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Ryk Goddard

Ryk Goddard worked with Melbourne’s the accidental company receiving critical recognition for works like Imagine a Life, superfluous man, Teapot and Fifteen Words or Less. He was appointed Artistic Director of Salamanca Theatre Company in 2000. This company, established in 1972, has a reputation for theatre excellence and innovation, most recently under the artistic direction of Deborah Pollard, producing over 100 contemporary theatre works for young people. Since Goddard’s appointment, Salamanca Theatre Company has changed its name to is theatre ltd. Promotional material for is theatre can be read as both a statement of intent and a question: is theatre: experimental, is theatre: site specific, is theatre: improvisation.

Can you comment on the name change?

is theatre ltd reflects our new role in Australian Theatre. Thirty years of theatre in schools has not produced new generations of theatre-goers. Another reason for the name change was that people couldn’t distinguish us from the Salamanca Arts Centre. The new name positions our company as always questioning itself and the ways we develop, promote and present performance experiences.

What do you understand by contemporary performance?

Contemporary performance is happening now. It’s work that is made by people in a particular time with an intention that’s relevant to that time. Whether it’s text-based, experimental or devised, my sense of whether it’s contemporary or not is to do with the intention in making the work. All new work or experimental work is supposedly contemporary. I live in permanent fear of contemporary performance trying so hard not to be things, that it ends up not really being anything at all. The result is work that can be amazingly insipid and lacking in courage and vision.

We’re not performing shows in schools any more. Our research and engagement with young people indicates that participation is as important as watching. is theatre is shifting philosophy and practice away from theatre-in-education to a contemporary performance practice that moves away from serving schools to serving young people. We are working directly with students in schools through participation and putting on outside shows that young people can come to. What’s desperately needed in Tasmania is things for young people to do that are relevant to them, and in spaces where they have a sense of ownership.

We’re aiming to present work where the given is the environment. With Freezer we wanted to enhance and expand people’s expectations of the dance party environment. A dance party is an existing valid culture. There are powerful dynamics in the space that are really interesting. We wanted to align ourselves with that and open it out further. I like work where the artists have to work hard for the audience to have an interesting experience. That makes the world bigger, richer and experienced in a new way.

Blink, Eat Space, Fashion Tips for Misery, Boiler Room, Freezer, flip top heart and am.p are names you’ve devised for theatre training programs, improvisation laboratories and site-specific performances in 2001 and 2002. What future projects excite and push your boundaries as Artistic Director?

In the biggest sense I’m excited that I finally had the courage to place my performance practice at the centre of the company. Everything we do is connected in some way to improvisational practice. This main-streaming of improvisation seems to be happening everywhere and I feel in step with the times. White Trash Medium Rare is the first show I’ve done for years where I fully understand why I’m doing it. It’s a performance installation supported by Australia Council New Media Arts funding. We’re looking at issues of white identity and every artist involved has their own voice and their own practice.

At the end of July I’m participating in the Improvisation Festival of Melbourne, before MC-ing Sydney’s Big Sloth at Performance Space and then performing in Canberra’s celebration of improvisation performance. Between August 22 and 25 is theatre will host Boiler Room, a participatory multi-artform event. Artists from dance, theatre, music and the visual arts will facilitate workshops and show existing work. On the final night the artists will create a performance that combines and advances their skills. Boiler Room will happen at is@backspace.

For many Hobart theatre audiences The Backspace is a familiar environment that has sustained a lot of theatre practice. You’ve been instrumental in refurbishing and revitalising it as is@backspace.

is@backspace is Hobart’s dedicated contemporary performance space. It’s a new multi-use, flexible, 100 seat performance venue. The space is available for hire to develop and present contemporary performance. You can’t innovate in a town without an audience base and space for artists. We’re thrilled because is@backspace is booked out for the next 6 months. It’s a space to nurture yourself as an artist in a low-risk environment.

is theatre, Boiler Room, teaching & performing Ryk Goddard and Helen Omand; music creation Josh Green; dance improvisation Jo Pollit; multi-media Sean Bacon; musician Tania Bosak. is@backspace, Hobart, Aug 22-25.

RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 40

The Studio got off to a good start with its first 6 month program, quickly establishing itself as a popular haunt for all sorts of live arts fans—sometimes it felt like each show attracted its very own tribe. It’s generally agreed that the contemporary arts scene has been enhanced by the presence of this comfortable and accommodating venue at Sydney’s premier location and its energetic support of Australian artists through programming, commissioning and co-producing.

If volume is what it’s about, The Studio has the goods. At the launch of Program 2, the management proudly stated that while there were 92 performances between July 2000 and June 2001, by June 2002 they’d counted 173. Given that most of these were short seasons, it’s amazing that Executive Producer Virginia Hyam and her team look as perky as they do. The new program suggests no rest is in sight, save for the 5 week season of The 7 Stages of Grieving. By the end of 2002, 104 independent artists, 5 small to medium companies and 17 music groups will have appeared at the venue.

A welcome new element is The Studio’s hosting of ReelDance Dance on Screen Festival in August (preview, page 32). And while the Dance Tracks programs might have had teething problems, it’s good to see a commitment to continuity in Dance Tracks 3, this time The Studio teaming with the Breaks of Asia Club as part of the Asian Music & Dance Festival, August 14-18. (Incidentally, don’t miss the visit by the acclaimed Akram Khan Company from London who’ll be performing their work Kaash at the Drama Theatre for the festival, August 20-24). Later in the year, in Dance Tracks 4, guest musicians are Endorphin and French DJ, BNX.

It’s great to see a classic of contemporary performance given a new outing. With Deborah Mailman’s current TV popularity, The 7 Stages of Grieving should be huge. Same goes for Donna Jackson who impressed with her Car Maintenance Explosives and Love at Mardi Gras a while back but hasn’t been seen in Sydney since. Her Body: Celebration of the Machine is part of the cultural program for the Gay Games. Hanging onto the Tail of a Goat created and performed by Tenzing Tsewang (RealTime 43) is a small but significant work originally previewed at Performance Space, premiered at Melbourne’s Gasworks and now given a welcome Sydney season. Premieres include Legs on the Wall’s foray into the primal world of sport, Runners Up, and Wide Open Road a collaboration between 2 youth theatres, Sydney-based PACT and Outback, based in Hay in south-western NSW.

The Australian Composers series features the work of 2 contemporary artists. Drew Crawford presents Lounge Music, an intimate evening of works chosen from his theatre and dance compositions, electronic works, opera, cabaret and concert music. And in Over Time Andrée Greenwell orchestrates her engaging collision of popular, experimental and operatic musics.

There’s jazz and fusion and some top notch stand-up in the form of Sue Anne Post (G Strings and Jockstraps) and Lawrence Leung (Sucker, winner Best Solo Show, Melbourne Fringe) and some quality acts in the exhibition space including Christopher Dean, Clinton Nain (responding to The 7 Stages of Grieving) and Mikala Dwyer.

As with Program #1 there’ll be hits and occasional misses in Program #2 at The Studio, a lot of creative risk-taking, and plenty to argue about afterwards at the ever inviting Opera Bar. Importantly, it’s all presented in a spirit of generosity and celebration of Australia’s contemporary culture. RT

RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 40

You get your first job after drama school and you’re told, ‘Remember your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.’
Anonymous actor

The craft of the actor has been nurtured in Australia for the past 20 years by a number of tertiary institutions. The National Insitute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Theatre Nepean at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), the Arts Academy at the University of Ballarat, and the Drama Centre at Flinders University are among many institutions that offer tertiary training in the craft. Since these schools are relatively young in terms of the history of Australian tertiary education, their overarching vision and curricula have been formed by their staff. It is difficult to imagine the holistic and passionate approach to actor training that one finds in these drama courses occurring with the quite same intensity in other arts disciplines. Peter Kingston, Head of Acting at WAAPA, expresses it in this way: “We talk amongst ourselves every week, every day, about what we’re doing.” But how does this “productive and generous self-indulgence” prepare graduates for an acting career?

In actor training there is a strong sense of a genealogy of method, a philosophy of theatre that is passed on to students. And something else—passion. When asked about their own training, all of the practitioner/teachers I spoke to were glad of the opportunity to speak about what had ignited them, to recount the story of finding their own sense of self within the art form. It is interesting to note that all the teachers of acting I spoke to had trained at a tertiary level in drama school—some as performers, others as directors.

In the courses I surveyed for this article, all have a curriculum built around movement, voice, acting, improvisation, devised work, singing, film and television skills, production projects and the creation of a show reel for graduates, often with a performance day for agents. Despite the overall commitment to a ‘total approach’ to training, there are some philosophical variances within the schools. At the VCA, WAAPA and NIDA there is a cohesive approach to actor training, guided by the Head of Acting at each school. In my conversations with 7 teacher/practitioners, I was struck by the depth of their commitment to the notion of the individual’s journey through the training, in preparation for the twisting path of a career as an actor/theatre maker. This personal connection, which Lindy Davies, Head of Acting at VCA, describes as “detached intimacy”, is exemplified in the question she put to herself when she was formulating the Acting Course: “How do I create an atmosphere where people feel safe?”

Peter Kingston says that he and his colleagues strive to deal with students “in a mutually respectful way, expanding their potential and our resources inside a laboratory, a rehearsal room.” Professor Julie Holledge, Director of the Drama Centre, Flinders University in Adelaide, also describes a holistic approach to the training of actors: “It is essential that an actor’s training balances the intellectual and the expressive, the intuitive and the analytical.” Kim Durban, Course Co-ordinator at the Performing Arts Course at Ballarat University, says: “The tool of the actor is the self, and the training is to sharpen and change and challenge those qualities of self as they are applied to the materials of theatre—time, space, body, silence, word, image.”

Lindy Davies has formulated a very specific method arising from her experience working at the Pram Factory in the late 60s, and training with Linklater, Brook and Grotowski in the 1970s. While working in Peter Brook’s company, she resolved for herself an apparent conflict between the contact-release work of Linklater and the discipline of Grotowski. “The form was the key to it all—it was the crucible that allowed the other elements to happen within it.” These experiences have been the foundation of her method in the last 7 years as Dean and Head of Acting at VCA. “We have a very radical approach to acting at our school. We don’t decide how we are going to say it or do it. The interpretation comes from the actor’s perspective—it happens kinaesthetically. We work to find the bridge between trance and language.”

Peter Kingston is in his 5th year as Head of Acting at WAAPA. Having trained at NIDA as an actor, he is inspired and challenged by the task of training actors. He muses that he and his colleagues in other acting courses are essentially doing the same thing, instilling in students “the importance of collaboration and that a truthful experience shared by the people making the work is the fundamental work.” Peter is eloquent about the state of ‘not-knowing’ at which point he encourages his students to begin. “What I bring to it is all that I don’t know. The group creates a fury of private investigation which spurs the work forward.”

Tony Knight, Head of Acting at NIDA was “thrown out” of NIDA as a student in the 70s and then went on to train at the Drama Centre in London. He says that the course at NIDA is “an intensely practical course—any theory happens on the floor.” As an acting teacher he draws heavily on the later Stanislavskian physical action method, where the action is played first, with the emotional/psychological territory taking care of itself. He believes that “acting always has to have an emotional and psychological approach”, but does not have time for any emotive indulgence from his students when they approach a character.

At Flinders, Ballarat and Theatre Nepean, the courses tend to be centred round a wide spectrum of skills, and the desire to expose students to all aspects of theatre. There is also an emphasis on theory and history to counterbalance the practical training. There is a heavy emphasis on ensemble work, so that students have the opportunity to write, direct, design, source props and costumes, raise funds, promote the work, in addition to performing. Julie Holledge was trained at the Bristol University Drama Department. “I was taught that actors require both a rigorous intellectual training and a highly disciplined physical training if they are to be expressive performing artists.”

After graduating from Bristol, Holledge worked as an actor and director in the alternative and experimental theatre in Britain for 10 years before moving to Australia. Unusually, the course at Flinders is a 4-year program resulting in an Honours degree. Holledge explains, “At Flinders there is no artificial separation between the body and mind, emotion and intellect. Our degree programs prepare our graduates to be creative, articulate and adaptable artists in whatever area they work.”

The question of how to prepare students for careers as actors is a common theme for teacher/practitioners, with acting courses often forced into review by university curriculum boards. Kim Durban says, “I am currently in a time of Course Review, so I often ask myself ‘what must a training artist know?’ I know many older actors are concerned that traditional theatre knowledge is disappearing. I sometimes wonder whether the old repertory system did a better job. However, where a university course can have value is in its connection to theory and research.”

Terence Crawford, Head of Acting at Theatre Nepean at UWS, trained as an actor at NIDA, and rejects the notion of a hegemonic method. “A method can be a bit of a lifeboat for actors to cling to, rather than just being happily ‘at sea’ on stage.” He teaches his students to think critically “before and after the act, but in the act, to lose their heads.” He believes there is terrible confusion about acting methods, with actors often not understanding that a method is for rehearsal, “not for going on stage. I teach methods toward acting, methods of rehearsing. I am very wary of anyone who says that this is a method and it will apply to all circumstances. As far as I’m concerned, such people have closed the book on creativity—have lost the humility which is the key to acting.”

After graduating, Crawford worked closely for 3 years with John Gaden at the State Theatre Company of SA in the 1980s. “John exemplified for me something I have continued to explore as a teacher: the connection between basic decency and acting.” This interest in the ‘ethical health’ of the actor has stayed with Crawford as he works with his students. “Good actor training is training for life—a kind of productive and generous self-indulgence. You’re there to look at yourself and learn about yourself in order to give, in order to be generous to others, to an audience.”

What does the world require of actors now, and how are they prepared for it by the academy? Tony Knight says “Most students who graduate from film and drama courses are going straight into film and television because that is the dominant market in Australia. The industry changes so quickly. What we have to do is get them ready for how the industry is now and for what they want to do in the future. We have to help them strike the balance between being an artist and becoming a commodity.” Kim Durban believes that the focus of today’s acting students is very different to those she trained with at the VCA in the early 1980s. “When I went to drama school we ridiculed the mainstream, looked down on TV and burned to be significant/alternative/ authentic. But now I have noticed a trend of leaning towards ‘the centre’—that many young and talented arts workers yearn to be discovered by the larger companies, to cross over. They are not committed to Howard Brenton’s “petrol bomb through the proscenium arch.” A visit to the theatre is often beyond their budget, on top of petrol for a 90-minute drive from Ballarat to Melbourne, in between working to make a living. They are far more likely to be writing a film-script and producing it on the weekends.”

Lindy Davies and Julie Holledge also speak about the need to balance the artist’s identity with the need to earn a living. “Actors today need to be trained in the skills necessary to earn a living,” says Holledge, “and for the most part these are connected to television and film. On the other hand, they need to be trained as performing artists who can push the boundaries of live theatre and attract new audiences even if this work, while sustaining them creatively, will never sustain them economically.”

Tony Knight has a big and hopeful vision for his graduates: “I want them to finish their training with the eye of a poet. I want them to show us new things. The baby boomers are going and something new will be in its place and I just hope they’re ready for it.”

Despite the focus now in acting courses on ‘survival skills’ to assist the graduate as they strive to enter the industry, all the teachers I spoke to agree that something more than skills and showreels are called for. The ingredient an actor needs to survive an unpredictable career is the ignition point, the passion that their own teachers began with. Yana Taylor, Head of Movement at UWS, wishes to inspire in students what Brett Whitely called “a true love for the difficult pleasures of the artistic life.” She believes that these ‘difficult pleasures’ “give you a view that enables you to move from job to job.” It seems that what everyone is assisting young actors to find is the indefinable thing that Terence Crawford calls “faith in the self”, and Peter Kingston “the spark of genius”, and Lindy Davies “something bigger than themselves” and Tony Knight “the eye of a poet.” In the end, perhaps it is the personal vision discovered, questioned and honed as a student that gets people through an acting career, and helps them to remember their lines, without bumping into the furniture.

RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 43

Front: Samantha Chalmers, Allyson Mills, Anthony Johnson, Steve Hodder, Michael Angus Back: Jodie Cockatoo, Shellie Morris, To the Inland Sea

courtesy Darwin Sun

Front: Samantha Chalmers, Allyson Mills, Anthony Johnson, Steve Hodder, Michael Angus Back: Jodie Cockatoo, Shellie Morris, To the Inland Sea

Having only just returned from a road trip across the Barkly, driving for hundreds of kilometres through a sea of yellow grass stretching from horizon to horizon, flat as a tack for as far as the eye could see, the notion of an inland sea is both credible and evocatively appealing.

What is not so appealing is the notion of another piece of theatre based on the heroic exploits of some misguided white male out to pit his manhood against this country’s heart of darkness, searching for a personal holy grail. This focus was obviously not behind the Darwin Theatre Company’s most recent production, To the Inland Sea, based on Charles Sturt’s ill-fated 1884 expedition. The DTC team charted quite a different trajectory across this well-trodden territory.

Conceived and written in the NT, this ambitious project was billed as “a fiction based on Sturt’s epic journey, during which he carried a whale boat on a wagon through the desert”, searching for a mythical inland sea on which to launch it. With this compelling story of folly and disappointment as a starting point, writer-director Tania Lieman, co-writer Gail Evans and Indigenous composer Shellie Morris also intended to tell the story of the Indigenous guides and traditional owners of the country being ‘discovered.’ As well. This post-colonial approach is par for the course these days in Darwin, as is the exploration of multiple histories and ways of seeing.

In To the Inland Sea Sturt’s linear, historical narrative is interlaced with a contemporary story of another lost soul, a young Aboriginal boy dealing with issues of dislocation and alienation of another kind. These stories run in parallel throughout the production, interweaving past and present, reality and dream, and interior and exterior perspectives.

A giant video screen provides the backdrop for much of the action and dominates the stage. On a huge scale, vast landscapes, endless sand dunes and flocks of birds stream past as Sturt’s company becomes ever more mired in the desert. During the contemporary scenes the landscape imagery is replaced with the face of the Aboriginal boy, filling the space with anger and pain.

This psychic link between the 2 stories is alluded to in the opening words of the play, “everyone’s on a journey”, spoken by the Aboriginal boy’s mother, sitting down painting her country. Some journeys are physical and some are spiritual. Not all lead to the goal we seek or necessarily to redemption.

Another link between the narratives of past and present is made by the chorus: singers Shellie Morris, Jodie Cockatoo and dancer/vocalist Samantha Chalmers. Morris’ beautiful and haunting music was a highlight of the production.

The usual DTC style of physical theatre dominated the more conventional narrative. There was an abundance of energy and action amid all the drama as well as choreographed set pieces such as a fictitious ‘last supper’ featuring a cast of explorers pontificating about their exploits, including a ragged Wills, like Hamlet, holding a skull.

Unfortunately as the production continued I felt I was drowning, being overwhelmed by altogether too much going on. There was never enough breathing space amid all the colour and movement and technical whizz-bangery. There were beautiful, poignant moments but too rarely the possibility of savouring them. This was a pity because otherwise To the Inland Sea was an enjoyable production with all the right elements: great ideas and visuals, energy, points of cross cultural contact and risk-taking.

Darwin Theatre Company, To the Inland Sea, Darwin Entertainment Centre, June 11-22

RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 44

Erica Price is a solitary dreamer and i industrious sex worker whose monologues reveal desperation for companionship. Her daily musings, including a mantra that ends, “…I ask myself: Who the fuck is Erica Price? And what is her price?”, allude to neighbourhood friendships that will never eventuate for her. A motif that begins, “When the Revolution comes…” refers to all manner of improvements and happiness that the increasingly delusional Erica needs to believe in.

Some of her clients are in love with her, some are self-absorbed, but they still want her reassurances, or her platitudes, for that is all she offers them. All 7 male clients are played by Lucien Simon, who is able to imbue each with a distinct persona. He conveys the hypocrisy and selfishness of several of these characters with particular skill. Subtly and empathically played by Marisa Mastrocola, Erica is vulnerable and determined, funny and sad as she descends into disillusionment bordering on the catatonic.

With Mastrocola’s pose and body language at the play’s conclusion exactly as they were at its beginning, director Tania Bosak implies that the action has come full circle. Erica is back at square one, having achieved nothing, and still longing for a life that will never eventuate. This confronting play could easily become too bleak but, finding moments of comedy, director and performers hit the right note.

Scape Inc., Who the Fuck is Erica Price, writer Sarah Brill, director Tania Bosak, Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, June 20-29; Carlton Courthouse, Melbourne, Aug 7-17.

The fallen-from-grandeur blend of architecture and streetscape of the historic Queen’s Theatre offered an apt historical and geographic metonym for the performance of Despoiled Shore MEDEAMATERIAL Landscape with Argonauts. Derived in part from a text by GDR playwright Heiner Müller, MEDEAMATERIAL is the latest production from a theatre ensemble of Flinders University Drama School graduates calling itself The Border Project. According to program notes, the ensemble aims to chart and map the future language of performance by exploring the interface between live performance and multimedia technologies, thus testing the boundaries between audience and performer.

While some familiar with the draughty venue and its hard platform seating came with cushions, woollen blankets, gloves and beanies, others caressed their glasses of Hardy’s in an effort to keep warm in the cavernous void of a minimalist performance space designed to represent “an urban wasteland where humankind has decimated and abused the natural landscape.”

More physical challenges were to come. The relentless amplitude of synthetic music beat incessantly, producing a searing soundscape like a techno time clock ticking towards death. It raked the skin and tore into the wrecked recesses of consciousness. The complex, cerebral text interfused references to the globalised technoculture of American popular culture (the banality of basketball and Big Macs) with a condensed version of Euripides’ Medea (the ominous effects of power, jealousy, betrayal and violation). These segments fused into a middle space of comic relief, referencing the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain and giving a luminous, stuffed dingo central positioning on stage in a darkly comic, John Clarke-inspired interview (with the dingo).

The final segment segued from the shadows of German expressionism and film noir to the decimated landscape of modern times. In the last scene, Jason, our damaged argo/astronaut, emerged from the void as television monitors flashed NASA film clips of the explosion of the Challenger space craft. All this, from Greek tragedy to 20th century eco-disaster, in 45 minutes.

The technically adept performance had its strengths. Particularly well realised were the enactments of actors’ identities and desires as the extensions of television images, as well as the evocation of a theatre-of-death psychic landscape rendered through the menacing music, the cacophony of accents, and the pastiche of images from German expressionism. The performance lost some of its impact to screeching sounds, halting, overwrought and sometimes frenetic speech and pronounced breathing of the actors, and the near hysterical pitch of sound and media landscapes in the final segment. The company holds more promise than it delivered in this instance.

The Border Project, Despoiled Shore MEDEAMATERIAL Landscape with Argonauts, writer Heiner Müller, director/designer Sam Haren, performers: Katherine Fyffe, Cameron Goodall, Ksenja Logos, David Heinrich, Amber McMahon, Paul Reichstein, Alirio Zavarce; Queens Theatre, Adelaide, June 20-29

Sydney University’s Sir Hermann Black Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of works by notable photographers working the documentary format. A collaboration with Stills Gallery, the exhibition showcases a wide range of approaches to the form. One image is chosen to document the work of artists who more usually exhibit in series or essay form, among them, Ricky Maynard’s huge and confronting portraits of Wik elders; Stephen Lojewski’s suburban enigmas; Ella Dreyfus’ stark depiction of a body in transition from male to female. Trent Parke is a remarkable young photographer who’s recently be accepted into the Magnum Photo Agency for a one year trial period before final nomination, the first Australian photographer to get the nod. His Dream/Life series is represented here with a luminous image. Also featured is Narelle Autio’s photographic poem to leisure, Not of this Earth depicting richly coloured and textured aerial views of people relaxing beneath Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. In all there are 19 great photographers including William Yang, Lorrie Graham, Jon Lewis, Peter Milne, Donna Bailey, Jon Rhodes—every one of them worth a look.

RePRESENTING the REAL, Documentary Photography 2002, Sir Hermann Black Gallery & Sculpture Terrace, Sydney University till 17 August.

In response to considerable demand, our annual feature on the teaching of the arts in tertiary education has been expanded significantly this year to cover 8 artform areas—music, sound art, visual arts, film, new media, dance, theatre and contemporary performance. We’ve decided to focus on the training of the artist at a time when issues abound about proliferation of courses, competing methodologies, limited job markets and the commercial challenge to art’s integrity.

The essay on visual arts aside, where the issue of what art schools really do is tackled provocatively by Adam Geczy, our reports survey the practical training courses Australian universities have on offer. Our writers have interviewed lecturers, many of them also practising artists, about their teaching. Sometimes they speak on behalf of their schools, sometimes about their own practice.

It was clear from many of our respondents that limited funding, escalating class sizes and threatened course closures continue to be a serious challenge to staff morale and the effective training of artists. However, our focus is largely on what the various schools offer regardless of the conditions under which they operate.

There are a number of trends that emerge in these reports, some have been with us for a while, some are new, all are reaching new levels of intensity. Almost across the board there is a desire to generate in students the capacity to collaborate, for both the practical and ethical advantages of cooperation (even in feature filmmaking where the ideal of the auteur has persisted for so long). Autonomy rates highly, not as individualism but as the capacity to be self-sustaining, to create work alone or in teams rather than waiting to be employed. Not a few courses promote adventurousness, in terms of keeping up with new developments or in challenging convention. And in an era when artforms are transforming and electronic media converging there is a great emphasis on flexibility and multi-skilling.

Some departments pride themselves on having industry connections, on being part of network clusters, of providing in-course opportunities to students in the commercial world. It is here that some tension is felt over the apparent pragmatism of the “creative industries” approach as art gives way to the broader notion of creativity, and the demands of commerce, for example ‘to entertain’ or provide ‘content’, threaten to dominate. Conversely, commercial and subcultural developments in the wider world of music require an academic response, as Michael Hannan argues, that recognises there will be a variety of serious musician for whom traditional training will have little value. This adjustment is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon, the evolution of artforms and, particularly, their engagement in multimedia and new media. If some lecturers ask that their students learn to “sit with ambiguity” as part of their becoming artists, then the ambiguity that surrounds artform developments is something that teachers also have to sit with.

While most schools claim good employment results for their students, the jobs issue is nonetheless a vexed one, particularly in visual arts and dance. Our report notes the global approach to employment by at least one Australian university dance school given the almost total lack of work available in this country.

Whatever the challenges, many lecturers spoke with passion about their teaching and their concern for their students. There’s a desire to create a safe place in which students are emboldened to think, to create, to collaborate, to accept challenge and, in turn, to challenge.

The death of a dancer: Russell Page

In a year already too burdened with artist deaths, we were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of dancer and actor Russell Page on Sunday July 14. We saw him dance a few days earlier in Rush, the work his brother Stephen choreographed for Bangarra Dance Theatre’s new program, Walkabout. As ever, Page danced with conviction, elegance, power and a unique dancer’s language. He will be missed. KG VB

At last Melbourne has got a festival where local artists—there’s a lot of them in the program—receive deserved prominence side by side with some unique overseas and interstate productions. It’s the first of Robyn Archer’s 2 Melbourne Festivals. The second will be about the body—in dance and physical theatre. Perhaps she’ll get the guernsey for a third festival given that she’s already forecast it to be about voice, as in opera and music theatre.

This one is centred on text ie language in performance. 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 a 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! From Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre 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). 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 performance about power and gender, Emily of Emerald Hill (writer Stella Khon), comes from Singapore. The 150 minute virtuosic adult marionette work, Tinka’s New Dress, has Ronnie Burkett creating and voicing 37 characters. Argentinian writer-director Frederico Leon presents one of his plays and a mini festival of recent Argentinian cinema. A handful of very intimate performances designed for small audiences include the Canadian STO Union & Candid Stammer Theatre’s Recent Experiences, 3 works by US actor-writer Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre) performed by local actors, and IRAA Theatre’s Interior Sites Project, an all night stayover theatre experience. 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, Chamber Made Opera, Back to Back Theatre, Company in Space, Arena Theatre Company, Joanna Murray-Smith & Paul Grabowksy, Helen Herbertson, Trevor Patrick and work-in-progress showings from others.

From Sydney comes 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 Yusef Komunyakaa. From Berlin there’s Uwe Mengel’s murder mystery installation, Lifeline, where you can 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 it’s the story of a massacre presented by an all-Indigenous cast. 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.” In the past there have always been a few shows to draw interstate visitors to a Melbourne Festival, but this time you can feel the pull of the whole program, a unique opportunity to see an impressive display of Victorian performance talent in the context of distinctive and provocative international productions and a theme of the reinvigoration of language in and through performance.

Dancer Wendy McPhee and film/sound artist George Poonkhin Khut share an interest in sexuality and memory. They began their collaboration on their new work, Nightshift, by looking at peepshows, karaoke bars and feminine desire. McPhee says: “I wrote a lot of the text. George designed sound and the installation environment. The meeting point was the medium of video. The bulk of the work is in the editing and sound design. We did one video edit together but we had 7 hours of material which is a lot of looking at yourself! My main concern was that the emotional quality of the performance be kept and not dissolved. I think it’s a very intimate installation even though the images are projected floor to ceiling throughout a vast space. The intimacy is reinforced via the soundscape which evokes a closeness of whispers, pulses and floating sounds of bar room singing.”

Nightshift Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery July 13-28; Artspace, Sydney Aug 22-Sept 14

Michael Riley (Wiradjuri/Gamilaroi people) is one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive of contemporary artists. He explores Indigenous issues in non-literal ways, working through curious juxtapositions that make us look at the Australian psychic landscape in new ways. Riley’s distinctive body of photographic and film works will be celebrated at the fourth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery opening in September.

Asia Pacific Triennial 2002 focuses on a number of artists who have made significant contributions to the contemporary arts internationally since the 1960s and each will be represented with a comprehensive group of works. Says gallery director Doug Hall, “The exhibition creates a context in which we see works by these senior artists, alongside artworks dealing with similar ideas and themes by other regionally significant, but lesser known artists.”

Artists to be represented are: Montien Boonma (Thailand), Eugene Carchesio (Australia), Heri Dono (Indonesia), Joan Grounds (USA/Australia), Ralph Hotere (Aotearoa New Zealand), Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Lee U-fan (South Korea/Japan), Jose Legaspi (Philippines), Michael Ming Hong Lin (Taiwan), Nalini Malani (India), Nam June Paik (South Korea/USA), ‘Pasifika Divas’ (Pacific Islands and Aotearoa New Zealand), Lisa Reihana (Aotearoa New Zealand) Michael Riley (Australia), Song Dong (China), Suh Do-Ho (South Korea/USA) and Howard Taylor (Australia).

Hall comments “The selection of artists reflects key themes, including the impact of the moving image on the visual culture in the 20th century, the persistence of performance as a key form of cultural expression in contemporary art, and the capacity of contemporary art to explore the complexities of globalisation.”

The survival of the term ‘new media’ confounds the 20 years the technology has been around in art and design departments of the tertiary sector—the term survives possibly as the ‘old media’ users resist a technology with which they are not comfortable thus prolonging the redesign of courses and the redefinition of tertiary education within the era of digital media. The AFC/ABC on-line documentary broadband initiative recently demonstrated that government cultural administrators still think it’s a matter of converting filmmakers to ‘content providers.’ Though the education industry is at last moving away from imposing such conversion upon the mature student, it is the younger students who are often best equipped to absorb the potential of digital technologies and utilise them outside such notions of educational progression.

In an attempt to harness the many, often conflicting possibilities of information technology, there has been an exponential growth in public and privately funded tertiary level courses and subjects, particularly in arts, design, information and communication departments over the past 10 years. Only some of the issues are discussed in this article. Marketing courses, until the dot com bubble burst, had not been difficult and the income from overseas fees formed the financial bedrock of many an enterprise.

For many reasons education has more recently become accepted as a lifelong process affecting all those who care about extending their knowledge of the world and even acquiring new skills, experiences and thoughts about it. The formal system of subjects, courses, assessments and qualifications have been augmented by centres, institutes and various research units to attract the validated research dollar as part of the dynamic development of a technology and arts practice still possessing the properties of the rhizome.

Innovation

Hybridity is increasingly encountered in the arts, and in the convergence of previously distinct communication industries. With such a flux, how do tertiary media arts course managers strike a balance between providing vocational skills and developing creative and aesthetic options within the contemporary discourses of commerce, design and the fine arts? Where providing competency training has been widespread, incorporating recent technologies into existing courses and curriculum has marked the secondary stage of realising digital medias’ specificities.

Martyn Jolly, Head of Photomedia at the ANU School of Art in Canberra says, “We have tried to integrate the teaching of new technology as quickly and as closely as possible into our existing curriculum. The distinction between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘new’ means much less to our students than it does to us. Specific vocational skills are redundant in 2 years. If you teach new technology ‘workshops’ isolated from the rest of the curriculum, you end up with really clichéd, superficial gee whizz results.”

Josephine Starrs at Sydney University’s College of the Arts aims “to familiarise students with the language of new media arts, some history of the area and the contextualisation of interactive media within screen culture.” A broad approach to the subject in the tertiary sector usually includes a general first-year introduction to the visual arts, then becomes more focussed as options and electives are taken, as course strengths are identified. Starrs says that “students are asked to give seminars on current trends in digital cultures incorporating virtual communities, tactical media, mailing lists, moos, computer games, and internet radio. We examine different conceptual approaches to making use of the ‘network’, including issues to do with browsers, search engines, databases, shareware, social software and experimental software.”

At the Faculty of Arts, Victoria University, Sue McCauley and Michael Buckley “do not tie course content to industry requirements as these are constantly changing. Rather we try to get students to critically engage with content issues for specific projects…industry placement for final year students is a part of the academic program.”

The new Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology indicates the pedagogic direction now beginning to show using teaching technique and program innovation specific to the perceived potentials of digital media. Keith Armstrong, a freelance multimedia and multiple-media producer and artist, lectures in the Department of Communication Design where the broad curriculum, as opposed to the mouse-jockey paddocks of the computer labs, is likewise central to the program, but with performance added. “We draw widely upon multidisciplinary sources and get the students off their computers wherever possible, lead them through simulation games and exercises set in contemporary environments. For narrative-based works we model through role-play where possible and development through interpersonal dialogue.”

“We insist on lateral approaches, reward risk, develop marking schemes that take account of short term failures…a potent means for making students realise their deeply important role as designers/artists working within communities evolving within designed environments… [We] insist they can write text fluidly and cogently, persuade them that reflection is almost always a vital design tool, [teach them to] recognise, critique and steer well clear of multimedia’s endless seas of entrenched clichés…[and] force deceleration so that they can listen and reflect more effectively and work slowly towards ideas of substance.”

The School of Visual Arts, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts within Edith Cowan University is perhaps an appropriately named setting for a wider reappraisel of the approach required. Students are regarded rather more as researchers who bring with them a vision and, in collaboration with the department, develop it employing what the head of school, artist Domenico de Clario [see page 37], describes as a “perceptual matrix”, encouraged during the early part of the course. Design, installation, sound and video then form the mentored streams into which the cohorts move, having access to a shopfront gallery in downtown Perth which, in accommodation above, houses an artist-in-residence. As with several other institutions, cross-overs with Information Technology and Multimedia faculty courses are being carefully negotiated, as well as closer links with community groups and the facilitation of community services, de Clario having acquired a old cinema building 2 hours out of the city.

Resources

Is it a constant fight to retain a workable budget? “Yes, yes, yes!” was the reply from one of the teachers, as all areas and departments skate the peaks and ravines of the bean counters’ graphs. Alisdair Riddell of the Australian Centre for Art and Technology at ANU, while supporting cross-departmental sharing of subjects, has great difficulty meeting the demand that this creates. Most faculties have specialised marketing officers to promote what is on offer as well as seek out what prospective students are prepared to pay. “Relatively speaking, income from overseas students allows access to good equipment” is how another correspondent described it, though the interests of the students in this area, following some disgraceful scams, are now protected by the CRICOS Provider system and new Commonwealth legislation.

“One of the greatest challenges in integrating new technologies into current pedagogical practices is explaining to those in control of budgets that the technologies classroom is inevitably more time-consuming and expensive than the format of lecture/tutorial.” Lisa Gye, Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology goes on to point out: “For example, in a number of subjects I teach, students engage in a moderated discussion list about new technologies. Most academic workload models are not designed to account for the time that is spent reading and responding to such a list. Last year, the group discussion for Issues in Electronic Media averaged 30 posts a week with each post running to approximately 300 words. Until workload models do reflect these changes, academics are going to continue with pedagogical strategies that are less time-consuming, like essay production, regardless of the relevance of the strategy to the content of taught material.”

Research grants and graduate fee income help support on-going postgraduate programs and the creation of a cultural area within the Australian Reasearch Council (nonetheless tied to the long-standing traditions of ‘investigation’ in science circles) have begun to increase the options for the development of digital media methodologies.

Antagonisms

Ted Snell is the Chair of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) and in a recent advertising report he states that for some graduates “…their degree provides direct access to a range of professions such as design, fashion and the new (sic) digital technologies. Each year these new graduates leave art and design schools with the skills to contribute to the economy and to maintain their on-going redefinition of our community.” The arts, it seems though, still need champions. Following some recent comments made by the Prime Minister, Snell goes on to conclude that “We are fortunate that they now have the trenchant support of our senior political leaders…”

Though faculties or departments in institutions have been encouraged over the years to seek links or intern arrangements with commercial companies or not-for-profit cultural centres, it is within cross-media teaching centres rather than places of employment that the breakdown of barriers between vocational and non-vocational pursuits exist.

Martin Jolly argues that “art and commerce are no longer antagonistic—they closely inform each other. The distinction for our students is much less relevant than it is to us. But it is always hard to get commerce interested in what we are trying to do because they are working on really tight margins and struggling to keep up, just like us.” Keith Armstrong is wary: “Of course there shouldn’t be and aren’t antagonisms [but the] constant push for ‘entertainment’ as a key goal within outcomes and the sidelining of art as a viable vehicle for research [has] something to do with a lack of understanding of the histories and convergences of art and media practices.”

Mike Leggett is a curator and artist currently teaching Media Arts at UTS. UTS’s Megan Heyward was interviewed in RT#49.

Image note: Student director Leigh Scholten, worked with 27 fellow students under the guidance Helmut Stenzel, University of Ballarat, to make Promotional Use Only, an interactive CD which won the Gold Medal, Art Directors Club 81st Annual Awards, New York 2002.

The Brisbane and Melbourne International Film Festivals consistently feature strong lineups of new films coming out of Asia as well as retrospectives (see “The ferocious eye of Kim Ki-duk”). In Sydney, fortunately, we have the Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival, now in its third year, a relatively small but tenacious and ambitious festival whose goal is not only to open up Australian audiences to Asian films but also, laudably, “to promote the professional development of Asian Australian filmmakers and actors and their presence in the local film and television industry.” Launching this year’s festival, Sharon Baker from the Film and Television Office of NSW (FTO) reminded us that the FTO had been involved in a visit to China by 20 filmmakers and, also, that the Australian feature film, Mullet, had won Best Direction at the recent Shanghai Film Festival. The time is ripe for joint ventures and growing cross-cultural awareness. This year’s SAPFF features 15 films from 9 countries and includes a new print of Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously. Festival-goers also get the first Australian sighting of Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times. As Festival Co-director, Juanita Kwok, advised us it’s a substantial change of direction from the filmmaker’s historical approach to Chinese life. This contemporary drama borders on whimsy in its fable-like construction but its sharp social observations about dreams and realities in a newly capitalist society bring it to a complex ending. Although the focus is on film from China, others range from full-on Bollywood (Heart’s Desire, partly shot in Sydney), to a Thai western, animation from China and Hong Kong, a Vietnamese reflection on war, Japanese avant garde director Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive 1 & 2, and the first new Australian film in this festival’s brief history, China Take Away, Mitzi Goldman’s account of writer and physical performer Anna Yen’s family life. The Short Soup film competition includes finalists from across Asia and Australia, and 2 seminars on Australia/Asia co-productions and the pressure to go mainstream and desert one’s origins promise timely debate. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle is the festival’s special guest—Gallery 4A will exhibit his photomontage works. This is a rare opportunity for Sydney audiences to participate in the growing Asian-Australian film dialogue.

Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival 2002, Directors Juanita Kwok, Paul de Carvalho, Dendy Cinemas, Martin Place, Sydney, August 8-17.

The best thing about the 2002 Next Wave festival is that it lives up to its name. It’s rich with a present tense sense of a confident culture (often defying the youth label with very adult responses to the world) but moreso of a future tense of possibilities and potential, most evident in the proliferation of multimedia, new media, sound and site works, with very few conventional artworks or performances in sight. This is a Next Wave springing from a coherent vision which is not surprising given Artistic Director David Young’s background as composer and creator of innovative multimedia music installations and performances.

The calibre of the some 70 programmed works ranged from the utterly raw (7, under-written, under-directed, but vigorously performed by Swinburne University Indigenous Arts Course students) to the half-cooked (Y-glam’s My Brother’s a Lesbian, a script with potential, some very good performances and a misleading title) to many that were consummately professional—eg Speak Percussion, Chris Brown’s Mr Phase, the excellent dance program at Horti Hall and many of the visual arts and new media works. This mix of standards is part of the festival’s character, as irritating as it can occasionally be, and is indicative of Next Wave as a testing ground, the festival as laboratory, working with the untried, the emerging and with communities venturing into the arts. Most of the works turn out well, for example, for example, Glowshow. The huge, internally lit inflatables spelling out Shipwrecked and Humanity, beside and across the Yarra, made for an impressively contemplative work from the Visionary Images team working with disadvantaged young people and artists. Risks are taken, the rewards are many.

This Next Wave was free, a significant gesture if you think about how expensive the arts are today, let alone the financial demands of forking out for numerous tickets for a festival. Bookings were largely taken online and a percentage of seats for performances kept available for walk-ups. It wasn’t long before the word was out and shows were packed, most notably the dance program and PrimeTime (a mix of serious and kitsch entertainments at North Melbourne Town Hall) but also the one night stand by Speak Percussion in a new music program. Next Wave staff and volunteers acquitted themselves admirably in handling the crowds.

There’s little to criticise about the 2002 Next Wave, but it does need to take a very serious look at is its opening ceremony. There was nothing about it that reflected its demographic or the works to follow over the next 10 days. Okay, there were Colony’s angels and the matching soundtrack with its young participants, but the speeches beforehand, delivered to a largely older audience, were dry and inherently patronising (how many times were the audience told to get out there and enjoy), directed at youth, for youth, but not of youth, but certainly of sponsors. In the same way festival also crucially lacks a physical centre, somewhere artists, media members and audiences can gather at any hour so that the works seen can be talked through, contacts made and future collaborations made possible.

RealTime was part of the 2002 Next Wave program. Editor Keith Gallasch worked from the Express Media (publisher of Voiceworks) office with a team of 9 writers (6 from Melbourne, 3 from Sydney) in their mid 20s to produce daily responses to festival works online and in limited print editions at festival venues. What follows are 45 responses to the festival from the RealTime-NextWave writing team (Ghita Loebenstein, Katy Stevens, Vanessa Rowell, Leanne Hall, Jaye Early, Clara Tran, Even Vincent and myself) and other contributors (Kate Munro, James Kane).

For better or worse, meat pies, football and throwing the odd shrimp on the barbie have become synonymous with all things ‘Aussie’. However, in a cultural melting pot as deliciously varied as ours, the search for a collective identity is neither useful nor relevant unless it begins with difference. The Viet Boys from Down Under is a play which explores the alienation and frustration that comes with not fitting into the fair-dinkum-jolly-swagman stereotype, or being wholly comfortable with one’s Asian heritage. It asks the perennial question: What does it mean to be Australian?

Having never been conflicted because I am part of two worlds—and not knowing many Vietnamese-Australians who are confused over issues of identity—I found The Viet Boys’ heavy reliance on cultural stereotypes in its search for answers somewhat uninspiring and cliched. Rather than challenge archaic notions of what it means to belong to eastern and western cultures, the play inadvertently perpetuates the very same attitudes it so obviously has problems with. Bong’s initial reluctance to become romantically involved with Brad because he is a ‘half-caste’ and not suitable for dating Vietnamese girls is truly cringe-worthy. Renditions of the theme song to Burke’s Backyard and the Vietnamese nursery rhyme Kia Con Buom Vang (The Yellow Butterfly), no doubt serve as easily recognisable pop culture signposts to a racially diverse audience and good for a chuckle, but fail to offer any meaningful discourse.

What saves this Vietnamese Youth Media project from becoming yet another tale of identity crisis turned up to ten is its strong and clever use of humour. Whether perversely ticklish and black, such as when Smithy hires a prostitute to act as his surrogate mother, or light and daggy, as in the case of a karaoke performance of Jason and Kylie’s forgettable classic 'Especially For You', there’s sure to be comic relief around the corner. The play mitigates the serious side of self-futility and depression with its ability to make us laugh, and in the process, manages to capture feelings that are both intensely subjective and universal. Before The Viet Boys, I never imagined that an Elvis Presley impersonator singing 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' had the power to simultaneously hit me in the guts and rub my funny bone with equal force.

With a budding romance, a story of both broken and realised dreams, martial arts scenes and corny karaoke thrown in for good measure, The Viet Boys is nothing if not a colourful array of musical and multimedia delights. Pre-recorded video images are used as an extra narrational device in the telling of the characters’ individual stories, often times running concurrently with the live performances. Ray Rudd gives a solid performance as the aspiring kung-fu film star, while Hai Ha La shows she is comfortable alternating between her 3 contrasting roles.

Go see The Viet Boys for its entertainment value. Although it doesn’t push any boundaries or delve into unchartered cultural territory, the play does offer a perspective on what it’s like for some Vietnamese youth living in Australia. You might not come away feeling any more enlightened, but you will be uplifted. That’s a promise.

The Viet Boys from Down Under, co-writer/director Huu Tran, co-writers/performers Dominic Hong Duc Golding, Rad Rudd, performers Khanh Nguyen, Hai Ha La, Christie Walton; Vietnamese Youth Media, Footscray Community Arts Centre & La Mama; La Mama Theatre, Carlton, Melbourne; 2002 Next Wave; May 15-26.

