing it as one of the most interesting things around, I’ve been involved ever since, first as a journalist covering it for publications and websites and then last year as an organiser.”

Taylor explains how it works: “This Is Not Art (TINA) is organised by Newcastle’s Octapod, which started out as a small volunteer-run community organisation, basically a hub for the local community. The TINA team organises all the festivals that are under its broader umbrella. Each festival has one to 2 managers. This is growing: Sound Summit last year had managers and state representatives who helped them to get people from different cities, and we did that this year too. The festival’s got such a good spirit that people want to come, to support it and help with PR. Each festival deals with its own funding, publicity and selection of guests but in the end it’s one big festival.

“This Is Not Art is triennially funded by the Newcastle City Council and that goes towards venues, printing the program, small administrative logistics. Each of the festivals deals with their own technical requirements, grant applications, begging, bribing…We got increased support this year from the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council, as well as funding from the Australian Film Commission’s Interactive Media Fund and FTO (NSW Film & Television Office). We’ve got no commercial sponsorship, it’s not something that quite suits the festival. It’s always had an energy about it that it’s not owned by anyone, it doesn’t have a lot of ‘branding’. We get in-kind support from local webservers who give us broadband access which is really important for our kind of festival. Metro Screen have been great too.

“Audiences have definitely been growing, and the number of different groups coming as well. When it started it was mainly underground writers and zine makers, and then the media aspect grew and that crossed over into Electrofringe and then with Sound Summit coming on board there were a lot of electronic music industry representatives and record labels. They naturally bring another huge audience just wanting to hear good music that wouldn’t be exposed anywhere else because it’s not particularly commercial. The past few years there’s been a big focus on parties at night that showcase electronic music. That brings in a whole group who wouldn’t necessarily think of going to a workshop on the possibilities of DVD surround sound, but might be there to see a great UK live electronic act, walk into a workshop and then think ‘wow!’.

“Some of the best things that happen at this festival, and I’ve seen it, are the collaborations that occur within those 5 days. People who met last year from electronic music or developing software are getting together this year to do something, producing side events. Because it is national there are some people organising events in their own city who say to people they meet, why don’t you come to my festival in Perth.

Nick Ritar and Sean Healy co-founded Electrofringe, genius, guys, a really great chance to get their friends into one place, with video, VJ-ing, sharing their knowledge. This year, for the first time, we put out a call for applications internationally and I went overseas to see work: Shannon’s house is covered with tapes and CDs.

“John Dekron will be here from Germany as well as locals like Wade Marynowsky and Lalila, who are all working in similar ways, developing video software for editing. They can improve on existing software and work with open source software as well. It’s like having a whole lot of young inventors getting together.

“I met Dekron in Berlin. He’s one of the leading video performers there (www.thisserver.de). In everything, from small underground events to really big scale Love Parade street parties, it’s the way he works with the footage to create tremendous environments. His software is amazing. He’s not like the Light Surgeons [UK, also coming] who are quite content-oriented, Dekron’s coming to share his skills with the workshop.”

Here’s how Dekron’s video masterclass is described in the Electrofringe online program: “The workshop will enlighten the way object oriented programming with Max and nato works. We will build an application that allows (you) to play back digital video material from the hard disk and output it with an attached DV camera. In the end we will be able to select clips with the number buttons, scratch the material using the keyboard (maybe the arrow buttons), adjust the playback speed and whatever comes into our mind. The developed patch will be turned into a standalone application and provided as freeware.”

Dekron writes on his website: “If the pictures react to the sound, an unsolvable (sic) symbiosis is developed which produces a new reality. Dancing figures transform into graphic items; music, images and dance become one. With the latest generation of computers realtime manipulation of videostreams is possible and offer the VJ complex control of the images.”

Taylor describes Light Surgeons (UK) as “a collective of designers, film makers and musicians who work with a variety of film, video, slides, spoken word, narratives. Their Chimera Project is based in 5 to 6 cities in collaboration with artists there producing large scale, beautiful live video performance—and no clichés. They’ll be on at the big Saturday night party. Their staging requirements are huge, with layers of gauze in front and behind. They stand in the middle working with shadows and projections…images come flying at you.”

The Light Surgeons have provided creative production and toured internationally with live music acts such as the Propeller heads, Cornershop, DJ Food and Unkle and have worked with many ground-breaking independent record labels and artists. They describe their work thus: “The material is mixed live on stage and forms an exploded, expressionistic documentary which crosses road movie with social political essay.”

Another guest, V/VM, also from the UK, “is infamous in the plagiarising, anti-copyright and cover band scene. He’s been around a lot longer than any of this ‘bastard pop’ started. He does a whole range of covers and makes them sound ugly and disturbing and he’s got a really great attitude. There’s lots of excitement about him coming. The way he works and mixes and edits is a good example of how technology works in popular culture and doesn’t fit into galleries or commercial music scenes.

“This year there’s quite a big computer game component, gam3_art, not specifically about computer games but the people who are using the same technology in their art and asking what’s a game and what is art anyway. They’ve grown up with that technology and don’t like commercial games because they’re boring and supported by big companies. So they create their own and question the whole corporate media thing.”

An enormous number of Australian artists will participate in Electrofringe’s workshops and panel sessions and performances. The program also includes a session on DIY social centres, looking at how to establish accessible community-oriented music, art and media spaces. This session involves SpaceStation, Spin N Jam, Midnight Star Squatted Social Centre, Mutagen and Turella. Taylor says these centres “use new media to set up and to claim space.”

There are many screenings of local and international video, including the all digital special Independent Exposure 2 from San Francisco, and the Mediateche showcasing of recent work by both local and international online artists. Laptop Cinema is Archimedia’s workshop/screening on the small screen. “Utilizing laptops to transform any room, dinner table, or bus ride into a microcinema, this workshop looks at the possibilities of the small screen space and guerrilla-style cinema when combined with digital media.”

There are some distinctly intriguing workshops including MELDart I [elektroXwerkshop] in which collaborations will link artists across genres. “Spoken word artists and electronic artists will thrash it out to create new works in the lead up to the elektroXwerd performance event.” DVD do’s and don’ts will show you “how to unlock the creative potentials of the DVD format for filmmakers, surround surgeons and pixel pushers.” What to make of Infinity Box Presentation? “The Infinity Box uses the relaxing FLURO FLUFFY CHAIR as its interface and is a totally self contained video instrument with its own internal rhythm generators.” Yes please.

Electrofringe is part of This Is Not Art which also includes Sound Summit, National Young Writers Festival, National Student Media Conference, Independent Radio Conference, Pacific Indymedia Conference and New Media: Critical Approaches. Newcastle, Oct 2-7 2002. www.electrofringe.net; www.thisisnotart.org

d>ART02 Exhibition

dLux media arts national touring show of short videos and 5 installation art works, d>ART02, seems to emerge from a machine-like sensibility, musing on the human condition from an electronically mediated and dispassionate distance.

Interactivity was a core principle of all but one of the installation works. Mari Velonaki’s Throw (Australia, 2002) invites viewers to pitch balls at projected images of figures that glide by like ducks in a shooting-gallery, making them flinch, bob and weave. Viewers variously display curiosity, aggressiveness, impatience and shyness, reactions that Velonaki seems to want to provoke to complete the work. Throw’s apparatus appears to be based on a movement sensor that triggers computer-programmed sequences of predetermined images, and successful interaction requires a good arm.

Another work with the capacity for viewer interaction is Sophea Lerner’s The Glass Bell (Australia, 2002), whose large glass screen, down which water cascades, shows first the façade of a house, then scenes of a pond and forest. Viewers are encouraged to touch the screen (hand towels hang nearby), which is intended to cause changes in the imagery. The opportunity for deliciously tactile engagement is teasingly offered. The work also includes photographs of the meditative patterns made by close-ups of rocks, leaves and snow, projected onto screens of white fabric. Suspended as a series of filters, the last delicate sheet barely registers the image.

Two videos requiring viewer participation were presented on sleek iMacs. Danielle Karalus’ Shocked (Australia, 2000) depicts a woman’s post-natal depression, relationship difficulties, consultations with her psychiatrist and subsequent electrotherapy. Essentially a short movie, and an absorbing and finely crafted one, it requires the viewer to activate each scene by finding and clicking on hot-spots on the screen. Rather than controlling the narrative and influencing its outcome, we’re only triggering its progression, retrieving data, and we can’t be sure we haven’t missed something. Debra Petrovitch’s CD-ROM Uncle Bill (Australia, 2000) is a black and white representation of life with a violent uncle that similarly requires the viewer to navigate the correct sequence of images. Both works offer dark histories to which we readily relate, and, like untended house-guests, we decide how deeply to pry.

Mathias Antlfinger and Ute Hoerner’s l’aprés midi d’un avatar (Germany, 2001) is the only installation that doesn’t need physical intervention. A large screen depicts 2 computer-generated figures walking and conversing in a barren landscape, independent of any operator and oblivious to viewers. This repeating sequence becomes sterile and disengaging, a feeling enhanced by having to eavesdrop on their babble via headphones. These escaped, life-size avatars satirise both human behaviour and their more biddable electronic brethren.

Interactivity is not new. Duchamp’s 1920 Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) required the viewer to start it. A rationale for interactivity is that it sustains viewers’ attention and involves them more deeply than passively observing. It also acknowledges the individual viewer, whose interaction contributes to or even completes the work. Technology alone cannot sustain art. A work such as Throw presents limited, though testing, options. The ‘players’ watching Shocked are involved but become impatient as they sense they can only facilitate the progression of a stalled narrative. We’re accustomed to human interaction, with its infinite and complex variety and mutuality, but these machines lack human capacities. Viewers find themselves in a limbo between responding mechanically to machines and responding as humans to humans. However, in Throw, Shocked and Uncle Bill, our ambivalent responses form part of the works’ resolution and meaning.

d>ART02 Screen

d>ART02’s screen program comprised 17 works varying from one to 16 minutes in length. Anouk de Cleroq’s Whoosh (Belgium, 2001) is evocative, eloquent and relevant. Stark black and white images from various sources are supported by subtitles compiled from the writings of, for example, Tennyson, McLuhan and Ballard and aggregated into a heartfelt message about our captivity by alienating technologies. Phrases like “in this age of global communication I still mumble sad lines to myself” remind us of the diminished space for emotion in a mechanised world.

Andreas Gedin’s So far, so good, (Sweden, 2001) is an absorbing piece of theatre. Two seated men face us, one eating pizza and describing to his blind companion what is happening on a TV out of our view. We try to comprehend the unseen image (silent movie slapstick?) from the speaker’s rapid-fire description, and wonder what his unseeing companion could make of it. The film is about the translation of experience into narrative, of the visual into the verbal, and the subjectivity of the human filter through which they pass.

A Film (Atanas Djono, Australia, 2001) is highly seductive though ultimately simply self-referential. We see a skywriter putting the final touches to the words ‘A FILM’ in a blue sky, and then for 15 minutes we watch the phrase gradually dissolve, occasional clouds drifting by, accompanied by background sound suggesting a babble of voices. Also playing on film as both medium and concept is Phillip Ryder’s Train (UK, 2001), a re-photographed version of a piece of 16 mm film (showing Ryder tied to train tracks) that had been run over by a train. His Rock (2001), about suicide by drowning, involves immersing in a river for 2 weeks a short Super 8 sequence showing someone waiting on a bridge over the river. In both works the film stock stands in for the victims. The damaging of the footage introduces an aleatoric element, giving the resulting movies an expressionistic, quasi-abstract finish that parodies aged celluloid. Though rich in metaphor, this is end-game movie-making, literally and figuratively.

In Crash Media (Tim Ryan, Australia, 2001) we can just make out a car rolling over in slow motion. The electronically distorted image (evoking an animated abstract painting) may make sense to the camera, but it requires our careful interpretation. The subject matter’s possibly catastrophic nature is occluded by the distortion. The work distinguishes machine perception from human perception, reminding us that the two are not the same and that the difference between them can be vital.

Myriam Bessette’s Azur (Canada, 2001) is an aesthetically delightful and mesmerising light and sound work. Line Up (Julie-Christine Fortier, Canada, 2002) provided some humour, showing a burning fuse tracing a path through a human head and continuing on. Sumugan Sivanesan’s Seismic (Australia, 2002) shows a street scene frozen almost still by repeated pressing of the pause button, shifting our perception from the cinematic to the photographic.

SALA: Moving Image Project

The absence of a traditional narrative trajectory was a criterion for inclusion in the Moving Image Project—42 recent short screen works, all by local film-makers, shown during this year’s SALA (South Australian Living Artists) Festival. Diverse and generally of a high standard, they complemented nicely the d>ART02 season. Joe Felber and Julie Henderson’s 25 Songs involved Henderson as choreographer and performer in a short film on classical dance, music and culture. This delightful piece set the highest production and performance standards. Choreographer and dancer Christos Linou showed 3 short films transferred from Super 8 to DVD—Thriving, a fragment of dance; The Sirens, in which images of the sea are overlayed with images of human movement; and the nicely satirical Act of Trespass, which depicts a businessman repeatedly walking and retracing his steps across a busy city footpath to the bemusement of passers by.

Equally interesting were the works that revealed fascinating microcosmic worlds normally unseen. Anne Walton’s DVD works all used a digital camera set for maximum close-up. Edge shows maggots sniffing about at the edge of what looks like earth pressed against a sheet of glass. The fascinating Glen Helen 1, 2 & 3 shows 3 scenes shot at that location in Central Australia, the first showing (upside down) a finger tip pushing sand up against the lens, the second showing a droplet of water slowly drying on a rock in the sun and the third showing the artist’s right cheek in profile as she brushes flies from her face. Walton’s technique shifts your perception.

A relief from the showcase of sophisticated technology were Aanya Roennfeldt’s Manbags and Pasta Cowboy Gets Takeaway, animations that used materials such as cut-out drawings on wood veneer backdrops—a down-market South Park. Both works comment humorously on social manners and male identity, the Art Povera materials adding a wry twist. James Strickland and Bianca Barling’s Second Fix explores the broken heart, while Shoot is a collage of tantalising fragments by 17 film-makers, adroitly edited by Danielle Walpole.

The moving image combines 2 essential aspects of culture: story-telling and visual imagery. Prior to the advent of film, still images such as paintings and photographs were often narratively driven, the fragments they depicted standing in for an implied whole. Film extended this potential to protracted actuality. In new media, narrative is often implied by virtue of the medium’s suggestiveness as well as our own suggestibility and desire for story. We don’t like a plot left hanging, but perhaps that’s where the art lies.

d>ART02, Experimental Art Foundation, Aug 1-31; Mercury Cinema, Jul 30. Samples of works shown are at the dLux media/arts website, www.dlux.org.au/dartNET .

The South Australian Living Artists Festival, Moving Image Project, curator Jo Holmes, Mercury Cinema, Aug 4 & 7

A British prelude

Just as we started out on this 2 part survey of multimedia and new media performance works-in-progress and the attitudes of artists to the technologies they have embraced, 2 interesting and pertinent things happened. First RealTime became a party to bringing the UK new media performance and installation group Blast Theory to Australia, so we recommend you read the interview with them (see article). Then, British performers Robert Pacitti (of the Pacitti Company) and Leslie Hill and Helen Paris of curious.com spoke in Perth, Adelaide and Sydney on their way to Time_Space_Place, the national hybrid performance workshop held in Wagga Wagga in September (see RT 52).

Blast Theory and curious.com in particular reveal the numerous ways that new media allows them to engage with issues and audiences. The audience become active participants in a performance they are witnessing online (communicating with the performers, or responding to performer strategies) or, in theatres and other venues, crossing the line to becoming performers themselves. In Blast Theory’s Desert Rain, which the company will be presenting in Sydney shortly, 6 people at a time, for half an hour each, are the focus of the work as they play a VR Gulf War game. curious.com describe Vena Amoris as a work where a small audience wait in a bar to be summoned via their mobile phones and, one at a time enter the theatre where, alone, they have a spotlit phone exchange with a performer they can’t see. At the end of the performance they pass through a door at the end of a long corridor opened by a tall blonde, revealing another, identical blonde, and stand in front of a full length mirror through which they momentarily glimpse the performer who has been talking to them. Very David Lynch. Given that this was not a profitable venture, Hill and Paris are trying to re-work the concept to handle slightly larger audiences.

Aided by a 3 year residency at the Institute for Studies in Arts, Arizona, courtesy of the City of Phoenix, and working in a well equipped and staffed laboratory (“true R&D as opposed to grant-to-grant”) curious.com have explored the practicalities of “how to be visceral in the virtual”, the subject of much of this survey. They worked with a camera triggered by speech and by motion (“it will follow you, be with you, stalk you”), filmed each other and created virtual clones of themselves. The work is called Random Acts of Memory [RAM] and photographs they showed from it suggested an eerie world where 2 figures claim each other’s memories, go in for “head to head wrestling”, “encounter unreasonable facsimiles” and only interact with the other’s clone—“as if the mediatised world had taken over.” They are currently developing a work about scent and memory in collaboration with Dr Upinder Bhalla, an olfactory scientist in Bangladore, India.

A very strange place

Memory is virtual, so is the future. So are the ghosts in photographs, films, videos and sound recordings. Perhaps this explains why so much new media performance (and other) work is about memory, traces of incomplete recollection, individual and collective, and reconstructions. It’s also why these works have a sci-fi, ‘what if…’ quality, doubling, as they do, as adventures in the vertiginous pleasures of wild speculation and the anxieties of miserable distopias, often at once. In this oscillation between past and future, the present is a very strange place. It also explains why so much new media is about science and technology, as critique or engagement: it builds on the possibilities of the technological, it experiments, tests, wants in on the debate about genetic engineering and other issues, and reclaims prophesy for art.

Screening the virtual

How do you represent and project the virtual in performance? Shadow play and projections on screens and gauzes, the use of television monitors and computer screens continue to play this role in performance with theatrical deftness (as in Robert Lepage’s smooth blend of hi-tech and old theatre illusion) and in various combinations and permutations—the multimedia theatre of simultaneity where, as audience, we are expected to bring various literacies to bear. But screens are flat. Screens are substantial. Artists are finding their capacities insufficiently virtual. Therefore they go for screens that are there but not there: transparent screens—glass, perspex, gauze, walls of fine water, smoke (for that holographic effect), curved surfaces (the massive screen tower in the La Furas dels Baus production of Berlioz’s Faust at Salzburg), mobile and plastic screens. The transparent screen not only holds an image, it also allows it to spill and multiply, generating larger virtual spaces and figures. And for a screen both ephemeral and substantial, why not the body itself, a well-known receiver of projections of all kinds, and another piece of old theatre magic given very new life (see Jonathan Marshall, “Fusion: the body as screen”, RT 50, p 28).

Hypersurfaces: depth in flatness

Of course, there is the computer screen itself (whose images are increasingly relayed to all these other screens), not just a surface for receiving an image and showing it, but a hypersurface: “an interactive, intelligent surface…with a spatio-temporal dimension…[where]…virtual spaces are depicted through the continuously changing ‘matrix of physical pixels’.” Here Alicia Imperiale is citing Marcus Novak in her book The New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture (Birkhauser, Basel, 2000) where she illustrates the depth that can be achieved in built surfaces, just as new media performance strives to create fluid virtual spaces (screens) for performers actual and virtual to inhabit.

Theatre artists speak of set design. Dancers sometimes describe generating space with their movement. Artists working in performance often speak of their performing space as architecture or sculpted space, as you’ll see in this survey, a reminder of performance’s strong kinship with architecture (think of Sydney’s Gravity Feed or Melbourne’s BAMBUco) and the visual arts. Architecture itself now embraces and embodies the virtual as buildings become screens, their surfaces embedded with technological outputs.

Staged subjectivities

In the cinema, point of view has primarily been third person, with most exceptions to be found in experimental cinema. An interesting development in new media and multimedia performance, especially in dance, has been an exploration of how to convey the performer’s point of view. This has been seen in filmmaker Margie Medlin’s work with Sandra Parker of Danceworks in In the Heart of the Eye; in Jude Walton’s Seam (silent mix) with Ros Warby (with the dancer wielding a tiny camera aimed at herself); and is, in part, the goal in new works described in this survey by Company in Space’s Hellen Sky and Mary Moore, one work dealing with memory and space, the other with the experiences of identical twins and how they see the world.

What are they doing?

The performers in the works we survey have a new multiplicity of tasks and roles. These can include being filmed in pre-production (virtually cloned, sometimes as themselves, sometimes animated), wearing motion capture suits (in the laboratory or in performance), triggering sound and image (via responsive cameras, mikes, lasers), performing with their virtual selves and others. Or they become screens. Or they play guides taking audiences into new realms of experience. And they can be relayed, as in the classic telematic works of Company in Space where a dancer in one space dances with another, often in a distant country.

What do we call it?

For convenience, we’ve used the term new media performance, It’s not entirely appropriate because some work is classically multimedia and not strictly engaged with new technology, however the delivery platform is increasingly digital and greatly facilitates the integration of various media. Then there’s the hatred of ‘new’ and the growing weariness at having to listen to people hating it. Of course, the technology is hardly new any more, nor some of the things done with it (the re-working of hallowed theatrical devices), but what is new is the ongoing experimentation, the yield of fascinating hybrids and the reworking of relationships with audiences. Perhaps it will, as some wish, all settle down into some form or other and the hype will pass, as it did for cinema in the last century, but this new work continues to offer excitement and provocation.

Getting a smooth outcome

Smooth exchanges, flow, continuous surface—these are the concepts that are ever-present in contemporary culture. Alicia Imperiale

What did we hear from artists as we surveyed the works they have yet to realise? What are they looking for? All kinds of balance and smoothness. This is nothing to do with the works themselves, which range from serene to cerebral to savage. It’s often about getting the mix right, smoothing out the relationship between ‘the visceral and the virtual’, not losing live presence to the seductions of the screen. Other tensions seeking resolution are to be found in oppositions often driving the emergence of these hybrids: desire (we love the technology) and critique (we worry about its effects); a tool (just another theatrical device) or a partner (its materiality for the artist cf language, paint).

There is also a tension generated by changes in the creative and collaborative processes with a number of artists comparing their approaches now with filmmakers. Working on the floor often has to be preceded or paralleled by significant conceptualisation, scripting and story-boarding (though these might not involve dialogue or plain narrative), for reasons aesthetic and often pragmatic given equipment costs and additional performer time for experimenting, recording and testing.

The resolution of these creative tensions is often sought in the proliferation of words like ‘liquid’, ‘fluid’, ‘balance’, ‘integration’, ‘synergy’, the appeal of ‘hybrid’ and ‘interdisciplinary’, and the practical correlatives of R&D, careful planning, story-boarding and time to develop.

Company in Space

The Melbourne-based Company in Space describe their new work in the 2002 Melbourne Festival, The Light Room, as “an immersive filmic opera, that showcases innovation in cutting edge digital technology and performance art, by skillfully integrating live music, spoken text and dance with video animation and interactive set designs.” It’s the result of a 3-year collaboration, “a synergy of media. One that is comfortable combining cutting edge technology with traditional art forms, such as pure operatic voice and dance.”

The choice of the words “integrating”, “synergy” and “comfortable” and the cutting edge/tradition opposition are perfect examples of new media and multimedia performance’s urge for synthesis, True to the history of performance, the substantial nature rather than the illusory effects of this 3 metre high glass installation (it is never referred to as a set) is made clear. Located in Melbourne Museum’s Australian Gallery, it is “a stand-alone interactive installation that can be accessed during museum opening hours and an operatic performance, staged at night.” There is a persistent reference to architecture in the artists’ notes and, in a show about memory and space, “Past, present and future interweave…in this ephemeral house of the future.”

Director Hellen Sky puts it more explicitly: “For me new media is a language that can speak of memory and life journeys through the choreography of sounds, images and the body within an architectural space…It is like imagining that the iron on your ironing board is a scanner and you can see, hear and feel the experience of the cloth.” Librettist and performer Margaret Cameron makes a case for new media as something more than a theatrical device, while seeking to maintain the visceral/virtual balance. “The interconnectivity of new media makes it a ‘partner’ not a tool in exploring how we make visible the experience of the body in the physical world; how the body experiences architectural space and how it might experience virtual space. Technology is a new medium but to interpret it as a poetic of experience, rather than a replacement for experience, is a particular thing.”

Architect Tom Kovac, who is creating the glass tower, writes how “The translucency and liquid quality of glass is extremely well suited to use with this new technology. It…can carry the ephemeral, transient qualities of digital light. The glass surfaces have made this unique futuristic stage structure a giant luminescent realtime screen…” And, sound designer Nigel Frayne writes of “a sonic architecture created from computer software and electroacoustic design elements. Sound and image are used like memory trails, tracing the steps of the performance’s 5 main characters.”

Asked what we’ll see, Hellen Sky says: “An environment like a glass house made liquid by images from 9 video projectors and a large, rear projection screen 3 images wide” used to create “single panoramic scapes.” A black gauze hangs in front of this screen so that it can also take images forward projected. “It’s like a film set. The projections on the glass create spaces and divisions inhabited by the performers.” The performers are not replicated (as either themselves or responsive animations as they have been in previous CIS works by being telematically relayed or working from motion capture suits). They dance, speak, sing. “They also engage with interactive systems”, tracking devices that “allow them to influence projected text…zooming in on or re-shaping words, making them more or less visible or opaque…Transducers, sensing devices that the performers activate, change the shape of the virtual environments.”

What are these environments? The products of 3D modelling, they include “rooms, corridors, a bridge, a virtual pier, a virtual library…” The performers appear to occupy these spaces on the glass screens. Not only that, but those environments are seen “as if from the point of view of the performers. They suggest remembered places.”

What is it about the frequent association of new media with memory? Sky thinks it’s the facility to play with time. It’s the capacity of new media to manipulate film and video documentation and, she says emphatically, “to layer it and to evoke the haptic relationship to space.” The Light Room focuses on “the senses and their relation to space, to architecture. The text and the libretto emerged from looking at forms…and how the senses work across ageing. The material is drawn from specific experiences but in the process of editing and sifting it has become less specific and more theoretical.” Sky sees the glass architecture as evocative of “the ephemeral…of our complex relationship to space” amplified by “glass’ capacity to reflect and refract.” She comments on the tendency in modern architecture to embed glass with other technologies.

Sky has always wanted to work with glass and now she’s got it: no easy task she says. Getting the funds, negotiating with an architect, glass engineers and sponsors, engaging with video-gaming engines and the sheer longevity of the project have made her feel not unlike a film producer. I ask if, like some other new media performance creators I’ve spoken to, the process has been like directing a film. “I’ve tried to keep a story board like Spielberg—live material matched with projected space, sound, light—so there’s a megascore but it changes on the floor. The rehearsal period is only 5 weeks and not all the performers will be there full-time. As the computer interface designer, John McCormick, explains, they won’t know how it all works until everything is installed: a classic example of the conflation of research & development with rehearsal, an inevitable outcome of costs.

McCormick calmly tells me about what sounds like a monumental task of working with Sky and the performers, filmmaker Margie Medlin, 3D modeller Marshall White and programmer Ricardo Zorondo on the task of integrating the components of the work. Some are relatively fixed, like composer David Chesworth’s score (though that is then mediated by sound designer Nigel Frayne) and the lighting, though that has to take into serious account not messing with the projections. Sound and lighting in turn have to be amalgamated with film, 3D virtual worlds, and the voices, gestures and footfalls that trigger the emergence and merging of virtual objects.

Mary Moore

Adelaide-based Mary Moore, a talented theatre designer, has become the creator of a series of significant multimedia works including Exile, a striking work for solo Butoh performer in a virtual world constructed by light, screens, film and animation. Moore describes her latest venture:

“The new work I am creating is The Twins Project (working title Double Vision), a mixed media performance work created by artists, all of whom are twins. The inner kernel of my vision for this project is drawn from my own experience as a twin. It began with a simple question: How do identical twins create separate identities from a shared experience? And it has developed into an exploration of similarity and difference, separation and merging, and the gap between the subject and the ‘other’: with all the possible ramifications implied by these terms within the global flows of people and customs.”

In the following account of her intentions, Moore addresses the issues of live/virtual balance and the flight from flatness, but also makes a strong point that it is no mere matter of focusing on the performer but of creating or ‘sculpting’ the space for them.

“Fundamental to my work as a designer is the creation of 3 dimensional performance spaces and I am continually interested in using projected images to create these spaces. Whilst it is always my intention to focus the performer in a performance work my obsession has been to liberate the projected image from its usual position as a flat screen placed at the back of the performer. I look for ways to sculpt space through projection and place the performer inside the image.

“Earlier this year I worked with Wojciech Pisareck (see RT 52) and Paul Jennings (both of whom are twins) on the creation of a 3D virtual world that can be projected to create a 3-dimensional playing space and can interact with the live performer. It involved the creation of computer-generated imagery and the testing of these images within the 3-dimensional playing space. We have been able to conduct laboratory experiments within the Flinders University digital studio using full size suspended surfaces and 6 video projectors. We used 3D Studio Max software and applied realtime animation as well as images rendered to video.”

Moore continues, raising the potential of conveying performer subjectivity: “My objective was to develop architectural images moving in real time to give the illusion that the acting space is a reflection of a performer’s point of view as he or she travels through the streets and alleys of a city. The most difficult challenge was to create moving perspectives that match the vanishing points on the multiple projection screens, and relate to the physical movements of the actor. The intention of these visual experiments is to create a doubled perspective that will express the individual spatial awareness of each of the twin actors.

“In a few weeks, I’m embarking on the next stage of the creative development with identical twin performers Brendan and David Rock, identical twin film artists Paul and Tony Jennings, and fraternal twin, digital animator Wojcieck Pisareck.”

Moore and her collaborators have benefited from working at the Australian Performance Laboratory (APL), established at Flinders University in 2001 to formalise the links between the Drama Centre and the independent artists and companies using its research laboratory. APL specialises in creating ‘real time’ solutions for the integration of digital technology into live performance, without overwhelming the visceral with the virtual. The centre is running a symposium on the performer and new technology for the Shanghai Festival as part of Celebrate Australia 2002 in November this year with stelarc, Company in Space, Mary Moore, Wojciech Pisarek, William Yang and Chinese artists.

David Pledger, NYID

For NYID’s latest project, artistic director David Pledger has enjoyed the “liberating experience of writing a script” rather than his more usual practice of creating a scenario of images and actions to be choreographed on the workshop floor. The process has taken some 2 years including a 2 week development workshop courtesy of MTC and script development support from The Studio at the Sydney Opera House (where Pledger hopes the work will be shown in 2003 after its 2002 Melbourne Festival premiere). Inspired by Kafka’s The Trial and contemporary issues of surveillance, a mediatised world and globalisation, Pledger’s script is not an adaptation of Kafka’s novel, rather, he says, it’s a response.

Given his themes, especially a long term preoccupation with surveillance, it’s not surprising that the camera should play a pivotal role in this production, “but as just another theatrical device which is there to communicate, otherwise we wouldn’t use it.” Pledger is emphatic that his use of screened live and pre-recorded images is “neither decorative nor aesthetic.” A bank of small, industrial monitors set low on the stage and a group of larger television monitors above frame the live performance while a large screen/wall to the side reveals large images.

Pledger says that the production is not about performers engaging with their virtual selves. Although they might watch themselves at certain points, and while they have to be aware of their relationship to the screen, this is not something Pledger wants his performers to be conscious of; “it’s something they learn and then forget.” Of the 7 performers, 5 have worked with him before, their impressive shared physical vocabulary was on show in the NYID-Gekidan Kataisha collaboration during Next Wave in May this year. Pledger says that this continuity is vital, and given the limited 4 and half week rehearsal period for K, is vital. Similarly his script for K has the screenplay quality of being very precise about what Pledger needs from his film and sound team in terms of images and duration. When asked about the relationship between script, performance and sound and image, Pledger says that the dialogue cues “aural trademarks”, rather like motifs, that then drop into an accumulating sound bed and subsequently have their visual correlatives revealed on the screens.

Gideon Obarzanek, Chunky Move

Closer, a commission of the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI), is an interactive dance installation created and produced by Chunky Move. It has been previewed at the antistatic dance event at Sydney’s Performance Space in September and will premiere at ACMI in December. Obarzanek writes:

The relationship is reciprocal, with the choreography endlessly modified by the actions of the audience. The audience’s actions are in turn shaped and defined by the installation, which calls upon them to touch, throw or press their bodies against upholstered, torso-size, sensor pads mounted on the walls in the installation space.

Obarzanek sees Closer as a choreographic instrument, an investigative tool, in which “bodies are pushed into a kind of physicality that is especially unusual in a traditional gallery context. They literally impact on the work.”

He describes how he started work on Closer. “This was 2 years ago and it was a slow process. I mapped out the possibilities with Peter Hennessey (Interactive and Visual Design) and worked with the dancer, Nicole Johnston, for 2 weeks in the studio on movement phrases. I had a camera: it was irrelevant to just use the eye. I focused on it moving with or away from the dancer. Most of the movement deals with the collision between a dancer and a surface. I shot a lot of material on video before we started working with Cordelia Beresford. She was using a 16mmm movie camera but we did it on video first and she came up with very good suggestions, what would work and what was practical—a strong influence on determining the menu of possibilities. It was an expensive shoot over 2 days, so we had to know exactly what to do. We worked with a padded wall and a padded floor and shot some of it from above to give the impression of falling, of impossible impacts. It all looks like a wall when you see it in the installation. Actually, you don’t see the wall, but the shock wave is seen in the body in the inky blackness.

“We ended up with a small amount of footage, but there had to be a massive amount of coding—Peter really kicked in—for lots of options and it required huge amounts of RAM. Darrin Verhagin, the composer, was there right from the beginning because the audience also influence the sound. There are 4 tracks running. One track is fixed but the others can be altered by impact with the pads. The testing period showed us how important sound was going to be for the sense of user involvement.”

Part 2 of our survey of new media performance will continue to focus on the issues explored here but will extend to animation and the virtual thespian, telematic performance and the significance of new media communications for collabarations between communities within Australia and internationally.

The artists and companies to be surveyed in Part 2 are Kate Champion, Wojciech Pisarek, Sarah Neville, Samuel James, IGNEOUS, Keith Armstrong and the transmute collective, para//elo, Hill & Nash (ex-Men Who Knew too Much), Cazerine Barry, Tess de Quincey, skadada and others.

See also, Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter, “Is any body really there?”, e-volution of new media, Artlink, vol 21 no 3, 2001.

Desert Rain uses a combination of virtual reality, installation and performance to problematise the boundary between the real and the virtual. It places participants in a Collaborative Virtual Environment in which the real intrudes into the virtual and vice versa. It juxtaposes the real, the imaginary, the fictional and the virtual as a means of defining them. Blast Theory

Blast Theory, the UK new media performance and installation group is coming to Sydney’s Artspace in November to present Desert Rain. Six audience members at a time, physically separated but electronically connected, will actively experience a task—they have 20 minutes to find their target. The setting: the Gulf War. The targets? Find out when you play Desert Rain.

As we fearfully anticipate another war in the same region, the product in part of America’s unfinished business with Iraq, its response to terrorism, and its post Cold War assertion of itself as empire, the arrival of Desert Rain in Australia is painfully appropriate, especially given our government’s support for the US and the severe limits on information by which to make any judgement about what is happening.

Although Blast Theory are skeptical of Jean Baudrillard’s theoretical position, they are nonetheless “influenced by [his] assertion that the Gulf War did not take place because it was in fact a virtual event.” They cite Paul Patton’s observations (about Baudrillard’s speculations) that “while televisual information claims to provide immediate access to real events, in fact what it does is produce information that stands in for the real…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 sea bird.” Desert Rain, say the company, is not designed to demonstrate a theory, rather “to accept its significance in informing our view of the relationship of the real to the virtual and especially in its assertion that the virtual has a daily presence in our lives.”

Those who have experienced Desert Rain variously describe it as challenging, involving, sombre and exhilarating. One reviewer called it “A complex and elaborate treatment of war in postmodern society.” Another wrote, “I can guarantee that you will come out of it changed and humbled.”

When they were in Sydney a few months ago planning the tour to Australia, RT spoke with 2 of the members of Blast Theory, Matt Adams and Ju Row Farr.

MA At one level we regard technologies as tools available for the creation of work…like a paint brush we can use creatively for self expression. But there’s also a sense in which we’re trying to reflect the environment in which we live. It’s easy to see it as faddish but it’s difficult to do that if you recognise the level of technological change in westernised countries in the last 10 to 15 years that has entered our lives. It seems to me that for artists not to be responding to the way in which technology is shifting our sense of space and place and our relationship to the world seems quite unusual.

JRF I don’t get fascinated with how it works or desire to be a deep level programmer. I’m interested in the personality of the technology, what it may do or not do well, as something we as a public now understand, its language, for example using a remote for turning the TV on, but also we can tap into that as a tool for an art work. Mechanically we understand a lot. How can we use that literacy to subvert the use of the technology?

MA It’s an oxygen we breathe. You watch TV and the language of editing is an intrinsic part of your experience and understanding from 2 to 3 years of age on. How does it change your understanding, your faith in the nature of being, when you witness 500 or 1000 fictional kisses before you have your own first kiss?

MA We did quite a lot of work around pornography, a more graphic sense of a similar thing. What is it to understand your sexuality when you see sex from the outside as well as experience it from the inside? That sense of distance is of interest.

The work we’re doing now with wireless technologies came out of a fascination at how the city is changed by having devices with you all the time which means you never really leave an electronic sphere. Mobile phones are the first devices that yield a ubiquitous sense of presence. There are people we know for whom it is an absolute presence…it never leaves their sides.

JRF Tech is also really good fun, partly in relation to popular culture where you feel you can do anything—it’s a play aspect we’re into. We take a strand out of that because we know it’s fun, not just to think it’s a deeply meaningful tool.

MA They are very liberating, aren’t they? In a multiple sense, for example George Soros’ distributing photocopiers in Eastern Europe in the mid 80s was genuinely liberating in terms of how information was then distributed in a sort of samizdat network. In the same way Playstation has a great sense of fun that you inhabit as a car thief or a killer. In this sense I would never have had any experience of graphic design but for a computer which lent itself to graphic design and allowed me, as a total amateur, to play with it and gradually accumulate skill.

MA I believe that games can be very serious so there’s a sense in which we are about play, in the way that in Kidnap we were pretending to be kidnappers and people who were kidnapped were pretending to be kidnapped. But there’s a point at which the line is crossed…so that what you’re doing is very difficult to distinguish ontologically from a real kidnap. That’s a fascinating thing. It’s true of sado-masochism: highly ritualised, very dramatic, structured around an archetype, clichés and imagery, and yet it is absolutely real within a certain sense….It’s a constant fascination for us, the line between reality and fiction. To what extent is George W Bush playing the role of President?… We’re increasingly savvy to those modes…they’re artistic expression. Our work looks at that slippery boundary and where playing games, fiction and pop culture bleed into important social and cultural definitions.

JRF We learned in making Kidnap (RT 27, p30) that we became one level of the audience, even though we were the kidnappers…We were like a front row audience held by every breath and move of the performers—the kidnapped. The whole audience thing spun around for us in that work and because we had a live chatroom for the online audience to speak to the kidnappers, we were somewhat the pawns in the situation. Their comments implied we were there to be directed from the web to do something: “This is boring…nothing’s happening…” Things we hadn’t anticipated hit us in the back of the head. It was before Big Brother—we’re big fans of reality TV.

MA The tedium of Kidnap, of watching people passing the time contrasted with the media reality. The web provides the opportunity for the sheer sense of duration.

JRF We were on the ground in Can You See Me Now, the audience were online. They were pursued online. We ran a ridiculous number of kilometres. We weren’t fit enough for the online players and had to develop strategies on the ground to go after people. The next stage is to put us online and the public on the ground, but we’re going to totally change the format because we don’t expect the public to be running with 100s of pounds of kit across roads—one for safety and 2 for the cash value of the kit.

MA Artistically we always knew it was a straightforward proposition—it’s a chase, it’s not artistically sophisticated. But we were interested in seeing if we could get a sense of presence between the street and an online player, that it would be sufficiently compelling as a chase and that’s what we established and felt significant, as well as covering a whole load of technical hurdles. We can take it further, to a different level of exploration of the city for the public, opening people up to their surroundings, or being able to interact rather than only chase them.

Whether you’re spectating or engaged is something we’ve been interested in for 2 or 3 years. An Explicit Volume, the interactive installation we made last year using pornographic imagery taken from the internet and put back into book format, was built around that sense of what level you’re implicated through the consumption of culture. There was a BBC doco on the Paedophile Unit and the arrest of people for downloading from the net—that was their offence. Are they responsible for the production of those images by the downloading of them, is [the inference] that at one remove you are responsible for the rape of children? It’s an extreme example but it parallels consumer issues like buying Nestlé products [in the context of] Nestlé and Third World mothers.

Blast Theory is one of a number of prominent British performance companies, including Forced Entertainments, Desperate Optimists and the guests of Time_Space_Place (Wagga. Wagga, September, see RT52), Robert Pacitti (of the Pacitti Company) and Leslie Hill and Helen Paris of curious.com (see page 21). Blast Theory have been producing performance, installations and television/cinema works since 1991 in the UK and Europe. Their video work TRUCOLD was part of the 2002 Biennale of Sydney.

Desert Rain represents a rare opportunity not only to see the work of a significant British company but to experience a unique interactive installation where the audience is at the centre of the performance. Performances are on the half hour from midday until 9pm. You are promised a brief, but intense experience.

Desert Rain, produced by Blast Theory with University of Nottingham, ZKM (Karlsruhe), KTH (Stockholm), NOWninety9 (Nottingham) & DA2 (Bristol). Artspace, Nov 12-23. See p7 for booking details. Presented by Artspace, dLux media arts, Macquarie University and RealTime with the assistance of the British Council and the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council

A recent submission states, “The use of new technology by artists and audiences causes a reconsideration of the nature and meaning of art, and opens the way for new interpretations and expressions of art, just as the technological advances in art practice have in the past” (Report of the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry, 2002)

The relationship between new media and visual arts is a multifarious one, possessing qualities of cause and effect. Progression and expansion in one field unfurls fallback and rejoinder in the other. The subject matter of much contemporary art work (including but not necessarily confined to new media work) is the developing ‘new’ technology itself (extending into computer science). The processes of formulation are not detached, rather they are integral elements, both in the making of the work and in the thematic concerns; these are not self-contained processes. The definitions themselves are fraught: new media—where the technologies are often no longer new (or progress to the uninitiated may seem slow); and visual arts—where an installation may include sound or video footage, and/or interactivity and, regardless, installation is arguably as much about the spatial experience as the visual one. The lines are blurred and the definitions ‘do the job’ in that they indicate the genre of practice we may expect, although they in no sense comprehensively define the extent of the works within these adapting fields. There is a tension between these terms, agreed upon within the communities involved, by a common ‘ease of use’ consensus.

Art practice per se is not easily separated out from the political, social, economic and cultural concerns of our time. The canon of visual arts evolves further than fine or visual arts and its intersection with developing technologies and the affects of our immersion within them produces a non-singular mode of art production. Art does not take place within a rarefied, isolated environment and many artists respond to living in the so-called information age by discussing the very information accessed. As artists we are immersed within and cannot readily differentiate ourselves from the effects of globalization, anti-globalization, cultural, social, ethical and political enquiry, world events or scientific development to make some kind of pure statement.

Bill Seamans’ Hybrid Invention Generator (currently on exhibition at Te Papa Museum, Wellington, New Zealand) “conveys its own fields of meaning through 3D models, texts and digital audio. Varying combinations of these fields of meaning are experienced through direct interaction with the system. Each participant will potentially have a different experience of this open work. The work provides an environment for rich associative and contemplative activity surrounding the notion of invention”. (Bill Seaman, “The Hybrid Invention Generator—Assorted Relations”, unpublished paper, 2002). Such a work sits within the field of critical technical practice, extending 3 categories of practice and research: computer science, new media, and visual arts.

Susan Hiller’s Witness, exhibited at the 2002 Biennale of Sydney, uses the internet as one of the means of gathering stories on UFO sightings and encounters. This installation goes beyond sound, narrative, content and the technology that made and operates it. The pulling together of this international delegation of voices and languages seems timely in an age where geographical location no longer precludes communication, and internet applications actively augment intimate conversation as the norm.

The permission to explore animation characters, to build one’s own, to delve into ‘cute’, to create whole other worlds/complete logic systems/systems of abstract meaning is a developing articulation of this field. Witness The Augees, (augee: (n) augmenting organism), a simple life form with emotional capabilities. ‘Playing god’ by controlling their emotions, the user can create differing levels of ‘happy or sad’ and ‘intellectual or strong’ for these abstract animated organisms/characters. (A group work for stuff-art by Minty Hunter, Rebekah Far, Charlie McKenzie and Michael Pearce; www.abc.net.au/arts/stuff-art/augees/default.html [link expired])

Philippe Parreno’s character ‘AnnLee’, takes the plight of the anime where the Patricia Piccinini and Peter Hennessy Lump CD goes, looking for who they are, the essential human condition (amongst many diverse outcomes and thematics). Parreno also collaborates, passing the character around and works between film, documentary, fantasy narration, video, and digital animation. Piccinini debates stem-cell replacement therapies, and raises important questions around evolutionary and genetic modification.

Visual art practice has embraced new technologies, political agendas and expanded cultural practices and evolved to a broad polemic of issues. The complex topography of the new global community lends a multidisciplinary direction through which artistic practices and processes come alive outside of the pre-determined institutional domain of westernism, or those situated solely in the sphere of artistic canons. Artistic, social and political theories and practices intersect. The technology provides the tools for extending this natural relation.

Documenta11, 2002, Kassel, Germany responded to contemporary cultural political and social themes via a visual discussion with conceptually persuasive art works. Engulfed in the smell of coffee grounds, I walk past 5 screens of white rubbish bobbing in clear blue water, wander amongst rolls on racks, clumps in boxes of deep dark browns and blacks, journey through dykes and parks, and watch 7 hour stretches of film—all of which proved to be a dynamic and rewarding challenge to attentiveness.

Also at Documenta11, David Small’s The Illuminated Manuscript combined graceful motion of spatialized language as a graphic element on the screen/page, with absorbing content and tactility in a stylish interactive installation. Both animated discussion and actual interaction occurred around this work. The mechanisms of the sensors were clearly visible and there was a real sense of delight in discovering the playfulness of the interaction, as well as the possibility of extending the format of the book and the way we read/interact with text.

Projected typography is virtually printed into the blank pages with a video projector. Sensors embedded in the pages tell the computer as the pages are turned. In addition, sonar sensors allow visitors to run their hands over and to disrupt, combine and manipulate the text on each page. The book begins with an essay on the four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Each page explores a different text on the topic of freedom. www.davidsmall.com

Igloolik Isuma Productions’ Nunavut|Our Land was shown continuously as a 13-screen installation. A work that crosses conventional boundaries of digital film making, its displays of the activities of daily life—husky-driven sledge journeys, fishing, skinning dead dogs, cooking and the conversations that occur throughout—make compelling viewing.

“We are Inuit storytellers in a 4000 year-old oral tradition,” says Zacharias Kunuk, producer-director and president of the Isuma collective. “In our time we have new technologies so it’s our job to adapt digital filmmaking to continue our elders’ tradition of passing on information to future Inuit from one generation to the next. It’s a bonus when the rest of the world sees our work and appreciates our Inuit point of view.” (www.isuma.ca/about_us/index.html [link expired] and “live from the tundra”, streaming from a remote outpost on Baffin Island).