If Colony, with its angels winging spectacularly of the Victorian Arts Centre Spire was just too ethereal or kitschy an experience for you, Christian Thompson’s Show Me the Way to Go Home, in the George Adams Gallery beneath the spire, provided a neccesary earth. Slide projections on 4 large screens right-angled against each other, fill the space. The slow pulse and dissolves of the screenings create a semi-cinematic space of recollection. Christian Bumbarra Thompson (Bidjara/Pitjara people, Carnarvon Gorge, south-west Queensland), resident in Melbourne since 1999, has re-enacted elements of his childhood on the land he grew up on and photographed them as a series of movements. A woman looks in a mirror as she applies makeup, lost in her reflection. We see her from various, intimate angles. A young Indigenous man in a military outfit stands to attention. He salutes. He looks into the distance. A woman, she appears to be white and is dressed as a nurse, watches Indigenous children at play. A large, handsome woman, brightly dressed and with flowers in her hair seems to sing in a darkened space, a club perhaps. These performances are inspired by photographs from the Thompson family album: “I guess you could say I am trying to recreate and savour the very elements of my past that have conditioned me to be the type of aboriginal person I am…I am a long way from my blaks Palace, from my country, but every day I try to be there spiritually…” (Catalogue dialogue.) According to a wall plaque, the soldier is based on Thompson’s father and the nurse his mother. Show Me the Way to Go Home is a lyrical work, quietly, thoughtfully engaging and memorable.

Show Me the Way to Go Home, artist Christian Thompson, curator Kate Rhodes, George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, Next Wave, May 18-July 14

By combing the working processes of 2 traditionally opposed mediums, documentary filmmaking and visual art, Simon Price and Simon Terrill have set out to challenge perceived divisions. Their exhibition thematic becomes: Where does the seamless conduit of a freeway and its implied utopia lead us? Their answer? To a world where space is a transition zone and identities become less grounded and more anxious. By adopting the distinctive perception of hitch-hikers, both artists embarked on a deliberately lateral journey from Melbourne to Darwin and along the way recorded their random experiences. The exhibition reflects a space where the 3 zones of the highway (human, machine and landscape) meld together to create unique relationships and multi-layered realities. The result is an exhibition divided into 3 rooms comprising sound, sculptural kinetics, the still image, a diorama—and the formation of an anxious reality.

Entering the first room you are greeted by a speeded up monotone voice describing casual encounters of the everyday…a cigarette…a dog…a car. A hurried succession of flashing vertical lights project onto a cube-shaped construction made from metal. Thin opaque material hangs in the cube receiving a succession of vertical lights. These seem to correspond to the pace of the voice. The work creates a chaotic and disjoined reality, by describing an uncertain narrative that weaves its way through a unknown landscape.

The second room consists of a video recording of 2 men projected onto a large wall space. The film is muted and plays in slow motion—its manipulation creates an eerie almost sinister atmosphere. Afigure sits in the foreground while another engages in a game of table tennis. Both are oblivious to the gaze of the camera recording, in detail, their every move. They appear to be detained, locked in a serious bout of navel gazing. The identities of the men are unknown and the viewer is left to form their own narrative of their reality. (The film is in fact of two British backpackers passing time whilst attempting to find relief from the intense Darwin heat.)

The third room consists of film, a diorama, and sculpture. One screen captures the ambience of the silent roadside vigil of hitch-hikers eager to be picked up—an exploration of the roadside universe takes place. What we see is a roadhouse late at night as a truck passes without any consequence, its headlights illuminating a kangaroo represented in large sculptural form. This image is then sharply juxtaposed with one on another screen of what appear to bespectacular blue glowing intersecting lights from an LSD trip. The camera slowly tracks to hundreds of frantic insects drawn to a roadside light. Situated inconspicuously, towards the back of the room, is a miniature 3D diorama replicating an aerial-map view of a fibre-optical landscape dissected by a piece of road implicitly symbolic of the exhibition’s journey theme.

The exhibition succeeds in creating a particular, anxious reality where the concept of space—both the literal floor space and gestalt of the hitch-hikers’ point of view—becomes a transition zone left open to audience interpretation. Or, as Simon Price explains, “ A zone where people can build their own narrative.”

Human/Machine/Landscape, artists Simon Price & Simon Terrill, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Next Wave; May 17-26.

Through the smoky haze in a twilight space there are people with no names and eyes that don’t seem to see. This place lies beneath words and thoughts, and if you are looking for sense there is none to be made. Ghosts, the raw, concentrated people before you are walking the edge of a precipice, waiting to be startled, recoiling at the slightest movement.

When they sit in chairs they fall backwards, looking at an absent sun, the backs of the chairs arching their spines, conjuring grasshoppers rubbing between skin and ribs. They flap, they gasp, necks straining, fish caught too far from the cooling sea. They sit bolt upright, breath drawn loudly to the back of the throat, flight in their bodies and eyes.

A clamour of music issues a loud invitation to dance. A man romances his battered suitcase across the room, fixing it with a besotted gaze before stopping to laugh at its Pandora depths. Around him a mad circus of movement revolves without pattern. Two men, with stature and dignity, hold each other firmly and waltz majestically around the room. A girl in a full-skirted dress is hounded by her double pecking fretfully at her hem; still others dance in a whirligig of hysteria. Everything in this place is reduced to neurosis, carbon-copied so many times it becomes a tic, a spiralling cocoon that you can’t break out of.

She embraces him, folds him with tender arms into the smooth hollow of her neck. And then she grabs him by the hand and flings him headlong into the wall, where he is pinned loudly before sliding limply and heavily to the floor. She lifts him gently, letting him melt childishly against her chest, and then throws him brutally at the wall, over and over in a merry-go-round of love and hate. But soon she infects even herself with this madness and they both hurtle together violently, animals in a cage. They could be trying to escape unseen terrors, or they could be trying to enter a Paradise just visible through the glass, but maybe they don’t know what they are doing at all.

If I bind your face in cloth, making you deaf and blind and dumb, and remove your clothes to shame you, are you still human? Or will you roll across the floor, willy-nilly, handcuffs clenched behind your back, scaring those don’t want to see you too close? Will you prance angrily in your high-heeled shoes, flicking your bangled arm out in frustration so many times it becomes nothing more than a compulsion?

There is a man with a granite face, wearing a silky grey dress with heaviness and dignity. He carries a metal bar in his powerful hands, rolls it across the floor with the soles of his feet. He could be by your side in a split-second. Behind you, someone is walking slowly past your chair, trailing audibly against the walls and softly brushing your clothes.

People tilt and swerve, running to clap up against each other in a cymbal crash of skin, grappling like wrestlers, colliding like old lovers. It’s not possible to know who is a protector and who is a predator. You can smell their sour sweat as it trickles fear.

Peel yourself gladly from this unrestful dream and relax. Unfurl your fingers, set your heart ticking metronomically. Rise to the surface and feel the breath held in the small of your back, tucked under your ribs and around your stomach. Breathe again.

Journey to Confusion #3, Not Yet It’s Difficult & Gekidan Kaitaisha, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Next Wave, May 18-22.

Intercultural theatre projects have explored diverse artistic and social practices since Peter Brook and Suzuki Tadashi in the 6os and 70s. Journey to Confusion #3 is a performance research project from Melbourne company Not Yet It’s Difficult and Tokyo’s Gekidan Kaitaisha. The cross cultural partnership began in 1999 with a season of Confusion #1 In Melbourne and subsequent work in Japan.

In Confusion #3 the companies create a unique time-in-space through intense physicality, prepared movement and various tensions. Neither company has banished their cultural viewpoint in the search to find cohesion. Instead of attempting to reconcile their contrasting body vocabularies they are, rather, observed. The juxtaposing of the performers’ histories and techniques strangely clarifies archetypes and symbols. Many of the solo moments within the piece characterise situations more associated with one culture than the other.

Through stillness, movement and voice the performers generate a palette of textures and tones. It is not necessary to grasp a single unifying thread, but rather embrace the confusion of humanity beside humanity. Confusion #3 begins as the silhouettes of 10 figures enter the space in a haze of mist. Their features are undefined, their identities ambiguous; they are also gagged. The long and slow silence forces me to observe the speech of the body and I become aware of a quivering energy present despite the calm. In Japanese theatre such as Butoh and Noh, performers move as result of the inner landscapes they create. It is this that I can feel penetrating the space between the performers and audience.

Confusion #3 is personal and political, subjective and global. There is very little by way of design, and only a few minor props—the power bestowed in the technique of the performing body activates the transformation of the space. Whilst the structure appears to be fixed, a lot of the actions, rhythm and pathways are dependent on improvisation. About a third of the way through the performance a number of the motifs have been articulated, including repetition, transformation and a suggestion of phantom pain. These return later in the performance.

By the end of the work there is an undeniable sense that the performers are trapped; hostages to the space, their bodies and their cultures. In an early sequence that builds to the point of audience discomfort, a performer flings himself against a wall. Another performer helps him up and then flings him straight back against the wall. This duet is repeated over and over with the whole company. It then implodes further as all the performers slap themselves against the stark white wall. I shudder as I watch the room fill with bodies trapped in repetitious assault on each other and themselves. Over this plays a country and western ballad with the lyric “In a world of my own” which doesn’t quite drown out the sound of flesh hitting walls.

With smeared lipstick, naked flesh, handcuffs, 10 dollar bills and dirt, agonised screams and spoken abstractions, Confusion #3 has all the elements of avant-garde theatre. It is rare that a performance has the intensity to leave you at the end of the show with quaking knees. It is not an easy to watch. This is no tame exploration of the body in performance and that is a good thing.

Journey to Confusion #3, Not Yet It’s Difficult & Gekidan Kaitaisha, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Next Wave, May 18-22.

In a festival high point, a young, curious audience packed the VCA Dance Studio 1, to hear Speak Percussion, 4 about-to-graduate VCA musicians with an impressive program, Argot: A Transient Vernacular. It boldly combined the percussive purity of Takemitu’s Raintree (serene perspectives on rain drops) and Robert Lloyd’s Boobam Music (a fast, loose-limbed, virtuosic rendition by 2 percussionists on 8 bongos) with new works layered with samples and dance and classical music from young Australian composers Brett Anthony Jones (Pauah Fayliah Bacchanaliah, alternating riff-driven passages and demanding unravellings) and Peter Head (You are here: Rubik’s Cube, an intriguing use of staccato CD cut-ups against minimalist rows ). Alan Lee’s Artikule, an etude, the third Australian premiere, is built from mouth sounds made into microphones—clicks, trills, pops, various breathings. A corresponding dance trio explored the pleasures of the tea-cup. This was a generous concert, the works augmented by dance (a little old-fashioned) and thematic projections (strange morphings of a tea cup into a foetal scan into a cell). Finally the musicians and composer-electronic artist Harry Arvanitis (all dressed like laboratory scientists in white plastic coveralls) created an epic drum’n’bass & ambient improvisation. We could have danced to it, but locked in our seats we had to wait a long time before the work (a little too heavily earthed by 2 drum kits) took off…and it did. It’s interesting to note in the Jones, Head and impro works an inclination to orchestral volume and intensity (thanks to the layering in of recorded sound)…a new romanticism? Speak Percussion are surely makers of the next wave. As they write in their program notes: “Argot is a hybrid arts event…where elements of the concert hall will evolve into those of the Rave.”

Argot: A Transient Vernacular, Speak Percussion (Justin Marshall, Eugene Ughetti, Minako Okamoto, Rory McDougall with Harry Arvanitis), sound engineer Tony Mite, choreographer/installation artist Glenn Birchall; Dance Studio 1, Victorian College of the Arts, May 24.

“Turn off the telly, see it live”, screams the promo for PrimeTime. And so they flock from lounge-room to theatre, mouths wide-open, remote controls in hand, ready to feed on their daily dose of primetime television trash.

Modelled on an evening of TV, PrimeTime follows the episodic structure of a night ‘in’ with the box, complete with live ad breaks and an old-school TV host, Lawrence Leung, who sits somewhere between the clichés of Burt Newton and Ian Burgess. His jokes are rehearsed and he holds up cue cards telling us to ‘laugh’ or ‘cheer’, and one where we must gasp, ‘Oh, how postmodern!’ Oh, how very post modern indeed. Except the night as a whole lacks the self reflexiveness that hallmarks postmodernity. Instead PrimeTime is a parody of the episodic nature of TV programming, providing a clever shell for what is in essence a variety show. Sourced by Lally Katz, the acts are all produced independently so the quality of performances varies greatly. On this particular night the best was left for last.

“Svila (Silk)” is promoted as a “haunting sound and song” performance by Anna Liebzeit. Centred around stories of her grandmother’s life in Novisad, Yugoslavia, her father’s immigration to Australia and her own journey to Novisad, the performance is half chanted, half spoken, half sung. Wrapping together fragments of memory, conversations with her father, stories of her grandmother and her own stream of consciousness, Liebzeit has a gift for capturing experiences and relaying them through sound and song.

Springing from beat-driven spoken word to an earthy bluesy sound accompanied by acoustic guitar, Liebzeit has a voice with the same unadultered quality as Kasey Chambers. There’s something in the way she sings that conveys recollected pain. Her voice alone could carry the show if she had the confidence to stand still and let us simply listen. Desperately in need of a choreographer, her stilted movements detract from the power of her voice.

After a slapstick ‘ad break’ by Andrew McClelland PrimeTime took a dive into serious melodrama with “Shrunken Iris” by Kamarra Bell Wykes. Captioned “fragments of an addicted mind”, the performance has Iris studying drug addiction through an addict, Lexi, and her subconscious, which constantly plagues her. Dressed as a devilish femme fatale, this ‘devil’s advocate’ follows Lexi through moments in her life from losing her mother in a crowd, to watching her father beat a wombat to death with a sledgehammer, Lexi’s subconscious entices her towards and sometimes away from self pity, blame and hatred. It provokes and damns her. Both Wykes and Suzanne Jub Clarke give strong performances although the program doesn’t make clear which roles they play. Direction by Jadah Milroy is nicely considered and there were a number of ingredients, including monologue, narration, movement and sound which blended together purposefully.

Unfortunately I can’t say anything more about Iris because of the teenage ‘domestic’ that was occurring in the row in front of me. At times their ‘performance’ completely drowned out what was happening on stage, an ironic interruption considering the domestic distractions that usually interrupt an evening in front of the TV.

If one of PrimeTime’s aims is to take postmodernism and media consciousness to the cleaners, then the star of tonight’s show was undeniably “Mr Phase”. Starring the indefatigable Christopher Brown this piece of “commercial theatre” is a collage of standup, monologue and physical theatre. Devised by Brown and Thomas Howie, Mr Phase is a vehicle for comic warfare against all that is kitsch and disposable in the fourth estate.

Brown’s performance is a complete montage of media iconography. From the contents of Nutrigrain cereal, to a meditation on love-”the reason for it all”—or the lack thereof, he is cocky, languid and brave. He performs part of his monologue in his underwear and recycles punchy media-speak in an excellently crafted script. “Passion has no volume control,” he professes during a meditation on sex, and then offers “be baked not fired” as sound ad-savvy advice. An excellent sound design by David Franzke helps to match the show’s fast pace with style and fluidity. Brown has definitely got it-Rove’s stage presence, Adam Spencer’s wry cynicism and the slapstick sillies of Adam Sandler. Keep your remotes on hand, it won’t be long before we’re seeing him on primetime.

PrimeTime, May 20 performance, North Melbourne Town Hall, Next Wave. Season May 17-25 includes other acts.

There is mind chatter in their bodies that aches to get out. It crawls their skins, making their hands snap at each other’s limbs. Snap and cling. Snap and cling. They pull together, a foot hooked in the crease of an arm, then fling away, discarded and banished.

Bumping Heads is a physical conversation between 2 people. Their words are confessional and passionate, violent and funny, possessive and intimate. Tina McErvale opens in a solitary arabesque, arms curved over body and leg pointed behind. She leaves and Brendan Shelper arrives, preening and punching the air, preparing us for the words he wishes to define himself with. She returns and coaxes her body into movement, quirky, supple and shy.

Then they are on the floor, rolling over one another, rolling through the curves of each other’s bodies. Hugging and clinging, never letting go. Giving caresses, taking them back and throwing them away. The soundtrack giggles, squeaks and foghorns, teasing the bodies and encouraging whimsical games. She flies through the air, taut, poised and balanced in delicate curves around him, through him, over him. She flies until she is literally standing in his hands-raised above his head. Don’t breathe. Let the chatter stop as the moment is held in a silent pose.

He is contorted, standing on his head. She strolls past obliviously, reading a magazine. What must we do to get the attention of the ones we wish to talk to? As an object of manipulation, she lets the magazine dance through her fingers and across her torso, flicking and patting it, until it too ‘speaks’. He steals it and taunts her, making it hover like a paper bird, full of things to say, until bang!… she shoots it dead.

They collapse into movement again to the romancing sounds of “Roxanne”. They repeat the same roll, throw, catch sequence, saying the same things again and again and again. “Come lie with me,” he says patting the ground next to him. She follows, they argue and she turns to leave. “I’m going,” she taunts, twisting horizontally through the air as he runs to catch her and bring her back home. Romance and games again and again, until he stops running after her and she falls flat on the floor from her elevated twist.

They tell us stories. They confess. She will give up cigarettes today. He remembers being hit in the face at school. He does what his body wants him to do and is made to laugh, cry, lie down. He is made to undress and fall in love with a beautiful body. It is hers. The same happens to her. His story is told through her body, manipulated through an omniscient voice. She undresses and runs around the playground, telling a remembered tale of playground love. She laughs, cries and lies down. “Tell me how beautiful I am,” the voice demands. And she does, almost naked and stripped of physical deception. It is him she tells this to.

They bump heads, colliding into each other in a sting of physical contact. Thinking the same thoughts, saying the same things, hearing the same sounds.

Back to words and humble caresses. As before they are on the floor, rolling over one another, rolling through the curves of each others bodies. Hugging and clinging, never letting go. They dance across one another, speaking in lithe, weightless tongues, their final words spoken in union and balance. He stands on her shoulders. A deafening pause. Don’t breathe. Let the chatter stop as the moment is held in a silent pose.

Bumping Heads, director/creator/performer Brendan Shelper, co-creator/performer Tina McErvale, Horti Hall , Next Wave, May 22-26.

Girls aren’t supposed to like comics, so where does that leave me? And comics aren’t supposed to be smart, literate, or beautiful either. I wonder how people can still believe that? Someone I quite respect once looked at me puzzled as I had my head buried in a mini-comic and asked, ‘Didn’t you study English literature?’ This was supposed to be a thinly veiled slight on myself and my reading material but in fact it showed up the abuser as a regressive reductionist who evidently hadn’t moved into the 20th century (let alone 21st) with the rest of us.

The Comic Book Lifestyle exhibition and accompanying Silent Army Anthology are prime examples of where self-published comics are situated within contemporary artistic and literary practice today. Since the comic form is really a multimedia one (in the purest sense of the term) it possesses unique qualities to communicate and represent the personal, the outrageous, the intimate and the imagined. The exhibition multiplies this already manifold means of representation through incorporating the sources of the exhibited works—found objects, letters, scraps, scribbles and clippings are located within the same space as the artworks. These artworks evoke their humble origins by being scrappily taped to the gallery walls—postscripts and after thoughts still in place on the borders of the illustrations.

The Braddock Coalition/Silent Army are 3 comic artists who seem to live and breathe the form, hence the exhibition title I suppose. The work (and scribbles, letters etc) expresses an obsession that refuses to die or subside, a compulsion without escape. Perhaps this is the mark of a committed, if mad, artist or creator.

The exhibited works are largely focused on the personal and autobiographical rather than the fantastic and imaginary so lauded in mainstream comics. The visual style is also deliberately distinct from the mainstream styles which proliferate—they are more closely related to commercial illustration than the archetypal comic form spread across comic store shelves. This style and commitment is also realized in the recently launched Silent Army Anthology featuring the work of 20 “comic book veterans” of the small press persuasion. This Express Media publication is a creatively engorged collection of work from in/famous players in local comic art. The breadth of artwork and narrative style is considerable and impressive, ranging from the grotesque and abject (Glenn Smith) to the quirky, cute yet disturbing (Keiran Mangan) and everything (that can be drawn) in between. As always I loved Amber Carvan’s work, not least because her confessional tale of a broken childhood friendship expresses an intimate and unmediated style which I find charming and affective. Matt Taylor’s hyperactive tale of puppets on rebellion is a hilarious, yet chilling tale. The collage work of Tim Danko is a lucid reminder of the popcultural origins of the comic, maintaining aesthetic quality throughout.

The exhibition and print anthology form an impressive collection of the quality calibre and range of alternative comic artistry in Australia today. If nothing else they should certainly trouble the conservative opinion that deem comics ‘trashy indulgence’, and hopefully they will encourage many to seek out the obscure and the wonderful that populates the local comic scene.

Comic Book Lifestyle, Linden St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts, St Kilda, Melbourne, April 18-May 26; Silent Army Anthology, published by Express Media, info@expressmedia.org.au, www.expressmedia.org.au

Stylishly, sculpturally designed and lit with rich dense colour, making deft use of masks and projections and with the techno-technical crew in view, Rawcus’ production of their own devising, Designer Child, creates an otherworldly space that hovers between an inexplicable nightmare and a blunt satire of a genetically modified future. A mother-to-be is faced with the hard-sell of the genetics industry, subjected to physical probing and quizzed relentlessly and patronisingly about her ideal child. Her retorts are wickedly droll, belying any sense of her limited capacities. The dream of calculated perfection is countered with the potential (so evident in performance) of those who have disabilities but have their own distinctive intelligences, skills and personalities. Nonetheless, despite the mother’s anxious repudiation of what’s offered (from men with genius, strength and height, but with the odd flaw—haemorrhoids or hay-fever) and the show’s other swipes at the likely blandness that will come of uniform perfection, she is still tempted, her hand reaching out at the show’s very end, like God’s in the Sistine Chapel, to that of the specimen on offer, a new Adam. Like the recent news reports of a deaf American couple wanting to have deaf children, the complexities of Designer Child are sometimes unsettling. In a different way so is the script: the TV gameshow format is very creaky, the roles for the ‘able’ performers are bland, and some scenes, while internally rigorous, don’t fit the whole at all comfortably. The work is not as sophisticated as that of Back to Back Theatre, but it is the company’s first major showing, and like its subject matter, it’s all about potential rather than perfection. There’s much to admire in the ensemble playing, in the clever devices designed to integrate and maximise the range of company skills, and in the support for the project from Theatreworks and the City of Port Phillip (one of a Next Wave’s community connections).

Designer Child, devised by Rawcus, director Kate Sulan, set & costume Amanda Silk, sound design Katie Symes; Theatreworks, St Kilda, Melbourne, May 19-26.

“Since we were children our Elders have told us ghost stories,” write the curators of Ab-normal, Daniel King and Gail Harradine. “These stories told us of our ancestors coming back to look over their grandchildren, of hairy men that would come to take the children, of old women that have the legs of an emu, seen on lonely desert highways at night.”

The 4 Indigenous artists in Ab-normal blend life stories and ghost stories, traditional Indigenous spirituality and post-contact experience (just who are those hairy men that come to take the children?). Stories give us insight into culture and Ab-normal relies on the transmission of knowledge and history through a strong sense of family. The stories in this exhibition are passed particularly through lines of women, grandmothers, aunties and mothers.

Paola Morabito-Tang (Wemba Wemba people) prints black and white photographic images onto giant sheets of paper. I couldn’t help but sneak a feel of the paper’s silky edge between thumb and forefinger; the textures of bark, gnarled wire, and pale grass are so strong. The 4 prints depict fences and trees filtering white, eerie light through palings and branches. The title of each work indicates the spirit layer of each piece; we search for kerratety kurrk (women’s bird), the goon dog, and ngatha murrup (little man). My favourite features a sagging wire fence in the foreground, a tangle of overgrown trees, and a house as hazy as memory in the distance. Ngatha murrup is deep in the shadows, a messy biro scribble. He is the most difficult to find, making this work the most intriguing.

Gary Donnelly (Gunditjmara) paints soft, simple landscapes, infused with a sense of power. The folds of red hill and sky are mysterious and suggestive of a presence, or perhaps an absence. His work is inspired by the stories of his mother, which serve to warn and protect. ‘The Messenger’ reminded me of just how dark it can be in the bush at night; the canvas is a thick inky navy, the stars diffuse behind clouds and the owl that brings sad news sits in the tree hollow, eyes sunk back into the night.

Craig Charles (Yorta Yorta/Mhutti Mhutti) offers a series of small abstract square works, brittle and toffee-like in texture. The series moves from rich glassy rose reds through amber to warm brown, referencing the “red eyed mooky man”. They have a number of layers; torn Easter egg wrappers create lines, like window bars. I could only connect Charles’ work to his story of being trapped in front of the telly, watched by his Nanna Th e torn lines evolve into shapes that made me think of boats and leaves. Perhaps this is the space of play, as Charles sneaks from the lounge room to join the cousins out the back.

Mandy Nicholson (Wurundjeri) has the most distinctively indigenous painting style in the show, employing traditional motifs of southeast Australia. Mindi, the Devil Snake, has a fat red body looped around itself, and a dangerous flickering tongue. Nicholson uses symmetry, fine lines and design to illustrate Wurundjeri stories. Again, these teach rather than simply entertain, “Mindi was always on the lookout for any people who wander from the safety of their camps and families.”

These very different artists indicate the dynamism of contemporary Indigenous culture, and engage the spiritual aspects of experience without reifying or idealising Indigenous traditions. King and Harradine hope that this exhibition gets its viewers a little bit ‘windy’, a little bit scared. At first I found it hard to feel spooked with classic hits cranking in the gallery space whilst I scribbled notes for this review. But I decided to stand with each piece again. I found that ngatha murrup was watching me from the dark before I found him, that the owl touched a deep sadness and that Mindi fixed me with that glittering gold eye. Aaaaiiieeeeeeeee.

Ab-normal, Ghost stories from young Indigenous artists, curators Daniel King & Gail Harradine, Dantes Upstairs Gallery, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Next Wave; May 14-25

On the plane heading to the inaugural REV festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse, I read about Frank Zappa's appearance on the Steve Allen show in 1963 (The Wire 218). Pre-moustached, a young and serious Zappa was scheduled for the 'kook' spot to teach Allen how to play a bicycle—how to make a flute of the seat support and thrum its structure. Perhaps the only thing that could have made Australia's newest music festival for 'new sounds and new sources' even better would have been a bit of Zappa wafting around the cacophonous halls of the Powerhouse.

The REV festival (Real Electronic Virtual) is the result of a partnership between Brisbane Powerhouse and QUT Creative Industries Music @ QUT, executively produced by Andy Arthurs and Zane Trow under the artistic directorship of long time instrument innovator and performer Linsey Pollak. Focussing on experimental musical instrument making, it featured over 40 artists making a diverse range of works in both acoustic and digital domains, not only offering the opportunity to see the works of prominent international and Australian artists but also serving as a public outcome for the masters students of the course of the same name offered by Music @ QUT. Over 3 days, every nook, crevice, (even bannister rail) of the Powerhouse was alive with talks, workshops, installations, whooshes, doings, tweets and bleeps.

The molecules of music

The international drawcards for the event were David Toop (UK), scanner (UK), Bart Hopkins (USA) and Phil Dadson (NZ). All made presentations about their history as sound makers. Hopkins and Dadson are primarily acoustic instrument makers, scanner primarily digital. Having played just about everything over the last 40 years, it was Toop's role to act as a kind of conceptual glue between the two methodologies. It was a very strategic move on behalf of the organisers to allow 2 methodologies so often thrown into schism to exist side by side, encouraging audiences and participants to make rhizomic connections.

David Toop provided a laid-back wander through his work over the past 40 years with audio samples from Bo Diddley, his own wild improvisatory work with Bob Cobbing and Paul Burwell, Whirled Music (made up of all things spun and whizzed through the air), up to work he has just recently finished using organic samples and computer manipulations. He posed the question that forever floats in the air at these events—is there a crisis in the live performance of sound and music due to technology? (See Keith Armstrong, and Joni Taylor on Analogue2Digital, RealTime 48.) Interestingly the debate never got off the ground in a formal sense, even in the scanner and Toop 'odd couple' forum 2 days later, but became an ongoing discussion among artists and audiences at the fabrique evenings where computer technology came to the fore. (For more on Toop see Greg Hooper, for more on fabrique see Richard Wilding and Keith Armstrong.)

Bart Hopkins is an instrument maker and founder of the experimental music musical instrument (ExMI) magazine and website. In his first session, he conducted a weird and wonderful journey through the work of some international instrument makers. Of breathtaking sonic and visual beauty was the Bambuso Sonaro made by Hans Van Koolnij-a huge bamboo flute-cum-pipe organ with the most haunting sound. Kraig Grady from LA has invented a whole new world and culture, Anaphoria, to provide a context for his new tuning, music and instruments . The long string instruments were also particularly fascinating. Played by vibrating the string longitudinally, requiring extraordinary lengths of wire, the action is full bodied, creating a kind of choreography. The most beautiful audio and visual example was Ela Lamblin's suspended singing stones, producing a stunning, sustained, almost pining sound. I would have loved to have seen video footage of the bodies in action. Hopkins also took us through mouth musics, using ceramic multi chambered pipes (that talk an underwordly language), metal musics, glass musics, even water musics. He completed the journey with Jacques Dudon's light music-a kind of light version of the pianola roll. Using a photosonic disc, photocell and synthesiser, the light shining through the patterns on the disc switch the photocell on and off activating the synthesiser. The patterns on the disc alone are very beautiful, the sound created a highly detailed electronic esoterica. It was a glorious journey through magic sounds and imaginations.

Hopkins also chaired a “brainstorming session” along with Phil Dadson and Craig Fischer (an Australian instrument-maker) for the discussion of burgeoning ideas. Although there was not a flood of new instrument concepts, the discussion was a hotbed of excited technical speculation, with the seed of one person's idea catapulting across the room to cross-pollinate with the work and ideas of another. As someone grappling with the physics of sound production I found it fascinating.

It is inevitable that at every gathering of artists there will be the discussion of marginalisation of certain sectors of the arts and the dearth of funding for these areas, and it found its home in this session. The flipside of this argument, tentatively raised, is “what's wrong with being on the margins, that's where all the good stuff happens”. However the discussion was artfully refocussed by Linsey Pollak suggesting that REV was a positive example of how to show critical mass to funding bodies, and a way of gathering new audiences. It was also in this session that the acoustic/digital argument came closest to erupting, as the suggestion that large companies had stopped developing new instruments—primarily traditional orchestral instruments—was countered with examples like Yamaha's heavy investment in computer-based R&D.

One of the artists whose opinion was frequently sought during the brainstorming session was Peter Biffin, who has long been developing coned stringed instruments in an attempt to minimise the size and maximise the vibrations of the sound board. These instruments were on display for the duration of the festival, and each evening, assisted by percussionist Tony Lewis, Biffin performed a mini-concert. Talking us through various developments, from his encounter with the Chinese erhu through to his own cone based tarhus (of all shapes and sizes), he played detailed pieces on each to exemplify the rich variations of sound. Due to the east meets west (and I mean country &) nature of the instruments, the music often had a gentle, haunting quality reminiscent of the beautiful collaboration between Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Dead Man Walking. Biffin's approach was informal and educational, simple and satisfying.

Phil Dadson presented an all too brief retrospective of his work with From Scratch, the New Zealand ensemble that has been making exhilarating, rhythm-based performance on original instruments since 1974. Much of the work shown (on video) incorporated huge instruments made out of pvc pipes struck with rubber mallets (or thongs, hence the colloquial 'thong-a-phone'). The sound is bold and bassy, full of wallops of air. Dadson describes his interest in new instruments as a search for “sounds with a bit of magic.” Based on political concerns in the Pacific and incorporating spatial and sculptural elements, the work enters intermedia areas, often site-specific, and more recently incorporating interactive video elements. Some of Dadson's solo installation work includes huge playable sculptures in a coastal sculpture garden in New Zealand where he is also planning a playable fence and a gorgeous gallery installation involving 5 tonnes of landscaping material to form a massive foley tray. In her introduction, producer Fiona Allan informed us that she had not been able to bring all of From Scratch to the festival due to the usual budgetary restraints, but from this glimpse of their work it was a great shame. There is a new audience that would appreciate this dynamic and ever evolving performance group.

Even the Kitchen Sink

The main showcases of the festival were the Diversi Concerts A & B. Presenting the work of the established instrument makers, the concerts were well planned to combine the more conceptually difficult work with more populist models, allowing audiences to get a taste of something new. Diversi B was a user-friendly all-star experience including a Graeme Leak retrospective, Greg Sheehan, Bart Hopkins, Hubbub and cameos from Linsey Pollak. Leak is a virtuoso. His work is very performative, sometimes leading it dangerously close to cute, but forever surprisingly innovative. Playing the contents of his briefcase he DJ'd with a zipper, scr-scr-scratched with a business card across his facial stubble, and beatboxed with a pencil against his cheek. With the assistance of percussionist Greg Sheehan, he even played the kitchen sink, and made a tuned percussive instrument of a fishbowl of water on which floated wooden bowls. This instrument reappeared in the masterful piece by Leak and Pollak called The Lab. Posing as scientists they constructed the instruments before us-blowing air under the wooden bowls to tune them, and accurately filling testubes to create a well tuned glass panpipe. Rather than loosing its mystery, seeing the process of tuning and tweaking these ad hoc instruments enhanced the magic and appreciation of the Leak & Pollak artistry.

Bart Hopkin presented his instruments in an appealingly simple and humble way. His creations are variations and manipulations of those already known, like bizarre cousins: a derivation of the clarinet made of open piping with a piece of sprung bent wood, to block air, created haunting slides and nuances; the cat face, a kind of thumb piano with different lengths of metal poking from it and big whiskers for ultra-boing bass; the multi-chambered wind instrument producing harmonies with itself; and the rocking horse zither called Polly, tinkling like an alien music box, accompanied by Pollak on his reed based saxillo. Hopkin's creatures are almost familiar yet produce mesmerising otherworldy timbres.

Less otherworldly was Greg Sheehan playing a variety of early childhood toys. I was reminded of Hopkins earlier in the day stating that his new instruments can never be truly tamed. These toys certainly had a mind of their own. There are moments of rhythmic interest and ingenuity, but it seemed generally haphazard. However Sheehan is a beguiling performer who worked the crowd well. I would be interested to see Sheehan and Toy Death—the Sydney group who use all manner of battery operated toys-have a play-off. That would get the analogue/digital dialogue going.

The final act were the festival favourites, Junkstas, playing the airbells-coke bottles inflated with a bike pump. When struck and shaken they produce clear ringing tones. The team of Hubbub music perform an energising body percussive choreography that literally sings, awe inspiring in its simplicity.

The Diversi A concert was a little more varied, and for me a little less satisfying, starting with Totally Gourdgeous, a folk band that play instruments made of Gourds—guitar, bass, drum, violin and more. They joked that they were the Britney Spears of the festival, amazed at the fact that, in the pumpkin-coloured clothing and silly hats, they for once were the most conservative thing on the bill. The folk tunes were well performed, and the instruments beautifully made (on sale in the foyer), however I found their abundance of joyful cheesy personality (yes, I'm a Sydney cynic), a little overwhelming. They are difficult to place among the experimental work of Phil Dasdon and Jon Rose but the concert series was called Diversi after all.

Dadson's work was pared back compared with that seen earlier in the day on the From Scratch video. His primary instruments were singing stones-flat stones that change tone, and almost chatter according to how they are cupped-and a long stringed instrument (relying on sympathetic resonances?) with various playing modes. In order to accompany himself he used a small fan with a an attachment on the blade hitting the string at semi regular intervals, creating a drone. The considered pace and space within this performance drew it close to a meditation.

Diversi A also included more performance-based work such as Amber Hansen, who belly dances while triggering samples from her chain and metal adornments-a shimmer of the hips sonically translated into a cavernous rattle. A well integrated performative concept, it will be interesting to see how far she can push it. Unaccompanied Baggage involved an elaborate setup of taking sound samples from the audience and activating them with triggers on the floor. Two dancers create movement phrases and build the work into a collaborative improvisation. Structured like a masterclass or workshop showing, the work was interesting, and while I'm often one to beg “show me the score”, I almost had too much of it in this performance. For some in the audience it was certainly an education, for others, just a little bit too much information.

The taste of walls

When I was 4 I announced to my parents that I didn't like my piece of toast—that it tasted like walls. It became a family expression for something that was bland. Biospheres: Secrets of the City, tasted kind of like the monolithic walls of the Powerhouse on which 3 artists' large scale images were projected. I appreciate the ambient aesthetic—catching things out of the corner of the eye, the edge of the ear. I appreciate finding things in banality (hell-try having a conversation with me). I simply found the work under-developed. The soundtrack, a collaboration between scanner and I/O (aka Lawrence English, also curator of the fabrique events—see Wilding and Armstrong) had interesting
text-u-real moments—samples of what I assume to be taxi drivers around Brisbane, the bleeps and bustle of a hospital ward, and a very nice moment of an old man telling his family history that had been effected to delete fragments of words, leaving you grasping for what was lost. But it was the relation of sound to projection that felt unformed, whether that be sympathetic or antagonistic.

One wall involved video that was partially obscured by the pyrophone (fire organ), creating texture washes. The centre wall had a series of slides of the minutiae of street signs, and projections of graffiti. I like the concept of walls projected onto walls, but wanted more substance to them—more like the scrawled message 'free' on one of the images—and more of them. It seemed like a limited palette. The Flash animation by rinzen was more rewarding, with a kind of screen saver mesmeric effect imposed over grey silhouettes of buildings made of chunky shadows and hollows, with bright flashes of street sign symbols. I feel like an opportunity was lost to let the walls of the Powerhouse seep out through the projections, really drawing our attention to 'familiar and mundane yet unrecognisable' referred to in the publicity hype.

The gesture of sound

A particular success of REV was the installation component, including the Roving Concerts, where an audience was guided through the space to different pockets of performance. The highlight for me was David Murphy's Circular Harp, a large semi spherical instrument strung according to geometric patterns. Looking a little like a masonic ritual (speculation only), it was played by three people (Murphy, Leak and Sheehan). The motion of hands crossed over and bodies circling created a beautiful synthesis of sound and physicality. The sound was appropriately light and ethereal, the trio constantly improving on the composition over the 3 days. But even more impressive was the integration of sound and video. A ball of mercury and 2 bowls (one with suspended aluminium dust, one with bronze dust) were placed over speakers, so that they responded to the vibrations creating wonderful textures and patterns. All perfectly circular these visual representations were layered and x-faded over a birds-eye view of the played harp. A video artist suggested that the interface was too simple, that so much more could have been done with the image, but for me it was the simplicity and connectedness of sound and sight that made the work so exquisite.

As Hopkins had suggested in his presentation, the beauty of innovative instruments is the gestural choreography required to play them. This was particularly evident in Stuart Favilla's Light Harp. Tracing virtual strings with lights and lasers, the instrument acted as a controller to produce samples. Favilla has developed a deft action of caressing invisible strings to produce both finely controlled and chaotic moments of improvisation, accompanied by Joanne Cannon on her leather Serpentine Bassoon wired up with and light, touch and movement sensors. (See also Greg Hooper on the Roving Concert)

The issue of gesture also arose in the demonstration performance [de]CODE me—a work in progress by Lindsay Vickery. Wearing a motion sensitive suit, the dancer has control over some basic parameters involving midi samples and video manipulation. Vickery admitted that it was still very much in development, and limited by software foibles. It was interesting to see the movement limitations it placed upon the dancer Katherine Duhigg (scheduled performer Melissa Madden Gray being unable to attend). It has potential and raises many questions as to new media integration with live performance and issues of the mediated body.

The Devil went up to New Farm

The concluding concert for REV was Hyperstring by Jon Rose. Having never experienced Rose's improvisations for midi activating violin and bow, I was filled with an almost manic joy—much like Rose himself. He prefaced the concert with words to the effect, “if you don't like what I'm doing at one time, hang in there because I'll soon be doing something different.” Like a hot whirlwind from hell he ploughed through his bag of tricks—similar to a car radio being tuned—creating fast and furious chaos punctuated by occasional moments of simplicity: a rumination on the place of the banjo; a glacial sample storm with minimalist melodic line. Rose is all fingers and toes, wiggling and jiggling and tickling every possible sound out of his instrument from rubbing the back of the violin with a wet finger to blaring speaker feedback like a vintage rockstar. He must have felt like one when the flock rushed him afterwards to talk. It was a glorious sounding out for the festival. (That's if you don't include the unofficial jam session on the Hubbub's Sprocket percussion machine that was still going when I left at 1.30am Monday morning.)

A joyful noise

Making noise brings out the child in us all. There is a certain naivety that even my cynicism is insufficient to quash when it comes to the production of beautiful noises from unlikely things. The real success of REV was not only the bringing together of diverse music and sound makers, focussing on new instruments and offering a level playing field for experimentation, but also, as most of the events were free and interactive, introducing audiences to new sonic experiences. Given the ongoing challenge to get audiences for new work in Australia, the positive effect of REV, with the Powerhouse bursting with clunks, clangs, whirls and whispers, and the showcasing of a myriad of innovative sound generating methodologies, cannot be underestimated.

Epilogue: Changing the metabolic rate

In the final moments of the scanner/Toop discussion, “Wave form style versus liquid breath technique”, attempting to grapple with the ongoing argument of performance in sound, an older woman began to describe her own work. She spoke of making installations in 4 dimensions, engaging the body within the sound by changing it's metabolic rate, forcing it to slow down and attend to detail, by using gravel or painting images on the floor. Zane Trow then introduced us to Joan Brassil, a significant Australian artist with a long commitment to performance as part of visual and sound art. In one brief description she managed to distil the arguments about the performative in sound down to the simple principle of involving and effecting the body in space, slowing it down to listen.

Early on the Saturday morning, my hotel began to play itself—becoming a musique concrète creation—water rushing through stereo pipes, handrails thrumming, bedsprings creaking. In my semi-conscious state I started to review the soundscape. I felt at that moment that I had made John Cage a proud old sound pioneer. Maybe even Zappa too.

REV festival April 5-7: Sound Body, David Toop, April 5 ; Who's doing What?, Bart Hopkins April 5; Brainstorming, April 5; Made from Scratch , Phil Dadson, April 6; Wave form versus liquid breath technique, April 7; [de]CODE me, April 6; Peter Biffin and Tony Lewis, April 5 – 7; BioSpheres: Secrets of the City, April 5; Hyperstring, April 7; Roving Concert April 5-7; Diversi A & B April 5 & 6, fabrique, April 5& 6, Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts.

Activist artists continue to pursue the refugee issue with an intensity that reveals how deeply recent events and continuing struggles have affected and divided Australian communities. On a recent visit to Sydney, I was fortunate to meet with activist and artist for social change, Deborah Kelly. Kelly is a key figure in the Sydney-based collective, we are all Boat People—comprising visual artists, writers, media, web and lighting designers, video activists, an architect, and an IT expert. During our conversation, as a suitably ominous-looking thunderhead accumulated overhead, she talked about the complicit role of mainstream media in the creation of ciphers, faceless beings on whom we can project our worst fears and imaginings. Images released pre-election of pixilated faces and aerial shots of hundreds of huddled bodies on the deck of the Tampa seem to have presented Australians with a new tabula rasa for demonisation and hate. Moreover, the detachment of the Woomera and Port Hedland detention centres from population centres, and thereby from immediate consciousness, has laid the ground for a conflict of mediated imagery.
The inquiry into the ‘Children Overboard’ affair revealed that orders were made restricting the kind of photographs that could be taken by naval officers documenting the event. The simulacra released by the Howard government were cued by an image history and visual language that samples, enlarges, cuts, recontextualises and frames. Over the course of the last century, contemporary artists, designers, printers and advertisers have exploited the particular qualities and degenerative idiosyncrasies of mass-produced image-making. The obscured ‘Children Overboard’ photograph of partially submerged figures can easily be recognised as a deliberate fabrication.

Although the artifice revealed by the inquiry was undeniable, the government’s merciless PR machine continues to barrel along, churning out spurious imagery and rhetoric. Another indicator that we have fallen foul of our most disturbing (and Orwellian) futuristic predictions is the proliferation of ‘Ruddock-speak’ as coined by Robert Manne writing in the Sydney Morning Herald. “For [Ruddock] a broken child has suffered an ‘adverse impact’; people who sew their lips together are involved in ‘inappropriate behaviours’; refugees who flee to the West in terror are ‘queue jumpers’.” The latest of these bite-sized and easily imprinted crisis-euphemisms is ‘refusees’ which, besides distancing asylum-seekers from the legitimate status of refugee, carries the multivalent meanings of rejected and unwanted and most horrifyingly, of refuse and waste.

How, therefore, can activist artists possibly offer alternatives to the machinations of a government whose extreme policies of mandatory detention for refugees are largely accepted by Australians? Teri Hoskin, an artist from the Adelaide-based volunteers in support of asylum seekers (v-I-s-a-s) suggests, “Artists know how images work, how they make meaning, and are tooled up to both make images and disseminate them. Artists can open up the debate to a depth that mainstream discourses couldn’t and wouldn’t…I also think that artists are perhaps more willing to take risks, and have an understanding that life is essentially heterogeneous, rather than essentially homogenous with deviancies that have to be fixed.”

From a Perth perspective, the interstate connections made by artists through forums, events and conferences over the past 12 months have had far-reaching effects, enabling long-term associations to be forged and dialogue to expand around activist art practices in Australia and overseas. These have included Newcastle’s Electrofringe (part of This Is Not Art, September 2001); dLux Media’s TILT (Trading Independent Lateral Tactics, Sydney, October 2001); Elastic (Adelaide, March 2002), and the Art of Dissent (Adelaide, March 2002 and Melbourne, October 2002). These brief and often inspirational connections between artists and the larger community are bolstered by the strong electronic social change networks provided by groups like v-I-s-a-s and Octopod (Newcastle).

Artist collaborations, and actions undertaken by groups including we are all Boat People, also offer a serious alternative to political party alignment over the issue of Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. Where the slippery territory of ideology can factionalise groups and deter people from joining an action or protest, the practices of some artist collectives emphasise inclusivity and the power of the individual to join and do something with their unique skills. Deborah Kelly says, “Our message is a simple one, and we think it says something all Australians know and understand. The only difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is circumstance. Our government has shown no compassion, and certain elements within the mainstream media have deliberately perpetuated the myths about refugees…In response, we have decided to spread our own message of unity and compassion…the strategy of the SWARM. A thousand small actions, lots of individuals doing something, anything. The message gets out, but more importantly, it gets into the minds of ordinary Australians.” During our conversation Deborah Kelly emphasises we are all Boat People’s mission to keep their ideas mainstream: “We have no interest in being marginal”.

Kelly and her collaborators are responsible for the creation of the tall ships/boat people image that identifies Australia’s colonial history and implicates all but our Indigenous peoples in its simple message. The distribution of this non-copyright artwork via flyers, downloadable PDFs /jpegs, and through a Perth T-shirt company, has enabled wide distribution across Australia. The actions of the group have ranged from large-scale projections of the tall ships image on iconic landmarks or at arts events to community activities resulting in the creation of a flotilla of 3,301 origami boats (one for every refugee in detention, on and offshore).

Their most recent actions have proved challenging and potentially litigious. On the eve of the Budget announcement, Kelly drove to Canberra to project the tall-ships image onto Parliament House, a site where protest is illegal. As Peter Costello announced an increased allocation of federal money to ‘Border Protection’, Kelly and her Canberra Boat People network were surrounded on the lawn by Commonwealth Police. Previously, on Good Friday this year, the group chartered a boat in Circular Quay as a roving, floating projection booth following the swift shut-down by security guards of several land-based attempts to project on the Sydney Opera House. Before the group had even embarked, the boat was boarded by Commonwealth Police who threatened to revoke the captain’s commercial charter license if any projections were made on prominent sites. The protected status of Sydney Harbour as a commercial tourist zone forced the group and their audience of 155 supporters to project outside Circular Quay onto an abandoned navy vessel.

While the anti-copyright, tall ships image has allowed we are all Boat People’s message and networks to extend as far as Perth, v-I-s-a-s have worked in a different way to bring artwork out of the Woomera Detention Centre and into an international forum. Drawings by children detained at Woomera were collected by arts worker and v-I-s-a-s prime mover Serafina Maiorano following the September riots last year. These works, depicting water cannons used against detainees by guards in riot gear, are currently being exhibited by Amnesty International at a United Nations meeting in Geneva. Although the works cannot be attributed to a particular person or place, the v-I-s-a-s copyright and web address is accessible to those wishing to discover more about refugee detention in Australia.

As an artist-initiated group, v-I-s-a-s organised part of the opening parade event for the Adelaide Fringe where participants were encouraged to adopt the symbol of a Refugee Freedom Key in opposition to the image of barbed-wire fences that has come to represent mandatory detention in Australia. “Open your heart…an invitation to all South Australians to take peaceful action to express humane opposition to the injustice asylum seekers face in this country. The punishment of people who are in search of refuge contradicts the most basic of human rights…rattle your keys…so that in time it becomes known as a refugee freedom gesture”. Aside from its public activities v-I-s-a-s hosts a particularly active website and a listserv that offers insights into the actions of other groups, with regular updates from the Woomera-based Refugee Embassy bus manned by activists Dave McKay and Ross Parry.

From Melbourne, artist and university lecturer Danius Kesminas travelled to Woomera with a group of predominantly exchange students from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong where they attempted to “revive the long standing tradition of Australian landscape painting and watercolours”. The title of this collective work, accompanied by photo-documentation, was A Soft Touch: Woomera Detention Centre Eyewitness Accounts, referring directly to one of the most quoted myths of Australia’s so-called ‘soft’ border controls. The work was shown at Kuntlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Danius explains “the thing to remember is that in German consciousness the 2 most significant places in Australia are Sydney and Woomera”.

In Perth, road signs are changing at the hands of Mickie Quick, who is converting benign ‘Refuge Island’ signs to Refugee Island, with the supportive male and female figures altered to a man with a gun leading an unarmed female. I spoke with Mickie Quick about his provocative culture jamming in relation to criticism that has been leveled at outspoken writers such as Philip Adams for conflating Australian Detention Centres with the concentration camps of the Holocaust. While this kind of statement can divide opinion, Mickie explains that his work is based on the sentiments of hate and xenophobia that are growing in Australian communities, leading to almost dismissive ‘just shoot ‘em’ attitudes. It’s certainly a difficult time and place for irony. Inaction resulting from self-censorship and fear of reproach also seems to be a significant factor for those who continue to be silent about the plight of asylum seekers in our country. As Teri Hoskin of v-I-s-a-s articulates, “It points to a certain paralysis of action when activism (as physical protest) is seen as the only possible response”.

we are all Boat People, www.boat-people.org
Download the tall ships/boat people image and stickers, and spread the message.

v-i-s-a-s, http://v-i-s-a-s.net [link expired] Join the mailing list. The drawings by children in detention at Woomera can also be viewed on this site.

Artists for refugees, artistsforrefugees@hotmail.com A Perth-based collective of art-workers who recently staged the Artists For Refugees benefit concert with proceeds going to CARAD, Coalition Assisting Refugees After Detention.

Show Mercy, www.showmercy.info [link expired] The Sydney-based Rights Campaign for Asylum Seekers recently staged the Show Mercy Concert in support of asylum seekers.

Australia is Refugees, www.australiansagainstracism.org
A schools project devised by founders of Australians Against Racism, writer Eva Sallis and designer Marianna Hardwick. The project will involve year 6 and 7 students in writing the stories of refugees in their families and communities.

The Art of Dissent, www.artofDissent.com
A national symposium for artists and community activists working at the frontier of social and cultural change. Now calling for speakers: Melbourne Festival 2002, Storey Hall, RMIT University, Oct 14-16.

This Is Not Art/Electrofringe, www.thisisnotart.org/ [updated link] A national festival staged in Newcastle of young writing, music, new media and digital arts.

Digital Eskimo, www.digitaleskimo.net
A global network of digital media professionals, they work with “socially progressive organisations.”

Isle of Refuge, exhibition, curators My Le Thi & Ashley Curruthers, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, early 2003 & touring. Featuring work by refugees and their children, and émigré artists including Imants Tillers, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, Guan Wei and Anne Zahalka.

News from Nowhere,
9am Mondays,92.1 RTR FM, Perth. Presented by anarchist & performance artist Mar Bucknell as an alternative to and critique of mainstream news.

Mobile Refugee Embassy. Support Dave McKay and Ross Parry in Woomera as they lobby government and attempt to provide legal and moral support to detainees.

We’d long been primed to expect ‘no pot of gold’ at the end of the Report into the Small-To-Medium Performing Arts Sector set up by the Cultural Ministers Council (10 state and federal arts ministries). Even so the report made for disappointing reading, thin on analysis, failing to recognise very real issues and proposing predictable solutions to a barely defined problem. Representatives of the Australia Council (Ben Strout, Executive Director Arts Development) and the NSW Ministry for the Arts (Kim Spinks, Project Manager, Theatre & Dance) who spoke at the recent SAMAG (Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group) forum in Sydney (Australia Council, May 27), guardedly welcomed the report. Each drew out the positives either in the report or by-products of it. Spinks spoke of the value of the data collected and how, for the first time, it allowed for some serious comparisons of arts strategies and spending within and across the states. Although sympathetic to artists’ expectations, Strout welcomed the report while pointing to a few of its problems: the unhelpfully large sample (when it comes to a thorough analysis) and the report’s claim that the sector was in surplus. He explained that this was partly the result of the project-based nature of the ‘small’ component of the sector and the requirement that they show a surplus in order to remain viable candidates for future funding. This often means, as we all know, that artists seriously under-pay themselves and are forced to stint on other project expenditure.

Fiona Winning, Artistic Director of Performance Space and the third member of the panel, expressed the feelings of the sector. Earlier she had described the report as akin to a misdiagnosis—“It’s as if we went to the doctor with lung cancer and were treated for bad breath.” Winning argued that in an era of quantitative rather than qualitative analysis it is very difficult to find the language with which to turn the argument for funds to issues of aesthetics and creativity. But, she said, a way had to be found and that the report had to be the starting point for improved funding.

The report clearly and repeatedly acknowledges that the small to medium sector is the source of innovation in the Australian performing arts. It stresses that the sector is seriously concerned about its capacity for continued research and development. However, since the report can’t quantify innovation, it throws in the towel and resolves in the direction of better business planning, “clarifying government expectations of the sector”, and improved inter-government communication, as the way out of what remains, in the document, an undefined problem. As audience and panel members recalled, in the 90s sponsorship was going to solve everything and look where that got us. Now, just when the sector needs a significant injection of funds, we get business plans and better communication. As important as these are, especially if a ‘whole government’ approach to the arts can be developed, they cannot deal with the diminishing capacity of the sector to be the nation’s creative laboratory.

For her assessment, Winning said she was drawing on the discussion at the May RealTime-Performance Space Forum, Size Matters, which focussed on the needs of the small to medium performing arts sector. Company representatives and individual artists spoke about the difficulty of conveying what they believe is a critical situation, at very short notice, to an inadequate questionnaire for the enquiry. It was revealed at the SAMAG forum that the compilers, adding insult to injury, had reported having to do a lot of “hand-holding” in talking artists in the ‘small’ category through their financial responses. In this context there are no surprises in the report. It seemed simply that the document was good in bits, that the statistics would be useful and that artists should start learning the pragmatic language of politics (as someone suggested). Perhaps we should call this the Arnold E Newman Report: What, me worry?

Our guest at the Size Matters forum was Sue Donnelly, General Manager, Arts Development NSW Ministry for the Arts, who explained the workings of the Cultural Ministers Council and the beginnings of the report in a call from then Victorian Arts Minister Mary Delahunty, responding to demands from her constituents for action for the majority of arts activity not covered by the outcomes of the Nugent Report.

Donnelly explained why there was no immediate source of new funds available and why the Small-To-Medium Report was different from Nugent. “All the states contribute to the Cultural Ministers Council… It’s a nominal amount of money. The Commonwealth puts in half, the States put in the other half and because NSW is the largest state it tends to put in 28% of the funds. So they don’t have a huge kitty. There’s probably about half a million dollars at any one time…The Nugent Report was slightly different from other reports that had gone to Council. It had come through the initiative of the Major Organisations Fund at the Australia Council and it also happened to have a banker at the head of the Fund at the time, Helen Nugent, who went on to lead the enquiry and who lobbied very hard. When she set up this report she wanted to have some money at the end of it. And she knew the right people to talk to. …When all the ministers came together to finally talk about the Nugent Report, everything had been pretty well signed off.”

The fact that the Small-To-Medium enquiry had been conceived without financial imperatives was news to some. This lead to a discussion about what the current challenges were, for example the splitting and multiplying of current funding sources, each with their own criteria, means of funding and less and less application of the arm’s length principle. Anna Messariti (Playworks) spoke of attending a recent meeting where the current ‘funding formula’ was described as “a 2-headed monster, with the Australia Council at one head and the Minister’s discretionary funds at the other.” The speaker (a highly paid consultant) went on to suggest that last year the latter exceeded the former. Chris Hudson (Erth) talked about this issue in relation to the Major Festivals Initiative: “There are no guidelines for the application. No public avenues that I know of to approach this funding program and, basically, from what I can tell, it has to do with how much one can supplicate to the festival directors of Australia.”

Another issue raised was the phenomenon of small companies needing to operate as if they were large companies in their dealings with international festivals and promoters. This schizoid behaviour affects a large part of the sector. In 2001 RealTime edited and produced In Repertoire, A Guide to Australian Contemporary Performance, a booklet for the Audience & Market Development Division of the Australia Council for international distribution. Of the 70 mostly small companies documented, half had already toured internationally and often extensively. Mobile small to medium companies carry Australia’s reputation, character and innovations with them overseas. This is acknowledged by the report but is not enough to warrant additional support.

Some speakers saw a major problem for the sector in the way funding is constructed. Companies are tied to break-even project funding which doesn’t allow for long term artistic and business planning and, critically, any protection against fallout from risky ventures. There was a sense that the sector was constantly being encouraged to be sound but not given the means. Kate Dennis (Theatre Kantanka) said, “A lot of us have been working in the sector for 15, 20 years and we can’t give as much as we could when we were 20. There’s something about that whole business of applying for funding and not being able to ask for budgets where we’re allowed to put some money aside for cash reserves, and build up some security for our future.” Chris Hudson added provocatively, “I don’t think it’s really size we’re dealing with here. I think we’re dealing with conservatism…a lack of support for art perceived as risky or unusual.”

There was also a widespread feeling that as funds remained largely static and were heavily competed for, artists and companies were being judged not on their body of work but on the success or not of their last show. The concept of the project has taken over. It doesn’t matter how far you are down the track, the work is still treated as a one-off. “And the irony of this”, said Michael Cohen (Theatre Kantanka) “is that for some companies you can get more money by having that project existence than if you apply for program funding. You’re actually safer being on that edge. It’s a savage irony actually.”

The discrepancy between state and federal funding criteria was an issue for many companies present. Amanda Card from One Extra Dance described the dilemma of 2 totally different responses to the producer-model under which her company currently operates: “The thing I find really frustrating is that when we apply for funding from the Australia Council, we’re asked as a small sector organisation (we’re still project funded) to deal with the word “innovation” all the time. And yet triennially funded companies in the dance sector are not asked to respond to that word. They’re asked to respond to the notion of development of audiences, long term strategy and so on. So the people with less money are expected to do the innovation while those with more resources—and in dance that’s the people with the solidly booked 6-8 dancers employed for 12 months of the year—are not.”

Other issues raised about the impact of limited funds included artists leaving the sector (Rosalind Crisp: ”People give up. It’s too hard. And that’s a huge loss”); life below the poverty line (prominent artists in the room admitted to living like this all their lives); the exploitation of artists (Anna Messariti: “The situation is now critical and the further exploitation of artists and artworkers in this sector is ethically unsustainable”); the erosion of vision (Caitlin Newton-Broad: “a shrinking of our capacity to be intellectually engaged and to be refresh ourselves creatively”); and the wholesale demise of permanent ensembles in the sector (Michelle Vickers, Legs on the Wall: “For years the company had 4 artists and was generally creating shows with casts of 4-5 which meant that they were able to keep up a certain level of physical skill and also of physical language.” Now the company hires from project to project.)

Rosalind Crisp read from Omeo Dance Studio’s submission to the enquiry describing the personnel in this largely non-funded organisation as having “developed our skills as administrators, promoters and producers increasingly in conflict with our desires to simply do our work as artists. However, the net return from both endeavours is simply not enough to support a paid administrator and the prospect of queuing for one at the funding bodies is not encouraging.” She went on to say, “The growth of my work and the studio means that I’m now even more stressed than ever—artist, collaborator, choreographer, dancer/performer, publicist, producer, administrator, teacher, studio cleaner, mentor, caretaker, artistic adviser, board member, reporter to Cultural Ministers Councils and last but not least, partner to another artist. All I can say is Help! The critical challenge is survival.”

At the end of the RealTime-Performance Space forum, it was felt that while the huge aesthetic, political and geographical diversity of the sector gravitated against forming a lobby group, nonetheless pockets of activity, an email list and further open discussions could be used to find ways to apply pressure to governments to recognise the deleterious struggle that belies the apparent successes of Australia’s innovators in performance. The subsequent release of the report makes this all the more urgent.

See also full transcript of the RealTime-Performance Space forum Size Matters. The Report to Ministers on the Examination of the Small-To-Medium Performing Arts Sector can be downloaded from the DCITA website: www.dcita.gov.au/cmc/stand.html [link expired]

By the third week in March every second year, Adelaide is a city no longer throbbing, but in the throes of Festival detumescence. Arts exhaustion notwithstanding, tickets for a bus tour—by night, through this city’s heart, by Madame Ivana—proved scarce, stimulating a brisk black market at the Fringe bus depot. Whether this represented an opportunity to experience the romance that only a relic from Tsarist Russia can provide, or the frisson of rubbing up against Adelaide’s soiled underbelly, who can say? But whatever each passenger’s desire, all this— and more—awaited on the bus line from Hell.

Once aboard, the formidable Madame reminisced, gesticulated and cooed as the bus travelled to Colonel Light’s Vision, Adelaide’s ‘highest point.’ Resplendent in rabbit, with gold accessories offsetting her taupe toque, and just a little stoked—“Dahlinks”—it soon became obvious that Madame was less Slavic princess than sleazy pretender from Sydney’s Northern Shores. “Vulgar” was hissed by local matrons in the middle row; a word equally suited to Ivana’s young ‘consort’ Vladimir, who bullied us off the bus Soviet style, lined us up under Light’s monument, and forced Madame’s ‘food of love’ (oysters and cheap shots of vodka) down our throats.

From here it was all downhill as the tour entered its Descent into Ugliness. Forty-nine passengers, agog with apprehension and terror, passed sad, stuffed figures hanging off the Rosemont’s verandah, only to be confronted with Red Algal Bloom in Phillip Street’s nasty Saville Apartments and the Remand Centre. But alas! The Boulevard of Hope (West Terrace) provided no solace; only acres of aluminium, tacky car showrooms and the gigantism of BP’s green and gold multi-nationalism casting a ghoulish glow across the entire precinct.

Hydroponic Melancholy (the residential south) stood witness to the relentless swathe of what is euphemistically referred to as ‘development’; streets once full of heritage buildings since razed and replaced by schlock apartments and anally aligned standard white roses. Their ubiquitous matchbox balconies became bathetic under Vladimir’s torch beam. And on it went, into Vladimir’s Night—all besser and brutality—with passengers craning their necks to spot just one old building. Around the corner was Memories of Chernobyl (King William Street) and “the grand avenue of central Adelaide”, with “public art adorning the median strip”—for Ivana, “expressions of joy and freedom,” and for Vladimir “shits on sticks.”

The Bourgeois Façade (around Hutt Street) revealed further nifty ways to pave over parks and obliterate history, but it was the Prophylactic Veneers of Pirie and Waymouth Streets, which proved the tour’s undoubted highlight. Here, amongst bleak and bland 70s buildings, the entire bus spilled out into eerie dimness to experience the jewel of Adelaide City Council, the Topham Mall Car Park. Another regimented vodka break, a group photo opportunity and on into the night, celebrating more car parks and the Doors to Nowhere along Light Square. “Such a pity”, someone remarked, “that Adelaide’s Lord Mayor couldn’t be with us tonight.”

We were now on the home run and as a glorious climax, the Festival Centre loomed ahead like downtown Kabul, with its guts bombed out and barbed wire everywhere. “Oy Vey”, clucked Ivana, “A symbolic wound cutting through the heart of your cultural icon. Don Dunstan where are you now—we say shame Adelaide, shame!”

Perhaps this Festival-Deficit stood as architectural metaphor for this year’s festival. More likely, it’s typical of a new architectural aesthetic rampant in South Australia which recalls that 50s ‘heritage’ a concrete-and-brick-veneer(eal) generation was so partial to—if it’s old, bulldoze it; if it moves, shoot it.

This truly was the Imperial Tour of Shame and mercifully did not include Adelaide’s inner suburbs. Now resembling mouths full of bad teeth, countless old homes are being demolished to make way for faux heritage follies and what is affectionately known as ‘Tuscan shit.’ Indeed the Soviet mouth comes prominently to mind, as millions of citizens had their teeth routinely pulled and replaced by stainless steel dentures—an effect not unlike the stainless steel, self-cleaning dunnies smack in the middle of Victoria Square.

On this brief excursion, interstate passengers were genuinely shocked and delighted by Madame’s revelations. Like most tourists, they knew Adelaide is an economic slum, but one dignified by ‘culture’, ‘charm’, and a strong architectural heritage; that same image relentlessly promoted (along with grapes) by State tourist campaigns. We locals—dismayed about Adelaide’s cultural future, having recently lost so much cultural past—nevertheless saw a new vision of tourism emerge on this very coach. That is, a niche market exposing and celebrating the fabric of ‘Today’s Adelaide.’ Call it ugly, but hey, it works, it’s entertaining and it makes a buck. Grab a seat now though; my undercover agent Dmitri advises that tours are filling up with City Councillors and Ministers of Tourism, Heritage, Planning, and, of course, the Arts, as the city’s buildings come down.

Your City is Ugly: A Tour of Adelaide with Madame Ivana, devised by John Adley, Chris Barker, Julianne Pierce, Katrina Sedgwick & Daryl Watson; Adelaide Fringe 2002, March 12-13.

One of the hits of 2002 Next Wave was Christopher Brown’s virtuosic performance as Mr Phase. Phase is a kind of Kaspar Hauser for the 21st century, an innocent nurtured on the language of advertising and able to slip into the personae of media stars like Ali G with unconscious ease. Or, as the writers put it, “Just like the kid who grew up with the apes. But instead he grew up with the ads.” The half hour performance was co-written with technical director Thomas Howie and directed by Margaret Cameron whose meticulous approach to language is written all over Brown’s realisation of the dense, lateral text and its demanding gear changes. Mr Phase should travel, and a longer version would be welcome.

“If one of the aims of Next Wave’s PrimeTime was to take postmodernism and media consciousness to the cleaners, then the star of tonight’s show was undeniably Mr Phase. Starring the indefatigable Christopher Brown this piece of ‘commercial theatre’ is a collage of standup, monologue and physical theatre. Devised by Brown and Thomas Howie, Mr Phase is a vehicle for comic warfare against all that is kitsch and disposable in the fourth estate. Brown’s performance is a complete montage of media iconography. From the contents of Nutri-grain cereal, to a meditation on love—‘the reason for it all’—or the lack thereof, he is cocky, languid and brave. He performs part of his monologue in his underwear and recycles punchy media-speak in an excellently crafted script. ‘Passion has no volume control,’ he professes during a meditation on sex, and then offers ‘be baked not fried’ as sound ad-savvy advice. The sound design by David Franzke helps to match the show’s fast pace with style and fluidity. Brown has definitely got it—Rove’s stage presence, Adam Spencer’s wry cynicism and the slapstick sillies of Adam Sandler. Keep your remotes on hand, it won’t be long before we’re seeing him on primetime.”

Christopher Brown is a writer-performer who graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts Drama School in 1997. He has worked with Arena Theatre Company, with the Other Tongue Theatre Company, and in film and television.

Mr Phase, performer-writer Christopher Brown, writer-technical director Thomas Howie, director-coach Margaret Cameron, sound design David Franzke, video design Adrian Hauser, choreographic assistance Cazerine Barry; PrimeTime, May 17-25, 2002 Next Wave.

Neil Roberts was a wonderful artist. He made works that were imaginative, challenging, playful, and always thoughtful. His art is lyrical and elegant, but in its spare beauty there is strength and integrity. All those qualities of his art were so absolutely present in Neil’s life, and in the way that he related to the world and to all of us. He was a wonderful artist because of that—he was true to himself in his art making. And he was a wonderful artist because he saw himself as part of a community of artists, and because he made us see ourselves that way too.

Neil came to the Canberra region nearly 20 years ago, in 1983. How lucky we are to have had him here for so long. Klaus Moje, the inaugural Head of the Glass Workshop at the Canberra School of Art, invited Neil to join him in a program of innovative, adventurous teaching in the workshop, and in his two years at the School, Neil had a profound effect on his colleagues and his students. Though he subsequently chose the sometimes precarious life of an independent artist, he always had a strong commitment to teaching and was an important mentor to countless artists, many of whom are here today. Neil had been trained as a glass blower at the Jam Factory in Adelaide and then at the Orrefors Glass School in Sweden and the Experimental Glass workshop in New York. His practice shifted over time from that of an artist who worked in glass to a sculptor whose practice describes a kind of unfolding, a cycle of collecting and reflecting, forming bonds between objects, between objects and language; re-making, re-thinking, taking chances.

When Neil and eX de Medici turned the old glass factory in Uriarra Road, Queanbeyan into a studio, home and the sometime gallery Galerie Constantinople in the late 1980s, it became a focus for exciting and idiosyncratic art and for the huge network of friends and colleagues who lived in the region or visited from interstate and overseas. A visit to the factory was always a treat, whether it was a performance night, the opening of one of those fugitive 3-day exhibitions, a special party for a friend, or just a lazy afternoon with cups of tea in the sun. Neil’s working space tells so much about him—his love of ordinary objects, his sense of order, his respect for tools, for objecthood, for the thingness of things. In the last few years the space was transformed, and the zone of comfort that he and Barbara Campbell created there seemed like a natural evolution from his space to their space.

As well as the richness of his life and work at home, Neil was an artist out in the world. He keenly sought knowledge, adventure, and exchange with colleagues in Australia and overseas. His many rewarding professional experiences included artist’s residencies at the Australia Council Greene Street studio in New York, Art Lab in Manila, and the University of South Australia Art Museum. Neil loved and thrived on his engagement with artists, writers, curators, academics and any other curious people and his experiences with them, and with their work, were distilled into his thoughtful, beautiful art. A Filipino friend said about the work Neil made in response to his time in Manila that, “maybe it takes an outsider to realise the treasures inside ourselves”.

Everyone here, and others mourning elsewhere, has a special relationship with some particular work of Neil’s. For me, at ARX in 1989, when I saw Neil’s brilliant neon words ‘Tenderly, gently’ writ against the Perth skyline of the butch Bond tower and the corporate madness of the times, I knew I was seeing something special. It was an exquisite and poignant work of art. In a very real sense his work was always about masculinity: its culture, its rituals, its nonsense, and the fantastic possibilities of its transformation.

Neil’s art had that kind of arresting impact on many people. Flood Plane, his commissioned work for Floriade in 1990—an irrigation machine on Nerang Pool, strung with neon words from an Adam Lindsay Gordon poem, was breathtaking. And his work for the Canberra Playhouse, with its delicious play on words, is a constant source of delight for city strollers. Neil was enormously respected and valued in his adopted town and region, and he was the inaugural recipient of the ACT Creative Arts Fellowship in 1995, and the Capital Arts Patrons Organisation Fellow in 2000. Neil’s survey show last year at the School of Art, The Collected Works of Neil Roberts, elegantly curated by Merryn Gates, re-assembled some of his most poetic works; works which resonated with the gentle wit of Robert Klippel, and the formal grace of Rosalie Gascoigne, both artists he admired enormously. The Collected Works were about found, and lost, objects—in these, as in everything he did, Neil looked for the human traces in things, the fragments which reveal things to us, the unseen possibilities in history and in our own stories.

Many people have treasured objects given to them by Neil—postcards, toys, badges, photographs, rolling pins, words, and letters, and will forever treasure the dialogue they had with him over years. His genuine curiosity, attentiveness and compassion made him a unique friend. My son Frazer, when confronted with the awful reality of Neil’s death said “I didn’t think it would happen to someone I know, who carried me on his shoulders”. That feeling of disbelief has been echoed across the broad community to which Neil belonged—he carried many of us on his shoulders, lightly and cheerfully; he gave us huge support, in times of grief, and in times of hope. He valued people and he loved his friends, and we valued him and loved him too—an exceptional, stimulating and inspirational artist, and a lovely, gentle smiling presence.

And we had reckoned on him growing old, and always being there, carrying us on his broad shoulders.

Neil Roberts died accidentally on March 21, 2002. This eulogy was delivered at his funeral. Deborah Clark is the Editor of Art Monthly.

He left his shoes neatly arranged. The clothes had all been collected from the dry cleaner. Very particular books were left turned face down at very particular pages. (Kundera, Arendt, Brautigan). There was no note. Colin Hood put his affairs in order and took his life on the night of the 20th of March 2002. He was 45 years old.

The hardest thing about the suicide of a good friend is respecting their decision. One can only judge by the traces left behind, but it seems that Colin made up his mind to free himself, finally, from suffering.

Colin’s suffering was of the most abstract kind, but no less painful for that. It should really come as no surprise that a man so capable of loving others freely came to that capacity for generosity out of direct experience of a life of suffering; of life as suffering.

Colin will not suffer any more. And although I miss him terribly, although I feel direct and terrible loss to my own life from his passing, there is a sense in which this pain and loss on my part is a selfish feeling. What’s really most important is that Colin will suffer no more.

Sometimes I would see him at a party or a function—he led a very public life—but then I would notice that he had slipped quietly away. And sometimes I would wonder if Colin was alright or not. I believe it may have been some small part of his intention to free his friends from their concern.

I loved Colin. As a lot of people did, I think. And I think he truly loved his friends. He was always a point of connection between people. Communities came together through him and because of him. Colin always gave me the sense that love and life were possible. This was his gift. This is his gift, still.

He had such a wide range of gifts for people. He was a beautiful dancer. If Colin was up and dancing then the whole room was threaded together with his sensuous joy. But in addition to his physical presence, he was a listener. He heard people. He heard not just their gripes and schemes, he heard their being. He always gave the impression of being capable of responding to your experience of your existence, even if you were not at that moment capable of responding to it yourself.

Colin was a perceptive and cultured and intelligent man. When he wrote, he wrote well and perceptively. He saw through the pretensions of self-promoters and the perverse logic of institutions.

If there was a space in which real art or culture was being made, Colin unfailingly supported it. He worked away behind the scenes in art, writing and performance with patience and care and with little concern for reward. He was indispensable.

Colin was many things to many people: friend, lover, comrade. But he was also the favourite funny uncle of a very large, very dysfunctional urban family. Colin showed many people the path toward creating their own way of life, usually just by example. From his little apartment in Kings Cross, he created a whole way of life that I, for one, feel privileged to have shared.

The last time I saw him was outside Kings Cross Station on a bright, warm morning. And I prefer to think that whenever I return to that old neighbourhood where we all laughed and cried and beat ourselves against the edges of life, he will be there waiting for me with a smile and a kiss and a hug, and his quiet but powerful sense of being in the world.

Colin Hood and RealTime

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter
Colin Hood was one of the original team that worked on creating RealTime in 1994 and 1995. He co-edited several issues, wrote incisive and demanding reviews, proof-read and concocted marvellous titles for articles, and contributed significantly to the energy and sense of purpose and fun (there was a party with every edition) that was so needed in those early years when RealTime’s demise always seemed imminent. He was not good at keeping meeting times, but he’d turn up at all hours on our doorstep (home was the RealTime office) with copy, gossip, ideas.
We are saddened by Colin’s passing. We honour his intelligence and his passion, and regret that in the end his restless spirit could not find a home among the living.

Janet Merewether is a screenwriter/ director and curator, and a designer of motion graphics and film title sequences for feature and documentary films. Her short films and videos, including the recent award-winning Cheap Blonde and Contemporary Case Studies, arebeing screened in Australia and internationally at a wide range of mainstream and experimental festivals, including the 2001 New York Film Festival. Her design work has featured in The Boys and The Diplomat. She lectures in Design and Experimental Film at AFTRS, UTS and UWS, and has just returned from travelling with a program of short experimental films by Australian women directors, Eye for Idea, which screened in Tampere (Finland) and Berlin.

I saw very few films in childhood. I can only remember the Marx Brothers and Jacques Tati. As a high school student I took myself off to the WEA (Workers Education Association) Film Group, so my first film experiences were not commercial cinema but sitting there as a 16-year-old seeing Godard, Eisenstein, an Esben Storm film; a whole mixed bag of Australian and European art house films, and later Surrealist and Dada cinema at art school. I didn’t grow up watching American cinema at all.

I didn’t set out to make films. I did a one year design course at AFTRS after art school where I’d been working with computers as design tools since the early Macs came out in 1985. I started to see the potential of the camera as a design tool, playing around with multiple exposures and the design and animation processes within the camera. Making video clips, I explored the use of an Oxberry Rostrum animation camera and realised it was an interesting bridge into making films which worked on an intensely visual level. During an exchange with a design school in Paris I spent a year in the Cinemathèque/ Videothèque, viewing screenings at the Pompidou Centre and video art installations. It was a huge education in classic cinema—directors such as Agnes Varda, the French New Wave, Bresson; contemporary American video artists like Gary Hill and Bill Viola. I developed a very different vocabulary of films as my reference points and thought about film in a much more sculptural way. Unable to make an installation work as a major project at film school, I spent 6 months working with the Oxberry animation camera on a stills-based animation, shot with actors, and exploring the possibilities of working with slides, cut-ups and rear projection (A Square’s Safari, 1992).

What I wasn’t seeing in international avant garde or experimental work was a history of women (Maya Deren aside) working with experimental forms or using language in a different way. Political thought or pure abstraction in avant garde cinema is wonderful in itself, but although I was interested in the visual and aesthetic explorations they were making, I wanted to work with performance and language and comedy. In a lot of political or left wing cinema comedy is demonised as trivial, and I take comedy quite seriously.

Across 10 years of stylistically varied work, comedy is the continuum. Tourette’s Tics (1994) is based on some of Freud’s case studies—ideas about hysterical women. I remember in the research project becoming incredibly depressed and upset by the material—the cocaine treatments and the pathologising of women’s bodies as diseased—it’s very intense and upsetting. Yet somehow, in a perverse way, Tourette’s Tics became a comedy. This also happened in my latest film, Contemporary Case Studies (2001)—a script with big, current, pressing issues for women and men. Even if I’m making something serious it often comes out as comedy. I don’t seem to have much control—it’s probably how the Dadaists worked with comedy.

With Cheap Blonde (1998), I was interested in the idea of a game, of using a very limited number of materials—I have 12 words and one image of a woman, and the image is a very short-looped section but the background changes. I gained permission to use the image of the cheap blonde from a company at a trade fair who were selling chroma key broadcast equipment. I’d been planning for a while to use the sort of imagery that you find in TV broadcast equipment trade shows. I’d often seen the models hired to sit on motor bikes. For the Sony stand, for example, you’d have lines of TV executives testing out new cameras on hired blondes. The assumption is that the blokes are the ‘tech-heads’, that the viewer is male. I’ve always struggled with that neutralising male gaze because it’s never my perspective, and I constantly found that I became very engaged with looking at men as they are looking. Also, I was interested in how illusions are built up in films and broadcasting. The illusion in Cheap Blonde is presented first—a woman in front of a waterfall. It’s only after a while that you realise she’s shot against a blue screen, that there’s probably a fan blowing her hair, and the constructed nature of the image is exposed. I was drawing a parallel in the soundtrack where there’s a similar construction demonstrating the artifice of cinema: the sentence, “A famous filmmaker said ‘Cinema is the history of men filming women’”, is repeated 22 times, as the 12 words are rearranged.

I was interested in the strangely subtle shifts of meaning in language. I used a synthetic voice in order to demonstrate the emotional qualities to be found in computer-generated voices. The sampled voices weren’t without emotion, and I wanted to know whether we listen differently according to whether it’s a male or female synthesised voice. I found the sound of the computer voice quite mesmerising, and the looped image of the woman was quite mesmerising as well. It sets up a strange conflict—even while we intellectually critique the blonde woman selling us a product, shampoo or a camera, we’re still drawn in by the gesture of the image.

In Contemporary Case Studies: An unromantic comedy, I wanted to work with performers again, in a proper studio, construct an ambitious mise en scène, construct a stage design. I wanted the artificial look of showrooms. Contemporary Case Studies is a showroom of emotions where each section of the film contrasts documentary, fictional and experimental genres in a very artificial, highly stylised space to cut out any attempt to read it naturalistically. The non-professional actors’ performances allow for ambiguous readings. I’m responding to the world, to texts, to media, or following models like language lessons (Making Out in Japan, 1996) and then playing with structures. Purely working with the visual quality has never been enough. My work is often included in mainstream festivals—they actually want new forms in Edinburgh and New York. Australian audiences don’t get a chance to see new work due to lack of distribution, with the exception of SBS.

Both these activities give me a way of working with other people. Through my titling work I can stay abreast with new technologies, work with other directors, and participate in the mainstream industry. The program I recently curated (Eye for Idea for Finland and Berlin) featured work by women filmmakers from the late 80s and early 90s crucial in making Australian cinema known (eg Jackie Farkas’s Illustrated Auschwitz). Coming after the feminist essay and documentary films of the 70s, these short, formally challenging films have won awards all over the world, but are already lost to viewers here. They play with the formal qualities of cinema and extend it to critique social, political and gender issues—a very different avant garde from the Ubu group in the 60s who were parodying or making purely aesthetic experimentations. Meaning can be communicated through the image—the current state of filmmaking treats the image as the window and not the producer of meaning.

You can’t sum up a festival like Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) in a short space. Better to mark out a few current questions and suggest ways the films help us think them through. While HKIFF is under pressure to maintain its position as a leading Asian showcase, there is so much to be discovered about Asian cinema that one could happily spend several festivals playing catch up.

Every year we ask the same questions of Hong Kong’s commercial cinema: are the glories in the past, and/or is it about to take over the world? This year’s key exhibit is Stephen Chiau’s Shaolin Soccer. It’s been snapped up by Disney, and while some Canto-fans find it too internationally accessible, what could be more central to Hong Kong than the search for fresh combinations of saleable popular elements? Here the mix involves splicing together soccer, kung fu and digital effects. As the program notes point out, “martial arts fiction has been a powerful tool with which the Cantonese people deal with modernity.”

The most impressive Hong Kong film (and winner of the FIPRESCI Prize) was the animated feature My Life as McDull. It uses diverse animation styles and cute Hello Kitty type figures to contemplate the way bullshit about the magic of childhood leads to an adult life of quiet disillusion. It’s a strongly local film, but also a fresh take on what lies beyond the end of freshness.

While Hong Kong’s art cinema was represented primarily by an Ann Hui retrospective, the most interesting achievement was Fruit Chan’s Hollywood Hong Kong. Chan’s movies always stem from such obviously good ideas. In the most incisive architectural juxtaposition since Psycho, this film brings together new high-rises (felicitously named Hollywood Apartments), with the shantytown at their base. The story deals with a prostitute and a family of fat men who sell pork. Flesh—source of fantasy, pain, and profit—constitutes us and keeps us weighted to the ground. The symbolism in the title marks out an opposition that structures contemporary life: the world of transnational consumer fantasy and the physical, historical world.

If a major theme in Asian cinema is the disparate pulls of past and present, the festival exemplified this with its Cathay studio retrospective. Chief attraction here was the 1960 musical, Wild, Wild Rose with Cathay’s main star, Grace Chang, as a nightclub chanteuse. You can trace a straight (though broken) line back to the 1930s Shanghai melodramas of Ruan Lingyu, where the strong, fallen woman throws it all away for some weak-chinned guy, not man enough to recognise the magnificence of her degradation.

Grace Chang was all over this retrospective. How can a musical called Mambo Girl not be great? Grace has the moves and the knitwear. She concentrates on the stylish shuffle sideways rather than the Great Leap Forward. She mambos and cha-chas through a digressive story that includes visits to nightclubs to watch acts like ‘Margo the Z-Bomb.’ Is it fanciful to imagine a print of this film finding its way into Mao and Jiang Qing’s compound, and in their horror, the seeds of the Cultural Revolution are sown?

Cathay’s comedies, such as The Battle of Love, Sister Long Legs, and Our Dream Car are full of stylish young things with new, western commodities. You might need a neo-realist film to clean your palate afterward, but they mark an important claim by the Chinese for a right to the conspicuous consumption that was for so long the prerogative of the coloniser.

Mainland Chinese films are also grappling with rapid socio-economic transformation right now. Several dealt with economic migrants to the cities, employing a style I’ll call International Chinese Realism (none of these films will probably be shown in China) comprising grubby settings, long takes, minimal non-diegetic sound with the atmosphere track brought forward in the mix. The characters are always cold, and the main reason they go to bed together is to get warm. Wang Chao’s The Orphan of Anyang was the highlight of this group with its minimalism and bold angular compositions. It builds strong intimacies out of long moments in which characters silently share noodles.

As Asian youth culture increasingly looks towards Japan, you wonder whether the Japanese are up to the job. This year’s innovation is the ennui of young Japanese. We know the straight world is boring, but now rebellion is boring too. Toyoda Toshiaki’s Blue Spring is a postmodern Zero de Conduite, taking schoolkid cool almost to a point of catatonia, and the title of When Slackers Dream of the Moon tells you all you need to know.

Suwa Nobuhiro’s H Story similarly abandons narrative as an endeavour too weighty for these times. It starts as the record of an attempt to remake Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s a clever conceit: a film about the making of a film which is a remake of an earlier film about the making of a film. More an exercise in the failure of signification than a comment on it, the film has to be endured, but it repays the effort through its subversion of any certainties about cinema.

Korea was the breakthrough cinema last year, seizing half of its domestic market, so it was disappointing to see so few Korean films at the festival. Kim Ki-duk, the focus of Melbourne’s retrospective this year, had international success with The Isle. His heavily allegorical Address Unknown confirms the way Kim builds his films around characters in impossible positions. The only options are to re-imagine the world or to destroy yourself, and ultimately the maintenance of the social order relies on the way we find it easier to grasp the second option.

While there were important political films such as Tahmineh Milaneh’s The Hidden Half, the best of the new Iranian films returned to the territory of childhood. Abolfazl Jalili’s Delbaran is a triumph of bold simplicity about a young Afghan boy who works as a gofer in an Iranian border town. It is a celebration of those who keep things running in a world which constantly breaks down. It is a cinema of long takes, simply designed performances, golden light and gentle humour.

Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? closed the festival. Like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, Tsai is a minimalist, but a minimalist who wants to be liked. While he uses long takes to explore time and space, he ultimately wants to make his characters readable in terms of psychological pathologies. The characters act out cleverly constructed scenarios of loneliness, grief and alienation while the tone resolves into one of cruelty.

Finally, why should we be interested in Asian film? One answer is that we watch films for the pleasure of learning something new, both about cinema and about the world. For a country whose cinema has so few options open to it, Australians should appreciate the formal and industrial diversity of Asian cinemas.

Over the last 4 years, the REVelation International Film Festival has gradually built a distinct and cohesive identity by offering a vibrant diversity of independent films. This has always been a festival that celebrates the sub-cultural fringes, the bizarre and the eccentric as much as it caters for serious film buffs. This year’s mix of short and feature fiction is complemented by a generous selection of documentaries, a sample of which fell into my hands to preview.

Fans of Jan Svankmájer’s idiosyncratic style will be excited by the prospect of his recent feature Otesánek (Little Otik) in which a dark Czech folktale is the template for a fabulously perverse tale of desire and the unreality it inserts into the everyday. A barren couple’s craving for a child becomes displaced onto a tree root (dug up and fashioned into a proxy child by the husband). When the latter becomes animate, it develops an insatiable appetite to feed its monstrous growth. Engaging and distinctive, this meditation on the subterranean aspects of desire filters Svankmájer’s black humored take on the complexities of adult life through the child’s view.

Of an extensive and diverse selection of documentary film, a definite highlight is Monteith McCollum’s superb Hybrid. This surprising film reveals the passionate lifework of Mid-Western corn farmer Milton Beeghly in his quest to interbreed different strains of corn to create the kind we are familiar with today. Slowly evolving, and shot in grainy black-and white, Hybrid features subtle time-lapse images and delightful stop-frame animation to augment exploration of its subject and of the ramshackle spaces of the aged farm. The lyric treatment of the taciturn Beeghly reveals a devotional relationship to the land. His work is a quiet hymn which opens up a sense of self conditional on the cycle of organic time and natural wonder. Intimate, witty and insightful, this gem of a documentary portrait eclipsed its category to receive the Grand Jury Award for Best Feature at the US Slamdance festival and the Fipresci Critics Award at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam.

Three of the other documentaries that featured in my sneak preview were polished productions from the US. Arisman: Facing The Audience (dir. Tony Smith) presents an engaging profile of graphic artist Marshall Arisman in his exploration of the mysterious and darker aspects of humanity. The speed and flow with which the artist demonstrates his working method in the studio, is augmented by his amicable dialogue and tales of extrasensory perception (he claims to see auras) which descend from his grandmother who was a medium. The camera examines Arisman’s complex imagery carefully, sensitively mapping out his painting and sculpture in a way that encourages a sense of getting inside the works.

The Hotel Upstairs (Daniel Baer) opens a window onto the lives of a handful of the 20,000 long-term boarders who live in residential hotels in San Francisco. Frank and sensitive depictions of the former reveal not only the range of lifestyle values, but also the dignity with which these have-nots have redefined the American Dream through ad-hoc community and coexistence.

Money For Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music (produced by the Media Education Foundation) offers a revealing glimpse into the current state of music distribution. It focuses on the future implications of the vertical alignment of production, distribution and retail into the Big Five Corporations of the mainstream music industry. Narrated by Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and featuring interviews with independent artists (Ani DiFranco, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, Michael Franti, Public Enemy’s Chuck D), Money For Nothing teases out the dilemma for creative artists in this corporate ‘massification’ of music production. Cogent and highly satisfying.

Australian documentaries also make a firm showing in this year’s festival. My sample included the early days of internet trespass with Kevin Anderson’s In the Realm Of the Hackers. This locates the thriving hacker community of Melbourne as world centre of the scene in the mid 80s. Here it unearths the story of teen hackers whose dedicated prank penetration of high-level computer security systems eventually forced the Australian government to create legislation to define computer crime. Despite an over dependence on ‘dramatic recreation’ as visual material (ostensibly in order to protect real identities), this is an intriguing look at those mythic, formative days of the information economy.

Rainbow Bird and Monster Man (Dennis K Smith) presents the harrowing tale of one man’s trial for murder. It is also a revelation of his struggle to survive a childhood decade of hideous physical and sexual abuse in the ‘bad old days’ of the 50s, where social taboo rendered his dilemma inconceivable and hence invisible. The frankness and sensitivity of testimonial is compelling, and the camera captures the complexity of its subject with due respect and maturity. Also heavily ‘recreated’, the imagery none the less provides some rewarding moments amidst the hard-going narrative.

Shannon Sleeth’s short The Meat Game offers a snapshot of workers in a rural farming town with only one main processing industry: the meat-works and abattoir. It’s a gentle, amicable portrait of one key family and features discussion with the workers about what the work means to them in their own particular context.

This year’s REV festival is shaping up to be a very satisfying mix. Given the diminished state of independent showings in Perth, film fans would be crazy not to check it out.

The REAL: life on film festival has grown bigger and broader over the past year and now bills itself as “Australia’s Premier International Documentary Festival.” The previous focus on human rights and social justice is still there but it’s been joined by a few other topics—art and design, music, culture, history, environment and identity—which makes for a fairly broad agenda (although I guess it still leaves room for some wildlife docos). This year’s program toured Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Adelaide and drew impressive attendances, with some sessions sold out. There’s clearly an audience out there for new documentaries, a consequence perhaps of the boom in DIY filmmaking and so-called reality television. We’ve all become REAL junkies.

Overall, the selection of films demonstrated that while the human rights component of the festival is still as strong as ever, there’s some way to go before it can justifiably claim to be a showcase for contemporary documentary making.