There are many frictions within the production of new media work. For net.art (with a trickle through effect for CD and/or HD outputs) the lessening of the interactive experience compounded by the inability to standardize expectations for delivery platforms initiated by the browser wars, has made a huge impact on output potentials. Alongside this is a frustration in dealing with the fallacy of the non-linear and interactive experience, of which any relatively competent programmer (and user) is all too painfully aware. In turn, the hype/desire for infinite possible outcomes proves a driving force towards more complex programming methodologies, AI models, discussions, critiques and production. It demands implementation of highly technical and complex structures/languages (which alter one’s mode of thinking and being in the world), to ensure ‘truly’ interactive outcomes within stated confines. A problem for the end-user within this propulsion is a misunderstanding of the level of sophistication required for implementation of these processes in the ‘real’ (and the enormous expenditure of time required). There is a ‘so-what’ attitude from a jaded audience bombarded by constant exposure to mainstream big-screen simulations of popularized futuristic narratives (made with enormous resources at hand).

A further struggle for new media work (and once again particularly net.art, with a seeping throughout) is its habitat, located side by side with an excess of software-driven dross, to which audiences become habituated and come to expect. ‘Mastery’ of the software ad nauseum is the resident context. Despite, or in stark contrast to these ‘blimps’, there is a refreshingly large amount of exciting and dynamic work being produced by artists, across many more areas including tactical media activism (TILT and Borderpanic), gaming paradigms, sound, sensor-based installation and performance works, with most being available (or referenced) on-line.

Another example of a refreshingly playful work currently in exhibition at Te Papa Museum, Wellington, NZ is Sean Kerr’s binney project. Starting with an iconic painting by the New Zealand artist Don Binney, Pacific Frigate Bird, Kerr has “generated a 7 screen interactive work that the audience will activate either through the internet or by mobile phone. The bird can be made to soar across the row of screens in the exhibition, move through 3-dimensional space, and perform in ‘flocks’ through commands from internet users from around the globe.” ( www.tepapa.govt.nz/BINNEY_PROJECT.htm)

Two recent shows at the Centre for Contemporary Photography explored the way time and space are constructed and mediated by photography and video. Daniel Crooks’ Time Slice, an extensive instalment of video and print works, challenged the traditional logic of the photographic still and the video sequence, blurring both the enclosed frame and the succession of multiple frames. The momentary pause of the photo is widened and the continuity of the video is disrupted, edited, literally making more or less time, more or less space.
Crooks’ digital printouts Train No.1 & 2 rework an understanding of landscape. Over 3 metres across, they show time-lapse collapsing into elongated stills that scan multiple zones along railway lines. They are panoramas, but of varying speeds recording the push and pull of the city. A stationary camera is put in opposition to a tracking one. Static No. 1 is a more psychedelic spread. Against a warped backdrop of horizontal lines and jammed magazines and posters stand people, vertical, just recognisable. There are bodies as waves, bodies carrying the extent of their journey within their own skin, and bodies as modulating blobs. Figure and ground seem to rush across each other in separate directions. In the video Static No. 5 there is a similar frenetic quality, in this case a photograph becomes animated, a violent cutting and pasting constitutes movement. Crooks creates a kaleidoscope or rather the scope to collide.

This transfers vertically well with works like Elevator No. 1, one of the most abstracted works, depicting a graphic falling, the apparent velocity turning an elevator shaft to flowing ribbons. In Elevator No.3 a whole building is morphed, levels contract, storeys expand. Even architecture is subjected to a radical ride. Elevator No.4 has the most ‘special effect’ though, where a lift door becomes a liquid peeling, the metal door unzipping itself to allow fluid, drunken figures to enter and exit.

The theme of motion in art was vigorously pursued early last century by the avant-garde, whether it was Duchamp’s descendent Nude, the Italian Futurist Balla’s attempts in paint or El Lizzitsky’s early photomontages. Crooks’ work in part carries this kind of energy, what Paul Virilio would call kinematic‚ as people and vehicles begin to flare, shunt, refract, becoming unhinged at the intersection of time and space. Crooks puts forth a poetics of public transport, using tramcars and train carriages, perfect units to play with at the junction of time and space. The artist’s work has a scientific methodology, the various videos and prints the outcome of invention. The data is both evidence of process and finalised works, thus they travel well.

If Crooks’ work is experimental then Jo Scicluna’s is experiential. A more packaged, measured and scaled work, the viewer encounters Scicluna’s timespace 04: timelapse 2002 behind a black curtain, a darkened room lending the work a more intimate, even cinematic reception. All is silent. Both artists at the CCP choosing to deal with time and space in purely visual terms with an absence of sound. Perhaps because the sonic would allow the viewer to ascertain another sense of time, a tempo or rhythm.

Scicluna’s work is in triptych with a single projection divided into equal frames, side by side. The first screen on the left shows a clock, cropped to hang above an undisclosed space. It is LCD perhaps, more digital than analogue yet it flickers, counts illegibly. Not counting down but away. The middle screen shows an entrance to a busy building, a revolving doorway, with suits coming and going, a security camera angle on fast forward. Or an escalator, its metal steps producing a dizzying, blurred optical effect. Or a lift with its floor by floor sequence. These are mechanised, automated yet unreliable vehicles. The final screen shows the face of a clock tower, a Warhol-like fixed shot in slow motion. An almost blank countenance: is it moving at all? The clock format of hours: minutes: seconds is echoed in the screen layout of real time: fast forward: slow motion. The viewer confronted with 3 different representations of time simultaneously is made to feel anxiety: panic: boredom. The work challenges the viewer’s sense of time and how it is shaped.

The work asks questions, positing an ever-increasing corporate time (time is money) against an outdated and outmoded State/Municipal time with an individual’s personal time being caught between the two. Vito Acconci, witnessing this paradigm shift, noted, “There was no need anymore for time to be installed on the street; no need for time to be set in place where you happened by, when all the while you were on your own time. Public time was dead; there wasn’t time anymore for public space; public space was the next to go” (“Public Space in a Private Time”, WJT Mitchell ed., Art and The Public Sphere, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,1990).

As an act of resistance and an adjunct of this, the last instalment of the timespace series by Scicluna, was her use of a still from the digitised clock made into stickers and applied to street surfaces in Melbourne and Vienna. These were then re-photographed. The stickers challenge the specifics of site as it were, they are ‘stuck’ in time in various places, proposing the artwork could possibly exist ‘anywhere’ but not at ‘anytime’.

Both Crooks and Scicluna use interventionist strategies in their art (posed, timely) being directly reinserted into life’s flow (chaotic, unconscious). And real time and real world variables are bought to bear in the so often atemporal assertion of gallery space offering some exciting and stimulating alternatives, both paused and at high speed.

Daniel Crooks‚ Time Slice, Jo Scicluna timespace 04: timelapse 2002, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne June 14-July 6.

Digital technologies and new forms of media delivery are dramatically changing the nature of documentary production, form and distribution. The audience can be a correspondent or a participant, not only a viewer. Digidocs

It eats technology

The cinema is a great cultural survivor. Whenever a technological threat has appeared which might diminish the grip movies have on the consciousness and hip pockets of their audience, the industry has taken advantage and turned into a parody of its own flesh-eating monsters, absorbed the new technology, gaining enrichment in presentation, audience attraction and ultimately, a new lease of commercial life.

This has happened because cinema has a fetish for gadgets and processes. Its history is littered with examples, some more successful than others, of using new technologies to create greater appeal.

The history of these special effects starts in 1902 with George Méliès’ A Trip To The Moon. His films created the legacy of the marvellous or fantastical which cinema has never relinquished. There is arguably a direct history from Méliès to the digital artists of the current cinema, both in the look of the image and its effect on the structure of narrative. The science fiction genre was born with Méliès, but the impact of digital technology goes far beyond the depiction of the scientifically wondrous. It is now, as films like Mullholland Drive, Timecode, Memento and others attest, a presence in all genres of storytelling and film forms.

After an initial panic, the cinema also successfully made a series of accommodations in response to its biggest threat, television. This has meant film and TV companies have absorbed each others archives, turned TV shows into movies and the reverse. The novelty of open-air screenings continues to be popular around the world despite being the antitheses of the passive darkened room. Even the width of film stock has expanded and shrunk in response to the handiness of the technology which uses it. No matter what size the camera, the process of constructing stories and recreating projected realities has continued unabated.

The digital is yet another cross-roads for the film industry. This time, some say, the issues are truly different because there has never been anything as fundamentally ‘new.’

Broadly speaking, there are 3 schools of thought on this: one is that digital technology is primarily an enhancer of effects, a tool which offers heightened presentation; the second says that digital is another dimension altogether where not only the look but the very structure of story and audience/subject relationship is fundamentally changed; the third is what might be called a whole-of-industry approach, embracing both the look and the structure of film.

Digital is now the norm across all media. Everything is on-line or else it appears to belong to yesterday. Increasingly, television shows and many films have a website, a chat room and on-line products for sale. This is being extended to include additional story involvement, as in the multiplatform TV series Fat Cow Motel (RT 50), formally launched this week by the Queensland Minister for the Arts, Matt Foley.

The look of it

For the general audience the impact of digital technology is in the effects— bigger, cleverer and ever-present. Two examples define the early boundaries. Remember the look of the screen in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) when he experimented with the digital density of the image. The film had layers of beautiful, elegant images which were more like lithographs than moving screens, whose purpose was to elaborate rather than drive a story forward. Greenaway is a director who believes in the centrality of the image and has no interest in cinema’s link to classical literary narrative.

In the same year, writer/director James Cameron in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) used digital effects to enhance story, permitting concepts such as the resurrection of a character from shattered pieces of chrome, a digital character who never dies because the bytes are smoothly re-arranged in the way cartoon characters emerge unscathed from explosions.

It is clear that the magic or spectacle of cinema will be further dramatically enhanced by digital technology. Ironically, this may bring about a return to the origins of cinema, to the place where the wonder is there for all to experience. This is an important issue for all those who make and critique films. The audience no longer runs from the theatre when the train comes into the station. We have seen so much that so much more needs to be on the screen to get us to react with anything like the innocence of early film audiences.

This does not apply to today’s children, however, who now encounter the digital experience literally pre-birth. It is not something they have to learn, or use as a replacement for an older analogue way of thinking. This will fundamentally affect the development of their imaginations and their creative acceptance of the image experience on a variety of screens. Digital says films today should be effects perfect, like Lord of the Rings or Babe. Children now watch Walking With Dinosaurs (2000) on TV (a program which is generations better that Jurassic Park (1993) in terms of the quality of its effects). The ‘spectacle’ of Spielberg has become ‘infotainment’ on the small screen for all ages, and the voice-over gives the program an added educational authority which no parent can refuse. It is likely that applications like this explaining the complexities of science or ecology for example, will be as important for the digital presence as its use in classical storytelling on the big screen.

Download it now

There are assumptions in the digital sector which have to do with the fetish of the new. Our equipment, and therefore the depth of our experience, is either cutting edge or out of date. You have Flash to access an on-line program or not. If not, then the viewer has a sense of being disenfranchised. The new dimensions of wealth and poverty in the digital age are very much about access to technology and the information which flows from it. Ideas now seem to be contained within the digital flow. It’s not human thought but electricity which is the platform.

This will change with some speed. Whilst it seems an absurdly wasteful use of technology to buy a bottle of Coca Cola with a mobile phone, the recent inclusion of digital camera capacity in mobile phones which can then email images directly is ground-breaking.

Convergence automatically creates access which would otherwise be difficult or expensive to acquire. This will dramatically affect the capacity of program makers and storytellers to be viable in the new age. Development and production funding, along with the financial edifices which have grown up around them, will be competing soon with more practical needs like equipment acquisition and training.

Digital technology has also had a profound effect on the sequence of production. What has been established as a set of roles for 100 years is now reversed. Editors are now involved in pre-production and designers in post-production, cinematographers too. This has forced a new flexibility onto the process of producing films which will change the way creativity connects to narrative structure and presentation.

How big is my story?

Stories have always been the engines of spectacle and the basic rule of story construction since the origins of narrative cinema has been containment and simplicity. However, the potential branches of film stories have usually been denied in favour of a focussed narrative of no more than 2 lines, ie a major thread plus a sub-plot.

This structure has dominated cinema largely because the audience was passive, receiving the text in a darkened room. The situation of cinema determined that essential relationship. For a director like Hitchcock this meant he could give the audience information (by showing who is hiding behind the door with a knife), send the character to their inevitable death and leave the impotent audience whispering, “Watch out, Watch out!” to an unresponsive screen.

The interactive possibilities of digital technology suggest other relationships between story and audience, removing the sense of being informed yet powerless. Dave Sag of Virtual Artists suggests ‘yellavision’ where the audience alters the fate of a character by shouting at the screen. Writers in particular need to consider what this might mean for their carefully constructed storylines.

One such opportunity will soon be provided by the Digital Media Fund of the South Australian Film Corporation (www.safilm.com.au) who are proposing a digital think tank next year—a week’s retreat where change and chance (multiplatform and interactivity) can be explored. This is a welcome opportunity especially for writers who rarely travel the whole length of a production as true collaborators. If that bridge is crossed then “Once upon a time” might translate into “Sometimes it goes like this…”

For SAFC, allowing filmmakers to join forces with professionals working in digital media in the hothouse of a creative retreat, builds on the accords already negotiated with ABC On-line and SBS New Media which are intended to produce a range of projects including animation, on-line documentaries (see, for example, A Year on the Wing, on-line documentary, www.abc.net.au/wing) and short fiction. It is not certain, however, if these projects will be for the large screen or smaller ones such as TV or computer where they will be competing for audience attention with interactive game shows and T-commerce facilities. Nevertheless, these initiatives suggest all kinds of interesting possibilities.

Meanwhile, AFTRS (Australian Film Television & Radio School) is developing digital technologies specifically as tools for special effects in films. Exploring the plasticity of the image through digital effects is part of the drive behind the best experimental short films, where the compression of time and image makes the wondrous especially effective. Physical TV’s ATOM award-winning short dance film, No Surrender is a good example (www.artmedia.com.au/ physical_tv.htm). Director Richard Allen calls it “a digital age story” where the camera (cinematographer Andrew Commis, editor Karen Pearlman) is a malevolent presence on screen, forcing the audience to question the intention of the technology used to construct the narrative. This too is a form of interactivity, but more subtle and ultimately intelligent. No Surrender points the way to the possibilities that abound when collaboration occurs across forms and new technologies are integrated into the totality of the vision.

Opening quotation from Cutting Truths: Convergence, Interactivity & the future of documentary. Digidocs, www.reangle.com.au/digidocs

It’s curious how often a bunch of film finalists can display striking thematic similarities although stylistically they work in very different ways. Without having access to the rest of the short animation field for these awards it’s hard to tell if you’ve witnessed a trend or a manifestation of the unconscious desires of the judges who made the final selection. Whatever, these films shared as their subject the evocation of childhood subjectivity—whether recollected, in first or third person, intimately or ironically—with some very interesting visual outcomes.

Into the Dark (6 minutes; also short-listed for this year’s Dendy Awards) is a brief moment-of-death reverie strung tautly between the poles of guilt (a boy shoots a bird in a huge backyard tree) and pleasure (the boy’s imagined moments of naked flight, lifting off from a pool of water on a bathroom floor). The shooting of the bird has a furtive quality, mostly done in a detached, objectifying silhouette, while the sustained bathroom scene has a pronounced sense of interiority. It commences from the boy’s point of view with the sharp black and yellow of the bathroom seen through watery distortion, one of the best graphic moments of the film. This subjectivity, reinforced by first person narration, alternates with another identification strategy as we find ourselves face to face with the boy, leisurely and sensually towelling himself dry, or about to float up. The firmness of line in the bathroom scenes contrasts with the smudged charcoal rawness of the journey to death on a hospital gurney, our only point of view that of the dying man. The operating theatre staff are giant silhouetted birds, there is a stoush with a dog. In the bathroom, the boy flies, but the dog and birds fight outside and a small bird, like the one the boy shot, flails and thumps like a giant against the window. The oscilloscope beep of life drains away into a sustained signal of death. The frame is filled with the same deep sepia photograph of a boy we encountered eye to eye as the film opened. The inclusion of the dog aside (a role never firmly established, you feel you might have missed something), Into the Dark is demanding, placing the viewer in an intensely subjective position while feeling at all times that this is someone else’s life. On second viewing I was less than happy with the use of the photograph with its suggestion of biographical reality and of time long past. The animation can stand on its own without this. In terms of manipulation of point of view and the merging of visual styles, Into the Dark manages to be both pleasingly coherent and nightmarish: a common childhood act staying, like original sin, with its perpetrator until death.

The wickedly inventive Sssh… (5 mins), is in no doubt that all human ills are born with us, or at least that’s how it can feel when a baby cries despite every attempt at consolation. This time the view is determinedly adult though that’s a position the film plays with very cleverly. The great thing about Ssssh… is not just its virtuosity and wit, but the framing of its lateral narrative. A baby drawn onto the screen by the filmed hand of the animator cries raucously and endlessly. The animator rapidly provides numerous, hilarious solutions (most playing with cartoon animation transformations) but none is effective—the companionship of another baby briskly sketched in yields 2 screaming kids, all mouths, and brutal erasure of the newcomer. The baby is spun around, the artist’s nib opens the back of the head and we are plunged into baby-world-view. Slick, lively Chuck Jones style animation is suddenly supplanted with aggressive animated stick drawings of all kinds of mayhem, funny and increasingly grim, including a potted history of the attempted genocide of Aborigines (the blood around the base of an Australian flag pole briskly cleaned up in an act of ‘forgetting’). The incision is bandaided and baby calmed. In contrast to reflective, lyrical animations with metaphyiscal musings, it was a pleasure to see an animation with political drive, focussed inventiveness, satirical wit and a vigorous playfulness with its own conventions. The switch to the style of children’s drawings is a bold one that works well, a rough ride from innocence to experience.

Pa (6 mins) starts out innocuously with an actress playing Grandma working her way through her huge collection of photographs, including many of her husband, Pa, while a boy’s voiceover informs us that the grandson never met his grandfather. The animation proper commences with a photograph of Pa’s grave, the site sprouting colourful flowers as the boy recalls his imaginings of what Pa might have been like from the odd bits of information he has gleaned. And it’s then that the film springs to life in its dextrous collaging and creative distortion of largely black and white photographic images that conjure Pa’s fantastic world. While reminiscent of, among others, Terry Gilliam working on Monty Python, director Neil Goodridge’s handling of the collage style is taut, consistent and makes the most of the juxtapositions the form allows while keeping the narration simple—the relative innocence of the words up against the heightened imagery. The boy fuses Pa’s love of chooks with his passion for cricket, and so conjures a cricket match played by Pa and his chooks in cricket gear, chooks watching from the the grandstand, and Pa beheading his team mates as his bat becomes an axe. Similarly a love of fish collecting and walks in the bush merge into a fantastic journey astride a huge fish through a forest. And it gets wilder, and wittier—Pa milking a snake as if it were a cow and spiking a guest’s drink with the poison. Pa, the canary fancier, joining the bird on its swing. Pa dreaming of going to Hawaii, the boy imagining him as surfing a huge wave (a striking scene) until he crashes, falling prey to cancer. We sense behind these astonishing visions a man who enjoyed many rather ordinary passions, but who was also a bit of character, and is sorely missed by the grandson who never knew him, hence the power of family lore and the photograph album. The film’s opening, with the grandmother, and its ending, with the face of the boy popping out of the head of the canary, are cumbersome and twee devices for a film of, otherwise, such drive, threatening to throw off-balance the engaging play of toughness and whimsy. As in Sssh… there was also a nice sense of the film emerging from our own culture.

Strangely, after the delights of familiar graphic forms, the 3D computer animation of Mark Gravas’ Show and Tell (5 mins) seemed almost traditional, so familiar and commercial has the style become. It’s set in a futuro-gothic, out-sized classroom juxtaposed with a richly coloured world of child fantasies, those of a despised boy who collects junk on his way to school and uses it as the subject of his show-and-tell. The rhyming couplet narration (adult, third person) nicely matches the boy’s growing success as he seduces the class (and demolishes his teacher) with a tale of a magical journey to “the mutant bat’s grave”, while producing from his bag mattress springs, roadkill and a one-legged dog called Max. It’s all too easy a journey to success, the teacher is a cliché, the dog under-used, but it has a nice, droll fabulist’s sense of wicked inevitability, expertly realised figures and a marvellously vertiginous play with perspectives.

The 5th contender Dad’s Clock (writer-director Dik Jarman; RT 50, p24) didn’t make it into the final 4. It’s an expertly crafted, melancholic reverie that juxtaposes a simple narrative told by the son of a dying father, with images of the man’s fantasy construction of a fantastic boat. Dad’s Clock is as expertly crafted as any of the above animations and shares not a few similarities in theme.

If these animations are indications of the health of the art, then there is no shortage of really expert craft, seriousness that transcends whimsy and a great capacity to play with psychological and visual point of view. In the end it was the feverish wit, visual inventiveness, lateral narrativity and political edginess of Shhh… that won me.

Into the Dark, writer-director Dennis Tupicoff, producers Fiona Cochrane, Dennis Tupicoff; Shhh…, writer-director Adam Robb, producers Paul Fletcher, Andi Spark; Pa, writer-director Neil Goodridge, producer Andrew McVitty; Show and Tell, director Mark Gravas, writers Bradley Trevor Grieve, Sandra Walters, producer Sandra Walters.

Four films are brought together for an awards ceremony and, inevitably, comparisons are made, similarities emerge, lines are drawn, like is compared with like but also with not alike.

A Wedding in Ramallah and East Timor—Birth of a Nation: Rosa’s Story are the ‘straight’ guys. They tell stories about ordinary people struggling with mundane realities—family, marriage, domestic life—in abnormal circumstances (the Palestinian Territories and East Timor). They like to look at life in the microcosm and see what it says about the bigger picture. There’s a subject who stays in front of the camera and a film-maker who follows them about. They’re revealing, touching, funny at times. They’re careful not to preach while still having something worthwhile to say.

The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinski and Rainbow Bird and Monster Man are the ‘arty’ ones, telling stories of unimaginable pain and personal suffering with great imagination and energy. They like symbols and motifs, re-enactments and dramatisations. Much of the telling is in the cutting and zooming, panning and fading. They are evocative, elliptical, edgy, looking for new ways to say something that can’t always be said easily.

A Wedding in Ramallah (90 minutes) is perhaps the funniest of the bunch but also has the most depressing air of hopelessness, its subjects seemingly trapped by circumstances, leading stifled lives with little possibility of genuine change. Director Sherine Salama has an eye for dry humour, a mildly sardonic appraisal of Life’s big-little ironies, such as the Palestinian bride who longs to be with her husband in America and, sure enough, winds up living in a suburban condo purgatory. Be Careful What You Wish For….! Not that the newlyweds have much of a say in the matter; the groom is only in the US to avoid being in an Israeli prison.

The film works by shifting the focus away from the familiar narratives of bombings and reprisals to show us something positive about Palestinian culture rather than simply viewing it as being ‘not us’. At the same time, it doesn’t try to airbrush the Palestinians into appearing ‘just like us’. It’s clever, cluey and revealing, thanks mainly to an astute decision to film the preamble to and aftermath of an arranged marriage. This is an event totally at odds with Western notions of romantic love but meaningful in its own context. (There are some wonderful scenes of the couple sitting silently together with nothing to say; you can almost hear Sherine Salama thinking out loud as she films, ‘Boy, this is terrific.’ And it is.) The link between ritual as a marker of identity and cultural/national autonomy is never articulated but seems obvious nevertheless.

Rainbow Bird and Monster Man (52 mins) is the grimmest tale of all, a soul-stretching story of child abuse and its consequences, as if somebody has taken all the macabre horror of a fairytale and said, no, really, this is what Life is like. It’s also the most affirmative viewing, a remarkable survival story. It starts with an anecdote about a man, Tony Lock, making music after a murder, in the police van, and then, later on, writing poetry in prison. And somehow that sets the tone, a sense of release suffusing the nightmare. The film’s strength is Tony Lock himself who, apart from a few re-enactments, narrates his own story with incredible clarity and insight. It’s an extraordinary act, not in the sense of a performance but of a deed accomplished, something created and offered to us. The film’s imagery, evoking different stages in Tony’s life, must do justice to his story and, for the most part, it does.

Rosa’s Story (55 mins) is another survivor episode, following the efforts of a young East Timorese mother to collect her children from various places of safe keeping. Rosa’s attempt to reunite her family for the first time is complemented with footage of Xanana Gusmao endeavouring to do likewise with the new nation, like Rosa travelling around the country to collect support and build a new life. It’s tentatively hopeful; the spirit is willing but the odds are not good for a single mother in a poor country.

Paul Cox’s The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinski (95 mins) gave me the best drift for some time, some dreamily dreamy daydreams and sub-conscious streaming. In fact I may even have been asleep for some of the time. It has some fine dancing too and the best performance of L’Apres-midi d’un Faune I’ve ever seen. It’s the only performance of L’Apres-midi d’un Faune I’ve ever seen, but I’m sure it’s very good.

In essence, the film is a visual accompaniment to readings from Nijinski’s diaries tracing his mental disintegration. It’s illustrated with trademark Cox motifs drawn from nature—fire, water, blood—and especially the play of light—shadows, silhouettes, reflections—to create a visual dance characterised by rapid movement, interspersed with a lingering stillness. Above it all there are Nijinski’s ramblings—fevered, obsessive, dogmatic, dismissive, expansive and always the voice—incessant, repetitious, loopily looping the loop, the Artist at odds with Society, childish and narcissistic, seemingly omnipotent but fearful of everything that opposes or diminishes his powers. I’m not sure if I learnt anything about Nijinski in the process but, as a performance, the film succeeds on its own merits.

So that’s it for this year—some madness, a marriage, children lost and found. Do we still have to pick a winner at this point? If so, I’m going for A Wedding in Ramallah simply because it hardly puts a foot wrong and, as Nijinski would no doubt agree, not a lot people can do that.

A Wedding in Ramallah, writer, producer, director, cinematographer Sherine Salama; East Timor—Birth of a Nation: Rosa’s Story, writer, director Luigi Acquisto, cinematographer Valeriu Campan, producers Luigi Acquisto, Stella Zammataro, Andrew Sully; Rainbow Bird and Monster Man, writer, director Dennis K Smith, cinematographer Kevin Anderson, producer John Lewis; The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinski, writer, director Paul Cox, cinematographers Paul Cox, Hans Sonneveld, producers Paul Cox, Aanya Whitehead.

The 14 feature films contending for this year’s Australian Film Industry Award constitute a bumper crop of impressive variety ranging from Ivan Sen’s powerful Beneath Clouds to Phil Noyce’s Rabbit-proof Fence and David Caesar’s Dirty Deeds. The lesser-known category of Short Fiction (under 30 minutes) displays notably less diversity, with the 4 finalists (out of 65 contenders) each playing out variations on a theme: male-angst-on-the-move. Two are set in Melbourne and 2 in Sydney.

Several of the finalist directors are products of film training institutions: Eve of Adha is written and directed by Leonard Yip from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), and follows a young Muslim man (intensely played by Paul Rene) facing a range of tormenting ethical decisions; the only film not to locate its angst within the confines of a modern, luxurious lifestyle. Into the Night, directed by Tony Krawitz from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, purportedly reflects the life of a street rent boy, but the first sweep of saccharine music, the principal casting, and the film’s main location within a sumptuous apartment suggest otherwise. It is unadventurous but slick and technically proficient, bearing the stamp of AFTVRS as an industry training ground, just as the VCA film, Eve of Adha, demonstrates the creativity associated with its art school genesis.

Eve of Adha opens with a quotation: “Everyone begins the morning by trading with his soul; he either wins it or ruins it.” The daily dilemma and existential loneliness of the main character is evoked and enriched through the use of an exceptionally good soundtrack featuring Middle Eastern inflected music composed by Justin Ryda and M. Nasir. Location sounds are withdrawn from the sound mix as Rene’s character prays, at home on his prayer mat or in an empty mosque, creating moments of clarity and suspension of time. While the minimal script is slightly awkward, subtle use of colour and textured surfaces in the interior sequences, and tightly framed shots create a compelling atmosphere, mirroring the protagonist’s mix of calm moments amidst inner turmoil. At times, it is the most visually interesting and provocative of the 4 finalists.

Roundabout, the directorial debut by Rachel Griffiths, also makes creative use of sound design and music (David Bridie is screen composer), and the flair of cinematographer Tristan Milani (The Boys) drives its narrative about an alienated businessman cracking under pressure. The film is cleverly structured and also concerned with the disruption of the flow of time. Roundabout features the protagonist’s car trip—the driver departs for the city from a stark cube in a wealthy suburb and gradually spirals out of control on the freeway in a series of imaginatively conceived and executed shots. But like a polished advertisement it slides over and away, the credits rolling as copiously as a feature film.

The longest of the 4 finalist films, The Host, is shot in chic black and white, its story again played out against luxurious contemporary architecture (which could have inspired the film—it comes to feature as a silent character in the story). Director Nicholas Tomnay (a past graduate of the College of Fine Arts, Sydney) sets up a host of expectations and stereotypes, only to cleverly turn them on their head. This is a film with a great deal of quirky humour, and despite its play upon illusion and decadence, it achieves a sense of veracity, partly though its casting and performances. The Host elegantly realises the potential of the short film medium through its finesse of form, exploiting the dynamic of this medium through skilful and beautifully paced editing. Robert Moss’s music creates a joyful thread throughout, working at times in counterpoint to disturbing events on screen.

The high level of skilful filmmaking in these 4 short films, and the (mostly) welcome integration between sound and image, with the music working as an integral part of the affect rather than a last-minute add-on, are strong indications of the vibrant state of filmaking at the moment, notwithstanding the difficulties associated with distribution and actually reaching audiences. I am left wondering however about the male angst; is this the post-Lantana theme of the early 21st century?

Eve of Adha, writer-director Leonard Yip, producer Chris McGill; Into the Night, director Tony Krawitz, writer Cath Moore, producers Melissa Johnston, Rachel Clements; Roundabout, writer-director Rachel Griffiths, producers Louise Smith, Jason Byrne; The Host, director Nicholas Tomnay, writers Nicholas Tomnay, Krishna Jones. producers Nicholas Tomnay, Alison Clentsmith, Linda Ujuk.

The AFI Awards roll around every so often like a funeral for a distant uncle. Time to take stock and try to find something nice to say about the old bastard. It’s not been a notable year for Aussie movies with domestic box office share sliding back into the 4% range. It is increasingly clear that Australian cinema rests on a star system that has overshot a local production base. The best analogy might be soccer, where fans are more interested in Leeds United than the local league. Forget the ‘telling our stories’ rhetoric—the nationalism Australians draw from the cinema is the nationalism of being acknowledged internationally.

It’s ironic, then, that a lacklustre year has produced one of the best Australian films for a long time. In a just world, Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds would walk away with this year’s award. Where most Australian films are formally conservative exercises full of Actors reciting Dialogue, Sen can use silence to build to a powerful emotional experience. It’s a film of enormous courage which doesn’t try to aestheticise pain or set it into a comfortably discredited past. It stands out as a film which successfully asks you to feel something.

If Beneath Clouds has been the major achievement in our cinema’s recovery of the courage to deal with Indigenous stories, Rabbit-proof Fence has been the popular success and will probably start favourite for Best Film. It’s a film with some fine moments whose importance is in telling us what we should already know about the Stolen Generations. While the emphasis on the strength of young Aboriginal women is a timely intervention, the film falls back on the comforting convention of racism as outmoded bureaucratic insensitivity. Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker situates racism as melodramatic villainy, though it does this to grapple with the problems of making our ugly history into aesthetically pleasing art.

Paul Goldman’s Australian Rules is another matter. It appears to have survived the bad odour caused by lack of consultation with the Indigenous community and is now draping itself in the mantle of liberal politics. All this for a collection of clichés: the regressive male hero of Black Rock (and a hundred other Aussie films); and the country town as hell. Although it’s about standing up to your father, its drama is built around the paternalistic assumption that the courage of white liberals is what’s important.

It’s all very well having aesthetic victories around the margins, but a healthy film industry needs a sniff of the multiplexes. Three films have had wide commercial release this year: The Man Who Sued God opened on 233 screens, Dirty Deeds on 183, and The Hard Word on 162. Rabbit -proof Fence was the closest thing to a crossover hit opening on 95 screens and then holding around 50 screens through a 5 month roll-out.

David Caesar’s got Kerry Packer’s money and Broynbrown in Dirty Deeds and yuz can all get stuffed if you don’t like it. You’ve got to admit that the money’s on the screen. Every shot is brutally art directed, every line of dialogue polished to a state of rough perfection. Each image strives to be a fragment of cultural DNA from which you could reconstruct the entire zeitgeist of late-60s Australia.

Alex Proyas has got Rupert Murdoch’s money in Garage Days. I suppose it’s this year’s Moulin Rouge, given that it proposes the triumph of visual bombast over quaint pre-postmodern conceits like characterisation. The musical has become the quintessential genre for these self-consciously flashy films. The puzzling innovation here is that although the film appears to champion the cause of live music, all the music is non-diegetic. Being a musician is a hip fantasy, not a matter of performance.

As its title indicates, The Hard Word grows out of the sharpness of its dialogue. There’s Guy, Rachel, and a caper which provides the pretext for hardboiled bon mots, though the wheels fall off during the third act. After seeing Claudia Karvan struggle to be a femme fatale last year in Risk, and Rachel Griffiths defeated by the same task here, I’m wondering whether we’ve got the dark relish of treachery within us. Our politics suggests that the evil in this country is much more banal.

The Man Who Sued God (Mark Joffe) is the kind of compromised, dishonest crap that gives commercial filmmaking a bad name. The impulse to populism manifests itself in over-produced music, helicopter shots, the kind of blue heelers you see in TV commercials, and the kind of Billy Connolly you also see in TV commercials. The film tries to kid you that it’s got something to say until the whole pile of shit finally caves in on itself and the only way out is to sell us the old one that love conquers all, even insurance companies. Tell it to your agent, Billy.

Back over in the art cinema margins, theatrical influences still hold sway. Tony Ayres’ Walking On Water is this year’s Soft Fruit, a film conceived in terms of individual scenes, each leading to its chunky moment of confrontation. The problem is that you get confrontation after confrontation right up to the moment when there has be to Resolution, which has to come out of nowhere. (Russell Mulcahy’s Swimming Upstream hasn’t been available for preview, but I fear we are in for a similar bout of Performance.)

Where Garage Days is hip that the surface is all, Till Human Voices Wake Us (Michael Petroni) is the complete opposite. Characters are intensely introspective and quote TS Eliot. Piano and cello are played sensitively. This is one of a number of films brought out of limbo to round out the field—but that’s part of the value of the exercise. The history of Australian cinema is littered with lost causes, tragically flawed films whose primary interest is in the ways they go wrong, the contradictions they can’t reconcile.

Let’s consider Paul Cox’s 1999 Molokai, a film about lepers with a famously troubled production history. It is tempting to reach for the obvious metaphor and see the film as something of a leper. Given its episodic nature, it is obvious that bits have already dropped off. David Wenham is hunkered down into his accent and declines into the clutches of the make-up artist, Kate Ceberano drops by to give us a tune and Chris Haywood goes blind from drinking whatever Kris Kristoffersen and Peter O’Toole were having in their dressing rooms.

I can see why Cox wanted to make a film about Father Damien, another European wandering in a beautiful but blighted wilderness at the other end of the earth. But it’s a hagiography whose time has past, in that it shares with Australian Rules the assumption that it is the white man’s burden to save the poor indigenous victim.

Like Molokai, Julie Money’s Envy was made in 1999. It’s another of these games of get-the-yuppy in which Sydney filmmakers seem to delight. I guess having a 3 generation mortgage will do that to you. Who is the audience for these films? It certainly isn’t the yuppies who are caricatured, and the rest of us can hardly be too traumatised by seeing Tuscan kitchens invaded or the paintwork scratched on the Beemer.

After a few festival screenings last year Willfull has had to wait for its brief swandive to the floor in commercial release. Rebel Penfold-Russell concentrates on the design of the film, but seems to have learned about directing actors from watching sitcom mannerisms. But then, the tragedy of the ghostly mother is that life is more complicated than simply being stylish.

Finally, the real suspense this year doesn’t concern the films so much as the AFI itself. Given that the organisation has been pared back to something that no longer does much more than this, the Awards are under pressure to produce and I fear that the sparseness of the field won’t help.

Existing almost purely in the domain of festivals, competitions and private video release, short film’s barely existent commercial screening life means that funding one most always involves independent means. As educational tools, short films are an important stepping-stone in the life of aspiring filmmakers. Whilst functioning as vignettes of creative experimentation, they also exist in a practical capacity as advertisements of the filmmaker’s skill.

The Young Filmmakers Fund (YFF) was established in 1996 by the NSW Film and Television Office (FTO) to encourage creativity and new talent in the film industry and in essence address the lack of funding for short films. In July this year the FTO announced the recipients of the 11th round of YFF grants bringing the total number of projects that have been assisted by the fund to 67. Each grant offers a NSW resident aged 13-35 up to $30,000 to produce a film (short or short feature) in any format or genre. The virtue of having the fund in place to cultivate local talent has been demonstrated in the success past YFF assisted films have enjoyed. Many have won selection and accolades at national and international festivals and have gone on to be sold to distributors and broadcasters worldwide.

The recipients of the 2002 grants demonstrate the diversity that the FTO supports. The 4 projects range in both content and style spanning black comedy, experimental and short drama. What comes across in discussion is each director’s solid sense of vision for their film and a keen sense of teamwork on their production.

Danielle Boesenberg’s The Easter Tide, produced by Sam Meikle and Rachel Clements, is based loosely on the marriage of the filmmaker’s grandmother, examining how love endures the pain of losing a child. Structured around a series of flashbacks the modern setting will have a “really contemporary look with lots of fluid camera” while the flashbacks will consist of more abstract shots that play with shallow focus to replicate the uncertainty of memory. “[The style is] very much flashes of memory and memory breaking up. With memory you remember certain details and everything else is a bit blurry.”

Boesenberg was pleasantly surprised she got funding for the film, musing that “Particularly in Australia there is a tendency to try and make a funny film. [The Easter Tide] is a little story. It’s not solving the world’s problems or making people laugh or trying to be anything other than a sweet little story.” The fact that all 4 of this year’s YFF assisted films are not characterised by glaring punch-lines is recognition enough that there are many ‘little stories’ out there yet to be told by young filmmakers.

Whilst Boesenberg has been harbouring the idea for her film for quite a while she sees it as a nice symmetry that she is able to start production in the year that her grandmother died. Having already made a few self-funded short films with her husband, screenwriter Meikle, Boesenberg is grateful she doesn’t have to go down that route for The Easter Tide. “The only way to make films without funding is to beg, borrow and steal and I think we’ve pretty much used all the calls we can make on that.”

Stray Heart, directed by Jason di Rosso and produced by Paula Jensen, was shot on a characteristically low short film budget and made use of the YFF grant entirely in post production. The story follows a lonely kleptomaniac who seeks solace in the shared experience of owning objects. Shot on a Bolex using nearly all natural lighting sources, the experience forced di Rosso’s team to be extremely disciplined in their filmmaking. Having scoured for locations where the natural light source “was as good as if we’d had all the trucks and money in the world” di Rosso concedes that “in actual fact we’ve ended up with a film that anyone would say looks stunning.”

The YFF grant then allowed them “pretty much all the resources we wanted” in post production and they finished the film on 35mm. “It was a different learning experience of not necessarily making ends meet but of learning to work on a professional level in an area of the industry I hadn’t had much experience in.”

Referring to the “dark shadowy edges” of the film’s images, di Rosso says the story was created specifically for the camera. DOP Sean Meehan wanted to do something that would lend itself to the look of the Bolex so “I immediately thought of something dark that dealt with the psychological and the metaphysical.”

For Louise Fox it was the resonance of a true story she had read that inspired her to write. A Natural Talent is about a woman living in central NSW in the 1850s who gains celebrity status by claiming she has given birth to rabbits. “I was pregnant when I wrote it and surveyed all the pregnant women I know. At some stage they’d all had weird dreams about giving birth to animals. It seemed to be quite a universal anxiety.”

As both an inward examination of grief and loss and a black comedy, Fox wants the audience’s attitude to shift through the film. She describes it as a “funny, strange and dark” drama and was intrigued by what could have driven a woman to create such a fabrication. “I’d been reading about women in that period and their level of loss (at birth)—5 out of 10 children—and what that did to an entire generation when there were no ways of speaking about it.”

Set in the “really dry but very beautiful” region of Wolca NSW, the visual style is influenced by the pastoral image of The Drover’s Wife. “I thought about the difficulty of raising children in that world and that iconographic imagery of Australian women in the bush through that period of painting.”

For Fox and producer Tamara Popper who are endeavouring to raise more money to fund what will be a short feature (26 minutes) the FTO grant has “engender[ed] a lot of faith in a lot of people” who may not otherwise have had confidence in relatively inexperienced filmmakers.

For Adam Sebire (Le Violon d’Ingres) the grant has allowed his production team to experiment with a new medium. “My background is documentary and this gives me the chance to step into a highly stylised visual and aural realm way outside of that. It will push all the crew in that sense and if it doesn’t I guess it won’t have succeeded.”

The film is a surreal exploration of Man Ray’s photograph Le Violon d’Ingres. The famous photograph depicts a nude sitting with her back to the camera, f holes super-imposed on her skin so that she looks like a cello. Using one long tracking shot around the photograph, the film is set to the music of Satie’s Gymmopedie No 1 and also references the poem said to have inspired Satie. According to Sebire it will be a “concentrated mix of music, poetry, light and sensual and surreal shapes all coming together in a tapestry.”

Sebire’s concept works against the view that Man Ray’s photograph places the woman as a passive object of desire. “In this film she comes to life and gazes directly and intensely at us, she sings us this poem and eventually metamorphoses into her cello ‘other’.” Yet rather than dealing with notions of the male gaze, Sebire is interested in debates about the depiction of ‘reality’ in photography. “I think Man Ray was playing with the idea of whether a photograph can be trusted to represent the truth. He has this very surreal image where we’re not sure if she’s a woman or a cello.”

Conscious that the idea of photographic manipulation has topical relevance, Sebire wants to “experiment with a type of 21st century surrealism to play with the illusion that Man Ray set up. Perhaps people will start to think about how we can look at an image and be sure that it’s telling the truth.”

The Easter Tide, director Danielle Boesenberg, producers Sam Miekle and Rachel Clements. Production to commence in Jan 2003. Stray Heart, director Jason di Rosso, producer Paula Jensen. Production completed. A Natural Talent, director Louise Fox, producer Tamara Popper. Production to commence in December 2002. Le Violon d’Ingres (working title), director Adam Sebire, producer Fiorenza Zito. Production to commence 2003.

The insertion of a major retrospective of experimental films from the U.K., Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! into the Melbourne and Brisbane In International Film Festivals brings into focus the way marginalised work is received and perceived here, how it relates to our own history and also triggers current concerns about technical resources.

Mark Webber, freelance film curator and writer (and guitarist with British band Pulp) sifted through hundreds of 60s and 70s 16mm films from the London Filmmaker’s Co-operative (LFMC) to curate Shoot!…. After taking 2 years to assemble, the films were initially screened at the Tate Modern in May this year. Webber was a guest at both Australian festivals.

The selection, he stated, is by no means definitive but does fairly represent the period. Some of the better known works have been overlooked in favour of the rarely seen. Those of us starved of access to films from this era from the National Library of Australia’s National Film and Video Collection (once accessible, for example, through the National Cinematheque and Experimenta screenings, and those organised and researched by Peter Mudie over the years) certainly appreciated this approach. In Melbourne, where I saw Shoot…, Experimenta presented the single screen films at Greater Union Russell Street as part of MIFF and the Multi-Screen Events at gammaSPACE in Flinders Lane.

Though some of us were re-visiting this subversive artist-centred era of cinematic practice, the bulk of the audience seemed to come to this work for the first time. Hopefully, for them, the program put some of the current concerns in new media about speed, repetition, structure and collage within an historical perspective.

gammaSPACE most closely replicated the intimate and transient spaces where such works first surfaced. There the audience responded disarmingly and directly to Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973 30min b&w silent). This film was simply a white circle drawn slowly over 30 minutes on a black background and projected through a smoke generating machine. The cone which thus materialized was touched, broken, examined and delicately interacted with by the audience, enveloping them into the film’s performance.

There was also a panel discussion at the MIFF Festival Club where Webber was joined by Simon Field, Director of the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and Simon Gammell, Director of The British Council (Australia). Talk was nostalgically centred around the empowering energy of independence, its politics and the artist-based nature of the self-contained LFMC which incorporated production, distribution and exhibition under the one roof.

The rigour of the Marxist theoretical stance emanating mainly from the writings of Le Grice and Gidal, the oppositional, formalist and conceptual nature of the work was at one point described reverently as Anti-Film. Such a comment underscores how “film” continues to be defined from the theatrical /story-telling end of the filmmaking spectrum, its dominant entertainment arm. It is worth looking at ES Small’s Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video As Major Genre (Carbondale, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1994 ) for an argument that such marginal experimental filmmaking is a form of theorizing in and of itself. Even more important is looking at the films themselves, given that so much has been written about them over the years.

Even the films presented in the section entitled “Structuralist/Materialist” were experienced as quite unassuming, delicate, playful, open and inviting. Unlike the theoretical/political discussions around them these films do not in themselves deliver any sense of ranting rhetoric. The program delivered a sense of a vulnerable human conversation between equals.

Shoot… allowed me to re-experience the pull of that film community, that international yet local film project. Each film in this program was like a sentence about film made in conversation with the surrounding work. Artists were talking to each other and their audience about film through film: as texture, flicker, material, repetition, crackle, time, landscape, dance, diary, multimedia, performance and so on.

This was a conversation into which many of us coming into film at that time felt unassumingly drawn. Many Australian filmmakers including Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, James Clayden, Marcus Bergner, John Dunkley-Smith and Albie Thoms were marked by such an impact and in their travels their work has found its way to a screening at the LFMC. While in London Dunkley-Smith collaborated with Guy Sherwin (represented in Shoot… by At the Academy (1974, b/w sound 5min). More needs to be made of such connections when importing blockbuster programs from overseas. Sure, this LFMC film work is outside the main game but here in Australia the local work experiences the schizophrenic reality of being outside the outside. Perhaps this is no different to those who came after this acclaimed “golden age” at the LFMC itself. As former transitional Londoner Paul Rodgers pointed out to me, that group has had to fight for the survival of the co-op itself as they watch their own work get marginalised even further.

My experience of the program was positive, though there were disappointments. Mark Webber himself was understandably affected by some of the unfortunate technical incidents that occurred during the Melbourne screenings. This culminated at gammaSPACE with him withdrawing David Larcher’s Mare’s Tail (1969, colour, sound 143 min) from the program after the projector’s take-up reel failed. It was a pity because the only other screening in Melbourne of this film had been in the mid 70s at a seminal screening of British Avant Garde film at the Melbourne Filmmaker’s Co-op in Lygon Street (yes, we used to have an artist run film co-op here too). Experimenta’s Executive Producer Fabienne Nicholas pointed out that it was a hard decision to cancel the screening but given the difficulty of sourcing acceptable film equipment it was prudent to not risk damage to a precious, stretched 30 year old film print.

We are indebted to BIFF for getting such a demanding and satisfying program to Australia, and to Experimenta and MIFF for getting it to Melbourne. Yes, it is disappointing that technical issues relating to projecting film in gallery settings remains an issue here. This is despite film’s growing importance within fine art communities internationally. It should be a solvable issue given the growing technical complexity of new media performance and installation amply evident at Prototype, an exhibition of New Media installations at another successful Experimenta presentation (see Lisa Gye).

Nor was the MIFF immune with some of the films in the final Diversifications section of Shoot… having to be shown silent because of equipment failure. It is hoped that Festival Director James Hewison, who has delivered a very successful festival, will show the leadership necessary and persevere in screening experimental work. As the festival discussion panel on ‘Global Film Culture’ noted, experimentation and the retrospective could be 2 of the stated cultural objectives of a progressive film festival.

Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! ,Brisbane International Film Festival; Experimenta, Melbourne International Film Festival & gammaSPACE, July 2002.