A key feature of REAL: life on film is the emphasis on locally made films. About half of the documentaries are from Australian filmmakers and it is here that the social justice agenda is most explicit. These films tend to follow a fairly narrow range of themes such as land rights and Indigenous stories (Fight for Country, Stranger in My Skin, Jetja Nai Medical Mob, Nganampa Trespass); or working class culture and the debilitating effects of poverty, drugs and crime (The Meat Game, The Woodcutter’s Son, Staying Out, Kim and Harley and the Kids). Mix in some autobiography and family history (My Mother India, Mick’s Gift, Welcome to the Waks Family) and that pretty well covers the bulk of the Australian component.

That doesn’t mean the films themselves are uniform or uninteresting—though it feels unfair to single out any particular film for comment because they all work in their own context. They are all passionate, painstakingly crafted works produced by dedicated filmmakers. There is a steady, insistent awareness of the issues involved, and it is obvious that the subjects and topics in front of the lens have seeped under the skin of the filmmakers, bringing forth committed, strategic interventions. They are documentaries that matter.

What it does mean, though, is that if you want to explore the effects of race and culture, class and politics, then the Australian documentaries in the festival fit the bill. If you want to find out about female Japanese wrestlers, or a lesbian, folk-singing Tupperware salesperson, or Romanian subway children, or just listen to some Bluegrass music (bearing in mind that these films are also about race, culture, class and politics), then you have to look overseas.

The other aspect of the locally made material is that it tends to be somewhat homogenous in form, a consequence of its intended audience. Most of the films are about half an hour or an hour long, designed to fill a slot in a particular documentary series or schedule. At times, the festival felt like a preview screening for the SBS/ABC documentary departments. This is inevitable given the current realities governing the commissioning and production of local material but again, it meant that the longer format, which brings with it certain advantages, was left to the overseas films.

A film such as Runaway (dir. Kim Longinotto/Zib Mir-Hossein), for instance, benefits simply from being 87 minutes long rather than 27 or 55 minutes. Runaway needs that extra space to work in because of the manner in which it allows the subjects—Iranian teenage girls staying at a refuge—to tell their own stories, and then stays with them through various encounters with their families until the point at which most of them disappear from view through the main gate. Voice-overs, precis or scene-setting context are not provided, so the only information we have to go on is whatever the young women reveal, as well as our own understanding of Iran and Islam, however patchy or ill-informed that may be. This challenges our impartiality in judging what the girls should do—stay at the refuge or return to their families? Thus, while we can acknowledge the bravery of the girls in challenging the social order and seeking to escape, we also have to accept that we can’t tell what is best for them. A highly poignant film that works because of its openness and semi-detachment; we can’t help wondering about the girls’ fates precisely because that is how we are left—there’s no neat closure, no emotional safety net, no way of knowing.

The other notable aspect of REAL: life on film is that, in a festival which places culture at its heart, the most significant omission is documentary culture itself: its history, genres, practitioners and ideologies. Questions of form and style, rather than just content, are elided, and no space is provided for experimental work, docu-drama or mockumentary. The idea of what constitutes documentary film therefore appears self-evident, which might come as a surprise to some people. In particular, it would be interesting to see the REAL element of the festival given a really good shake-up. At the very least some acknowledgement needs to be made that problems of representation, objectivity, engagement and so on are day-to-day issues for documentary film makers, not something that can be taken for granted. This is particularly important at a time when there is clearly a desire, a hunger among audiences for factually driven representations, not to mention an awareness of media manipulation and the manner in which reality is produced.

For the record, there were 4 winners of REAL: life on film awards announced at the festival. My Mother India (dir. Safina Uberoi) won the Odyssey Channel Award for Best Documentary; East Timor—Birth of a Nation: Rosa’s Story (dir. Luigi Aquisto) won the SBS Award for the Promotion of Cultural Diversity through Film; and Welcome to the Waks Family (dir. Barbara Chobocky) won the Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking. And Kim and Harley and the Kids (dir. Katrina Sawyer) won the Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking.

REAL: life on film, Melbourne, May 3-8; Sydney May 9-15; Perth, May 16-18, and Adelaide, May 23, 25 & 27.

Martha Ansara has been making films since 1971 and of the more than a dozen films she has made, 3 titles were still lodged with AFI Distribution, the distribution arm of the Australian Film Institute. Janet Merewether has been making films for over 10 years, and has made 7 short films as well as some video and music clips. She also had 3 films in active distribution with AFID. They are just 2 of the hundreds of filmmakers whose 1500 titles made up the AFID collection. They are now concerned not only with the practical details of retrieving their films and associated materials from the AFI’s Melbourne headquarters, but with the much more worrying problem of finding another distributor.

This is because Australia’s only national screen culture body has had to close down its distribution service. This, despite being the largest distributor of Australian short films and documentaries, and one that has seen the wide dissemination of work by Australian filmmakers to a variety of hirers and purchasers for nearly 30 years. The Australian Film Commission (AFC) announced 2 years ago that it would no longer fund AFI Distribution because it believed that its users came mainly from the educational sector, which should therefore take responsibility for the service. The AFI has tried to operate without government funding for the last 12 months. “We actually did very well,” says Marketing and Development Manager Jason Cook, “but just not enough to keep going without any subsidy.”

The AFI is currently preparing final royalty statements and sending them out to filmmakers along with a letter explaining the situation. “The filmmakers will get all the brochures, stills, and correspondence related to each title, and we’re including a listing of all distributors who might be interested in taking the films, along with other alternatives, because we do believe the films should remain visible and accessible”, Cook explains.

Martha Ansara recognises that older films such as hers may have a problem. “The activity on my films was in dribs and drabs—but it adds up! Everything was in place at the AFI for those films to keep making sales, year after year, but would another distributor be prepared to set that all up again? There are a number of films, like mine, that aren’t new, but still have an active life. For an acquisitions officer at an educational institution, what will they do now whenever a film comes up for renewal, or a tape dies? Will they have to track each filmmaker down? And will the filmmaker have kept their original materials?” She believes that small unsubsidised distributors can only afford to be interested in immediately rewarding markets, and will only take on newer films with such possibilities. “They really won’t be concerned with issues of preservation and long term availability.” She’s now debating whether to try and distribute the films herself, or join with filmmakers in a similar position and perhaps establish a website.

Janet Merewether is not so concerned about her own films, “I do a lot of distribution work on them on my own, anyway,” she explains. What really worries her is the loss of a centralised source of information on filmmakers and their work. “There must be a central point—even if it’s a database—because filmmakers move around a lot, and there must be a way of finding out where they are, and how to get their films, or where their original materials are kept. I was curating the program Eye for Idea (short work and inventive documentary by women filmmakers in the 90s) for this year’s Tampere Film Festival (Finland), as part of its Australian retrospective, and I found it very hard to track down some of the makers of the films I wanted which were not represented by the AFI and several of the films were missing. These were films I knew, because they’d been well received at various festivals and had won awards in the last 5 years, and yet they had disappeared. If it’s already hard to track down award-winning, recent films, how much harder is it going to be with the AFI gone? Surely someone should be responsible for maintaining a complete record of Australian production?’

Jason Cook believes that older short films still have a life because of new technologies and the opportunities they provide, such as broadband, compilations on DVD and the possibility of being used as a support to a feature on DVD. “The problem is that although there are a number of opportunities in the market place, often a particular distributor may not be exploiting all those areas, so filmmakers may have to deal with more than one distributor,” he explains. Likewise, would a client who wants to buy large numbers of films from the one agency, confident that they are getting a good range of films of similar quality, “be prepared to deal with a number of different distributors with a few films each, or even worse, a number of filmmakers with only 1 or 2 films?”

Back in the early 70s the filmmakers who were making that first rush of short films and documentaries realised how important it was for their films to reach the audience. As low-budget production, funded through various government agencies, gathered momentum filmmakers formed the Sydney and Melbourne Filmmakers Co-ops and became actively involved in the distribution process. From 1975, the latter was supported by the AFC. After the closure of the Co-ops, the AFI became the main distributor of Australian work. Its collection included early short films by many famous names, an important collection of films by and about women, many documentaries, films by Indigenous filmmakers on Indigenous issues, and work from the students of Australia’s film schools.

AFC Director Kim Dalton doesn’t see any great cultural importance in the ending of nearly 30 years of continuous AFC funding of distribution. “I’d rather say that the AFC reacted to a situation over 25 years ago, when it was approached by Australian filmmakers. It was the best way to get those films seen [then], and the AFC continued to support it while it was. What we have done is withdrawn funding from one organisation. But the AFC is still very actively involved in making sure there is a range of exhibition and distribution mechanisms for short films and documentaries [including] festivals, screening events, regional tours.”

He argues that smaller distributors: short film specialists like Flickerfest, and libraries like the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, are already home to a number of film collections, and should pick up many of the titles. “There was, in fact, an enormous level of complaint and disquiet about the AFI, whether or not it was deserved. I’m sure there are some very interesting and energetic small distributors out there who, now that there is some space, will do good work. The AFC has not washed its hands of this area of activity—we’re talking to people, and listening to proposals. It’s an area that is organic, dynamic, and changing—I’m convinced that the majority of the films will still be able to be seen.”

Andrew Pike of Ronin Films, one of Australia’s oldest independent distributors, believes there is still a role for a subsidised distribution service. “The distribution of such a wide range of films, and particularly short films, just isn’t commercially viable, and can really only be carried out if it is part of the cultural strategy of the funding bodies.” Ronin will pick up a number of films from the AFI,” but they will have to fit in with its almost entirely documentary collection, mainly marketed to the educational sector.

Bronwyn Kidd says that Flickerfest has been distributing short films in Australia for 4 years, selling mainly to Eat Carpet and to a small educational market. “We’re putting together a first catalogue of about 20 titles for the overseas market. We’ve been getting a lot of interest from overseas broadcasters over the years, so we’re taking advantage of that. The overseas market is much bigger; many international broadcasters in both Europe and Asia have short film strands, and there’s an educational market, with libraries wanting an Australian representation. We see it as an extensive and growing area. There’s a lot happening with cable channels, where the audiences are bigger and seem to be looking for alternative entertainment. It’s complementary to what we’re doing with the festival, and similar to what a number of overseas short film festivals do.”

However, she doesn’t see Flickerfest as taking on many titles. “We’d see a manageable catalogue as being about 70 films at any given time, and I think most filmmakers are aware that their films have a finite life of about 3 years. It’d be no good us taking on any films that had been in the AFI’s collection for several years.”

Several agencies are working to guarantee at least the preservation of the titles from the AFI collection, and to ensure that the films are accessible. Filmmakers are being made aware of their options, whether or not the film is picked up by another distributor. Films can be lodged with ScreenSound Australia, Australia’s national archive, and even if ScreenSound already holds the film, it may be interested in acquiring additional prints for preservation or viewing purposes. However, “we neither want to, nor would we be able to replace the AFI’s distribution service,” insists ScreenSound Director Ron Brent “and I’m concerned that the large majority of the films won’t be picked up by any other distributor.” The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (formerly Cinemedia), home of one of Australia’s largest film collections, which lends films to registered borrowers (mainly film societies, educational and community groups), had been one of the AFI’s largest clients. Collections Manager Simon Pockley explains that ACMI is neither a distributor nor an archive, but a lending collection. “We do want to make sure that as many as possible of the short films from the AFI remain accessible,” he adds.

“If the film is to be available through ACMI, who sells the film to them now?” asks Martha Ansara. “And who handles any requests for a new print?”

This is a confusing and worrying time for filmmakers. “I’ve got a project in development,” says Janet Merewether, “but I’m already spending so much time on distribution, in contact with festivals and sales agents, that I can’t get on with my filmmaking. What will happen to Australian production if that happens to many other filmmakers?”

“Where is the filmmaking community in all this?” asks Martha Ansara. “The only way we had a distribution service in the first place was because of filmmakers’ action and lobbying. Where is the pressure now?”

Released within months of each other, Panic Room (David Fincher) and The Others (Alejandro Amenábar) share an obsession with the darker side of domestic life. These films reverse the traditional association between home, stability and security, emphasising instead entrapment and danger. They join a long list of films where the home transforms into a jail, confining and controlling its inhabitants. This list includes Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), with its evil apartment where white walls trickle blood and sprout hands that grasp and threaten to engulf its inhabitant. Another is Robert Wise’s ‘deranged’ Hill House in The Haunting (1963). Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), is a more recent example of menacing Gothic architecture. The Overlook Hotel is haunted by the restless spirits of the Indian burial ground beneath. The interior is designed like a labyrinth; it has elevators that gush blood and a ghostly inhabitant who transforms from an alluring beauty to a vile corpse in the blink of an eye. The most significant link between all of these films is their representation of the domestic space as uncanny: things are not as they first seem and most alarmingly, people are not as they appear.

Originally Nicole Kidman was to star in Panic Room as well as The Others, until a knee injury forced her to abandon the project just 2 weeks before shooting commenced. She was replaced by Jodie Foster who brings a quiet resilience to the role, recalling some of the more tenacious female characters in recent American cinema like Ripley in Alien (1986) and Sarah Conner in Terminator 2, Judgement Day (1991). As the central character of the Gothic drama, Nicole Kidman is perfectly cast. Her porcelain skin, seemingly untouched by sunlight, combined with the stiffness of her body, express a reserve vital for a narrative that is sustained by her denial. Resplendent in a deep blue, impossibly well-fitting knitted jacket, Kidman’s character appears as a nostalgic reinvention of the coolness of Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman.

The retrospective impulse is most evident in the homage to Hitchcock featured in both The Others and Panic Room. Each director produces a version of Hitchcock’s famous circular shot designed to replicate Alicia’s (Ingrid Bergman) bleary eyed vision as she wakes and tilts her head, struggling to focus after a night of drinking with Devlin (Cary Grant) in Notorious (1946). By recreating this shot, both Amenábar and Fincher restate Hitchcock’s concern with the problem of vision. Do the protagonists see clearly, or are they hallucinating? Disorientation, doubt, hesitancy and disbelief are staples of the Gothic. This occlusion of vision is facilitated by a distinct lack of light in The Others where windows are barricaded and doors kept locked. With its muted tones and interiors sheltered in darkness, this film is as close to black and white as is possible in mainstream cinema. Panic Room also limits its color range to steely greys, blues and whites, with more darkness than light in its climactic scenes. Both rely on darkness and off screen space to suggest menace, both manipulate point of view, systematically revealing and concealing information, raising apprehension when the familiar becomes unfamiliar.

Amenábar’s The Others develops suspense by questioning perception. Characters are defined according to those who see and embrace the ghosts, and others who resist the presence of the supernatural. In The Others, this split is represented by a gulf that separates Grace from her 2 children and the trio of ‘new’ servants. While the children interact with the ghosts, Grace remains in denial until the final moment when the connection between the spirits and the home is revealed.

In the Gothic, the haunted house is almost a character in its own right. In The Others, the mansion is obsessively controlled by Grace with curtains drawn and each door locked before another can be opened. Amenábar highlights this by amplifying the jangling sound of skeleton keys on the soundtrack. According to Grace, her children are ‘photo-sensitive’; they have an allergy to light where exposure will result in suffocation. Isolation is emphasised further with Grace’s pronouncement to the servants that the house does not have electricity, nor does she own a radio or television: silence is prized above sound. This is a mansion that is haunted by loss: the loss of childhood and the loss of companionship. Grace reveals that her original servants vanished “into thin air”, and she waits for her husband to return from a war that ended long ago.

The mansion imprisons its inhabitants. It is surrounded by a dense landscape making transit difficult, if not impossible. When she attempts to find help beyond the limits of her estate, Grace becomes disorientated in a forest thick with fog. The most resonant image of The Others frames Grace between the iron bars of a front gate that imprisons her family. Whilst her body is confined, her eyes search the distance. This picture of feminine incarceration is an archetype of the Gothic genre, the visual expression of quiet desperation. A similarly tightly framed image of Meg is used in the promotion of Panic Room. Her head is horizontal and her wide-eyed expression suggests alarm whilst a blurred menacing character hovers behind.

Panic Room establishes a sense of claustrophobia and questions vision right from the opening credits. Set on the Upper West Side of New York City, the credit sequence is a montage of images of tall buildings—mostly anonymous—framed to fill the screen with grids of windows. Gigantic white letters form the opening credits, hanging between the buildings as if by magic. This clash of text and image gives the supernatural a familiar context, introducing a sense of the uncanny.

The house itself is an immediate problem: it is referred to as an ‘emotional’ property as if it were alive. In his monologue introducing the house, the realtor Evan calls it a ‘townstone’: a hybrid of the townhouse and the brownstone, extremely ‘uncommon.’ Its vertical design makes movement within difficult. The winding staircase is steep and extensive and the house contains an ancient elevator, replete with an iron grid gate. A wall of screens recording video from strategically placed static cameras flattens and fractures the space into a collection of low-resolution black and white images. These are contrasted with Fincher’s more flamboyant representation of the domestic space. Adopting an impossible point of view, the mobile camera glides throughout the space, travelling into keyholes, between rooms, through walls, floors, even deftly slipping through the handle of a coffee pot.

The most compelling space in Panic Room is the secret chamber. This room is discovered by default when Meg notices an anomaly in the dimensions of a room. The panic room is concealed in the negative space of a smaller room. It functions as asecure space for millions of dollars worth of bonds concealed in the false bottom of a safe, but it also offers refuge from home invasion. The panic room chills Meg and she acknowledges the potential for entrapment when she asks her friend, “Ever read any Poe?” But the point is lost on Lydia who replies, “No, but I loved her last album.” As the mother and child shelter within, the space takes on a sinister dimension, a possibility anticipated by Sarah who insists that live burial doesn’t happen quite as often as it used to. Immured within, Meg and Sarah are subjected to an array of assaults (including gunfire and asphyxiation) which threaten to transform the shelter into a tomb.

The house in Panic Room eventually becomes a refuge for Meg who transforms the space into an obstacle course. She denies the burglars access to vision by turning off lights and smashing the surveillance cameras with a sledgehammer. In the darkness, the focus shifts from the eyes to the ears. Meg tracks the progress of the burglars by smashing a mirror and listening for the burglars who crunch the glass underfoot. The roles are reversed and hunter becomes hunted as Meg regains control of the house.

The cinema is the perfect vehicle for domestic Gothic dramas. It is the only medium that has the ability to reanimate the dead or to depict menace within seemingly harmless environments. Like the Gothic, the cinema questions vision by producing a hesitancy between the real and the imagined. Panic Room and The Others offer compelling representation of the uncanny by defamiliarising the most familiar space of all, the home.

Storytelling

Liz Bradshaw
Foucault, I think, makes it clear that the exercise of power turns every/man into a despot; that there is no such thing as consent. Solondz agrees. Storytelling is nuanced, visceral filmmaking on the interdependence of racism and misogyny. The two vignettes expose the ugly corollary of ‘freedom and democracy’ rhetoric in all its brutal grotesquery. Sophisticated commentary on the American nightmare, and the truth/fiction ruse.

Writer/Director Todd Solondz, distributor Roadshow, currently screening nationally.

The Hard Word

This should really be called The Hard Work in recognition of the tremendous effort put in by all involved; the actors act like actors, the cinematographer films away from beginning to end, the sound man delivers the sound loud and clear, wardrobe and make-up make well-considered contributions, even the stunt team puts in with some neat driving and tumbling. Everybody pulls together, plays their part. It’s a team effort, a tribute to the skill and craftsmanship of the local film industry. All that hard work, all that dedication to the task and still the damn thing just sits there, refuses to fly, take wing, soar above the collective perspiration and professionalism of those who made it. A turkey is a turkey is a turkey.

It feels like a script that doesn’t cohere, leaving great gaps in its credibility without summoning up enough energy to make us leap those gaps. The characters are ‘characters’ sewn together from cast-off characteristics; crims with consciences, corrupt cops with none, a sleazy lawyer and a sultry dame. There are too many scenes in which lines are batted back and forth like ping-pong balls—all veiled menace and double-crossing entendre—and just about as exciting. Still, it’s filmed in Sydney and Melbourne so there is plenty to look at, and it’s a great film for spot the actor: Paul Sonkilla plays a cop, Kim Gyngell plays a crim. It’s lovely to see. There are some curious interludes too, such as a couple of male fantasy relationships between 2 of the criminals and women (a female prison psychologist and kidnap victim) that go nowhere and contribute little—so why are they there? Gratuitous or what?

Much of the pre-release publicity with The Hard Word focused on the ‘return home’ of Australian actors (Guy Pearce, Rachel Griffiths) who have worked overseas. This draws inevitable comparisons between the American way of doing things and the Australian way, and perhaps alludes to a wider anxiety about a loss of identity; Australia being seen as little more than an exotic location, an inexpensive Hollywood sound-stage. In the film itself, there is a constant urge to assert a certain Australian-ness; indeed, what defines it as Australian more than anything is this need to define itself as Australian. The conservative nature of this identity reveals itself in the rather time-locked feel to the film, drawing on a pre-Wood Royal Commission era of hardmen and brutal killings, an Australia of Big Things and Kellyesque gangs, larrikin humour and lots of red meat.

Writer/director Scott Roberts, distributor Roadshow, currently screening nationally.

No Surrender

In a dramatic reversal of one of cinema’s favorite tropes, the pursuit of the terrified woman, the subject of No Surrender’s gaze, an Indigenous woman (dancer Bernadette Walong), wakes to find a camera (our point of view) prying between her thighs. A violent chase ensues, rich in night time colour, strange locations and hand-held urgency until the woman’s spirit is unleashed in an ecstatic dance. She turns on the camera with fists, kick-boxing knockouts and flame, the shattered lens flickering to faltering readouts. No Surrender exploits digital possibilities to the painterly max with slo-mo strokes, sudden zooms and deft super-impositions. In a cinema with wrap-around sound, as at the Popcorn Taxi Sydney premiere, music and sound design stunningly amplify the immersive quality of the cinematography. It’s a rare experience for the audience being cast as the baddy. No Surrender won Best Experimental Film at the 2002 Annual ATOM Awards for Film, Television; Radio & Multimedia, has been shown on ABC TV, and has been selected to screen at the 2002 TTV Performing Arts on Screen in Riccione, Italy, and the Commonwealth Film Festival in Manchester, England.

Writer/choreographer/director Richard James Allen, composer Michael Yezerski, sound designer Liam Price, director of photography Andrew Commis, editor Karen Pearlman. The Physical TV Company in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 12 minutes.

Baise-Moi

Barbara Karpinski
A post-punk, part-porn splatter movie. Baise-Moi, roughly translated, means ‘Fuck Me.’ Vilified by the French, first-time director Virginie Despentes was not deterred. Baise-Moi is the collaboration of visceral ex-porn star actors and Eurotrash underground voices. If raw, uncut, bleeding and not so prurient pussy terrifies you, keep your pusillanimous self at home and watch store-bought porn where all the chicks are much more obedient, and blonde. Go girls go.

Writer/Directors Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, distributor Potential Films, banned after initial release in Australia.

of day, of night

Megan, your new interactive work of day of, night follows on from I am a Singer, the CD-ROM which you completed in 1996. Like other artists with a fascination for a field that has been called “interactive cinema”, you continue to examine the operation of memory and the construction of identity in the subject. The latter is a woman who “has lost the ability to dream and has set herself the task of re-learning.” The way she achieves this is with the collaboration of the other subject, the ‘user’, who navigates the work. Could you outline what a typical series of encounters might be?

The tasks involve firstly collecting found objects from various locations in the day environment—from a street-market, river and café. Imagining the objects’ fictional traces and histories, and arranging the objects into a kind of cabinet. Upon completing these tasks, the user/audience gains access to the night area of the work, where the objects and their stories collide, transmute and create new meanings in a regained/re-imagined environment of dreams. of day, of night is part narrative and part game, part memory and dream. Fundamentally, it explores intersections between new media and the nature of dream experience.

There is a dualism here, in both works, where the subjects—the woman in the piece and the user or navigator of the work—observe or are observed, constructing a personality through the encounters that are made and the stories that are told. How would you distinguish between what happens for the individual audience member encountering memory and identity in the cinema, and in your work?

As the audience moves through the work, there is a gradual slipping away of the prominence of the woman, Sophie, and a growing emphasis on the objects and their traces, histories, intersections and juxtapositions. The dreams of night do not represent an individual psychology as such, but rather are a set of interweaving stories comprising aspects of various cultural rather than strictly personal identities. All of these are refracted and reconfigured, by and through Sophie to create new stories and meanings within night. I think it’s revealing that some of the earliest and most deeply embedded conventions within cinema involve the depiction of memory and dream sequences including fades to white or black, colour effects, specific approaches to set design and mise en scene, the use of compositing etc. Fragmentation, multiplicity, association, juxtaposition, collision: these are all qualities of memory and dreaming that are shared, for example, by hypertext.

Influences

Much of the experimental work with narrative and hypertext has occurred on the internet, on listservs, MUDs and later websites. Were your ideas aided or helped by these discourses or do you see your influences lying elsewhere?

Though I am familiar with listserv and MUD narratives, my influences are more from experimental cinema, literature and hypertext. My work always starts with the writing. In researching and preparing to develop of day, of night, I immersed myself in a range of works concerned with dreaming such as Breton’s Communicating Vessels, Sontag’s The Benefactor, Moravagine’s anthologies of literary dreams, and Jungian archetypes. I revisited early Surrealist cinema and literary games, the wonderful Dreams That Money Can Buy, dream sequences from classical cinema—although the dreams within of day, of night are very different to these expressions. From a new media perspective, I looked at a lot of hypertext, in particular writers like Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Deena Larson and more recently Talan Memmott. Intermingled with this was research into visual style, music, objects and the locations to be used within of day, of night.

Beyond the hard sell

Before entering the area of new media technologies in the early 90s, you worked and taught in the advertising industry. Did this provide you with an identifiable set of skills or experiences which led you towards what was known then as the hyper-linking of text, narratives, images and sound?

Advertising desires the immediate, unquestioning, and spectacular. The layering and association inherent in new media and hypertext involves work by an audience—associating ideas, making room for or reconciling multiple viewpoints, exploring an environment that may reveal its stories over time, not necessarily immediately. These qualities are anathema to advertising. Advertising is also an environment of very strong professional gender stereotyping, where invariably men were allowed to have a creative vision, and women were the enablers of that vision. I didn’t know of a single female director, but at least 70% of producers were female. A reaction against these kinds of entrenched gender inequalities in the traditional media industries has probably contributed to the embracing of new media by female artists, and the range of female voices in this area.

The limits of broadband

CD-ROM-based work over the last 10 years has probed, essentially, the potential for affecting the experiential substance of an interactive encounter with a work. Option-taking is a requirement for the work to have meaning. This is at variance with the dynamics required for making a linear drama or documentary narrative succeed. However, you have been lecturing on new media at the University of Technology, Sydney since the mid-90s in an area shared with film, video and sound production. Though the course has recognised the benefits of overlapping specialism and the continuing convergence of production media and dissemination channels, what conclusions have you reached concerning the convergence or divergence of the aesthetic dimensions of linear and non-linear work, for the audience, rather than the producers? For instance, has your current research into broadband delivery of media rich content (video and sound) indicated that as a delivery system (using ASDL telephone and cable connections), broadband will address the distribution issues that have so affected the availability of artist’s CD-ROMs? Or is there a more fundamental issue concerning the audience’s reluctance to engage with interactive artefacts unless they appeal to the gamer instinct?

I believe audiences are engaging with a wide range of works, sometimes almost imperceptibly, other times provocatively. From interactive installations and hypertexts, to certain expressions of traditional media—feature films that play with linearity or point-of-view, or the participatory elements of reality television. What is clearly an issue has been the lack of distribution opportunities for interactive works. However, it should be remembered that commercial interactive work has also proved very problematic.

And while broadband technologies supposedly offer the potential for distribution of media rich interactive works, they also present some serious barriers. That is, the added complexity and expense of the production process for broadband delivery (after shooting and editing, compressing, coding, hosting), and the specialised marketing required to actually get people to visit your site. It is clear to me, through observing new media art and from working with students, that there is a desire to write, read and communicate in ways that are increasingly complex, which involve linkages and associations across ideas and texts, and which bring together text, sound, moving image and participatory elements. This is worth holding on to.

of day, of night has been exhibited in the Experimenta Waste program (October 2001), Stuttgarter Filmwinter (January 2002), the Fusion program, St Kilda Film Festival (May), and will be exhibited at ISEA 2002 in Nagoya, Japan (October). It was shortlisted in the new media category of the 2002 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.

One of my favourite images of the becoming-second-nature of digital literacy, concerns the story of the San Francisco lawyer addicted to playing the computer game Myst, “The only problem was when I began clicking on things in real life. I’d see a manhole cover and think, ‘Hmmm, that looks pretty interesting’, and my forefinger would start to twitch”. At this moment of unconscious, involuntary action, our lawyer manifests the precept that everything in the world is data and everything is connectible. To live in the world is not enough. One must now make the world a database (DB). The image of wandering through the street, processing information into new, unpredictable relations is the paradigm of an emergent way of living in the world. Digital literacy and hypertextual consciousness are some of the names given to this new sensibility. If we were able to ask our lawyer to describe his view of the world, he would probably respond by saying, This is what it feels like to be a wireless apparatus…a streaming consciousness always on the avant-go.

Conceptual art Ebook-happening in site-specific performance environment with literary figures nomadically wandering through an open field of relational aesthetics. Or: composing a network. That’s as good a way of describing Filmtext (2001), Mark Amerika’s most recent experiment in net art, coming on the heels of his influential Grammatron (1993-1997) and Phon:e:me (1999)—as any. Commissioned by PlayStation. Exhibited as part of Amerika’s 2001 retrospective at the ICA in London, Filmtext is ostensibly a game-space, an online story world based on the premise, what might it be like living in a post-apocalyptic desert of the real. The mise en scene of this world is a rather arid landscape of dormant volcanos that act as interfaces or portals into an alternative way of looking at and sensing this apparently barren world. As with most computer-based games, there are levels to be moved through, subject to the achievement of competencies and the completion of tasks. The fundamental logic or literacy of all computer games—seek, find and use—becomes a conceptual logic of understanding, a forging of wholes out of the relation of parts. As we move through the levels as meta-tourists, we quickly realise that we are in fact riders (to use William Gibson’s term), digital hitchhikers, vicariously streaming consciousness through someone else’s point of view. It may be, for all we know, that San Francisco lawyer. But we learn that he has a name. He is the Digital Thoughtographer. He is a desert apparition, a trace, an incipient identity only glimpsed in silhouette.

Surf-sample-manipulate. In using the idea of an ambient game-space to track the movements of a nomadic alien life-form, Amerika has inventively elevated the computer game to the level of a performative manual of DIY electronic subject formation. Instead of scoring points, play at becoming a network, a data-sphere, or a cyborg. In Filmtext, Amerika re-defines Claude Levi-Strauss’ notion of the bricoleur for the digital age. Amerika’s Digital Thoughtographer is a composite of listener, reader, user, finder, seeker, jack-of-all-trades. A nomadic figure who wanders through the contemporary media-scape and makes do with whatever is at hand in the name of literacy, he/she also brings the shadow of other media, of other ways of conceiving the world through media, of conceiving the world as media. Far removed from the static eye of Renaissance optics, the Digital Thoughtographer is reminiscent of the ‘kino eye’ of Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera; the peripatetic flaneur of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud; the jump-cut-edit-as-you-go aesthetic of Jean Luc Godard, and the reality media of anyone who can get their hands on a digital camera and some editing software. Rather than being overwhelmed by a bombardment of disconnected information, the Digital Thoughtographer creates new forms of meaning, new gestalts forged out of the logic of relational aesthetics. Consciousness, artistic composition, even the humble art of reviewing, can be redefined as digital remix.

Expanding the concept of writing. Mark Amerika has variously described his work as “unclassifiable writing” or “literature’s exit strategy.” In his work we find the concept of writing pushed to extremes. As an alien life-form, the Digital Thoughtographer stands for writing as it was imagined in classical times. That is, that which is from afar, inhuman, yet capable of altering what it means to be human. As “techne”, an art for ordering the world into meaning, it converges with our current media and in the process transforms them. The last thing one could call Amerika is an apologist for post-literacy, since his work represents an active demonstration of what writing might look like as it transcends the printed page. Not restricted to the word, writing now includes time-based media, animation and the database. In this, Filmtext is a compelling response to the calls from philosophers such as Jacques Derrida to put into practice an integrated audio-visual-pictographic writing. In combining the language of film and inscription, Filmtext is an expression of our ‘post-literate’ culture.

Filmtext, Mark Amerika, E-media Gallery, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne April 14-May 4

Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, eds Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro, will be published October 2002 by Power Publications and MIT Press.

Perth’s digital biennale

BEAP 2002, The Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth, is already laying claim to being “the premiere electronic arts event in Australia.” If size matters, then BEAP already looks like the biggest of Australia’s smattering of digital arts events. As for how much of it will be about art, that remains to be seen. It’s the wide-ranging art-science-technology-education brief that BEAP has assigned itself that helps make for the size of the event, a reflection of the breadth of the impact of new media on older disciplines and the making of new art. Like the 2002 Adelaide Festival’s conVerge, with its focus on the much vaunted science-art nexus, BEAP promises a scientific bent. Paul Thomas, Director of the Biennale, has announced “that the inaugural thematic focus for BEAP is LOCUS—where we believe consciousness exists. This idea is being expanded through the developing biological relationship to consciousness, contrasted with the external input of the computer generated or augmented realities and their effects on consciousness.” It’s not surprising then that Consciousness Reframed, an annual international conference on its 4th outing, will be held in Australia for the first time and as part of BEAP. All the Biennale’s exhibitions will focus on aspects of consciousness: Immersion, at the John Curtin and spECtrUm Galleries, “explores our relationship with concepts of external virtual realities”; BioFeel, at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts “explores emerging relationships between art, biology and consciousness”; and Screen, at the John Curtin Gallery and other venues around Perth, “will focus on the relevant aspects of cinematic realities.” Other events include forums tackling developments in the relationships between art, technology, biology and consciousness; ethical questions of using living systems and biological technologies; current pedagogies and future possibilities of spatial practices in the arts; cinematic realities within the digital domain. BEAP 2002, July 31-Sept 15, http://www.beap.org

Big bad broadband?

Megan Heyward argues in her interview with Mike Leggett that “the added complexity and expense of the production process for broadband delivery (after shooting and editing, compressing, coding, hosting), and the specialised marketing required to actually get people to visit your site”, pose serious challenges for artists. The AFC, in association with the ABC, are much cheerier. With a series of capital city forums (Hobart and Darwin excepted), they plan “to inspire and encourage filmmakers, television producers, digital content creators, interactive media producers, animators, web designers and other creators of screen content to develop projects for broadband delivery.” Perhaps more inspiring is the announcement that funds will be available 2002-4 to help create interactive programs for broadband delivery. Less inspiring is the requirement that these innovative works “be designed for audiences or user groups in the areas of children, youth and education.” That’s going to leave a lot of artists out of the loop. Remember Creative Nation’s fatal splurge on the CD-ROM with many a turgid educational product. Doubtless, however, many an artist will be curious to hear what the AFC & ABC think broadband’s got to recommend it. The seminars will outline the Broadband Production Initiative and screen examples of interactive content.

More than a digital playground?

dLux media arts’ 5th d>art opens at Sydney’s MCA with a performance by Wade Marynowsky (Apocalypse Later) and the premiere of Mari Velonaki’s Mutual Exchange # Throw. There’ll be 2 forums: Debra Petrovitch and Danielle Karalus will ‘walk’ audiences through their CD-ROMs; and Nigel Helyer, Marynowksj and Velonaki will discuss experimental media—“digitally enhanced playgrounds or tools to reflect the magnitude of current affairs?” Seventeen screen works will be presented as part of the Sydney Film Festival before touring nationally. A Fun Night Out with Severed Heads (June 17, 8.45pm & June 19, noon) could turn out to be the highlight of this year’s d>art, with clips and tracks from this seminal underground music and v-jaying group. The d>ART02 web gallery will be launched June 13, housing web works from Canada, Australia, Germany and USA. d>art02 features gesturally interactive installations by Sophea Lerner (The Glass Bell, a giant touchscreen with water running down), Nathaniel Stern ([odys]elicit, viewer movements trigger stuttering text onscreen), and Mari Velonaki’s Mutual Exchange#Throw (soft satin ball interfaces with projected characters as targets). d>art02, from June 13.

The big, diverse one

Celebrating the diversity of film culture, the 2002 Melbourne International Film Festival has themed itself Crossing Borders. An astonishingly diverse festival, it is screening 350 films—international features, documentaries, animation, short film (in serious competition and with a welcome trio of retrospectives), music on film—and presenting Sideshow 02’s collection of works incorporating digital media. As part of Sideshow, American new media pranksters, Damaged Californians, will present Alternate Routes, an online project that recreates/re-imagines/perverts your holiday from the photos you (bravely) submit. Go to the festival website for a sample of the project and entry details. This year’s featured filmmaker is Korean Kim Ki-Duk whose entire output will be screened. An interesting companion for this tribute will be the New and Emerging Asian Women Filmmakers program. Also screening will be the best of Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Awards for innovative debut features (the festival’s director will be in town). For fans of SciFi, the B-grade the bizarre, old and new, there’s Strange New Worlds, Journeys Into Alternate Fictions. A rare treat will be a focus on comedy: There Goes the Neighbourhood! Humour On Film. Just as Ingmar Bergman (who could make comedy as well as fuel the dark side of Woody Allen) is being reassessed after a critical quiet patch, comes Northern Lights—New Scandinavian Cinema: From Bergman to Dogme95. And there’s a youth program: Mach 2. Faced with so much diversity and such cinematic riches, the agonising challenge for film lovers is to make up their minds just what to see. Melbourne International Film Festival, 23 July – 11 August.

Pulling in the filmmakers

Short film festivals are proliferating, prizes are multiplying, ambitions are soaring and winners are setting out on the ever expanding international festival circuit in search of careers and markets..and more prizes. The mix of festivals encouraging short filmmaking is remarkable, ranging from the jokey to the niche to the eclectic, supported by local councils, screen culture organisations, arts festivals and minor and major film festivals. Sydney’s Metro Screen is a great nurturer of the art as part of its day to day activities. For its Kaleidoscope Short Film Festival this year it’s pulling in the punters with the promise of great rewards. Perhaps the burgeoning and increasingly competitive festival market requires a greater wooing of filmmakers. Or maybe it’s just that talent deserves reward. Metro Screen is calling for entries for its short film festival where the selected filmmakers compete for a 16mm filmmaking package and a share of $40,000 worth of funding in 11 award categories. Fifty independent films will be shown over 5 nights, September 30-October 4th, competing for the judges and audience awards. The entry deadline is August 16. Enquiries: 02 9361 5318

Why (he asks, uncomfortably aware the question’s recycled but nonetheless valid) would you use the web but not exploit it? Why choose it as just a distribution conduit, or a drawing board on which to blu-tack galley proofs of intransigently print-oriented work, or flatly-static (A)4-square table-of-content-ed variants on the magazine or anthology? If there’s no functional click or imaginative synergy between text and medium, or genre and format, why would we read (really read, focused and immersed) onscreen? Is poetry, for example, as she’s spoke in online journals, oxymoronically better suited to the pristine purity of stark black type and Sunday-arvo-bookshop browsing?

On the Mary Poppins medicine principle, let’s start with Blithe House Quarterly’s special Australian edition of queer short fiction, which has the chastening virtue of eliciting such terrific writing (exuberantly better than any recent print collection) you almost, very nearly, kinda don’t mind that it’s all static full-screen, left-right-top-down blocks. Okay, so Deborah Hum’s Reading Jack, with its clipped, jump-cutting, punny, garrulous, James-Ellroy-word-jazzy reflexive home-road-movie homage to Kerouac; and Benedict Chiantar’s modular riffs with psychosexual noir, multi-path narratives (‘press Escape to continue’) almost howl for illustration, dramatisation, chunking, the fluid volatility of links and nodes, something, anything, more than a few horizontal dividers (Mangrove: resuscitate, we need you!)—but the stories are so damn good you get wrenched into it anyway.

This mostly holds true for Divan, run by intrepid Box Hill TAFE students. It’s developed exponentially since its 1998 inception with a revamped design, is much expanded in size and range of styles, voices and forms, new facilities (annotated links, a forum, archives), plus a portfolio of well-known poets like MTC Cronin, Jordie Albiston, Ian McBryde, Alison Croggon, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Dorothy Porter and Susan Hawthorne. It’d be unjust to attempt a survey or identikit of the remarkable, consistently tensile strengths of the poetry itself. But there are no graphics, no framing, no fancy formatting. It’s all stripped bare, letting short lines, brief stanzas, enjambment and crisp imagist vignettes do any rhythmic and visual work, mental rather than remediated.

Ditto 3rd Muse, a monthly journal into its 20th issue with a grumpy editorial, a black-on-grey brutalism, emphasis on highly-selective quality and crystalline forms (Kick the Sonnet Habit Before It’s Too Late by Richard Jordan is a satiric metapoem on this very same)—plus a determinedly international contributors’ list. These are both excellent journals, while OzPoets is more like an extensible resources database; tautly organised, featuring individual poet’s work on a semi-regular basis, offering intensively-used workshops and forums, an events calendar, critically-framed index of links, poetry readings (RealAudio), reference tools, and an interactive venue for poetry submission, review and commentary.

The screen-as-mimeograph-print-aesthetic gets even more literal in Soup, as much a lo-fi corporate brochure as a journal; determinedly dilettantish and mid-90s in its anti-design, collapsed into an inert (if often enjoyably varied) archive, it is a Lego-logic directory of snapshot Oz-poet samples/ads-for-books (as with Siglo or other mainly-print mags). Rehabilitated somewhat by the use-all-screen-real-estate format of some of the poetry, which is sprawlingly concrete and architextural even when defiantly ASCII (eg Kieran Carroll).

By this stage I was panting for a scanned photo, even a gif animation, so a revisit to Overland Express was a happy relief. Witness the shift towards the interactive and web-workable in their more recent issues, particularly the hypertexted interview, plus Tim Danko’s gorgeously-Eeyore Flash animation, and the palimpsestic faux-po-mo high-irony text-image collage by Paul White sending up the very rhetorical questions with which this review opens.

John Tranter’s jacket (still going strong, still a great read) has an unOedipal rival in Brentley Frazer’s Retort (motto: ‘think forward answer back’) which is equally compacted, similarly slickly micochippy in minimalist but striking design, also cites Australian work in a lattice of international and heterodox contributors; and is likewise bristling with links, interviews, reviews and contextual articles (e.g. Burroughs meets Baudrillard). But against jacket’s historiographic sensibility and elegant thematic clustering, Retort pits a feral diversity and a growly avant-gardist manifesto against “the established cult of ignorance consensus idiocy.” Again, a la Tranter, there’s so much jack(et)-in-the-box-folded into this Salon-stylish mag that an afternoon goes languorously by on any one issue. It offers downloadable posters, both a public and a subscribers’ forum (threaded articles, comments, meticulously organised, laid-out and archived, startlingly practical, surprisingly engaging), extensive archive, dynamic newsletter, daily updates, serialised novella, featured artists (e.g. Shannon Hourigan’s sumptuous velvety Se7en-gothic doll Photoshoppery), eclectic proliferating links, a fashion and style section, spoken word and mp3 performances (Mary the Robot reads Linguistics is the Opiate), excerpts from new books, a Brisbane poetry gig guide, and Bjork’s new online video. The poetry is sinuously sharp, its readership is exploding, its sense of connection to (and interaction with) an active community of writers, readers, artists, designers etc is strong and productive—and it’s got that early-hours-nicotine buzz performance poets specialise in. Full of unwhimsical surprises. Yum.

Overall, this crop of Oz journals offers little that’s very hypertexty, interactive or multimedia but lots of engaging writing. The web addict in me got gently exasperated, the writer got enjoyably envious, the avid reader got more than satisfied.

I was standing with Lucy Orta and her husband and artistic partner, Jorge Orta, discussing the heart-like sculptural objects that were being made by the Fluid Architecture Workshop participants. Lucy and Jorge were bending over a dozen hearts on the floor when Lucy quickly straightened, accidentally thumping the back of her head against Jorge’s forehead. Moans of shock and pain came from them both as they assumed head-rubbing positions, followed by a terse exchange in French. It was a moment when fluidity froze and an artistic practice seemed distilled in unintended ways. Is this an art of the unforeseen encounter?

Lucy Orta has gained increased international exposure in recent years for her Refuge Wear and Nexus works that have employed the aesthetics of high-end outdoor clothing and adventure equipment to negotiate issues of refuge and homelessness. These works have involved varying degrees of participation by members of such communities, whilst Orta has driven the works’ conceptualisation and representation. After exhibitions in recent years at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts, Sydney’s MCA, and the Art Gallery of West Australia, the City of Melbourne invited Orta to undertake a residency project as part of their Community Cultural Development Program. This was a significant commission from the City Council’s Arts spending, and given the risk of unknown outcomes, one boldly undertaken.

Fluid Architecture took up residence in the currently disused, former military Drill Hall at the northern end of the city, and utilised it as the site for making, discussing, displaying and performing artwork over 3 weeks. Orta intended Fluid Architecture to create a “space in which ideas flow and evolve freely, constantly changing and fluctuating”, but it was also clear that some form of culmination communicable to a broad audience was desired by both Orta and the City of Melbourne.

So begins a project located to ride the tension between infinite process and fixed product; between ‘anything-can-happen’ chaotic idealism and ‘but-what-are-we-doing?’/’this-is-what-we-are-doing’ pragmatism, and between self-determining participative processes and imposed representations of participation. Questions of locating the project along old axes—of community art/contemporary art, art/design, and the rhetorically useful/ experientially useful—were beside the point as the project invited one to encounter its many tensions.

A number of elements were introduced by Orta to shape the fluidity. Firstly, 2 themes around which to explore making work: ‘nexus’—the Latin word for link—a theme which runs through much of her oeuvre, and ‘heart’—a theme Lucy and Jorge have been jointly exploring. Secondly, a core collection of collaborators was invited to participate and draw in other people. Core collaborators were: community artist at Carlton Housing Commission Estate, Geoff Kennedy, musician Tim O’Dwyer, documenters Catherine Acin and Nicholas Sherman, architect Dylan Ingleton, cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis, performer/ choreographer Daryl Pellizzer, and myself as artist/industrial designer. And thirdly, Orta had requested that a silver caravan (inferring temporary habitation and immanent mobility) be brought into the work-space, and that a large pin-up style wall be erected, on which to collect evidence of the process as events unfolded.