The third Sydney Asian Pacific Film Festival gave the impression of a cultural event nascent with possibility. Despite the abundance of work to source, the program comprised a promising sample of films from across the region combined with popular cult offerings.

Opening night featured festival guest Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times. While Yimou’s earlier works, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern and Shanghai Triad are saturated in colour, allegorical period themes and immaculate stylisation, Happy Times focuses on contemporary Beijing and those marginalised by China’s economic miracle. Zhao (Zhao Benshan) is a retired factory worker struggling against the stigma of poverty in his longstanding yearning to marry. When he finally locates a prospect through a dating agency she demands an expensive wedding, the first indication of her new China greed. Zhao’s friend suggests they raise money by hiring out an abandoned bus to young lovers, The Happy Times Hut. Zhao, embellishing his standing by masquerading as a successful hotelier, is persuaded by his fiancée to take care of her stepdaughter Wu Ying (Dong Jie). Zhao becomes increasingly protective of the blind Wu Ying as their friendship evolves through shared feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Despite at hinting the possibility for greater intimacy, Yimou crucially frames their mutual need within the overwhelming dispossession of a new class unable to define its place, making the comedic and humanist touches seem whimisically misdirected at the film’s emotionally demanding resolution. While Wu Ying escapes to make her own way in the new world, Zhao’s future is as forebodingly open-ended as China itself.

Demonstrating much about modern China’s reading of western individualism, Quitting is an autobiographical account of Jia Hongsheng, a prominent actor whose career is derailed by drugs. After months of smoking pot, Hongsheng becomes convinced he is the progeny of John Lennon and is committed by his family to a mental asylum. This is not the kind of hedonistic depravity the world’s alternative press might latch on to as an example of vertiginous chic, and audiences jaded by the west’s fetish for chemical excess in film (drug porn) will find the film’s earnestness naive. With Honsheng’s elaborate confession to authorities the key to his redemption, it’s little surprise Quitting passed Chinese censors despite its taboo subject.

In contrast, Tekashi Miike’s Dead or Alive (Japan) is a vision of surfeited postmodernity. Its opening montage is a machine-gun paced exposition of Tokyo at the moment of apocalypse. A prostitute jumps from a high-rise, a man greedily snorts a 5-metre line of cocaine, hit men pull automatic weapons from a convenience store’s frozen food section, a Chinese crime lord erupts ramen noodles as a gluttonous feast ends with an assassin’s bullet, and for a further 10 minutes violent imagery cascades in a tsunami of perversity and power. Miike’s disintegrating world is constructed from images without origin—the same diaspora and rootlessness that defines his characters. Crime fighter Jojima (Aikawa Sho) and gangster Ryuichi (Takeuchi Riki) share a profound longing for connection and place. Jojima is alienated from his family and Ryuichi is the offspring of ‘Zanryu Koji’—children left in China after WWII who returned unwanted to mainland Japan. Feeling no debt to Japanese society, Ryuichi and his small group muscle in on the Shinjuku underworld. The searing final confrontation between Jojima and Ryuchi suggests anything is possible in Miike’s films. Apart from the lead actors, the sequel to Dead or Alive is a complete departure. Sho now plays Mizuki the hit man and Riki his mysterious rival. Escaping from the yakuza the two share a ferry-ride home to a small island far from Tokyo, rekindling a childhood friendship. With the spiritual hollows of the Tokyo underworld behind them, the island gives rise to a nostalgia for lost innocence. Refreshed and purposeful, the killers leave to revive their careers, pledging to donate future profits to help suffering third world children. Despite a brief period of renewed professional gratification, the team discover the yakuza have long memories and hit men aren’t a rare resource in Tokyo city. Using a formula of chaotic imagery heavy with pastiche and satire, Miike takes the yakuza genre firstly to a limit of excess in DOA I, switching to a far more mercurial sense of possibility in the sequel. With his prolific average of 4 films a year, the crammed and sometimes vocal audience was evidence of Miike’s revered reputation in Japanese cult cinema.

Hong Kong’s signature action films were absent from the program, but flights of HKs irreducible cinematic imagination were on offer in the animated children’s film My Life as McDull. McDull is an animated piglet and he’s impossibley cute. He’s also a failure in the eyes of his mother, and seeks to prove his worth by becoming a master in the ancient art of ‘Kung Fu Bun Snatching’ (no really). My Life as McDull is scattered with many Desiderata-like platitudes to assuage the gravity of average inadequacy, but a blending of disparate animation techniques and an almost random inventiveness from image to image is enough to overcome a lack of ballast.

Sandy Lives (Vietnam) demonstrates how the cinematic image has the power to place us in another cultural reality, if only as tourists. Set just after reunification, a husband and wife reunite after a 20-year wait, only to find their lives are now irrevocably disconnected. Memory, desire and the lingering horrors of war shift together and apart like the transient shores upon which their riverside village is built.

Entertainment as myth disguising social and economic contradiction is at the core of Heart’s Desire, the smash hit of 2001 Indian cinema, providing the festival’s best taste of popular Asian cinema. Set in Mumbai’s equivalent of Bel Air, 3 baby-faced young men sing, dance, laugh and cry through 3 hours of gushing Bollywood optimism and coming-of-age romantic longing. After their summer of discovery, Aakash and Sameer are matrimonially bound. Siddharth, the inquisitive, sensitive young artist almost derails the friendship by falling for Tara (Dimple Kapadia), an older woman with a child and a drinking problem. From the ensuing fallout we learn that young Indian men are strongly discouraged from relationships with older women who like a drink. Thankfully for the buddy motif, Tara dies of cirrhosis, allowing the trio to blossom to manhood accompanied by more socially acceptable partners. Despite occasional thematic reservations, it’s impossible not to enjoy this Mumbai 90210 epic with its sprightly performances from Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Skashaye Khanna, and Preity Zinta, and especially the scenes shot in Sydney.

For me the festival standout was New Moon, a contemporary dramatisation of the resistance of Mindinao Muslims in the Philippines. Akmad (Cesar Montano) is a Manila doctor who returns to rescue his family from attacks by state-sanctioned Christian militias. As Akmad is drawn deeper into the conflict, director Marilou Diaz-Abaya subtly subverts an obvious moral resolution, emphasising the complexity of history and tolerance. The mostly expatriate Filipino audience connected deeply with the deft storytelling, sighing in epiphany at twists in the sentient narrative, demonstrating how the collective experience of engaging with film transforms according to viewing culture. Cesar Montano’s introduction of the film increased the generous and intimate audience fervour. Leaving the session, I was repeatedly asked if I enjoyed the film by enthusiastic strangers. How often does such openness occur in Sydney’s film-scene citadels?

Unsurprisingly, New Moon and Heart’s Desire shared the audience award for most popular film. The Short Soup short film competition winner was Tree by Eliza Johnson, an impressionistic and simple play of colour in which a young girl protectively remembers her dead mother through elaborate rituals. Ballad of the Praying Mantis by Naoki Tsukushi, a fatal affirmation of queer identity over family duty was the winner of the SBS eat carpet award. Also promoting a sense of Asian community were seminars on co-productions and the special challenges facing filmmakers in developing unique Asian-Australian voices, a retrospective of formative and hitherto suppressed Chinese animation, and a ‘meet the filmmaker’ session with cinematographer and Wong Kar Wai collaborator Christopher Doyle.

Despite room to grow the program, directors Juanita Kwok and Paul De Carvalho have succeeded in bringing the vast voices of Asian cinema together in best possible spirit. While Australia’s view of Asia is so often founded on economic opportunism rather than a desire for cultural understanding, festivals such as the Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival are vital in promoting greater regional awareness. With screenings mostly well-attended audiences can only hope for an expanded festival in 2003.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.
Rumi

Brisbane International Film Festival 2002 was characterised by the bold and timely 1001 Voices: Cinema of the Middle East and Islamic worlds. The program extends Brisbane’s renowned Asian film programming, giving voice to stories from a region at the forefront of global consciousness.

There’s no better time than now to try to understand the cultures of the Middle Eastern and Islamic worlds when we’ve been saturated with select, managed images of the region. Images, some information, but very few stories. The newsmedia have propagated images of extremists grappling with modernity, but generally we’ve been denied access to detailed accounts of everyday life.

Stories from the Middle East can go some way towards filling this vacuum. For all its social relevance, though, the BIFF program largely resists the temptations of propaganda. Artistic Director Anne Demy-Geroe’s choices tend toward broad humanism and away from highly politicised expression. This task is more difficult than it sounds, naturally, given the intensity of the conflict in so much of the region. It would be hard to imagine, for example, a documentary such as Palestinian Rashid Mashharawi’s latest, Live‚ From Palestine, about the lives of people at the Voice of Palestine radio station achieving ‘apolitical neutrality.’ In that film’s chilling postscript, occupying forces raze the station. A bomb placed in every room, every studio, and everything—lives, careers, hopes, dreams— is destroyed.

Mashharawi’s previous fictional works, Curfew (1993) and Haifa (1995) dealt with the hugely topical issue of refugee camps, as does Asmin Aslani’s tragic The Mourning Book for the Land of the Meridian, set in Afghanistan and popular at this year’s festival. Though the content is inherently political, the real power derives from the level of engagement with the stories of the people—bewildered refugees, traumatised children, shattered journalists whose lives we momentarily enter.

Iranian Abolfazls Jalil’s well-known concern for orphaned children is beautifully realised in Delbaran, the story of Kaim, a refugee boy nurtured by an old couple at a truckstop. With its sudden, poetic moments of kindness, cruelty, beauty, humour and the bizarre, Delbaran, is infinitely stronger for the director’s rewriting of his original script to incorporate the Afghan nationality of the outstanding child actor he had discovered, Kaeem Alizadeh. His films eschew advocacy or stridency, yet depict the complex and heartrending social reality of the region in powerful ways. They raise questions about representation and the extent to which a culture’s stories can be separated from its politics. Considering the fusion of church and state, it would seem futile, if not artificial, to expect most films from the Middle East to be empty of political content.

Despite this, most of the films in 1001 Voices are more contemplative. Indeed, rigid ideologies are often problematised, such as in the superb Under the Moonlight, Iranian Reza Mir-Karimi’s story of a young mullah awakening to the different and difficult world away from the seminary. The film argues for the acknowledgment of the difficulty and necessity of somehow reconciling fundamentalist and reformist elements.

Though the films of Kiarostami were noticeably absenct (perhaps to give others a chance to shine), Iranian cinema featured strongly, ranging from the lush lyricism of Farhad Mehenfar’s mystical The Legend of Love and Alizreza Ghanie’s The Wind Game, a tribute to the works of Rumi, to the deliberate innocence of Hamid Jebelli’s White Dream, to Mazar Bahari’s surprising and touching documentary, Football, Iranian Style, about the nation’s unifying passion.

Babak Payami’s democratic farce, Secret Ballot (also translated as “Void Votes”), set on the remote island of Kish, is an absurdist treat. The determination of the plucky female electoral agent (Nassim Abdi) to collect every single vote on election day, regardless of the soldier’s (Cyrus) petulance, is endearing. The film’s seriocomic narrative is at its best in the scene where the young girl complains of the irony of being “old enough to marry, but not old enough to vote.” Payami leavens the didacticism with just the right amount of absurdity—the stoplight in the middle of nowhere is a prime example). Characters represent the themes: he, patriarchal tradition, incompetence and the law of the gun; she, progress, modernity and, ultimately, hope for a better future. Visually mesmerising, Secret Ballot’s tenderly-delivered message, about the need to resolve ideological differences for the sake of progress is all the more powerful for its comedic embodiment in two memorable leads.

In addition to the outstanding Iranian program, other masters from the region were also represented in the BIFF program: Youssef Chahine with the exhuberant, irresistible Silence! We’re Rolling, a loving tribute to the MGM musical, and Amos Gitai, with his accomplished Wadi Grand Canyon, made in the style of Michael Apted’s 7-Up series but with deeper political resonance. Gitai, whose oeuvre is characterised by explorations of relationships between ethnic groups, returned to the canyon of the title (a disused quarry on the margins of Haifa) at 10-year intervals from 1981 on. The result is a cumulative portrait of a group of individuals of mixed ethnicity across time. The depiction of the effects of time on the relationship between Miriam, a Jew, and her Arab husband Scander, is particularly moving.

The stories of the Middle East experienced in the boldly programmed 1001 Voices provide a unique and valuable access to an under-explored and generally misunderstood world. The program’s range of voices—poignant, tragic, funny, bizarre, beautiful—entice us to open our eyes and ears; to throw off our mediatised somnolence and apathy, and to awaken.

2002 Brisbane International Film Festival, Artistic Director Ann Demy-Geroe, Greater Union Hoyts Regent, Myer Centre Cinemas & State Library of Queensland, July 9-21.

Barbara Campbell is using the archival and intellectual environs of Sydney University in the manner of an 18th century Salonniere, to host a long-standing conversation with art history and theory. Her archival research method, orchestration of objects and images and her attention to site departs from the traditions of theatrical performance. This novel approach is signalled in the title of her upcoming survey of recent performances, Flesh Winnow: a homage in part to the art historical grandmaster Marcel Duchamp. As the artist notes:

Flesh Winnow is of course a reference to Duchamp’s, or rather Rose Selavy’s, 1920 work Fresh Widow, itself a pun on French Window, the basic form of the piece. I’ve always loved that work because I think it’s one of the most powerful anti-war pieces and because it comes with a cutting performative element—Duchamp had replaced the glass window panes with panes made of black leather which he insisted should be shined every day like shoes.

This art-historical play (in the performative sense of the word ‘play’, as in playing with or toying with) suggests a diabolical dimension to the discipline and its venerable traditions. Thus with tongue firmly in cheek, I asked Barbara the following questions.

Along with your chosen subject matter and thematic references, how has your visual arts background informed your 20 years of performance work?

My visual arts background comes in 2 parts really—the practical and the theoretical, having done time in both art schools and university art history departments. Both areas impact equally, I think. The material language I draw on comes from a direct contact with the materials and techniques of art making. Etching processes, large sheets of paper, the drawn line, a white gallery wall: all these things have come into my work because of my early contact with them at art school. Equally, I’ve had quite a lot of art history training over the years and am aware of the historicising process. I know how histories are constructed out of narrative, how new histories are created when a piece of the narrative gets added or omitted. I like to play with these narrative chains. I think that process is essentially a performative one. An object—a painting or a sculpture for instance—is as much an actor as the human agents who surround it—the makers, writers, dealers, handlers, framers, audiences, photographers, etc.

When you say performative, does this refer in any way to theatrical traditions? Could the 3 traditions (visual arts, academic art history, theatrical performance) be more intertwined than we think, despite the fact that, at an institutional level, performance studies, visual arts and art history are becoming further segmented and specialised?

I was using performative in the sense that contemporary anthropologists and historiographers use it—the sense that history demands actors and audiences. But in that big ‘T’ Theatre-as-institution sense, while I don’t participate in it, I do use it. The things that are used to support the Theatre—the fourth wall, the rehearsed action, the tricks of lighting and costume, I choose to foreground as the substance or subject of the work itself.

How does your choice of site help to determine the formal or thematic qualities of each performance, including multiple performances in different sites?

Well of course there’s no such thing as a neutral space from which we artists can create something unencumbered by history. So whether the site is a black-box theatre, a white-box gallery or the side of a quarry, you must be cognisant of the attendant meanings and conventions of each space. The difference is that an audience may try harder to understand the meanings and conventions of a quarry before they question the meanings and conventions of the other, seemingly naturalised spaces.

While the University is not a quarry (though many may disagree with me), it does present the performer and her audience with a raft of a priori associations. How did you approach the University’s specific archival and pedagogic machinery?

I was very fortunate in having virtual free rein with choosing sites for all the works. It’s one of the great things about universities (even still)—the sense of being given the licence to try things out. So, for example, with Inflorescent, I was drawing on 19th Century notions of looking, that kind of looking which is about fascination with difference, particularly sexualised difference. I’d always loved the Macleay Museum and knew it would be the perfect site for the work and I think I approached the Director, Vanessa Mack, about 2 weeks prior to the performance and she was incredibly open to the idea and not at all fazed by the short lead time. The great thing about the Macleay is that it’s not just about the objects, but how those objects are stored and displayed within a 19th Century tradition of museology, so the museological techniques are on display with the objects. It’s an instance of the university’s assets helping to create a work. Of course that happens every second in the university’s libraries, but a performance is a bit different from an essay.

That suggests the performance of a perverse style of librarianship: an example of (Duchampian) ‘best practice’…

Well, you know, I do love a good library. I think libraries are for me what ‘the bush’ is for other people. And it’s as much an aesthetic thing as an intellectual one: the textures, the colours, the quiet movement of bodies. I remember with the first performance I did in residence at the university, The Midday Movie and the History of Australian Painting, I deliberately set out to use the tools of art history against itself. I think that’s pretty evident from the title alone. The inspiration actually came from the body of work that Paul Saint had been doing in the mid-1990s. I found his wonky woven baskets quite hilarious and appealing in their simultaneous subversion of both craft and art practices. I commissioned one from him and it became the vehicle for a performance where I could play with the mismatch of disciplines and the abuses of art history (me being the main perpetrator of such abuse).

Another source of inspiration for the work came from attending the big exhibition on Turner at the National Art Gallery in 1996 and for the first time hiring one of those audioguides. It was such a comforting experience looking at these beautiful atmospheric objects and being absorbed in the aural narrative of their making. But then there was this incredibly dramatic moment when looking at a seemingly innocent picture of the Devon or Dorset coastline, we were told how Turner carried on a long-term affair with a woman there and masqueraded as a sea captain amongst the locals: from the sublime to the smutty.

So in developing the work, I spent a lot of time in the Power Library writing an obscenely contracted version of the history of Australian painting that could be fitted into the 8 ad breaks of a midday movie and that were scripted in such a way that didn’t distinguish between the high-brow and the human interest. I was very conscious of how different this kind of writing about an art object is from the standard art historical approach. In the performance, these 8 little scripts were recited by me but were channelled through Paul’s basket which stood over and stood in for my head as I lay on the floor.

Your performances also have an utterly seductive attention to form. This is most apparent in your work with the nude, Inflorescent being the most obvious example. In part this occurs through what one viewer noted as a fetishisation of the detail. Is there a danger in your spectators coming in too close?

I must say I was quite nervous about the mise-en-scène I’d created for myself in Inflorescent. I nearly thought myself out of doing it at all because I tried to second-guess the audience’s response. Funny things happened during the first performance of Inflorescent. Although the boundary between my space and the audience’s space was clearly defined, one bold woman and her reluctant female friend broke through the invisible fourth wall and came into my space. I think my steely resolve not to be affected by this intrusion eventually forced them back. At the other extreme, I noticed 3 male professorial types lined up along the back, who found a safe distance from which to stare and stayed nearly the full hour. Generally, I think it was much more uncomfortable being a member of the audience than it was for me lying there naked. I gather there was a constant pull between looking (straining to look in fact), and being conscious of looking, either looking too closely or for too long. All this illustrates the part of the audience in shaping a performance. I’m not the only author, especially in a piece like that.

In Cooked, the first of her dual photographic installations recently exhibited at Sydney’s Stills Gallery, Pam Kleemann uses liquid light emulsion to transpose images of human bodies onto stainless steel and aluminium cookware.

The black and white images coalesce with the silvery surface grain and their miraculous form has the resinous immanence of a freshly greased cake tin. Cooked sets up a buffet, the red caterer’s cloth over a long table on which are the empty cooking vessels and utensils; a casserole pot, pie dish, platter, fry pan, 7” bain marie dish, fish kettle, pizza tray, scoop, saucepan. The images within give a liminal sheen to the domestic grade surfaces, as the viewer recognises a hair braid, a vulva, ear and hoop earings, scalp and wart, podgy baby’s foot, a palm. The images are mainly external body surfaces, their folds and follicles, rather than internal viscera, and there’s really only a mild effect of attraction-repulsion. Overall the experience of viewing is quite palatable and seems deliberately unfetishistic. This isn’t high quality silverware and doesn’t raise the spectre of a naked chef. The confluence of metal and flesh usually associated with a more mechanistic, technological, medical or military aesthetic is also refreshingly disrupted—as the images provide more of a bodily geography or ecology, surreally in situ.

In her notes to the exhibition, Kleemann makes reference to the global economy of body parts, and she mirrors that capitalist and imperialist carving up by divvying up and unusually framing her bodies within banal apparatus. The images and objects suggest gendered individuals from domestic family contexts (rather than any illegal trade in Third world body organs), and are depicted here as offering a poetic resistance to the corporate, colonial, consumption of flesh writ large in our culture.

Hairball Café the second installation, announces itself as an ironic and playful performance. The artist has prefigured the position of the viewer as a café customer. The central motifs are ‘hair’ and ‘food’, and Kleemann serves up photographic plates of “Meaty Hairballs served on a bed of Twisted Angel Hair”, “Map O’ Tassie Burger served on a Sea of Squid Ink”, as well as hair print table cloths and napkins. Such parodies of nouvelle cuisine in a Paddington Gallery seem at first a bit too overburdened by middle-class pop humour, as if assembled for a mimetic Donna Hay shoot. Yet the installation is therefore free of any real Naked Lunch pretensions: where the artist is in a position to see what’s really at the end of your fork—and is suitably accompanied in the notes by quotations from Don Delillo’s novella The Body Artist, along with interesting trivia about hair and abjection. These foodie images have a perfection about them and appear less lubricant than the images in Cooked. Although, as Kleemann notes, she is playing off the fact that hair removed from the body usually “becomes foul, disgusting, repulsive, dirty, unhygienic, gross. Especially when it might have strayed from another’s body, and found its way onto your napkin, into your food or your mouth.”

In Hairball Café, the photographer’s process of baking (this time colour) photographic images onto objects references an Italian funerary tradition which imposes images of the departed onto graves and crockery. Kleemann divorces this technique from its original functional use in producing objects of memory, and without using portrait photography, she still captures the more kitsch elements of photography’s application in producing unique collectables.

I left the exhibition conscious of the difference between contemporary art’s bodily reliquaries and the more traditional, though equally quirky. Last month at flea markets in Rome I picked up some old tarnished pieces of tin, each with a raised area forming the image of a body part: legs, arms, lungs, distended belly and emaciated ribs. Discarded from their Catholic context, they immediately appealed to my aesthetics formed by reading Zone books and the current ubiquitous fascination with the corporeal and iconographies of the body. My Italian friend told me they are called ex voto, and offered to a saint after a healing miracle. We then went to see the Capuchin monk cemetery with pelvic bone chandeliers, skull graves and miscellaneous bone trompe l’oeil.

Alin Huma, image for L’Eccentricite, a fashion installation event conceived and curated by Dragana Spasich

Western Australia has a new biennial festival. The name isn’t new; the Artrage festival has been an annual event in Perth since 1983, surviving on hard work and tiny budgets to provide local artists with space to be seen and heard. However, over recent years many in the arts community have felt that the organisation was failing to renew itself, becoming insulated and embattled. Whatever the truth—and perception is everything—it is wonderful to report that, like all good ideas, Artrage isn’t going away, just turning around. And the person behind or in front of the wheel (depending on where you like your directors to sit) is Marcus Canning, 28 and happy to be here.

The appointment of any festival director is an act of faith, signalling support for the preferred models, practises, and affiliations of the newly appointed person. Canning brings to Artrage his experience across a range of artforms and communities. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Western Australia, and has a history in performance and installation. He has demonstrated strong commitment to visual arts through his involvement in the establishment and running of the jacksue gallery, a very active artists’ space that survived through the 1990s. Having worked with both the children’s festival Awesome and the Lookout Network of Regional Festivals, he understands the organisational imperative. And as someone who has performed in Artrage, he knows its core responsibility to local work. You get the idea from talking to Canning that he knows lots of people, lots of people know him, and he likes to talk. In his short time as director, he has been able to re-establish communication with existing art spaces. At the risk of simplification, his ethos seems to be the more art, the better.

Change was always on the cards for Artrage, but the shift from an annual to biennial event is a big move. The recommendation pre-dates Canning’s appointment, but he is right behind the new model. “The move to a biennial model radically challenges the organisation and the annual festival cycle, and it allows us to use that off-year to deepen and grow our role as a support agency and production house.” Along with this new cycle comes another way of programming, including a series of creative partnerships and projects unlike any previously undertaken by the festival.

Perhaps every festival is beset by the apparently contradictory demands that it both stay home and build a centre, and get out and serve the wider community. Canning is very aware of these twin concerns, and keen to demonstrate that a festival can do both. At home in Northbridge, he showed me Artrage’s new multi-purpose venue, The Bakery Arts Centre, secured thanks to core sponsor, local utility Western Power. While only the Breadbox Gallery has opened, the level of activity suggests that there will be no trouble meeting the October festival deadline. Local artists will be well served by this space, which will be managed and operated by Artrage throughout the year.

Canning is keenly aware that change must be articulated to Artrage’s former and potential constituents. “When I first started,” he says, “we had just got the building and I was really keen that we make a statement to the arts community about where Artrage was going, which is why we opened the Breadbox Gallery space.” In my brief stroll through the James Street premises (“Perfect placement”, says Canning, citing PICA on the eastern axis of James Street and Artrage at the other) I saw that much of the renovation of this shell had been completed. Look forward to The Window Box (installation window), and The Black Box (80-seat performance space).

And if you’re wondering where the dough is coming from, or imagining this is another budget-sucking exercise in empire building, there is everywhere a comforting meld of high-energy DIY and low-budget know-how. Along with participants in a Work-For-the-Dole program coordinated by Artrage, volunteer friends and artists are pitching in, eager to see another local multi-use venue for rehearsal, exhibition and performance in a city with a severe shortage of affordable, accessible space. “This is a solid resource,” says Canning, “and we have to make it pay for itself; that’s where we can be entrepreneurial about the use of the space. A space is a very precious thing. We want to drive it so it is about continual activity. When a festival comes about it ends up being the culmination of streams of activity, and this space will be a focus for that, but also a point of departure.”

The heart of this year’s festival will remain the Bakery. Across the road, the local park, Russell Square, will be reborn as the Moon Garden, home to a free open-air festival. However, creative partnerships in 2002 take Artrage out of the comfort zone. The City of Swan will partner a Satellite Festival in Midland (20kms inland from the CBD), coinciding with the UK National Review of Live Art (brought to Australia in collaboration with Brisbane’s Powerhouse, RT 50, p35). Amongst other events, Kate MacMillan will curate Urban Anxiety, bringing together a group of local, national and international artists. It is intended that the exhibition will then travel to each of the participating countries.

New spaces and places dominate. On the Queen’s Birthday, with partner Perth Zoo, Simon Pericich and Thea Costantino’s cardboard caravan (first seen at PICA’s Hatched 2002) will be placed amongst the card-crunching orangutans, high up on their new architect-designed enclosure. “There is an element of awe-inspiring fantasy here,” says Canning.

He is particularly excited about Artrage’s partnership with Pride. Together they will co-produce a range of events, including a one-day forum, Beyond Border Panic, with activist artist Deborah Kelly. She will also work will 10 local artists to develop new work for projection during the Pride parade.

While Canning is keen to ensure that Artrage 2002 is identified as new and different, he is aware that the tried and true processes of inclusion must continue. This year hopeful artists put forward proposals, as they have done for years. But don’t be surprised to see visitors from planets other than Perth mixing with the locals. “One of the ways to support local work”, says Canning, “is to bring people in, but always to give local people access and methods of engaging with those people.” So while Artrage 2002 will bring national and international artists such as Space Invader (France), Deborah Kelly (NSW) and electronic artists Funkstorung (Germany) to Perth, funding for these events is coming from sources outside those committed to the core support of local artists. “From the outset,” says Canning, “we have tried to look at ways to extend Artrage’s activities, and build on the notion that festivals are a time when the arts find ways to renew themselves in unexpected spaces.”

And don’t expect Artrage to disappear when the 3 weeks is over. Marcus Canning hopes that the festival can use that time to grow and feed local work, through seeding events and bringing mentors on board.

It is an energetic, imaginative and above all, achievable vision that is being articulated by a new director—everyone is looking forward to Artrage, and you can’t do better than that.

In the online edition of RealTime 50 I wrote that at last Melbourne has a festival where local artists have been given deserved prominence side by side with some unique overseas and interstate productions. The last festival in which Melbourne artists enjoyed such visibility was Barrie Kosky’s 1996 Adelaide Festival.

Robyn Archer’s 2002 Melbourne Festival is centred on text ie language in performance, the next one, on the body, and the third, on voice. If you’re expecting a season of nice plays, forget it. Archer’s choices and her vision of text in performance are as wide-ranging and provocative as you’d expect from her Adelaide Festival programs. She deals another blow to the myth that postmodernity has been the ruin of language. Here it comes embodied in dance, puppetry, music, physical theatre, installation, multimedia, contemporary performance and, yes, plays, but what plays.

The profoundly disturbing, not-to-be-missed Societas Raffaelo Sanzio make their first Melbourne appearance with Genesi, from the Museum of Sleep. Ivan Heng’s 140 minute solo about power and gender, Emily of Emerald Hill, comes from Singapore. The 150 minute virtuosic adult marionette work , Tinka’s New Dress, has Ronnie Burkett creating and voicing 37 characters. From Berlin’s Hebbel Theater comes Total Masala Slammer, Heartbreak No 5, an erotic adaptation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. There’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, adapted by Michael Gow from the novel (QTC/Playbox), and the Pinter version of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (VCA).

In an interesting piece of programming from (as Archer sees it) our much neglected southern hemisphere neighbour, Argentinian writer-director Frederico Leon presents his play 1500 metres above the level of Jack (centred on a performer in a bathtub of the water for the hour), and curates a mini-festival of recent Argentinian cinema.

An exploration of the rich possibilities of contemporary theatre is evident in a handful of very intimate performances designed for small audiences. It includes the Canadian STO Union & Candid Stammer Theatre’s Recent Experiences (you’re inside the set with them), 3 works by US actor-writer Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with André) performed by local actors in small spaces, and IRAA Theatre’s Interior Sites Project, an all-night stayover theatre experience for audiences of 7 only. Gertrude Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights the Lights (St Martin Youth Arts Centre) gets a rare airing, and Daniel Schlusser, Evelyn Krape and sound artist Darrin Verhagen take a tough new look at Medea. And there’s more, from Five Angry Men, The Keene/Taylor Project, NYID (with David Pledger writing as well as directing; see interview), Chamber Made Opera (libretto by Duong Le Quy), Back to Back Theatre, Company in Space (text by Margaret Cameron; see interview), Arena Theatre Company, novelist and playwright Joanna Murray-Smith and composer Paul Grabowksy teaming to create music theatre, Helen Herbertson (her magical Morphia), Trevor Patrick (dancing with some fine text) and work-in-progress showings from others including RantersTheatre .

From Sydney come 2 multimedia experiences that also work with text in interesting ways: Kate Champion’s impressive dance theatre work Same same But Different; and Sandy Evan’s Testimony, a powerful and beautiful big band multimedia tribute to Charlie Parker to a libretto by American poet Yusef Komunyakaa. From Berlin there’s Uwe Mengel’s murder mystery installation, Lifeline, where you become an active investigator. From the Kimberley region of Western Australia comes the passionately debated Fire, Fire Burning Bright. Premiered at the 2002 Perth Festival and presented by an all-Indigenous cast, it’s the idiosyncratically told story of a massacre early last century and its impact. There’s also a visual arts program (featuring Susan Norrie and Nan Goldin), a National Puppetry & Animatronics Summit and a timely national symposium on “The Art of Dissent.”

I met with Robyn recently and asked her about the focus on small to medium companies and productions in her 2002 Melbourne Festival. Was it a budgetary decision, was it heroic? How would the works fare up against international talent when they are mostly brand new works? Was this about what Australia now has to offer the world?

Robyn Archer: Speaking to you a couple of years ago in RealTime, I really thought it was going to be a couple of easy years for me. It was just when I’d backstepped out of the Gay Games—mainly because there just wasn’t enough money to do what I wanted to with Asia-Pacific gender-bending stuff. I thought it was back to my own work. Then when Melbourne came knocking I really had to think, do I really want this or not? And probably what made it worth doing was the challenge of a completely different city that needed another look at its festival. What was patently obvious was that the joint was overflowing with really inventive artists, really good people like David Pledger, Hellen Sky, Michael Kantor, Kate Cherry, IRAA, Back to Back, Arena, all those companies. I had lunch with 5 or 6 of them and said, well, what would you want a Melbourne Festival to be? And Michael Kantor instantly said, “In the perfect environment where we were all creating our own work, with the financial resources and the venues we needed to make our best work, we would only want the Melbourne International Festival to bring inspiring international work. The fact is that’s not the environment we’re in.” There was this feeling that there were a whole lot of people out there having immense difficulties making the work they wanted to make. I regularly used local Adelaide companies during the 2 festivals I was there. In Melbourne it’s times 20. It’s a bigger city. But also, it’s true that alternative theatre really blossomed down in Melbourne through La Mama and the APG (Australian Performing Group) and that whole thing. And it does seem there’s a residue of that drive here.

It’s a different kind of milieu now isn’t it, more contemporary performance, physical theatre, multimedia, new media, music theatre?

It’s not primarily playwriting. That’s interesting because in the Buenos Aires scene Federico Leon comes from and in Tehran where I was in February, what young, adventurous, bold, courageous artists do is write plays and put them on. In some cases the play is absolutely the thing. But I looked at the strength of the projects here (and there were many more than I’ve included) and I thought what a great basis to have in an essentially theatre-based festival. If you’re looking at text-based work, you could invite the world. So I thought, okay, my criterion would be I’ll invite something that I can’t get here, that audiences don’t actually see in Melbourne, not necessarily something bigger and better.

You’ve got something like 20 new Melbourne performance projects including some works in progress.These companies are usually lucky to get a new show up each year. If they get it headlined at a festival that’s very good for them—we know that the capacity of the small to medium companies is to tour internationally. Many carry the flag for Australia already.

Absolutely. I was singing in Zurich recently and it was amazing to see 5 or 6 Australian shows there, admittedly one of them was Elision’s opera, Moon Spirit Feasting, and the other The Theft of Sita. On the other hand, Moon Spirit is the product of Artistic Director Daryl Buckley’s amazing persistence and comes out of a new music ensemble which by any other standards would be seen as small and doing wildly out-there new music.

A French dance festival in Val du Marne in November is featuring Sydney-based artists Tess De Quincey, Rosalind Crisp and Gravity Feed—Gravity Feed’s first gig overseas.

That’s the festival we’re doing an exchange with for 2003, bringing out some French companies that otherwise wouldn’t come here, and we’d love to be able to invite Ros Crisp as well. I personally can’t imagine that there will be an invidious comparison between the Australian and the international guests at this year’s festival precisely because the work I’ve invited is set on totally different premises. Total Masala Slammer and Genisi are just right-out-there, large productions built on individual genius. You couldn’t say that either of them fitted into any mould. It’s not a kind of international theatre—they’re one of a kind. I’d say the same of Ivan Heng and of Ronnie Burkett. It isn’t like bringing the Royal Shakespeare Company. And I feel they have more in common with a number of individual Melbourne artists.

What can be the future for the companies in your festival other than continuing their local existence with a new show every year or two?

There’s an increasing audience for Australian work overseas. I think we’re on an incredible cusp at the moment. And whether we capitalise on that is entirely to do with attitudes on the way our international push goes. There have been several big bangs of umbrella-ed Australian work like at BAM (New York) for instance and the Expo thing that I did in Hannover and the Heads Up thing in London. My gut feeling at the moment is that we’ve done enough of those. The market is already there, forged for example, by the exemplary work of Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann (Hebbel Theater, Berlin; Zurich Festival) who came to Australia several times, did her research well at a really intimate level, simply talking to artists. Her recent Zurich Festival had 5 Australian shows including Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Oddities. So it wasn’t just big things. William Yang was there. Paul Grabowsky and I did some cabaret. And Michel Caserta has invited to the Val du Marne dance festival artists that he likes and it’s not a particularly a commercial mob. I’ve been saying in a number of quarters that I really think supporting the ‘natural’ invitations is the way to go and increasingly getting the information out about what is available, rather than what I call the“sheltered workshop” approach. We don’t have to proselytise any more. I get the feeling that now a lot of international presenters are looking for what they can invest in. And most of those presenters are more interested in small companies that don’t cost so much to tour.

As ever, Archer is an eloquent spruiker for her festival, and a very attractive festival it is, as well as a provocation to those arts festivals in Australia that persistently refuse to headline all but a few local artists and companies and, when they do, often lose them in the small print.

This year’s Melbourne Festival wasn’t about me commissioning anybody to do anything. It was really just a group of very good artists busting to get the next project up and the festival being the way that could happen. And I think it’s safe to say that many of those projects would be unrealised in their entirety and some would simply have been much smaller versions if we weren’t able to give cash assistance and the help it gives to sit in the festival brochure.

In the past there’s always been a few standout shows a year that draw interstate visitors to the Melbourne Festival, but in 2002 I feel the pull of the whole program, a unique opportunity to see such a display of Victorian performance talent at one time in the context of distinctive and provocative international productions and considerations of the reinvigoration of language in performance.

Joey Ruigrok van der Werven is one of the unsung heroes of Australian contemporary performance. He has brought to his work with the internationally well-travelled Stalker and Marrugeku companies his own box of tools, considerable technical expertise in construction, rigging, contraption-making, pyrotechnics management and strong design sensibility along with a collaborative spirit nurtured in the Netherlands. He was first a props maker in repertory theatre and then, more significantly, head technician and team member with Dogtroep, the renowned Netherlands’ performance company. RT spoke with Joey during the preparatory stages for Mechanix, “a mechanical ecosystem of contraptions”, a spectacular new work in collaboration with the local community for the Bankstown-based Urban Theatre Projects.

I’ve been living in Australia for 5 and half years. There was a lot of creativity in making the props for repertory theatre but not in the shows and what people did with the props. I was always disappointed. But in Doegtrop everyone contributed. I was part of the team, one of the creators of images, apparatuses and effects. I was also the main technician. Every member in Dogtroep has to come up with scenes. You become a creator—it’s not like someone saying can I have this or do that. Musicians, sculptors, welders, performers, inventors, dramaturgs, all have to come up with their own scenes and they can be very hi-tech—motors, pistons, sprockets, fireworks, lots of lights—but also very very lo-tech, like props made out of bamboo and paper.

Just before beginning work on Mechanix, you were in Newcastle staging the first run of Stalker’s Incognita. How has that developed?

In the creative development stage we developed some of the rigging and some of the flying and some of the work on poles. We took these to the designer Andrew Carter. I’m the builder of Andrew’s designs, but the collaboration with him is like I’m part of the design team, which is fantastic. Incognita is inspired by the outback of Australia. We told him about the structure of the show, that it possibly had a house, possibly had a rig and that we were inspired by Arthur Boyd paintings and Drysdales—maybe Boyd more for the content and Drysdale for the images. Also very inspiring were Drysdale’s photographs…beautiful.

Andrew made the design, I built it. There’s a house and we have to rig off it. So a lot of the work was developed by setting up and rehearsing the show. For example, there’s some things that have to be destroyed—corrugated iron which breaks off, the performers have to rip it off. It’s not like something you can just draw and design, you really have to do it, to see if it works. There’s a lot of that in rehearsal, trying it out, me building it. The house is the rigging. There’s a tree clump and a house and between there’s a tightrope wire, and from the house there’s 2 guy ropes which makes the whole thing rigid but it looks very flimsy. When I went to the engineer—I have to calculate everything of course because people swing off it—he said, “Ooh, it’s more difficult than the Olympic stadium, construction wise”, and he meant it. Sometimes when you look at a structure you can see the internal strength, and in this one you don’t—it really is in the rigging and the guy wires. This set has to be able to travel by plane, so we’re restricted by weight because of too short a time between festivals to ship it. It worked okay.

Incognita is set in the desert, and Geoff Cobham, the lighting designer wanted the really sharp shadows you get from the movement of the sun. So he wanted a light that would move in that way, 5 metres high, coming up behind and over the audience and then sinking. Everybody always told him, No you can’t do this, and I was the first one who said, “Yes, let’s do it!” Even though I thought we’ve got too much to do. But if you’ve got a lighting designer you have to give him the opportunity to be creative. I think it works—it’s on a trolley with a 4 metre arm with a big counterweight.

On paper Mechanix looks exciting and ambitious. We don’t see this kind of work in Australia.

It’s very ambitious. At a forum, Alicia Talbot, the Artistic Director of Urban Theatre Projects, heard me speak about my work with Dogtroep in Amsterdam. That triggered the possibility for a fantasy she’d had for a while to make a performance with local community members using contraptions and machines as the main players. This is what we’d been doing in Dogtroep and it is one of my specialities. So she invited me to talk about a show in which community members would come up with the ideas, the basic design for the contraptions and I would work closely with them. Also I would become part of the direction, as a co-director with Alicia. That’s a new thing for me. It’s also daunting because we rely on the community members to contribute with their ideas and also their time to build things. So it’s up to us to create the environment for them to feel free to imagine.

We’re up to our third meeting with them and they really inspire me a lot. We have to guide them, see which ideas can work, put some people together. We also have a number of core artists. Reza Achman, the musical director, is a percussionist from Indonesia with a World Music background, working with community members to make sounds, drumming and atmosphere. The composer Liberty Kerr is the sound director and is going to make a soundscape with gadgets and horns and secondhand stuff we found. I hope she’ll use her cello—in the end the show is about the emotions, a visual spectacle is never enough—and the cello is the opposite of hard metal. Simon Wise is doing the lighting: he also likes making things. Lee Wilson will be movement director creating a movement vocabulary to go throughout the show and built on reactions to the contraptions, some of which will be static, some mobile.

First we looked at old railway sheds and found an amazing place, barren, there was just soil and a roof, but you would have had to bring in all the infrastructure. Then we thought, let’s do it smack bang in the middle of Bankstown in the plaza, occupying the whole area. Bump in for 2 weeks, have lots of people seeing us preparing. But then we found another space, a State Rail freight depot where we could build the contraptions. The building itself is small but there’s a lot of open land around it so now we’re thinking we’ll do it there because we can build the work and perform it in the same place and it’s close to the railway station. We might start with a parade from the plaza to the depot, it’s only a short walk.

The theme is about how living in Bankstown, in a suburban area, is not easy. On average, people have a bit less income and less opportunities. We thought if you live there and you run up against society what kind of machine would you build to make life better. Instead of a narrative about telling and explaining what your problems are and what your solutions are, now the machines have to speak for you, explain the fantasy. I hope we can do it without the inventors having to use words, a number of them have already expressed that desire.

To get the whole process going rather than starting blank, I’ve created a central structure, a theme around which the people making the contraptions can hook on or jump off from and get inspired. The buildings in Bankstown are very low so I thought of building a tower—a house with 3 levels in which stuff happens—and a crane that can move easily in the space, but that’s all I’m going to tell you now. I’ll make the crane—all the cranes you hire are too heavy and too strong. Tonight I’ll make a drawing and then go to the engineer again. We’ve got a full 9 weeks to create a world and a performance.

Urban Theatre Projects, Mechanix, venue TBC, Bankstown, Sydney, Nov 27-Dec 8, Tel 02 9707 2111 www.urbantheatre.com.au

The formalistically expansive Explorations season sits well alongside the predominantly naturalistic scripts fostered at La Mama. Lloyd Jones’ latest piece of self-conscious ‘non-theatre’, Discontinuities [in 3 parts]—though not actually part of the program—acted as a challenging prologue. His deliberately shabby event was almost operatic in scope, addressing the failure of reason, US global dominance, and youthful self-destruction and disempowerment by using a collection of fragmentary scenes and devices. Michael Kieran Harvey, playing jagged, modernist electric piano and musique concrete, concluded this impressively apocalyptic triptych, which marked Jones’ 40th year at La Mama.

Musical experimentation also played a part in John Britton’s Cyclops Alley. Australian electronica legend Warren Burt provided an evocative score of low-key electro-chords, supporting Britton’s venomous descent into urban darkness. The writing closely resembled early 20th century misanthropy as exemplified by Céline or Drieu la Rochelle. Unpaid sex in a filthy alley with a desolate prostitute led the narrator to proclaim himself an indomitable god who walked the earth, wreaking his emotions upon those he encountered.

Though Britton’s gruff yet precise, glottal recitation and writing were exemplary, his direction was less assured. A young, largely non-speaking cast joined him, occasionally falling into cliched mime-like poses or mutually supportive lifts common to Contact Improvisation. They were most effective when acting as mute witnesses to the narrator’s inspired ravings. Cyclops Alley nevertheless successfully recreated the emotional landscape of nocturnal urban desperation, sketching a portrait of contemporary citizenship in the wake of S11 and Tampa— a radically atomized ‘community’ overseen by the God of Hate, not Love.

Sarah Mainwaring has performed in many of Jones’ events: she delivered a striking monologue in Discontinuities. Mainwaring’s performance in her Foreign Body possessed a similar unalloyed beauty. Director John Bolton’s almost moralistic ethic of honesty as the essence of good theatre was evident here. The scenes constituted a patchwork of skits, poetic musings and deferred details of Mainwaring’s upbringing following a childhood car accident which left her with a brain injury. Her speech was extended but not labored. Her words dolloped forth, treacle-like, before leaps of quickened enunciation added drama. Her movement had a similar quality—drawn attention to through references to her difficulty in putting on the cuffs designed to aid her recovery, as well as merely being part of her general bearing. Tremors came and went, strength in one arm seemed particularly difficult to control. Mainwaring’s confident concentration, however, shifted these dramatic nuances into a realm beyond both pathos.

A forceful “No!”, sharply delivered as her mother attempted to dress her, eloquently conveyed the trauma of her early years. She forced spectators to consider the experience of one day awakening with a different body, a different mind, both of which seemed recalcitrant. Mainwaring’s character passed through this crisis by voicing an almost formless, poetic longing which echoed her psychophysical status, crying out for the “monstrous moon” not to abandon her. The unresolved yet contented quality within the performance suggested that the character overcame this challenge by retaining this formlessness, this resting between states. Bodily tensions were not resolved; they simply came to coexist. When she gazed at a photo of the exquisite Linda Evangelista, reflecting on the “poetry cascading down her well defined form,” this was neither melancholy nor tragic, but rather signified an empathetic identification with Evangelista’s pleasure in her own physicality.

Lynne Santos and Peter Trotman also explored psychophysical perceptions in Songs of Entrapment. The performance had a strong sensorial quality, Santos at one point calling for “smell music” to dance to (Phillip Glass’ Dracula). It was a performance haunted by memories, by yearly rituals, the texture of an aged letter, with a Gothic ambience evoked through rich descriptions of a wide, empty mansion. Songs was so narratively cohesive, relating a redemptive encounter of a mad, sensual woman (Santos’ skill at ecstatic dance serving her well) with a dryly ritualistic hermit (Trotman as a gauche, shocked WASP), that it was hard to believe that all but the framework was improvised. Trotman and Santos have collaborated before, and Songs showed that they are developing a distinctive aesthetic, comparable to a denser, verbally-rich version of fellow exponents of improvised “eccentric dance”, Born in a Taxi. The pair’s presence in Explorations helps ensure that strongly physical performance will always remain part of La Mama’s d aesthetic.

Explorations, La Mama, July 3-28; Discontinuities [in 3 parts]: Beyond Nothingness, What Lies Ahead? Last Judgement at the Oval Office, La Mama, June 20-30

From the time we first meet Alicia in her dressing gown in the foyer, being asked if we have any ‘special requests’ for the evening, and are then moved upstairs to be presented with her naked body in a display cabinet with a brown paper bag over her head, we’re apparently being offered this woman for the fulfilment of our fantasies. She’s the faceless female behind the glass, like a sex worker in Amsterdam, although already preparing for her ‘final exit.’

We then move into her intimate and plush boudoir, kitted up like a brothel complete with silken cushions and a real fluffy puppy. She’s now the charismatic fox we’re all watching as she firmly coerces us into paying more for the show. Soon we are slipping coins and notes into her purse like men in a strip club—competing for the privileges of her sexual attentions and our public face. The hostess tells us that she will play out and indulge a number of fantasies for the gentlemen and for our entertainment. She excites the audience before it is clear, perhaps,what the full implications of this relationship will be.

Any initial embarrassment born as a reaction to her sexual showcasing manifests itself in spunky flirtations from the men she chooses for short role-plays. It seems like this is the show for everyone that’s ever wanted pillow talk with a prostitute, but has been too PC and theatre-going. The dominant stance is soon dropped and in its place a pervasive romanticism drives the feminine role into instant surrender on the slightest exchange. She gets an audience member to ring her mobile phone and then gushes a power-draining exposé of her obsessional thinking. Asked what word comes to mind when we think of ‘love’, we answer ‘intimacy’, ‘close’, ‘sex’, though this soon contrasts with the more Lacanian notion the show has in mind of ‘offering something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it anyway.’ Alicia won’t ameliorate any longer; Joni Mitchell soon segues into Leonard Cohen. The men are still talking dirty on command, stroking her hair, complicit as ordered. Meanwhile she’s demeaning herself further and further, becoming more and more abused and debased in ever more submissive roles—as she demurs, “I hope this was the experience you wanted?”

After her hands are tied behind her back and her collar latched to window bars she tells a story of a birthday present to a boyfriend in which she promises to reply “I will with pleasure” to every his request. The boyfriend gets two of his mates over to use her as a piece of sexual furniture, for oral and anal in a classic pornographic menage a trois pose. He stands and watches, while she considers her ultimate act of love without realising that he will instead leave her, presumably because of the depravity of her self-sacrifice. After this Bataille-like monologue she asks if someone from the audience will come and untie her. A man rushes over, tenderly loosens the ropes and releases the catch—male roles leap out on cue.

The show ends with a demonstration of the limits of this audience/performer interaction. Closing her eyes Alicia asks if anyone in the audience will love her, put their arms around her? There’s an awkward lull, a sudden complicity with all the other rejections—it would take a bigger masochist than Alicia to stand up at this point. What if a woman did? The show has so far been hardcore hetero, the relationship has always been orientated.

If there is a linearity to this narrative of romantic decline and victimhood, then as the audience leaves after the performer has not returned to bow for her applause, Alicia as sex worker remains indifferently talking on her mobile phone outside the studio room. Perhaps sex work is suggested as the character’s only way to become a defiant operative in the sexual exchange. This never-ending performance is vintage Talbot, and memories from her other performances remain—monologues on oral sex in utes, the audience eating chocolate from between her thighs, and a blurring of the boundaries of performer/performance when she once showed her (real?) scars. Talbot’s work often seems to re-suggest formative teenage experiences of sex, where ‘healthy’ boundaries and lines of respect are not clear. Part self-destructive relationship spinning in the same old tight cycle and part, almost glorious, homage to the psychosexual, I Love You xxx mines heterosexuality along its glimmering schisms—where masochistic female strategies and sadistic male rebuttals are not in fact a perfect match. Explicit about the potential violence and possible arrestations of such desire, the performance leaves it up to the audience to consider any reconstructive possibilities for themselves.

I Love You xxx, writer-performer Alicia Talbot, director Nigel Kellaway, lighting Simon Wise, Performance Space August x – September x. I Love You xxx was created by Alicia Talbot and John Baylis as part of a Performance Space residency in 2000.

Two young people on the street, alone, separate, voices in the night. He (Leon Ford) has a secret. When he was child he killed his father. Did we hear this? We’re not sure, especially when nothing more is made of it in the first act. An urban boarding house. A sad landlady (Lynette Curran) addresses someone who seems not to be there. An old man (Martin Vaughan) is forced to share his room with a newly arrived country boy (Damon Herriman). The boy introduces himself to the reticent old man with the probing speed and bite of the baddies in Pinter’s Birthday Party. The young man on the street stalks the young woman (Rita Kalnejais). They meet. He exudes a quiet malevolence, equating himself with “a reptile, sunning itself.” She wanders because she fears sleep paralysis. She is searching for her demons, “to kill them.” The old man conveys to the country boy his hopeless dream of youthful independence as embodied in his Ford Mercury, his loneliness in his mysogyny—of the landlady he says, “she sucked my life out.” The ‘ghost’ she addresses is her dead husband, the father of the young man we first saw on the street. The country boy meets the young woman in the park, they fuck, he loses his wallet, she finds it, gives it to the old man who removes the money in order to educate the country boy in the evils of womanhood. By now I feel like I’m watching a Daniel Keene play with a plot. And the plot is not very good and gets creakier in Act Two.

However, I’m enjoying van der Werf’s way with language, a grim poeticising spiced with blunt wit, and also the manner in which he builds his night cosmos so that we must work a little at putting together characters and events. However Act Two loses the play’s sense of mystery as plot takes over. The business of the wallet is worked over. The old man collapses and dies, finding brief conciliation with the country boy. The young man reveals he killed his father. Well he didn’t really, but perhaps he could have prevented the suicide. It’s far too late to treat this revelation as thematically or dramatically significant. Once again in an Australian play, the outing of a secret stands in for the real need to get it out in the first place and then explore the consequences. Young man to his mother: “I couldn’t speak for months, don’t you remember?” She doesn’t appear to. As for the young woman, she doesn’t seem that important in the end. In the language of dramaturgy she hasn’t really been given a trajectory of her own.

For all my irritation with the way plot sinks Presence, the production is nonetheless quite an experience. The play has something and that something has been realised by strong performances and fine direction. Van der Werf’s expertise in creating exquisitely uncomfortable, tense exchanges between pairs of characters is a great strength. The dialogues between the old man and the country boy (excellent performances from Vaughan and Herriman) generate a very real feeling that words will run out and violence ensue. Ros Horin amplifies this with a carefully choreographed awkardness, a sense of personal space invaded, a failure of intimacy, something that goes beyond this shared room into the lives of all the characters. It’s a claustrophobic night world, well and truly cut off from all the other realities we deal with in everyday life—a deadly, closed circuit. Presence has real presence, though I was never sure to what end. Cast and director clearly believed in it, bringing great conviction to bear, a reminder of just how powerful the Griffin theatre experience can be.

Patrick van der Werf, Presence, director Ros Horin, actors Leon Ford, Damon Herriman, Rita Kalnejais, Martin Vaughan, Lynette Curran; Griffin Theatre Company, The Stables, Sydney, Jul 5-Aug 3

The latest initiative from Hobart’s is theatre ltd, Boiler Room, was the culminating performance following a participatory 4 day multimedia event that featured workshops and cross-art collaborations. Improvisational artists including the avant-garde music collective the Freedivers, Ryk Goddard, Helen Omand and Jo Pollitt, performed extended improvisations in an interactive space designed by installation artist Sean Bacon. As a pilot project Boiler Room aligns Hobart with current national trends which are re-orientating and re-energising improvisational practice.

Improvisation connotes a movement away from the constraining frameworks of delineated performance while denoting an absence of closure. This apparent paradox is partially resolved through the resonances established by the improvising artists as they modulate space and time to explore the tensions between structure and freedom. What emerges ideally are performances in the moment that enable insights into the vicissitudes of our contemporary culture.

The improvisation practitioners modelled both technique and a finely honed capacity to maintain or relinquish the impetus for an idea. Text, sound or movement was generated from their open-ended presence in the space. Boiler Room was accessible as performance. For the spectator, the insights and understandings are both negotiated and generated through entering and exiting at any point in the space-time continuum.

Sean Bacon’s design incorporated a large screen that split the space with performers traversing either side of the divide. An aluminium can rolls and the subtlety of the sound spills into the silence. A small digital camera captures drummer Josh Green scratching and riffing on metal kegs from behind the screen. He is unseen, yet we apprehend his presence through the digital images before us.

In front of the screen, Jo Pollitt moves against her projected image accentuating the here-yet-not-here aspects of her virtual/actual presence. This interplay between the visible and non-visible generates a fascinating conjunction between the ‘kinematic’ potency of the image, with the dancers’ and musicians’ corporeal presence and absence separated by a scrim (skin) of screen.

Ryk Goddard, through a combination of language and physical improvisation, provides a paean to genial craziness. His verbal skill with its blend of nonsense, paranoia and humour provides a wry social commentary that is politically informed yet without party line divisions. He cunningly reveals our addiction to the 10 second grab line which re-presents the world as a fiction. Despite his verbal ad-hocracy, Goddard offers enough of an obscurely nuanced through-line to chart the terrain of his particular journey.

Mathew Clare provided a visual highlight with a lipstick camera placed inside the bell of his saxophone, projecting a series of chiaroscuro images. Dancer Helen Omand simultaneously explored the rotating rim of gleam surrounding the bell’s silent black void. Perhaps this sequence provides a summation of is theatre’s Boiler Room and the opportunities for improvisational artists to move onto new ground and into the realm of each other’s practice. Here is the moment. Sounds from silence. Movement from sound. Dare to dive.

On the internet you can now listen to radio from anywhere in the world, anytime of the day. While this offers occasional treasures, such as a lost fragment of Glenn Gould, it does not have the same kind of mystery you find on radio that comes via the airwaves. It is sometimes reassuring to return to a familiar institution like Radio National and re-discover the pleasures of programming that goes beyond international and covers instead the weird expanse of Australia.
For those unable to live in the nation’s ‘centre’, Radio National connects us with its worst and best. On week nights, the arts chat-show The Night Club is inflated with that chummy Oxford Street bravura that reaches for the popular jugular, leaving the subtleties (and ratings) behind. But on Sunday evenings, The Night Air reflects a more Glebe-like way of engaging with history, surfing the archive for odd turns of meaning. For those who’d prefer to visit Gomorrah, rather that live in it, The Night Air is a weekly dose of the readerly Sydney sensibility.

As well giving us a Sydney fix, The Night Air has re-invented the medium in a bold and visionary way.

The Night Air is valued-added radio. It draws from primary sources such as Radio Eye and the The Listening Room, to produce themed programs such as “Going Bush”, “The Biff”, “For the Birds” and “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” The Night Air is broadcasting for the Google age: each of its themes is fed into the radio search engine like an encyclopaedic I Ching that creates mysterious combinations.

The Bastille Day episode illustrates the power of the program as an audio envelope. “Liberty” began with “Fugitive Promises” produced by John Jacobs and Cathy Peters. This segment was drawn from otherwise predictable sources, including a Martin Luther King speech, the Mabo decision, recordings of demonstrations. But these elements were deftly contextualised by music and cross-fades. Following this was a sermon by the Australian film maker Paul Cox on the importance of art. To younger ears, Cox can sound smug in his distaste for the mainstream. But with The Night Air treatment, a futuristic sound track was heard in the background, making his words seem more explorative and less Cox-centric. Similarly, an episode on the ‘Marsellaise’ by Kaye Mortley would have seemed quite breathy if isolated in a Radio Eye time slot. But linked with items like Robyn Ravlich’s East Timor recordings and other freedom songs, it added to a chorus-like political theme.

“Liberty” was a substantial achievement. Often in public media, we become so attuned to flippant ironies, that calls to action can seem embarrassingly naïve. The Night Air managed to present a serious message in a way that was palatable to sophisticated 21st century ears.

The Night Air can take occasional wrong turns. The choice of music can sometimes be too literal. A recent program “Poison” featured rather too obviously the Alice Cooper song of the same title. Whereas the Sunday morning Background Briefing producer Tom Morton shows how effective music can be as a subtext that adds a new dimension to the main theme, rather than a throwaway cliché.

One of the dangers of an archival program is that it settles for retro kitsch (Skippy soundtrack) rather than go all the way to the past ‘as another country’. In these cases, The Night Air is often saved by Brent Clough, whose mellow voice invites the listener into the mystery. Rather than beef the program up with a radio personality, The Night Air links items with ‘sound bridges’. Signature phrases like “breathe it in” help relieve the sometimes manic crossing of themes.

The ultimate The Night Air experience for me was during their “Going Bush” episode. After the 9 o’clock news break, the program re-commenced with a Gregorian chant. At the time, it seemed an ecstatic moment of programming genius. The idea of putting something medieval into the Australian bush had real imaginative daring. It was only when the next Gregorian track started that I realised they had begun playing Mary Nicholson’s excellent musical program Nocturne, which normally begins at 10 o’clock. It was a mistake. Naturally, I felt disappointed. But looking back now, it seems more a positive reflection of The Night Air’s power to charge otherwise familiar material with new possibility. Perhaps The Night Air could follow where chance has led them.

The Night Air reminds us that radio can be an art in itself. With time, I hope it will gain a little more confidence in that art and treat its themes a little more dialectically. There’s a lot of air left in the night.

Lordy, Lordy, Praise be to Jesus. Cut your throat now life doesn’t get any better than this. Topology. Corridors of Power. Brisbane Powerhouse. On the program tonight is a collection of Aussie tangos circa 1997—The Keating Tangos—initiated by Russell Gilmour after the political demise of the Blacktown Domingo. These tangos are short, a couple of minutes at most, and are delivered in pairs between the longer pieces. First up, only some mother from the wrong side of the House couldn’t love The Scumbag Tango, lyrical and perhaps even a tad sneaky. Or straight out of a Leunig nightclub comes The Sweetest Victory Tango, busy sax with a doodley piano solo to demonstrate heartfelt emoting.

With a couple of tangos under the belt Topology move onto Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover by Michael Daugherty (US). Sing Sing is clever. Daugherty drops in cliché after cliché: glissando strings like sirens, the most appalling saccharine Home of the Brave/Battle Hymn of the Republic maudlin nightmare trash. Except it’s not cliché, maudlin, or trash. It’s witty and resonant. Beautifully played. Clever. And over the top is the voice of Hoover, our father.

Post Sing Sing and it’s another couple of tangos. Richard Vella’s Tango for micro-economic reform is sad, majestic, a little furtive and world weary. The Mabo Tango: The Lizard of Oz from Robert Davidson is up. Poppin’ bass. Slab piano. Following is David Lang’s (US) Cheating, Lying, Stealing. “Ominous funk” it says on the score and that’s what it sounds like. There’s low down staccato sax for starters and then a piano figure. Up the register and oriental mourning breaks in courtesy of the viola and sax. Spatial percussion on car brake drums either side of the stage and the piano carries on regardless. A friend leans over and says “Hate to lose my place in the score.” That sort of piece.

Even more tangos. Tango Republic is all salon music, God Save the Queen, ABC themes and cucumber sandwiches. The Placido Tango is slimy, themed for Lotharios of regret.

Next is a Topology rendition of Pat’s Aria from Nixon in China by John Adams. It’s a gem, and I keep noticing what a great touch Kylie Davidson has on the piano.

Last before the half time break is another piece by Robert Davidson, Big Decisions: The Whitlam Dismissal. Davidson is a master at capturing the rhythm and pitch of spoken voice, and using it to structure music. In this case a bunch of statements from various worthies presiding over the last gasp of Crash Through Or Crash. So the piece is chunky, where a spoken phrase is a chunk. And it’s polite. “Well might we say God Save the Queen …” as drawing room farce. Kerr’s Cur as strictly fairground.

Polite and farcical. And looking back, giving The Dismissal a bit of the Then and Now, it’s true. No-one stormed the streets, threw TVs through shopfront windows, or overturned cars and set them on fire. It was raised voices and heated discussions and going home to crash into failures that have stood the test of time.

After the interval is Airwaves. I’ve reviewed this before. (Topology and Loops, Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, RT 45, p31). Good to hear it again.

Fibreculture

Networks of Excellence? 2nd Annual Fibreculture Conference, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, November 22-24. http://www.fibreculture.org

Getting Enough Fibre?

What do you get when you fill a museum with the nation’s brightest new media artists, theorists and educators for a weekend of debates, discussion and brainstorming? Find out when fibreculture converges in Sydney for its second annual conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art (November 22 – 24). Following the success of last year’s meeting, and as the lively fibreculture list goes from strength to strength, this year’s event promises a program bristling with fresh ideas on the cultures and politics of new media.

Fibreculture at the MCA

This year will see a special focus on public network policy, alongside the community’s usual fascinating collisions between art, IT and politics. After a screening of recent new media works on the theme of border transgressions (curated by Anna Munster), the event will kick off with an evening public debate on the theme “Networks of Excellence”, investigating the role of the latest “Centre of Excellence”: National Information and Communications Technologies Australia (NICTA). Is NICTA playing to Australia’s strengths? How do its activities in computer science research relate to broader knowledge—of media-makers, artists and other ‘creatives’? Where are the spaces to address the ethics and politics of innovation?

Panels at the 2-day ‘round table’ conference will feature discussions such as: Convergent cultures of new media; Who says online education is the future?; Assessing the great challenge of open source; Globalisation and the net. Broad participation is a goal of all fibreculture activities; so too at the conference—expect punchy panels, short presentations and a lively floor. No sermons allowed.

Fibreculture is expanding the traditional models of academic collaboration and publishing by involving the entire list community, in a kind of open-source model, with a greater transparency of the processes of intellectual labour. This year’s meeting will see the launch of 2 new publications: a refereed electronic journal to support the public policy debates; and a free fibreculture magazine–exploring the cultural, political and philosophical dimensions of new media. (To contribute work, join fibreculture now and watch www.fibreculture.org).

What is fibreculture?

Fibreculture began as an e-mail discussion list in January 2001. In the last throes of ‘New Economy’ boosterism, the economic skies were still blue, ‘new paradigms’ grew on trees, and all our institutions—governments, businesses, the media and even universities were poised to snap up their share of the Fast Money. However, few were carrying the notion of networks as public infrastructure, as public assets, as public space.

While a lot of net-related research, criticism and theory was being done in Australia, it was happening largely in isolation. The list began as a nexus for the exchange of this far-flung idea-work, and within a year there were over 300 subscribers, an invigorating off-line meeting at Melbourne’s VCA, and the first fibreculture book, Politics of a Digital Present, a wide-ranging inventory of net criticism and theory.

Fibreculture is an independent, evolving network for thinkers, writers, new media artists, activists, teachers and policy makers. It initiates events, publications and dialogues, and fosters these through an unmoderated mailing list with over 500 subscribers, predominantly in Australasia. The list is administered on a no-budget basis by a team of facilitators across Australia and New Zealand. It is maintained as a completely open channel alongside all of our activities. It remains a non-institutional, certified public space.

The languages of net-criticism

From the beginning, fibreculture faced the linguistic challenges that emerge within convergent media spaces. It’s difficult for a list with a largely ‘arts/humanities’ background (that’s enough discourses already!) to engage propeller heads and programmers. Although many subscribers have university affiliations, the list has developed its own ‘tone’ of discussion in a sort of liminal zone: neither conversational nor academic. We encourage subscribers to post more substantial stuff: articles, reviews or research papers. A separate announcements list (::fc::announce::) is dedicated to up-to-date postings about new media happenings.

A trawl through the list archives (see the website) reveals a wide range of approaches to network politics and new media cultures. Recent threads have included: the perils of ‘cyber-junk’; ‘globalisation from below’; all you need to know about blogs; cybersquatting and culture jamming; taxonomies of spam; and debates about online education and broadband policy.

For all its diversity, the fibreculture network is a collaborative space in which to develop ideas and projects. Every new subscriber means new opportunities so visit the site, come along to the meeting, and sub into the network!

Fibreculture facilitators

Fibreculture’s 24 page Networks of Excellence? will appear as a supplement in the next edition of RealTime.

Prefiguring Cyberculture

Eds. Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson & Alessio Cavallaro, Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, Power Publications, University of Sydney, Australia, MIT Press, USA, November, 2002.

Reading this book is an exercise in reconfiguring how we see how we are in this formation called cyberculture. In the process, readers enjoy what binds the authors and editors together—the capacity to be surprised in the belly of the monster. Donna Haraway

Prefiguring Cyberculture looks to literature, science and philosophy for antecedents of the informatic culture of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Within 3 thematic sections—broadly, artificial life, virtuality and futurology—leading philosophers, media theorists, critics and historians of science were asked to examine seminal texts that anticipate key aspects of cybercultural theory and practice, such as Descartes on the mind/body split, Plato on the cave, Turing on thinking machines, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Philip K Dick on androids, William Gibson on cyberspace and Arthur C Clarke on the technological future.

The many contributors include Mark Dery, Margaret Wertheim, Gregory Ulmer, Erik Davis, McKenzie Wark, Damien Broderick, Elizabeth Wilson, Scott McQuire, John Potts, Russell Blackford, and Zoe Sofoulis. In addition, cyberculture artists Stelarc and Char Davies explore how cybercultural themes have been taken up and critiqued in the electronic arts.

Culture and Technology

Culture and Technology is a comprehensive overview of theoretical developments and debates concerning new media technology. Its emphasis is on the creative uses of new technologies. Chapters include “Digital Aesthetics”, which considers developments in intellectual property, the changing status of the image, and other ramifications of digital media. There are also detailed discussions of technology, thought and consciousness; virtual ecologies; war and sovereignty; cyborgs and information technology; and the various forms of science fiction. Artists discussed in the book include Robyn Stacey, Patricia Piccinini, Stelarc, Rosemary Laing and Nigel Helyer.

Very Strange Weather

Very Strange Weather is a one day conference and symposium addressing artists’ use of media technology to create environments as alternative spaces or as commentary on existing social/cultural spaces. Speakers will consider the ways artists create media ecologies, expressed as dynamic and emergent environments.

Presenters and speakers include: Blast Theory (UK), Robyn Backen, Ross Gibson, Martin Friedel, Edward Scheer and Andrew Murphie.

Future Active

Ian Meikle, Future Active, Media Activism and the Internet, Pluto Press Australia, 2002

“Like Naomi Klein’s No Logo, this is a fine book which may end up being in the right place at the right time.”
J ean Poole (see review).

Femmedia 02

Femmedia 02 is the multimedia program of the WOW International Film Festival organised by Women in Film & Television and screening this year at the Paris Cinema at Fox Studios, Sydney October 17-20.

Curated by Danielle Karalus, creator of the interactive CD-ROM Shocked (see page 17) which lets loose your worst fears about medical intervention, the program includes:Tatiana Doroshenko’s Shot—“In this game, some of us find there is no such thing as looking”; Emma Byrnes Constructing Cyburbia, one of a number of works on the city theme; Stand Your Ground, an interactive documentary on an inner-city arts project by Julie Masterton, Michaela Pegum and Tandi Rabinowitz; and Zoe Horsfall’s The Wedding, “a black comedy about the happiest day of your life.” In Fate 187, Kate Davitt plays with interactive cinematic narrative.

Interactive web-based works include Melinda Rackham’s intimate investigation of viral symbiosis in the biological and virtual domains, Carrier (www.subtle.net/carrier); Homeless by Rose Hesp (www.abc.net.au/homeless) which offers the vicarious experience of “one homeless day around the clock, around the world.” From the US Jody Zellen conjures an ever-changing Ghost City (www.ghostcity.com) and Krista Connerly collects those accidentally intimate moments we all experience on public transport in Transitory Contact. Isobel Knowles (Australia) invites us into her Shockwave shopping gallery at http://ik.rocks.it [link expired]. Animations include The Way to Venushill, a road movie completely produced in Flash by Sabine Huber (Germany) and The Nerve Game by local girl with her finger on the button, Van Sowerine (see page 5) in which you’re invited to “Watch your stress and depression rise to levels never seen before. Watch yourself collapse, then explode!”

This year’s WOW Festival is put together by the team at WIFT led once again by the indefatigable Jacquie North and looks as generous as last year’s with a huge range of features, documentaries and shorts.

Like the best of modern dancers, Bebe Miller watches movement intently. At her Melbourne workshop presented by Dance Works in June this year, the New York choreographer asked the participating dancers to “take the idea of weight being at risk and allow an interruption to happen.” She wants them to avoid the familiarity of their known dance vocabulary, or its beauty. “How does an interruption become a staccato pattern? Why is that dissolving gesture a continuous thought rather than a break with form?” The dancers struggle with these ideas in their improvisations. Katy McDonald has one foot curved under while another foot is flat, then she flips her body over like a tensile cat. Miller responds with a series of strategies to intervene in the phrasing of movement-hair-pulling, visual or aural distraction, speaking in one ear, manipulating body-parts.

Later in conversation, Miller explains this idea of interruption, as both an aesthetic and political act. She is interested in the ‘civilian body’, a body available to the dancer outside her training but which becomes buried in the habit formation of dancing. “It is only when we know that we have habits that we can use them. Why is the habit of ‘light touch’ always about the same temperature and the same weight in relation to the task at hand. If you change that, then what do you feel? Or resist it? And what if you follow through?” This habit change involves utilising the pedestrian to interrupt the codes they have as dancers.

Political dimensions of being seen as dancers with civilian bodies are linked to interruption. “Studio practices have myths about equality and about mood as if you accomplish what you need to within given rules. But I’m not here to make everything equal. Two men together carry a charge, 2 women, black and white – we live in this world where those things are real so I try to let that be visible.”

I ask Miller where choreography is going in the 21st century? “I think we’re in the middle of a 40 year shift and time is not on our side. I feel there is a path towards relevancy. I went to Eritrea in Northern Africa a couple of years ago for 3 weeks. I’m in a foreign environment and I had this sense of them looking at me intently while I’m looking at them intently. They are looking at someone foreign inside something familiar, so we have a different point of view in terms of intensity. What is that about? Is that something that I can capture in dance? As I work on it, it occurs me to that that difference of gaze is political. It shows up in Ohio, it shows up in Pakistan and Palestine. What seemed like a foreign adventure is in fact localised. So the choreography is about how I can use the home environment, not recreate an African experience. It is not just about race, it is about vibrating in a different way. That is the ultimate test of globalism, can you allow that body vibrating differently to be next to you.”

Her voice in class says “go-girl”and “Yeah! Yeah! “and “oh, hello” when she sees an interruption that vibrates. In watching, Bebe Miller shares this potential for dancing to create physical or psychic change even though she does not know where the choreography of civilian bodies might go in the future.

Fortyfive Downstairs, once a gallery now a gallery and performance space, hosted a winter collaboration between art and dance, entitled Focus 4. During its season, the space was arranged by placing 4 installations side by side, and nightly cameos in a vestibule. Its audience was led into each constructed situation to bear witness to the dancerly component which brought alive each installation. Dancers and artists integrated their work to differing degrees, with some constructions necessary to the dance, some complementary, some autonomous and others a hindrance.

Stephanie Glickman’s movement bore great allegiance to Michael Sibel’s large, steel sculpture (a conical monkey bars). Glickman sought inspiration from the limitations of bounded space, climbing, weaving, and swinging from steel bars. Here, installation offered an aesthetic puzzle, which provoked Glickman towards a bold clarity of exploration. By contrast, Benjamin Gauci and Louise Rippert seemed to mirror each other: both working in a minimalist sense, whether with white ceramic shapes and flour, or repeated circular movement leaving floury traces. Together, a sense was created of gentle but insistent assertion. Marc Brew’s collaboration with a wheelchair produced some beautiful inversions, where it could have been either chair or body as installation. Brew’s dialogue with his own body suggested the kind of play with structural givens that Glickman found in Sibel’s sculpture.

Glickman, the curator of the show, wrote that the dancers and visual artists did not know each other before working together. As might be expected, such a risky venture is likely to lead to contrast as much as integration. Naree Vachananda’s very personal and moving work was framed by but not particularly connected to Anna Finlayson’s mural collage, whilst Benjamin Gauci’s strong, balletic composition positively crashed through Louis Rippert’s hanging fabrics.

The variety of relationships between artist and dancer taken collectively offer food for thought as to the range of ways in which one form might collaborate with another. Not forgetting that Merce Cunningham’s own option was to combine at the very last minute, allowing different elements—music, lighting, sets-to freely juxtapose.

Tracie Mitchell’s recent work, Under the Weather, was quite different in texture to the above. Although it combined video and dance, there was a sense of an authorial aesthetic, emerging from a single perspective. From dark beginnings, a video triptych blinked and winked, creating a powerful portraiture of urban existence. Dancers emerged from the shadows singly or together, drawing elegant lines. The set fanned out from a recessed centre, suggesting that something was being aired, turned inside-out. Dancers ventured then retreated, hidden again by shadow.

There was a section where each dancer performed solo. Carlee Mellow’s work was striking, precise, quirky, repeated just enough to gain familiarity with her vocabulary. It was also enjoyable to watch Mia Hollingworth and Shona Erskine move through what appeared to be their own material subjected to Mitchell’s careful direction. Sadly, the piece ended before the 3 dancers were able to come back together. So much had been created and established that a desire was born for hiatus and closure. Instead, the piece gently fell into shadow, leaving an opening where before there was none.

Focus 4, Stephanie Glickman & Michael Sibel, Nicholas Mansfield & Andrea Meadows, Benjamin Gauci & Louise Rippert, Naree Vachananda & Anna Finlayson, Marc Brew, and Amelia McQueen, at Fourtyfive Downstairs, Flinders Lane Melbourne, Jul 26 -Aug 4

Under the Weather, choreographed and directed by Tracie Mitchell, performed by Shona Erskine, Mia Hollingworth and Carlee Mellow, music by Byron Scullin, Gasworks, Port Melbourne, July 23-27

Hold that deadline. Other cultures from ours experience time and the detailing of events, and hence, meaning, differently. In particular, there is a concept of “thick time”, a Balinese term for when events and significances line up in a particularly dense overlay of resonances (John Broomfield, Other Ways of Knowing, 1997). I begin to wonder whether, in improvisation, “thick time” becomes a condition of performance: from the initial, tentative setting-up of an idea, or partnership, through to the layered, richly-confluenced zone of thought and action that looks and feels expanded, hugely spacious, where the span of a single breath is wired to so many options (and organs), words, shudders and slides, that one is not holding, marking time, but that it holds you. Helen Omand says: “The best improvisations are when it seems like the score has already been written in space/time, and the body makes it manifest” (RT 45 p11).

To improvise is to enter a zone approaching the infinite that is yet bounded with finitudes: muscle, step, language, wind. In their finer moments, the most seemingly divergent practices-from Grotowski’s “shedding of resistances” to the classical acterly “training up” to form-also whisper each other’s virtues, hugeness meeting the particular (or vice versa) in multitudinous intimacy. I observe the final session of Precipice in Canberra-not, alas, the fall of the incumbent rulers from their parliamentary spire, but a 4-day improvisation jam, now in its 9th year-and reflect on some of the “givens” of the artform.

Trust. Trotman and Santos in partnership reveal an intimacy that is verbal, physical and structural, with structure a distinct body with its own edges joining in the play. Their interplay seems helix-shaped, diverging, converging, holding their differences in a brilliant interweaving. Santos, glowing-eyed, ‘redeems’ them from the edge of chaos, insisting on the unity of their ‘two becoming one” whilst Trotman falls off a cliff with the other billion into which they have already multiplied. Two gaspingly beautiful moments where their two distanced bodies turn as one.

Ghosts. They show their training, as performers do when they improvise. Trotman and Rees-Hatton through Al Wunder’s Theatre of the Ordinary sharing a tendency to separate words from movement in alternation. Trotman’s words left gasping, arms grasping; peculiar and particular, a quaintly-disjuncted relationship to impulse recognisable as a TOTO influence, yet here ignited with a special resilience and wit. Rees-Hatton belies her maturity with hops and skips, an adult dancer partaking in an all-day lollipop.

Hitching on the glitches. Ryk Goddard plays tag and chasings with patches of light which cut out just as he arrives. An at times harrowing biographic discursion on finding and keeping home, of an identity teetering and lurching away from stable balance. Both verité confession and postmodern artifice, the bravely darkest and most personified piece of the session.

Possible vs impossible, known vs. unknown. Barnes and Bonnar tease out the tango form, decaying, redeeming, querying and quarreling with it as their feet wickedly flick and sashay. A delicious turning-over of a form that already leaves itself open to unturn, tickling at (in)competencies and (in)complicities. His solid body helps her into a backbend, drags her metres across the ground; their roles reverse, she’s surprised to be caught in an impossible expectation to do the same.

From intensified abstraction…. In a butoh-based slaughterhouse blues, Pemberton, O’Keefe and Hunt alternate slack-hipped mimickry of cattle-men with Body Weather incursions into the muscles of slaughtered bovine souls. Blood on the hay, buttocks jammed in corridors. Kimmo Vennonen’s soundtrack veering from literal to a blood-journey through the internal nightmare.

…to dissolution. We emerge in late-afternoon wind and light to Alice Cummins’ silver hair reflecting the agedness and deepgnarled beauty of the courtyard’s central tree. At times her relatively still body seems to sprout from it, at times nearly fall like a leaf, or suspend from within it like a limb; thence dance along its skin, a difference of time and density. Cummins afterwards expresses her consciousness of being the final performance of the weekend. In what way might such consciousness interfere? The show must go on, but performances stop, do they? Cummins’ performance aptly softened the rhetorical edge of the season’s title with a grace and heart that rendered time thick and thin as water.

Precipice, Peter Trotman, Lynne Santos, Lee Pemberton, Anne O’Keefe, Victoria Hunt, Kimmo Vennonen, Sarah Bonnar, Gary Barnes, Ryk Goddard, Noel Rhees-Hatton, Alice Cummins; lighting: Mark Gordon. Australian Choreographic Centre,

Nightshift 's latest incarnation has increased the work magnificently in scale, complexity and duration, and is magically immersive in Artspace's largest gallery. On opening night, guests disappeared into the darkened space for long, satisfying reveries, wandering amidst the large transparent screens, intrigued by the flickering images reminiscent of peep shows, silent movies and film noir, but uniquely something else-a curious meditation on dance movement and sexuality. Images multiply and enlarge across the space with a photographic intensity and viewers become a shadowy part of the picture themselves in this intimate walk-in cinema of desire. The addition of extended movement passages to the original enigmatic glimpses of McPhee and a more audible and developed sound score confirm Nightshift as a major work in new media arts.

I used to think sound art was about the sound of sound. After engaging is a crash course of events and recordings, I discovered that, similar to more traditional music, a lexicon of noises generated electrically and digitally, has emerged that one can become accustomed to, begin to absorb as naturally as equal tempered tuning. So experiencing a sample of What is Music? events, I came to the (perhaps belated) revelation that more than just being about sonic textures, sound art is often about discerning the (sometimes apparent lack of) relationship between the modes of production and the sound they make.

Saturday night at The Studio, Sydney Opera House, offered a program jammed with different methodologies of making. Jim Denley opened the evening in acoustic mode, playing a saxophone and contact mike. Circular breathing, he created a gurgling drone textured by mouth clicks, tongue tocks and breathy grunts. At one stage the only sound you hear is the scraping of the mouthpiece over his stubble. The performance appears to be an exploration of air within the curls and corners of the instrument, an internal examination of the instrument itself. Joyce Hinterding, tuned us into the ether with aerials, computer and mixing desk. She created an increasingly dense carpet of drones out of electrical hum, tuning into higher tones and buzzes, tapping into slower, loping waves that chopped up the air around us.

Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras launched into a sonic maelstrom, Fox on computer and Pateras virtuosically pounding a small keyboard and activating changes through a breath activated mouth piece. Then just as suddenly the chaos pared back to a respite of a metronome looped and effected. Pateras then took to the strings of a deconstructed piano with kitchen cutlery, chopping and impaling the notes further manipulated by Fox. Toshimaru Nakumura and Sachiko M created a cool, quiet world of machine made sine waves, electrical pings, and pulses. There was no layering, just pure tones introduced for a few seconds and then removed. Binary, on/off. Phantom tones and warm hum of air conditioning. All moments controlled and measured.

Ottomo Yoshihide dragged us back to gritty earth with an improvisation for guitar and record player. He used the guitar to generate drones, occasionally moving into a rock-god lick of suspended notes, pumping up the overdrive, creating loops that hit the torso and kept cycling long after. (I am told it was an Ornette Coleman standard and must admit to ignorance on this one). Finally he threw a cymbal onto the turntable creating a manic carrillion, your head stuck inside the bell. Some couldn’t handle it, others stayed to the bitter end mesmerised or paralysed by its delicate obnoxiousness.

A regular feature of What is Music? is caleb k’s impermanent.audio—this year at PACT in Erskineville, creating a kind of rock concert feel compared to the intimacy of Hibernian House. Ai Yamamoto (Japan/Aus) on laptop (also running visuals) created a dense yet delicate sonic landscape with cascading streams of sound-notes and noises rippling over each other, constantly descending. Her palette of sounds is exquisitely created, concise, crystalline yet full bodied. She manages to produce under-rumbles with no grit in them. It is a stunningly “pretty” sonic universe. Anthony Guerra (Aus/UK) cycled feedback round the speakers, round your brain, with pops and glitches keeping the space unpredictable. He fused the sound into a massive perverse growl, both beautiful and ugly, which eventually pulled back to where it began. Snawkler started with acoustic samples, fingers on the fretboard of a double bass. Their use of samples is like unfinished thoughts of multi-streams overlapping, clashing, overriding other frequencies, a kind of cutup orchestral chaos out of which sonic thought bubbles arise. Their second piece using gamelan samples is a beautiful exploration of glassy and metallic colours. Günter Müller (Switzerland) and Tetuzi Akiyama (Japan) provided an improvisation, interesting in the uneasy differences of sound production. Müller bowed small gongs and metallic objects and played with the overtones, while Tetuzi Akiyama investigated (again) the sonic qualities of an electric guitar—running a metal ruler over the strings, applying things to the velcro strip attached to the body-nothing more than an exploration of the exploration. SEO performed with a joystick, and created sounds that seemed to have lost their video game. Standing in front of the audience, shoes off ready for action, he toggles the stick with full bodied gestures, manipulating loops of hysterical voices and agitated intonations that accelerate and escalate like a car race. I’d be interested to hear works with other sample palettes. Toshimaru Nakamura, played once again, but solo, in a similar vein to the studio night, with simple tones, emphasising the negative aural space—the trains to Erskineville, the sneezes. At the end of a program of such dense sound moments, his work was like a cleansing of the aural sphere.

In only 8 years Oren Ambachi and Robbie Avenaim's what is music? has become a vital celebration of Australian sonic explorations, exploitations and manipulations. After the hangover, activities will continue in dark corners, warehouse and white gallery cubes around Australia, spurred on by the growing sensation that there really is something significant going on here, beginning to impress itself on the Australian cultural psyche and the international scene. Many sonic loving (are we batlike?) creatures await, ears back, for the next instalment.

what is music?,The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Sat July 21, impermanent.audio, PACT, Tues July 23.

Dante Alighhiere’s The Inferno is a remarkably visual work that records the poet’s imagined pilgrimage into the vortex of the damned, phrased in 100 Cantos of 1292-style vernacular Italian poetry. It is the first work of the Divine Comedy trilogy, written after he had been exiled, a victim of the political chaos and corruption of medieval Florence. Hence it paints a vivid picture of Dante’s yearning for the earthly triumph of human potential in an era of deep injustice, corruption and unfettered greed. It’s not surprising then that such a subversive, political allegory still holds much currency today.

It was this model of symbolic retribution that inspired composer John Rodgers to create this modernist, sonic epic for Australia’s national contemporary music ensemble, ELISION. Appropriately they chose to present The Inferno as an installation, placing numerous performers throughout the abysses of Brisbane Powerhouse’s main theatre with grand-scale video projections (by Judith Wright) at each end of their netherworld.

Throughout most of his journey down through the Circles of Hell, the pilgrim Dante had the benefit of the poet Virgil as his personal guide. However, despite such unfettered access to the “voice of reason” even Dante ultimately required further assistance in navigating those deeply complex terrains (provided by Beatrice,symbol of Divine Love).

Anyone who takes on a work like The Inferno is nothing if not ambitious. While attempts at direct illustration are undoubtedly futile, plenty of well-signed guide posts are required to avoid audiences feeling like lost souls groping to “see” horrors in the darkness, such as the Vale of Suicides, the marsh of the Styx or Cocytus, the frozen centre of Hell. Rodgers describes in Real Time 36 (‘Sacred Geometry’, p. 43), how he went about structuring an “architectural” spectrum for audiences, visualising “each instrument’s sound world” as “a microcosm of Hell.” Tactics he employed included electronically generated drones, extreme degrees of distortion and the construction of complex arrays of “multiphonics.’ These were skilfully produced by ELISION’s manipulations of instruments as diverse as slack-stringed violoncellos, bowed polystyrene boxes and water damped Cretales, and, impressively, a flute and oboe cast from ice leading to an audio-visual meltdown. However Rodgers admits in the same article that “most” audiences would miss his numerous Dante-inspired “details”, yet still remain satisfied by a work that does “not need to have any relationship to Dante’s poem”.

Whilst Rodger’s composition offered a generous viscerality it lacked the deep visual sensibilities of Dante’s words. Hence I looked to Judith Wright’s accompanying video text for my guidance, given its significant placement and physical magnitude. Subtly timed interactions of sound and image have undeniable power within new media performance allowing audiences to vividly ‘picture’ for themselves. However with the visuals provided I frequently struggled to conjure up Dante’s incendiary visions of corrupt contemporaries, tortures beyond the pale or indeed much of his imagined geographies.

Suffering therefore from a disorientating blindness, I gratefully alighted upon Murray Kane’s poetic essay in the accompanying program: “‘ How will I recognise Styx’, I asked? ‘Sullen Strings choking on fumes of spite’, he replied matter of factly”.

In the early 90s there was a possie of us all hurtling ourselves through the air and swinging from things, but some of us got a bit tired, a bit hurt, had to get jobs, and it seemed like the Sydney aerial scene went into hibernation. But since 1999 Aimee Thomas and Shelalagh McGovern have been determined to make things, mostly dangerous looking things, happen with their creation of Aerialize-Sydney Aerial Theatre.

Big in Japan was their annual celebration and fundraiser. Described as a night celebrating Asian influences on Australia, the Newtown Theatre was gorgeous decked out like an old music hall with flowing red silks, origami sculptures and a huge scenic backdrop framing the live musicians, Entropic and Deepchild. The majority of the work was a celebration of strength and skill, which the artists had in abundance. Highlights included Suzie Langford’s Cloud Swing routine Tokyo Clouds. Compared to the trapeze this apparatus allows for a gentler physical gesture, making Langford’s death-defying free falls all the more surprising and breathtaking. Susan Mitchell performed an invigorating web spinning routine, Kamikaze, with great strength and precision, and the Urban Spin duo between Langford and Mitchell showed a maturity in their skills and performance presence-they make a good team. Under the Sea, performed by Shelalagh McGovern, was an elegant and gutsy swinging trapeze routine with heart-stopping drops to foot hangs at peak swing, accompanied by guitarist Antonio Dixon and blues singer Mari-Jon Berna, who has one of the most soul-satisfying voices around.

Fortunately, a few of the pieces attempted to push through the showy style that inevitably arises from apparatus and skill-oriented work. Bernard Bru’s Sakura was based around a well developed clown persona and involved an elaborate routine of innovative climbs to the ceiling to release a gentle flow of sand-perhaps a meditation on time and Zen. Playing with the gestural translations of cartoons like Astro Boy, Meika Kiven and Charmaine Piggott pushed the regular trapeze tricks-half angel, foot hang, one armed hang-into refreshingly new shapes and constructions creating an integrated relationship between apparatus and performer. In contrast, Hiroshima by Genevieve Moran, with text by John Hersy, though elegantly performed, did not create a significant connection nor juxtaposition between the physicality of standard ‘tricks’ performed on the lyre (hanging hoop) and the text-one of the difficulties to be worked through when pushing physical performance into more narrative ground.

The most interesting work for me was Simple Terms. Catherine Daniel appeared on stage in simple day wear (no glitter to be seen), looking for her partner. Casually she ran through her complex routine on silks, chatting to the audience, flirting with a boy in the audience. Eventually Jessica Paff arrived and they performed a sophisticated, though still casual routine, on the one silk, continuing the conversation. The underplayed, anti-theatrical nature of the this work was refreshing and suggested a different conceptualisation of aerial performance. I hope they continue investigations in this style.

Big in Japan was a celebration of skill more than of Asian cultural influences. Many of the references were slight, a red sun Tshirt here, a kimono there, which considering the enormous influence of Asian performance training systems (Suzuki, Butoh, Bodyweather) on Australian contemporary performance seemed a little naive. Now that the skills are there and developing, it would be great to see an increased engagement with material on deeper and more conceptual levels-admittedly difficult in such a tricks based medium but something to strive for as Aerialize continue training Sydney performers to swoop, dive and fly.

Big in Japan, Aerialize- Sydney Aerial Theatre, Aug 29-Sept1, Newtown Theatre, Sydney.

A broken tree, each segment labelled with a number. Standing among them Koon Fei Wong silently accounts for each piece on her air calculator. Pale and willowy in little girl dress, the performer is nevertheless powerfully present. Plagued by nightmares, trauma of collective memories, she strives to embody her visions in fragments of language and gesture. The tiniest of wrist actions takes our attention, it animates an arm that floats out from the torso. From the side of the stage Liberty Kerr on cello and Barbara Clare sampling sounds, underscore or interrupt with their own murmuring utterances. Images spill onto the stage. A pile of bodies, dead arms reaching out to be held. Fei chops at her arm, repeats “Long or short sleeves? Or sleeveless?” She stands on a dismembered trunk, “I’m great. I’m terrific.” A proud little smile dances on her lips, in the corners of her eyes, while those same muscles reveal the lie. She speaks of bloodied bones in snow, the colour moving between elements, red to white to brown. In the elusive way of dreams, events drift apart from physical sensation. Remembering her child self as helpless witness to violence, she detachedly describes events in voiceover. Meanwhile her naked body grasps at the sensation in ineffectual movement, shuffling awkwardly on her buttocks from one side of the stage to the other. Finally she falls and falls and falls. And exhausted, she re-assembles the strewn fragments of the tree.

Koon Fei Wong came to Australia from Hong Kong 5 years ago to study Aeronautical Engineering. Thankfully, she lost her way and wound up at the School of Theatre Film and Dance at the University of NSW. Fei was also a participant in Tess de Quincey’s Triple Alice project in Central Australia, a profound experience which triggered some of the thoughts on dislocation and identity she explores so powerfully in this performance.

Teik Kim Pok in generic T, BVDs and white crew socks ponders his place on the map of cultural identity. Whether in Singapore or Australia, clearly being Teik Kim is not enough…”In a past life, I may have yelled ‘Long Live Chairman!’ Today I yell, ‘Long Live (fill in name of Western popstar)’.” And why have his parents only ever called him Daniel, a moniker officially registered nowhere? Taking stock of his upbringing and its effect Teik Kim tosses round possible identities, re-modelling himself, parading for us on a black and white runway. It’s a nicely judged performance, a blend of seriousness and fun that keeps the audience guessing. Along the way, he asks us to take a look at each other, to shake hands while resising eye contact. Finally uncomfortable in the suit, he discards it for a clearer match for his cultural confusions, where else but in the enigmatic persona of Michael Jackson-the black man who could pass for white, maker of his own idiosyncratic moves. Teik Kim flicks the switch to vaudeville and at last, utterly convincing to himself and his audience, with jutting pelvis, single glove, hat concealing features, he slides a slippery moonwalk to “Billy Jean.”

These 2 impressive short works were created as part of Teik Kim Pok’s and Koon Fei Wong’s research as Honours students in the School of Theatre Film and Dance at University of NSW. Both have also engaged with the contemporary performance community in Sydney for the last 2 years with earlier works seen at PACT Youth Theatre, Urban Theatre Projects, Performance Space and Belvoir Street.

Dis(re)membered, performer Koon Fei Wong, sound liberty & bc from magnusmusic, project supervisor Clare Grant; Post-Op Chamber Piece, performer Teik Kim Pok, sound Michelle Outram; Io Myers Theatre, September 25-28.

The paucity of international contemporary dance companies touring to Australia (a handful at arts festivals aside) was brought home by the visit from the UK of the Akram Khan Company and the excitement and dialogue it generated. The company was also resident at the University of Western Sydney and presented different programs at the Sydney Opera House and Brisbane’s Powerhouse.