From there, the greater fluidity of the process commenced. A diverse collection of people dropped in, joined in and pissed off over the weeks. Traces of their presence were left by RMIT University students of Fashion, Industrial and Interior Design, and Sculpture; by residents from the Carlton housing estate and the St Vincent de Paul’s Ozanam Drop-In Centre; and by Victoria University of Technology (VUT) Festive Arts students. Those people who were brought into the project by one of the core collaborators were inevitably those who felt they could belong there, whilst one-time, off-the-street drop-ins or group visitors provided a constant source of variable influence. Levels of comfort with the situations people found themselves in were in constant flux.

One of the most successful workshop activities was on the first day when a range of people let their apprehensions fall aside, and formed pairs with strangers to create a physical device to link 2 bodies together using cords, fabrics, web-strapping and click-clips. VUT students explored the resulting Nexus works via improvised performance during the closing event. The musicians continuously recorded, processed and re-distributed 4-track sound, varying from calming/alarming heartbeat effects to the stream-of-consciousness ravings of Johnny Shakespeare, to the heavenly-aspiring gospel voice of Tupie—both big characters from the Carlton Estate. A shy guy walked in off the street and within 10 minutes had intimately entangled himself in webbing with people he’d never met before. Kids, pensioners, groovy students, down-on-their-luck blokes and warm-witted artists got into making organ-like heart shapes—all ultimately orchestrated by Orta into Arbor Vitea: a tree of life suspended in silver from the Hall’s ceiling. Designers, jewelers, architects, engineers and Orta wrestled over converting a symbolic heart-organ shape into a large, steel wire framed structure. The result was a sketch-line-like object that a performer writhed within and kids climbed all over at the closing evening.

There’s no doubt that a project exploring fluidity can frustrate expectations for clear direction and purpose, but this is to miss the potential. In an Australian political climate where fear of strangers is too easily provoked, encountering other people in a new situation and exploring ways of coming together has a timely resonance. The encounter is real and symbolic: its awkwardness can be avoided or it can be recognised with a thump on the head. Fluid Architecture picked up threads of Orta’s practice and unraveled them a little further. In the process, people were inspired to generously participate while others were unclear about owning the product of their labour. What is clear is that the practice prompts us to encounter it. And its effects in Melbourne? The Ortas encountered unexpected new links. Who can speak for others?

The door to Artspace is obscured by a horse float (renovated), its internal mini-bleacher facing a TV screen, its distorted faux white cube annulling the pragmatics of its construction, both façade and delayed entry. The Trailer Project (Claude Leveque & Valerie Mrejen) suggested location and movement and it struck me that all the work in the exhibition was concerned with place, not only geographical or chronological, but the location of an aura, an auratic space.
The trailer, a strange, quasi-absurdist object, seemed elusive, to perhaps lose something in translation, in its dislocation from its own conventions. This tangible disjuncture and pause in signification, becomes a qualifier for the imagery on its internal screen, begging the question: where do we locate the work?

Detritical Vibration (Mark Brown) is complex: addressing the intersection of the object and the image; sound and sight; past and present. A flaky epidermis, peeled from some industrial site, and stirred by the vibration run through the apparatus like a soundtrack, becomes a metonym for architectural space and the span of time. The apparatus itself is seductive: tripod, suspended box, tiny camera on a mike stand; almost complete without the accompanying live feed to the opposite wall. The sound is the centrepiece. Distilled noise, its rhythm and tone reaches out, if in a minimalist way, to the sounds of Glitch, to percussive timbre, to the crash of construction. And I think percussion always bypasses the intellect in some way. This highly focussed installation is then transferred to a screen: an instantaneous movement and echo.

Terra Incognita (Maslen & Mehra), made of generic variations on the enlarged sections of map-like topology and giant white semi-transparent blades of grass, seemed to leave too little incognito. Lit at each corner by rotating coloured pulses, the light cast strong shadows on the walls and drew the space into the work, creating an ambiguous space. The pulses set up a rhythm, a heartbeat, a measure of time. The blue-white light made the work glow with an eerie, snowscape quality; this ‘making strange’ was its high point, lending it an almost sci-fi aura, and raising questions of location and belonging, artificiality and the real, what it is to be human.

When the pulses turn green or yellow however, a certain theatrical space dominates, a hybrid of stage set and Xfiles cornfields, falling toward kitsch in the best, most serious sense—an intense overcoding, leaving no room for the viewer to work with ideas of landscape (that already most loaded and overdetermined of Australian cultural objects). This overcoding suffers under the weight of its multiple signs, with too many and too similar interpretative clichés; as though grass was always green, and sunrise and sunset the warmest of glows; as though the island metaphor were animated by proprioception, or we could be mirrored or critiqued by the various body sized forms. The work relies on these metaphors to animate it, but there is something oddly representational at work that closes off the more provocative readings for which it held the potential.

Finally, the 3 ‘screens’ of Dead Flow (Adam Geczy & Thomas Gerwin) each present the viewer with the barest of narratives; the stylised edit of the passing of time and the entry and egress from the frame. A European train station, the no man’s land of departure and arrival, and its local counterpart—brighter and sunlit—recognisable if you are familiar with the city. The third: still images from a generic lake scene, its rippled surface filling the frame and punctuated by the occasional duck. The images fill the walls, the passing figures larger than life and strangely distant at the same time, our point of view almost a simulacrum of surveillance: all disjointed editing and repetition. Clearly, there is a nature/culture divide at work, a certain question of migration, and an almost interactive mobilisation of the gaze, no longer cinematic, but webcast.

Most engaging is its strange opacity: no minuscule reading of its pedestrian imagery accounts for its gestalt. It produces an eerie silence and emptiness, the manipulated sound at once familiar and legible, truncated and elusive: a ‘somewhere else’ that would not be a meaning ascription for the work, but an interpretative gesture, and a reanimation of the question of the filmic frame.

Dead Flow, Adam Geczy & Thomas Gerwin; Detritical Vibration, Mark Brown; Terra Incognita, Maslen & Mehra; The Trailer Project, Claude Leveque & Valerie Mrejen, Artspace, Sydney, April 4-27.

LSSp is the cryptic acronym of a new, evolving Hobart studio space catering to some dozen artists and incorporating a much-needed, if very small gallery suited to solo shows—especially installations—not afraid to engage with the unusual (L-shaped) form of the gallery and its limited size.
It is clear on entering the labyrinthine complex (a former senior high school), that LSSp runs on a shoestring budget. This is not a criticism. The bulky doors and stairwells retain their institutional feel, the shared work spaces are identifiable as the classrooms and laboratories of an earlier generation, but when you enter the exhibition space you step into a creative microcosm, a fully-functioning contemporary art space full of constantly changing visual surprises and challenges.

LSSp was established in late 2001 and besides several excellent solo exhibitions, has hosted events including an artist’s residency and an evening of alternative short films to an overflow audience.

Of the solo shows, Conspiratorial Tones, by Samstag scholarship recipient Matt Warren, is part of an extensive multi-faceted on-going work, the absence project, which examines the effect of loss and bereavement in everyday life. Warren’s time-based installation accommodates both the confronting and the contemplative. A red strobe illuminates a video screen, functioning as a kind of closed circuit TV security device, revealing unlovely empty areas of the arts complex. Sequences of blank screen heighten a sense of unease, and a family anecdote involving, implausibly enough, a chair, is delivered as a poignant yet wryly amusing monologue. Warren is a powerful intellect and a masterful video artist, not afraid to examine personal issues in public. His next solo show opens at CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania) on June 7.

By contrast, painter Neil Haddon’s show, Nihil sub sole novum, explores the possibilities of the painted modernist surface, with actual and trompe l’oeil peeling walls, the artist’s distinctive geometric striped acrylic paintings in a palette of colours reminiscent of 50s decor, and props such as pristine paint cans becoming part of a kind of all-enveloping environment that embraces almost the entire gallery space. A crucial, initially imperceptible element of Haddon’s work is that he subverts his apparently systematic colour patterns and meticulously executed perspectival lines, so that the colour sequences are not consistent and the perspective is actually impossible.

Sally Rees’ installation, the punningly titled A Loft is perhaps the most enigmatic and seductive offering to show at the gallery so far. Like a Kafka stage set, the space is arranged as a human scale replica of a budgie cage with outsize mirror, colourful exercise ladder and amusingly large bell, oversized balls of birdseed and a large seed tray. There is something intriguing about the idea of the artist fashioning these bizarre objects, not to mention the possible motivation behind them. It is hard to know if they are meant to be endearing, kitsch, comical or grotesque; they are surreal, certainly.

There is another element to the work: 2 medium scale photographs of—one assumes—the artist in a suburban bedroom, unremarkably clad but for a rubber rooster’s head mask. The sheer eccentricity of this image, the contrived unselfconsciousness of the gestures as the artist poses in very good imitation of a bird springing into flight, is confronting. And again, myriad interpretations are possible, from the grotesquely erotic to the theatrical and more.

The Letitia Street Studio artists group show was held at the new premises of arts@work, an arts advocacy/employment/ promotions body which now shares a building with CAST. Continuing with the esoteric names, this exhibition LSS@arts@work showcases the variety of work being produced at the studios.

Whilst the arts@work organisation has—once again—a small exhibition area, this group show, with 1 or 2 works per artist, was sympathetically hung throughout the complex. Besides the aforementioned artists, the show featured the compelling trademark broken-glass sculptures of Matt Calvert and Shelley Chick’s bizarre and beautiful wall-based lampshade incorporating steel, rubber and play-tiles and decorated with an image of an exotic bird.

Meg Keating’s oil and mica paintings are evocatively titled studies of figures in action, but they transcend the figurative. Her bright, limited palette and ‘marbled’ paint give them a satisfying quasi-abstract edge. Michael Schlitz is an accomplished printer, and his work in this show features more of his sparse gentle monochromatic ‘house style.’ Without advocating novelty for its own sake, I’d like to see something new from this artist.

Also in the show are textile artist Rosemary O’Rourke, painter Anne Morrison, digital artist Troy Ruffles, mixed media sculptor and installation artist John Vella and painter Richard Wastell—all of them significant, emerging Tasmanian talent to watch.

Conspiratorial Tones, Matt Warren, Oct 12-Nov 3, 2001; Nihil sub sole novum, Neil Haddon, Aug-Sept 2001; A Loft, Sally Rees, Nov 3-Dec 9, 2001, LSSp (Letitia Street Space), Hobart.

LSS@arts@work, Group exhibition by LSSp artists, arts@work Gallery Space, Hobart, May 2002.

Walking through Patrick Pound’s photographic installation, The Memory Room, is like entering a stranger’s home in their absence. At the CCP the installation is camped in a corner of the front gallery. At the ACP where I originally saw this work, it feels more like a bed-sitting room in the tiny backspace gallery.

An unmade bed, lamps left on, radio playing, a chattering television balanced on a suitcase, a heater, pieces of clothing, a cup and plate with the remains of a meal. On the floor, scraps of dog food in a bowl. Opposite the bed a wardrobe converts to a desk, a light dangling above what looks like someone’s work, put aside. Should you sit on the chairs, like Goldilocks? Better not. Might be sprung. You decide to take a closer look at the pictures on the walls. Nothing tells you more about people than their debris and the things they collect. The last thing you remember is a photograph of a man holding up a giant carrot.

You have entered the world of Patrick Pound. Hundreds of photographs, along with cartoons, plastic maps, small architectural models, pages from books, 26 Comparisons. Befores and Afters. A collection of brown objects arranged across the floor. Bizarre images. “Bless our Mobile Home”, Jaquie O cutout dolls, stills from The Fountainhead. It goes on. And on. And in. And out. What is going on here? A taxonomy of trivia or a homage to the god of small things? Perec in 3D? Abandon sense all ye who enter here! Jigsaw landscapes. Wax models. A cutting from a newspaper with a photograph of a building in a wilderness—“Lives on hold: Some of the people who have fled to Australia are sent to Woomera Detention Centre in SA which holds 1,026 people.” 1,026. Remember that. Measurements.Transformations. Suddenly, on the wall, a clue! Write it down. Quick!

You think, my boy, you have an obligation to describe everything fallaciously. But still, to describe. You are sadly out in your calculations. You have not enumerated the pebbles, the abandoned chairs. The traces of jism on the blades of grass. The blades of grass. All these people who are wondering what on earth you are driving at may as well get lost in the details or in the garden of your bad faith.

Walking through The Memory Room your mind wanders to the occupant and his (definitely his) whereabouts for a while and then you lose yourself altogether in the detail. While documentary photographers tussle over truth, Patrick Pound conjures the palpable persona of a documenter, then leaves you with the task of making sense (or poetry) of his evidence. He has vacated the room so you can replace him—you being the only solid thing here amongst all these fragments. You are. Aren’t you?

The Memory Room, Patrick Pound, CCP (Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Melbourne, April 12-May4; and as part of Peter Hill’s Stranger than Truth, ACP (Australian Centre for Photography), Paddington, Sydney, Jan 4-Feb 10

Something Something Video Something

Daniel Palmer
Pioneers of the artist-run commercial gallery, the gallerists at Uplands, are proving nifty at packaging artists working with video. A jukebox style, DVD menu of conceptual work screened on an over-sized TV offers a selection of work for viewing. (Tire of one, move on to another). The mix strikes a balance between the slick and game-inspired; Anthony Hunt’s Atari-style 1 minute digital poetry composed of every 3 letter word in the English language, or Stephen Honegger’s Doom-like virtualisation of the gallery space; and wackier grungier works by A Constructed World (Lane Cormick, Matthew Griffin). Also featuring Melbourne artists DAMP, Daniel von Sturmer and Meri Blazevski, David Noonan and Simon Trevaks, Dion Sanderson, Jacinta Schreuder, Laresa Kosloff, and Marco Fusinato.

Mary Scott

Diana Klaosen
Hobart-based digital artist Mary Scott currently works with large-format digital prints depicting women juxtaposed with pigs. This motif, whether as a plastic toy animal or, more subversively, as patterns etched or stitched onto skin, effects a (peverse) metaphoric coupling with the female figures. Pigs reference both a perceived lack of personal grace and the animal’s historic connections with female sexuality, specifically vernacular descriptions of female sex and prostitution. Strangely witty work.

David LeMay

The intimate distance of memory. Overhead projections throw layered fragments onto gallery walls and floor: text, photos of family and landscape, gestural marks. A row of ‘real’ photos, a ‘real’ drawing and a ladder standing on a plastic sheet overlap the projections. This distilled, erotic conjunction of the material, virtual and mechanical is as lyrical as its title. Beautifully just there.

Forgetfulness and Thunder, David LeMay, 24 Hour Art, Darwin, May 10-25. Performance Space, Sydney, June 7-29

Katrina Simmons

Katrina Simmons’ sleeping puppies is misleadingly named. The toys, in fact, are masturbating; floating contentedly—if stickily—in pools of hardened icing. Utilising the soft toy, that ubiquitous signifier of childhood, Simmons explores the role of artefacts within the mental process of memory-construction. The subverted objects are presented on spindly-legged plinths reminiscent of high chairs or precarious dream-ladders whose next rung remains always out of reach.

Kate McMillan

Bec Dean
One of Perth’s most tenacious (and tireless) young visual artists and curators, Kate McMillan is currently beginning a 3 month Australia Council residency in Tokyo. McMillan has taken extended leave from her position as Program Manager at Craftwest, to refocus on a career that has evolved from fine object-making to an installation-based practice that interrogates institutional waste, packaging excesses, and the by-products of cultural production.

In the 80s, Glasgow’s underworld tore itself apart over routes for ice cream vans. Not just because Glaswegians have a mania for the pig fat confectionery but because the routes were ideal cover for drug couriers and distributors. But you get the picture: bad food and violence. Glasgow’s main exports.
New Territories is one of the city’s claims to a cultural singularity of a different kind. Nikki Millican and team woke the city from its mid-winter hibernation with a mix of work from dance and performance art contexts. Millican is a key figure in this scene in Glasgow. At about the same time as the ice cream wars broke out she developed New Moves, a festival of experimental dance. She has also curated the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) for the previous several years. New Territories brings the 2 events together under one umbrella—and boy do you need one of those in a Glasgow winter.

Here are some fragments from one day of NRLA material: a room pulsing with heavy bass electronica as an installation, no dancing allowed (Alistair Macdonald). Documentation of an event exhibited as the event—a room full of papers with all the appeal of a KGB committee meeting (Third Angel). A sensible looking woman painstakingly cutting up Safeway bags and knitting the resulting plastic twine into a straightjacket (Elaine Dwyer). Yes, shopping can be a constraint on your time, but so can neurosis. An Indian woman with her eyes closed speaking a text directly into a microphone (Shamshad Kahn). Simple, personal and powerful performance delivered with a hypnotic pace and tone. This is what live art can be, but too frequently isn’t.

Then came Forced Entertainment. This Sheffield-based performance ensemble have been together for around 15 years but have never made it to Australia though they told me they’d love to come (take note live-art curators!). One of the ground breaking companies of recent British performance they, once again, found a fiendishly clever way to unbuild a performance event in And on the Thousandth Night (based on One Thousand and One Nights of course).

Here’s the scene. The company are onstage wearing red silk capes and paper crowns. One by one they address the audience and start telling stories beginning with “Once upon a time there was a…” They compete, interrupting and stealing each other’s stories over the 6 hours of the piece’s duration. Tim Etchells, the composer of much of their work, says he became interested in the performance potentials of this free narrative mode when having to invent bedtime stories to tell his kids. I liked the one about 2 duelling aeroplanes writing abusive messages to each other in the sky. Amazingly, despite or because of the relaxed mode of address, real conflicts build on stage and the mood in the auditorium shifts in and out of a kind of mild hysteria. I found that, though I knew there was no end to the stories, I listened as if there would be, my desire completing the structure of the event even as it was unravelling before my eyes, proliferating fragments.

The venue for this and the NRLA was The Arches, a series of dusty cavernous spaces under Central Railway Station. Used by clubs and bands more than conventional performance genres, it’s run a bit like Performance Space was at the end of the 90s but the bar and foyer areas are the stuff of designer fetishism: orange dangle bits and moulded plastic furniture. This collision of packaged space and found space mimes the city itself. That is, merchant city, tenement city, housing estates, and the liveliest club scene in the UK.

Right outside the Arches, a skateboarding performance event took place in the futurist abstract landscape New Plaza designed by Toby Patterson, artist and skater. A champion of his city, Patterson said on receipt of this year’s ICA/Becks Futures Arts Prize, “anything that puts Glasgow on the map is good.” More impressive was the collection of skater art videos including Patterson’s which was part of the Intersection program screened at Lighthouse, a contemporary art space in the city. These pieces brilliantly translate the traditions of body art into a contemporary urban context through the twinned technologies of digital video and skateboards. Gliding figures cutting through a variety of bleak urban environments may not be everyone’s idea of performance art—but which is more artistic: a skater passing an art gallery, or a skater wearing a suit of electric lights and zipping through a housing estate at night? Intersection is an intriguing mix of Dali and suburban leisure aesthetics and, believe it or not, there’s already a book on this phenomenon: Skateboarding, Space and the City. Architecture and the Body by Iain Borden (Berg, Oxford).

A short bus trip (I never skate in winter) away from the Arches is Tramway, the venue for much of the dance-theatre component of the festival. Occupying converted tram sheds in a derelict part of Pollockshields in South Glasgow, it’s a strangely pristine space for such a crappy environment. Here Ultima Vez, the Belgian based company of Flemish choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, presented Scratching the Inner Fields. This was a portentous piece that relied too heavily on a text by Peter Verhelst that relied too heavily on the use of the clause “they say that” (whoever ‘they’ are). Passages such as “They say that hunters enjoy chasing after game. That they enjoy the smell of a frightened animal. That they come when the blood flows over their hands. That they smear the blood over themselves”, had me pining for the chirpy discontinuous narrative of Forced Entertainment. The all-female cast did what they could with this cumbersome material. Meanwhile, some intriguing choreographic manoeuvres were playing themselves out. A woman with her hand locked in a casket. The staccato slap of rolled up cauls hitting the stage wetly and then stretched over lights to become membranous shades dividing the space into miniature red light areas. Three performers collapsing with exhaustion, being buried in dirt, then emerging, dirt clinging in patterns to their sweat drenched bodies. But the visceral and apocalyptic images of the piece do not cohere, and the sheer intensity of the staging is the only trace of Vandekeybus’ time with Jan Fabre.

Companhia Paulo Ribeiro of Portugal managed the interplay of the textual and the physical much better in a piece called Sad Europeans—Jouissez Sans Entraves —an effective counterpoint to the chaotic weightiness of the Belgians. This virtuoso dance-theatre piece mixed technical rigour with parodic reframing of technique. The dancers’ development of a movement was followed with a reflection on its construction redolent of Bausch and DV8—but with a quieter, more focussed staging. Ribeiro has the guts to rely exclusively on his own wit and the skills and animal energies of his company.

This piece was a suitable follow-up to Lisa O’Neill’s clever pastiche of Tadashi Suzuki (his technique and his critique of western ballet) in her Fugu San. My students at the University of Glasgow said they thought it was ‘cool’ and that they ‘didn’t know you could do performance like that’ (I think that’s what they said), but that they didn’t get the Suzuki stuff. It’s true to say Suzuki, and Japanese performance more generally, does not play the role in Scottish performance culture it does in Sydney and Brisbane.

They found Cazerine Barry’s Sprung easier to read with its claustrophobic exploration of domestic space suggesting a loss of dimensionality, a similar game played by Station House Opera in Mare’s Nest. This piece has 4 performers working both sides of a large structure comprising decking and a screen with a doorway connecting the 2 sides of the space. The interior of a room is projected onto the screen. In this virtual area we see a variety of images which we are denied in the flesh eg 2 of the performers turning their naked bodies away from us. At one moment, we see a performer on the screen shoving his penis at the doorway just as the real door is slammed. But it’s soon pretty clear that the switching between ontologies is the only game in town.

The idea of technology as performance took on an even more spectacular aspect in the work of Italian company Materiali Resistenti Dance Factory with their Waterwall. The piece consists of members of the company in black rubber suits cut off at the knee negotiating an enormous metal structure which eventually starts gushing water. This is the brainchild of Ivan Manzoni and it is pure retro-Futurist confection: part aqua-aerobics part biomechanics. Imagine 6 Irma Veps abseiling down a metallic waterfall and then sliding off into the audience. Choreography isn’t the right word, but the effort of the performers swinging rhythmically off ropes under the cascading water and maintaining timing and balance was the real achievement of this spectacle.

An image to close. Leaving the Materiali piece I approached the glass exit doors to see the company in street clothes under the eaves with a torrent of rainwater pouring down behind them. Someone should have told them that on the West Coast of Scotland in Winter, dancers should always wear their rubber suits all the way back to the hotel. Oh, and don’t buy the ice cream. Not until it warms up anyway.

New Territories: An International Festival of Live Art, Glasgow, Scotland, February 11 – March 16

A loose cluster of plays constellate, unikely companions, strange planets, sharing the unreliable gravity of Time in fantasias of recollection and projection. It’s a sometimes unnerving journey from theatre to theatre. It’s a long moment, lasting weeks, when synchronicity rules, déjà vu spooks and what makes immediate sense is later often inexplicable. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth at Sydney Theatre Company, Sam Sejavka’s In Angel Gear at The New Theatre, Alma de Groen’s Wicked Sisters for the Griffin Theatre Company and Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela for Playbox flicker and flare.
Frayn’s Copenhagen is performed on a planet. It’s Earth as an abstracted floor map pierced by a long wedge, on which physicists Bohr and the Nazi Heisenberg (and Bohr’s wife as accuser and commentator) create versions of their 1941 meeting and its abrupt ending, some predictable, one at least horrific. In this moral kaleidoscope, coherent purpose (why was Heisenberg there, to see a friend, to spy, to steal a secret that could make Germany a nuclear bomb, to compromise the Jewish Bohr?) evaporates into indeterminacy. Frayn boldly makes Heisenberg the self-interrogator, the primary constructor of the narrative, an act the playwright’s detractors have deplored (one going so far as to compare him with David Irving), but which makes this little journey into the heart, or rather the consciousness, of darkness, almost the nightmare it yearns to be. Copenhagen unsettles but finally fails me with is its inexorable neatness, from its pedestrian opening on through its ordered reconstructions and potted explanations of theories and the analogizing of these (like Heisenberg’s indeterminacy) with human psychology. The rationalist framework keeps us cosy, thoughtful, judges and jurors in a high-modernist in-the-round courtroom of Michael Blakemore’s direction and Peter J Davison’s design. There are moments when the temporal gears shift (however doggedly signalled by text and blocking) and the brain speeds up, attentive, accommodating another account that is like the one before, but then nothing like it. But Copenhagen stays strictly in the sphere of assaying moral relativism before driving its message home with a piece of perfectly executed stage spectacle. I left the theatre longing for the delirium of Polish cyberneticist and sci-fi writer Stanislav Lem’s chilling transformations of theories into projected realities in the novel Solaris and some hilarious short fictions where people bump into themselves with nasty consequences. Frayn’s Heisenberg never meets himself. I’d have to wait for Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela before I’d experience time and character illuminatingly out of joint. Nonetheless it was good to take the trip to Copenhagen, a serious talking head play which has generated debate and spinoffs that constellate around the play as it’s performed across the world, including Frayn’s elaborate updates in the printed program, The New York Review of Books (March 28) and a small companion volume, where he matches up his projections with the facts about an event almost lost to history as they begrudgingly emerge.

Macbeth is a butchering torturer, already a thug before the witches channel their prophecies of kingship through whoever happens to be available. Lady Macbeth is a trashy version of Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, all brazen carnality but already quaking at her ambition for her husband. Duncan is a dwarf with a dancing lilt, sparkling like a faery king, too beautiful for murder. But the tale must be told, and it is with relentless determination, staccato delivery and rich and often bizarre imagery, some of it insightful, some of it silly (like the large, black, hairy muppet that rises from between the possessed Lady Macbeth’s thighs, bares its fangs and waves its long tongue at us). Instead of waiting for time to take its course and the witches’ prophecies to come true, Macbeth and wife take time into their own hands and push it fatefully along. Benjamin Winspear’s production works on and off, but it does remind us that Macbeth is no great intellect, that his wavering and his wrestling with superstition make him a creature of the moment, essentially blind to the future, and almost incapable of reflection. Russell Kiefel’s account of “Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow…” therefore is bitter, impatient, not tragic. This is a man whose cure for his ailing wife is a lobotomy he performs himself. Macbeth is a killer from beginning to end; the verities of psychological development and character-as-time (one of Shakespeare’s inventions perhaps) are put to the test. Easy to dismiss, because it’s not the Macbeth we think we know, but the production conjures a frightening, claustrophobic timelessness that tyranny loves and that stays in the psyche for weeks to come.

It’s a short step from Macbeth to the subjects of Sam Sejavka’s In Angel Gear, junkies locked in the monstrous loop of addiction, in which time is either momentarily and ecstatically overcome or suffered as purgatory until the next hit. There’s little sense of the past and fantasies about the future remain just that. The play shows its age with creaky voice-overs that illustrate something of each of the characters in turn and there’s some awkward plotting, but the everydayness of the addict’s life with its narrow yearnings, squalor, glimpses of escape, criminal desperation, betrayal and easy violence are portrayed in both writing and production with an unequalled frankness for the stage and with the necessary sense of duration. The horror of time passing possesses these wracked bodies and restless psyches (fine, exacting performances from Winston Cooper, Jaro Murany and Victoria Thaine) as Sejavka and director Alice Livingstone allow the lived moment to unfold until you think you feel it in your own body.

Three sisters gather and reflect on the dead husband of one of them and on each of their thwarted lives. Secrets are revealed, darker and darker. Here was a man who screwed everyone sexually and emotionally, and a fourth woman professionally by stealing her research. He created a computer program, based on her ideas, that generates evolving ‘life’ forms. His womb envy lives on and he still dominates the lives of these women. The computer sits in a perspex swathed column in the wife’s home, university-controlled, humming, squealing if touched. In the Dead Husband genre (that includes Hannie Rayson’s Life After George and Tobsha Learner’s The Glass Mermaid) the challenge is partly to make the man intelligible, to understand how he could have had the impact he did, why this wholesale female surrender. Otherwise he remains a phallic archetype from a crude kind of feminism. Seeing the outcomes of his impact is to have only half the picture and that’s all we get in Wicked Sisters, a kind of verbal farce that edges towards Ab Fab but with heavy-handed playing, tiresome quipping and loaded plotting. Neither director (Kate Gaul, far better on more idiosyncratic projects) nor writer (Alma de Groen) are at their best and time stands still for all the wrong reasons as the characters rummage through each others’ lives. Only Judi Farr as the husband-murderer is allowed any gravitas, conveying a sense of weary, wounded interiority and a life where time is suspended, finished despite the revelations and the blackmailing that batter her.

In dark stillness, tall columns of moon-ish light slowly illuminate 3 seated Angelas (Lucy Taylor late 20s, Natasha Herbert early 30s, Margaret Mills 40 years old) in Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela. There are no explanations, these women and, soon the child Angela, simply co-exist in a shifting space of recollection and reverie across time. We enter of web of associations and resonances built out of things, animals, insects—lino, chess, horses, a spider, a bat—that like the women overlap and interweave. We hear the sound of a horse, a horse is spoken of, Angela calls the chess knight a horse. Lino, the backyard path, the chess board merge (“The truth of the matter is that there are always two landscapes, Viriginia. One always on top of the other.”) Angela 1’s scenes with husband Jack, little, spare naturalistic moments of out of sync emotion and sexuality, recur with Angela 2, same but different, quietly desperate—Angela: “You’re unconscious.” Jack: “We’re all unconscious.” There are 2 train trips to central Australia (narrow, several metre tall projections of the landscape rolling magically by), opening up not the landscape but the interior Angela—backyard and desert merge in the father’s making of a path like a chess board, the child is there, and her dead mother.

This simultaneity of actions and chronologies seems anchored in Angela 3, as if hers is the central consciousness, hers the challenge, speaking of herselves in first and third person: “There was something to discover about time, it was as if the sandwich, the bushes, the trees, the earth, were all getting on with something and she just wasn’t quite getting it. Something important was eluding her.” Perhaps it’s about being 40, feeling unconnected, living with the discontinuous narrative of past selves. As Angela 2 muses: “Am I six forever? Six in my thirty-third year?…27 years on a garden path?” The child Angela (dancer Ros Warby appearing tiny, marvellously angular, wrought, dropping…) evokes the mystery of a past almost too long ago to be understood except as play, watching and visceral anxiety. Perhaps it’s about a dead/lost husband. We don’t see Angela 3 with Jack (“I can’t hear you Jack you don’t have any sound, any presence, as if you were creeping along the pavement with bare feet, trying to trick me”). When asked “What’s wrong” at the play’s end, Angela 3 replies, “Probably grief.” But that’s all, because anything more literal would belie the larger forces at work in Angela’s psyche.

The return journey on the train from the desert unites the 3 Angelas in hilarious chat interspersed with glimpses of new strength. Angela 1: “Inside my clothes I’m an animal. Head neck sinews, lungs breathing, heart pumping. No one knows that between me and my dress, is a cosmic leap. A leap of faith into oblivion.” Angela 2: “His body hung in space like sexual atmosphere, you couldn’t help ingest him and even if his mind was elsewhere, he knew he was disappearing down your gullet and up your cunt!” Man: “And who was he?” Angela 1: “He was the Animus!” Still Angela is a liberating experience that realizes in performance the strange intersecting relativities of time, space and personality, theatre as dream. Jacqueline Everitt’s design, with its eerily inverted bushscape and startling depth of field, David Murray’s play with darkness and starry desert nights, Ben Speth’s film, and Elizabeth Drake’s nuanced score (horse, trains, distant songs, sometimes as if half heard, fragments from a dream) all merge with Kemp’s marvellous writing and the company’s deft delivery and fine movement (Helen Herbertson) yield an intensively subjective experience. A true play with time.

Time stands still. The recent death of Ruth Cracknell has deprived us of a great Australian actor. I treasure above all the memory of her rivetting performance in Beckett’s Happy Days. It’s as if I saw it only yesterday.

Michael Frayn Copenhagen, Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company, opened May 8; William Shakespeare Macbeth, Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, opened May 11; Sam Sejavka, In Angel Gear, The New Theatre, Sydney May 3-June 1; Alma de Groen, Wicked Sisters, Griffin Theatre Company, The Stables, Sydney, April 11-May 4; Jenny Kemp, Still Angela, Playbox, Malthouse, Melbourne, opened April 10.

I imagined the title of this “marathon performance installation about culture and the sea” referred to Australia’s national anthem, Advance Australia Fair. Girt By Sea conjured up images of Australia, the island-continent surrounded by ocean, and the boatloads of refugees not allowed to land on Australian soil. It all depends on your perspective.
Having witnessed Badai Pasir, Deborah Pollard’s performance/installation on Baron Beach near Yogyakarta, Central Java in 1996, I was looking forward to its translation into an Australian context. Invited to Sydney to work with Urban Theatre Projects, Indonesian artists Hedi Haryanto and Regina Bimadona collaborated with a number of local performers. And in Australia, as in Indonesia, this performance installation was staged over the weekend at a local beach.

Arriving at Manly by ferry from the city, sunlight glistened on the ocean as you looked across to the West Esplanade Harbour Beach at Manly Cove. “What’s that on the beach?” asked a fellow passenger as 8 brightly coloured huts—black/white, green/orange, blue/yellow with lifebuoys hanging over their doors—came into view along the beach.

Greeted by lifesavers doing the hula, you couldn’t help but follow as their female companion—and her extra large box of NutriGrain—led them down the beach. Two nuns were playing volleyball at the water’s edge while someone else was in the water fishing from a fish bowl suspended in a blow-up ring.

Queues formed in front of the huts as inquisitive observers joined others to find out what exactly was inside. Three huts housed installations with images and shadows created by the play of light and shade. The other 5 hosted one-on-one, 2 minute performances. Upon entering, you were directed to pick up headphones and listen to your personal soundscape on a CD walkman. A story with soundtrack unfolded before your eyes. A cheeky face peered over an old Globite suitcase as its contents—a miniature beach with tiny towels, a seagull, flags and sand—were slowly revealed. A recipe was given for beach babes. You became part of a Chinese tourist visit to Bondi Beach. You listened to a Vietnamese legend.

The beach was alive—a chef basting a sunbather; an office executive in power pink sitting on a plastic dalmation-print inflatable lounge chair, mobile phone glued to her ear; a neat row of sandcastles; a girl in floral print dress and apron sifting sand through a flour-sifter, making patterns along the beach, and lifesavers buried in the sand, roaring for their Nutri-Grain or posing in early 20th century period costume, ankle-deep in water. As sunset approached, the light was tinged with pink and muted evening colours, giving the landscape an even more surreal quality.

The general public were exposed to something quite outside their usual beach experience as they stumbled across these events. Indeed, from whichever perspective you approached this amalgam of works, you couldn’t help but be touched, challenged and left pondering. Girt By Sea had many layers and many faces—a truly fascinating mix of cultural responses to the sea.

Girt By Sea, presented by Deborah Pollard in association with Urban Theatre Projects, artists Deborah Pollard, Hedi Hariyanto, Regina Bimadona, George PK Khut, Monica Wulff, Arif Hidayat, Simon Wise, Peter Panoa, The West Esplanade Harbour Beach, Manly Cove, March 23-24.

No Answer Yet is a new performance work that effectively critiques the holding of asylum seekers in detention. Presented by Ommi Theatre in association with Hunter Writer’s Centre, it was performed by a collective of young performers at the Palais Royale, a late 19th century landmark located on Hunter Street, Newcastle. The Palais has had multiple lives as a roller skating rink, dance hall and nightclub but now operates as a youth venue under the auspices of the City Council.

The Palais is a vast performance space. A parquetry and carpet covered dance floor is capped at one end by a raised stage of generous proportions. Tonight, a large square of sheer white material is stretched vertically from floor to ceiling before the stage. At the foot of the stage the performers sit individually or cluster in small groups playing chess or chatting. Tents are pitched on either side of the playing space. A white cage with a white bird inside it hangs from the ceiling. Spectators are huddled with others behind a barricade constructed from wood and rope located far from the playing space. Between the barricade and the performers are several rows of seating. The distance across the space makes it difficult to distinguish the individual features of the performers.

A video sequence plays on the large white screen opposite the barricade. One by one the performers appear in close up speaking directly to the camera. The faces fill the screen as they explain the circumstances leading to their detention as asylum seekers. Countering the Federal Government’s physical distancing, dehumanisation and demonisation of asylum seekers (see Bec Dean, The artist & the refugee), the strategic use of video in performance gives the human figures in the distance a face and a voice.

At the end of the video, a performer approaches the barricade and addresses the audience. She states that the camp guards are currently preoccupied with other business and that we, the new batch of detainees awaiting processing, can sneak into the camp to meet fellow detainees. The performer removes the barricade and leads the spectators to the performer-refugees. After a while the same performer ushers spectators to the reserved seating. She explains that the camp detainees would like to perform a small drama of their devising to entertain us.

The young performers stand alone in apparently random positions within the playing space. On impulse they run to the edges of the space. Some seem to be testing the boundaries of their confinement. Others seem to recognise a familiar face beyond the borders of their captivity. The movement increases in frequency and speed until the action reaches a state of chaos. There are no words spoken, only a mournful musical track playing in the background and the image of people running themselves down in anger or false hope.

The exhausted performers retreat to the edges of the space. Two men sit playing chess, watched by one of the women. Another woman sits at the back of the space simply staring back at the audience. Another performer, a young Korean woman, walks from performer to performer in an agitated state. She doesn’t speak but cradles a stuffed bear under her arm. With her free hand covered by a scouring mitt, she vigorously scrubs the toy.

This performance within a performance weaves together the different stories of the asylum seekers, focusing on how they came to be placed in detention. The mode of storytelling is fluid and fragmentary as performers advance towards and then withdraw from centre stage, the telling punctuated by the depiction of aspects of everyday life in the camp. For instance, performers are often interrupted by a voice from a loudspeaker summoning the detainees to mealtime. Life inside the camp is shown to be harsh. A couple who lost a child while making a dangerous border crossing, bitterly come to terms with having their second child born into captivity. One woman in the camp is mute though she does sometimes sing. At the end of the show she collapses and dies, presumably from sadness. Another woman becomes quite hysterical at any loud noises and fast movements. One detainee is called to the administration office by number (the detainees refer to each other by number rather than name) and does not return. It is explained that she doesn’t have the proper papers and must return from whence she came. In this and many other ways, No Answer Yet reveals the inhumanity in collecting together in a confined space a group of already traumatised people and leaving them with nothing to do.

Quite apart from the difficulties involved in watching material that is disturbing and upsetting, I had to question the representation of asylum seekers by young performers whose theatrical skills and emotional capabilities appeared, at certain moments, to be stretched by the task of representational identification with the psychological dysfunction, trauma and pain of asylum seekers. Iraqui-Australian writer-director Nazar Jabour responded that the efficacy of the performance lay in the process of taking young people through a research and rehearsal process. The performers, who wrote about their involvement in the project in a local zine produced by the Palais Royale Youth Venue, stated that No Answer Yet provided them with an opportunity to perform their thoughts and feelings about the detention of asylum seekers for the local community. Their identification with asylum seekers and the solicitation of audience empathy seem worth the risk of a sometimes difficult performance. Jabour is currently researching a second show on the refugee issue.

No Answer Yet, writer-director Nazar Jabour, performers Catherine Comyns, Michelle Nunn, Mathew Steele, Victoria Lobregat, Andrew Richards, Blayne Welsh, Holly Manevski, Jandi Kim, dramaturg Brian Joyce; Palais Royale Youth Venue, Newcastle, April 4-6.

Chunky Move, Wanted, Australia’s Most Wanted: Ballet for a contemporary democracy

Choreographer Gideon Obarzanek took the concept for Wanted from Russian artists Komar and Melamid, who in 1993 polled Americans on the most statistically desirable painting (see the interview with Obarzanek). A comparable survey on the elements of a dance production was carried out for Wanted. However the most and least desirable dances only feature during the opening and finale; most of the piece being what Obarzanek calls a “dance documentary.” That is, a seated woman reads findings, examples of which are then presented.

This self-reflexive, show-and-tell format is novel and engaging, a kind of postmodern Brechtian approach, with tongue firmly in cheek. Dance is fragmented down to its most basic elements to the point of absurdity, as spectators are offered a rough guide to dance terminology (erratic versus soft movement, etc). Obarzanek’s own muscular choreography does, however, inflect many of these examples.

The survey is a great springboard for devising material, but the comparative findings between the various polled groups, which give Wanted its humour, are devoid of statistical validity. Over 75% of the respondents were female teachers and dancers aged 15-45, mostly from Victoria and NSW. It is therefore unsurprising that other populations appear to exhibit unusual tastes—“Northern Territory people have a higher preference for techno/dance music.” These groups constitute such relatively small samples that a few strange responses amongst them displaces the mean.

The comic approach also eventually wears thin. Obarzanek’s own choreographic style consists of an aggressive form of dance theatre, exhibiting a high degree of dramatic expressiveness. Yet when “expressive movement” appears as one of the most wanted qualities, it is not Obarzanek’s own style which is displayed, but rather an inflated spoof of bad Graham technique, arms thrust to the sky as the dancers sigh loudly. Obarzanek thereby excludes himself from the critique of popularism he is offering.

The audience is therefore finally cheated, as the “most wanted” work itself is not performed at all, but rather a deliberately silly send up of it. Nowhere on the survey were respondents asked if they wanted their opinions mocked. Instead, one is left feeling that Obarzanek is talking down to his audience. ‘Here is the dance which you asked for’, he seems to be saying in a superior way, ‘and isn’t it crap!’ A valuable opportunity has therefore been lost. If the dancers actually meant it when they performed the most wanted piece, one might be better placed to discern what makes such choreography so statistically compelling. It is ironic therefore, that Obarzanek—a frequent champion of pop culture in dance—has employed a mass marketing model to generate a work that ends up conforming to the stereotype of elitist arts: showing up the masses for their poor taste. It is the simplistic bread’n’circuses critique of mid-century Marxism all over again.

The “least wanted” work, by contrast, provides a more satisfying spectacle, albeit also a comic one. The most wanted style is akin to Graeme Murphy’s Sydney Dance Company—no surprises there (though in an apposite program note Tom Wright compares the polled preference for soft yet athletic dance dealing with the human condition to the Nazi Triumph of Will). The least wanted aesthetic however, appears to be angular dance theatre performed to discordant music. Obarzanek offers us, therefore, an extremely funny Cubist take on The Three Little Pigs. A choice that—in a more generous vein than the show overall—implicitly sends up Obarzanek’s own dance history, as his 1999 piece All the Better to Eat You With explored another fairytale. The bemusedly deadpan delivery of this section is also far more respectful of its audience.

The program closes with Clear Pale Skin, an equally promising work which does not quite fulfil expectations. This features another of Obarzanek’s psychotic female characters, here superbly played by Fiona Cameron as a dancer obsessed with the measurements, aesthetics and form of a fellow dancer (Nicole Johnston looking suitably gorgeous). The narrative of obsessive narcissism leading to murderous intent is well handled, but the only surprise in this familiar tale (Single White Female etc) is how beautiful it all looks. Slight reference is made in the work itself to the outside forces which have made this character feel this way. The drive for perfection is therefore rendered primarily as the personal problem of this woman rather than a social one with which dance itself is complicit. Cameron’s own works (Looking For a Life Cure, Buy This) are more eloquent in this regard.

Overall, both Wanted and Clear Pale Skin are fine pieces, which nevertheless rarely move beyond pedestrian social observations, leaving aside more nuanced understandings of the relationship between the individual and culture. The strength of these works therefore lies less in their conception than in their assured execution, with Chunky Move’s long-term dancers looking better every day.

Wanted: Australia’s Most Wanted: Ballet for a contemporary democracy & Clear Pale Skin, Chunky Move double-bill: choreography Gideon Obarzanek; set & lighting Bluebottle; composition/sound Luke Smiles; costume Jane Summers-Eve; Chunky Move Workshop, Melbourne, May 24-June 9

Sound scultpure: Intersectionms in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks by Ros Bandt

This book is welcome in many respects. It is welcome as a documentation of Australian sound sculpture, which has been—in Ros Bandt’s words—“an uncharted landscape of time and space.” It is very welcome for its lavish production, including some excellent photography, colour reproduction of artists’ scores and charts, and a 30 track CD coordinated with the text. It is also most welcome for the comprehensive account of artworks and artists provided by Bandt, who is herself prominent in the field.

As she remarks, the ephemeral nature of sound—and of most installation-based work—makes sound-oriented art difficult “to design, capture and document.” The book is a major step forward in the documentation process. Significant works by Nigel Helyer, Joan Brassil, Joyce Hinterding and many other artists are displayed, described, and represented on the CD. By combining audio excerpts with photos and illustrations, this book comes as close as a book can to document such multi-faceted work.

The range of artists covered is extensive. No doubt some readers will point to omissions, but that is inevitable in a book of this type. More important is that Ros Bandt has assembled a broad range of works here, and the book’s designer has presented them in an engaging format. The curious reader will be drawn in by the attractive design (some of the photos are superb), and to accommodate those unfamiliar with the field, the book includes a glossary, discography and bibliography.

For all its impressive qualities, this book would have been lifted into a higher league by a stronger conceptual account of the field. Consider the opening sentence: “Sound sculpture has been as ubiquitous as it is varied and ephemeral.” This confusing effort is a bad sentence anywhere, but as the opening of the book it doesn’t augur well. The problem with Bandt’s text, however, goes beyond sentence structure. It relates to the slight theoretical approach she takes to sound sculpture, which is nowhere adequately conceptualised as a form with its own specific attributes, criteria and history. The curious reader is likely to come away impressed by certain works, but confused by the incoherent account provided of sound sculpture.

Partly this problem derives from Ros Bandt’s rejection of recent sound-art theory, which for her “has borrowed heavily from other fashionable post-modern disciplines.” She complains that this theoretical work (well developed by Australian writers) lacks attention to specific art works, due to its dependence on “European linguistic and philosophical texts.” This is fair enough up to a point: at least here we’ll be spared the ordeal of theorists struggling to fit Derrida—with his literary bias—into the non-literary domain of sound. But for her book to succeed, she needed to replace this body of sound theory with something cogent.