In her handy summation of Khan’s career and philosophy, “Clarity within chaos” (Dance Theatre Journal, Vol 18, No 1, 2002), Preeti Vasudevan reports that the 28 year-old Khan was born in South London into the Bengali community there, dancing from 3 years of age and beginning with kathak, classical dance from northern India and Pakistan, at the age of 7. At 21 he decided to train in contemporary dance and, subsequently to work at its integration with kathak. Khan says in the interview, “What I’m exploring is kathak, the dynamics and energies of kathak. It is kathak that informs the contemporary.” He conceptualises this classical dance as clarity and contemporary dance as chaotic-not in a sense of formlessness, but, somewhat akin to Chaos Theory, in terms of the invisibility of its borders. “It is an unfortunate misconception that [contemporary dance] has no boundaries. the difference is that you cannot see them…[but] you know [they] are there…”

Khan continues to perform kathak in the UK and India, but his fame has primarily emerged from the contemporary work with his company, a powerful perpetual motion motor whose collective speed reminded me of nothing less than the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass-with their enormous, continuous flow of notes that for all the rapidity of their playing conveys a transcendent, subtle shifting of states. There are significant changes of pace and form in the 3 sections of Kaash (the 2002 work presented in Sydney), but the overall impression is of a mesmeric totality incorporating intense solo moments (Khan, reciting and demonstrating movement instructions from kathak focused on its gestural vocabulary) and remarkable collective harmony (a precision rarely seen in this country). From within this flow, which like Chaos Theory’s companion Complexity suggests a system working at optimum but ever on the edge, come strikingly memorable moments as dancers rapidly traverse the stage, spin and come to a sudden, curiously unabrupt halt, a sheer stillness, or, a little later, with the rhythms of the movement still in their bodies, an almost indiscernable rocking.

The contemplative blend of unleashed energy and overarching form is embodied too in Nitin Sawhney’s musical composition for Kaash. The dance corresponds closely to its rhythms, ecstatically in the bursts of tabla-driven propulsion. The viscerality of the percussion is layered with sustained notes sounding like they have been scraped from the edges of small gongs and cymbals, sometimes reverberating in harmony with the pulsing, barely stilled bodies of the dancers. It’s a composition that, like the dance, fuses the classical and the contemporary with confident ease.

The context for Kaash is an open performing space forward of a huge work of art by Anish Kapoor-a painting of a framed, huge black hole. In the Kapoor manner it’s often difficult to see where this emptiness begins, the line between presence and absence constantly shifting and blurring, a state amplified by transformations of colour and density wrought by a superb lighting design.

This is no mere backdrop. Not only does it provide a parallel to the shifting energies of the dance, but it also reflects the thematic preoccupations of the choreography. Khann says, “‘Kaash’ means ‘if’ and I am basing it on the concept of Shiva. Shiva in Hindu religion is the destroyer and restorer of order. Shiva in Hebrew means the number 7. Seven is close to the rhythm and music modes of Indian classical that works with energy…What if you put a dancer in an ice cube and then the energy is released when the cube melts? That’s what Shiva is about” (Vasudevan).

Nor is Kapoor’s painting ignored by the dancers. In a work that is otherwise highly formalised the opening and closing moments of Kaash have the kind of abstract theatricality you’d expect from Saburo Tehsigawa. We arrive in the theatre to find a performer gazing into Kapoor’s creation, in turn therefore directing our own gaze, initiating the contemplation that follows. At the end of the performance one of the dancers becomes totally preoccupied with this vast, beautiful but disturbing portrait of sheer flatness and depth, his body swaying left to right, almost as if to fall, to be caught by his comrades in this dangerous reverie. Blackout.

I hope that this visit will inspire a producer or an arts festival director to bring the company to Australia again; in the meantime we can only be grateful to the Sydney Opera House, the Brisbane Powerhouse and the British Council for giving us a rare glimpse of a work of bracing and contemplative totality and cultural resonance.

Fiona Cameron has for some time been one of the most striking presences within Chunky Move, her tall, statuesque pose breaking down into low, complicated, interwoven positions with disarming ease. She has produced several of her own works, notably Looking For a Life Cure (2001), in which she explored the near schizophrenic internalisation of contradictory states within modern life. Her latest project is a pair of duets dealing with urban alienation and the distance between individuals, performed at various informal locations (indoors and outdoors) within Melbourne.

As always with these much in demand dancers, Cameron and partner Carlee Mellow move with such elegance, poise and confidence(as well as with a touch of self-deprecating humour(that their merest physical inflection is eminently satisfying. Cameron is all jagged discomfort to Mellow’s absent-mindedly musing traveller, the knots they tie each other up in taking on a mood of accidental combat. Composer Luke Smiles adds a sense of sonic complexity, jumping from hip-hop loops to hyped techno flourishes, as well as more abstract digital fields and soundscapes (horns, motors, coffee-machines; a cacophony of urban samples).

The dance itself is somewhat slight both in terms of overt content and choreography. It is predominantly the performers’ dramatic nuances that bring it to life. The first piece is an extended joke of how when one is on public transport, one can end up with one’s foot over the ear of a neighbour, despite one’s best efforts to avoid physical proximity. This is a fun little dramatic sketch, but that is all.

The second dance is more provocative, depicting Cameron as a city dweller who has learnt the physical regimes and moves one must go through to avoid chance encounters. To draw on Public Enemy’s hip-hop terminology, Cameron’s character has been rendered “niggatronic,” or robotised in body and psyche (if not race, given that Cameron is white). Like break-dancers, her character moves to the subliminal beat of contemporary, urban capitalism(yet unlike B-boyz, her character (as opposed to Cameron the choreographer) does not consciously manipulate these movements and feelings so as to dramatise her condition. Mellow by contrast seems to follow John Cage’s exhortation to consciously react to the random sounds and textures which surround one in urban life. Not so much stopping to smell the daisies, she pauses to hear the music of the city and pay attention to the other individuals who move throughout it.

Cameron’s dance-theatre scenario of 2 movers who respond very differently to the barrage of Smiles’ sounds encourages such reflections(particularly for those familiar with hip-hop preachers like Chuck D or Kodwo Eshun. It is nevertheless an uncomplicated work in itself, depicting a simple exchange between the characters leading to a comic resolution in which Mellow leaves Cameron reluctantly holding the hands of 2 co-opted spectators. The production was disappointing in the limited way it interacted with or was consciously situated within the spaces it was staged(beyond dealing with the broad theme of urbanity. Overall Inhabited was a thoroughly enjoyable, interesting, short performance which nevertheless did not amount to anything substantial. One hopes therefore that this curious divertissement represents a taster for more impressive full-length works to follow.

“I ain’t goin’ niggatronic; smart enough to know that I ain’t bionic.”
Chuck D, from Public Enemy, Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (NY, Def Jam, 1994)

Inhabited, director/choreographer/performer Fiona Cameron, performer/co-choreographer Carlee Mellow, co-choreographer Nicole Johnston, music Luke Smiles. Various locations, Melbourne, Aug 2 -Sept 1

Phillip Adams’ Amplification (1999) was an intensely focused study of damaged physicality and desire. His new work, Endling, however is stylistically closer to Adams’ Upholster (2001), employing a jump-cut, mixmaster approach to develop something akin to an absurdist opera. Musical references identify which aesthetic tropes are evoked and assaulted in each of Adams’ scenarios: bucolic neo-classicism for ballet, Modernist dissonance for empty angst, Ligeti for 2001-style fantasies of rebirth.

Adams treats culture and art history as a bazaar, plundering them for ironic details and unlikely, kitsch amalgams. While Upholster is ultimately little more than a choreographically-complicated, funny and sexy divertissement, leaping from the Karma sutra to furniture upholstery, the grab-bag historicism of Endling charts a more coherent and thought-provoking path through the detritus of high and low culture.

Thematically, Endling deals with issues of animality, with the dancers both applying anthropomorphisms to the biological elements they engage with (a fox stole looks back, quizzically, at Stephanie Lake after a brief, sexualised encounter) as well as becoming animal themselves. The early section has an almost hysterical energy, flinging bodies rushing from one scenario to another with a pathological illogicality reminiscent of Lake’s own Love is the Cause (2001). This explosion of themes and movement soon stabilises into a more measured approach however, with Adams increasingly framing and posing his events into lightly moving tableaux.

The comic bizarreness of Endling had me thinking of Grand Union dance theatre or ‘the World’s First Ever Pose-Band’ from the 1970s. Adams has remained close to a maniacally Pop-art sensibility. The Pop reference is also significant in that the humour he develops, while strong, comes from a sense of irony more akin to Warhol’s flat persona than the Chunky Move productions he and several of his dancers have worked on. This is intensely serious play, the characters attempting new rituals for a world where animality-whatever it may signify-is at best attenuated and difficult to encounter. The performers stretch out a massive cowhide between them like a trampoline and rearrange glass-eyed fur wraps upon it, as though testing a form of neo-paganism-but like everything else in Endling (as opposed toAmplification) no desire, satisfaction or ‘primal force’ is evoked. These are rituals which fail to produce a religion. Like Adams’ own approach to culture, the characters of his drama burrow through material without settling anywhere.

Endling can therefore be read as a critique of Martha Graham’s primitivist works such as Into the Labyrinth. Unlike Graham (or even Stephen Page in reappropriating Graham devices), Adams is not suggesting that references such as bullfighting allow us access to a primitive, pre-civilised state. Animality is finally seen as nothing more than a mirror held up to humanity, a projection of human concerns, and not “Nature untamed.” For Adams’ characters, to be animal metaphoricises social marginality, sexuality, or (in a lingering duet between Byron Perry and Toby Mills) homoeroticism. Ultimately the stuffed animals the dancers play with, or the projected footage of the last Tasmanian tiger, preserve a distance from both performer and audience, remaining objects which play in our (human) imagination.

Balletlab, Endling ‘Self-Encasing’ Trilogy: Part #1, choreographer Phillip Adams, primary design Sally Smart, lighting Paul Jackson; performers Michelle Heaven, Stephanie Lake, Toby Mills, Byron Perry, Brook Stamp, Joanne White. Dancehouse: Balletlab, company-in-residence, Melbourne, June 12-16.

The setting is familiar and so are the people. Someone fills your wineglass and asks if you’re having a good time. Faces you recognise stop and say hello, while new acquaintances smile as they pass by. You even look at the art every now and then (just to remind yourself why you’re there). We expect it all to mean something but it rarely ever does.

Memories create the basis for illusion and constructed landscapes offer limitless possibilities. Nothing is ever as it seems in the photographs of Rebecca Ewer. Closer inspection will reveal the truth. Simple scenes are sometimes just that, but reality is always open to interpretation. Watch this space.

Works from Ewer’s The Gallery series have recently been shown in the 5UV window and Adelaide Central Gallery.

The phenomenal growth of communication systems promotes somewhat idealistically the view that geographical and social boundaries are dissolving. However, negotiating interpersonal relationships is still fraught with miscommunication. Contemporary existence relies upon disentangling systems of social, historical, political and personal bias and can leave us subject to preconceptions and psychological instabilities. It is the fragile dynamics of human interaction that tends to undermine our conscientious desire to get along, leaving us, potentially, a bit myopic.

At times then, it seems necessary to adopt a particular viewpoint and defend it and Ricardo Fernendes, writing in the exhibition catalogue on the work of Singaporean artist Mathew Ngui, acknowledges that this can have a polarizing effect. He states: “Everyone chooses his position, be it conniving or rebelling.” The slipperiness and fallibility of systems of communication is demonstrated in Ngui’s cleverly devised installation in Adelaide’s Contemporary Art Centre. As in previous works it is layered with complex metaphors for human activity and the subjectivity of perception.

Precisely planned out in its choreography of materials, Ngui’s installation uses technological devices to negotiate and invert perceptions of the real. Two video cameras on tripods at opposite ends of the room are trained on a forest of PVC pipes inscribed with hand-painted and unintelligible markings. Innocuous looking scraps of timber are placed against one wall and along the gallery floor. When the viewer looks through the video eyepiece the forest of pipes appears as a flat wall and the markings form into a coherent text describing the action of sitting upon a chair. When viewed from a precise vantage point the apparently random bits of wood suddenly coalesce into a chair or rather a perspective ‘drawing’ of a chair in space.

In an empty gallery the PVC and text are coolly totemic. However the static image through the eyepiece is interrupted when visitors pass between the pipes as they navigate their way through the room. This destabilizing of perception is further heightened when the viewer moves to the back room. Here, the relayed wall of text, together with taped sounds from the video cameras, is now projected directly onto the gallery wall. In a performance video Ngui observes, interacts with, and seats himself upon the representation of the chair as seen in the first room. Under surveillance, the viewer has participated unknowingly in the work and becomes an integral part of it.

Multiplying possible viewpoints through the use of multisensory devices and strategically placed clues, Ngui reminds us that reality is a construct, subject to flux and interpretation. Electrical conduits and PVC piping suggest systems of conveyance but interpretation of the objects requires a willingness to ‘see’ beyond the obvious. The viewer is led by recognition and misrecognition of vision, sound and text to investigate the ‘logic’ of spatial and social realms. Trompe-l’oeil illusionism provokes shifts in pictorial space by introducing ambiguous imagery that appears to fluctuate from the real to fictive. Ngui’s work provides metaphors for the perception of multiple physical realities and provides a parallel invitation to explore the complexity of the emotional realm. The transmission of the personal and the emotional are equally susceptible to misinterpretation. Fernendes underlines this emotional capacity in the exhibition catalogue stating, “It is an open space for poetic, logical and metaphysical interventions.”

Mathew Ngui, Tell Me Where I Stand, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australi , July 12-Aug 11

At a LaBasta! gig, someone is deliberately butchering Beckett’s Waiting For Godot with her ultra-dry, self-interrupted delivery. Before the shadow puppets come out, someone else forces a What Is Music? flier into my fist. What Is Music? When is that? Somehow, I get to an under-promoted, but nevertheless packed gig at an old, rock’n’roll pub. Toshimaru Nakamura’s superb No-input mixing board CD is ringing in my ears.

W.I.M? festival co-director Rob Avenaim is first up, making scratchy noises and false-foley work. It reminds me of Pauline Oliveros’ latest CD (In The Arms of Reynolds, Lowlands Distribution, Belgium), but not as good. He drapes his long hair off stage to be replaced by Tetuzi Akiyama, who takes a metal bow with custom microphone pickups on either end to a static acoustic guitar and begins to saw. Zzzz, zzzz. Wow. It all builds to this high-pitched nastiness as he provokes things with his free hand, holding blunt knives and plastic brushes. Almost too many (dis)harmonies. Luv those Japanese minimalists.

Next up is Julian Knowles, having a subdued, fun time behind his laptop—dull to look at, great to listen to. He takes us on a wild ride, from the gritty atmospheres of contemporary digital soundscapes (what would we do without Pro Tools?), then sheets of aggressive, sparkling, scintillating neo-electroacoustics, asymmetrically off-the-beat drum’n’bass, fluttering bass-drones, and more. I haven’t heard such a stylistically expansive palette since Battery Operated toured.

The big deal of the night is up next. I’m not keen. I’m not an Oren Ambarchi fan, his guitar hum is too damn quiet. Same problem with digi-man Phil Samartzis. They’re joined by Günter Müller, who, by rubbing 2 microphones together, or skimming them across cymbals, kicks up quite a din right from the start. Ambarchi and Samartzis respond in kind. Did I just see Ambarchi play an actual note? His guitar sounds particularly dark tonight, ghosting the styles of his peers, while deep, resonant hums emerge from Müller, and Samartzis caps it off with loud, crinkly, micro-exclamations. I remember Pierre Schaeffer’s statement of composing for “the astonished ear.” Well, my ear’s feeling pretty astonished.

After that unexpected delight, Nakamura takes ages to set up. A technical problem? We never know, but an icy draft in the pub is making the audience decidedly restive. When he finally plays, he proves disappointing. Sure, it has a rough aggression lacking in his CDs, a playful expressiveness, but these short phrases seem a bit like pointless noodling. Where are the exquisite, ringing loops captured on CD (No-input mixing board, Tokyo: Zero Gravity, 2000)?

My blood is slowing to ice as the last act, Voicecrack, set up, in the middle of the room, a table covered in cheap electronic doohickies: toys, bike-lights, clapped out scanners, and a heap of photoelectric contraptions. In near darkness they start manipulating the number, intensity and periodicity of light sources flickering onto the light-sensitive devices. A huge wall of industrial noise emerges; the kind of sound that would make Merzbow proud. The Swiss duo’s work fits well into Nietzche’s Germanic ideas about Dionysian chaos uniting life and death. I listen for 20 minutes, but their annihilating sound hasn’t warmed up the pub. I scatter for home before I turn into a pillar of salty ice.

What Is Music?, Corner Hotel, July 16; Waiting for Godot, versioned by LaBasta!, Meyers Place Bar, July 7.

It is opening night at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna’s 9th district. The foyer is packed with vibrant yet reserved Viennese for the second season of Paul Capsis’ Boulevard Delirium. Viennese are a very diligent theatre going lot with the city boasting 45 theatres for a population of 1.7 million. There is no need for programs to develop new audiences or to attract young people—it is a core aspect of a culture that has spawned the likes of Mozart, Strauss and Klimt to mention but a few. The minister for culture, who was in attendance on opening night, is the third most powerful man in Austrian politics. It is not surprising that one of Australia’s most challenging and talented directors Barrie Kosky has taken up residence there as the director. With an annual budget of just under 3 million (AUD), a core staff of 10, a box office income expectation of just 5% and 3 month rehearsal periods he says it’s like a dream come true.

The house lights dim and Capsis appears spot lit in front of a lush red velvet curtain, his burlesque character in total harmony with the theatre’s historic ambience. Top hatted and tailed, he launches into a sumptuous rendition of 'Windmills of My Mind' which segues seamlessly into the wrenching 60s classic 'Anyone Who had a Heart.' The audience is transfixed.

From this intimacy the curtains part to reveal the full complement of the musical ensemble. Capsis is in his element, he is singing the blues-and how! The songs are raunchy, and the Viennese bristle. Relief comes climactically through the heartfelt ballad 'Little Girl Blue'. Capsis then evokes Garland and we are her audience in Carnegie Hall. Kosky’s delicate orchestration allows us an intimate insight into this vulnerable persona. Through classic standards such as ‘The Man that Got Away' and 'Get Happy', Capsis is able not only to interpret Garland but also to add layers through his unique renditions, from pop to punk and back again.

The Viennese swoon to Marlene’s appearance in their native tongue, only to be caught off guard by a strident Streisand attacking them with 'Don’t Rain on My Parade.' And before our next breath, we are praising the lord in a fervor of gospel evangelism.

With a twist of his hair and the placing of a flower, Billy Holiday makes her entrance. Close your eyes and the similarity is remarkable, the characterization sublime.

A Capsis show is never complete without Janis hitting the stage; her reckless hair and loose presence throw us into a free love euphoric Woodstock affair. The audience go ballistic. Capsis and Kosky cleverly exploit this dynamic by catapulting us into a sensational version of Queen’s 'We are the Champions', the poignancy of the rock ‘anthem’ touched the heart and soul of the audience. Capsis exits leaving us chanting for more. We are appeased by a beautifully stark rendition of 'Summertime' before he concludes with the edgy and provocative 'Home Is Where the Hatred Is.'

Broadway Delirium is the culmination of the Capsis experience, combining his favorite characters over the years in a fresh interpretation. Kosky’s clever staging, lighting and direction create a richly dramatic journey, the essence of which lies in the brilliant placement of songs. Backed by a very agile and tight band led by musical director Roman Gottwald, the electric combination of Kosky and Capsis results in a dangerously sophisticated and stylized cabaret. The Viennese loved it.

Paul Capsis, Boulevard Delirium, director Barrie Kosky, musical director Roman Gottwald, Schauspielhaus, Vienna, Sept 6.

I refer to Solrun Hoaas’ “An Australian Blindspot “ in RealTime 50. As the Festival Programmer for REAL:life on film I feel it is important to respond to some of the criticisms raised by Hoaas in relation to the dearth of Asian programming at this year’s festival.

Since its inception in 1999, REAL:life has attempted to redress the balance of anglo-centric programming within the Australian screen culture industry with a culturally diverse program of documentary films in terms of origin, content and style. While I agree that documentaries from the Asian region did not adequately feature at this year’s festival this was by no means due to a disregard for the promotion of the cultural, social, political or personal issues represented through Asian documentary or the styles and sensibilities of Asian cinema. This was, in actual fact, a result of the limited submissions received from Asian filmmakers both internationally and locally.

Out of the 10 international titles that screened at this year’s festival, REAL:life featured documentaries from the USA, UK, Japan, Iran, Romania and France. While most of these films were co-productions with UK or USA-based filmmakers it is important to note that over the past 3 years REAL:life has showcased documentaries from all over the globe including India, Israel, Lebanon, China, Slovenia, Ethiopia, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Taiwan, Cuba, Egypt and many more. The 13 Australian titles selected to screen in 2003 featured culturally diverse stories from the parochial to the international. A number of these addressed issues within the region including the aftermath of the East Timor declaration of independence, the impact of the 1984 Indian Sikh riots on an Indian-Australian family and Korean-American cross cultural identity.

With the growth of the festival, greater resources and better access to international titles, REAL:life looks forward to featuring more Asian documentaries and is currently researching potential titles for inclusion at the next festival.

A focus on the performance of “contemporary classical” or any other kind of current music is not something one generally associates with the major music schools in Australia, some of which still use the label “Conservatorium” to describe themselves. This term implies an agenda of conserving the repertoire of western classical music, principally of the 18th and 19th centuries. Noble as this aim is, the contemporary reality means new approaches to preparing music professionals are being sought across the sector. Professor Nicolette Fraillon, Director of the Canberra School of Music (and now the newly appointed Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Australian Ballet) notes that because “traditional performance jobs are still being reduced in terms of funding and the sizes of orchestras, (graduates) need to be really prepared and creative in a variety of ways in order to support themselves.”
The traditional preparation of a classical music performer is a long and rigorous process. It requires considerably more dedication if you add the skills associated with a variety of contemporary music practices such as the ability to play complex rhythms, to use non-traditional techniques and music technology, to improvise and even to engage with movement and acting. Musical genres are constantly blurring and mutating so it is difficult to know what approach can be adopted to provide the best kind of grounding for the modern musician.

The traditional music school has been forced to reconsider its offerings as the contemporary musical landscape has changed and the relevance of music degrees has come into question from the wider music industry. At the core of the problem is the traditional curriculum. According to Dr Tony Gould, Head of the School of Music at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), “the curriculum hasn’t changed much since I was a student more than 30 years ago.” In the same period, however, the repertoire and required skills have expanded greatly. Gould questions the deeply held notion in the Conservatorium culture that one has to have mastered Mozart and Beethoven before attempting the contemporary repertoire. Stephen Whittington, Senior Lecturer at the Elder School of Music in Adelaide, also believes the curriculum needs to be more flexible and that more interaction should formally occur between the various streams in a typical music school (eg composition, music technology, classical music performance and jazz performance), streams that have been traditionally segregated from one another. For Whittington the undergraduate curriculum is full of subjects that music academics steadfastly believe are core requirements for training a musician. Consequently there is no room to add new subjects such as multimedia as they come into the picture. Whittington asks: “Can you do multimedia if you can’t write a fugue?” The answer is obvious, but the reluctance to let go of archaic fields of study still represents a stumbling block in curriculum reform.

One modernisation strategy gaining momentum is the incorporation of compulsory improvisation training for all students at undergraduate level. Queensland Conservatorium and the University of Western Sydney (UWS) have done this already and, according to Professor Sharman Pretty, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music is poised to follow. Pretty explains that this will be one of the likely outcomes of a large development project at the Sydney Conservatorium in the field of “performance and communication”, a project that “aims to find ways for mainstream classical musicians to break out of the mould and to interface better with the broader community.”

Major music schools have always had to balance their focus of training elite musicians with providing a general training and performance service to the community, but in the current climate the need seems more pressing than ever. A greater responsiveness to the music industry and to other industries being served is also an urgent matter.

For example, Professor Robert Constable at Newcastle Conservatorium reports that there has been demand from the students doing the Church Music strand of the Bachelor of Music degree to incorporate contemporary gospel composition and performance training into the curriculum. Newcastle Conservatorium has also successfully introduced a suite of online postgraduate music technology courses that have mostly attracted school teachers seeking to upgrade their professional skills.

It has perhaps been easier for the small music schools to take a more radical approach to the problem of the contemporary relevance of their courses. At Southern Cross University in Lismore NSW we have completely broken with the classical music tradition in favour of training musicians and audio engineers for the contemporary popular music industry. In this specialist area there is arguably even more pressure to remain relevant to the industry, so we constantly struggle with the appearances of new musical genres and ever-advancing technologies. A few institutions, notably the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and UWS have chosen to embrace the contemporary in a more global sense, combining a range of contemporary styles including the popular. According to QUT’s Associate Professor Andy Arthurs, “there is no one way to play or compose music.” Thus at QUT experimentalism and a diversity of contemporary stylistic performance and creative practices are encouraged. At UWS, Dr Jim Franklin describes a more radical approach insisting that students broaden their stylistic palette. If they come in as rock musicians, for example, they will be expected to engage also with a contrasting tradition such as classical performance, and vice versa. All performance students, even classical specialists, are also required to incorporate sound and/or visual technology into their performance exam projects in a substantial way.

Even within the conservatorium, mandatory engagement with the contemporary is a strategic option. At the VCA, Tony Gould is deeply committed to “correcting the balance between the old and the new.” However, in programming recent Australian works for all student orchestra concerts he expects significant opposition from conservative elements within the school.

In many senses the rise of computer music technology has changed the ball game forever for music schools. Most of the sounds now heard on radio, television and interactive multimedia are predominantly electronic. In much pop music, the only thing that isn’t electronic is the voice. In the nightclub scene people dance almost exclusively to electronic beats. So while the majority of music students are performers it is arguable that the most vital work being done in music schools is in the recording studios and computer workstation labs. Activities range from the production of audio and multimedia artworks to the invention of new methods of digital arts creation and manipulation. Traditional music schools such as the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Canberra School of Music have led the way in the creation of software instruments in Australia, and have been joined in recent years by QUT, UWS and a few others. There is understandably more activity in this area going on at postgraduate level where the curriculum is much more flexible.

Despite these advances in the modernisation of curriculum and research there are continual challenges as the technological revolution grinds on. Stephen Whittington notes that at the Elder School of Music there is a new type of composition student who is not concerned with live performance outcomes and often not competent in, or even interested in, music notation. Working with sound entirely in the digital domain is fast becoming the norm in creative music. Whereas a decade or two ago there was a concern that the so-called “musically illiterate” rock guitarist or drummer was not being catered for in the tertiary music education system, we are now faced with a new set of creative practices that bypass the performer altogether. Another anomaly is that no tertiary music institution seems to have seriously engaged with DJing. The DJ is arguably a performer and an improviser but it is difficult to envisage a performance major being created to cover this ubiquitous performance practice.

Although it is impossible to imagine that the music performer will disappear from the musical industry landscape, it is clear that a different breed of musician is likely to emerge who combines a broader range of performance techniques with skills in composition, communication, multimedia and niche marketing.

With the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary arts practice, music and other single-artform schools and their host institutions are also being forced to confront their artform ghettoisation tendencies. There have been a number of ways forward including the trend to establish digital arts degrees in institutions that have both visual arts and music programs. This is more viable when the contributing disciplines are in the same location and when strategic decisions to focus on multi-arts and technology collaboration have been made. In recent times the most spectacular example of this phenomenon has been the formation of QUT’s Faculty of Creative Industries.

How music as a discipline fares in these cross-disciplinary conglomerates remains to be seen. At the core of music is live performance, whether it is a string quartet, a jazz ensemble, or a contemporary pop band. Maintaining the performance tradition in the face of the digital arts revolution will be one of the great challenges of music and music education in the future.

Writer Richard Murphet notes in his introduction to Quick Death (1981, in Performing the unNameable, Currency Press with RealTime, 1999) that where most scripts are concerned with “What is it about?” and “Why?” his work focuses “on those thrilling questions—When? and How?”

Slow Love could be seen as an Australian avant-garde classic, enjoying the rare privilege of entering its fourth staging. The text consists of a series of instructions which make up over 100 short, cinematically-framed, enigmatic scenes—mostly without words—which explore various romantic, erotic and affective permutations between 2 men and 2 women. For example, woman 1 sits on a bed and looks right before man 2 rises, topless, from the bed behind her. After blackout, this scene is repeated, but with man 1 walking in on them.

Murphet’s approach opens a rich vein of interpretive possibilities for both audiences and directors. The scenes hang in a dissociated realm where it becomes apparent that both the characters and the audience craft their lives from a limited number of possible actions and outcomes. Virtually all of the worlds sketched by Murphet have been scripted before in film, television and romantic literature.

Murphet’s strongest cinematographic reference is film noir. Chamber Made Opera director Douglas Horton describes the 1983 Anthill version, directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon, as having a “Bette Davis/African Queen” feel, while the cast of the Australian-Flemish co-production (director Boris Kelly; Belgium, Holland & 2002 Adelaide Festival) were clothed in chic, black garb. Horton however has consistently refused to stick closely to extant staging conventions (The Chairs, Teorema). Far from having film noir’s dark, sharply defined contrasts, this production is closer to the grubby, smudged pathos of Ken Loach films. The cast are dressed in drab, loose-fitting, down-market clothes, while the set is reminiscent of a building under demolition. Undressed, mismatched window frames are laced together to produce 2 open work rooms, while a squat, ugly, black wall defines the stage wings. The lighting too exudes lower-class dejection, yellowing mists filtering through, or garish red and blue spots stabbing out like at a cheap nightclub.

The effect is to remove Murphet’s treatment not only from its stylised origins, but also its stylish ones, placing the performance in a world of petty jealousies and fragmented, unsatisfying relationships. Where earlier productions tended to deflate social expectations of romance by the unremitting portrayal of its classy, fictional origins, Horton’s version is a portrait of sad characters whose gestures only barely manage to evoke such models as Davis and Bogart, against which their own lives are unfavourably compared. Murphet notes that where younger casts have played Slow Love as if the characters were beginning their journey into romance, these figures now seem jaded—in Murphet’s words, they are “haunted” by love and its fictional images.

The general grubbiness of the production is also enhanced by the use of cinesonic samples, with grabs from television advertising and other fragments screened onto semi-occluded, on-stage sets, or mulched-out in Stevie Wishart’s live electronic score. The music is indeed the most perplexing element of this production, the sound abruptly leaping from extended string-produced drones (which Wishart creates by reinventing the hurdy-gurdy as an angular, Steve-Reich-style, avant-garde instrument) to beat-heavy drum’n’bass (which seems rather inimical to characters’ moods and actions). Wishart’s score is highly engaging in its diverse palette (almost Enya-like vocals, Laurie-Anderson-style violin doodling, semi-improvised processed samples) but it seems pegged to the cumulative effect of Murphet’s text as a whole, rather than anything in the scenes themselves. The music therefore exists almost entirely parallel to the staging, instead of providing much in the way of keys or entries into the work, or even an overt sonic dialogue with the performance.

What is one to make then of this production overall? I myself was rather disappointed. Not having seen Murphet’s works in performance, I was expecting the sharp chiaroscuro of film noir, “played (as the introduction to Quick Death states) cleanly, clearly and accurately.” Horton and Wishart by contrast have deliberately muddied the look, feel and sound of this aesthetic. Nevertheless, by doing so they produce a work which, despite its drawbacks, demands careful attention to the slight, enigmatic nuances separating ‘natural’ performance from the highly evocative tendrils which link it to romantic fictions as venerable as the Renaissance serenades Wishart briefly drops into. Earlier, slicker takes on Murphet’s script may, in the long run, prove preferable. None of those associated with this production however are content to allow either this script or performance practice in general to remain static. I therefore put Slow Love down as a fabulously brilliant, challenging failure, and fervently look forward to more such works—successful or otherwise.

Chamber Made Opera, Slow Love, writer Richard Murphet, director Douglas Horton, music composition & performance Stevie Wishart, design Trina Parker, lighting David Murray, performers Anne Browning, Beth Child, Mark Pegler, Ian Scott. Malthouse, June 21-29

Recent productions by Hobart companies, IHOS’s Touch Wood and Scape Inc’s Who the Fuck is Erica Price (see review) while stylistically distinctive, shared certain concerns, notably human isolation, if not tragedy, and a non-judgmental view of aspects of mental instability. These bleak topics were countered by spellbindingly good productions, with nuanced performances bringing out the best in script and libretti.

Increasingly, IHOS Opera mentors younger performers through its Music Theatre Laboratory, presenting works-in-progress. These performances are arguably more successful than some of IHOS’s full-scale productions, several of which have been excessive in their attempts to incorporate every trick in the book. The Laboratory, says IHOS, is “a place of experiment, discovery and learning” that gives young Tasmanian performers and composers the opportunity to work with directors and composers of national and international renown.

The program begins with 3 short works, varied in musicality, style and content, but well suited for showcasing the potential of the performers. Butterflies Lost is inspired by a work-in-progress by writer Joe Bugden and is an evocative soundscape set in the Terezin ghetto, the way station to Auschwitz for Jewish artists. Recorded voiceovers include excerpts of Nazi propaganda. Five ragged children play in an elaborate, forbidding set that incorporates broken glass. There’s a strong sense of menace. This is a very moving, very visual work.

Allan Badalassi’s Harmony explores the human potential of healing, incorporating Baha’i prayer text and referencing recent hostilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The voices of a 10-person choir soar, their glorious harmonies amongst the highlights of the evening. Rosemary Austen’s Eden’s Bequest sets to music the poetry of Judy Grahn. Solo soprano Sarah Jones performs as a sort of Everywoman, singing a repetitive leitmotif with exquisite clarity and exhibiting a dancer’s physical expressivity. Three female actors represent the ages of woman, engaging in esoteric and symbolic mime and ritual.

The main work, Touch Wood, is a thorough success. Concept and direction are by prominent Finnish choreographer and director Juha Vanhakartano and its music is by Adelaide-based composer Claudio Pompili. Touch Wood is accessible without losing intellectual rigour and largely succeeds in being humorous without trivialising its subject, obsessive-compulsive disorder. It looks, as the program note says, “at the rituals and obsessions we create to maintain our sense of security and draws parallels between them and the superstitions of mediaeval times.” It asks whether we enjoy greater freedom nowadays or if it’s an illusion. Five characters play out their private compulsions and rituals, occasionally interacting in amusing or poignant ways. There are some well realised solos incorporating spoken word and movement. I found the hypochondriac, the religious fanatic and the “compulsive apologiser” particularly entertaining.

The set, lighting and costumes, reminiscent of German Expressionist cinema, are integral to the success of Touch Wood. The performance reaches a musical and dramatic peak with a clever group-choreographed “silly walk” around the stage. The climax is loud, tuneful and exuberant and seems to imply that the human spirit can overcome even impossible odds.

IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Touch Wood, Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, May 23-26

In one of the essays from the Liquid Architecture 3 National Sound Art Festival catalogue, Luisa Rausa uses the myth of Echo as a starting point for sonic arts. Echo was banished to a cave to pine for her visually-obsessed lover Narcissus, cursed to return the words of others until she became nothing but an insubstantial echo. Sound has long been associated with such absent-yet-present ghosts, an ideal that reached its height with the extruded tape effects and smudged, crinkly soundscapes of musique concrete.

Although Jeremy Collings and Robin Fox supplemented these venerable tools with contemporary electronic devices, their work strongly evoked this tradition, creating a dense soundscape worthy of Xenakis. Natasha Anderson added inventive, breathy sounds, ranging from incomplete vocalisations, to wind glancing off a flute or gentle recorder notes. These were stripped, banished and contorted by Fox and Collings. The metaphor of Echo or Plato’s cave, of incomplete calls and responses drifting into abstraction, seems apt.

The gritty, spacious soundscapes that are a signature of later, digital processes—what Darrin Verhagen calls “delicate instability”—also featured in the festival. Black Farm for example was a strangely evocative, abstract AV work in which George Stasjic offered garish, cartoon images of the heads of Afro-American vampires and sheep, the camera moving slowly in or out. This was accompanied by Tim Catlin’s open, humming, acoustic world, which, in his words “privileges sonic density, texture and movement.”

The festival overall, however, was notable for its diversity. Bruce Mowson for example has a technologically-dirty-sounding take on minimalism, looping simple, hissy sounds so that his drones become the aural equivalent of op-art. Aural perceptions generate changes in modulation and emphasis where none objectively exist. Mowson’s short festival offering may not have been his best, but it had the elegant simplicity which informs all of his work.

Martin Ng on the other hand produced sharp spikes within an airy, static realm, employing what he described as “the molecular biology of DJing.” Using tiny sonic inversions, he crafted great waves of dense aural assault. Ng performed alongside guitar-pickup manipulator Oren Ambarchi. I confess that Ambarchi’s recent CD left me somewhat nonplussed. Ambarchi characteristically uses extremely quiet sounds and I lack the patience for such excessively hard listening. The live performance began in a similarly desultory fashion, audiences straining to hear anything, but Ambarchi and Ng developed it into the equivalent of an acoustic tenderising-mallet. Ambarchi has a second pick-up on his guitar-neck, and gently tapped it, generating layers of hums. Ng used a similarly cumulative approach. The final crescendo therefore constituted a massive, overdetermined wall of noises. The intensity of this conclusion was compelling—smoke even emanating from Ng’s amplifier!

Several notable AV pieces reworked sonic and visual historic traces. Cassandra Tytler’s My Happiness for example evoked a distressing yet affectionate portrait of Elvis—Elvis young, Elvis fat, Elvis beautiful, Elvis sweaty, as well as his fans—all passing over the viewer’s eye as if through a glass darkly. Light, shade, colour, everything seemed slightly off as Elvis’ voice leaped from one prison of echoing repetition (“Love me/Love me/Love me”) to another. Philip Brophy’s re-scoring of 1980s, easy-listening, rock-videos (Elton John, Billy Joel, Phil Collins) was far less kind to his subjects. Their voices were inverted into screams which Brophy described as possessing “a repulsive yet attractive granularity.” The most revealing aspect of Evaporated Music however was how easily punctured are such fat-cat musos’ conceits. The original film clips which Brophy replayed were crafted to sketch self-important narratives of romance or rebellion. With the voices no longer underscoring this however, these images immediately fragmented—without any further intervention upon Brophy’s part—into a series of meaningless, disconnected shards.

Sonia Leber noted in her paper a similar gap between sounds as historic elements (the recorded voice) and traces (emotion, breath etc) acting primarily through a-linguistic sonic qualities. Her public installations in collaboration with David Chesworth are concerned with gentle interventions in this field. The sounds of dog-owners calling to their pets featured in The Master’s Voice which uses charged or intimate vocalisations to manifest within new social spaces the babble of absent interactions.

Perhaps the most satisfying sonic ghosting of the festival was Hashima. This supremely beautiful study of an abandoned urban settlement on an island reminded me of the haunted visions and sounds of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The camera switched from largely static shots of layered, dirty walls, to the detritus of people whose lives remained present yet inaccessible, while Jennifer Sochackyi provided an equally haunted score. Gentle echoes, shifts in proximity between the always slightly-removed sound of children, the hubbub of incomprehensible conversations—all became Echoes active within the caverns of history.

Liquid Architecture National Sound Art Festival 3, curators Nat Bates, Bruce Mowson & Camilla Hannan, July 2-20, including Liquid Crystal, North Melbourne Town Hall, July 11; Liquid Vision, Treasury Theatre, July 1; Liquid Papers, Treasury Theatre, July 13-14

Nigel Helyer (see interview), whose sound sculpture Meta-Diva won the 2002 Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, questioned whether there were any courses in Australia which allowed for the study of sound in proper depth, responded by asking “Is there anywhere that teaches [among other sound subjects] psychoacoustics, soundscape concepts and electronics?” Given Australia’s predominantly deaf visual culture, it is typical that sound not be resourced at the level of other cultural practices.
Sound arts being what they are, a collection of disciplines ranging from post-digital music theory to film soundtracks, live performance to interface hacking, field recording to physical acoustics, it is difficult to find an institution which embodies these in a singular structure. The reality of the practical application of sound is that it is used in a variety of ways dependent upon the needs of individual projects. Yet the sheer variety of applications and their relative potency, especially compared with the ubiquity of visual media, suggests that Australian educational and cultural institutions are unaware of or unable to respond to the need for structures that support and develop the sonic arts in substantial ways. The establishment of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the new building for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, for instance, highlights this emphasis on visual culture. A proposal for a major soundscape studies facility in Melbourne was recently rejected, and funding for sound culture at the level of screen, visual and music institutions continues to be denied. For people wishing to study sound at a tertiary level beyond the superficial offerings of the black box focussed SAE style course, there are a number of institutions run by passionate and committed practitioners who can’t guarantee you a job, but can guarantee a thrilling sono-cranial re-wire.

While it is possible to study a sound subject here or there as part of a more general curriculum, some of the most comprehensive courses in sound in Australia are at Media Arts, RMIT in Melbourne and the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney. Media Arts offers workshops in Video, Animation, Installation, Fine Art Imaging, Sound and Soundtrack and lectures in Audio/Visual theory. Students can study any combination of these and can complete sound projects exclusively, if desired, for the full 3 years of the degree. This interdisciplinary/poly-arts model has the advantage of creating a culture of collaboration—sound artists study alongside, and often develop projects with, photographers, film-makers and animators. The staff at Media Arts RMIT include contemporary practitioners Phillip Samartzis and Phillip Brophy, and the department is very much a driving force in the Melbourne scene, having spawned events such as the Immersion surround sound concerts, the Cinesonic Film Soundtrack and Sound Design Conference, the Variable Resistance international sound art events and the Liquid Architecture National Sound Art Festival (see review). Brophy offers some of Australia’s only specialist soundtrack subjects and Phillip Samartzis teaches a series of open ended, workshop and project driven subjects, which see students pursuing their own directions, be they Post-Digital Music, Surround Sound and Immersive Environments, Hip-Hop, Drum and Bass, Rock, Post-Rock or Soundscapes. The course curriculum is intensely student-driven, and syllabus changes for the workshops are a reflection of developing trends and themes in the ongoing collisions between sound, music and media. Anything a student produces publicly (performing and/or releasing material) is incorporated into their assessment and the sound culture of the course is deeply threaded: all the current lecturers in the time-based workshops were once students when Brophy ran the Sound area prior to taking over Theory and Soundtrack duties.

Sound at the University of Western Sydney, headed by the multi-talented and highly proactive Julian Knowles, offers a 3 year, 6 subject sequence in Music Technology which takes students from the ground level up to professional level in music and sound technologies through either a Music Technology major in the Bachelor of Music degree or a Sonic Arts major in the Bachelor of Electronic Arts degree. On top of this they offer Spatial Audio, a subject which is dedicated to the creative potentials of 5.1 audio and multi-channel composition; subjects titled Sonic Landscapes/ Electronic Cinema 1+2 which focus on experimental sound in the context of macro and micro cinema (screen, installation and web); and Pressure Waves and Electric Fields which focuses on experimental approaches to instrument design (soldering iron stuff). There are around 9 specifically focused semester-long sound subjects outside of what you might call more ‘traditional modes’ of acoustic music making. A number of core subjects allow students to work on self-proposed creative projects in an open and supportive environment. It is therefore possible to do a bachelor’s degree where up to three quarters of your subjects see you working with sound in some practical capacity. The remaining subjects are theory subjects which nevertheless allow for sound to be made a focus. Broadly speaking, all sound subjects are available to students in all degrees. There is no rule which locks a student out of a subject due to their discipline base or the degree in which have chosen to enrol. Students are quite heavily connected with festivals: What is Music? (Oren Ambarchi teaches a New Musics subject), Electrofringe, Freaky Loops and regular Sydney series like impermanent.audio and Frigid. Students have also received a grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts to run gigs and exhibitions in an abandoned drive-in at one end of the campus and have had a partnership with AudioDaze on 2SER-FM.

Another opportunity to study sound within an academic context in Sydney is at the Department of Media Arts at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). The department offers theoretical subjects: ways of listening, culture and sound, music and popular culture which develop a critical approach to listening and historical and cultural contexts for sound; and practical sound subjects including audio production, creative audio techniques, audio workshop (producing experimental features for web/broadcast), soundtrack and installation and exhibition for sound and new media. The philosophy of the course is that sound should be an active and considered element of production—whether it be pure sound or music, or fused with other elements in a soundtrack or installation. The students at the course are active contributors to local film and video culture, various music scenes and some are involved with the more experimental DJ/VJ scene, and with sound art oriented installations and exhibitions. The department has links to 2SER, particularly through James Hurley, the sound facilities manager, and the staff include Norie Neumark who has been associated with Radio National and The Listening Room and creating new media work such as Shock in the Ear, and Shannon O’Neil, whose activities include running the Electrofringe festival, and working in broadcasting, composing and performing. The department previously offered a sound major which, regrettably, was discontinued due to funding pressures.

The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, offers a range of studies in sound. In the context of the well regarded Music Theatre and Acting courses, sound students enjoy a highly professional environment. Sound Design is treated as a discipline at the Academy and covers sound physics and speaker placement in all possible environments as well the use of audio to both create and enhance content in theatre, music theatre and film. Most of the lecturers and tutors work in the industry, and class sizes are small, currently averaging 8 students per year. The faculty has 4 studios, 3 digital and one analogue, which are networked and one of the digital studios is designed for surround sound. The Academy has rehearsal and production slots every 5 weeks, and each slot has 3 to 4 productions. The productions are most often theatrical although some include contemporary, modern and classical dance, and the Academy produces 2 films per year. Students put in on average a 60 hour week and are also expected to develop independent projects within the community, often appearing as DJ’s, engineers, and recordists on local productions. The students come from all parts of Australia and a third of these are women.

The usual place of sound, however, is as a module or elective within a larger curriculum of media studies, media art, fine art, new media and communication. At the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra, Mitchell Whitelaw lectures in new media, and offers several sound components in subjects in the degree course. Similarly, the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, in Sydney offers some practical sound segments, and formerly offered a theoretical class The Art of Sound taught by Virginia Madsen, and the Department of Media and Communication at Macquarie University offers sound within its Time-based Arts subjects. The best scenario for these situations is that the lecturer or teacher of the subject has experience of sound practice. The interesting thing about sound’s position within media arts is that although it exists in a fragmentary form, an understanding of how it works will be of benefit in a range of situations, from paying keen attention to the voice while directing, to determining sound stream information to the audience in theatre, from making a video projection sonically effective in a gallery, to understanding temporality and composition for all media in terms of rhythm, layering or spatialisation.

While these and other institutions provide a lively atmosphere in which to study sound, and while sound culture, through live performances, releases, installations and other forms, continues to flourish, some practitioners have concerns about the future overall direction of education in Australia. Julian Knowles, for instance, comments that “we need a new government. People need to value education and intellectual life and start voting for a government which sees these areas as more important than detention centres, border protection and major sporting events.”

This was a special experience. Saariaho is a distinctive composer, often blending acoustic instruments with electronics, often with a dramatic intensity but also an unbroken line of development that separates her from her modernist peers and precursors and aligns her somewhat with eastern European and Russian composers but without their melancholic spirituality. I’d had the pleasure of immersing myself in her Prisma CD before attending the concert. It includes Dawn Upshaw singing Lonh, Anssi Karttunen playing the cello work Pres, and Camilla Hoitenga on flute for NoaNoa. In concert, soprano Alison Morgan managed admirably the sudden shifts from full voice to spoken word to whisper, sustaining the stream of sound that marks the work, faultlessly mixing it with the electronics and recorded voices. Pres is a more intense, argumentative work. I thought Geoffrey Gartner’s attack was bordering on the romantic, but listening again to Karttunen’s slightly more austere approach, I reckoned the difference was primarily a visual one. Witnessing the demands on the player in concert is a reminder of how much the CD experience can be an abstraction of a performance. Gartner’s performance was a fine one, fluent in the gearshifts in the second movement over its propulsive foundation and organic in his approach to the passionate, often moody third. Flautist Kathleen Gallagher’s account of NoaNoa was rivetting, ranging from the guttural to the spoken to the ethereal with ease, and providing some of the most interesting of the acoustic-electronic synthesis in the concert. Harpist Marshall Maguire deftly played Fall, a shorter work with a minimalist insistency that demanded an instant replay. The introduction to Saariaho’s work at the beginning of the concert by musicologist Anni Heino was very welcome. By the way, the Prisma CD (Montaigne naïve, MO 782087) is accompanied by an excellent CD-ROM that includes many hours of biographical and critical information, analyses of individual works as you listen to them, associated imagery, an entertaining opportunity to rearrange a Saariaho work and an eery photo-image of the composer morphing through all the 50 years of her life. Ensemble Offspring have done a fine job of introducing Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho to Sydney audiences with this superb concert.

Ensemble Offspring, A Portrait of Kaija Saariaho, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, July 7

There is a comment that hangs in my head from my time at art school. One of my lecturers, prising his rolled cigarette from his lips, confided to me in a deep voice, “being an artist is like being a cross between an intellectual and a rock star”. The mixture of earnestness and lèse majesté made the equation sound axiomatic. More than any other kind of tertiary education institutions, it seems to me that art school is where home truths and apocrypha blindly coexist. The role of a good art teacher these days is to dispel all the false myths that are woven around art and artists, and to instil in students the skills and the conceptual tools that are behind all good artistic intuitions. The lecturer in question is, alas, neither an intellectual nor a rock star. Academics like this abound in other disciplines, but a more visible concept of testable rigour chastens them. Art schools today suffer from the dreams of virility cherished by some of their staff, and the misconceptions that the outside has of art as a discipline. Art schools of today are both the beneficiaries and the casualties of the fact that art is a practice that cannot be verified. Never forget that economic and social rationalisation is a matter of proof, not truth.

One of the basic tenets of an art education is to make students distinguish between work that is illustrative and work that is critical, that is, ironic. Irony is the essential quality of art once art loses its continuousness with religion. Once out of God’s service, art becomes a mercurial form of play, and it is its sharp playfulness—or to use the philosopher Kant’s famous phrase, purposiveness without a purpose—that makes art so difficult to position. Like telling a joke to someone with no sense of humour, to speak of art as a rigorous practice is usually in vain. Art schools in Australia have been in a parlous state for some time. While experiencing their own hardships, it is not quite the same for schools in Europe whose riches are aligned to continuations with, or strategic departures from, pedagogical traditions and acknowledged mastery.

Signs of the low premium placed on art in Australia are already there in secondary school. Since 2001, art in NSW is only offered at the rudimentary two-unit level. This carries with it significant philosophical baggage, depriving students of the option to specialise and focus, effectively placing art on the same level as home science. It is one of those cases of cultural amnesia that undermines art’s classical parity with architecture, music and poetry. And we might as well bury the fact that the history of art developed in concert with other disciplines of social and political history, anthropology and economics.

Making the study of art still more unattractive is the logic behind the way the results are scaled. The UAI (university admissions indicator) operates according to a median scale which means that someone with a perfect score in art will be scaled down to about 92, whereas more people will be likely to get 95, or over, in something like four-unit mathematics. Yet, according to this very system, if as many people did four-unit mathematics as did art, mathematics would score worse. Art is a liberal subject which means it takes a wider range of students, but now better-scoring students are less willing to jeopardise their final score by studying art. The most intelligent students, however, are also the main performers in art. What puts such squalid policies in operation is the recent romantic myth that art is an expression of innate, essentially unlearnable urges, the province of eccentrics and visionaries tragically ruled by their passions. (We might start by considering that the common beliefs about van Gogh are mostly fictitious.) Unfortunately, a good deal of art is also taught along these lines.

Art schools were also founded on similar prejudices, namely that art is something studied by either the lazy or the emotionally overwrought. (Admittedly art schools are full of students and teachers like this, but they don’t make good art, if they make it at all.) Around 1990 a NSW statewide restructuring resulted in independent art schools amalgamating with universities. Students were enthusiastic, since their degree sounded better and they were also in a more favourable position to shift to other senior university degrees. The staff, (supposedly) practising artists, joined the ranks of academics. The modern art school begins with the Bauhaus (1919-1933), a free and subtle balance of spiritualism and technological logistics geared toward innovations of form that ranged from theatre to painting to design. This legacy, still dominant, can hardly cope with the sort of values that universities impose. In the normative sense, the university is built around the concept of Wissenschaft, which not only means science but also cultivated learning. Art is not science and its learning is not cultivated according to scholastic or rational models.

Throughout Australia, one of the main avenues for university funding is through the quantity of demonstrated research. An academic accrues points depending on books and articles. But the output is stringently vetted: books must have a recognised distributor, articles must be refereed and so on. Non-compliance, no points; the fewer points, the smaller a university’s share of the pie. Until this year, so-called creative labour such as exhibitions (including novels, musical works and the like) did not accrue points. Subsequently, since the staff could not be seen to contribute to the institution in a material way, art schools became an increasing liability, like a handicapped child whose parental love is perfunctory or indifferent. For to field art courses can be up to ten times as expensive as others. Making matters worse, the humanities at large are given proportionately less money per student than more professionally oriented areas.

Despite artists now being able to accrue points, it will be a long time before art schools will contribute materially to the institution as a whole. Oddly enough, a large proportion of tenured art lecturers have been protected by the lack of recognition that their discipline has had up until now. There is an alarmingly small proportion of tenured art staff who are, strictly speaking, regular, active practitioners. Art schools are also more protected than may first appear from the overbearing onus put on universities to make their courses answerable to vocational training criteria. Here is not the place to dwell on the absurdities of such expectations in the realm of the humanities, but in art, precisely because that knowledge is so difficult to quantify, it is easy to diddle the criteria. Being an artist is more an occupation than a profession. In comparison to countries with so-called old money, our art market is meagre and few artists can support themselves from their art. Subsequently, artists service their careers with neighbouring professions, web design, gallery assistance, teaching and the like. Thus to measure the “vocational” success of an art school is best done not in terms of jobs, but how many students go on to become artists; let’s be kind and make the standard 1 exhibition every 2 years. On this score art schools fail miserably.

This begs the question, which is being turned over and over these days, whether art schools should teach students skills or teach the problematics at stake in the whole art game. Either impart techniques without the strategies for manoeuvre, or strategies without techniques. Although most art schools try to do both, most of the staff are themselves divided as to what to teach—and there is now a decreasing knowledge of skills. I know of several students who attended the art school I went to who had to return to TAFE to do foundational courses. It is a perennial concern for prospective students, but not for ignorant teachers. In not teaching them much, they can avail themselves of the myth that they are not constraining the student, letting “creativity” have free sway.

The two most immediate pressures on art schools in Australia are attracting industry dollars and teaching new media. Financially straitened, art schools have to try to service courses which students enrol in for the principal reason that they cannot afford the equipment themselves. This is chiefly the case with new media and time-based art. The only problem here is that the boundaries for this area are far from historically set, and there are but a few people who could competently teach it. And the money for holding and upgrading costly equipment and software is supposed to come from elsewhere—industry—as if industry is a blind and bottomless resource. But art schools are supposedly different from industrial and graphic art colleges. Getting art schools to attract corporations is as ridiculous as trying to get a carthorse to gallop.

Carthorse—or dead horse? Curiously enough, the crises of faith in art schools have been been felt most deeply from within. No other tertiary discipline over the past 10 years has undergone as many face changes as the visual arts. The names of departments in this country’s major art institutions differ from conventional to goofily outlandish, either masking or reflecting what is taught. It is tempting just to say that art schools should be shut down and replaced with selective, localised TAFE-like courses. A writer must know how to write, a dancer dance, a musician play or mix, an actor act. But a good painter, for example, need no longer know how to paint in the conventional sense, not to mention that there is more than one sense of convention. Art schools are themselves a convention, but views are divided as to whether they’re a necessary one.

Julie Kovatseff, University of SA,
Nicotine Traces: the search for the other in the city

Originality is important, and one of the dangers of creative writing classes, for instance, or any critical approach to literature, is that it under emphasises originality. After all, a professor of literature is trying to find a tradition, and influences, which can be traced. People would rather talk about Poe as the typically American genius than as the total kind of lunar nut that he really is. There is nothing typical about Poe: he’s from the moon.
Edmund White

White is aware, of course, that absolute originality does not exist. Yet he knows that it’s the grain of the individual’s voice as it exceeds the strictures of a tradition that is at least one of the thrills of creative endeavour. What interests me, is that it’s possible to be a total lunar nut even while one is channeling an artistic exemplar. Apprenticeship and finding one’s own artistic path can go hand in hand. Hatched offers the proof. And this is also the yearly pleasure of the show, as we find the host bodies that the young artists have invaded gradually morphing into something (nearly) distinct. It is, to go down the familiar Freudian path, a deliciously uncanny experience that highlights the manifold possibilities inherent in every artist’s oeuvre.

Sean Cordeiro’s accomplished $hop & Save, for instance, takes its cue from the Brit duo Jake and Dinos Chapman. Like theirs, Cordeiro’s work is not exactly burdened by emotional warmth. In it, we find a pair of store dummies who’ve been magically turned into a satyr and a centaur. Replete with fake waterfalls cascading in cheesy electronic images behind them, it is distressingly banal. As shopping arcade props meets arcadian fancy, therefore, it draws fascinating parallels between all that Hobbit-ridden mythic fantasy crap and Gucci-style fantasy bullshit; Cordeiro hints that both are about a desire for transformation and that buying into them can leave one petrified like a lump of deformed plastic. $hop & Save is Ab Fab-meets-Tolkein by other means (a severely unsettling pairing) and is a terrifically resolved, if determinedly discomforting, piece.

German artist Thomas Demand makes an appearance in Hatched as host body for David Lawrey. As you might expect, then, Lawrey’s series of photos, Plastic and Cardboard, captures a kind of fake-realness that throws the viewer entirely. They look real but there’s something wrong—like Dorothy’s house after the tornado, shaken, stirred and wrenched from the bonds of the earth, the light is a little off, the seams in the wall and ceiling feel bizarrely stressed and bowed, the curtains suspiciously stiff. Given this, the difference between Lawrey and Demand should be clear: in Demand the violence exists as hidden narrative, in Lawrey we scope the visible scars. In his deliriously pessimistic work, therefore, Lawrey traces the faultlines, the almost gothic heaviness of space, and all the impending implosions that are just waiting to fuck us up and shake our lives into new, probably pretty hideous, dimensions. A nicely paranoid post September 11 riposte.

These are just 2 examples of art education doing its job—providing students with a rich body of works and artists to enter into, to channel through, cannibalise and then spit out. Most of the work in Hatched is in this vein, and it would be pointless to tick off work by work. But this said, the show did throw up a few true Poe-style lunar nuts. To my mind, Julie Kovatseff has to be the furthest satellite. Called Nicotine traces, her work suggests she probably got bored with trains and turned to something a little less salubrious—butt-spotting. Even so, she’s as anal as any clothed capped dweeb as she presents a 1960s style dress with cigarette butts adorning the cuffs and other places, photos of chalk circles where butts were collected and, finally, a map locating their broader positions. With the chalk outlines like crime scene markings she implies the obvious that—and despite her statement that she’s not concerned with the health aspects—smoking may be tobacco-company sponsored suicide. She transcends this banality on another level, however, as the piece becomes a pungent instance of urban archeology; a nicotine stained version of Benjamin’s asphalt botanist, Kovatseff maps the moments where we suck in relief from work or whatever, and hints at an underlying oral erotics that leaves its smoky haze over entire cities.

Also from the moon are Brendan van Hek and Anthony Kelly. Van Hek’s door in its own wooden coffin, Hinge:a joint that functions in only one place, is a wonderfully Wittgensteinean work. Devilishly nihilistic, it is, like all of Ludwig’s best stuff, a piece of packaged uselessness that is both an entry to nowhere and a sign of wasted human labour. Kelly, on the other hand, provides a quirky cold war flashback that has an oddly surreal overtone. Think the setting for a stage version of a Graham Greene novel directed by Robbe-Grillet and you’ll have an idea. Just as a dumb old art fan, I also really liked Midori Oki’s series of small ink drawings, Skin Diving (see page 10), depicting a fleshy nude figure wrestling with its own skin and a small black hole. On the same theme and equally interesting was Winnie Lim’s Felt, a scattering of clothing over the wall.

To use ad-speak, Hatched has something for everyone as it shows a recently birthed art world gleefully taking from their elders what they want and junking the rest. They’re moving on and moving up and many will find themselves in the disturbing position of being host bodies one day. And it might be sooner than they think.

Edmund White is quoted from The Burning Library: writings on art, politics and sexuality 1969-1993, Picador: London, 1994.

Hatched, Healthway National Graduate Show, PICA, Perth, June 7-July 21. Online catalogue and symposium papers at www.pica.org.au/hatched

Aboriginal art is really my expertise. I don’t normally write on subjects such as this but I happened to stumble on a small exhibition, VietPOP, in outer southwestern Sydney, that inspired and positively moved me. Aboriginal art is art made by Aborigines but what was this? Simple affirmations, autobiography of powerful human experiences and vitality, yet from one of the most denigrated youth communities in Australia. Think Vietnamese, think drugs and violent crime. The refugee story, the story of a group of people who have really struggled to become Australian is rarely talked about or given a voice. Maybe it’s the overbearing, fascist, political climate or my own tired state of mind from working in a decaying, surreal academic environment, but I felt I had to write about VietPOP.

The show, involving a curatorium of 7 young artists of Vietnamese heritage, was hung in the Liverpool Regional Museum, a small community cultural space that is a beehive of activity. The exhibition is alive with wit, colour, honesty and pathos. Though there are other Vietnamese artists exhibiting in Sydney (such as Dacchi Dang) this show is, I am told, one of the first (if not the first) to concentrate on young, emerging Vietnamese artists. It is this generation that articulates the changes in the way Australia constructs its ethnic and cultural identity at this moment. A special kind of tension hangs over the exhibition—the effervescent optimism of youth and yet the shyness of an uncertain ability to achieve their ambition. This is a responsibility felt by any serious new rising generation. We want to do the right thing, we want to succeed, we want to honour our parents and our past, we want to make our own statement, we want to determine our own future, we want to be ourselves. The artists are Cuong Phu Le, who is also a community arts officer working with the Vietnamese community, Thao Nguyen, Garry Trinh, Christina Ngo, Thuy Vy, Cat Tien Chuong, and Kevin Vo who collaborated with and provided a counterpoint to Sydney 2002 Biennale artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba. In fact Jun’s own students who now are exhibiting themselves are to collaborate in the future with this south-west Sydney group.

Futures and memories. The exhibition appears to be divided into 2 parts that ambiguously, like the lives of the artists, reinforce and yet diverge from each other. The refugee experience is of course central to their lives. It should be remembered that the culture of the West is littered with such stories. The cinema classic Casablanca is a refugee story. A Vietnamese-Australian version has yet to appear. Artists were asked to bring something from their journey, usually a common object belonging to their parents, that had attained an almost sacred, iconic status. Displayed under glass these mundane things resonate equally with sorrow, hope, gratitude and other memories. The parable of the sarong of Thao Nguyen is particularly poignant. It speaks of the escape of her parents and herself as a child from Vietnam. How a Cambodian man they encountered, after selflessly guiding and caring for them to see them to safety of sorts in Thailand, leaves them without asking for payment and is lost to them for ever.

The inclusion of the international Vietnamese-Japanese star artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba is interesting. Apparently an email had been posted widely from this group about the time of the Biennale asking, among other things, “What does it mean to be Vietnamese?” It reached a member of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art staff who invited the 2 parties to meet. Jun took to working with this group of ‘same but different’ kin (there’s an Aboriginal expression that says: we are the same essentially but definitely, in minor ways, different). Jun, it appears, has his own sense of responsibility and adventure.

Jun’s life and those of the young artists in fact have meeting points. He was born in Vietnam of a Vietnamese father and a Japanese mother. His work often deals with the experience of being a refugee and of statelessness, and of being Vietnamese in the world, whether you are in Ho Chi Minh City, in Paris, in California or in western Sydney. Yet, what Jun shows is that having 2 cultures and 2 languages enables people to gain insights that they wouldn’t normally. It’s what is added, not what is lost.

The Vietnamese population in Sydney is the largest of any city in Australia and supports flourishing community organisations, religious groups, restaurants, shops and other businesses. Its presence is very much felt. Today there are over 180,000 Vietnamese-born people living in Australia and over 50,000 living in south-west Sydney alone. In 1975 there were only around 900. Of these more than half were babies waiting for adoption. The first refugees arriving in Sydney in 1975 after the unification of Vietnam, were 283 orphaned children who were adopted by families throughout the country. This experience is revealed in newspaper clippings, photographs and other memorabilia in the artwork of Indigo Williams who as a baby was adopted into a very white Australian family. She had also made contact through the same internet survey that led Jun to the group.

The exhibition, despite its seeming lightness, deals with deep issues, the often terrible refugee flight experience, diasporic alienation, of personal identity and acceptance [even if only by your own parents]. Cuong talks of the ‘one and a half generation’—those born in Vietnam before their journey to Australia who have an experience, a memory of the country of their birth, but feel that they have to forge a new experience and a new sense of identity. There are also those who were too young to remember, and those born in Australia. A broad range of homeland experiences, memories and reconciliations exist. Kevin Vo’s almost nostalgic but seemingly detached account of his return visit is different from that of Thao Nguyen who appears to visit Vietnam often.

In a world of dichotomies nothing speaks louder than the senses. Science now tells us that taste is 90% derived from smell, so it is no accident that odours, pleasant and unpleasant, account for some of our strongest, longest lasting, most evocative bonds to people and places. Vietnamese refugees have frequently commented on the sanitised odourlessness of the Australian city environment compared with Vietnam’s rich mix of humidity, spice smells, cooking aromas, decaying vegetation and human life in action. Garry Trinh’s playful logo work I love pho reminds us of the sinister, predatory nature of the globalised fast food industry. In Vietnam the ubiquitous and delicious local and economical pho (a type of noodle soup), though really a breakfast food, can seemingly be found anywhere, 24 hours a day.

In Australia, Aboriginal people describe how animals are at their peak and look their best when they are full of fat. For Vietnamese people the concept of personal image is intriguing. Contrary to Western notions of slim well-being, in Vietnam it is positive to be fat. Some appear to struggle with this in Australia: “All this can be yours. Cars, houses, rich husbands…Life’s not fair, so make it fair”, reads a beauty shop billboard in Thao and Garry’s work. Notions of acceptable or desirable physical attributes and the ability to get ahead in the dominant culture have always had a life in minority cultures.

The exhibition gives these young artists a voice that isn’t necessarily their parents’. Though not denying their past or their roots they are different from the previous generation who often see them as “mat goc” (lost roots) or ‘the forgotten.’ Thao Nguyen’s video piece records conversations between her father and brother where they don’t appear to be listening to each other. Through their voices, these artists reclaim their history in a positive critical reinterpretation that prepares it for generations to come.

Red. Yellow. Colours are read differently on the margins. In the north of Australia, Aboriginal people of mixed descent are sometimes referred to by other Aboriginal people derogatorily as ‘yella-fellah’, or as ‘half a colour.’ In Arnhem Land, these people, who in another context might be described as sophisticated or cosmopolitan, are referred to in Djambarrpuyngu language as “narrani”, bush apple, red on the outside but white on the inside. Like the Asian banana, yellow on the outside but white on the inside. Most probably the appearance of Chinese migrants in the Northern Territory at the time of the gold rush is the source of this term. If an Englishman had Italian and French roots he would be seen as extremely cosmopolitan, intelligent, and be highly regarded. For the ‘other’ a mixture is always recorded by Western writers as a dilution, a loss and a person between 2 worlds, as never belonging to either—something white Australians and Europeans apparently never experience—they are never the ‘other’. They never have to explain or define themselves. This is Kevin Vo’s banana lamp. As Thao Nguyen explained at the opening of the exhibition:

When watching the cowboy movies and John Wayne films, in so many scenes they ask, ‘Are you yella?’. Do you guys know what this means? The Chinese—Asian yellow skinned— migrated to America and Australia during the period of the gold rush and have been here for a long time. They became known for their submissive nature. ‘Are you yella? Are you yellow? Are you submissive and lack courage and tenacity to rise up against me?’ This is what it means…I don’t want to be the next generation of submissiveness.

Ironically in Aboriginal Australia it was these ‘yella fellas’ who, though submissive for a time, came to be the most politically active in leading social change. This exhibition’s participants are also emblematic of change.

What would Australia be without the Vietnamese presence manifest in places like the thriving, amazing market place of Cabramatta? And yet few non-Asian Australians have much contact with the Asian community. Why has it taken nearly 200 years for a contemporary Asian-Australian Art Gallery to appear? Amazingly, in Sydney, the present Gallery 4A’s policy is to deal with inclusiveness which has a broader context. Although there is an emphasis on Asian-Australian artists, they are presented within a mainstream contemporary arts context. And yet this most important cultural centre struggles from a lack of core funding from key funding bodies.

This exhibition in the marginalised south-west of Sydney allows the work to speak to its own community. Largely invisible to the art establishment, the works give young Vietnamese people ideas for expression and being. Attended by over 300 people largely from the Vietnamese community on opening night the show was emotionally and warmly received. The centrepiece of the exhibition was a long banner by Kevin Vo in which each of the artists is portrayed, in political banner fashion, with their own affirmation. Aptly, Kevin Vo’s Superman (it’s hard to be) pop song digital projection, broadcast at full volume, made us aware of how the public act of producing such an exhibition transformed the artists into true Supermen.

Beverley Southcott

Beverley Southcott, Fuel and Gruel (foreground) and Contained Breath (mounted on wall)

Beverley Southcott’s art addresses the alienation of the individual from society and how the interdependence of the economy and the individual, through the cycle of consumption and production, constructs urban life. Her Garden City exhibition included a table at which one must stand to eat, and photos of windows that deny access.

Peter Burke & Robin Hely

Peter Burke and Robin Hely make an excellent duo. Both artists are drawn to witty performative interventions into everyday life that play with our expectations of truth. Burke is known for his alter-egos and fake street tabloid Pedestrian Times, while Hely has become infamous for a recent project at Westspace in which he secretly taped a painfully fraudulent blind date, only to leave us guessing if the angry female subject was in on the game (the whole event given added perversity when publicly broadcast on Channel 31’s weekly art show, Public Hangings).

In their recent show Delivery at Conical in Melbourne, Burke and Hely pose as Starlink Express, a fake courier company. For the exhibition, the 2 artists turned the gallery into a mailroom/depot, creating a major installation of floor-to-ceiling cardboard boxes leaving only a narrow entrance. They even arranged authentic props: a small radio, maps, old beer bottles and newspapers, all as an inventive way of showing video documentation of recent stunts based around the idea of involving the public in a staged art event.

A first video shows the artists dressed in distinctive orange courier uniforms lugging a package around the streets of Oporto, causing confusion among an unsuspecting Portuguese public by trying to deliver a huge, L-shaped brown paper parcel with an illegible address. Hidden inside the parcel, the camera shows the public’s interest in trying to find the owner of the parcel, made all the funnier with subtitles. Pedestrians become performers who freely give directions, help carry the parcel and question the couriers, curious to know what is inside.

Parcel-cam is an innovative trick. As the artists suggest, “the street becomes a lively and engaging performance space for improvised narratives and the mysterious parcel is a metaphor for indefinable content.” On the other screen, the artists are shown attempting to deliver the same parcel to befuddled but helpful recipients at various Melbourne addresses: Federation Square, Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery, Parliament House, the Crazy Horse sex club. On the street, the artists left the parcel with unsuspecting pedestrians—“Hey, could you mind this parcel for a minute while we get some lunch”—before disappearing. It seems we’re used to performances in public now, and some even speculate that they might be part of “some dodgy advertising campaign.” But more than an amusing reality-TV prank, the project becomes a surprisingly touching study in animating public trust. Daniel Palmer

Peter Burke & Robin Hely, What’s inside the box?, Conical Inc. Gallery, Melbourne

Anthony Johnson

Anthony Johnson, Utopia 2002
Sculptor and installation artist Anthony Johnson currently works in Hobart. He focuses on the “non-place”, typified by warehouses, cargo yards and construction sites, as a non-contextual site of transience. The non-place symbolises being nowhere yet everywhere —and the experience of feeling nothing yet everything.

These concerns inform the object-based sculptures and photographs shown at CAST, work meticulously based on equipment and detritus to be found in Johnson’s “non-places”, rendered ambiguous by their construction from incongruous materials such as polystyrene and clear perspex.

Johnson explains, “Despite their generic nature, these objects imply an illogical sense of ambiguity, mimicking the disorientated consciousness of our global village and the utopian quest for the “perfect world.”

Lily Hibberd

Virginia Baxter
For the past few years, the generous collective of artists who live and work at Imperial Slacks have hosted a regular program of performances and exhibitions from independent artists at their gallery in Surry Hills. Alas, Sydney rents have claimed another artist-run space and following the August shows (Look Mum, No Head—a performance/installation night on 2 August and Slacking Off, their final exhibition opening 21 August) Imperial Slacks will close its doors forever.

We dropped in to the gallery one afternoon in May to see Melbourne artist Lily Hibberd’s Burning Memory, a haunting little exhibition consisting of 15 paintings depicting various stages in the destruction of a burning house, each with an evocative title— Vicious Flicker, Collapse of dreams (skeleton). The room is infused with orange, yellow, and white light emanating from the canvases. A musical undertone bleeds from the corner where a video archive shows house fires from newsreels and films such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca. The effect is of something large contained in a small room. A slow and accumulating drama for the eyes and ears that, like fire, fixates. In her catalogue essay, “Wall of Fire”, Natasha Bullock refers to Hibberd as “referencing some of the devices of cinema—still, close-up, distance shot, cropped, blurry and sharp—(to) create a dynamic environment where interacting physical, perceptual and psychological spaces are built, re-built and collapse.” Burning Memory is a peculiarly immersive experience propelled by luminously impressionistic imagery.

Lily Hibberd, Burning Memory, Imperial Slacks Gallery, Sydney, May 29-June 25. www.imperialslacks.com

AFTRS student filmmakers

In April this year I attended the CILECT (Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision) congress at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Founded in Cannes in 1955, CILECT is the association of the world’s major film and television schools, with 108 member institutions from 50 countries on 5 continents. The congress was an excellent opportunity to observe how screen teaching practices and philosophies in Australian schools fit into an international context. The 4 key congress themes were “School and Student—The conflict between Harmony and Invention”; “Curriculum Change and Technologies”; “Triangle—the creative collaboration between Writer, Director and Producer”; and “Documentary in the Teaching of Fiction.”

The first of these looked at the challenges of supporting students in their creative endeavours within specific cultural and economic contexts. The Australian film schools, like their international counterparts, deal with this through a variety of teaching models that range from independent and auteur to creative collaboration driven by producers, as well as courses that reflect the models of mainstream television and film production.

Globally, school curricula are responding to changes generated by new technologies. The range of opinion about use of film versus digital media in the training of emerging filmmakers—when, where, how soon, how much—was immense and reflected the way courses develop to match the resources and traditions of each school and the cultural role they play in their community. The Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS) is an interesting example of a national school that has changed over the years to produce graduates who can create innovative work in various forms—television, documentary and new media—rather than just focusing on the traditional training needs of the feature film industry.

“Triangle” explored how curricula can foster creative collaboration. The question of how to create and manage it within a film school is pedagogically challenging and requires the commitment of teaching staff in every department to agree to support the concept and system.

With issues as potent as innovation, cultural specificity, the demands of new media and collaboration all circulating, the choice of where to go and how to get started in a competitive industry can be daunting for emerging filmmakers. AFTRS, the Victorian College of Arts (VCA), Royal Melbourne Institure of Technology (RMIT), Queensland College of the Arts (QCA), Charles Sturt University and Flinders University all offer practical courses with a range of curricula, entry levels and outcomes. I asked lecturers and heads of schools to describe what is unique and innovative about their courses and teaching practices. Here are their edited responses.

AUSTRALIAN FILM TELEVISION AND RADIO SCHOOL (AFTRS)

The full-time postgraduate program is an intensive, hands-on, production course. Students work on productions in their chosen specialist roles (DOP, editor, director, producer, etc) while at the school. Production work emphasises the nature of creative collaboration and assessment requires reflection on the process and collaboration. Teaching approaches include lectures, seminars, workshops and one to one mentoring. The short course program is linked to the full-time program and external students can take up units within it.

The diversity of the AFTRS program is a major strength. Students work on animations, TV magazine programs, documentaries, short dramas, feature scripts and drama series. With 12 different departments (from Cinematography to Design, from Directing to Sound, Visual FX and Producing) AFTRS offers a unique program with its in-depth specialist focus. It is one of the few schools in the world that offers a comprehensive program in Visual Effects Supervision.

Many graduates go on to develop their own production companies and often form teams through the networks they build at AFTRS (eg The Boys, The Bank). A 1995 study indicated 96% of graduates interviewed were employed in the film and television industry. Students range in age from 21 to 40 with 25 about the average. Entry is highly competitive. AFTRS receive several thousand requests for the application form each year which calls for a fairly solid portfolio of written and visual material. About 450 people apply for the 60 or so new places available each year.

VICTORIAN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

The VCA School of Film and Television courses include a 3-year Bachelor of Film and Television degree, a one year Graduate Diploma in Film and Television, a Masters in Film and Television, a part-time non-award Foundation Program and a series of short courses.

The VCA aims to develop students who can make motion picture programs of high artistic and technical standard at a professional level. The strength of our style of training is that it develops students’ creativity and independence. The VCA School of Film and Television places ideas at the centre of all its teaching and development programmes. Innovation is at its heart.

Programs produced by VCA students have won numerous awards at festivals nationally and internationally. Alumni of the school include directors Gillian Armstrong, Geoffrey Wright (Romper Stomper), Andrew Dominik (Chopper), Aleksi Vellis (The Wog Boy), Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde); BAFTA and AFI award-winning producer Jonathon Shiff; Academy Award nominated editor Jill Billcock (Moulin Rouge); DOP Ian Baker (6 Degrees of Separation); and animators Peter Viska and Adam Elliot.

VCA students come from a variety of backgrounds and ages—some have substantial industry experience, others none. It is very competitive to get into the BFTV. In 2001 we had 203 people apply for 14 places. People sometimes apply several times before getting in to the course.

QUEENSLAND COLLEGE OF THE ARTS
GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY

Established in 1881, the QCA is one of Australia’s leading art and design colleges. Today it is strengthening a reputation in creative arts innovation, offering study across a range of disciplines—Animation, Screen Production, Australian Indigenous Art and, from 2002, a new Bachelor of Digital Design. An interesting feature of QCA has been the close link our film school has made with SBS Independent, producing 5 films in the last 7 years.

The college was annexed to Griffith University in the early 90s and offers an atelier style 16mm film course (the only one in Queensland) separate from the much larger video and media theory courses offered by Griffith University’s Humanities department.

The performance indicators by which to judge film schools are awards and jobs. We take less than 30 students per year, and their employment rate after graduation is high. Films produced at QCA win many awards in creative as well as technical categories. In 2000, honours student Peter Hegedus was invited to the prestigious Dokumart European Documentary Festival in Neubrandenberg, where his Grandfathers and Revolutions won a Highly Commended Award. Widely televised, the film has been seen around the world.

In 2001, 4 QCA graduate films were selected for New York University’s International Film School Festival; Natalie & Tanya Grant’s Ballet Shoe Laces shared the Audience Choice Award, competing with films from 70 countries. These are outstanding results equal to the best of many national film schools around the world from an emerging regional competitor.

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

Recognising a need for further production training in South Australia, Flinders University introduced a Bachelor of Creative Arts Screen (BCA)in 2002— a 3-year course with an optional fourth Honours year. Prior experience in actual filmmaking is not a necessary requirement but evidence of creative work in visual or written form is, and a short-list of applicants is invited to interview on the basis of this submission. Last year we received 70 applications for a first intake of 14 places. The BCA is designed to be “industry ready”, producing students with sufficient skills to gain employment in a variety of screen/media industries at entry level, capable of gaining additional funding support for independent production, and qualified to pursue postgraduate study in this area.

The practical training emphasises collaboration and the role of the creative team, producing students who can get a foot in the door of industry, can think analytically, critically and creatively, and who understand screen media. Flinders University is an institution which endeavours to encourage innate creativity. Graduates are highly visible in the South Australian film and television industry. Two of the 3 South Australian Film Corporation’s $50,000 Filmmaker of the Future awards and all of the SBS/ SAFC documentary Accords for Australia By Numbers have been awarded to Flinders graduates. In the first few years after graduation many find attachments through the South Australian Film corporation (SAFC) on features and go on to a range of jobs, from project officers at SAFC, to production coordinators/managers, editors, sound recordists, DOPs, producers and directors in television, new media and feature films.

For students aiming for a career in the television industry the following courses may be more suited to their needs.

RMIT

RMIT Media Studies provides a 3 year Television Production major that introduces and develops a broad range of skills relevant to independent and commercial television and film production. Television Production is a Major within the BA Media Studies at RMIT.

The major strengths of our approach are the ways in which students are encouraged to work in independent and collaborative projects. We have redefined production to acknowledge the converging nature of the media industries. Students in their final year are able to develop and produce major collaborative projects that have multiple real world outcomes for converged media environments.

Broad television skills are emphasised, 16mm film production is available as an elective, and television studio experience is also available. Students are encouraged to concentrate on basic skills in the first 2 years of their program and in their third year to specialise in cinematography, direction, producing, sound design, editing, or digital postproduction. There is also the possibility of specialising in networked interactive video.

Our graduates are well represented throughout the film and television industry in Australia and enter the film and television industry as assistants to established industry practitioners, or start their own independent production companies.

The majority of our students are school leavers and there is a broad mix of local (Australian) and international students. Our first year enrolment is approximately 50 students.

CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY

The 3-year degree course in Television is vocationally oriented. It provides high level craft skills training at broadcast operations level combined with an equal emphasis on storytelling and aesthetics. Students are exposed in first year to the range of craft skills used in television production, from tape ops to directing, single camera to 3 camera multi-camera studio and are expected to identify their craft interests early in the course. The major strengths of this practice lie in the graded approach to skills acquisition and consolidation in the first 2 years.

We only teach within the electronic television environment. However, anything they learn in this course is transferable laterally to filmmaking. The course is a BA (Television Production) with the possibility of Honours (an additional year) and a Masters degree.

We have had a take up rate that varies between 80% and 95% and at least three quarters of a class of 35–40 will be employed upon graduation. We work at this constantly by making our training both relevant to the industry environment, and challenging to future creative possibilities. We aren’t in the business of training ‘button-pushers.’ It’s why you push the button that matters.

Most of our students graduate around age 20-21. Backgrounds are varied, but most have had some exposure to video production at secondary school. We look for students who have a passion for television as an expressive storytelling medium and want people who will take a risk, not just conform to fashion. Television needs to be constantly challenged and I think the core of it all is that we want to train these young people to be employable and challenging in the coming decades.

The paradoxical question of how you teach creativity while training people for an industry that is about commerce and business is constant and ongoing. As are the issues of how many students we should be training, how many graduates will make their way into careers that are (and always have been) highly competitive to enter, difficult to survive in financially and often already oversubscribed.

The schools covered in this article are by no means the only way to get into the film and television. For young people starting out, the CREATE training package on offer in some TAFEs and schools can be a useful place to begin, as can the many undergraduate courses on offer within Screen, Media and Communication departments in universities throughout Australia.

Does Australian documentary programming reflect the turning away from our region that characterizes the last 5-6 years?
A glance at the exceedingly amero- and euro-centric line-up of the last 2 Australian International Documentary Conferences in Adelaide in 1999 and Perth in 2001, as well as the recent touring Real: life on film documentary festival and the REVelation Festival in Perth would suggest this disturbing trend. It is as if our documentary programmers unwittingly have fallen in line with the direction followed by the Howard governemt.

Even more disturbingly, at a recent brainstorming session in Melbourne, there did not seem to be much recognition of the problem or interest on the part of the organizer of the next documentary conference in Byron Bay in 2003 to shift this exclusive focus on films made by North-American and European filmmakers. To invite people from other parts of the world is put in the too hard basket because they are seen to require special attention (They might need interpreters! ) or because most documentary makers in Australia have no interest in knowing how their numerous counterparts in Asia, Africa or Latin-America view their own societies and present their stories. Audiences for their films at the Melbourne and Sydney documentary conferences in l995 and l993, which made laudable efforts to include them, were embarrasingly low.

We seem to prefer and perpetuate the trend among many Western filmmakers to go in search of the extreme, the exotic and unusual, the ‘underbelly of Asia’, to satisfy a Western audience’s obsession with sex and gender issues. Asia is meant to remain ‘the other’ and satisfy our desires. These are the films that rate well in our festivals.

And what of SBS (which laudably screens more documentaries than any other channel) and its programming of works by documentary filmmakers from the Asia-Pacific region? They are virtually non-existent. The World Movie afficionados are catered to with feature films (dominated by Hong Kong movies and Japanese animation), but hardly ever a documentary from the point of view of people who live in the region. Surprisingly, SBS differs little from the commercial channels in assuming that we need to have the real world interpreted to us by Australian, North-American and European filmmakers.

Is it perhaps SBS’ eagerness in recent years to be recognized as a European arthouse channel that drives this programming policy? Or is a multicultural Australian audience assumed to be incapable of understanding other perspectives? For all the variety of faces on screen as presenters, newsreaders etc, the decisions on what we get to see have over the years rested largely with born-and-bred Aussies and people of predominantly Anglo background. One can’t help wondering if that is why they are so incapable of accepting documentary formats and aesthetics that have been influenced by non-Western cultures.

We’ve come a long way in recent years when it comes to recognizing an Aboriginal perspective through film. But documentaries on our own Asia-Pacific region are constantly filtered through the eyes and storytelling practices of Western filmmakers. (Migrant stories, too, are seldom told by people who have arrived here as adults and may have a different aesthetic and way of telling stories.)

A few years ago a series of half-hour films from the Asian region that allowed local filmmakers to tell their stories was hailed as a daring breakthrough. It was, however, produced, selected and packaged by Australian and British producers who were credited with the series. I asked the UK commissioning editor who attended the Adelaide AIDC conference if he would have programmed them had they come directly from filmmakers in Asia. His answer was, “Probably not.”

At the IDFA documentary conference in Amsterdam in l997, a forum was held to discuss a new fund to support Asian filmmakers, and some of the guests from the region had been invited. After listening to the patronizing attitudes of several European broadcasters, a well-known Indian filmmaker responded with disgust that rather than dispense charity, the best thing they could do would be to actually purchase and broadcast films that are already being made by Asian filmmakers.

Film festivals are concerned with bums on seats to survive. But we should expect that specialist events catering to a reasonably informed audience, such as the documentary conferences and Real: life on film, would see it as their responsibility to educate audiences and move us forward into an awareness of the world around us instead of falling into line with the deplorable trend set by the present government.

In his second year as director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, James Hewison has extended his policy of foregrounding Asian cinema. His stated policy is that “this festival should be a representative or even advocate of the region to which we belong.” It certainly helps that Asia is producing the most interesting films in world cinema at the moment.

Hewison has a particular interest in South Korean cinema, aiming to locate it as “an almost irresistible part” of this year’s festival. He describes Korea as “an incredibly energetic film culture, one that takes risks in style and content, and is unafraid to confront its difficult past.”

This year’s retrospective focusses on Kim Ki-duk, a Korean director whose harsh, violent films will generate considerable controversy. Hewison sees Kim’s films as containing “a raw naivete—almost an innocence—but also anger and anguish expressed in his landscapes usually populated by marginalised characters. Like some of Kitano’s earlier films, there are exclamation marks of brutality that give his work striking, visceral impact alongside poetically constructed beauty.”

Like Japan’s Miike Takeshi, Kim works quickly (with 7 films over the past 6 years) and seeks to attain a transgressive edge by emphasising perverse sexuality combined with explicit violence. Like the Japanese new wave “eros and massacre” directors of the early 1960s, Kim’s films try to imagine what the world looks like when repression reaches an unbearable limit. When desire finally emerges, it does so through rape, murder and mutilation.

On his website (www.kimkiduk.com), Kim states his aesthetic credo that “film is created out of a point where reality and fantasy meet.” He claims that his films attempt to access “the borderline where the painfully real and the hopefully imaginative meet.”

The conjunction of pain and reality goes to the heart of Kim’s social critique. His is a world with a pecking order of beatings in which introverted artists and women occupy the bottom rung. Images recur of caged birds, of fish flopping around out of water, of dogs being beaten. The social world is divided utterly and communication is impossible and hardly attempted. In this world, artists are beaten when they show people truthful portraits of themselves.

At their most superficial, the films can often be read as political allegory. Wild Animals (1999) deals with a North Korean and South Korean forging an unlikely friendship; Address Unknown (2001) revolves around the American military presence in Korea; and Birdcage Inn (1998) and Bad Guy (2001) generate their conflicts out of class differences within Korean society.

Underlying these social conflicts, however, is a broader thematic. Kim works with a heavily psychoanalytical model of character. He has a rather hydraulic conception of sexual desire, where repression builds to a point of explosion. Sex is essentially linked to pain and rage in these films. Desire seeks to possess and incorporate its object, and the frustrations in attaining this end only serve to increase its sadistic ferocity.

No failing is so widespread or so dire in Kim’s films as the inability to identify with someone else. His narratives set up these self/other distinctions in order to find hope through collapsing them. The snotty middle-class girl of Birdcage Inn merges into the prostitute who works at her mother’s inn. The artist of Real Fiction takes on the personal history of the actor he encounters at the start of the film. The female protagonist of The Isle appears to dream, but we end up seeing that the dream belongs to the male protagonist. The woman forced into prostitution in Bad Guy stares into a mirror until her image overlaps with that of the pimp who has enslaved her.

As this final example might suggest, Kim aims to shock and offend. His champions invoke surrealism and Artaud in the emphasis on transgression as a means of cutting away bourgeois pretence, of being outside of boundaries. The imaginative leap to identify with others can only come after the embrace of one’s abjection.

After sitting through Bad Guy, however, and being asked to countenance the proposition that brutalisers of women become dependent upon their victims and that being raped and forced into prostitution can put women on a trajectory to emotional growth, you’ve got to wonder whether this is transgressive or just the retelling of a story we already know only too well.

Bad Guy and Real Fiction (2000) are films generated out of post-Laura Mulvey film theory. They both deal with relations of looking as a source of power. A character in Address Unknown asserts that the human eye is the scariest thing. The male protagonist of Bad Guy sets the narrative in motion by staring at a woman and then goes on to watch her sexual degradation from behind a one-way mirror. The male protagonist of Real Fiction can only return himself from the violent fulfilment of his fantasies by smashing in the head of the woman who has been following him with a digital camera.

This points to a reflexivity in Kim’s work that runs alongside his thematic concerns. The obvious analogy for Real Fiction, which was shot in 200 minutes, is Mike Figgis’s Time Code. The most impressive aspect of The Isle is revealed when it is viewed as a technical exercise in which psychologically complex characters are presented without the use of dialogue.

Indeed The Isle, which we saw at last year’s Melbourne festival, is Kim’s strongest film. In paring the drama down to the 2 protagonists, he introduces an economy and an intensity to the film, discarding the stock villains who circle around the few psychologised characters in his films. The Isle is about finding the still point at the centre of life where desire is taken to an end point where it exhausts itself.

Finally, in a year when all of the local festivals were scraping to find Australian films, it is worth posing Korean cinema as a point of comparison. Both countries had feature film industries brought into being and sustained by government intervention. At present, South Korea films have 49% of the domestic box office of their country. The films span a fascinating range from schlock genre pieces (Teenage Hooker Becomes Killing Machine) to national prestige films such as Chihwaeson, to the auteur margins inhabited by Kim. From where I sit, looking at Australia’s 4% of domestic box office, that looks like more and more of an achievement.

1. The debris of a smile

Fergus Daly
In the 1980s, when ‘the Sublime’ was the idea that defined Postmodernism for cultural analysts, Jean-Luc Godard realised it was by working through the idea of the beautiful that truly creative things would begin to happen. Not the Kantian beautiful wherein disinterest before the artwork relieves the spectator of his habits of thought, but a kind of bio-political ethico-aesthetic notion (when asked some time ago what it might mean to be ‘Godardian’, the filmmaker replied that it would be “to defend an ethics and an art”). In this notion, nature would have to be re-invented by cinema and bodies constituted by way of relinquishing their ‘habits of habitation’; both human subjects and the earth would be born in a single movement of life.

Éloge de l’amour, Godard’s first feature in 5 years, interrogates Memory, History, Resistance, Language, Ethical Adequation. Widely touted as his “most accessible film in years”, in reality it is barely penetrable yet deeply moving and stunningly intelligent, and its ‘method’ brings poet Paul Celan to mind: “Speak—but keep yes and no unsplit. And give your say this meaning: give it the shade.”

A one and a two and a three and a four—this count-in, a beginning, is also a count-down, 4, 3, 2, 1—a blast-off! 4 for the moments of love, 3 for the stages of life, 2 for black and white, 1 for monochrome and colour, cinema and video, TV and life, Hitler and Weil, Spielberg and Godard. But in recent years it is the 1 that most preoccupies Godard, ways of being one. Not so much the conventional problem of Singular versus Universal, but a form of the universal that would also be singular.

Godard’s fundamental problematic is unquestionably Ethics: ethical possibilities that don’t have the dead moral weight of established transcendent moralities. Godard’s characters are literally embodied ethical positions. If the human body remains the locus of new forms of resistance to ‘the Program’, then in Éloge the lightness that passes between bodies, in particular those of the vital trio Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), Berthe (Cécile Camp) and the old Resistance fighter (Francoise Verny), reaches a Bressonian intensity. Hence Godard’s invocation of quotations from Bresson’s Notes sur le cinématographe, as well as of Simone Weil (Edgar is composing a Cantata for Simone Weil).

This direct confrontation with the universe of Bresson whose characters are “figures with a movement in which weight plays no part”—to borrow Alain Bergala’s citation of Weil’s definition of grace—has been a long time coming in Godard’s cinema. Not only is there something of the Bressonian model in Putzulu’s performance; also in Edgar’s approach to the actor/bodies he seeks: he seems to want not models—vessels containing the spiritual—but beings carrying the ethical. Is Berthe not the embodiment of values somehow still out of Edgar’s reach? Godard wants not only his actors but his characters, even his documentary subjects, to suggest ethical possibilities. In his version of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, Godard—rejecting a Grace/Fall duality—rummages through the signs and traces of the city for the meeting point of singular modes of ethical being which would also be universally beautiful.

Beauty is a matter of ethics for Godard. In Éloge it is tied to the theme of adulthood. “I’m not beautiful enough for the role”, Berthe tells Edgar. It is said of Edgar that he’s “trying to be an adult” but to be ‘at one’s prime’ as an artist tends to forego the capacity to capture birth and decay, childhood and old age. Compare Edgar’s inability to see Berthe’s singular beauty with Godard’s skill at creating a context to allow certain bodies or faces to appear on screen. In particular he succeeds in creating a unique sense of intimacy—the appearance of the old resistance fighter woman’s face (in all its History-lined beauty) appears to ‘find its moment’ in a way that is truly overwhelming. In allowing her to exist on screen, Edgar proves to be the film’s true ethical consciousness, or rather, the revealer of a new ethical possibility.

What has changed in Godard in the 35-40 years that now allows this face/body to appear on screen? Something which could never have occurred in the 60s, for example. Maybe it has to do with the eschewal of the ironic for the development of an approach that, in countering the manner in which the ironic announces itself, allows a revelation coming from a completely different place, and a new form of the beautiful.