Her (laudable) aim is to “present original artworks first”; from examination of these works, her hope is that “a relevant language will emerge in an appropriate way.” Yet the quest for this relevant language is a failed one in Sound Sculpture, mainly because there is no well-defined sense of what sound sculpture is. When generalisations are attempted, they are questionable. “Most sound sculptures,” we are told, “defy categorisation and are their own composite blend of visual and aural characteristics.” The visual/aural intersection or “ricochet” is repeatedly mentioned as the core of sound sculpture—which raises the question: “Is that all?” What of tactility, which is surely part of the sculptural element, and an important sensory factor?

The multi-disciplinary nature of this medium—with its fusion of music, sound, sculpture, electronics, architecture, acoustic engineering, design and other components—is part of the form’s fascination. But Bandt passes over this unique hybridity in a few sentences, preferring to discuss the works according to categories such as “machines and automata” and “indoor installation.” This creates the effect of a rather random detailing of works, with no thematic exposition. Any appreciation of sound sculpture as a specific art form is achieved only incidentally, with no developed idea of problems specific to the form, how artists engage with materials and technology—and no sense of the criteria by which works might be judged. This doesn’t require a canon to be built, or masterworks to be revered, but it does require some suggestion of ways in which the success of a work may be appreciated.

Strangest of all is the absence of a history of the form—or of any kind of context. Sound sculpture seems to have dropped out of the ether. Given that the book mentions work by Percy Grainger from the 1890s and the 1950s, there was the opportunity to sketch some of sound sculpture’s background or to detail the way its myriad components have come together to shape this thing called sound sculpture. Some exposition of this type would have provided the text with much-needed definition.

As it is, many of the observations are glib and superficial. In discussing Australia as an acoustic environment, Bandt compares “the hustle and bustle of Sydney’s Circular Quay” with “the quiet whispering of the casuarina trees in the remote Lake Mungo region.” Surely some recognition of the differences between urban built environments and natural ones is needed here. Later there is the claim, “Acoustic space is void. Sound fills it.” This peculiar statement—void of what? if the space is acoustic then it isn’t void of sound—shows the text’s need for at least some reference to the sound theory disdained by its author.

To be fair to Ros Bandt, she hasn’t set out to write a definitive theoretical work. She hopes that her book will “lay the foundation for more informed critical debate and discourse” around this topic. But for all this book’s impressive documentation and description, it could have laid a much more substantial foundation for future development.

Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks, Ros Bandt, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001.

“It was at that time the business with the cat occurred.” Fassbinder’s killer opening line is also seized on by Nigel Kellaway. But this is immediately countered by Andrew Morrish—the always charming, disarming Morrish—who spins off into an hilarious, expansive impro along the lines of “Let’s just leave the cat alone.”

We have been warned. This is not a production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, although it does draw on that work for at least part of its organising structure.

‘The cat’ was one of the early victims of Ian Brady who later, with Myra Hindley, terrorised, raped and killed 5 children in England in the 1960s and buried them on the moors. Leaving the cat alone, resisting violence and victimisation, is also an underlying entreaty of this piece which has been created “respecting those we sometimes dismiss as victims or less-than-losers” (program note).

entertaining paradise echoes the Fassbinder play in that it contains sections of narration about the exploits of Ian and Myra (or ‘Mein Führer’ and ‘Hessie’—after Rudolf Hess—as they called one another); dialogue between the 2, and a series of scenes “about the fascistoid underpinnings of everyday life” as Fassbinder saw it.

The ‘everyday life’ which Kellaway chooses to portray is that of the schoolyard—the performers are all costumed (by Annemaree Dalziel) in blue box pleated school tunics, and the piece opens with a giggling schoolyard courtship ritual. Their playground, populated by the loathsome bullies we all remember, is the triangular performance space (piano at its apex, complete with one of the school nerds playing; Michael Bell at the piano), and it is thoughtfully used to mirror the victimisation triangle of 2 ganging up on one. A triangle where allegiances shift suddenly and mercurially among the partners/victims in crime.

Here, the one-time Brady/Hindley victims are the aggressors—not to provide the simplistic excuse of arrested development or childhood trauma for adult atrocities, but perhaps rather to also allow for some timely self-reflection. Adults, of course, should know better than to persecute the innocent, the weak and the different. But are Ian, the bookkeeper and Myra, the secretary so different from the millions of other bookkeepers and secretaries who, closer to home, listen to Alan Jones, vote for John Howard, and hate their neighbours? It is the evil side to their banality that we need to worry about.

At one intriguing moment of the performance, peering deep into their music scores, Ian and Myra perceive the images of their victims. And so too, during this performance, are we uncomfortably reminded of the ugly hearts of glorious cultures that produce Berg and Hitler, Purcell and Brady. Closer to home, what ‘we’ love and hate is, literally, embodied in Indonesian-born Peretta Anggerek: the heights of Western musical culture emanating from the body of a despised and feared Other.

(And this is further subtly reiterated in performance: it is no innocent gesture for Anggerek in his school uniform to quietly read his Tintin book on stage. It points to an insidious and ongoing colonial project, which many seem so reluctant to relinquish. Not for us the putting away of childish things.)

Music is central to The opera Project’s work, and here Michael Bell provides the excellent live accompaniment (everything from Elvis to Berg); and Anggerek’s lovely counter-tenor is a pleasure in and of itself, whether he’s singing a traditional Indonesian tune or songs from the Western repertoire.

While an intense engagement with music is familiar territory for Kellaway’s productions, improvisation as a major element is a new departure and an inspired addition. What improvisation can so successfully do, in the face of the other very structured and often technically demanding performance elements (piano playing, opera singing, text-based theatre), is to undo them. It can rewrite and overwrite—it adds the dash of danger, the unexpected swerve, to performances which otherwise have their set paths to follow from beginning to end. And then there is also, simply, the pleasure of watching the performers create as they go, the thrill of the instant response to the immediacy of their situation.

Kellaway and Heilmann are—as always—riveting performers and seeing their work with the Fassbinder text (and especially as Ian and Myra) was enough to make me idly wish—heresy!—for the opportunity to see them do ‘straight’ theatre.

Clever, unexpected, provocative and captivatingly performed by all—I wish I had had the opportunity to return again (and again) as others did to see the re-creation of entertaining paradise each night during its season.

entertaining paradise, The opera Project, director Nigel Kellaway, performers Regina Heilmann, Nigel Kellaway, Andrew Morrish, counter-tenor Peretta Anggerek, pianist Michael Bell, The Performance Space, April 19-26

This year’s Totally Huge New Music Festival began, as did last year’s festival, in the bush 600 kms from Perth. This time there were noticeably fewer locals in attendance while a greater number of people had traveled up from Perth. So why the bush? “It’s the mixture of the unexpected”, explained Tos Mahoney, the festival’s Artistic Director. “All these artists together in this vast isolated space, who knows what could happen?” Indeed, the “unexpected mixture” proved to be an underlying thematic of the fifth Totally Huge.

Melbourne-based duo Clocked Out, pianist Eric Griswold and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson, have been working for some time in Chengdu, China, with composer and musician Professor Zhou Zhiang and dancer Ziang Ping. Their performances offered the first fruits of that collaboration to be heard and seen outside China. Sampled street sounds and pre-recorded traditional performers blended with live music and dance to create a surprisingly seamless mixture of eras and cultures. In the bush, on the first Saturday, video images of modern China were projected onto the shearing shed behind the stage, and served as both backdrop and metre for the performance. The constant turning of the performers to reference the video sequences, and the strict association of music to vision periodically promoted an unfortunate sense of being a performance of live Foley. At each thematic change the music was temporarily subordinated to the visuals. Regardless, it was an outstanding work amongst others performed by this remarkable quartet.

Back in Perth, the following Friday was electronica night at the Amplifier Bar. Perth’s percussion and electronics group Zoo Transmissions opened the night. Transmissions are an enthusiastic and energetic group of performers beginning to make a real impression on the local club scene, proving that the music doesn’t necessarily need to be beat-driven to attract an audience. Lake Disappointment followed up, performing behind a projection screen showing dark and enigmatic images which complemented the group’s guitar-based, almost ambient sound. Eastern states visitor, Pimmon, topped off the evening. Pimmon, aka Paul Gough, has been making waves internationally with his glitchy, hard-edged laptop electroacoustics. His one-hour set began and ended with a visceral beat, but in between ranged over a breathtaking variety of textures and timbres, a swirling powerhouse of noise, that continually threatened to resolve into order.

When Rob Muir’s and Alex Hayes’ Project 44 was relocated from its bush premiere to the city, it was sited in fashionable East Perth. Overlooking an Aboriginal site of significance, it was simultaneously overlooked from the opposite direction by the latest inhabitants of medium-rise townhouse developments. Set between these 2 cultures, the industrial sounds from the 44-gallon drums echoed the recent white history of industrial occupation of this now expensive real estate. Apparently an uncomfortable mixture for some, Project 44 was moved several times until it found a home somewhat further from the public eye than originally intended.

Also in East Perth, but across the Claise Brook at the less peripatetic Holmes a Court Gallery, Ross Bolleter gave a single performance of thought-provoking narratives accompanied by the sparse and haunting sounds of 3 ruined pianos. Bolleter’s work with ruined pianos began in 1989, with the discovery of an instrument on a sheep station near Cue in Western Australia. No performance can ever be reproduced exactly because, by their nature, these instruments are in a constant state of entropic change. To Bolleter they are priceless rarities and, by the end of the evening, the capacity audience agreed with him.

Perth’s new music ensemble, Magnetic Pig, celebrated its tenth anniversary with a performance on the last Friday of the festival. The members of Magnetic Pig for the most part compose the works they perform. They have lost none of their exuberance and originality over the past 10 years. The offerings ranged from the recent, very approachable, almost cabaret-style pieces of Cathie Travers, through to the much denser and more difficult compositions of Lindsay Vickery. Incorporated into the evening were the Chinese performers Zhou Zhiang and Ziang Ping. Zhou played the ‘chin’ (a traditional Chinese string instrument) in Vickery’s Delicious Ironies 13, while dancer Ziang performed in a Miburi Suit, its midi controls effecting sound and video.

Before they left Perth, I asked Zhou and Ziang what they thought of their first Totally Huge New Music Festival. They replied, “The collaborations—working with Lindsay (Vickery) and the others—we were not expecting this. It was very good for everybody.”

Drums in the Outback, Wogarno Station, March 29-31, Totally Huge New Music Festival, Tura Events, Perth, April 12-21.

A lot of experimental sound happening in Sydney at present is appearing in somewhat unexpected locations. Sonic Alchemy, a series of afternoon performances, was held at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills, set in front of Whiteley’s painting, Alchemy.

Experimental sound and music has long been associated with gallery spaces. The art world has often been more accepting of new and difficult sounds than the music world, especially in the name of art. However, in this case, the surreal imagery and explicit actions of Whiteley’s monstrous work, to my mind, are not at all in keeping with the improvised, minimal, experimental audio presented here.

The series of improvised trios has been curated by local musician Jim Denley, and includes a number of improvisers currently active in the Sydney new music and audio scene. For this afternoon’s performance the 3 musicians are set up without PA, each with his own amplification via guitar amps and a shabby home stereo.

Oren Ambarchi is the best known of new musicians to emerge from Sydney. He is a sought-after performer on the international scene, and is also very active locally. Using a heavily modified guitar and an array of guitar pedals, he pulls audio that has little causal connection to his instrument and actions. Less well known are Peter Blamey and Brendan Walls. Like Ambarchi, they use a series of feedback techniques to draw sounds from their analogue technologies. In both cases, this is centred simply around a mixing desk which has been ‘improperly’ patched and so draws different types of feedback. These sounds are often high pitched, extremely stripped back and minimal: sinewaves, squarewaves and the odd standingwave for good luck. Though not loud, these frequencies can be disturbing to the uninitiated. Casual visitors to the gallery quickly press fingers firmly into their ears.

The performance began quietly and minimally, the tones and frequencies in the high range making use of the reverberant space of the gallery, and ranged into a more fully textured and disjunctive style as the musicians let their individual voices play out. The key moment came near the end when a slow burning drone was initiated, the sound gradually building in volume and density. With no PA or sound engineer, the performers were free to take this to the limits—a wild card in this environment. Just as the volume reached the limit for many in the audience, Ambarchi created an extremely rich and dense audio. A slow fade to the end seemed inevitable but this was dramatically subverted by Blamey who continued playing after Ambarchi and Walls had clearly finished. Improv is usually about the group.

As with much new audio, the space plays an extremely important role in determining the outcomes. The variation this space creates is well worth experimenting with, and what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than in an unfamiliar environment with new and improvised music.

Sonic Alchemy, curated by Jim Denley, artists Peter Blamey, Brendan Walls, Oren Ambarchi, AGNSW’s Brett Whiteley Studio, Surry Hills, Sydney, April 21

I’m off to the Judy for my first experience of Elision. I’d heard about them, I’d heard they were real quality, and I’d heard they were mainstream modernity—the classical avant-garde of the conservatorium. It was all true. The program drew on material from the last decade or two. Most pieces were by composers involved collaboratively with Elision.

The program opened with a solo percussion piece written by Richard Barrett and played on the vibraphone by Peter Neville. The performance was a stunner. He’s playing chords with a couple of mallets in each hand (a bit like playing golf with 4 clubs and 4 balls at once), and the piece must have thousands of notes—all sorts of chords, and it’s really fast. I’d love to see this guy working the chopsticks at a Yum-Cha. Neville made a couple of early mistakes (whoops—missed), but this is a failure rate any machine would envy. It’s easy to get used to the enormous polish that excellent performers have.

Two duets by Michael Finnissy for guitar and voice followed, with Geoffrey Morris on guitar and Deborah Kaiser singing. Great voice, especially low. Lots of medieval-style ornament. The guitar was a bit soft in the first piece, but came into its own in the second. This was followed by a solo piece written by Aldo Clementi. Morris’s guitar was assured, but the piece itself was a little incoherent for me. There’s that whole old school avant-garde thing—which of these two random sequences do you prefer? It’s an approach to composition that runs through the entire concert program. From an information/theoretic point of view, there’s a lot of information in random sequences. From a musical point of view, there’s none.

The first half of the program then finished with a bravura solo performance of a Richard Barrett trombone piece by Ben Marks. Once again the performance was gob-smacking. However, as a compositional strategy I can’t help but think that ‘new sounds for old instruments’ lost its cachet about 20 or 30 years ago.

After the break was the highlight of the concert, Timothy O’Dwyer performing his composition, Sige, for solo bass sax and prerecorded backing. The piece begins with O’Dwyer centre stage—rocker hair and Pelaco shirt—carrying a bass saxophone. Underneath, a low sustained drone changes up a fourth like a sluggish 12-bar blues is about to roll forth. Instead, the drone continues as O’Dwyer fumbles about with the sax, a few fitful noises, classic ‘just can’t get into it’ stops and starts. The drone stops for a brief moment and the process repeats. But with each repeat, O’Dwyer starts to play more, until we’re watching and hearing wild, Jimi Hendrix-meets-Mac-truck multiphonics, trills, grunts and squawks. It’s the archetypal sax solo. And he does this again and again and again. The playing is phenomenal, but it’s totally hermetic, the performer isolated in his own ecstatic space like a caged rat pressing the food bar over and over again, raising the question: Who’s a solo for?

Empire of Sound, Elision ensemble, The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, March 24

It’s been 7 years since the formation of Chunky Move, with 4 of those as Victoria’s state dance company, and Gideon Obarzanek is the first to admit that developing his craft in the public eye—and with the burden of associated expectation—has been challenging. This year, a move to a new studio with expanded facilities has helped stabilise the company’s local connections with open classes for professionals and

Maximise, a program offering space and promotional support for independent practitioners. After polling the public about their tastes in contemporary dance, Chunky Move are presenting the results in Wanted, a double-bill featuring Clear Pale Skin and Australia’s Most Wanted: Ballet for a contemporary democracy. Later this year, the company is touring to Sydney with the multi-media installation Closer, before heading off to Budapest and France.

Commissioned earlier this year to create a piece for Graz Opera Ballet in Austria, Obarzanek took the opportunity to meet up with European choreographers including Alain Plaitel and Wim Vandekeybus.

GO: Graz Opera Ballet was my first commission in 3 and a half years, and was both exciting and scary. After 3 years hard work in Melbourne, it seemed important to work with other people again. I was very happy with the work I did—it was an early version of Clear Pale Skin, and I came back and reworked it with my dancers. It’s good to travel but I have changed and need to work much more intensively, and with dancers who know the way I work. I don’t think you advance very far as a freelancer. But I did come back with enthusiasm and a lot more confidence, wanting to do more and do it better.

In previous works [like Arcade], I have had an interest in the relationship with the audience. Then I came across a book by 2 Russian visual artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who in 1993 conducted a survey to find out the ‘most wanted’ painting. I thought the discussions in the book were really compelling in regard to how a vision could be arrived at through the mechanism of a democratic process. Then we had the federal election last year, which I found simply demoralising—the 2 major parties were following the polls very closely and not taking responsibility for important decision-making. I remembered this book, and thought it would be interesting to make a dance piece about how a work could come together from the results of what people most wanted to see. The work of Komar and Melamid arrived at a style of painting from a period that most suited the answers—a Romantic landscape from the 19th century. While my work does arrive at the ‘most wanted’ work, the piece is close to an hour and is mostly concerned with the report itself and an analysis of the result—it’s actually performed to a reading of the report. So in a sense it’s a documentary, and not about dance but (a report which is) read through dance.

This, being a novelty or ‘gimmick’, is quite different to how you normally structure your pieces.

It’s very different. The report directs the work, and it’s split into sub-sections such as choreographic structures and qualities of movement, music, costumes and sets. So it’s like a series of small chapters, and there is a process of reducing each element down to the highest preference and then adding all the elements together at the end. What was difficult was not to impose my own idiosyncrasies on the work. It really became group-choreographed through a series of tasks I set, so I didn’t have much input into the actual movements or expressions.

It is interesting that you’ve arrived at this project given Chunky Move’s agenda to open up contemporary dance to new audiences—the idea of polling is almost the logical conclusion to that.

And that definitely began with Arcade’s format, a series of 6 choreographers and directors in 6 shops, with the works going on simultaneously. The audience could make a decision about what they did/didn’t want to see and how long they would stay with works—which also made the works somewhat competitive. As an artist running a major, state-funded dance company, you are very exposed to discussions about performing arts on a federal and state level. It seems in Australia, particularly since the Nugent Report, many of our conversations about art have been about who makes it, how much it costs, is it getting to the right people, and is it what people really want. This work is a response to the language, time and emphasis that is placed on the economics of art. And it’s certainly not an answer but probably another question. It’s an extreme response, but it came quite naturally.

You are constantly driven to make work that’s relevant to a large audience. What other things do you draw from? Last time I spoke to you, you mentioned film, music and cartoons.

I’ve always had a curious nature. When I was younger people thought I was too distracted from being a dancer, whereas now it’s an advantage in regard to making work. But I must say I feel a bit less connected to pop culture—particularly TV. I think I made signature works earlier on—things that came naturally to me about how I was placed in the world. But I don’t want to tell those stories anymore, and I’ve become more interested in the medium itself. So my works have become a little more analytical; they’re not story or character-based but about the relations between performance and people.

Regarding the themes of Clear Pale Skin, I recalled a conversation we had about the horrors of ballet school—is your past revisiting you in this work?

The whole ballet environment is a strong influence in this piece. It revolves around an obsession that one woman has with another, believing this other woman is extraordinarily perfect and that she herself is not. These kinds of distortions are certainly drawn from my experience at a suburban ballet school and then the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne. Seeing how obsessive and fanatical dancers can be about their training, the perceptions of themselves and the people around them, and the competitive nature of it all. So in this work there is a lot of faux ballet going on which is used to set up the relationship between these 2 women.

Did it ever become a problem having these dancers who are quite perfect and the piece becoming self-referential?

No, not really. Luckily most of my cast, and particularly Fiona Cameron, take an interest in the idea of the grossly imperfect and work on all their insecurities, letting them fester and come forth. You certainly don’t get the impression they are perfect when they do that. And the piece is not really talking about imperfect people but their perceptions of themselves, so the dancers can be quite amazing and beautiful.

We started here 7 weeks ago when it was still a hard hat area. This building houses Chunky Move, Australia’s Centre for Contemporary Arts [ACCA] and Playbox’s set-building workshop. We have 2 studios where previously we had one. Previously too, the conditions of rental from the Opera meant that if they had rehearsals they could kick us out. One of the studios is enormous, like an aircraft carrier, and the other is much smaller. We are clocking a lot of hours because we can stay here all night. It’s great to have a home. We’ve also noticed that our morning classes, which are open to professionals, have increased in attendance and this year we’re going to have a lot more showings. Lucy Guerin is showing her work here later in the year, which will be the first time the studios will be used for a season. And we have a program called Maximise where choreographers can have studio space, technical equipment and some marketing for independent projects. We do have these resources and we like to share them when we can.

Working in other media—film, CD-ROM, installation—is an interest of yours. What have you got coming up in the future?

I have an installation with Peter Hennessy, Darrin Verhagen and Cordelia Beresford called Closer. It’s a projection in a room, the opposite wall of which is padded with sensors. People coming in are encouraged to ram their bodies into the wall, which effects the film. It’s not cryptic either—people learn very quickly which part of the wall effects which part of the film so it becomes a tool, a game.

We shot it on film but it actually uses video because all the information sits on a hard drive—but it does have a very rich filmic look. It focuses on a body and it is shot in close-up and extreme close-up. Working in a live context you assume that the body is viewed from head to toe, even in a small venue. The one thing that film or video has to offer, and which I like as a choreographer, is the close-up. Working with dancers in a studio you see a lot of interesting detail which disappears when you put it on stage—like tendons under the skin, and hand grips. One of the reasons I’m so attracted to the installation is the relation it has to moving bodies in the room, and the choreography emerging as people move around and ram the wall and make teams—that live aspect interests me most. Closer was commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image [ACMI] for its new building in Federation Square, but it’s not going to be open in time so we’re previewing it in antistatic at Performance Space in late September.

An orange light flashes in a corner of the Seymour Centre forecourt. A tinny recording of a familiar tune bounces off the walls. Suddenly a Mr Whippy ice-cream van emerges, appearing at first larger than it is. A bemused looking, genuine Mr Whippy drives. In the passenger seat is Julie Anne-Long in messy orange wig, her head moving left to right on a horizontal plane while her forearm, propped up on the window sill, moves up and down. Both gestures are precisely coordinated, surreally slow motion. As the van slides by, a grotesquely grinning Mrs Whippy is captured almost in freeze frame.

Mrs Whippy is one of 3 pieces in a dance-performance programme presented by One Extra Dance featuring MissXL, the performance persona adopted by Long whose body and spirit refuse to conform to balletic (or even postmodern dance) ideals. She is not the dutiful dancing daughter but a wayward woman conceptualising, choreographing and performing a contemporary and hybrid form of burlesque. In Mrs Whippy, MissXL “calls on her prestidigitatorial and pantomimic powers to expose a mother’s fears”; in Cleavage she “holds you to her bosom in a socio-erotic danse macabre”; and in Leisure Mistress she “discovers terpsichorean heights in a dancer’s demise” (program notes).

After introducing the audience to the delights of Giuseppe’s ice cream, Mrs Whippy transforms into stereotypically evil characters from children’s literature. With a long black beard she dances in front of the iron gates of the forecourt, hopping from one leg to another, one arm moving up as the other goes down, the rhythm awkward, hands balled into fists. Long skillfully manages the large open space as she moves through the audience on her way to each new performance place. At one point the audience is ushered into a triangular nook where we watch through a large window as she dances on a box wearing a long, crooked nose. Long’s final dance as Mrs Whippy is one of stillness. She stands on a box lit by the ice-cream van as moving images are projected onto her apron. Robert Helpman in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang entices 2 children into a playhouse on the back of a horse and cart. As the children move inside the house the exterior falls away to reveal the bars of a cage. At this point Long howls in pain, her body slumping forward as she clutches her apron in a fit of maternal anxiety.

Cleavage is performed in the Downstairs Theatre. The set is triangular with the base running across the front of the stage and the apex receding into a vanishing point at the far end. Stage left sits a reel to reel recorder. The recorded voice of a male paleontologist recites information on geological formations and rock cleavage. Long appears stage right, chatting informally with the audience while dressing in a brightly coloured bustier and performing dramatically exaggerated gestures of grooming. The reel to reel recorder plays throughout Cleavage incorporating a number of different voices—a young female change room attendant tells stories about fitting women with brassieres. Male voices discussing the look and feel of breasts are juxtaposed with those of women. Children’s voices delineate similarities between breasts and buttocks while a young boy asserts that he always draws pictures of women with cleavage! A dance theorist pontificates on the invisibility of breasts in dance. Babies suckle. Long skillfully interacts with these voices as the stories cue segments of her live performance. Cleavage is a consummate work. The recorded stories complement an intelligent and witty live text. Long’s versatile dance performance melds dramatic and performative elements. Cleavage replaces the brooding malevolence of Mrs Whippy, where the boundaries between good and evil merge, with an up front and often hilarious piece of dance-theatre about fleshy bits.

Long’s world-weary Leisure Mistress, modeled in part on Marlene Dietrich in her later performing life, is wheeled into the performance space by a faithful assistant (Victoria Spence). Dressed in blue chiffon with oversized faux diamond rings dripping off her fingers, the Leisure Mistress repeatedly tucks a wayward section of blonde bob behind her ear. Her first dance (she announces each numerically) is performed lying on her back. Only her hands and feet move in repetitive phrases in time with a perky musical track. The other dances are similarly compressed variations of the Diva’s once famous dance pieces now performed in absurdly reduced form. One dance is performed leaning against the side of the stage. As her legs continually collapse under her, the Leisure Mistress runs her hands down her thighs to re-straighten them. This correctional gesture becomes a key movement phrase in her dance of extremities. In the final dance (“the first she ever performed”) the Leisure Mistress undertakes a costume change which proves disastrous. In a hair net and an undersized dress which gapes at the zipper, she cavorts about the stage performing derivative contemporary dance movements in an attempt to remain relevant to her audience (having described herself as a “submerging artist” in the age of the emerging artist). Somehow this final image captures what Julie-Anne Long is so good at conjuring and performing in dance: the weird and wonderful world of the grotesque and the anxieties that form it.

Miss XL; concept, choreographer, performer, writer Julie-Anne Long; designer Rohan Wilson; music (for Mrs Whippy) Sarah de Jong; video Samuel James; dramaturg/co-writer Virginia Baxter; lighting Janine Peacock; One Extra Dance, Seymour Centre, April 3-13

Questions of space and time often arise in Shelley Lasica’s work. Space has been highlighted in a number of her Behaviour Series, with work being presented in very small rooms, in large auditoriums, in hallways, and in galleries. In those works, the viewer was often and variously made aware of the ways in which his/her body was implicated in the viewing relationship.

History Situation, like Situation Live (1999), presents issues in a sedimented manner. Its themes appear to be trapped beneath that which occurs on the surface. For example, there is a sense of narrative in both works. Dancers combine, interact and separate. There is almost a story to their actions but the nature of the story is never made clear. Rather it is treated performatively and according to kinaesthetic relationships.

Five dancers enter the newly refurbished Horti Hall, all in turquoise. Each takes off his/her cloak and rests it on the warm wooden floor. The space is wider than it is deep. A large translucent rectangle lies on a tilt at the back, lit in reddish brown. Two monitors show a series of images by Ben Speth. These are sparse public spaces; phone booths, atriums, streetscapes, banks—locations populated not by people but reminiscent of them. The locations may be deserted but their content suggests a virtual habitat within which human movement may be found, movement such as occurs outside the monitors.

The dancers are connected. They enter together and leave together. They wear the same colour and material, folded and pleated to suggest a degree of individuality but clearly they are of similar ilk. A delicate piano arises; the staccato rhythms of Jo Lloyd’s movement offers another music. The 5 form a number of beautiful tableaux—5 green bottles, all in a row. Not all the movement is elegant, dancerly; some of it is gestural, occasionally naturalistic. Jacob Lehrer and Jo Lloyd perform and repeat a duet. Deanne Butterworth and Bronwyn Ritchie move their hips in synch. The group gathers then disperses. Repetition, recognition.

The look of the Other plays its part in these comings and goings—bearing witness, signifying relationships. There is conflict, and opposition; referring perhaps to events within what is called the Source Script by Robyn McKenzie. The dynamics of 5,4,3,2 and 1 are quite complex in all their combinations, especially as there is a sense that each configuration means something particular, something that cannot simply be transferred from one body to another. And yet, the emergence of one body, one lived corporeality in all these dancers, is palpable. Although Lasica doesn’t perform here, her body is evident in the bodies of the dancers, an absent presence.

Francois Tetaz’ music assisted the sense of connection and buried narrative within and throughout the piece. Its ending was evocative, e-motional, allowing for personal speculation and imaginary dialogue. If this work was about time, the final moments of music and movement suggested a metaphysics of time, of lived time, human (inter)action, finite and focused. The dancers collect their cloaks and leave the space. Time is no more.

History Situation, choreographed and directed by Shelley Lasica; dancers Deanne Butterworth, Tim Harvey, Jacob Lehrer, Jo Lloyd, Bronwyn Ritchie; music Francois Tetaz; set and lighting Roger Wood; costumes Richard Neylon; source script Robyn McKenzie; images Ben Speth, Horti Hall, Melbourne, March 14-24.

Here. The place in which you find yourself. From the viewing level, the rear stairs of the Turbine Hall drop though 2 tiers like a medieval descent into purgatory and hell. Brian Lucas begins his story eye to eye with his audience, a story of victim/aggressor drawing on the impulses of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and lures us from safety into less certain waters.

Voice and movement embody his text, a recollection of events one cold New Zealand night. Our gaze travels down through this torch-lit temple to an intimate space—a dining table, a serve of raw liver, a romantic dinner date. The symbiosis of word and gesture set against Brett Collery’s aural backdrop of a girl pop group, returns us to another version of events. Repetition lulls, then puts us on alert. Danger intensifies, and Lucas disappears below as into the mouth of hell. Calmly, he re-emerges from the basement—as though oblivious to the ravaging animal that had just given vent to its most depraved desires.

Here/There/Then/Now, an initiative of director Cheryl Stock, brings together independent solo dance artists and their collaborators (visual, multi-media, lighting and sound designers). Four unique sites around the Brisbane Powerhouse were nominated for the creative response of 3 discrete creative teams who came together under Stock’s direction in the fourth space, the Visy Theatre, for Now.

There. We follow our guide and peer down into a concrete cell resonating with Nok Thumrongsat’s plaintive Thai singing. Choreographer Leanne Ringelstein relentlessly assailing the walls of their confinement. Trapped, neither acted upon the space in the way Lucas did, but instead made themselves subordinate to it, responding within the language range of their respective disciplines. Purporting to examine cultural responses to stress and confinement, There ended with its first action—the assertion of one individual against an/other, unfortunately leaving off just when it got interesting.

Then. Time past. Embodied in still life, a painting in 3D: Vanessa Mafe and Jondi Keane’s response to the theatre foyer site. Still life? And yet the dancer moves, exploring the installation—an arrangement of stoneware on a suspended glass table. Picking up, putting down, rolling around an orange. Ko-Pei Lin looked lovely in her orange-lined hoop petticoat, lovely in Ian Hutson’s stills that line the walls. So…why is she moving? Then might have worked just as well in a conventional black box for the dance added no new meaning, attempted no journey, held no dialogue with the place Ko-Pei Lin was in.

Beyond its visual design, Then was an aesthetic frolic within the language of contemporary dance as accumulated in the performative body of Ko-Pei Lin. (A smattering of oriental hand movements slightly enriched the vocabulary.) For director Stock, an aspect of the project was the way in which the body’s accumulated history of technique and culture inform creative outcomes. The exclusive physicality of these dancers’ histories sometimes seemed to remove them from the immediacy of the present. Ringelstein’s voicelessness in There seemed an unnatural gag on her expressive potential, where singer Thumrongsat moved with a natural fluidity (holistically) across the borders of discipline. Thumrongsat was actor/singer/dancer, her performative body providing sound, gesture and meaning.

Now. Where we culminate, where we converge. Stock speaks of the “site as a sparsely fragmented repository of what has gone before”, and of “stairs to nowhere, deep crevices with no purpose.” If the site began as a void of ambiguous negation, Now did little to fill it. Juxtapositions that are merely serendipitous can’t be relied on to engender new narratives. Floating objects—hoop skirt, finger cymbals, a candle—referenced the previous works as part of a sea of memory: amorphous and impact-free. Three discrete themes, woven together in time and space, never bore upon each other to produce a fourth element.

After a while though, a tableaux evolves. Girl eats orange, transforming still life. A story is retold, transforming the past. Finally, a step forward, into the unknown, into future stories. The re-action becomes action; relationships move beyond design and sensation and begin to initiate meanings for the spectator, allowing us to become active listener, not just voyeur.

Lucas’ creative response was both active and reactive. If the site was point A, his Dahmer text gave him point B, between which a productive tension took place. This tension forced him to apply conceptual (rather than corporeal) agility in order to command the given space to serve a greater purpose. After Lucas’ layered and multi-disciplined opening, what seemed lacking elsewhere in the program was an explicit intellectual response, an equivalent engagement with a resource of ideas. Here was where I wanted them all to be.

Here/There/Then/Now, director Cheryl Stock; choreographers Brian Lucas, Leanne Ringelstein, Vanessa Mafe, Cheryl Stock; dancers; Ko-Pei Lin, Leanne Ringelstein; singer Nok Thumrongsat; composer Stephen Stanfield; sound artist Brett Collery; visual artists Jondi Keane, Ian Hutson; lighting design Jason Organ, Brisbane Powerhouse, May 15-18

At a time when opportunities to experience seasons of contemporary dance works are thin on the ground in Sydney, events like the forthcoming The Action Pack season at The Studio at Sydney Opera House (June-July) and antistatic at Performance Space (September-October) are welcome indeed—as is the news that Robyn Archer’s 2003 Melbourne Festival will have a dance focus. Given the demise of the national touring organisation Made to Move, these days it seems easier for choreographer Phillip Adams to get to Mongolia (as he did courtesy of Asialink in 2000) than to Sydney (although this trip is with the last of Made to Move’s funding). The chance to see 3 companies of such high calibre as Adelaide’s Australian Dance Theatre, Melbourne’s BalletLab and Kate Champion’s Force Majeure performing in a mini festival is exciting enough. This, plus the offer of generous discounts (“a strictly limited offer” of $69 for all 3 shows), is almost too good to be true.

The Studio publicists have gone all out promoting the threesome as “fast, fraught with risk, breathtaking, the equivalent of white water rafting” and my favourite, “sex on legs.” Thankfully, they’ve also found a few column centimetres for the smarts, ie for “fresh” read radical approaches to dance and for “thought provoking” read personal, political and sociological. There’s even a warning about “adult themes.”

The last time we saw Phillip Adams’ Ballet Lab in Sydney was in the remarkable Amplification which, like a lot of Australian contemporary dance works, has made successful international appearances. The company’s new work, Upholster, is part installation, part deconstructed movement, part furniture workshop with live sound mixes by turntable master Lynton Carr. RealTime’s Philipa Rothfield has described Upholster as “intricate and detailed, manifesting Adams’ deep-seated interest in design. Hinting at the conceptual grounds of upholstery, it weaves an aesthetic web. On the surface, beneath the surface, questions are covered over, but they are there to be discerned as the work unfolds.” (RealTime#43, p33).

Sydney audiences went wild for ADT’s Birdbrain (RealTime 44. p37) which toured here last year with its witty and sometimes unbelievably vigorous dance vocabulary. This time they’re bringing their new work, The Age of Unbeauty, which premiered as a work-in-progress at this year’s Adelaide Fringe. Once again choreographed by ADT’s artistic director Garry Stewart, with sound design by Luke Smiles and video by David Evans, this is a developing work. Conceived at a time when world politics were making their own risky moves, Stewart describes the dark poetry of The Age of Unbeauty as “a highly personal response to the terror in man’s ability to act inhumanely…”

Once the word was out, it was impossible to get a ticket to Kate Champion’s Same, same But Different which premiered at this year’s Sydney Festival. Breaking new ground in the live/filmed dance genre, Same, same like all the works in The Action Pack season, showcases the work of some truly remarkable Australian dancers (RealTime #47, p6). And across the 3 works, you’ll also see a star lineup of collaborating artists—among them, filmmaker Brigid Kitchin, designers Geoff Cobham, Dorotka Sapinska, Gaelle Mellis, Damien Cooper and composer Max Lyandvert.

The Action Pack: The Age of Unbeauty, Australian Dance Theatre, June 25-July 6; Upholster, BalletLab, June 26-6; Same, same But Different, Kate Champion & Force Majeure; The Studio, Sydney Opera House. Bookings 02 9250 7777. www.sydneyoperahouse.com Forum: Champion, Stewart, Adams, The Studio, June 29, 5pm.

Having only just returned from Melbourne after 11 days of working with young writers on responding to an exhausting, exhilarating and innovative 2002 Next Wave, and having walked straight into helping get RealTime 49 to the printer and onto the streets, there’s been little time to think about an editorial. So this will be brief.

One of the saddest things about Australia’s refugee crisis is the widespread lack of empathy for those seeking a haven from war and persecution. This amounts to a major, in fact a national, failure of imagination. How rare it is to hear questions asked about what it would be like to be a refugee, how you would handle it emotionally, who you would turn to for help and, yes, what it would mean financially.

However, there are a growing number of artists who are addressing the issues, answering these questions through their art, direct protest and some quirky activism. Bec Dean’s “The artist and the refugee” describes the political fictions by which refugees are trapped (not just in mandatory detention centres), the many ways artists are trying to undo them and where you can turn to participate. Kerrie Schaeffer reports on a Newcastle youth performance written by an Iraqui-Australian about the refugee experience. In Melbourne I saw Platform 27 & Melbourne Workers Theatre’s The Waiting Room, a gruelling recreation of life in a detention centre.

The second notable failure of imagination comes from the Cultural Ministers Council in the form of The Report to Ministers on an Examination of the Small-To-Medium Performing Arts Sector. The document produces a classic double bind. Yes, the sector is the key innovator in performance and it is in financial surplus (kind of). But, yes, the sector is experiencing a serious diminution of its capacity to innovate for want of funds, artist burnout etc. The solution? Nothing much. Everything (business planning, clearer government expectations, inter-government cooperation etc) but funds. Like the visual arts (also subject to an enquiry already signalling no new funds), the small-to-medium performing arts sector desperately needs additional, ongoing funds and the suggested reforms to government communication. It’s not just that the sector is disappointed by the lack of funds at the end of this particular rainbow, the word was out about that a while back, but it is shaken by the shoddy analysis and the perpetuation, in fact, of the double bind which applauds the work and keeps it in firmly and exploitatively in check. KG

Disability, disability culture, and identity politics were just some of the themes and issues celebrated with passion and debated with rigour at the High Beam Festival. This festival offers a rich, colourful and at times, cutting edge program of theatre, music, film, dance and visual arts exploring the theme of disability. High Beam is not concerned with its marginalised status in the broader ‘arts as excellence’ arena, nor the spare seats and low profit outcomes. Its purpose is making the arts accessible to a group often excluded both from the arts and from the means of producing art. The ‘art as therapy’ model, or ‘medical model’ as some people call it, seems no longer acceptable as the modus operandi. While High Beam makes room for such art, its motivation is more closely aligned with a cultural development model that aims for an enriched and inclusive society where disability is not about being on the wrong side of ‘normal’ (as the medical model would have it). On the contrary, ‘coming out’ takes on a whole new meaning both within the festival productions and on the streets.

As other minority groups have staked an identity out of oppressive regimes of otherness, people with disabilities are making visible their bodies, identities, ideologies and sexualities, weaving personal narrative into works of theatre, comedy, dance and visual art and evoking new representations that challenge constructions of normalcy.

Caca Courage, presented by Access Arts and Queensland Performing Arts Centre, entertains, provokes and challenges the boundaries of ‘normality’. “Caca” is the French word for ‘poo poo’, and this work metaphorically ‘shits’ on the patronising idea that people with disabilities are so, so, courageous. This is achieved through a visually stunning production and a clever series of provocative moves that defamiliarises, in the Brechtian style of ‘alienation’, the ideologies of the ‘normal’ body.

Mat Fraser’s Sealboy: Freak moves beyond the personal narrative and juxtaposes 2 characters, one representing the historical genre of human freak show exhibits, and the other a contemporary actor with a disability struggling to eke out a career in the mainstream. Fraser uses the ‘spectacle’ of his body, at the same time as reclaiming the word ‘Freak’ in a deliberate attempt, in his words, “to shock people out of their complacency.” Fraser wonders whether he is in fact only read as a ‘freak that acts’, and not as a talented professional actor. Fraser worries that too often the audience responds with the ‘wow factor’ such as, ‘it’s incredible, what, with him having short arms and everything.’ Fraser’s show is a piece of realism yet he plays with notions of identity via postmodern pastiche, providing both entertainment and witty retort to straight culture through Rap-style music.

Most of It’s Queer is by Philip Patston from New Zealand, who describes himself as a gay disabled vegetarian, and who relates through comedy and in a very conversational style the everydayness of his cerebral palsy and life as an actor in a New Zealand soapie. Patston’s character and mannerisms add a charming quality to his stage presence. His contemplative, playful and yet often covertly serious material was well received by the audience. Patston claims, however, that he never goes on stage with the intent to educate people. “I’ve done that” he says “and an audience just sees right through it and goes, oh we’re being lectured at. So my work is to entertain but it comes through my life and my training as a social worker—that’s what makes it work—I’m taking the piss out of society.”

Aside from the performances—and perhaps more evocative—were the forums, workshops and post-show outings in which performers and artists came together to share conversation over food and wine. Often what goes missing in the reviewing of a production are these everyday spaces and unfolding of ideas. One may well imagine that in the difference of disability lies homogeneity, shared experiences and unifying ideologies. While on some level there is a sense of disability culture, many came to agree that indeed the word ‘culture’ could well be replaced with ‘culture(s)’ to reflect the real and surprising diversity amidst those who identify as people with disabilities. Debate raged over disability politics and the role of the arts. Some argued for the drawing of distinctions between ‘professional performance art’ and that which is described and experienced as ‘therapy.’ Whatever decisions are made for the next High Beam Festival, we can be guaranteed of a radical exposure to culture(s) of disability.

Sealboy: Freak, Mat Fraser; Most of It’s Queer, Philip Patston; Caca Courage, Access Arts & Queensland Performing Arts, High Beam Festival, Adelaide, May 3-12

For me the choreography is a vehicle that I use in performance…I feel like I’m more interested in using the material—going past the dancing, supported by technical foundations that I can move off from. I’m not concerned so much with being a good dancer—I’ve become interested in something on the other side of the dancing.

That is an issue—being the choreographer definitely effects the relationship. I can do what I want with it in a way. However, the material I’ve made with them has definitely come out of the dancers’ bodies too. The solos in traffic were worked out with them, were made on and with them. So the material itself is material that they do best. I think they ‘own it’ really well. We recently performed traffic in Melbourne at Bodyworks and that was one of the comments—that Katy and Nalina were right ‘in’ the movement.

Well it is what I’m interested in. I’m not sure that I am getting to the other side or going past doing the choreography well. Perhaps it’s a kind of different maturity…The dancers are concerned with looking good and that’s one of the things that makes them dance well, but I’m not concerned with that anymore. I think I probably was once. Now I simply use the material and the body I’ve got.

There’s always been a strong sense of performance when you dance—a presence and impression of spontaneity.

Years ago when I was doing more improvisation I think I probably did rely on my performance to pull it off, which may have developed a particular strength. But I’ve realised I really like working with the detail and that’s been a shift. Now I like to study the detail so that it’s very precise. And I’ve arrived at that without really knowing…Rather than creating freedom in the work itself, which can be a kind of trap in performance, I clean the choreography and I feel I have a reason to be out there. It gives me a different freedom—a space to listen and to be present to the moment. For instance, if it’s based on momentum, like the last section in traffic and some of the material in the new solo, there’s still a precision. Even if it’s very loose I can trace it and know it’s going to go through particular positions. I’ve got the template. There are degrees of improvisation and I’m convinced that the structure supports the improvisation I do.

Your work has been getting shorter recently and there does seem to be a particular challenge involved in creating an evening length contemporary dance piece.

It’s the tradition of being entertained as opposed to the tradition of the gallery for example. The length of a work can be a nice creative challenge. I’ve been commissioned to create a 30 minute solo. I’ve done an hour long solo back in the dim dark past and I like the challenge of creating something that long. However, 30 minutes is actually quite long for a solo, especially as I’ve been in this ‘moving-a-lot’ phase lately. I think I’ve been making shorter pieces because what is interesting me is paring the work back. I make copious amounts of material and then I’m very liberal with the scissors. Hopefully there’s enough repetition in different variations or movements through phases so that you do get enough to ‘read’ it. Although I do find it difficult with repetition as such—why you choose to do it.

So what’s the process of cutting back. Why is the choice to eliminate made?

I like to be focused around one idea—put it on the ‘coat hanger’ of one idea. Once that idea becomes clear, then it is also clear what movement is relevant. What I tend to do when I’m making new work is to take threads from the last work and spend a few months reprogramming my body and the other dancers’ bodies, trying to get into some new vocabulary and actually undo the last work. I’ll try and subvert the habits and the familiar pathways, redirecting and getting into some new territory. It’s about trying to create a new vocabulary each time. And of course it’s never completely new; there are always habits and histories. And when you reprogram, that becomes familiar and that is what you want otherwise you wouldn’t be able to create a phrase.

We spend a lot of time creating new vocabulary around some particular movement idea, a physical idea. I describe these ideas in words. I make up words like ‘anchoring’ where one part of the body is stable and things happen around it. Or it could be a relation around a joint, or a shape, then a shifting and rewinding or a change in scale. I find words to describe physical ideas that come out of improvisation and then use them as a score to develop material with. Then it becomes clear what’s in or out, what is relevant to that idea.

So there is a challenge to resolve between doing and talking about what you are doing?