Éloge de l’amour, as Yonnick Flot has noted, expresses “his way of seeing in adulthood the neutral gear of life, held in suspension by the energy of childhood and the forces of old age.” Here Godard returns to the ontological problem of lightness versus heaviness treated by Leos Carax in his first films, now staged in terms of History—more specifically, the French Resistance. In this context, Godard examines the way in which memory is transmitted from old to young people and the role of cinema in that transmission. Here we witness Godard continuing his search for a specifically cinematic ethics that would also say something philosophically about the present’s relation to the past. The film suggests that there is a certain lightness that passes straight from childhood to old age (from liberty to wisdom), thereby bypassing heavy adulthood.

2. Ode to Something

Adrian Martin
Today, Jean-Luc Godard likes to proclaim that “memory has rights and that it is a duty not to forget these rights.” How does he show this viewpoint on screen? Those in power who suppress historical memory (that means Hollywood, TV, government, capitalist corporations) are villains. And those ordinary people who possess no cultural memory—all those extras in Éloge de l’amour who have never heard of Bataille or Hugo or the inventor of some snazzy car—are simply fools, worthy only of being yelled at. But is it their fault? Godard sometimes makes his viewers feel the same way, like ashamed ignoramuses: didn’t you know that the train station sign “Drancy-Avenir” is also the title of a recent political film? Can’t you recognise all those Parisian sites where the key moments of the French Resistance played themselves out? Didn’t you appreciate the profundity of the citation from Bresson?

Let us return a harsh judgement back upon JLG: “The labyrinth of echoes, the anxiety of influence, the maze of connections without substance, the schizo-circuit diagrams, become unbearable” (Raymond Durgnat). Godard’s films are frustrating to study closely, because they rarely coalesce. As someone who has long been partial to the aura of Godardian cinema, I become fascinated with bits and pieces of Éloge. For instance, the strange scenes of conversation, more dislocated than ever, with lines of dialogue reconstituted on the soundtrack so that they overlap and cancel each other out. Or the sense that (in Peter Wollen’s words), since 1990, Godard has been “reworking his own origins as a classic reference text”: hence the return to Paris and black-and-white, the echoes of Bande à part and Pierrot le fou, the touchingly aged actors from his old films. Or suddenly beautiful, touching images, like Berthe whispering something into Edgar’s ear, something we will never know. Or, finally, that peculiarly Godardian form of fiction: some events that have already happened (but we can never exactly fathom what), combined with the film-to-be-made which cannot quite start, creating auditions, digressions and researches that lead only to business partnerships and personal relationships dribbling away, producing nothing, not movies or money or children…But all this is still not enough to redeem Éloge de l’amour.

My friend Fergus Daly sees and feels something in Éloge that I cannot—or only fleetingly, fitfully. I cannot grasp the film or its logic, and I suspect that it is, ultimately, incoherent. Godard’s artistic and philosophic thoughts proceed by a zany ‘free association’, leaping from one word-play to the next. Do these thoughts ever develop, grow, lead to a satisfying synthesis or resolution? For example, we hear often in this film about childhood and old age being real, genuine life-states, while adulthood is a void. It is a void because adults need social identities (banker, wife, thief), and identities lead to stories, and stories are, for Godard, ‘Hollywood’, thus they are bad. Then we leap up to the level of nations, and history: North Americans are void as people, because they have no real ‘name’, no origin, and they stalk the globe pillaging the stories of others…

And yet we will hear it said, with emotion, that the doleful Edgar is “the only person trying to become an adult.” Is this a joke, or a tribute? And hasn’t Godard spent several decades celebrating everything that is ‘unformed’ and ‘in between’ and uncertain—just like Edgar? As always, Godard vacillates cagily between a lyrical fullness of meaning and an adolescent desire to sabotage all meaning: hence, this ‘ode to love’, in the film’s obsessive inter-titles, often becomes just an ‘ode to something’, or maybe to nothing.

Denying himself most of the pleasures and possibilities of narrative, Godard depends purely on his formal structures to provide movement, mood and pathos to this crazy-quilt of quotes and notes. It all comes too easily to him: the perfectly placed repetition of a few bars of music by David Darling and Ketil Bjornstad; the welling up of an oceanic visual superimposition, combined with a halting, nervous camera-zoom or freeze-frame; the large-scale interplay of the film’s 2 halves, which is almost like Kieslowski; even that old poetic stand-by, the central character on a ‘journey’ (via foot, car, train), across mutually alienated spaces (city and country) and back through the shards of lost time, but mainly on the road to nowhere…

When asked what he looked for in the actors here, Godard replied: “Something, perhaps not much, that was real”. Fergus intuits the grace in these morsels of physical reality. I am frustrated, yet again, by the absence of genuine personality in Godard’s characters, and by his inability to invest their exchanges with anything resembling plausible, everyday emotion. I realise they are not meant to be ‘realistic’ characters, just supports in an ongoing essay/collage. But Godard’s 2-dimensional sketches either serve as an ‘open sesame’ for the viewer—prompting him or her to project all manner of emotions and meanings into the empty intervals on screen—or else they block any kind of engagement. Stéphane Goudet in Positif (no. 484, June 2001) wondered whether “the flagrant gap between the film and its title (‘love’?)” reflects, in the last analysis, “a fear of feeling and an anguish when confronted with the body.” There are still too many vestiges of the old Godardian dance, poetry and musicality in Éloge de l’amour for me to completely agree with that verdict. But I am sorely tempted.

Robert Humphreys is a cinematographer whose credits include David Caesar’s Mullet, a major award winner at the recent Shanghai Film Festival, and Tony Ayres’ Walking on Water which premiered as part of the 2002 Adelaide Festival and will be released by Dendy Films on September 23.

When did your interest in cinematography start? Was it film in general or photography in particular?

You often see quotes from people who work in film who made Super 8 films when they were 10 years old and were passionate filmmakers from the cradle…Well I can’t in all honesty say that’s me…my interest in film came from being a viewer, but it wasn’t until I went to the NSW Institute of Technology in the early 80s that I can say I thought ‘this is the life for me.’ My career path went parallel between stills photographer and cinematographer. I took lot of photos for rock bands, album covers, posters, and some theatrical stills and a little bit of fashion. And at the same time I was filming pop clips and eventually cinematography was much more of a challenge than stills photography.

I actually wanted to be a journalist and it wasn’t until I went to uni and saw the cruel hard world of journalism I realised I didn’t like it…but in the Communications degree there was a filmmaking course and that pretty much took over as the great fascination. I basically spent 3 years watching films.

We watched everything…Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, Visconti, film noir, and my special favourite, Bertolucci…I think The Conformist is one of the truly great pieces of cinematography and for me that film is a text book.

Yes. The very first Australian film I saw I had to sneak out of school to see. It was The Devil’s Playground, which I still remember in incredible detail, then Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave.

If you were a photographer you would be able to have a consistent if developing style, but cinematographers work across forms, for very different audiences and directors. How does that affect the evolution of a style?

I think that the cinematographer is not so much an artist but more a craftperson whose job it is to visualise a director’s dream, to visualise words from a page…being an architect is an analogy. I also believe it’s a team of collaborators who make a film, so it’s directors and producers, or writer-directors who have a dream of a film.

I pride myself on not having a recognisable style; every film I do is dictated by the script, and I try to visualise a film. Flower Girl was a breakthrough for me, and also for the director Kate Shortland. It was one of those films that was a melding of styles. Where it came from is interesting. One of the all-time classics for me is Godard’s Breathless. It is still for me the most influential piece of cinema that I can think of, in that it was all hand-held, jump cut, it broke all the rules of editing, and it was pretty much shot with natural light, and it was filmed by Raoul Coutard. In Australia we like to think of cameramen like Chris Doyle as being breakthrough operators who use available light and are freeing the form,. but to me all of those films are Breathless shot in colour.

A lot of my style is based on not being intrusive: I don’t like to look at a picture and be able to see the technology behind it. I don’t like excessive backlight which is what you get in film noir, or camera moves which are designed to take you out of the story. If I have a choice my style is naturalistic. So if you’re in an interior in a house, say, it will be lit from the window, and in Flower Girl there’s only about 2 lights and we researched the locations very carefully to give us that effect.

Colour is everything in this film, and I strove for a really saturated image. If I have to admit to a house style it would be that use of colour! So on Mullet and Walking on Water there is a strong colour palette…it’s controlled by the designers, but what I do is saturate it so it becomes a strong part of the story.

How does that different response to each script connect to your choices of technology?

I’ll receive a script from a director. The cinematographer and the designer tend to be on the project from the very beginning, from first draft or very early. I’ll read it. We’ll talk about the specifics and have broad discussions about films [the director, the designer] like or don’t like, photos and paintings as well, almost anything they think is relevant to their script.

David Caesar talked about Mullet being a Western. It had a classic Western structure…the lone gunslinger/outlaw coming back to the hometown, and David always wanted it to be a big wide-screen experience. There’s little camera movement, the composition is classical, and to that end he made a tape of influences…films like Hud, which has a detached, wide-screen, observational style of filming. For interiors he looked at Drugstore Cowboy. He didn’t want Mullet to look exactly like those films but their influences added something to the discussions.

Then with Walking on Water, [director] Tony Ayres and I looked at a lot of things. We couldn’t settle on anything until it came to 2 references. The first was a film called Under the Skin, photographed by Barry Ackroyd (he works with Ken Loach a lot) and his strengths are to create very naturalistic looking films where the camera never draws attention to itself…everything is quite elegant. But Under the Skin is quite different. It uses long lenses, the camera is quite jerky and uses only natural light…We settled on that as the closest template and mixed it with the work of photographer, Nan Goldin, an American. Her work is incredibly honest, naturalistic, raw and powerful, documenting the death of her friends in the 80s from AIDS.

For Walking on Water we used an Ariflex and for Mullet we used a BL Evolution, one on the shoulder and the other never moved. Some cinematographers are highly technical and others like myself are more intuitive in their relation to the choice of camera. With Walking on Water we used long lenses, and the reason for that was that you can isolate actors in their environment, and so you tend to draw the audience’s attention to their performance rather than the environment. It’s also a good budgetary thing because it doesn’t need huge sets. Mullet was shot on Super 35mm which is standard 35mm blown up to anamorphic format, 2.35 to 1 ratio.

You also shoot for TV. You’re in the middle of Fat Cow Motel which is described as a multiplatform production.

It’s a TV series shot in Queensland, paid for by Austar, and going on air on Austar and Foxtel. It’s a 13 part series where each of the half hour episodes poses a problem which is solved at the beginning of the following episode…a lateral thinking problem, and is often tied up with a mystery in the town.

Yes, I could happily describe it as a cross between Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure. The cinematography avoids the classical Australian soap opera look, and as for the multiplatform side of it, each of the clues that are posed is elaborated on different platforms such as internet, text messages, and viewers register and receive the clues.

Is this the future…technologies altering the narrative, creating an open text?

It’s open in the sense that they’re trying to give people more value…the story on screen is 23 minutes each week, but if you go online there’s hours more.

A story is a story…classical cinema equals classical story. There are always people who will go to the movies to see those stories…even if the home screens get bigger. I still think the movies will be attractive as long as people are communal animals and enjoy that experience.

Molokai: The Story of Father Damian

Jane Mills
A worthy biopic of a real-life Belgian priest (David Wenham) who defied his superiors and risked his life caring for lepers in a neglected colony in Hawaii in the 1870s. A beautiful location and an amazing array of acting talent including Peter O’Toole, Kris Kristofferson, Derek Jacobi, Sam Neill and Leo McKern fail to save this movie from tedium. It becomes a painfully slow race between Wenham and the prosthetics department as bits of his body swell, distort and flake off. The prosthetics win but nowhere soon enough.

Director Paul Cox, writer John Briley. Distributor Sharmill Films. Screening nationally.

A Fun Night Out with Severed Heads

Keith Gallasch
What is striking about Severed Heads’ videos of the 1980s is their visual and aural integrity. That and being well ahead of their time. The manic, tautly rhythmic recurrence of images (within and across the works) and the richly overlaid minimal sonic and musical structures fuse into a singular go-with-it or lose-your-grip ride for the viewer. And it still feels new. This is no grab bag of the makers’ favourite bits and pieces (too often encountered these days). There’s lots of fun (tempered by leering Mexican Day of the Dead skulls), occasional political jabs (CIA, Disney), pop culture plunderings (Max Headroom), lunatic performance art and Tom Ellard and Stephen Jones in concert (some seminal VJing via a homemade video synthesizer). The 1988 Big Car Retread grabbed me like no other. A classic. The projections are big and DVD-crisp. Ellard keeps an ear on the mix by the side of the screen. Ian Andrews’ program essay on the group is a must-read that tells you just who did it and how. Thanks to dLux media arts for screening a significant piece of cultural history where avant-garde and popular impulses successfully met for a while.

d>ART02, Sydney Film Festival, Dendy Opera Quays, June 17 & 19. Other d>ART02 events will be reviewed in RealTime 51.

Minority Report

Keith Gallasch
Minority Report is action picture (Tom Cruise leaping impossibly from car to perfectly rounded car as they speed vertical roads; Tom welded in to a new car on a production line), Twilight Zone spooky what-iffery (seer cops float in tanks of amniotic fluid forecasting murders yet to happen; other cops, like orchestra conductors, wave at screens to conjure murder sites), Blade Runner urban nightmare (including a gruesome eye operation to short circuit iris identification), arthouse (Janusz Kaminski’s enveloping blue-grey cinematography, Max von Sydow’s father figure and Colin Farrell’s edgy Christian DA), murder mystery and political thriller (who controls the data?). Texture this with visual gags, deft sci-fi techno touches in the everyday that yoke the present to a not too distant future, add a great overlay of relishable paranoia and you’ve got a terrific cinema experience—if you like this kind of many-headed beast and you can put aside the weakness of the whodunnit (just another case of American Oedipal irresolution). Unusually, Spielberg keeps his narrative taut and to the point and does some justice, better than most, to the strange vision of Philip K Dick on whose short story of the same name the film is based. KG

Director Steven Spielberg, writers Scott Frank, Jon Cohen. Distributor Twentieth Century Fox. Screening nationally.

Italian for Beginners

David Varga
Reading the Dogme 95 manifesto (http://cinetext.philo.at/reports/dogme_ct.html) evokes a retro-avant-garde nostalgia for that variant of cinematic ‘truth’ that suspectly trades itself above the pleasures of cinematic artifice. Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners, the fifth film in the series, applies the stripped-bare technique of Dogme to triumph the preternatural over the natural, in a subtle and satisfying mix of melancholic pleasure, character based absurdism, ordinariness and desire.

2002 Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films

The 2002 Yoram Gross Animation Award went to Dad’s Clock (director, writer Dik Jarman; producer Sarah Drofenik). Immaculately crafted figures (a man carved from wood, a bird made of precision metal parts) and set (a ribbed boat that unfolds into being) comprise a fantasy world that is juxtaposed metaphorically with the spare, naturalistic telling, by his son, of a father’s journey to death by cancer. The other animations were also excellent. Lee Whitmore’s superbly drawn Ada was my winner, a gentle evocation of old age observed by children as the sunlight through a window gradually colours a room, its inhabitants and our understanding of age. Anthony Lucas’ Holding Your Breath, although narratively awkward, creates an intense, dark, silhouetted industrial world from which a girl ventures out to an equally daunting stretch of nature and a relationship. KG

The tape was in the recorder, and it was a long tape. I knew Nigel Helyer would have a lot to say, because even before winning the Helene Lempriere National Sculpture Award earlier this year, he had been busy. And since taking out that prize he’d been overseas, interstate, here and there, on the move, working on projects, collaborations, schemes and dreams. So I came equipped with my trusty mini tape recorder.

Which didn’t work! Press Record or Play and all you got was a blast of nasty static. White noise is fine in its place, but this wasn’t it. No worry: surely Nigel himself, a technician/engineer/acoustician (these sound artists are such polyglots) could fix the recalcitrant thing. He jiggled, he coaxed, he gave it a whack, he held it to his ear, he looked into its soul—but the rascally machine just wouldn’t cooperate. So there we were, on the verge of discussing the fantastic worlds of sound sculpture, Virtual Audio Reality, Networked Environmental Audio Systems, Biotechnology, Intellectual Property, magnetic fields, cockroach hearing and miniaturisation—and the technology let us down.

Funnily enough, one of Nigel’s themes, once we get started, is the robustness of contemporary audio technology. So, dispensing with my dysfunctional recorder, we begin, using the even older-school technology of pen and paper.

First, what of his prize, the National Sculpture Award, which came with a sum of—dare we be so vulgar as to mention the figure?—$105,000? How did it feel to win? And (questions downloaded from E! Entertainment website) has the money changed him? Is he a big-shot sound artist now? Will we see him in the international jet-set, rubbing shoulders with Brian Eno and Moby?

Nigel was “pleased and surprised” to win with his environmental sound sculpture Meta-Diva, which is now installed in the grounds of Werribee Park, Victoria. Meta-Diva comprises 30 tall aluminium stems equipped with digital audio chips and timers. Standing in a pond, the work requires zero maintenance for at least 10 years. One pleasing aspect was the technology used to run Meta-Diva, so that the win in part “recognises that we should be using solar power more.” He adds that “for the first time we can use digital audio in solid state technology with memory. I’ve become very interested with the idea of being robust. Usually now I’m only let down by third parties [like the tape recorder]. Ten years ago you had to depend on technology with moving parts—tape or CD machines. Now you can expect these technologies to run, they’re much more robust.”

Meta-Diva is a successful, yet relatively simple, example of what Nigel calls a Solar Powered Environmental Networked Audio System. Its playback of sampled nature recordings provides an “almost infinite mix” which listeners can’t pick from nature. This technological rendering of natural sounds fits the 2 environments in which Meta-Diva has been installed: one an artificial lake in Korea, the other the English country garden landscape of Werribee Park.

As for the prize money, it will be invested in new versions of environmental audio work, networks that interact with both people and environment on the model of “emergent behaviour.” Some of this work draws on the Virtual Audio Reality System developed during Nigel’s 2 and a half years at Lake Technology, where he was employed as Senior Designer. Having left his academic position, does he now miss the financial security associated with a post in the Ivory Tower? Existing outside the academy is, he admits, “financially risky—but I’d die faster if I stayed there.” As compensation, he has an Australia Council Fellowship for 2 years, and a host of Visiting Fellow positions at various academic institutions in Australia and the US. One of these, at the University of NSW, will enable further development of Virtual Audio, based partly on Satellite Positioning technology.

So what are the artworks that result from this confluence of research and technology? One is an installation called Seed, which was first exhibited in Phoenix earlier this year, and is currently on show at the Biennale of Electronic Arts (BEAP) in Perth. Seed is a “sonic minefield”, a series of 16 facsimiles of Russian landmines as used in Afghanistan. Each one sits in the centre of an Islamic prayer mat which plays recordings of the 99 names of Allah as well as Arabic music. This work melds the Old Testament rhetoric of sowing seeds—like mines, they “lie in wait for the future”—with the “contemporary disasters of military and ideological conflict.” The visitor enters a “place of ambiguity” within the context of current military and political events.

From October, Nigel Helyer will be Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Western Australia. In a lab called Symbiotica—designed to facilitate cooperation between artists and scientists—he’ll be working on a project involving “compound hearing.” This results from research into the animal sensorium, especially that of insects. Spiders, for example, have 8 legs with tiny hairs as sound sensors: a phenomenon known as distributed hearing. But where is all this likely to lead?

“We hear in stereo, with our two ears,” he says. “But other life-forms, especially insects, hear with multiple organs, like legs covered with tiny antennas. In the lab we should be able to plug in things like a cockroach antenna into a listening or sound generating device. I’ll be showing this kind of project in Stanford [where he will be visiting Fellow early next year]. Stanford University is very big on biotechnology. Apparently, you can almost use cockroach antennas as microphones. They’re so well designed that cockroaches can hear us humans. Most insects have poor hearing, but cockroaches have a wide range of hearing.”

Being able to listen like a cockroach presents some interesting possibilities. One other aspect of biotechnology research—the small scale used in the study of, for example, insect antennae—corresponds to a direction of Nigel’s recent art: working in miniature. A project for the School of Sound in London next April involves miniature technology. Called One or Two Things I Know, it uses induction coils in a work of 10 tiny visual pieces drawn from Jean-Luc Godard films. The pieces are so small that you need to look at them with a magnifying glass; in the process, your physical presence affects the magnetic field, which triggers the audio content of the work.

This piece uses an ingenious interface, free of buttons, keyboards and screens. It’s designed, Nigel says, “so you engage the audio without realising it. It’s like a re-enchantment device, where the audio becomes magic. It gives an extra dimension that’s not automatically apparent. I also appreciate the tiny scale. I don’t want to be trapped working in large scale all the time; I like the intimate, hand held scale.”

And why Godard films? This relates to a childhood experience, when as a 13-year old Nigel stumbled across a Godard movie in London’s Victoria Station. It was a cartoon cinema that for some reason was screening Godard! It left a lasting impression, so that when later teaching sculpture to art school students he showed them Godard films to illustrate metaphor. Sadly, his students in the 1990s objected to the films: “They were deeply offended and told me I was sick.” Time to get out of the academy, then.

Nigel is convinced of the potential ensuing from the union of science and art. The omen was there in the town of his birth, which had earlier hosted both Halley (the famous astronomer) and William Blake, the famous mystical poet. Nigel has “grown into the idea that there’s no difference between art and science. Both are to do with creativity and inventiveness. Working with Lake, I found business people very open to creative ideas. They can be generous in the way they do things.”

This fusion of art, science and technology will be advanced in all these projects, as well as the various residencies and fellowships at universities and other institutions. There are other ventures, such as Nigel’s involvement with Polar Circuit, a series of workshops for media artists and theorists initiated by the University of Lapland. And the task of creating an international network of sound artists and theorists. Not to mention the difficult task of re-assembling the complicated installation work Silent Forest for its inclusion in the new Federation Square wing of the National Gallery of Victoria. And did I mention some of his online collaborations, such as Music for Mutants —keyboard standards re-designed (and re-copyrighted) for aliens with extra fingers?

There are other projects, collaborations and ventures, but they can wait for another day. For now, we separate, I with a broken recorder and writer’s cramp, Nigel with a head full of projects and schemes.

Performance Space is elegantly reconfigured into a diagonal wedge, angled screens to the left, wall to floor screen on the right; breaking the hard lines are diaphanous spirals, cylinders, cubes, bending and absorbing projections to their own image. The eye is drawn to the proscenium arch where there is a breathtaking orchestra of equipment—tiered rows of computer screen lit bodies, concentratedly clicking away, live mixing the sound, video images and realtime feeds into the sensory immersion that is Video Combustion—Alpha release. It is hard not to worship at this altar of technology.

An archetypal cybermistress greets us. Slicked-blonde and cold-scary—her whitened naked body projected upon and filmed live, overlaying her prerecorded face—she has been “digitally re-membered.” This apparition in the flesh and machine (Jaqilen Pascoe) is our guide, advising us to question the “nutritional value of our information diet”, a constant reminder of the “meeting between meat and machine.”

The tangible commodity is atmosphere. With 11 video projectors, every surface is textured. Images surround us at 3 million pixels per second, sound pulses the air in our lungs. Transitions are viscous, sections merging and evolving like an organism growing itself. We are kept abreast of the action by screens showing us the score—who’s on first, who did what, what’s over there. Another mode of watching is required, a kind of holistic ambient viewing. However the configuration and size of the space creates a static, seated environment, requiring the audience to concentrate for 2 hours on streams of video consciousness. With so many points of focus it is frustrating to be stuck with a limited viewing perspective. The second part of the evening opens the space up to wandering, but by then the performance focus has dissipated. A larger space would allow an audience to roam this world, to stumble upon the more performative moments.

I try to tease out specificities about sound and image, but they seem fused, like melted electrical cables. Video Combustion is a surge—energy that is absorbed rather than experienced as vision, as sound. Integrating performance into this fusion is the ultimate challenge. Pascoe strikes a balance between absorption and visibility, her spokenword-scapes (created with Wade Marynowksy) and live interaction are cool and slick, her prowling presence arresting, if a little familiar. Working beside and against projections, Momo Miyaguchi achieves the beginnings of a dialogue between image and live body. While the dance pieces of Talia Jacob, Annie Robin and Helen Bergan are thematically focused by video images of classical ballet and live overlays, the dance style is naive and conceptually unchallenging. I offer a thesis: the human body is not that interesting to project upon—the surface area too small, and the body too nullified by mandatory white lycra. The work is more engaging when the live body works actively with projection or is chewed up and reintegrated into image, as in the opening sequence of Pascoe’s face multiplied and affected by her own reprocessed presence. This is where the tensions and fusions of interdisciplinary work become electrifying.

The scale of the collaboration, the mastery and marshalling of technology and the degree of hybridity in Video Combustion are impressive. At the conclusion of the evening Justin Maynard (co-director along with Cindi Drennan) thanks all those who have helped “propagate chaos.” Interestingly, I have seen none—the event is calm, genteel even, bordering on reverent. Perhaps it was necessary to tame the multi-cabled beast for Alpha Release and in its next incarnation to loose the bonds. This beast feeds on hybridity and can only grow stronger through closer connections and knowledge of each artform. Therefore I send out the call to arms—video artists, see more performance—performance artists, experience more new media. Blast through Sydney’s discrete scenes and see everything!

Video Combustion—Alpha Release, produced by tesseract research laboratories and the vidi-yo network, Performance Space, June 22. www.videocombustion.org

Filmmakers routinely claim that movies are performative, that they actively generate and realise meanings and affects in space and time as the images flicker. Filmic projection is therefore eminently suited to accommodating live performance. Does the projection of images alongside a living performer however simply multiply the performers in the space, unnecessarily replicating material, rather than producing a new aesthetic? The Fusion program of multimedia performance seemed to demonstrate that video projection is most effective in live performance as a mobile form of painterly framing and overlay.

The collaboration between video-composer Dylan Volkhardt and dancer Tony Yap for example established that while both are extremely talented artists, little new was created by bringing them together. Yap danced, the projection showed evocative images of stars or a deserted urban construction, but what occurred between them was unclear. Ubique, on the other hand, resembled what Kraftwerk produced over 20 years ago (rotating wire-grid bodies, painted in with simple skins), the unremitting banality and lack of variation in the images actually detracting from a relatively interesting noise-sheet score.

Audiovisual artist Klaus Obermaier and dancer Chris Haring by contrast established a direct relationship between body and image by using the living body itself as the projection screen. Starting with a series of visual gags, D.A.V.E. explored the possibilities of the changeable, plastic body existing within an expanded, virtual realm. Hands were held to the side of the head to allow the illusion of massively distended, praying-mantis-like eyes, or thrust below the pelvis to make it appear the head was protruding from between the legs. The piece often relied on ‘gee-whiz’ black-theatrics and near-flawless illusionism. It was so profligately inventive that it was if anything too full of surprising, spectacular changes. Haring turned around to return wearing an elderly man’s projected skin, then that of an amused young woman; his anus talked (oral lips projected onto different labia); he ripped or pulled at his body, stretching it like India rubber, recalling Robbie Williams’ video Rock DJ.

This videophonic toying was however grounded in Haring’s equally impressive live physicality. In normal side-light he slipped about the floor in a delicately balanced yet vaguely brutal play of weight and gravity which rocketed about his pliable form, dropping into surprising shifts, rolls and articulations—all to the crinkly, swiping-sounds of Obermaier’s musique concrete or abstract breakbeat. Haring was so masterful at the near dislocation of limbs that he barely needed projection to establish a sense of radical fungibility.

Although D.A.V.E.was breathtaking in performance, it is Cazerine Barry’s House which lingers in my memory. House had a stronger sense of clockwork precision, of sharp, funky beats (mostly cheesy 1960s studio music) which set an exact rhythm for the morphs of space which Barry’s character negotiated, from the on-the-beat rotations of a projected house-plan, to lurid ‘primitivist’ fantasies of a rubber-tree-filled garden bearing vaguely sexual overtones. Barry’s work depicted a day-glo suburbia through an at once affectionate yet slightly disturbing reappropriation of 1960s kitsch—Howard Arkley in videochoreography. The video served as an ever changing projected frame or ‘front-drop,’ each tableau pierced by well-defined windows in which Barry posed, or through which she elegantly sashayed.

Though ostensively focussed on the theme of imagining one’s dream home and finding one’s place within it and the community which surrounds it, House also touched on the commodification of day-to-day experience, and the collapse of the separation between private and public space. The desires of Barry’s character were so saturated by the chic, manufactured designs she played with—or which occasionally squashed her into shape—that even her dreams of a lush, jungle garden were immured in representations from 1960s fashion. Any suggestion that “home” is a space where one shuts society out therefore seemed spurious.

In a particularly eloquent scene, Barry stood gesturing like a Monopoly traffic-cop, directing contemporary finance, pointing to lines in the projection which marked the passage of capital from BANK to ARMOURED CAR to PUBLIC. She reached into the screen-space to pull a box of relations to her chest, before shunting money somewhere else—a fabulous comment not only on commerce, but also the maddening complexities of home loans.

In both D.A.V.E. and House, the screen space was left resolutely flat and 2-dimensional, its 3-dimensional evocativeness generated primarily by the physical body it came into contact with, via gestural dialogue in House, or by the body serving as a lumpy screen in D.A.V.E. Ironically, this flattening of the filmic space successfully created a compelling sense of spatial depth in combination with live performance.

St Kilda Film Festival: Fusion: Performances in new media, presented by Experimenta. Works from the program reviewed here: Time Lapsed, direction/writing/producer/video Dylan Volkhardt, choreography/performance Tony Yap, music/sound Nick Kraft, James Cecil, Mik La Vage, Pip Branson; House, concept/performance/video Cazerine Barry, lighting Jen Hector, dramaturgical assistance Nancy Black, concept-development-associate-direction Rachel Spiers, production support Tom Howie; Ubique, sound/video Massimo Magrini (Italy); D.A.V.E. (Digital Amplified Video Engine), choreography/performance Chris Haring, video/music/initial-concept Klaus Obermaier. The Palace, St Kilda, Melbourne, May 29 – 31

halflives [a mystory]

The fixity of the photo album and the diary or chronicle, both print-based memory machines, have obscured just how fragile and momentary our family histories really are. When you start to explore a family’s history you find that there are moments of clarity brought about by recollection which are always temporary and are constantly displaced by new pieces of data. My grandfather was a somewhat vague but fairly fixed character in my mind until about 6 years ago when a woman rang my father and announced that she was his half sister. This new information profoundly reshaped my understanding of who he was. And then the more I looked into the past, the less certain it seemed. The name Gye, which I’d always believed was French, turned out to be Chinese—an anglicised version of Ah Gye. I started to see family as a kind of memory machine whose operations were similar to the computer—moments of coalescence alternating with dissolution as new data reshapes our understanding of our families. This opened up possibilities for thinking about how we might preserve our family history in electronic media in a way that more closely reflects its dynamic nature. Halflives attempts to reflect on the construction of our identities through family remembrance in an online environment. Part genealogy and part theoretical speculation, the site draws on Derrida’s theory of hauntology, Barthes’ reflections on photography and a range of family documents and photographs in order to explore new ways of understanding the past.

The last few years have seen a depletion of university resources resulting in fewer staff, an increase in student numbers, fewer places to put them while they’re on campus and no particular place for them to go after they’ve graduated, and all this within what seems like a constant review process necessitating radical restructuring of whole departments, and a rethinking of their function within and relationship to the communities they seek to be part of. Speaking to representatives of institutions teaching full-time dance courses, I detected a very determined positive stance about these changes with notes of distress filtering through.

Practice: new frameworks

Don Asker, Senior Lecturer and Post Graduate Coordinator at the Victorian College of the Arts is aware of the increasing rate of revision and evolution of courses generally. “A decade ago, there was a sense that a course was what it was, you could immerse yourself in it, and the field itself was quite tangible. But that was rather fanciful, and we are actually in a world that is dynamic and evolving at such a fast rate that there’s no real justification for perpetuating some programs…some institutes are better able to find a foundational core which enables the flexibility for dealing with rapid change and emerging needs. If you’re not in such a place, then you’re constantly involved in setting up new infrastructures and new resources.”

Kathy Driscoll, Senior Lecturer in Dance, University of Western Sydney, discussed the hilariously named “harmonisation process”, a university-wide restructure in which Dance, Acting and Theatre-making have been coerced into a new Bachelor of Performance, Theory and Practice. This was in addition to a simultaneous and thorough departmental review where people were invited to make submissions and students were surveyed extensively. She was concerned about the fragility of the wider tertiary system to support arts practice: “We’re facing this cut in dance, but the whole school—music, visual arts, all areas of contemporary arts at this university—is looking at cuts in staff, about a 30% reduction. That’s so significant.”

Ronne Arnold, Course Coordinator, National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association, comments: “Right now, I’m looking at an assessment report which suggests that a field trip is not an integral part of the course. But really, the field trip is the crucial element. Students get acquainted with the dances here first, and once they have an idea and know the elders who come to teach them, it’s easier for them to go into the community, because they have developed a relationship. Otherwise they’d never go.”

Development of specific cultural identity aside, the push is definitely global, and some institutions have been more successful in attracting a diverse range of students, from those interested in conservative approaches to dance and performance to those who desire more conceptually based collaboratively conceived, multidisciplinary work. Queensland University of Technology epitomises these strategies in its new Faculty of Creative Industries, and exhibits all the buzz words on its website: “QUT’s Creative Industries initiative is driven by changes in the international economic and social environment…The vision is to take the best of what we already offer in the performing and visual arts, computer and communication design, and media and journalism, and co-locate them in an interdisciplinary cluster dedicated to the creative aspects of the new economy…emphasising partnerships, networking, project-based innovation, and flexible working patterns.”

Cheryl Stock, Head of Dance, Queensland University of Technology, discusses the new configuration. “We have 6 different degrees, with 5 core units across all the degrees: Introduction to Creative Industries, Transforming Cultures, Creativity, Writing for Creative Industries and Introduction to Digital Multimedia, and no matter what discipline you’re in, you have to take 4 out of 5 of these components. We have 2 performance degrees (Bachelor of Fine Arts and the Associate Degree); the professional degree (Bachelor of Creative Industries, Dance) where students major in dance but take pathways through various subjects; and a double degree in Education Then there’s the new one, the Bachelor of Creative Industries (Interdisciplinary Degree) where people don’t belong to any particular discipline.

“Dance is fairly dominated by the digital environment. It’s definitely a valued component, but we have to keep reminding people not to forget about live work as well as mediated work. And that creates a problem for dance. With live dance forms, we have students working in the studio, so of course we still have huge contact hours.”

Elizabeth Dempster, School of Human Movement, Recreation and Performance, Victoria University, comments: “There’s a tension between the concern about experiential learning and its value, and the rather economic rationalist view that says wouldn’t it be good if everything was on-line, and funds could be diverted to other areas, away from studios and teachers. In fact some institutions would be under more pressure than we are because they’re even more practice-based. We haven’t chopped the experientially-based work but contact hours are less, due to funding restrictions.”

The VCA (University of Melbourne) and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Edith Cowan University) are 2 such practice-based institutions. VCA’s website states that the philosophical underpinnings still lie in studio practice, with classes in ballet and contemporary dance closely interrelated with composition and performance, and increased time in performance workshops. Performance and practice are also central to the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) philosophy, with daily technique classes, choreographic development and regular performance opportunities in a variety of venues. So is nurturing of strong links with professional organisations, companies and other artists, both locally and internationally. Both the Advanced Diploma stream and the BA program have a common year in first year and a core of ballet, contemporary, performance and choreography. While the Advanced Diploma is directed more towards mainstream dance with add-ons like pas de deux, pointe, repertoire, variations, the BA is more diverse and less defining, having been redesigned so that students can pursue individual goals as dance artists, choreographers, teachers or researchers. In the Honours course, students can choose either a research/performance project or audition for the Link Performance Dance Company. The MA in Creative Arts offers students the opportunity to refocus education in one particular art form and expose it to others.

Courses and communities

The social functioning within tertiary dance institutions and the relationship to the communities they are part of can sometimes be a complex weave of mainstream arts practices and non-dominant social values. VU, NAISDA and The Wesley Institute of Ministry & the Arts (WIMA) are 3 such institutions whose inceptions 20–30 years ago deviated considerably from what mainstream dance practice might have dictated. Still most important at NAISDA is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. “The component that the students come here for is the Indigenous—that’s primary, but we have a twofold program. Some of our students have never had the benefit of mainstream training so our institution fills that gap; a lot of students who come here also have no connection to their traditional culture, and they want to acquire that knowledge.” Similarly, WIMA offers courses which integrate dance training within a Christian framework. Evelyn Defina (Head of Dance, Wesley Insititute of Ministry & the Arts) comments: “Because of the nature of the college, there’s no competitiveness, no bitchiness. It’s more an atmosphere of encouragement and support, helping students to reach their potential. We offer a lot of one-to-one counselling, which we can do because we are small. That’s part of our brief.”

Elizabeth Dempster describes how the course at the Victorian University was initiated in response to a field of practice which didn’t have much institutional representation, being conceived of as “a platform for dance practices that were situated in cross-disciplinary or visual arts contexts and didn’t come out of conservative dance institutions. It was also giving ‘knowledge about’ and ‘experience of’, rather than expecting people to pop out of the course and be fully fledged artists. Now, it’s hard to decide what that community might be, it’s changed so radically over the last five years.”

Nanette Hassall says of WAAPA’s current environment: “We operate within a number of different communities. The most basic is the small group of independent artists who work in Perth. I spend two-thirds of my sessional budget, which is something like $40,000, on supporting that community. Artists are invited to make work with the students…When I came here, I found Perth very factionalised, and I think what we’ve done has helped to bring them more together, with more recognition of each other’s skills. We’re a kind of meeting place.”

Institutions also addressed questions about their skills base differently, but often discussed a similar convergent core of body-based work functioning alongside a diverse eclectic mix of other work which depended almost entirely on visiting and local artists. VU’s project-based work—8 hours a week—is determined by the visiting artists teaching it. Dempster says, “Strictly speaking it may not be a choreographic or dance approach. It may be a writing or visual arts project. The community of artists we draw on would rarely be from mainstream companies; they’re more the independent artists. And the sessional teachers are artists who have evolved and established their own practices in some way or other. These people are very diverse.

“The course is broad-based, and strong conceptually. Students get really excited by it, but they don’t get 2 technique classes a day. They have to find resources outside to build up the skills base if they want them…I still harbour the idea that you need a body practice in which to ground work, but for various reasons, the body-based work is about a third of the program. We do experiential anatomy, ideokinesis and improvisation, and these function as resources for students whose work may not evolve into a movement or dance-based form.”

At QUT there are rigorous classical or contemporary classes 4 days a week “because choreographers and directors still expect highly trained and virtuosic dancers…Mostly the contemporary styles are release-based because that’s what people teach, and are manifested quite differently with each teacher. All students are assessed similarly in alignment—which is fundamental in first year in both ballet and contemporary. We’re looking at generic attributes of styles, but we like the diversity that casual staff bring.”.

Getting work

Another concern has traditionally been about what students can achieve on leaving tertiary training. David Spurgeon, Faculty of Theatre, Film and Dance, University of New South Wales, has no qualms: “The immediate end is that students are going to be high school teachers of dance. Technique is fine, but we all know there aren’t jobs for dancers. What I’m promoting has a real goal in front of it. Everybody who graduates, who wants to teach and is prepared to travel, has a job. If you don’t want to teach full time, you can do casual teaching 2 days a week, which is better than waitressing, and you can make work.”

Nanette Hassall comments: “There’s no work in Perth, so it’s really important to get them out. But we can’t afford to turn their attention back to the eastern states because there’s no work there either…We encourage students to do overseas exchange programs which include places like Julliard in the US, the University of North Carolina, primarily for students who are very interested in teaching…There’s a lot of international benchmarking, taking the students to perform internationally. This year we’re performing in Dusseldorf at the Global Dance Festival. We’ve been to Korea twice, Malaysia 3 times…We’re also trying to invite at least one guest artist from Asia each year to make a work. Last year Shih Gee Tze came from Taiwan, and he also invited our students to perform with his company.”

Don Asker finds the contemporary VCA culture empowering: “We are getting a broader range of people and we can satisfy a broader range of desires. Within that, we’re making it possible for people to see that performance is changing. There are people working for companies like Chunky Move and Sydney Dance Company, but there are also a number of people seeking work in project environments that sometimes become extremely highly profiled. In the past we tended to have a more hierarchical perception of what was good achievement, but now we’re noticing that vocational pathways are much more complex. People move across them. Goals and aspirations are changing.”

Restless Dance’s in the blood continues this company’s interest in personal biography. The flow of memories weaves around the childhood body and the image of the birthday celebration, an event where the tension between welcome and unwelcome attention is heightened. The celebration of the person is poignantly lost amongst the preparations for the birthday and in group games.

A young man sits quietly on a chair. The other performers interact around him as if he is not there. Later he methodically moves along a row of cupcakes placed across the front of the playing area in a ritual of wishing—lighting the candle on the cake and blowing it out. Behind him daily tortures like the ‘hair brushing ritual’ or the ‘stand in the corner’ injunction are played out. Bodies struggle against each other in pleasure and discomfort. Times of physical achievement emerge—throwing, balancing on one’s hands. The piece moves effortlessly between group sequences, partnering and solos. The performers seem deeply engaged in the pleasure and process of moving.

Memory is constructed as decaying, both in the choice of the old Queens Theatre as venue and in the discoloured, frayed costuming—versions of Sunday best that also pass as retro-chic. The floor of the space is covered with fine sand and the replaying of memory leaves traces on this surface. In the distance, framed by a huge doorway, 4 musicians create swells that circle and resound in the space and then fade. At one stage one of the musicians plays Happy Birthday on water-filled glasses. The sound is slightly off-key yet crystal clear and melancholic.

The past is a strange country, so why and how do we revisit it? There is something in this work about reclaiming the desire to be playful and special. There is something also about pleasure and defiance in the struggle against interference and control by others.

Works in progress from Ausdance’s SA Choreo Lab were presented this year at the Space Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s programming initiative, in-space.

Helen Omand’s Up Front and Naked comprised a sequence of images of states of loss—loss of comfort, loss of perspective, loss of purpose, loss of belief, loss of restraint, loss of self, loss of mind. The unifying element in this associative flow between language, dance, light and video image was the sense that in each event the ‘performer’ was ‘out of place.’ The piece drew attention to the fact that the experience of ‘nakedness’ is perhaps the experience of a mismatch between behavior and context.

Katrina Lazaroff’s Finding the Funk was a solo about dancing. A series of sequences were structured around the contemplation of movement, moving into and out of a tap dance, contemporary, jazz or ‘club’ routine. It was intriguing to wonder what it was Lazeroff was wrestling with, in trying to ‘find the funk.’ Was it a quest for some sort of integration of disparate dance experiences or a more subjective discernment of when her dancing was ‘in the groove’?

Amanda Phillips’ When There’s Only (cinematographer Mark Lapwood) is a delicate and evocative film portrait of intergenerational and intra-generational relationship and dance. It shifts between a contemporary solo by a young woman and a group of older couples ballroom dancing in what appears to be a railway tunnel. The camera moves between couples and we notice nuances of touch and facial expression that suggest a far more subtle dance of desire and rejection as these bodies sweep across the floor. Is this the past travelling to meet the present or moving away from it?

Later we see the elderly men sitting on seats, waiting to be chosen to partner somebody. Their nonchalance and/or discomfort is captured in shifts of limbs and weight. One by one they are lead away until one man is left. He walks through the tunnel, then the young woman appears and they dance. Is he her father or grandfather? Is she his memory of lost love? The older dancers are interviewed on camera. We hear the stories of life partnerships formed or never found on the dance floor. The film poignantly captures the exquisite interplay between love, death, memory and dance and how the past and the present dance towards each other.

Waiting, choreographed and performed by Ingrid Steinborner and Felecia Hick, and filmed by them with Monte Engler, closed the gap between dance and video image through a seamless transference of action from live to video image. The performance built from the video image of a young woman waiting at a train station. This simple game between virtual and live body was so well played it felt like magic. The spatial shifts worked to bring the filmed and live bodies into such a direct relationship that it seemed as if the game was taking place in real time.

Sol Ulbrich’s tender fury began with an intricate sequence of gestures, a conversation between 2 women and a man that becomes barbed. Eventually the 3 break into a fight that travels through space and onto and off screen before transforming into a series of duets. This piece seemed influenced by the possibilities of film—the close-up and the location shot.

Sarah Neville’s Artifacts explored performance as archeology. The jangling of bone on bone accompanied Neville’s journey across the space. Bones unloaded with a thud, she danced. Drawn from Butoh and contemporary dance, her movement appeared deliberately fossilised, subject to a past logic.

Once Bitten, performed by Naida Chinner, devised with and directed by Ingrid Voorendt, was a study on love. It teetered between vaudeville slapstick, physical theatre—tragic comedy. Chinner enters in high heels, arms laden with tomatoes. She stumbles and the tomatoes spill across the floor creating a terrain of ‘bleeding hearts.’ She sings of love, performs a puppet show with the tomatoes and dances the spills of love, the falling down and picking yourself up again, with the occasional high kick. Some hearts get squashed. Chinner’s sweetness and bravado had us rooting for her in this sticky game.

The State Opera South Australia and Leigh Warren and Dancers collaborated to produce Philip Glass’ opera, Akhnaten. The Opera Studio was transformed by Mary Moore’s neoclassical design into a combination of exhibition, library and museum with slides, display cases and reading tables, chairs and a ‘temple.’ The opera begins with the principal singers as visitors to this museum/ library being shown around by the scribe, who is also the tour guide. The chorus enters as tourists dressed in clothes that could be day wear but also ancient costume. The dancers curl their bodies into the space. Their movement is repeatedly arrested. These contracted and splayed bodies become the preserved dead on display.

Various texts from ancient sources, some sung, some spoken, focus the music in each section. In this production each section is presented as a unique display. Warren’s staging is reminiscent of Glass’ music. The groups of performer are interwoven so as to present a unique image for each section.

The singers slide between representing historical figures and students of history or tourists. Their bodies have a held quality. They are careful, respectful tourists and historical characters suspended in time. The dancers create a shadowy play of past creeping around the present that reaches a thrilling climax when they compel the principal singers down to the floor again and again. It is in these moments of interaction that the ordered environment comes alive. Another exciting moment occurs when pages from the oversize books, used to structure the space, are torn out and scattered and the books slammed shut and thrown off their pedestals. This desecration of the pristine order of the space is visceral.

This production draws our attention to the act of preservation. The past is preserved and laid out for us and we, the audience to this past, are held in place, controlled in the present as we view this past. There is something relentless in Glass’ music, a similar obdurateness to that of the display case. I found myself revelling in the High Modernism of the production and longing for excess—the uncontrolled, damage, decay, the living body. It directed me though to muse on the place of the present in the contemplation of the past.

Restless Dance Company, in the blood, direction Ingrid Voorendt, The Queens Theatre, May 8-11; SA Choreo Lab, The Space, Ausdance & Adelaide Festival Centre, May 9-11; State Opera of South Australia & Leigh Warren & Dancers, Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts by Philip Glass, director/choreographer Leigh Warren, designer Mary Moore; The Opera Studio, Adelaide, May 16-25; Ausdance [SA], Australian Dance Week 2002, May 11-19

If the first ReelDance international Dance on Screen festival in 2000 had an emphasis on experiment and the arty end of the spectrum, this year’s event is more expansive, taking in social dance, ritual and traditional dance as well as popular forms such as music video.