A lot also happens through watching and osmosis. And a lot of words are used throughout the training process that I develop with the dancers, so there is a foundation to work with. You can see it in class—the difference between people I’ve been working with for a while and someone else who comes in and doesn’t have the same field of tools. There are layers of common ground created through training and improvising and watching and working on material: it’s not just about words although we do share words.

There is an evasion of the term ‘technique’ in new dance practices, to avoid locking things into patterns, so how do you describe this common physical language you share with your dancers?

I think there are tools and techniques. There are some things I would say are technical…like having weight in the pelvis and underneath support in the body, as opposed to “pulling up”. And I work with Contact Improvisation as a technique to get people in touch with their weight and have a 3-dimensional awareness of the body in space. There are lots of improvisational and choreographic tools which someone else may call techniques—like how to develop an idea, for example folding and unfolding as a score, shifting levels or speed or emotional quality or taking up more space. I think of those things as tools.

I guess it’s that opposition between technique and ‘original gestures’… the idea that you can evacuate the body of technique and have a blank slate. I always wonder where personal idiosyncracies are meant to go.

I think that’s really interesting. We’re so loaded up and the more technique we do the more loaded up we get. There’s no such thing as neutral body. It’s also just a use of words—you could take ‘emptying’ as a movement score. But getting back to the idea of going past dancing, it’s about how you use your history and the accumulation of sensation information. The older I get the more stuff I’ve got to use. My instrument feels richer all the time, and it will I guess until it starts emptying out…

The history in the body does seem to be a motif in recent Sydney dance performance.

I’m not trying to perform my history, but I’m aware that I am accumulating history. It may be more relevant in relation to my process rather than performance—what’s in my body, what this instrument does or is interested in, the way it works and the way I work it.

On another note, can you tell me a bit about Antistatic, the dance event— the impetus to set that up and how it’s panned out.

Angharad Wynne-Jones (then Artistic Director, Performance Space) set it up in 1997. Mathew Bergan was involved, Sue-Ellen Kohler and myself and Eleanor Brickhill, and others…It was quite a large group. In 1999, I curated it with Sue-Ellen and Zane Trow (the next artistic director). We wanted to bring to the fore dance practices that we felt were not given enough support here and to acknowledge the work of established practitioners who were doing amazing things in these areas and had been working away at it for years. We were trying to elevate their work and open up the notion of practice. It was definitely a choice for me to focus on the newer approaches to the body—Contact Improvisation, Body-mind centering®, release work and improvisation. It was very particular and I think that’s good. It didn’t take care of all aspects of dance, but there’s plenty of time and space for other events that do that. In a way I felt there was a need for positive discrimination.

I did feel very attached to Antistatic and it was difficult when the group was opened up in 2001 [there was a return to a large curatorial committee] and the program was dispersed throughout the year. I’m really pleased that it has gone back to the concise, intense model this year.

Now I’ve stepped out of it and Julie-Anne Long and Performance Space will take it where they want and that’s great. I’ve let go. I didn’t want to leave a half-baked vision for them to realise. I’m sure it will be completely different. I was looking forward to doing it with Julie-Anne. I chose her because I felt she brought another point-of-view and we’d bounce off each other. I also think the climate has shifted and I would not do it the way I did last time. We are not in that space; for example, there is a lot of work happening now that crosses over into text and physical theatre, probably more than there was then. The landscape’s different now and I’m sure they’ll respond to that as much as they can.

There’s a new ‘grooviness’ seeping into the lower levels of the Opera House. With the opening of the Opera Bar (live music on tap), extending the boutique bar strip from the Toaster almost to the forecourt steps, the possibility of a drink at interval—or sometimes during a show—is bringing a younger, hipper crowd to the hallowed sails. A proactive attempt to tap into this market is evident in The Studio’s programming of Dance Tracks #1 and #2—music/dance collisions between electronically based music outfits and contemporary choreographers.

There was a buzz in the foyer at Dance Tracks #1. Set up like a night club (with plastic bracelets for tickets), the crowd consisted of the softcore dance music lovers come to hear The Bird and B(if)tek and the contemporary dance crowd interested in the choreographic interventions of Kirstie McCracken, Lisa Griffiths and Michael Whaites, and host Lisa Ffrench. The music lovers went home well sated, whereas I suspect the dance crowd left with a queasy sensation that they had been short-changed.

B(if)tek is one of the more performative dance bands. With a baroque geek-girl persona there’s no pretence about how much of their sound is created live. They often leave their stations to daggy-dance to their own tunes. This was fortunate because the choreographed dance moments were few and decidedly uninspired. Michael Whaites’ doctors & nurses Carry On pastiche performed to B(if)tek’s (or Cliff Richard’s) hit Wired for Sound’ showed few signs of serious collaboration between musicians and dancers.

During The Bird’s set Whaites performed a quasi-aerial number which offered a few interesting transitions from ground to air but was rather tame. The highlight came from Kirstie McCracken and Lisa Griffiths in The Bird encore—a pacey piece performed with Chunky Move slickness, all angles and attitude—giving us a glimpse of the potential of the evening. The strongest element was the video work of Carli Leimbach and Kirsten Bradley, including a beautiful underwater dance sequence. There seems to have been more opportunity for collaboration between video artists and choreographers than occurred with the musicians.

Dance Tracks #2 showed signs of learning from program 1. Commissioned by the SOH as part of the Indigenous Message Sticks program it featured PNAU (Nicholas Littlemore and Peter Mayes with Kim Moyes from Prop) and works choreographed by Albert David, Jason Pitt and Bernadette Walong. Here, the focus between the music and dance was well balanced with dance pieces seamlessly woven into PNAU’s set and musicians actively engaging with the dancers. Albert David was great to watch. Moving between states of weight and weightlessness, grace and strength, percussive stomping followed by flowing twists and turns his work (both solo and with Lea Francis) was authoritative, poetic and enthralling.

The highlight of Bernadette Walong’s choreography was a piece in which dancers balanced on drinking glasses. Lisa Davis and Marne Palomares worked their way across the floor intertwining, swapping glasses and shifting body weight on these fragile axes, sensitively accompanied by PNAU and the ringing of the glasses shifting across the floor.

Jason Pitt also experimented with aerial action, creating a skilful work on silks performed by Sha McGovern and Aimee Thomas that utilised the Studio space well. His work on the ground, however, was too choreographically safe to satisfy me. Watching him on the side of the stage, groovin’ to the music as his dancers performed, I longed for some of this relaxed style to infiltrate the performance. As in Dance Tracks #1, the video by James Littlemore was well integrated, especially the piece using dancing brushstroke stick figures which was beautiful in its simplicity

Dance Tracks is an excellent model for integrating artforms that are naturally symbiotic yet so often separated, and it was good to see the progression of the idea from #1 to #2. Dance Tracks #2 showed that success involves a vibrant dance between choreographers and musicians, not just sidelong glances. I’m not sure the Studio will ever feel like the right place for a dance party, and they’ll need to be careful to avoid merely skimming the cream off well established cultural scenes, but hopefully the Studio will continue its commitment to producing original collaborations, collisions and confabulations.

Dance Tracks #1; musicians B(if)tek and The Bird; choreographers/dancers Michael Whaites, Kirsty McCracken, Lisa Griffiths, hosted by Lisa Ffrench, video Carli Leimbach, Kirsten Bradley; April 26-27; Dance Tracks #2; musicians PNAU; choreographers Albert David, Jason Pitt, Bernadette Walong, Video Jason Littlemore; as part of Message Sticks, May 24-25; The Studio, Sydney Opera House.

One of the things I like about Topology is their insistence on communicating with the audience. Their program guides have notes on every piece, and URLs for some of the composers and also for the band. Often one of the performers will speak a little about the piece they are going to play, but chatty, not too Adult-Ed. And because they premiere a lot of works (tonight is no exception) it is often useful.

Tonight the concert is about music and generative processes. Sometimes the process generating the music is maths, and obvious, sometimes it’s loose and subtle. All of the pieces are at least predicated on the idea that systems can generate worthwhile music.

A selection of Tom Johnson’s Rational Melodies provides a linking device throughout the night. These are the most overtly generative pieces of the night, and sometimes are a bit too simple to be interesting. Johnson works along the boundary of audification (direct mapping of data to sound) and music. Worth a go. You can try one at home. Play the first note of a scale. Play the first note, then the second note in the scale. Play the first note, the second note and now the third note…Keep going until you’re playing all the notes in the scale, then stop.

So some of the Johnson’s were better than others, and only a couple of other works didn’t work for me. Nyman’s Shaping the Curve was a little formless, and ended up having that ‘one thing after another’ effect. Same for Davidson’s second piece, Squaring the Circle.

However there were plenty of goodies. Bernard Hoey played the first two compositions from the 6 part Viola Sonata by Ligeti. The first, Hora Lunga, is based on the natural harmonics of C. Slow and lyrical, the unusual tuning works a dream—expressive, coherent and consonant, but not quite normal, not quite right. Perfect to convey longing and the melancholic approximation of ideals. The second piece, Loop, is fast, structured, virtuosic, double-stops all over the neck. A stunner performance. Big ovation.

Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not! by Michael Gordon (from Bang on a Can) was another good piece with a performance to match. It’s a strange piece that deliberately prevents the building of momentum by interpolating stilted percussive sections into the larger ensemble performance. This gives a repetitive, disappointing air to the piece that somehow works without becoming monotonous. About half way through, Robert Davidson pulled out the electric guitars and started up a distorted chunky rhythm that sounded like a chicken playing the kazoo. Perfect.

Other memorable pieces. John Babbage’s jazzy Chop Chop, and Jeremy Peynton-Jones’ Purcell Manoeuvres. Based on Purcell’s Trio Sonata #7 in G Minor it still sounded like Purcell, even with all the algorithmic modifications to the old guy’s composition. As always, I came away from a Topology concert chatting away, thinking about buying a CD (the Ligeti), looking forward to the next one.

Topology, Rational Melodies, Powerhouse centre for the Live Arts, Brisbane, March 28

When is live, live? If it’s not live, is it dead? Can it be half-live? How much equipment can be used before it’s dead? These are questions arising from contemporary music/sound performance. Stelarc provokes considerations of ‘the body’ against ‘the machine’ in an obvious visual way—with half a ton of metal hanging off him. Musicians, however, have been sonic cyborgs since the coming of electronics to sound. With the current popularity of laptop computers as instruments, the divide between the performer’s body and the sounds produced is emphasised. Like the mouth and eyebrows of a guitar player which dynamically narrate the ‘hotness factor’ of the sounds at hand, the nostrils and corners of the eyes of lap-toppers dance a funky beat to the shifts of their controller data.

Melbourne digital media artist SEO (Jeremy Yuille) uses a games joystick to control the sounds coming from his laptop. The set-up includes the laptop on a music stand at about stomach height, and Jeremy standing about arm’s length behind it. Using the joystick as an interface allows his body, rather than just fingertips, to be involved in the performance. Jeremy’s face is alive with concentration: reading his controls on the screen and reacting to the sound from the PA. He shifts from one stance to another, moving with a slow grace. The scale of the movement is reduced—down from the 100% physicality of a drummer or dancer to a more subtle 10%, but the body moving with the music none-the-less.

Traditionally, musical energy flows from bodies. But with computers “you can just hit return and have 16 channels of anything” (Violinist Jon Rose, in Andrew Beck, “totally huge: it’s what you do with it”; RT # 43 p39). Taking this to an extreme is a Merzbow performance— Masami Akita seated calmly behind Powerbook, his mouse-hand twitching as if he is playing Pac-Man, as the audience is practically eviscerated by a barrage of searing white noise. Hrvatski, a U.S. drill and bass producer, admitted that his role when playing ‘live’ is to hit ‘play’ and ‘stop’ at the start and end of each song. During his set at the 2001 Electrofringe Festival, he jumped into the audience to dance to his own music. This kind of makes him a DJ. Putting electronic and particularly computer-based performers on a continuum with DJs is important in understanding what is going on in contemporary music performance.

The DJ has been accused of being an overpaid prima donna (the same accusation levelled at conductors), stealing the glory from the people who ‘actually make the music.’ They portray, however, a realistic relationship between technology, the audience and the performer. 99% of the music we hear is recorded, and the role of humans playing live is both optional and discontinuous—present in the same way the violinmaker is present in a recital.

Bands are the worst offenders, cherishing the live performance, the direct connection between their soul and the audience; but happily using pick-ups and mikes, effects pedals, amps, compressors (etc ad infinitum) and the PA —all of which is conceived and performed by faceless sound engineers. (To come clean here, my other life was as a faceless sound engineer). Who is ‘the Band’ trying to fool with its ‘honest’ live performance using ‘no digital sequencing devices’ (‘Area 7’, 1999) or ‘studio trickery’. If you want live, go busking.

SEO (Jeremy Yuille), Oven-Garde, Melbourne, April 1. Oven-Garde is a performance series held on the first Monday of the month at the Builders Arms Hotel, Melbourne, and is presented by the tRansMIT sound collective.

David Toop was one of the first experimental musicians I became aware of, as a wee tacker back in the 70s. He gave one and a bit talks at REV. Very personable, fireside-chat-like. The first talk was on his life in music (so far). It went Suburbs, Normal non-musical Mum and Dad, Radio, Comedy records, the Goons, Quatermass, all that BBC radiophonic stuff, Bo Diddley and homemade guitars. (I first heard of David Toop as the man who'd played the world's slowest guitar solo. Impressed me at the time seeing as this was 70s stadium big hair rock days ). In the 70s Toop became interested in the physicality of sound production and formed a long term friendship with Max Eastley, making and performing on large scale sound installations. Another consistent interest of Toop's has been constraint-based or scenario-based performance. Asking the question: What can I get out of this seed pod, a peg and a balloon floating away? An approach used now by people like Matmos.

Across both his talks, Toop returned to the relationship between technology and performance—particularly in the era of the laptop performer. Toop is not just wanting to spice things up (ie add a video wall), but asking what is the nature of human engagement with performance as perception and action, audience and performer (see also Paul Lansky). This is a critical issue with plenty of room for more exploration.

At the end of the second talk, shared with Scanner, a woman, the oldest person in the room, started talking during the audience participation bit. Oh no! Methinks: some irrelevant boring old granny reminiscences. Well, what a bigot I am. These few minutes of Joan Brassil talking about her work were a highlight of the festival, and not just for me. The audience, Mr Toop, and Scanner were more or less stunned as this elderly woman described the wonderful work she has made. Sophisticated, subtle, and humane. We keep hearing the world is full of amazing people, well one of them was there, sitting amongst us, a secret til she spoke. David Toop's response was “I must talk to you about the next exhibition I'm curating”. Yes he must.

Sound Body, David Toop, as part of REV, Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 5; Wave form versus liquid breath technique, David Toop & scanner, as part of REV, Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 7

Saturday night of the REV festival and a large crowd gathered for another instalment of fabrique at the Powerhouse's Spark Bar. Many punters had just emerged from the preceding Diversi A and B concerts and headed to the bar for a drink and a chat while others were drawn at the end of the day by the promise of high-profile international names. The previous night had been an exclusively Australian affair but tonight two UK sound artists were headlining: David Toop and Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner).

First up though was Sydney-sider Oren Ambarchi armed with a highly customised electric guitar and a bag of effects units and floor pedals. His vibe at first was purely ambient/minimalist as now and then he plucked a single spare note on the guitar, barely seeming to move. Fed into long, cycling delays these notes formed lines of virtually imperceptible ostinatos that slowly accumulated into a shifting sea of tones. As the density of the tonal liquid increased so did Ambarchi's movement, leaving the guitar to manipulate effects and keeping the currents moving. Inexorably the guitar tones began to disappear and the oscillations and granulations of the effect devices themselves took over as Ambarchi focussed on turning up the level of energy until the grating noise machine seemed to choke itself to death. The performance was entrancing in its slow organic progression and proved to be the highlight of the night for me.

David Toop continued the axe assault by improvising on a Hawaiian guitar with various Inquisatorial torture implements including pieces of pipe, an electronic bow and a range of effects pedals. Toop's work was multilayered consisting mainly of ambient wefts on CD used as a bed for improvisation on guitar and flute with acoustic and electronic manipulation of the instruments. God was in the detail as Toop's improvisatory gestures responded to elements emerging from the intricately crafted background–at one point he even played a descant to microphone feedback using the flute! Unfortunately much of the detail required close listening which was generally impossible in the hubbub of the Spark Bar.

With the second UK artist, Scanner, the vibe shifted into club mode with more familiar harmonic structures and greater rhythmic energy which pulsed with the ambience of the venue. Scanner is one of the breed of laptop warriors and proved a crowd favorite as he extracted and convulsed material from Mini Disc and portable synthesisers with the aid of software on his Macintosh. At times he leaned towards a deconstruction of the bombastic stylistics of anthemic dance music and at others ventured profitably into areas of ambient glitch producing a very polished and structured performance set.

Amorphous Brisbane electronic outfit I/O comprising Lawrence English and Tam Patton finished the night on a postmodern note with improvised turntabling and more laptop action. As Patton scratched and droned with the vinyl, English sampled, fragmented and reconstructed the sounds in real-time using interactive looping software. In a departure from general DJ practice, rather than focusing on the prerecorded material on the records, the performance emphasised the grain of the medium itself.

Overall, perhaps what struck me about the night was that though fine music was being made nothing really new with regard to experimental performance practice or sound production was offered. All the artists worked with techniques and processes that have become part of the canon of electronic art music, whether it was Ambarchi's delay effects, Toop's tortured Hawaiian guitar or Scanner's deconstruction of dance club aesthetic. Is the revolution in electronic music over? Am I just nostalgic for some dubious thrill of avant garde unexpectedness? Of course it's inevitable that “new music” will become generic and that those genres will stabilise and become respectable (for want of a better term). Rather than being revolutionaries these artists are working now with the rich results of a revolution consisting of a range of mature and highly sophisticated techniques along with an accumulated tradition of experimentation. QUT Creative Industries' intellectual and capital investment in the REV festival as whole demonstrates that these genres and techniques are now pedagogically viable concerns. However much we might grasp at defining what is new music it's probably what slips through our fingers that will end up surprising and challenging us.

Though the REV festival has finished, fabrique continues throughout the year at the Brisbane Powerhouse under the guidance of Lawrence English and promises the chance to hear more Australian and international electronic acts continue a rich tradition of experimental music.

REV Festival, fabrique, performers Oren Ambarchi, David Toop, Scanner, I/O, Spark Bar, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 6

Sunday night for the last Roving Concert. A group of us are led about for a 10 to 15 minute performance from each of 5 groups. A bit of a taster, and it works well. First up is the Pyrophone (fire heats the air in huge organ pipes) from Steve Langton and Hubbub. It's outside, at the front of the Powerhouse: a designer-shabby industrial wall, flat slab, rough concrete, maybe 15 to 20 metres high. Up against are a few vertical stacks of giant exhaust pipes, steel tubes going straight up. There's a large crowd. The act is a bit corny-leather jerkins at the forge, reverence for the primordial mystery of fire etc-but the sound is massive, body-shaking, and the jets of flame make for great visuals. Crowd pleaser #1.We then troop off indoors for the Sarah Hopkins' Harmonic Whirlies. The clear, diffuse sound is generated by whirling plastic hose (think pool vacuum hose) around at various speeds in a cross between call and response folk dance and harmonic singing. Great exercise.

Next! David Murphy's Circular Harp. Vibrations from hammered strings are fed into bowls of liquid. This makes patterns which are projected onto a large screen. Real-time correspondence between the visual and the auditory. A bit like a physics lesson in dynamics, but with art instead of physics. After that come the massed handbells, more audience participation and clear sounds. Then Stuart Favilla's light harp and Joanne Cannon's serpentine bassoon. Good bassoon, but the light harp is not much. When you replace harp strings with narrow beams of light the fingers brush against nothing. This reduces the ability to make fine motor movements and articulate sounds—no anchor and pivot, no force feedback. That's the way our sensory and motor systems work. Exploit it, don't deny it. (see Gail Priest's alternate view of the Light Harp)

Last up is Linsey Pollak's ewevee, out on the Brisbane River played by Pollak and Jessica Ainsworth. A vertical set of bars are struck to trigger samples. The samples attached to each bar are changed, giving totally different sonic effects for each piece. A nice play between the physicality of the instrument and the virtual nature of the output.

Short sweet performances. If you didn't like one you'd like the next. If you didn't like any then you don't like music much.

Fabrication: the making by art and/or labour, an untruthful statement; to fake or to forge the process of manufacturing.
Macquarie Dictionary

A festival based on new fabrications, and “ideas” about music and sound (to paraphrase executive director Zane Trow) inspires much questioning, especially when it brings so many ideas people together. My brain started ticking when David Toop commented to me that performance was no longer a useful term for much of the electronic-based sound-making practices at REV. We are in a phase of transition he suggested, before expressing his deep disquiet about the validity of his own sedentary ‘performance with a laptop’.

Set the task to concentrate on fabrique, a cabaret of electronica and sonic electro-hybridity, and Silent Movie, a live jamming session of REV artists to Russian Dziga Vertov's revolutionary film, Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a number of questions occurred to me.

What do the interfaces to REV’s new media instruments contribute to the performative experience? For example, Greg Jenkin’s pluckable, sonic cacti spines, Amber Hansen’s jangly miked-up jewellery or the ubiquitous laptops utilsed by Pimmon/Scanner/etc. And should we need to understand them more fully in order to accept their roles in performance?

What are the issues of mapping that these new instruments imply? We understand the basic mapping of a grand piano as being a relatively clear relationship between finger velocity, subsequent mechanics, appropriate string tension, physical collision and focussed sound emission. We know what the performer is grappling with, so we focus on the sonics rather than the mechanics of the experience. But it’s much harder to know quite what these R(eal) and/or E(lectronic) and/or V(irtual) instruments are, and herein, maybe, lies a problem. We know that the computer long ago destroyed the relationship and fixity between inputs and outputs. Forever. Hence new performance tools based on computers allow deeply convoluted and dynamic mappings of input action and ultimate sonic response.

So, on that basis, what were the virtually invisible sound artists Scanner and I/O actually doing up there on the roof during the installation/performance Biospheres, Secrets of a City? Was it performative? Now you’d never ask that irritating question of the venerable Jon Rose. His virtuoso performance of an augmented string instrument, using the violin and bow as interface to trigger a bank of sound generators consummately succeeded in mapping action to sonic outcomes.

At REV it seemed that almost any device capable of either self-generating or responsively generating electrical impulses was being employed as a playable interface. For example, performance sense was made through the use of inductive, magnetic coils (Andrew Kettle) or through miniature microphones picking up surface textures (Michael Norris). There were the resolutely digital instruments triggered in the main by velocity sensitive synth keys, MIDI actuators or computer keystrokes (aka Pimmon, Hydatid, Rene Wooller etc). Somewhere in between lay a rather clunky fish-shaped device used to trigger granular-synthetics via MIDI (Tim Opie) and a performer in a Yamaha MIDI body suit producing, through rather mechanical movements, a broad range of sampled sounds ([de]CODE me directed by Lindsay Vickery).

All of these diverse forms of gadgetry were being used by their performers to create sounds for subsequent processing, or to actuate virtual banks of preset and ever changeable sounds. Then of course each performance’s sound mixer could completely re-affect the balance of almost everything before we finally heard it. All this became the means for generating REV’s new sounds. Needless to say, any attempt at reverse engineering on the part of audiences was largely futile.

So what might a performer do to help those of us who care, are curious or simply need to know? Should those players, lit only by their laptop glows, apparently devoid of fingers and face behind their flip up screens demystify their mappings, given their choice to perform rather than be downloaded? (In welcome contrast, REV’s accompanying installations each had an attendant on hand to explain and demonstrate, interface, mapping and intent).

Many might be asking by now, is this line of questioning simply a cul-de-sac? Is the desire/need-to-know actually a major barrier to bringing new, electronically mediated forms to a place worthy of the tag ‘performance'?

This question is integrally tied to how we choose to make the transition to new performance forms. I for one hope it will be towards the ‘transactions’ so characteristic of performance forms that acknowledge their audiences as integral.

Toop is right and, by the way, REV is definitely pushing the right combination of buttons to get there.

This forum was held April 8 before the release of the Report on the Examination of the Small-to-Medium Performing Arts Sector. For an early response to the Report, see “Size Matters: the Small-to-Medium Sector issue”, RealTime#49. The meeting was informally chaired by Keith Gallasch.

Introduction: No pot of gold

Keith Gallasch
Welcome to the 8th of these forums for artists about issues of practice and survival. I’d like to welcome Suzanne Donnelly, General Manager, Arts Development NSW Ministry for the Arts who’s going to brief us as much as she can within the limits of confidentiality about the Report from the Examination of the Small to Medium Performing Arts Sector which is a report to the Cultural Ministers Council (from the 10 federal and arts ministries in Australia). It would seem to be fundamentally a report about the viability of the small to medium sector of the performing arts. The enquiry happened very suddenly last year as some of you will be aware when you had to drop everything and prepare responses. Rumour has it that there’ll be no pot of gold at the end of this particular report. One of the reasons for holding this meeting is that the expression “no pot of gold” was becoming oddly recurrent.

Rupert Myer, the head of the Australian Contemporary Visual Arts Enquiry announced not too long ago in an interview in the Financial Review that there would be no pot of gold at the end of that particular enquiry. I went to a meeting with him and about 20 visual artists and administrators and he spoke about improved networking, about tax breaks for artists, about something like the dole for artists (but hassle free) as solutions for the problems of the sector. But despite considerable pressing from the gathering, he would not admit that the artform, in this case the contemporary visual arts, was in need of additional funding or that the development of the artform had been frozen by inadequate funding. He wasn’t interested in that. Then late last year in the Australian we heard similar noises emanating from the direction of the Small to Medium Performing Arts Enquiry—that there were not going to be any financial outcomes from this and “why should we expect any”?” It’s only a report. It’s not Nugent!” So suddenly there was quite a lot of sector concern about the point of the exercise.

It was interesting at the meeting that it was Brian Kennedy of all people, Director of the National Gallery of Australia who said if things are rotten in the laboratory, how can you expect the artform to develop. And he kept pushing Myer to acknowledge something was wrong. But every time the word ‘crisis’ was mentioned of, Myer would say ‘no, no, not that word’. Nobody wants to hear that word. But perhaps that might be worth thinking about.

I know some of you here believe that we are facing a crisis or that the arts, especially the small to medium sector, has been in crisis for at least a decade, maybe more, as artform funding seems to be frozen at a basic level. On the other hand, new government initiatives appear to be opportunistic or pragmatic, and are to do with regionalism and emerging artists, youth, community and Indigenous art, and multiculturalism—all very important in themselves but with no account of what’s happening in the overall artform practices themselves, wherever thy are located.

Given there’s not much information around about the enquiry, we thought we’d ask Suzanne Donnelly to talk about it. Are you actually on the Working Party?

Background: Cultural Ministers Council

Suzanne Donnelly
No. I was and then I went away last year and Kim Spinks replaced me. I’ve now drifted back into it. One thing I just want to preface the talk with is that the report hasn’t gone to the Cultural Ministers Council yet and it doesn’t go till May 1 when they meet. And so when Fiona asked me to come and speak I said, could you possibly put off the date of the meeting because I’m not going to be able to tell you a whole lot about the recommendations because it’s not a public document yet. It probably will be but…But Fiona thought that it would be a good idea for the community to get together to talk about it anyway. So I’m not being evasive. That’s just the way it is.

I don’t know how many people are aware of the Cultural Ministers Council and if most of you aren’t you won’t fail in your next funding submission…It’s not something that’s well known. You’re probably aware that around Australia there’s an arts minister or cultural minister who usually stands alone or sometimes has charge of another portfolio or could be the Premier, as is the case in NSW. And it used to be that once a year all the cultural ministers, including the 2 Federal ministers, would come together and have a meeting. This has been going on since about 1985. It would tend to be rotated and each state would host it. And each state would contribute to the setting the agenda. The Australia Council also attends, as does DCITA (Department of communications, information Technology & the Arts) but it’s mainly for the Ministers. Then there’s the Standing Committee of Cultural Ministers Council and then associated with the Standing Committee are a number of working groups. So the Small to Medium Report came from a working group of the Standing Committee of Cultural Ministers Council. And the main work is usually done at the officer level, the Standing Committee level or indeed at the working group level. And what happens is that usually the ministers come together. They don’t agree on many things—if anything—and then they go away and everyone says, well that was a waste of time, wasn’t it.

What’s happened over the past few years is that there’s been more energy put into Cultural Ministers Council and there have been some big agenda things happening—not necessarily in the performing arts area. For example, at the last Standing Committee meeting, which I attended a few weeks ago and is where you discuss the agenda that will go to the ministers in a month’s time, the sorts of things they were talking about were heritage collections. They’d been talking about these for a number of years, funding a number of studies. They talked about Small to Medium. They looked at Public Broadcasting. There’s a big move about advancing Reconciliation that’s come out of the Council of Australian Government. They also talked briefly about the Myer Enquiry into Contemporary Visual Arts. Not that that’s part of their brief but they wanted to discuss it. They also have a statistics working group which does a lot of research and is actually quite valuable when you’re trying to progress a case in terms of getting extra money or putting something forward.

All the states contribute to Cultural Ministers Council and it has a funding formula. It’s a nominal amount of money. The Commonwealth puts in half, the States put in the other half and because NSW is the largest state it tends to put in 28% of the funds. So they don’t have a huge kitty. There’s probably about half a million dollars at any one time. It can fluctuate and different studies may require different amounts of money. So that gives you a bit of an overview of CMC.

A new status for the arts

It’s an unusual situation because the arts hasn’t been, till recent years, very high on the political profile. It’s only been in the last 5 years or so that you’ve had a number of Premiers taking an interest in the arts and been willing to push it. That can sometimes be good and sometimes difficult. Sometimes not having the Premier means that the minister is more able to push the arts because they don’t have to worry about when there are fires in the state or worry about the hospital system or whatever. The other side to it is that having the Premier there means that he can elevate the arts.

So in terms of the decision about setting up the Small to Medium Sector report, what it came out of was, as you’d all be aware, was the Nugent Report. Now the Nugent Report was slightly different from other reports that had gone to Council and the reason was that it had come through the initiative of the Major Organisations Fund at the Australia Council. And it also happened to have a banker at the head of the Fund at the time, Helen Nugent, who went on to lead the enquiry. So it was quite an unusual thing. Nugent lobbied very hard. When she set up this report she wanted to have some money at the end of it. And she knew the right people to talk to. There was a lot of political stuff going on. So there was a lot of discussion about the Nugent Report and then there was no Cultural Ministers Council for about 2 years. Interestingly, the Commonwealth kept delaying the Council Meeting. It was clearly a delaying tactic because the Commonwealth weren’t prepared to engage in it until they were sure they had money to commit to it because they were quite behind Helen Nugent. When all the ministers came together in Sydney in May last year to finally talk about the Nugent Report, everything had been pretty well signed off. All that work about recommendations and agreeing to things had been a year of negotiations at officer level. So it was really a matter of most of the ministers signing off although there was a bit of grandstanding.

Origins of the report

At that meeting, Mary Delahunty who was the Arts Minister in Victoria put forward a recommendation to say, okay, we’ve looked at the major performing arts sector, but we in Victoria are getting a lot of flack from our constituents about the rest of the arts—not just the small to medium performing arts sector but the whole of the rest of the arts. What about the visual arts, and so on? So they proposed that there should be further investigation into other areas of the arts. It was a fairly general position that was put forward. They didn’t have any terms of reference. They just wanted to float the idea. And there was a huge fight about who should be in it and how it should happen. In the end, they settled on looking at only the performing arts sector because there wasn’t much money to look at the whole arts sector and where do you start and ‘how do you do it and really, we’re not into doing it for years on end’. The Cultural Ministers really wanted to sign off on Nugent, thank you very much, and they didn’t want to do anything else. So it was agreed the focus would be on the Small to Medium Performing Arts Sector and there was some talk at that time that there may well be a Visual Arts Enquiry, so that kept the peace there. There was also a discussion at that meeting by the ministers that they really didn’t want to be seen to be committing to another huge amount of money as they had done with Nugent, that that was a very unusual situation, a one-off and they didn’t want to get caught up in it. So they spent a lot of time on the wording. They talked about an “examination” of the sector. NSW’s position, despite the cynicism of the meeting, was that we should do it because it’s really good to have some research on the sector, even if it comes up saying things that we may already know. There’s some hard data there and you need that in terms of arguing with Treasury. Even if the other states didn’t have a position or didn’t want to go along with it, we were quite happy to support it and the other states all agreed. Then it was a matter of getting DCITA to come on board and eventually they did.

Terms of reference

A working party was set up and officers were nominated to be on it and qw with any working party, it needed to be hosted by a state and, in this case, it was hosted by Western Australia. So the officers all met to define the terms of reference and they came up with the following: the role that the small to medium organisations play in the performing arts sector of Australia’s cultural life; the sector’s capacity for creative innovation, experimentation, research and development; the contribution of the sector to audiences, employment and training; the role of the sector in regional touring and access programs; the contribution of the sector to Australia’s international profile; the resourcing of the sector including models of working, management and governance issues and cost and revenue dynamics; and the relationship between levels of government and the sector including enhanced management of funding.

That last one is probably code for whether you should end up with a formula for funding like Nugent

So they were very broad terms of reference and there wasn’t a huge amount of money to spend on the study. There was a discussion on the best way to proceed and most of you here would have been at the other end of that. There were 2 studies done. One was done on quantitative research that was done by a group called Hydes Consulting where you would have been asked to fill in a whole lot of financial data. There was another one, a qualitative study done by Campion Decent whom a number of you may know. Those 2 report then fed into a bigger report and what’s happened now is that bigger report has gone to the working party who talked about it a lot. It went back, bits got re-written and it went back again. And now it’s going to Cultural Ministers Council and that’s where we’re up to now.

Valuable statistics

I attended the first meeting of the working party but then I went overseas last year and I wasn’t around. But what a number of us were trying to do was to get some research to underpin what we believed to be the case, to have the hard data. So it’s not going to be any surprise when the report comes out that certain statements about this being the R&D end of the sector, the creative end, the sector that contributes most to international profile, that does most of the regional touring—none of that is going to be a surprise. So you might think when you eventually get to read it, oh yeah, we all knew that. Tell us something else. Where’s the dollars? But that is in fact quite important because, if you’re dealing with hard headed Treasury officials, even if it doesn’t go any further than the CMC, from a NSW perspective, from my perspective when I have to sit and argue with Treasury officials all the time, it’s actually very good to have this information to hand.

What next?

It will go to CMC when they meet on 1 May in Melbourne and they’ll discuss it. Then there are recommendations that I can’t talk about. Then they’ll decide what they’re going to do with it. Again, with Nugent, it wasn’t Cultural Ministers’ Council that attached the dollars to it, that was all done at an officer level in terms of trying to negotiate it. That’s ultimately what needs to happen. The other problem is that each state needs to deal with its own jurisdiction. With Nugent, some of the states weren’t interested in coming on board and it was very last minute stuff. If there’s going to be a common approach to this, I think what will probably happen that there’ll be general things that the states and the commonwealth will look at in terms of what they can do together. The states will use the data themselves to try and progress the situation for their own companies.

Inter-government cooperation

I would hope that we can get a clearer discussion between the Australia Council and ourselves about how we do the funding so that you guys aren’t always putting applications in for projects and you get funding from us but not from the Australia Council or the other way around. Or that there’s an agreement that the states do the boring stuff and we fund all the buildings and stuff like that and the Australia Council can go off and fund all the glamorous international stuff. If there was an agreement like that it would certainly be useful but I’m not sure what will happen. Certainly I think there’s a will at this point to reach some negotiations about those things so that it’s clearer to groups and to funding agencies what will happen.

Nugent inroads

SD
I think it did. And for all my personal scepticism at the time, I think it’s made a lot of inroads. It has entrenched that elite group up there, but I also see that there’s a way to use this. Whether or not the Nugent companies were just trying to be nice, they were very strong in advocating for the Small to Medium Sector, saying they need to have more resources. How that translates is another thing. Now, I do have pick up on one thing that Keith said about funding being static for a long time. In fact, in NSW funding has grown and we’re looking at more buildings.

SD
Even if you look at Theatre or Dance budgets, they have grown. It probably hasn’t grown as much as people would like but compared to when I first came to the Ministry a few years ago, it was totally locked in. The Theatre budget was 99% locked in. You’d go to a meeting and think, what’s the point? Whereas now, they actually fund projects and certain companies have received increases in funding and other companies have come online. Some who only ever received project funding now receive operational funding. So I think that’s been a good spin-off and partly to do with the fact that we have an Arts Minister who’s also the Premier.

KG
I’m talking about an overall situation where the states across Australia are taking increased responsibility for projects and production whereas the Australia Council funds are very locked and people are still heavily dependant on the Australia Council so I wasn’t commenting so much on the states. But I’m sure we all look forward with excitement to the infrastructure developments in NSW that are happening at this very moment.

SD
I think it’s really important. We got the NSW data pulled out and just to have that to argue the case for Everleigh (Carriage Works, now purchased by the NSW Government for performing arts use) and more work on Leichhardt (other buildings) has been really important. And we couldn’t have done that alone. We’re really small and we don’t have the resources to get that sort of research done. And I have to say, the NSW companies were very good in responding to the enquiry. So, well done. And we did have the most companies who were reviewed in it.

[Sue Donnelly left the meeting at this point.] [Keith asked those present to speak about key concerns.]

Chris Hudson (ERTH, part-time administrator)
I think that size is not really the issue at hand and we’re really dealing with conservatism. The funding scenarios we see around the country are heavily biased towards the traditional and the classic. If we look at companies, and I’m not wanting to single any of them out as not deserving of support, but if we look at companies who work in more traditional genres such as the Australian Chamber Orchestra or The Song Company, we see that there appears to be plenty of government and corporate support. And one could say that their product is popular and that’s part of the reason for their success. But if you look at a popular cultural product such as dance parties, they don’t need the subsidies of $50 per seat that opera requires to exist and I think that indicates a bias against youth popular culture. We could ask what would happen if dance parties were funded to that extent, what type of event would we see.

The baby boomer solution for this situation is resources that encourage youth to consume antiquated cultural product such as discounts for seats and promotional programs encouraging people to consume cultural product that is not their first choice.

In Adelaide I only recently found out about the Major Festival Initiative which is a great way for companies to get reasonable amounts of money for the commissioning of new Australian work. I thought it was interesting that the way I found out about this was via a crumb that came our way to develop a show. It hasn’t been secured as yet but on consideration of the MFI I thought it was interesting as an initiative funding program. There’s no guidelines for the application. No public avenues that I know of to approach this funding program and it basically, from what I could tell, by how much one can supplicate to the festival directors of Australia. So I don’t think it’s really size we’re dealing with here. I think it’s a lack of support for art that perceived as risky or unusual.

More about Nugent

Rosalind Crisp (choreographer, dancer, Omeo Studio)
It’s interesting the way Sue Donnelly drew attention to the Nugent Report entrenching the elitism of the MOB people. It’s like it’s even undermined the small to medium companies more in a way, because that elevated them even further, entrenched their position.

KG
Nugent was very focussed on a small group of companies—the state theatre companies, the Opera, the Ballet and a bunch of orchestras. Together, those companies lobbied and they created a business plan. It was very specific. A banker working with a number of business people. There wasn’t an artist in sight and it was targeted. But the small to medium enquiry, 280 companies! As someone said when it started, why not take a smaller sample and work really hard on that instead of something so diffuse. There are other shockers. The Visual Arts Enquiry, for instance, has no brief to really analyse the financial situation. They didn’t ask the submitting bodies to give a financial breakdown of their situation. So it’s all much more anecdotal.

But as Suzanne said, and as Chris has said, in the area we all work in, there’s incredible diversity. We did a book last year for the Australia Council on Contemporary Performance in Australia with companies ranging from ERTH to Circus Oz. Of the 70 companies in that book, 34 had already toured internationally and often quite extensively. The big companies can’t tour as easily as the more mobile small to medium ones that carry our reputation with them overseas. And this is not very well acknowledged. And this is a problem for the small to medium companies. They’re increasingly being talked about. There is this enquiry that your general public and people who support the arts just don’t know about. I think that’s a major problem.

Small plays large

Michelle Vickers
I’m the General Manager of Legs on the Wall and what I’m going to talk about is much more specific to the challenges that we face because of our size and our limited resources. I think that one of the biggest challenges we face is that we’re a small company that’s often trying to, and expected to, operate as a large company. Some of our shows are quite large scale and we’re often dealing with major festivals, major venues and I find in those situations, you need to be able to react with the kind of quick responses that those sectors expect. They want to talk to your production department but you don’t have any full time production staff. That’s kind of you and I find that in that situation your analysis of any risk becomes a key factor in the way you operate. You have to make an assessment about what are the most important projects for the company, what’s the most important activity and where you’re going to take a risk in resourcing something further than just on a project by project basis.

Ensemble, unpaid labour rise

Legs also suffers from not having a permanent ensemble any more. For years we had four artists and were generally creating shows with casts of 4-5 which meant that they were able to keep up a certain level of physical skill and also of physical language. Over a number of years, we’ve moved to a project based company and we did this for a number of reasons but primarily for financial ones. We just weren’t able to sustain that. And for years when Legs did have a permanent ensemble if we didn’t earn the money to pay the ensemble, they just didn’t get paid. And I think that in this sector it would be interesting to understand what the value of unpaid labour is and favours that are called upon, based on people’s personal relationships, and a lot of that contributes to the sector. A lot of that keeps the sector alive and apart from a company level and an individual level, it’s largely unrecognised.

Scarce space

Another key issue for Legs is space and we’re in an extremely fortunate position in that we have a permanent space that we share with Stalker. However, it’s a completely inadequate space and almost unusable at times for the work that we do. As many of you would know if you’ve worked in there as circus or physical theatre artists, the rigging capabilities are extremely limited. The floor is uneven so you can’t even do a straight tumble run down it if you wanted to. It’s an unsealed space so we’re often unprotected from the weather which can make it an unsafe space as well. I think that’s a key problem for a lot of the S and M sector. They’re aren’t many affordable options around, as people would know. And it’s great that the Ministry in NSW is working towards developing a couple of spaces at the moment to address that. But I think space is still going to be a major problem for a while yet.

No room for error

Generally one of the problems related to size is that you’re constantly working with limited resources and with financial constraints and you’re taking a great deal of at least artistic risk and often financial risk and there’s very little room for error. The small to medium sector is more likely to suffer greatly from something going wrong than the larger companies who have a stronger capacity to spread their risks over a great range of projects. So if you’re working on a project basis or if you’re in a small company each risk that you take is so important and any fallout could potentially put an entire company at risk. Just look at the number of companies who are suffering at the moment from the hikes in Public Liability insurance. Legs is okay at the moment but I know some companies are going to the wall because they can’t ride out those problems over a number of years.

Picking up on what Chris said earlier, the larger sector certainly benefits greatly from the risks our sector takes but our sector is largely unprotected from the pitfalls of that risk

KG
That’s something I hadn’t thought about, the extent of risk. And I hate to return to the word “crisis” because I don’t like to toss it around too lightly but a lot of companies are living on the edge.

One size fits all

Rosalind Crisp
It does seem that the expectations have changed. It’s probably as much as it was [early in legs history] when artists were prepared to work for nothing and now there are artists in there who aren’t and why should they. But it’s like Legs has hit this ceiling where it can’t kind of move into being a MOB member [a client of the Major Performing Arts Organisations of the Australia Council]. So it’s straddled there at this mid-way point and I think that’s a problem for a lot of organisations who have developed and matured but the resources haven’t been there to take them further so they’re still reconstructing themselves.

KG
It’s primitive. It’s like you said earlier about small companies operating as if they were large ones. If you’re touring internationally, you have enormous responsibility. It’s a big responsibility.

Rachael Swain (Artistic Director, Stalker/Marregeku Company)
We often talk about having to have a structure where we can go from really big to really small and we do that constantly throughout the year. We have to be able to be this huge and tour shows with 25 people and then go back to having 2 people part time to keep the office open.

KG
There’s a high burn out factor. People do it for the love of it but they get punished for it. This is one of the hard things to convince governments and enquiries to think about. As well Australia has an appalling record at dealing with ensembles. I remember the various government fantasies of the 80s about funding ensembles. They didn’t last because there was never enough money. Most ensembles we knew have long gone. The unpaid labour thing is something as well which is not very well documented. The Australian Bureau of Statistics did some research on it in 1997. It was phenomenal the amount of unpaid labour in the arts in this country.

Nigel Kellaway (Artistic Director, The opera Project)
I’m sure there are many people here who have to fill out their little form every 3 months. It’s been going on for years. I’ve been doing it for about 5 years now. They keep collecting information.

Project-based funding & viability

Kate Dennis
I work as the Business and Accounts Manager at Stalker. I also work as part time administrator at One Extra Dance Company and I’m an active member of Theatre Kantanka Theatre’s Board, so I feel I’ve got a bit to say. I really feel strongly about what Ros just mentioned about companies growing out of something kind of “family”. There’s something that brings the people together originally and the companies develop on the blood and the unpaid labour of the artists and core members. And then slowly but surely the companies wind up continuing to be small companies who are trying to operate on an international level. I see that constantly—everyone’s stretched beyond the resources of their projects.

When I submitted a number of responses to the enquiry, I mentioned issues of governance and sponsorship and time and space, none of which I’m going to address today. I personally fluctuate on what the burning issues are so I’ll speak about the thing that’s burning in me at the moment. I’m really looking from my perspective at the financial administration and management of the companies and keeping companies viable. I feel very strongly about the approach to funding bodies of a project by project basis. What we’re asked to do is apply for funds and submit budgets that are break-even. I think something has to shift there. We’re going to state and to federal government and we’re saying we’re doing such important work on a national and international basis and we’re trying to develop our artform but every bit of money you give us we’ve got to spend on that particular project.

And because I’m interested in the running of the companies, I’m really concerned about how we can have surpluses on those project budgets—and I know it’s kind of a joke because we can never even fulfil the vision of the artists let alone have surpluses to run the company with or develop the people who work for the companies. Particularly the people who have come up through the companies and to have money left over for resources and infrastructure and getting off crap computers that are 10 years old. A lot of us have been working in the sector for 15, 20 years and we can’t give as much as we could when we were 20. There’s something about that whole business of applying for funding and not being able to ask for budgets where we’re allowed to put some money aside for cash reserves, and build up some security for our future.