For curator Erin Brannigan, this choice reflects trends evident in the major dance film festivals worldwide of which there are now around 12. “We’ve got everything from military drills performed in a deathly quiet country field, through a dance ritual set against a bombed out cityscape in Chechnya to the very best dance-theatre by Holland’s Hans Hof Ensemble—in their work R.I.P performers give a physical rendering of adults coming to terms with the death of their parents. In Human Radio Miranda Pennell (UK) films ordinary people performing ‘private’ dances in their living rooms. David Hinton (UK) is best known for his work with DV8, Wendy Houstoun and Russell Maliphant. We’ll be screening Birds, the film that won him the prestigious IMZ Dance Screen Award in 2000—a choreographic study of birds in flight.”

This year Brannigan again teams with the One Extra Dance Company to present ReelDance and coming on board for the first time is The Studio at Sydney Opera House, the venue for the festival, as well as a number of state-based organisations (Dancehouse, ACMI, PICA and the Adelaide Festival Centre) as partners in a national tour

Other highlights of the program include Sean O’Brien’s Sunrise at Midnight made with Melbourne choreographer Yumi Umiumare and inspired by an historic photograph of a troupe of Japanese female performers who toured outback towns at the turn of the century. There’s a chance to see Canadian Laura Taler’s multi award-winning short A Very Dangerous Pastime purported to “dispel the myth that dance is beyond comprehension for the lay person.” And all in 14 minutes. There are also full length documentaries on ‘bad girl’ Sylvie Guillem and ‘bad boy’ Michael Clark who disappeared from the dance scene a few years ago to deal with his heroin addiction.

Dance aficionados of all stripes should get along to Saturday night’s Legends of Tap and Jazz, a full evening of short and longer films from the Cinematheque de la Danse in Paris featuring rare footage of Josephine Baker, the Nicholas Brothers, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, Fred Astaire and all those others whose names are not so familiar (whatever became of Buck and Bubbles, Pops and Louie?). Nicolas Villodre from the Cinematheque is the special guest of the festival and will speak prior to the screenings at the free forum entitled Images and Dance: Struggle and Necessity. The forum’s at 7, followed by screenings from 8.15 on.

Recent music videos featuring some of the more radical experiments with dance will also be celebrated. Think Spike Jonze’ film of Fat Boy Slim’s Weapon of Choice with Christopher Walken dancing up a storm or the mockumentary dance troop in his Praise You or Lisa Ffrench’s choreography for Custard’s Girls Like That. These and others featuring Nick Cave, Moby, Madonna, Daft Punk and Blur will be screened, followed by a video forum with directors, choreographers and musicians.

The festival culminates with the finalists in the ReelDance Competition for Australian and, this year, New Zealand dance film and video, followed by the presentation of the Digital Pictures Award and other prizes. This year 60 films were submitted, double last year’s intake and according to the judges, showed an impressive degree of sophistication. The 11 selected for screening are: Arachne by Mathew Bergan and Narelle Benjamin and featuring the late Russell Page; in absentia by Margie Medlin and Sandra Parker (winners of the 2000 competition); No Surrender by Richard James Allen with performer/consultant Bernadette Walong; Sue Healey & Louise Curham’s Niche; Kate McIntosh’s The Gloaming; Tuula Roppola & Ian Moorhead’s Blowfish; Shona McCullagh’s Fly; Rosetta Cook’s Frocks Off; Julie-Anne Long & Samuel James’ Miss XL, Olase’s Dance by Louise Taube and court.(caught) a work by students from the University of Otago’s Dancelab.

ReelDance, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Aug 2-4 August; Adelaide Festival Centre, Aug 6-7; Cinema Paradiso in association with PICA, Perth, Aug 10-11; Federation Hall, VCA Melbourne in association with Dancehouse & ACMI, Aug 14-17; Star Court Theatre, Lismore in association with Dance Action Northern Rivers, Sept 27.

Despite the odds (funding uncertainties, space shortages and touring impossibilities) an impressive line-up of dancers from across the country will front for this year’s Antistatic dance festival which offers a positively immersive experience for audiences.

The galleries will be jumping with installations. You can go a few rounds with virtual dancer Nicole Johnston in Chunky Move’s interactive dance installation CLOSER conceived by Gideon Obarzanek with new media artist Peter Hennessey. This will be a sneak preview of a work commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and premiering at its opening in Melbourne later this year. More meditative possibilities on time, space and the performance experience are on offer in Queensland artist John Utans’ installations on second thoughts and immersed, the latter created with dancer Wendy McPhee and sound/film artist George Poonkhin Khut. In NICHE Sue Healey choreographs for 2 dancers and film loop by Louise Curham, and in Bird Talk 1-7, Paul Gazzola (the world via WA) answers, among other questions, “Can a toy bird teach me choreography?” In and around the galleries, in mini-Me the anarchic Jeff Stein attempts to join opposing forces of minimalism and expressionism in the one body and The Fondue Set lead the audience on another kind of dance.

Important at this year’s Antistatic is the presence of emerging choreographers in a program entitled Mobile States which also tours to Perth’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Artists include Simon Ellis (Victoria) presenting FULL, a dance-theatre work based on the life of his grandmother; Felicity Morgan (WA) unpacking a dialogue on duality in Twosomely; Helen Omand who’s work has been raising eyebrows in Adelaide at events like Fresh Bait and Ignition, presenting her solo Rapt. And if you missed its short season at B-Sharp last year in Four on the Floor, there’s a chance to catch Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters in the sexy Sentimental Reason which offers some new connections between physical theatre and dance.

In the second week, Rakini weaves dance and vocals in Claustrophobia, a collaboration with composer Liberty Kerr; Eleanor Brickhill and Jane McKernan take a close look at self-image in Waiting to Breath Out and Michael Whaites presents Driving Me, his elegant duet with the work of video artist Carli Leimbach.

Works in progress will be presented by NSW artists Nikki Heywood (Body/explosive device) investigating “how to deliver gesture and text to within the skin of the listener: bullet-like”, and stella b dancers Nalina Wait and Katy McDonald collaborate with lighting designer Richard Manner. Brian Lucas (Queensland) works with “a dense format of dance, text and sound” in The book of revelation(s) and Ingrid Voorendt (SA) choreographs Fatigue, a solo for Stephen Noonan in which words push against movement.

On the talk front, in Dances with Screens you can join in a conversation between artists working with live/virtual bodies including Gideon Obarzanek, Wendy Houstoun (UK), Louise Curham, George Poonkhin Khut and Brigid Kitchin (filmmaker on Kate Champion’s groundbreaking Same, same, But Different). In Everyday Dance Erin Brannigan, Elizabeth Dempster and Ros Warby examine some theoretical and performative possibilities of the pedestrian body.

The workshop program throws up all sorts of interesting challenges to the brave dance artist. Special guest tutor Wendy Houstoun, investigating the nature of projection, asks “What rationale requires screened and live bodies to appear together? Voice expert Carolyn Connors wants to know, “What are you trying to say, and are you?” And in Impro Inferno Andrew Morrish asks his charges to jettison the concepts of choreographer, author, director, theme and content to concentrate on “the performer” and “the moment.”

Imagine a bridge, its centre collapsed, swallowed by the river below, and with it the steam train the structure couldn’t hold and the passengers the train failed to protect and deliver. What remains from disappearance, or rather from the appearance of the accident, the catastrophe?

paralla x presents a series of points: marks that make a map. As Deleuze & Guattari suggest, you can enter and exit the map at any place. I sat, and walked, in the space for perhaps 90 minutes and enjoyed the necessary ‘slow time’ of this series of points or intensities. Most of this time I listened to the audio (the ghostly appearance of software artifacts, or a short time made longer) that accompanied panorama a, whilst watching the iterations of birds, the water, the fragments of a bridge (over the River Tay in Scotland). There are tones of the small and the inconsequential, and also of the devastating effects of catastrophe that makes me wonder about the expectations and failures of technology. There is a strength to this ‘work’ of play that lightens the weight of absence and mourning. It seeks neither to solve anything nor to problematise technology, rather to open up the spacings or the intervals within which things take place.

Perhaps the thing architecture and dance have most in common is a necessary primary concern with gravity. Jude Walton worked with dancers and a biomechanist over a period of 4 months, using a range of equipment designed to measure the moving body. The use of augmented video goggles blurred the distinctions easily made between perceptions of inside and outside bodies: the points where the actual and the virtual meet, intersect, and affect bodies and orientations. On a small monitor set back in an angled recess, trace 3 displays lo-hi-tech stick-figure tracings made by sensors placed on points of the body in movement.

Mark Michinton’s catalogue essay, “Dance, chance, dream, scream”, notes the changes to the perceptions of the body in space effected by technological innovations in the 19th century—trains, planes and cars. The shock of speed. Across from the loose pile of fallen poles lit from underneath trace 2, is panorama b. Triggered by movements nearby, a model train engine circles a barren space. Enclosed in a wire cage this could be the interminable state of emergency.

panoptic sphere is a large video wall projection of a dancer (Ros Warby) in a room. The camera records her movements from below the floor and repeats its capture at feet, at thigh, at chest, at head, from above. “[The] size of the image (gargantuan) overwhelms as our imagination tries to construct the whole” (Jude Walton, email). It wasn’t so much that I was overwhelmed by the size of the image—perhaps the now familiar scale of megaplex cinemas has something to do with that. Rather I was made curious about where the body of the dance, or performance, meets the body(s) of the viewer, the gallery space and the image.

Quotation from Cristina Caprioli, Immanent Choreographies: Deleuze And Neo-Aesthetics, Conference, New Tate Modern, September 2001

Jude Walton, paralla x, video and light works installation; panoptic sphere: Ros Warby: choreography, dancer; Jude Walton: camera, editing; panorama: Jude Walton: camera, editing; Nick Von-der-Borche: train table design and construction; Tony Bishop: wire frame tunnel; Jason Keats: model; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, May 2-June 8

The Age of Unbeauty has a sombre beauty. Musically, from its minimalist beginnings, through glides and subterranean bubblings, through its sad piano reversed against heaving organ chords, its insistently ominous rumblings, it breathes not dissonance or dissent but a fluent angst, resignation even, and is in the end usurped (presumably it had nowhere else to go) by some sentimental Bjork hymning, happiness-to-go. The design is vertiginous. At the back of a deep space a huge wall, like a parquet floor viewed from above, stands as if about to fall. Performers standing on their hands dance against it, the world upside down. Hidden doors open. One reveals a naked man and woman forced painfully against a perspex barrier, looking like a Renaissance painting of Adam and Eve banished from Eden, but with nowhere to go, only this purgatory. To be purged of what? Until near the end of the work, the beauties of the place are austere, danced duets and trios that speak not of union and sensuality but of bodies locked in furious combat or exercising en masse as if to exorcise…what? It’s a world where the mass divides and turns on itself with a finely articulated cruelty—those who are now the other are naked or masked and manipulated like puppets, beautifully, with apparent compassion but a dangerous grip. This is a world where the blind lead the blind, their suit trousers down around their ankles as they traipse again along the wall. One man (Dean Walsh), a kind of Everyman, or rather no man, because he doesn’t fit, totters awkwardly through this nightmare unable to break through to connect, occasionally complicit, only once eloquent and beautiful as he dances the wall, as if to scale it, and, at the end of the performance staggers to the forestage and collapses, presumably finished. Around him are couples whose entwinings no longer seem knotted, but supple and responsive, but…too late? The performance has ended but the wall, as it was at the beginning of the performance, becomes a huge screen filled with faces of diverse ages and cultures and Bjork bjorks on and on. Poor old Bjork to be put to such use. It might have seemed a radical gesture a decade ago, but here it irks with more sentimentality than irony, as if, like Luke Smile’s score for the performance, Stewart simply couldn’t conjure optimism, only in this addendum. Conceived partly after September 11, The Age of Unbeauty has some sense of topicality—a single strand of barbed wire hangs high across the stage, beneath it, as the performance begins, figures stand or sit in groups, or alone, watching, waiting, perhaps like refugees. They regroup. Time passes. They shift. It’s a potent image. Soon, however, the nightmare speedily engulfs them and is only ever distantly evocative of the specific unbeauties of our age. The Age of Unbeauty is a powerful work, even if it short circuits itself from time to time, and even if it feels less coherent than it should. Its dark vision might have seemed less loaded and the dynamics of its finale more complex had it foregone its cinematic ending. As ever, the dancers are superb, meeting Stewarts’ theatrical and choreographic demands with verve, bringing beauty to torment, one of art’s strange but necessary conditions.

Australian Dance Theatre, The Age of Unbeauty, devised & directed by Garry Stewart, choreographed with the company, dramaturgy David Bonney, design Stewart, Gaelle Mellis, Geoff Cobham, costume Gaelle Mellis, sound design Luke Smiles, lighting Damien Cooper, video artist David Evans. The Action Pack Season, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, June 26 – July 6.

Upholster is, as Phillip Adams states, a choreographic upholstery. From the intricate warp and weft of the movement to the larger patchwork of dance genres, across multiple references to fabrics, coverings, home-decorating and domestic environments, Adams takes a lateral, comprehensive and humorous approach to his theme.

With the proximity afforded by The Studio venue, the choreographic inventiveness, speed and sophistication is thrilling. Duets, trios and quartets fill the space with single figures appearing peripherally only to disappear again before pulling focus. Moving from podiums at the back of the space onto futon-like mattresses on the floor, sexual partnering and playful tussling inspire a choreographic frenzy of inter-weaving limbs and bold positions—thighs wrap around hips and dance partners kiss in a refreshingly frank representation of sexual intimacy.

On their feet, the dancers eat up the space in more clever groupings, or strut across the stage to take up new formations. The inventiveness continues with our attention drawn to both the large movements through space and the articulations of limbs, hands, fingers. The flow of this style of choreography is interrupted by 2 episodes. Knitwear provides Adams with a finicky and intimate choreographic device as the dancers button themselves into their own and each other’s cardigans. The tone of this sequence is in perfect keeping with the ‘cardy’ as an object associated with domestic cosiness. The second episode features Michelle Heaven in a deft characterisation of a shy upholsterer drawn into a fantasy world of floating lounges and sensual awakening. This section is well-crafted and entertaining, and clearly fits in with the themes of upholstery and the sexual liberation associated with the 70s though the shift in performance style requires a leap of faith from the audience.

The score provided by ‘turntabulist’ Lynton Carr drives the performance with psychedelic rock & roll, searing guitar riffs and funky rhythms. References to 70s music, fashion and ideals add other aesthetic/thematic layers to the texture of the choreographic fabric, and at times threaten the subtlety of the broader theme. The costuming is an example of this; a blend of singlets, lairy loose pants, chunky Y-fronts and pleated Dervish-like skirts for the boys, cardigans, frilly knickers and 50s frocks. The schizophrenia suggested by this is not necessarily a bad thing, and the plethora of styles, fabrics and patterns is appropriate to the theme. But the second half in particular accelerates and fills with so many references that the ending left me feeling unsatisfied—a promise that had been registered in the first half left unfulfilled.

The dancers are a group of individualised performers, rare at a time when youth and physical facility seem to dominate our dance stage—not that these dancers lack either. A variety of body shapes and personalities carries Adams’ work off in style, with stand-out performances from Stephanie Lake, Brooke Leeder, Gerard Van Dyck and Michelle Heaven. The Studio also felt like the perfect venue for this ambitious and style-savvy work.

Phillip Adams’ BalletLab, Upholster, choreography Phillip Adams; performers Michelle Heaven, Gerard Van Dyck, Stephanie Lake, Brooke Stamp, Ryan Lowe, Kyle Kremerskothen, Brooke Leeder; turntable composition Lynton Carr; décor/costumes Dorotka Sapinska; lighting Ben Cobham & Andrew Livingston. The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 26-July 6.

Since the 1960s at least, the body as raw material for art, as a canvas or screen, as a site for artistic exploration, as a kind of (anti-)performance in real time, has generated insight and alarm, especially where it’s been the artist’s body and the means have been endurance or invasion, often by cutting. There are many forms of performance art, even if they are rarely encountered these days in Australia, but in Europe what has become a tradition, or perhaps unfinished business, is still well and truly alive and provocative. Some of it is coming to Australia.

Zane Trow, Artistic Director of Brisbane’s Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, met Nikki Milican at the 2000 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Milican was there as part of the New Moves (new territories) venture with the festival and the Australia Council. The Choreolab workshop in Adelaide was the precursor to some 30 Australian choreographers and dancers participating in the New Moves (new territories) international dance event in Glasgow shortly after. In 2002 Millican invited 2 of those artists, Lisa O’Neill and Cazerine Barry, to participate in new territories, a celebration of new choreography and performance, incorporating New Moves, Scotland’s international festival of contemporary choreography, and The National Review of Live Art, a unique annual event which has been running since 1981—and since 1984 under Milican’s directorship. NLRA is focussed on performance art, contemporary performance and time-based art, all under the Live Art banner. Trow had attended the 2001 event and commissioned the works by O’Neill and Barry that Milican picked up. Now it’s his turn to bring several British artists, Milican, Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency and a Glasgow arts journalist to Brisbane in October for the next stage of what he hopes will be a growing pattern of exchange and market development.

The NRLA is exemplary, says Trow, in providing infrastructure for performance: “It has done so for 20 years and you can feel that resonance…It brings together the young and the established and creates an energy.” The variety and richness of the performance forms Milican presents is evident in Edward Scheer’s report on the 2002 event in RealTime 49 (see also www.newmoves.co.uk). The festival featured over 200 professional artists from more than 12 countries across 4 continents. For his small but intensive 3 and a half day first-time program, Trow is focusing on performance art (as opposed to theatre-based contemporary performance): “I’m a lover of performance art because it is so anti-theatrical, so casual and off-handed, and it continues to investigate time, space and the body in significant ways.” He thinks the NRLA has been invaluable in nurturing performance, creating a safe house for the development of risky work, commissioning new work for many years and spawning offshoots like the London-based Live Art Development Agency (www.liveartlondon.demon.co.uk), an organisation which receives funding from the British Government and allocates it to the performance community (a model we should be giving serious thought to in Australia).

Australian performance artists have not been able to sustain careers focused entirely on their practice in the way that UK and European counterparts have done for over 20 years. Trow would like this issue debated, especially as he thinks that Australian performance artists are as good as any, more eclectic and often with a different sensibility with regard to the body, hence the acclaim for Lisa O’Neill’s idiosyncratic performances in Glasgow. It’s been a long time, he says, since the 1994 celebration, 25 Years of Performance Art (RT 5) and the appearance of Anne Marsh’s Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969-1992 (book and CD-ROM, OUP 1993). While names like Mike Parr, Jill Orr, Linda Sproul and Barbara Campbell have currency, and venues like Artspace are committed to occasional performance art events, the form is not prominent and careers are provisional. In Glasgow in 2001, Trow relished meeting artists “who are still ‘crazy’ and have careers as performance artists…appearing in Vienna, London, New York, and are recognised, and survive as artists and teachers in their field.” Trow also thinks that the NRLA “tells you a lot more about Britain than the RSC and Oasis.” The performers he’s bringing out, he says, offer a snapshot of British culture.

Given Milican’s enthusiam for Australian work, Trow sees the exchange with the NRLA as creating “a pathway into Europe in a different way from the Australia Council’s Performing Arts Market and the big arts festivals.” He’s also encouraged by the likes of Daryl Buckley, Artistic Director of the ELISION new music ensemble, who has successfully worked with a group of European producers to create an international audience for his company. For these producers, Millican and others, like Maria Magdelena Schwagermann (formerly of Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre and now Artistic Director of the Zurich Arts Festival), Australia is a hothouse of artistic creativity and distinctive inventiveness.

Trow describes the NRLA at the Powerhouse as a mix of installation, performance, workshop and dialogue. Performances will also be presented in Perth by Artrage (the longtime fringe festival is now under the new artistic directorship of Marcus Canning; see interview in RT#51). Trow is hoping that the visit will provide an opportunity for Australian practitioners to come and meet their British counterparts. It’s also an opportunity to hear from Milican and Keidan just how live art is nurtured, regarded and archived in the UK. The NRLA has a close association with Nottingham Trent University which has recently digitised 20 years of documentation of UK performance art. It could also be an opportunity to hear about the Contemporary Theatre Practice course at Glasgow’s Royal Academy of Music & Drama—Milican is Chief External Examiner. Lois Keidan (formerly Director of Live Art at London’s ICA) will speak about the NRLA, the Live Art Development Agency, curation and government arts policies and the support for performance across Europe. Mary Brennan, a mainstream journalist and passionate supporter of contemporary performance will address the media’s relationship with art.

Trow describes Michael Mayhew’s work as “extreme.” A preoccupation with death and decay is realised in a “durational work in a coffin in which he damages himself with glass and creates puppet icons of the body.” Mayhew has been creating works since the mid 80s, travelling “through the disciplines of dance, theatre, large scale and site-specific.” He is currently Artist in Residence at NRLA. In the notes provided on the performers, Mayhew writes that while in Australia he will search for a sister he has not seen for 38 years, and “I hope to travel to the desert to play with fire.”

Richard Layzell, says Trow, is “very anti-theatre”, “one of the first to stand in the street with a cardboard box on his head.” His “sustained anti-performance” has included a lecture on varieties of ducting tape “delivered in a bad 70s safari suit…funny, but real and with no theatrical pretense.” His work is “a mix of video, spoken word and meaningless gesture…so well-formed, a well-honed meaninglessness developed over many years.” Layzell is a member of Rescen, a research group of performers, composers and choreographers based at Middlesex University. For NRLA at the Powerhouse, Layzell will present Performing Everyday; it’s about “process, making, not performing, the art of cleaning, personal history, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi and Layzell’s alter ego.” An intriguing aspect of Layzell’s career (which includes international performances, a widely seen interactive installation and several books) is his role as Visionaire for AIT Ltd, an arts-industry crossover company established in 1995, “recently voted in the top 5 companies to work for in the UK.”

Kira O’Reilly, whose work Trow sees as having kinship with that of Mike Parr and Stelarc, invades her own body in acts of self mutilation. He describes the work as demanding, as “monumentally beautiful and very considered”, “asking the most difficult question…how far can art go? Far beyond questions about voyeurism and ‘is the theatre dead’? It is a work of art, not self-abuse.” O’Reilly might perform (the demands of the work preclude an early decision); she’ll certainly talk and show videos of her work. She writes: “Making direct and explicit interventions in my body, I have bled, scored and marked and scarred by way of investigating the unruly and chaotic materiality of my substance and the disparate narratives at play within. This action begins where words fail me.” A 1998 graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, she has been the recipient of a grant, a visual arts award and 6 commissions.

George Chakravarti’s video installation, Shakti, fuses images of the Mona Lisa and Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation with that of the artist himself. Born in New Delhi, Chakravarti was raised as a Catholic but also came under the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism from within his family. He writes: “Shakti integrates painting and performance and delivers it as a time-based medium. An hour-long piece in real time, Shakti is viewed as a painting. I see the piece as a self-portrait, placing myself as the hybrid figure…I question my own identity and experiences of gender, race and sexuality, originating from the East and located in the West.” Based in London, Chakravarti is currently completing his Masters Degree at the Royal College of Art.

The 3 and half days of the NRLA in Australia at Brisbane’s Powerhouse promises to be intense and provocative, another (hopefully ongoing) significant addition to Brisbane’s burgeoning contemporary arts scene and a great opportunity to gain insight into the nurturing, funding and proselytising of performance in Europe. Most of all it’s about meeting and witnessing the work of leading British performance artists. To add to the frisson, you might think of enrolling in Richard Frayzell’s performance workshop, “which will explore communication, the irrational and the state of ‘not performing’. This is suitable for all ages and abilities, no previous experience is necessary.”

The National Review of Live Art, Brisbane Powerhouse, in partnership with New Moves International, Oct 15-18. www.brisbanepowerhouse.org

Innana’s Descent

There’s something eerily right about being taken beneath a Masonic Centre (appropriately a bunker of a building in Sydney’s CBD concealing sanitised ancient male rituals) to see a performance about a Sumerian goddess of about 5,000 years ago whose various manifestations (Ishtar, Astarte, Isis etc) place her somewhere in the long transition from matriarchal to patriarchal cultures. Her moon goddess journey into the underworld to confront the dark self of winter and death (her sister Ereshkigal) before emerging to regenerate the world requires her, as ruler of the solar year, to sacrifice a male, the shepherd king, the man-bull Dumuzi (from an earlier time when shepherds could become kings and kings were ritually slaughtered). There’s a curious pleasure in seeing this ritual enacted, especially when we are cast in the role of tourists visiting an archaelogical dig in an underground carpark. Here we are transformed from observers into witnesses as the performance slips from site tour (with lectures and projections) into ritual, sometimes hovering between as the workers in the dig appear as gods from the waist up, their grubby shorts and boots below, and battered car hubcaps and number plates are labelled and held aloft like sacred icons.

Our progress is brisk as we move into the harsh lights and dusty hubub of the wonderfully constructed site (designer Joey Ruigrok, sculptor/prop maker Shigeyuki Ueno, lighting Richard Montgomery, sound/music Felicity Fox, Gene Gill) with its wall charts, projections, table displays, industrial rumble and rattle, the manufacturing of objects (for the tourist trade?) and the droll chief archaeologist (Katia Molino) who will be our guide. She’s a likeable eccentric in love with the erotics of the dig (“excruciating as a slow striptease”) and divulging some of her own rituals—she collects the underpants of 147 men she’s slept with to date as well as purchasing round glass paperweights that recall their testicles). She also explains the fragmentary nature of her discoveries and of the goddess narratives, and muses, like any good postmodernist, ”Do you take fragments for what they are?” However, the tensions rife among the workers on the dig, without signal, become those between the gods they are symbolically (and later literally) exhuming. One of them (Chris Murphy) becomes Innana in a serio-comic boots’n’all expression of desire: “Who will plough my vulva, who will water my lettuce?”

From then on the sheer strangeness of this ritual world enmeshes us as we are marshalled about the site, watching Innana in a small wagon sharing wine with her increasingly drunk Father-King (Michael Cohen) and divesting him of his glittering royal apparel from top to bottom (including, of course, his worker’s underpants). After Innana ropes in the man-bull of her dreams (Dominique Sweeney), 2 thuggish and brutally competitive guardians (Cohen and Carlos Gomes) drive a path through the audience, divesting her of those same objects as she is drawn to a opening in the site wall, a projection that transforms into a spiralling journey into the vulva-underworld of her fearsome sister (Yumi Umiumare, magnicifently poised, cackling gutturally). Innana disappears. We are lead deeper into the underworld, the next floor down, and seated in a circle for a demonstration. The archaelogist makes a small cut in the mummified goddess, unaware that the demonic sister hangs below on the same gurney. A hand slips out of the cloth, Innana emerges. However, Ereshkigal will not release her without sacrfice. Innana seductively traps the horned Dumuzi (he’s enjoying a beer and a bit of country music) as the line between the fantastic and the real again emerges. Innana’s pudendum flowers with lettuce, a moment equally serious, comic and other. Life is restored. The archaeologist worships her alabaster statuette of Innana, a private ritual. The big, satisfied audience heads for the overworld, chatting, bemused, enthused. We’ve been somewhere deep in our white psycho-cultural history with its perplexing middle eastern origins, heading home to dig out our copies of Totem and Taboo, The White Goddess and those feminist histories of matriarchy.

It’s been a long time between shows, and earlier works were flawed despite some impressive moments. Theatre Kantanka prove themselves with Innana’s Descent. The structure of the work, the physically brave, focused performances, the totality of invention in design and audience management reveal a maturing vision. There are still challenges: the dialogue is simply not of the same calibre as the rest of the work and the realisation of the one conventional character, the archaelogist, seems incomplete. Katia Molino’s performance, as always, is a fine one, however her relationship with Innana as scripted seems more ironic than intimate, just as her private rituals seem trivial beside the cultural and psychological riches of the Innana stories. The audience is immersed in this other world, but the archaeologist seems largely immune to it and what it might mean for her. Having established her preoccupations so clearly it seems a pity that they have nowhere to go. I craved an encounter between the archaeogist and Innana, some more substantial act of identification. In another, imagined version of Innana’s Descent, the archaelogist, not one of the site workers, becomes Innana, at least somewhere in the unfolding ritual. Complaints aside, this was an enjoyable, sometimes disturbing experience, a work that demands to be kept in repertoire.

Four on the Floor

In Legs on the Wall’s latest and invaluable ongoing collection of new works by company associates and guests, it’s Alexandra Harrison as performer and director in Together and Diffusion who impresses with a challenging presence and some bold inventiveness. Like Sentimental Reason (Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters) from last year’s B Sharp program and Brendan Shelper and Tina McErvale’s Bumping Heads (Next Wave 2002), Together (director Rowan Machingo, creator-performers Harrison & Machingo) displays a scintillating choreographic sensibility fusing dance and physical theatre in a tense couple scenario of power shifts and in-and-out-of-sync emotional phases. In Diffusion, although rather slightly resolved, Harrison packs the performance with physical distress, erotic manoeuvres and a deft use of the vertical in the tiny theatre.

Pussy Boy

Christine Evans’ fable about a boy who wants to fly but whose only flights in the end will be those of fancy, even lunacy, is tautly constructed, ably directed (Chris Mead) with an eye to suspense and clarity, and finely performed. Ben Fountain as the boy is quietly curious. His tyrannical father (Chris Ryan) just as quietly imposes on the boy his misanthropy (built on mysogyny) via physical threat (from the same hammer and nails he wants his son to master) and example—casting out the old woman (Clare Grant) who lives with just too many dogs in the same building. A policeman and a policewoman, a kind of bitter-sweet chorus, watch the action like indifferent minor gods who might occasionally empathise but know they have no real power and who are more interested in each other in the end. Ryan and Grant, both from Sydney’s contemporary performance scene, bring distinctive presence to the work, a stillness and restraint that suits the poetry of Evans’ text and the intimacy of Belvoir St Downstairs. The live musical score for cello is fine in itself but too heavily underlines the misery of the tale. Evans (My Vicious Angel), now writing from the US, again proves herself a master of construction and spare, evocative dialogue in a quasi-fantastic setting.

Kicking & Screaming New Writing Theatre, B Sharp, Downstairs Belvoir St Theatre, June 20-July 7.

The Waiting Room

Works like this are important at a moment when Australia is evincing an insular meanness on the one hand and global gung-hoism on the other in an ugly allegiance with the USA. For the converted, who know these issues only too well, the work is a theatre experience that confirms convictions but, given the distance the government has calculatedly put between us and refugees, also puts emotional flesh on the bones of abstraction. The Waiting Room, from Sydney’s Platform 27 (director Richard Lagarto), but premiering in Melbourne in collaboration with the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre, is a gruelling experience on at least 2 counts. The first is its explicit enactment of life in one of Australia’s detention centres. A large projection screen, a clutter of video monitors (multimedia by Rolando Ramos) at floor level and a large, ominous mobile, transformable frame (set design Sam Hawker) collectively evoke a concentration camp in the Australian outback, aided by Liberty Kerr’s melancholy score, played live, and Stephen Hawker’s shadowy nightmare lighting. The screens also carry images evocative of harsh journeys paralleling the story-telling of the performers as refugees, as well as the ludicrous Australian Government video with its shots of dangerous fauna aimed at deterring asylum seekers. The construction of The Waiting Room epically alternates the Kafkaesque tale of a distressed traveller, personal stories of refugee flight and dramatisations of escalating detention centre cruelty with moments of pure agitprop satire of government and media. All of this is admirably performed, sensitively and often with physical and vocal verve by Wahibi Moussa, Steve Mouzakis and Valerie Berry multiplying themelves into a host of characters ranging from depressed children to John Howard. The second count on which this show is gruelling is overkill. The understandable anger that drives The Waiting Room constantly threatens to overwhelm it, to suck everything into an agitprop vortex—everything is known, worked out, pre-judged, performers become virtuosic machines, their personalities dissipated, some scenes are hectoringly simplistic, a number feel redundant. There is nothing here that cannot be addressed by judicious editing, some opening out of the best material and a fresh look at some of the scripting (by many hands) now that the play has had its first run.

The Waiting Room is a confident step forward for Platform 27. Trades Hall, Melbourne, May 15-June 1

Talking performance training is like finding yourself in an alternate universe, the familiar suddenly becomes a terrain of possibilities, bristling with unmapped spaces, virgin forests, alien influences, new performative species. Explanatory metaphors fill the air, time and space seem different here. The inhabitants speak of perceptual fields, of performance as thought and about having to learn to sit with ambiguity and uncertainty. Protocol demands you not mention the psychology of motive or the actor’s relation to story, certainly not until a lot of other things are addressed. In this world, the practitioners of contemporary performance and teachers in acting schools and performance-making courses are responsive to both the performer’s complex needs as a body, and to a new world where ways of being, holding space, the very desire to perform and the need to speak, if at all, are pivotal. Here performers are proud of their autonomy and the capacity to collaborate, occupy theatres, galleries, streets, sites, and interact with communities, across cultures and cyberspace. This world is a wilderness, new and uncharted, but like all such places it has its own proliferating laws, methodologies, possibilities and those poly-linguals who speak its languages. The university and the actor training school can be found here too, adapting to the artistic, intellectual and job market demands of the new performance species. They are also instigators, these artist-teachers and fellow travellers, opening out notions of acting and performance. While the very idea that universities should teach contemporary performance is alien to some, Mark Minchinton, actor, dramaturg, lecturer (Faculty of Human Development, Victoria University) proposes that the terrain he and his fellow teachers have opened up (and sometimes fight to preserve) within a university is a “wild space.”

Minchinton says that the 3 year Bachelor of Performance Studies is about performance-making but it is not strictly vocational: it’s for thinkers, makers, performers who are encouraged to “think the performance”, a performance not rooted in traditional forms. He says, however, that the course is excellent preparation for theatre and dance, or, alternatively, for established performers re-thinking their craft. Minchinton himself teaches performance skills, in particular what he calls “performance ethics” explored through team work and collaborative projects mixing first, second and third year students. Individual projects also emerge, especially in the final year when the focus is entirely on making works. By turns the work, he says, is exhilarating and nerve wracking because you’re always asking, What am I doing?” His answer? “Creating and preserving a wild space, re-describing it and protecting it…playing with the university structure…establishing an ethical relationship with it, striving to not be dictated by it.”

The nature of the collaborative projects is up to the artists who teach in the course. “We depend on diverse sessional staff as a guarantee against insularity.” Teachers include Elizabeth Dempster (see page 30), Jude Walton, Margaret Cameron, Margaret Trail, Chris Babinska, and Minchinton himself. Graduates go in many different directions—Pia Miranda into film (Looking for Alibrandi) and theatre (eg Benedict Andrew’s demanding production of Fireface for Sydney Theatre Company), Domenico de Clario into performance art and heading a visual arts department (Edith Cowan University, WA), others go on to further study and training at RMIT in fine arts and multimedia, and the VCA for theatre or dance.

For Bruce Keller, writer, performer and teacher, University of Western Sydney, the Theatre Making (formerly Theatre Theory & Practice) Bachelor of Arts degree is about all kinds of performance—site specific, community, cross-cultural—and alertness to new developments. The course combines study and practice. Keller says that students usually arrive with a rigid notion of theatre. He tells them however, “We’re here to mess with your minds,” opening them up to possibilities, to appreciate the diverse range of performance practice to be found in Sydney. In a university with adjoining music, dance and fine arts departments the cross-disciplinary potential is rich. Keller’s particular pleasure is watching for student epiphanies. He explains that most students when they enrol know that they like the arts, but are not sure what career they want, unlike, say, those students who are accepted into this university’s acting course. It might take a year or 2 of making work before a student hits on what they want to become—that could come from performance, lighting, sound, production management, a community project… Sometimes, he says, it comes out of a very demanding experience. Many students will go on to become teachers, taking with them an expansive and subtle view of performance. What the students gain, he says, is confidence, openness and ideas. Through off-campus projects as part of the course they work with communities and interculturally. These and other experiences provide professional links and industry contacts. Like Minchinton, Keller is emphatic about the value of sessional teachers drawn from Sydney’s performance community: “Students often don’t know it but they’re getting the cream of the Sydney performance milieu.”

Writer and director Richard Murphet runs the performance-making course at the Victorian College of the Arts within the Drama School. It is a 1 year Post-Graduate Diploma in Animateuring (or a 2 year Masters) in collaboration with the Dance School. Murphet sees no polarity between theatre and performance, believing it a continuum entailing “deep, interpretative acting skills.” What is central, he argues is “the figure in space and how text, image, structure, multimedia relate to the performer.” Rather than character it’s “the revelation of presence” as demanded not only by contemporary performance, he says, but the plays of Maria Irene Fornes, late Beckett, Caryl Churchill, Jenny Kemp. For the postgraduate animateur performance-making course, it’s all about “what’s going on in the space”, not the story: “Narrative is only [Hitchcock’s] McGuffin…it’s what’s between the actors that the audience gets off on.” What has to be asked is “what is the grain of the voice?”, “how do you whisper a movement?” The animateurs do 3 or 4 projects involving a solo performance, participation in a production directed by Murphet, facilitation of a work involving first year actors and an independent project of their choice. In these activities the students get to work with composers, choreographers and other artists. In their courses they are taught by Lisa Shelton, Tanya Gerstle, Robert Draffin and Murphet. They observe scene classes with Lindy Davies (page theatre article) and “pick what they want.” Graduates, he says, get work everywhere, with theatre companies, venues, in regional arts, directing, facilitating, performing.

I was curious about what a director expects of the trained performers she works with. Jenny Kemp has produced a unique body of work in Australian theatre that makes very particular demands on her performers who have backgrounds in acting, dance, voice and movement. She has worked recurrently with a number of performers and, significantly, regards them as her collaborators. Kemp articulates her expectations precisely. “Rhythm and timing are to do with intuition. Sometimes they are automatic in a performer, but not always. They have to be nurtured.” There is also the challenge of balance between the vocal, the physical, conceptual and spatial kinaesthetics of performance. “In a very general way”, she says, “tradition leans on the voice. Therefore the text is attended to and not the space” the performer finds herself in. In rehearsal, the performer “has to find a place, a world in which to stand, to inhabit…and must respond to the text spatially. The response should not always be that the performer speaks. Again this is to do with timing which is a kind of umbrella over all the elements of performance.” Kemp thinks that the worst scenario “is a homogeneity of rhythms in a group of actors…They each need their own sense of rhythm and character.” Another expectation is for performers “to sit with uncertainty and ambiguity, to be able to deal with contradictions within the rehearsal process, within their character, within the play. They must accept that a director will make mistakes and will change her mind.” Similarly, they must understand that contrary actions can be played in a character: “It’s obvious, but the actor must sit with complexity and contradiction, must embrace pluralism and difference.” Because the work is group-based, the performer also needs to be patient and tolerant, to keep working when not paid attention or when things are difficult, to have “a certain degree of autonomy.” A key expectation is to “hold form during performance. It’s a standard requirement but it’s not always understood. If the trajectories are strong it always helps.” I ask Kemp about younger performers she’s worked with recently: “I felt the training and the talent…There’s somehting palpable when someone arrives with training. It’s also about curiosity. It has to be there. Sometimes [it’s there] despite the training—which is sometimes developed for something else…It’s about how an actor relates to surfaces and depths, the inside and the social.”

Margaret Cameron is a writer and performer and has been a sessional teacher at the Victoria University for 7 years as well as at the VCA. At the former she teaches voice to first year students, “But not in terms of technique. It’s about the need to have a voice, of finding the need to have a voice, to go straight to the point about articulation. I ask the student, ‘Tell me something exactly.’ The more difficult it is to speak of something, the more interesting it is.” Like Kemp she sees the working group as made up of different qualities. “A performance is many perspectives in a space. The next premise is that space is created by perceptual practice…the intersections of those perceptions. A stage is a frame, a point a view, a window…” Cameron describes our usual state as like having a hand pressed against our face: “you have to push it away to create a space, a performance space in which to play. There is no play without space, no articulation of bits, no movement.” The process then is about “ways to practice perception” and in this she has been influenced by Deborah Hay, the American dancer and teacher she has worked with. After creating the desire to speak, Cameron procedes on to movement, to using the “invisible muscles…breaking every movement into a trillion pieces” by asking questions with no answers and afterwards asking the students to tell her what they felt, their own feedback. “They come back to language as if new. You put yourself in a place of observation minutely, otherwise there is no space. This is about thought and the body as thinker. Thought is the ability to endure ambiguity.”

For Cameron, the unversity “has been an amazing assistance. I use it to work. The university and my students are my collaborators.” At the end of the course? “The students are alone with it”, with what they have learned and become.

There’s a growing tendency for theatre and performance studies departments that are not primarily training oriented to include a practical component to offer students some sense of what it means to devise, produce and perform in a work for an audience and how that relates to what they’ve been studying. Clare Grant, former Sydney Front member, solo performer and actor teaches in the Theatre, Film & Dance Department, University of NSW.

She declares: “There’s nothing to study unless you’ve done it.” Her focus is on performance making, offering students alternatives to the character-based, cause and effect narratives of conventional theatre. Students opting for performance making include those in theatre, performance studies and film, or studying combinations of these for their degree. The Workshop Exercise course, for example, planned in conjunction with other courses, and, choosing from a range of performance types, culminates in a public production. Grant says that if she’s directing, the outcome is “not group-devised”, but “comes from individual imagery,” yielding a multi-layered performance. She amalgamates the individual performances into the finished work. One goal is to develop an awareness in students of “how to present the present moment” and she encourages students to “learn how to work without creating subtext.” Although Grant is not formally training students to be performers, her aim is for them “to be confident and hold the space”, “to look good in that space” and “to have a good experience.” Autonomy is important: “they create the material, they know what the task is.” Students go on to teach, to work with PACT Youth Theatre, a few go to NIDA or the VCA, some to directing, some to postgraduate work on performance.

Sydney performer and a founding member of Version 1.0, David Williams was a Theatre Theory & Practice student at the University of Western Sydney in the 1990s. He contributes his commitment to performance in part to the inspiration of a teacher, Yana Taylor, who insisted that students see contemporary performance, “work out what is” and brought artists from the performance scene to classes. In a course where students were introduced to an electic range of disciplines and “made work within loose parameters”, there was a sense, Williams says, of being able to make choices and to follow a form or an idea to see how you could go with it. As the course progressed “a set of principles for performance, not a style, emerged”, a sense of how to be, to occupy space, alternatives to being a plot-driven character. At it’s best, he says, the course encouraged openness and exploration and interdisciplinary relations with other university departments. There were moments, however, when performance making students felt like the poor cousins of those in the acting course. Some students sought extra-curricular training at a time when Open Season at Performance Space and Contemporary Performance Week at Sidetrack offered short term but critical opportunities for performance and development. Williams laments the passing of these events. The challenge on graduating, he says, was how to develop a practice, rather than a string of projects. PACT Youth Theatre, then directed by Chris Ryan provided the opportunity to perform in directed works and, in response, create one’s own. Williams spent 5 years training in Suzuki with Meme Thorne. Nowadays, as is happening across Australia, it’s improvisation at the Omeo Studio, says Williams, that’s providing a foundation for his practice.

This brief visit to a new otherworld of performance teaching and its nexus with changing attitudes to actor training is a small sample of the many more university departments who are opening up their own wild spaces.

On a chill Melbourne May morning over coffeee and tea in the Hairy Canary bar, the Snuff Puppets’ Pauline Cady and Andy Freer speak with a shared conviction that takes the edge off the chill and from time to time fires the arts conscience. After a decade of work (and well before that with Canberra’s legendary Splinters) their vision has lost none of its heat, however quietly, if insistently, it is spoken. A mix of artistic sophistication and political bluntness resonates in the work. A Snuff Puppets’ event is a curious combination of the raw and the cooked; there’s a rough-hewn immediacy (so vital to outdoor performance) and careful crafting—even the wildest of their giant, lumbering puppets has to be made for manipulability and a long performing life.

Pauline joined Splinters in 1985, Andy in 1988. After working on the company’s Cathedral of Flesh at the 1992 Adelaide Festival and driving back to Canberra, Pauline and Andy, with another Splinters cohort, artist Simon Terrill, decided to go direct to Melbourne instead. They’d been “doing puppets” since 1988 within the Splinters framework, but now they felt an urge to make it an entirety, to step right away from working with language. Pauline declares, “one look from a puppet can convey the whole of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’.” The Splinters years had been invaluable—the visual arts underpinning of the shows, the constant re-working of audience-performer relations and being part of something that was “so fringe, so underground.” However, inspired by the American Bread & Puppet Theatre and the British Welfare State company, the incipient Snuff Puppets wanted to reach larger audiences. The question was where, the answer was—on the streets, appearing without warning (“hit & runs”), sometimes as part of protests, sometimes as “fixed site shows with, say, the city as backdrop.”

The street shows could “disrupt traffic, scare children and drive parents away”, but they could also generate a classic pantomime relationship between puppets and audience. Pauline recalls in Adelaide people protecting the Cow from the Butcher (The Dancing Cow Show). There is a roughness to the puppets that their creators feel is “an antidote to Disney”, to a sanitised view of the world and the neat animations that purvey it. They love the open streets, but fixed site shows “offer more control over every element of the work.” The goal is to get the audiences they attract on the streets into a performance site that is still outdoors—“our ideal is the outdoors, it’s so beautiful to be out.”

Snuff Puppets have other audiences, ones that become collaborators. These are communities of many different kinds. It’s an area of work Andy and Pauline see “as having huge potential. We have so many offers we could do People’s Puppet Projects back to back.” These have taken them to Arnhemland (with a timetable spread over 2 years including a component this August), Singapore, China and Japan. On these ventures they “push the handmade aesthetic versus the slick” but also find that their own palette gets bigger. This can entail some amusing creative compromises—Japanese participants wanting to do kangaroos and Snuffies (as they are known to fans) attracted to Edo period art, doing “huge carp with other puppets inside and crazy geishas.”

“Fetishisitic” crops up several times as Snuff Puppets describe their relationship with their creations. It’s meant in its sacred rather than psycho-sexual sense. “The puppets are built from scratch with rough methods, but with a lot of attention to skin and look, very woven…A puppet is an object you love, it’s precious…You keep fixing them up. It’s a natural thing to do…There’s an element of such religiosity, of the god in the mask.” Snuff Puppets are fervent proselytisers. “We are spreading our attitude to puppets, their roughness, openness and accessibility….People recognise things in puppets.”

If these puppets have such power, why then the name Snuff Puppets? Originally it was an exhortation, as in “Kill the puppets!”, “Kill the standard concept of puppets”, show the workings, reveal them in daylight.

Performing locally, touring internationally and running community projects all compete with the creation of new work. It seems this gets harder and harder but a new work is “created or kickstarted every 12 months.” Careful scheduling is vital so that the puppet builders have ample time, performers can be given new challenges, and new shows can be run in properly. Balancing income generation and the demands of creativity is a challenge, but Snuff Puppets are undaunted. A trip to Bath (UK) in April for a puppet festival was inspiring, helping lift their profile, and they now have the support of a Belgium-based agent who will not program them into shopping centres. Wherever their work takes them, their commitment is still to intimate performance and to working the streets.

Snuff Puppets’ recent work includes The Water Show (2001), “an allegory of a pristine world, inspired by Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.” It’s a work that combines parade, spectacle and a workshop for 100 people. As beautiful as photographs from the show indicate that it is, almost a decade on the company can still have an almighty effect, attacked in The Sun Herald by Andrew Bolt over their pagan contribution to the Moomba Parade, the newspaper’s front page shrieking “Family Fury at Shock Parade.”

The company is the head tenant of an old army drill hall in West Footscray, part of an arts centre “in one of the poorest communities in Australia. The council and the Big West festival do a great job for the community. We’re staying.” When not at home they’re in Singapore followed by Arnhemland, Japan and China, sometimes working in 2 teams at the same time in different countries.Then it’s back to Melbourne for Wicked, a festival for children at the Gasworks Theatre (Sept 26-Oct 6), and some thinking about a brand new show next year, called Snuff Puppet Club, a night club run by puppets. Sounds like dangerous fun.

As Australia’s only full-time puppet company for adults (and the whole panoply of modern families) and as wickedly funny ideologues for puppetry that is political, communal and downright strange, the Snuff Puppets occupy a very special place in Australian culture.