Andrew Morrish
It’s the classic picture of the poverty trap. It’s the equivalent of the situation where every cent you get is committed…For me one of my fears is that this report will talk about how diverse, dynamic and successful this sector is which is lovely for us and acknowledgement is welcome. But what we’ve got is a diverse, creative, successful group of very poor people with no way to get out of that, no bridge being offered, no light at the end of the tunnel, just more and more of that.

KG
The whole concept of project has taken over. It doesn’t matter how far you are down the track, your work is still treated as a one-off project. Your track record doesn’t count, your body of work. We’ve heard so often recently about people being judged on their last project. What about the previous 10 years?

Michael Cohen (Artistic Director, Kantanka Theatre)
And the irony of this is that for some companies you can get more money by having that project existence than if you apply for a program. You’re actually safer being on that edge. It’s a savage irony actually.

Insecurely secure

Harley Stumm (Executive Producer, Urban Theatre Projects)
It’s complex. We just had our first commission from a major festival and our commission fee was almost as much as our triennial funding from the Australia Council we’ve had for the past few years. Okay, we get triennial funding from 2 funding bodies but being at the Performing Arts Market and hearing companies talking about developing work for international touring and contrasting it with UTP’s experience where we’re trying to make 3 or 4 shows a year, producing and presenting in Western Sydney, has made me think about the privileges and luxuries that we have compared to the ones who don’t have triennial funding, like Stalker and Strange Fruit and Kantanka. But also it makes you think about the advantages that those companies have. On the one hand we have the security of funding and permanent wages for 4 people, whereas we have responsibilities to our audiences and requirements to spread those resources not just into creating work but into producing and presenting it. When we do site-based community work, that means maintaining a database of audiences, keeping contact with communities, maintaining networks with our peers, with local government. Then I look at Strange Fruit and hear Roderick Poole say they’ve made 4 works in 8 years and I count up our 20 something in the same period. And I’m not slagging Strange Fruit but they’re in a position where they’ve got to keep making that work and keep touring it, or they don’t eat.

So in a way it’s a privilege for us to be able to create 3 works a year but then we put these under-developed works out there that are being judged against works that have been 2 years in development or works that have come from Belgium or France with huge resources put into them. I’m just thinking about how much we should be trying to produce. Should we be spending more time developing work? But then what happens if you want to make work in Western Sydney, which we’re committed to doing, where there is not a flexible black box theatre venue between Redfern and Kingswood. This means we make site-based work and we’re doing that because we’re interested in it, because urban geography is a key theme in our content but also out of necessity. So if you’re tying to make 3 or 4 shows a year, you’re putting stuff on in venues that have no history. Every dollar you spend in marketing has very few long term returns for the company. I understand Michelle’s problem with the Legs venue but at UTP we can’t develop any building capital or marketing capital or historical capital in a bigger sense. We’re always having to move around.

What, us viable?

Rachael Swain
One of the things that I get really concerned about from Nugent to this current enquiry and the kind of reality of our existence is that the recommendations and actions that came out of Nugent were very much based around financial viability, industry, better financial models and I think part of the nature of the beast in our part of the sector is that we’re not necessarily financially viable nor were we necessarily every intended t be that. And I know the last couple of big projects I’ve been involved with weren’t really viable. They had really long periods of research attached to them, long devising processes, they were about gaining new ground in terms of artform and cultural issues. I know some of our works are for community audiences, some are for particularly educated audiences, some are exploratory. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re about a cheap financial achievement and balance and roundness. It puts us in areas of risk and often that is dependent on individual’s choices and lifestyles. I know our company only exists because of the lifestyle choices of the freelancers that we work with and that we’re completely dependent on that.

People have chosen not to have children and mortgages and all kinds of things so that they can make this kind of work. I’m really concerned that there are going to be a whole lot of recommendations about how we can be more financially viable when that might not actually be in reality the nature of what we can be, the reality of what we can be if we choose to do what we do. That’s one of the concerns I have about the relationship between the report and our reality. I think for as long as we can possibly stand it, we shouldn’t become structurally funded. The management of our company might completely disagree with that but I think that staying project-based keeps us putting the money into the work. It keeps us desperate. It keeps us very unstable. It keeps us putting the money into the work and making the work the best it can be. I’ve had conversations about this with companies like NYID in Melbourne who see that for this scale, for this area of the sector that staying tight, staying flexible, staying project-based, staying responsive to the work that needs to be made is a kind of optimum position to be in. But it puts enormous stress on people—people leave.

Chris (ERTH)
But shouldn’t people be able to make the work they want to make and have children and earn a reasonable salary as well.

Chris
It’s a 2-sided coin. In other sectors—even in industries like forestry or whatever, what is viability and what is sustainability? I think that people in the small companies like Stalker who are making new and exciting work, should be on a permanent wage and a reasonable wage.

RS
I don’t disagree with the “should” but I’m talking about what the reality is. It’s like it’s about society’s choice about paying for our level of enquiry and research. And in this country at this moment, it feels that the society doesn’t choose for us to be able to have a viable life and do that work.

Chris
Isn’t is worth talking about and to try and reach the goals we want to reach?

RS
Absolutely. But in terms of the focus of the work, that’s my feeling. For us it’s better to stay project-based which keeps it hard for us. And I think that the burning issues are always the fact that we never know if what we’ve got planned for the next month or 6 months is going to happen or not. So we’re all playing this waiting game of maybe we have to start waiting tables in the next moment…

KG
How long can you sustain that, though? You’re still young but it’s a pretty hard trot and it’s inequitable compared to lots of other arts cultures in other countries.

Ros Crisp
It’s a Catch 22 because so many people give up, like Sue-Ellen Kohler, she gave up. It’s too hard. And that’s the fallout. People give up and that’s a huge loss.

Viability or sustainability?

Andrew Morrish
I think artmaking is always gut wrenching. By its very nature, it’s a hard thing to do. And if that’s confused with economic instability, you start to think that that’s part of the gig. Whereas in the past I’ve had conversations with people in The Australian Ballet (I don’t speak to people in the Australian Ballet these days) but all they talked about was how hard it was for The Australian Ballet with their limited budgets to do what they wanted to do.

There is an issue of ethics or morality which says, why can’t we be provided with in an adequate way so that we can get on with the struggle that’s artistic rather the struggle that’s just financial.

I don’t see it ever getting easy. Artmaking should be hard. It’s never going to be easy. And if it was, I for one wouldn’t be interested. But there’s an issue of sustainability. The real question is: how do you get enough support so that you can keep doing this thing which is hard to do? And I think there’s a distinction between viability which is kind of like a growth model and sustainability which is an ecological model which says I can keep doing this and I’m not having to destroy that much of the world in my attempt to do it.

Chris
That’s why I was interested in what you were saying, Kate, about not being able to show a surplus for projects and you just spend the money that you have because in any business models, there’s always a reserve. There’s always an amount that you put towards a reserve. It’s part of a sensible business plan.

Diminishing vision

Caitlin Newton-Broad
From my perspective, having spent 3 years in a small company (as former Artistic Director, PACT Youth Theatre), essentially 1 full-time staff member, 1 part-time staff member and about 350 volunteers and maybe 40-50 contracted artists paid at an abysmal rate sustained the life of the company. And I think a lot of companies here—and PACT is comparatively small on the scale of things—exist on a fairly similar model. That’s what surprises me all the time…The human resourcing is always so compressed and under stress. And I don’t think that necessarily is always a creative place to work from. I think it really produces a shrinking of our capacity to be intellectually engaged and to refresh ourselves creatively so that the work stays alive and so that you can think laterally to resolve things when they come up. I think when you work under that limited human resources conditions you’re in a reactive position—just like the poverty consciousness model. And it’s emotionally unsustainable. That reactive stuff is just so far away from what you dreamed that creative project or experience would be.

My interest is in how you write a report and answer, essentially, lots of the questions you can only respond to in anecdotal ways, or only use expressive terms to describe what you’re going through. And then you put dollar values to it. And it all seems quite reasonable. But I don’t know how the stuff that we’re feeding back can be digested and reported on adequately to reflect what’s happening. It would actually take a real strategist to put it into a framework that makes it saleable to the Treasury.

Anecdotal reporting

I just looked over the report that I wrote to the Small to Medium Sector Enquiry in the midst of a million projects, punching the stuff out and being hammered by various people in the youth arts sector saying, you have to make this the best report it can be. You have to make this the most convincing argument…And when you hear that the Nugent Report came out of people getting together in really in-depth meetings, coming up with a business plan together, as a collective of organisations—I think that would have been a really interesting way to maybe attack this report. As it is, we all did them on the fly. They’re anecdotal. It’s very hard to digest the information and make it readable in any way other than anecdotal. I think that’s a real problem for this area in terms of that relationship between economics and experience and the whole translation between the two.

It’s interesting to hear other companies speak about project funding and possibly one of those projects would eclipse the whole annual program of PACT, but people are still facing the same issues. And I can only respond emotionally and say it’s all a bit scary that we think we’re doing it hard at PACT and we know we have the tiny protection of a space, an identity, a miniature infrastructure. And you think, well that’s good but you’re just working so hard every moment of every day to keep it running. And you think, oh well, there might be a shift to another place. And you leave that organisation behind because you know that it’s never going to grow. So you might make a shift to another organisation that within its scale is suffering the same dilemmas. I think it’s about strategic reporting and the collection of hard data…I don’t know how you can put this anecdotal information into a powerful form, apart from having powerful friends and sit at powerful dinner parties.

KG
And those major organisation did form an association very quickly to fight their case.

Diversity versus strategy

Harley Stumm
And there are what 16 of them and they all do the same thing. There are flagship theatre companies, ballet, opera. They all run on basically the same model. They can actually all get together and do a strategic plan. There are 280 of us and look around the room, just the people here—Stalker, One Extra, Omeo, Urban Theatre Projects, Performance Space, RealTime, PACT, Kantanka, ERTH…. Okay, the work is probably most similar and that’s diverse enough but if you look at the structures—one company is touring internationally and doesn’t have triennial funding and this runs a venue and that one doesn’t…..There are so many differences. How would you do a business plan—

CNB
—to digest the information. The questions we were asked were so vague. They were so broad, sweeping, I don’t know how you could make a sensible document based on the questions we were asked.

KG
And the process was so hurried. There wasn’t time for meetings like this. Regina Heilmann and Chris Murphy, you’ve just taken over as Artistic directors at PACT. It’s probably a little premature to ask for your thoughts…

Productivity versus poverty

Chris Murphy
A little, but I guess one thing that I would say is that just the amount of work that gets produced, that’s one thing that has astounded me looking at the history of PACT—the volume of work compared with the size of the resources. Also, I can comment from my experience with Kantanka over the years, on the unpaid labour and the energy and commitment and love that goes into the work that is so huge and that’s what sustains the companies. At PACT I see a similar scenario.

Regina Heilmann
What astounded me first coming into the job was, my God, how did Caitlin and Lucy Evans (Administrator) work under these conditions! But gee, the chairs don’t work, the computers don’t work. I thought, how on earth did they generate so much fantastic material over the years working in these conditions? I thought, I can’t…I had to go out, go for a walk. There’s no windows, no light in the room…But also it costs money to dream and take time. And I get the feeling that you’re constantly working on that kind of energy that goes ‘how much money can we ask for and will the other little foundations prop it up and…’

CNB
….being only as good as your last work and the terror of the whole thing collapsing.

Ros Crisp
I thought I might read some of the submission I sent. “The Omeo Dance Studio is committed to the development of an informed and critical culture of dance. It nurtures research and enquiry during ongoing practice and acknowledges risk and experimentation as essential for the development of new work. Omeo is the site of my practice and vision as a dance artist. In speaking about what it contributes it seems odd to give from this perspective when I set the studio up 5 years ago to serve in making my work as an artist. Now it does so much that one can look upon it and say this is an organisation and it contributes to Australia’s cultural life through supporting the making of new dance, experimentation, research, collaborations, emerging artist opportunities, mentorships, training, tours, international exchanges, a community of 50 peers and a database of 600. But hey, an organisation. This is an organisation by virtue of the fact that I have organised voluntarily the creation and production of my work, a space, a community, a venue, a phone line, a group of peers, relationships with funding bodies and critics. A small percentage of this has been funded activity. I live below the poverty line and have done so for all my life as an artist. I received a Fellowship from the Dance Board for 2000-2001 that has given me a taste of how the rest of the world lives. During this time I have used the financial security to facilitate more projects at the studio and to promote the work that has developed there with my company Stella b to venues overstate and overseas. The studio is no longer strictly “me” but it’s still inextricably linked to my work in major and minor ways. As a space for my ensemble to work in, through the young artists that art attracted there through the organic community that has evolved and now through the artistic community of peers that voluntarily manages Omeo Dance Incorporated.

“We have developed our skills as administrators, promoters and producers increasingly in conflict with our desires to simply do our work as artists. However, the net return from both endeavours is simply not enough to support a paid administrator and the prospect of queuing for one at the funding bodies is not encouraging. The growth of my work and the studio means that I’m now even more stressed than ever—artist, collaborator, choreographer, dancer/performer, publicist, producer, administrator, teacher, studio cleaner, mentor, caretaker, artistic adviser, board member, reporter to cultural ministers councils and last but not least, partner to another artist. All I can say is Help! The critical challenge is survival.” I’ll finish there. So, I don’t know how they dealt with that.

Whose claim to fame?
Andrew Morrish
One of the things that interests me about Omeo is that it’s never been funded. Ros’s projects have been funded and she takes money out of the budget to pay for studio rent but as an organisation it’s never had any support. It’s been quoted as one of the 5 top dance producing organisations in the state. And I get a little bit annoyed when arts departments start promoting Omeo as an interesting and important asset for the state when it’s made no contribution to it. In a way that independence has been really important for Ros. The studio is paid for by people renting the space from us and the work that we put in for nothing doesn’t generate money to pay for anything but the rent and the costs that come with that space. So it’s interesting that all of a sudden it’s become an artifact, a contribution to a sector. It’s been appropriated by the bureaucracies in this way and held up as a shining example. The thing that strikes me about this sector is that we think everybody else is the success. We think we’re the only ones struggling and everybody else is doing so well compared to us. And this is a successful model but at what cost, and to what end? At what point did we volunteer to become part of a sector when in fact, the impulse was Ros responding to her own artistic needs. Organisations grow in these ways. You get some support but to get more you have to become more and more like that which is required to be like to get the support. There’s a shaping. We start trying to be strategic and fulfil perceived objectives of funding bodies. And there’s a whole heap of us rattling around in that world and being distracted from the artistic intention as a result. It’s a problematic thing.

Rachael Swain
Whenever they have these Celebrate Australia things—I don’t know if any of you have been involved in them, they’ve had them in Japan and Indonesia and we’ve been dragged into them a number of times—they’re basically always the small to medium companies that get put into those things because we’re interesting, we communicate in places where other languages are spoken because we use visual and physical languages to tell stories. They’re not the MOF [Major organisation fund] companies. When Australia wants to hold up the flag and say this is what we are, it’s our work that goes on display.

Michelle Vickers
And often you’re already on tour internationally so, it’s usually the companies that are in that region that find themselves in these showcases.

AM
The other part of that is that I find it completely distressing when paid consultants ring up Ros to get the data which she contributes for nothing. I’m not allowed to speak to them but if I was, I’d say if it’s that important, could you donate your salary to Ros while she does your work for you. This report is supposed to have cost $63,000 and a couple of people have done very well from it. It’s not us. This is just a personal little thing but it’s indicative of something bigger.

A small dance company tries to fit

Amanda Card (Executive Producer, One Extra Dance)
Since 1996 the model for One Extra has changed. It was a directive of the Board as a response really to people like Ros and all the independent artists working in Sydney. These artists, independents and small companies have always done everything. The artistic director, the person making the work has always been the accountant, the office manager and multiple things. There was a stage where One Extra had 5 people in the office—2 co-artistic directors, a publicist, a general manager and an office manager. That was in the days when “small” companies were actually quite large. There were 4 or 5 in Sydney, a few in Melbourne. Those companies have been decimated over the last 10 years and the independent sector is just people making work under their own steam.

So One Extra sounds a bit like PACT. It’s basically me full-time and Kate 2 days a week. We provide a producer model for independent dance theatre artists. The reason it’s dance theatre I guess is that’s my curatorial bent and also it’s the history of the company. Kai Tai Chan 1976 to 1992 and Julie-Anne Long and Graeme Watson for the interim between 1992-96. Janet Robertson had the company from 1996-2000 and she worked with a variety of artists. I tried to bring it back to the idea of working with a group of artists working in a dance theatre mode and as wide as I can push that model.

But I think what I find frustrating are 2 major things. The biggest thing for our company is the disparity between the NSW Ministry and the Australia Council. The Ministry understands why we exist in this mode. The Australia Council has a real problem with a producer model. What the Council seems to be doing in the dance area at least is that they have a finite amount of money and every 3 years they re-fashion it to make it respond to what they think the community is in need of. And it’s usually a bit like the law. It actually runs up behind what is actually happening. So as soon as something start to become familiar, they change their program to try and catch up with what’s really happening. So they’ve just recently done a change, a Special Programs grant which is a reintroduction of a yearly grant. So you could be triennial in dance or project funded. Or you could be a yearly triennial, which I find really interesting. So they brought it back in but they didn’t bring any more money to the coffers. They took money out of New Work and put it into Special Programs.

So then you apply differently and the model you apply for is one that we were unsuccessful with last year for various reasons. The question they asked was what do I do, what is my reason for being there? And so this year I’m doing exactly what you’re talking about—looking at how they structure what they do and trying to formulate what we do to fit so that they can understand what we’re trying to do. And I’ve just had a meeting, well it was a collective meeting, with Karilyn Brown from Audience Marketing and Development (Australia Council). What they’re doing is taking each sector and looking at it and at the moment, they’re looking at dance. So over the next 3 years they’re going to look at dance and try to work out what to do with dance to make the structures work. What they’ve come up with now is that perhaps a producer model might be quite a good one. But when I had the conversation with Karilyn it was all about the producer model to take things overseas and I felt a bit like the people in the Northern Territory—I went to an Ausdance thing in NT recently—and they were saying to us people in other states, look we can’t even get up to where you are. We don’t have any infrastructure at all. And what Karilyn Brown was talking about was taking companies like Bangarra and ADT and Ballet Lab overseas. But there’s a whole lot of people doing stuff here that don’t have any structural relationship and One Extra is struggling to keep those people working.

At One Extra we try and have a relationship with an artist. So an artist might come in and work with someone else, then they might produce a small solo work and then in a larger work and we try to have them flowing through. But we have drop them off all the time. People are dropping off. Kate Champion’s in this position at the moment, being employed for 6 weeks of this year.

Kate Champion (choreographer-dancer, Artistic Director Force Majeure)
And I’m very successful.

The innovation trap

Amanda
Everyone else thinks Kate’s doing real well and it’s great but she’s employed for 6 weeks of a whole year. So I’m trying to find ways to keep those people functioning and producing work. One of the other things I find really frustrating is that when we apply for funding from the Australia Council, we’re asked as a small sector organisation—we’re still project funded—to deal with the word “innovation” all the time. We have to be innovative. And yet triennially funded companies in the Dance sector are not asked to respond to that word. They’re asked to respond to the notion of development of audiences, long term strategy and so on. So the people with less money are expected to do the innovation while those with more resources—and in dance that’s the people with the solidly booked 6-8 dancers employed for 12 months of the year… It seems to me to be an odd relationship that we’re asked to be innovative but we make a project for $60,000 and we’ve got to employ 5 people and have 6 weeks rehearsal once the choreographer can start working with their people. And of course, with 6 weeks to develop and rehearse, we have under-developed work. But all the independents that we work with are expected to produce this innovative work, this new and exciting work, without any of the aerials and the videos and the…..They’re just people on stage most of the time and we beg, borrow and steal anything we can find to make the production values slightly better. But they’re always working in a situation where they can’t guarantee they’ll produce this incredible innovation.

Fiona Winning (Artistic director, Performance Space)
And then you have to do all the other stuff as well. You have to find an audience. You have to manage your company well.

AC
That’s the easy part. I think One Extra’s is a really good model. A model that works…It would be great to have a model where you could have someone who could work with someone like Ros Crisp and wouldn’t have any relationship to the creation of the work but would actually help you get to that point where you don’t have to do all that administrative stuff. Some kind of centralised place perhaps. This happens overseas all the time. Here we don’t be able to come to terms with the changing models that are out there.

With dance it’s really difficult. In the case of a show like Traffic (Stella B) it was incredibly innovative in terms of someone watching a lot of dance. But you get someone who comes in from outside of that, I can’t see that they’d necessarily see that. There’s not a lot of wheels and whistles there.

Producer-centred funding

Rosalind Crisp
I think there’s a suspicion about what One Extra does and that’s why it’s hard to make a shift. I know what you’re saying. In Europe there is that model. There are lots of theatres and lots of producers who will curate what they want and support it really well. But here, there’s a suspicion. I’m not quite sure why that is.

Kate Champion
Maybe it was the shift from when Kai Tai Chan set it up. It kept the same name but went from one thing to the other. There’s a sentimentality there.

RC
Maybe because we have that history of doing what Legs or Stalker or I’ve done where there’s been this tiny family or community thing that was free and so you kind of feel…

Andrew Morrish
I know when I was on the Victorian Dance Assessment Panel, which I was for 3 years while they still had one, we were very suspicious of that sort of (model) because we used to say, it’s a hidden tier of funding. As the funding body, we were worried that people would start and invent their own funding bodies. So Dancehouse would say give us this money and we’ll decide how to spend it. We’d get really nervous about that. We’d say, where is your accountability? Our accountability is clear—applications come in and we assess them all. That was one of the concerns that I noticed when things got tight. We’d say, oh they’ve got their own little funding tier and got really nervous about that. I think the time for a producer model is ripe. And there’s got to be a way to articulate that. But the curatorial focus would be what’s necessary.

RC
The problem is also that there isn’t the money. So it’s going from one area into something else. It’s not coming from elsewhere. So you’re in competition with me then for funding. That’s the situation.

AC
Also this new producer model, this idea of shift will not be given any more money.

An unsustainable situation: exploitation

Anna Messariti
My own position is very personal and I wouldn’t like to be considered just as representing the view of Playworks. For the last 9 years I’ve been working as an artistic director of small to medium sized organisations in 2 states and prior to that I worked at the Australia Council as the Creative Development project officer (Theatre Board) and the views that I hold are a reflection on all of those years of work and what I perceive has happened and I suppose my preoccupations at the moment are more to do with big picture things rather than the situation of the particular company that I work for.

I perceive the situation that we have at the moment in the sector as being totally unsustainable on every level. I suppose the level at which it affects me the most is that I find it ethically unsustainable because I feel that the only way we can survive and continue to exist within the sector is to be complacent about an ethos of exploitation of everybody that works in the area from the least experienced artist to the most experienced, from the volunteer to the highest paid amongst us. At all levels, the situation is really quite appalling, irrespective of the fact that sometimes it’s interesting and often rewarding and maybe good fun at times, it is at the same time totally immoral and the state and federal governments are complicit in this.

I recently went to a strategic planning meeting of a national organisation which was run by a consultant whose rate of pay was [considerable]. This person’s background was in marketing and he did a lot of consultancy work for state arts funding bodies, for DCITA; I don’t know what involvement he had with the Australia Council. He basically described arts funding at this point in time as being a 2-headed monster. At one head of the monster was the Australia Council and at the other head was the discretionary funds of the minister. And he said, though he didn’t produce the facts to back it up, that in the last financial year the discretionary funds of the ministers exceeded the amount of money that the Australia Council has to fund the whole of the arts, and that this would be the first time this had happened since the inception of the Australia Council. And I felt really alarmed by that because I thought if what he’s saying is true, we don’t know it, we don’t realise it and what we’re actually witnessing here is the complete disintegration of the arm’s length principle as we know it.

Funding for political gain

He then proceeded to tell us that there would be no more increases in funding in this sector. That the outcome of the Small-To-Medium Report would be nothing. We wouldn’t get any more money. It wasn’t an enquiry but a report. I mean, we’ve heard this everywhere. That the trend we are seeing at state and federal level at the moment is for all ministers to take the view that they’re no longer interested in arts funding for its own sake. They’re interested in arts funding that is directly tied to political gain. And so if they can see a voter outcome, political benefit in supporting the arts, this is basically where we may see increases. He referred to it as the Ra Ra money which was regional and rural money, ie where the political interest is at the moment and that’s what we should all be striving for.

In that situation where you’re actually trying to plan the future for another struggling small to medium sized organisation as a voluntary board member who already works for another under-resourced organisation that has to manage its own voluntary board and the vicious cycle of exploitation that goes on, I felt really quite desperate. I thought I’ve seen enough in the arts in the last 10 years I’ve been working in it that the minute we start to compromise the artistic integrity of what we believe in and what we do, and start to pander to all these sorts of political agendas, we’re lost, the work is lost. There’s no point in trying to work in it any more because it’s a completely cynical exercise.

Funding from ignorance

I don’t really know what the solution is. I feel that since 1997 when the restructuring of the Australia Council took place and we saw large committees and boards turned into smaller and smaller funds which have now been reinvented as Boards again, we saw a conflict of interest policy developed which basically means that nobody who’s involved in work at any level or who knows anyone or has any kind of relationship with anybody on any level can actually sit at a table and make a decision. And we have seen a situation where there used to be subjective but often passionate and interesting discussion about the way that the arts got made in this country. That’s what we used to have and it may have had its problems but I wonder if what has replaced it, this incredibly sterile numerical model which is very much applications- based. And anyone who’s ever worked for a funding body knows how easy it is to manipulate that system if you’re strategic about it. And “strategic” is a word we’ll probably hear a lot more of when the results of the Small-To-Medium Report are published. I suppose I just feel as though without even realising it, many of us are complicit in a culture of exploitation and dishonesty that we’re not even aware of—and we have no choice about it.

I came out of the meeting where there was talk about the Ra Ra money and the 2-headed monster feeling really angry about this, that it’s degenerated to this point and most of us don’t even realise it. But now I feel quite frightened by it and I think we need to come together more and express our discontent. But instead of directing it at the funding bodies whom I perceive to be completely powerless, I think we need to be directing it towards ministers, towards politicians. I think we need to bypass that whole level and go direct to the people who do have the power to do actually something about it.

The NSW: the international trap

The only other thing I’d like to say is to do with relates to NSW in particular. I’ve worked in other states and I work for a national organisation at the moment. The one thing I’m aware of in NSW that I think affects us all in a different way from any other state is that in NSW, every organisation and every artist who’s subsidised at any level is expected to be catering to a kind of national agenda. NSW has that reputation of being the international city. We’re expected to be international in the way that we operate. We’re expected to have that kind of leadership. But if you actually compare the infrastructure and the level of support that people get to work in NSW, if you compare it to what’s going on in every other state it’s just unbelievable. If I could be absolutely honest about this, when I read the report in The Australian a few weeks ago about the investment in buildings in NSW, I thought oh, that’s really great— but it’s 10 years too late. The roof of the Performance Space has been falling down for a decade. I remember Sarah Miller in 1991 talking about the buckets collecting water and the fact that the building could have been bought… I remember all of that, all the planning around it. I feel the crisis has existed for a decade and finally something is being done about it. We don’t know exactly what but something is being done. Whereas in Queensland they’ve invested in an infrastructure that’s much bigger than the arts sector that exists there but over a decade you might actually see that whole community and population grow into it. And I feel as though the whole country needs to be at that level at the moment because what we have is a situation where the thing that will disappear in this continual exploitation of artists and arts workers is experience and wisdom in the field and in that sense all that will happen is that we’ll all go backwards or we’ll just become incredibly mediocre.

What to do?

KG
I think a lot of us are feeling the same. It’s interesting with the craft organisations in NSW and with the NAVA (the National Association of Visual Artists) fighting to make that enquiry work, they’ve certainly gone straight to ministers. In fact, NAVA got so angry after the meeting with Rupert Myer that I attended that it immediately put a figure on how much they needed. They’d never done that. And the next day in The Australian they said we want an extra $15 million a year for the visual arts. I thought that was great. It gives people something to fight about. You actually put a value to it. This happens in all other fields like marine biologists working on projects say this is what the area needs for the next 10 years. In the arts we’re very loath to do these kinds of things. So, Anna, those words could be fightin’ words. And perhaps tonight we should decide what we want we think we should do, if anything.

Fiona Winning
That’s one of the reasons why we decided to proceed with the forum tonight even though it was going to be before the report came out. It’s because there’s got to be a way…In my folder, I had completely forgotten about this, in Victoria, about 40 small companies got together to respond to the enquiry and for all of the reasons that we know, we didn’t do that in NSW. So maybe this is the time to be mobilising to have some sort of response. And I agree, talking directly to ministers.

What happens to the art?
One of the things that I think I’ll talk about is the art. Let’s go back to the art and what is at stake at the moment. To me, in these 6 week projects where many independent artists are meant to self-produce, create an innovative work and then find an audience and blah blah blah, it seems that we are in an impossible situation and that we probably need to be talking about some really radical re-thinking about the way we make work in this country. Every international festival we go to, we all get depressed because we can’t make work like that because, you know, in Belgium….you know, they don’t show a work-in-progress until they’ve been working for 3 months!

I feel a little like Russell Dumas in saying that all we do is look to other places at the moment because we’re so fucked. So let’s try to think about what is going to make it better. And I’d suggest another set of discussions is needed. Because the conditions we’re working under are pathetic. I think people are achieving astounding results given those conditions. But I had a lot of trouble coming to terms with my job when I first started here because here we are with triennial funding from the New Media Arts Board and we have one broken down projector that has to be serviced every 6 weeks. I had a computer that operated at one sentence a fortnight. I mean some of that has changed and some of that has been upgraded but nevertheless in terms of making new media work, it’s a joke. We can’t afford to hire the stuff for a month to show it in the galleries because that means the artists get nothing. So you’re forever weighing up these variously stupid equations between paying for the work and paying for the infrastructure of the equipment.

So the lack of technology, the lack of time to make work, the dismantling of ensembles so we can’t experiment on any sort of ongoing basis and this absolute demand for people to be able to do everything, whether they’re the self-producing artist, or the director of the Performance Space who’s still learning how to do some aspects of her job. Going back to Chris’s opening comments, because of the conditions that we’ve been talking about, I know that I make decisions in my job that are extremely conservative. I find myself looking at something that is a good idea and looking at how we make that good idea work and unless there’s something like a 60% chance of being able to do it, we can’t invest staff resources to try it. So it means that on a producing level and on an artistic level, we’re actually diminishing our visions constantly. And I know that we have to be pragmatic as well.

Unnatural attrition

But I actually think we’ve got to the position where we’ve diminished our vision so seriously that we’re not going to be able to compete internationally any more. Looking at the work that comes out of this space, several years ago the Performance Space director could have said well there’s this many international tours of works from this space. There haven’t been any for a number of years. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a reflection of the work. There’s been good work but not as good as that fucking Belgian work! One of the contributing factors to that has been the gradual attrition of artists and producers and administrators and good people in this area of work is enormous. We need to be arguing that we have people with skills to make good art and with the conditions necessary to make good art, it will be done. It is being done. It’s just that the good art is only being made under awful conditions generally and we are being diminished by this not just personally but culturally on a much broader level.

I was heartened by the Roger Wilkins (Director General of Arts, NSW) interview in RealTime (#48) because it seemed like he might respond to those issues and I don’t know if we can argue strongly onto a national ministerial level, but it seems we do have to be talking about the diminution of ideas.

Despite my depressing rave, a lot of good art is still coming out of Australia and a lot of it is going overseas. It’s just getting harder and harder to make and the visions are being seriously diminished all the time. Actually at the Performing Arts Market—I don’t know if this is any guide—the international delegates were making noises about the work not being as impressive as in other years. Now whether that’s to do with the choice of work, I don’t know.

Supply & demand

KG
The thing is everyone works their arses off. Artists put out terrific work. Governments can be complacent. The booklets we’ve done for the Australia Council, we’ve done 5 of them now, show an astonishing range of work and a lot of it has travelled. Now it might be touring on the sweat and love of the performers but that still looks really good on paper and as Rachael said, it’s the small to medium companies that are doing these international tours, not the state theatre companies.

Caitlin Newton-Broad
One thing I’d like to say as devil’s advocate is that the small to medium companies don’t necessarily get good audiences in Australia. So, in fact, you still need that groundswell of support from audiences in your own country. And really, I don’t feel like we as a field do so well on an audience level. But it really depends on what perhaps you mean by audience.

KG
The Australia Council’s Audience and Market Development promote this work very well overseas. There seems to be no equivalent work on the ground in this country. Although there’s a growing number of producers, touring networks are still not strong.

Clare Grant
There’s a system of distribution they can plug into overseas. There aren’t the systems here.

KG
Terry Cutler (former Chair, Australia Council) spoke about cluster studies. They’re all the go now. You work out the distribution of the arts and where it is and what’s resourcing it and how many funding directions are supporting it and how it can help itself. DCITA actually funded one for several million dollars in the new media area to see how digital arts and new media is working in Australia. As Suzanne Donnelly has said, in this area there are not enough statistics to know what ‘s happening. And yet, the whole Australia Council direction shifted towards the Saatchi & Saatchi demand side. It was almost like we’ve created all this product, supply if you like, but it’s not getting taken up, so now let’s look at demand, the audiences. They went about it in a funny way and I suppose the Saatchi Report will soon be forgotten, but perhaps not now that Cutler’s gone. But it’s like nobody wants to really invest additional funds in basic artform activity, the supply side.

What to do? Part II

Michael Cohen
Instead of trying to form a national coalition which sounds very grand but is probably unachievable, is there room for something like happened in Victoria which happened before the Small to Medium Performing Arts report was undertaken. I think they got together and made recommendations to the people who put together the report as to what the guidelines should be. Given that NSW is the most populous in terms of companies represented in the report, is there not space? Of course, it’s another voluntary job for someone to organise it, but is there room for an umbrella lobby group. Is it just an email noticeboard. Is there room for that among a disparate group of NSW performing arts companies?

KG
If we do something like that it’s important that the NSW sector talks to the Victorian sector and so on. It might not need to be huge. We don’t want to form an incorporated association.

FW
It might not need to represent everybody either. It’s a lot of work to make sure that all the performing arts companies are represented. Maybe it’s a sectoral thing within the Small to Medium companies.

Jan Irvine
SAMAG (Sydney Arts Management advisory Group) doesn’t have the resources. I was actually just thinking about that and whether there could be some funding available through the Ministry or whatever. Being time-poor, how much time can you really devote to getting lobbying strategies together. I don’t want to use the word consultant because it has such terrible connotations…but I’m just thinking whether someone could be funded to drive a lobby group even for a period.

MC
Even the Carriageworks at Wilson Street is an example of a pretty disparate group of people who got together and in a kind of very ad hoc way wrote letters and sent emails. I’m sure that wasn’t what pushed it over the line but we can only hope it contributed some impact. I don’t agree that art is created out of desperation, or that we should accept that. I really disagree with that. Now, I’m not putting my hand up to run a lobby group, but I’m wondering if there’s not space for that.

Harley Stumm
That’s an example, and the buildings in Western Sydney and what’s been happening here at Performance Space. The most effective kind of lobbying is the companies who have some common interest working really hard on it. Rather than everyone feeling they have to sign up. Maybe some kind of strategic plan to assist in identifying goals and opportunities. What Wilkins said in RT was about good policy being a mix of opportunism and forward thinking. It’s political speak, okay, but it’s true. You know what you want and when you see an opening for one of the things you want, that’s when you push for it. Even though it might actually be your second highest priority, there might be that time when that’s the chance to get it. I think we need to be more strategic and I don’t have any objection to that word.

KG
A smaller group of companies working in Contemporary Performance challenging the outcomes of this report when it’s released could be quite strong. Especially if we can find some allies interstate.

HS
And there might be time when Railway Street and Griffin and Sidetrack and other companies who aren’t represented here where we should be working on the broad front with them. But there would be times when we have common interests and times when we’d be in competition.

FW
We can start with the people in this room as the network to be contacted about coming together.

There is no doubt that the arts can seem unimportant—even trivial—in the wake of traumatic events, including September 11, the refugee crisis, the war in Afghanistan and ongoing but pressing Indigenous issues in our own country. In truth the arts have suffered for years from the perception that they are unimportant. Our news and media outlets fill their entertainment and lifestyle sections with little but celebrity gossip and box-office grosses. And if we indulge in entertainment when the hard times take hold, it is because it offers the security of escape.

However, that ill-defined thing called Art is not so easily dismissed or perhaps as easily welcomed into our lives. Yet, confronted with the equally urgent, if less overtly spectacular (because hidden) abuses against humanity taking place in this country, I found myself extremely grateful for my experiences at the 2002 Adelaide Festival of Arts. While the outcomes were compromised and many of the processes flawed, it was nonetheless, an essential experiment establishing a radical interface between art and community in a previously inconceivable context. By including many previously disenfranchised artists and attempting to speak meaningfully about issues of fundamental relevance to all Australians, the festival achieved something unique, even if many chose not to take up the invitation.

Many complaints around the festival focussed, somewhat bizarrely it seems to me, on the apparent role reversal between the Adelaide Festival and the Adelaide Fringe. In the end, I’m not sure that distinction mattered (except maybe to the accountants). By taking advantage of both programs, it was possible to have your cake and eat it. I ran myself ragged but still missed far too much. That Katrina Sedgewick, Artistic Director of the Fringe, did an outstanding job is indisputable. That the Fringe provided not only entertainment but also productions and events of substance is also true. What interests me, however, is the fact that several big-ticket international acts were able to take place in the Fringe, without apparently receiving the subsidy typically guaranteed through a major festival. Maybe they didn’t need it?

As Karen Meehan, writing in Dramatic Online (March 13, 2002) noted, “by far the most important debate around the Sellars’ ‘myth’ or ‘legacy’ (depending on whether you agree with him or not), is actually about the structure of a major festival—a debate the Australian media [and many in the Australian arts community] seems to have bypassed” , except to be offended by the very notion of community or the positioning of Aboriginal peoples centre stage (sic). Meehan, is the only Australian journalist I know who has undertaken in-depth interviews with the much maligned Associate Directors, in particular the Indigenous Artistic Directors, Karl and Waiata Telfer (March 20, 2002). Did no-one feel that the views of Indigenous artists, participants in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital program or audiences at the Parkes Community Centre, were worth canvassing? Does anyone remember the Saatchi & Saatchi Report?

Equally bizarre is the suggestion that incoming Artistic Director Stephen Page will have nothing left to do as the Indigenous stuff has already been done. A similar notion was touted following Brenda L Croft’s groundbreaking Biennial exhibition, Beyond the Pale for the 2000 festival. The inclusion of Indigenous people is not a one-off event but a way of life. And as for spending relatively big money (in arts terms) on community based (low) art events instead of real (high) art, the screams of outrage could be heard across the country.

If those who say they love the arts really believe that art can define our times and probe our societies in ways that speak across continents and even millennia, then why were so many of them ungenerous and unwilling to take the risk? Surely it is the much touted ‘universality’ of art that has been so celebrated by those who prefer their art classical and their heritage European. Of course, it’s precisely this long reach of art—so incompatible with the immediate appetite of the news machine or the entertainment industry—that may have made the festival’s aspirations so unpalatable to so many.

When I experience a unique and profoundly moving opening ceremony like Kaurna Plati Meyunna, see a film like Ivan Sens’ extraordinarily beautiful and devastating, Beneath Clouds; an oratorio like John Adams/Peter Sellars El Ninño, or visit the Parkes Community Centre where Urban Theatre Projects worked with a bunch of kids from diverse and often disadvantaged backgrounds, I am privileged to enter into other worlds of experience created by artists, offering new ways of seeing and understanding. Their content and their approach to the particular and peculiar effects of time and place, of structure, form and media, suggest, against the odds, real change might be possible.

The Intertwine program, which took place at many venues around Adelaide, has emerged as one of the real success stories of the Peter Sellars/Sue Nattrass Adelaide Festival. Comprising a series of loosely affiliated weaving workshops, public forums, and exhibitions of woven art works from Australia and beyond, Intertwine was a genuinely community-based, grassroots, cross-cultural and collaborative event. It perfectly exemplified the original Sellars vision for the festival and its themes of truth and reconciliation, cultural diversity and ecological sustainability.

Intertwine brought together Indigenous weavers from the Top End of Australia and from Ngarrindjeri country in and around the South Australian Riverland. Senior Maori weavers also participated, along with other community artists from all over Australia. Included in the latter group was the high profile Queensland based artist Pat Hoffie who regularly works on collaborative projects with weavers in the Philippines.

But the Intertwine program was most definitely not about promoting stars or lionising the achievements of individuals. The level playing field approach evident in this collective enterprise seems to have been a deliberate ideological decision on the part of the organisers. In a similar vein, Intertwine’s focus has not been exclusively on the end product, on the woven object as either artistic creation or object of desire, but equally on (re)establishing a sense of community among practitioners. Talking with the other participants about weaving practice and creating space to share stories or simply yarn have been integral to this communal—and process-oriented program.

Accompanying the workshops and dotted around Adelaide’s inner and outer suburbs were a number of exhibitions and installations of the weavers’ work. This attempt to cater for audiences outside of the CBD was also consonant with this festival’s more regional focus. For example, the Prospect Gallery in Adelaide’s suburban north, played host to a wonderfully engaging and beautifully realised exhibition entitled Weaving the Murray, featuring works created by non-indigenous and Indigenous weavers including prominent Ngarrindjeri weaver and language expert Rhonda Agius.

In recent years Ngarrindjeri weavers have revived the traditional Ngarrindjeri craft of coiling rushes and sedge grasses native to the Murray so that many young Ngarrindjeri have become confident and skilled practitioners. In addition, classes are now held on a regular basis for non-indigenous people who want to learn this ancient art. This revitalisation is a truly remarkable achievement on the part of the Ngarrindjeri. The pressures of colonisation in their region dealt such a severe blow to traditional processes of intergenerational knowledge transmission that the practice of weaving came perilously close to disappearing.

Woven in traditional Ngarrindjeri style and suspended from the ceiling, a large communally-woven Ponde or Murray Cod, itself a threatened species, is without a doubt the piéce de resistance of the Prospect Gallery exhibition. It is a visually appealing work with a cogent environmental subtext.

Concerns about the environment also figured prominently in the Intertwine workshops. Participants spoke later in almost rapturous terms about the sense of esprit-de-corps engendered by this unique program. The quality of the relationships forged while taking part will be one of its enduring legacies. Integrated events like this one have a real capacity to build social capital and sustain community as well as produce artistic outcomes. Maybe down the track, when the dust has settled, Adelaideans will remember this as a festival we had to have for precisely such reasons.

Think about Maralinga. What does the word conjure up? A mushroom cloud, probably, hanging malignly in the air; no land, no people. That was very much the line of thinking entertained by Lynette Wallworth, one of the Adelaide Festival’s Associate Directors 2 years ago. Shouldn’t we all—especially in Maralinga’s nearest capital, Adelaide—know more about the land and its people below the cloud?

And that radical way of thinking was/is intrinsic to the Peter Sellars’ Festival. If only he and/or the limp administration had been able to deliver on such original promise.

Mind you, that Maralinga idea has thrown up a pretty rich harvest. The proactive side of the notion involved sending the English video artists, Mongrel, out to work with the kids there on telling their stories with the latest technology and offering the Tjarutja elders, newly returned to Maralinga the idea of painting their experience. Victorian artist Lance Atkinson demonstrated techniques of acrylic painting at the elders’ request. This required the festival to conjure up its own visual version of what it did to take to Oak Valley, to appoint an arts adviser and set an arts centre in train. The paintings produced are a challenge—often combining a traditional dotted background with almost Pop art images of the Cloud and, in one case, an upside-down roo flying through the irradiated air. They hang outside the theatre where The Career Highlights of the Mamu is playing.

Mamu was a separate project in WA, eagerly seized on by Wallworth—because it involved the Wankatja people, who’d gone West rather than East when missionaries passed on the heartless government message that the land they had stories for, going back to the last Ice Age, was going to be irrevocably polluted by the British atom bomb test. They—at least the survivors amongst them—ended up around Kalgoorlie after a 300km walk through the Great Victorian Desert.

Twenty-seven-year-old Trevor Jamieson was born in Perth to Wankatja parents and describes himself as “hungry for the truth” about his origins. He envisaged a one-man show and began working with writer Scott Rankin, experienced in such story-telling through his work on Box the Pony with Leah Purcell. Somewhere along the line though, Jamieson’s family had a better idea and now all 17 of them are on stage round a campfire with 2 musicians and 3 screens at the back showing painted images, photos, documentary interviews and surtitles. Putting it baldly, the original show has not yet grown to encompass all these accretions, despite dramaturgy from Nick Enright, direction by Andrew Ross (the man who got Bran Nue Dae and the Jack Davis trilogy so right), a choreographer and 2 assistant directors.

But then, such documentary theatre encompassing a range from ancient dances to Super 8 interviews with elders out at Maralinga, is a pretty complex form. And one of the most affecting moments involved Trevor’s Auntie using language that was barely translated to tell of her parents and 2 siblings dying from radiation poisoning and/or the effort of walking through unknown desert country to Kalgoorlie, while a live camera revealed every emotion on screens behind her. Trevor had just told us how the men of the tribe had attacked the rolling radiation cloud with spears, identifying it as a Mamu Devil Spirit. At the other end of the theatrical spectrum, we’d also heard the tale of the first train sighted, scared off with spears: one hero had shat his pants, which he admitted to his mate in language. “You can’t say that”, his mate responded, “we’re supposed to be naked!” “Not to worry, they can’t understand what we’re saying”, the surtitles told us meta-theatrically!

Such a blend—that also ranged through powerful Hiroshima poetry and Country & Western sentiment—is always going to be dangerous. Where does a commissioning festival come in, trying to get it all right? The lesson of the Marrugeku Company’s chaotic Crying Baby is instructive. Revelations during the Performing Arts Market suggested that both Perth and Sydney Festival Directors had been fobbed off when querying its development with the line, “You don’t understand how Aboriginal work is made”, suggesting that as much rigour is needed in this important area as in any theatre-making.

Desert Oaks, a painting project by the Oak Valley Community, Maralinga Lands. The Career Highlights of the Mamu, Trevor Jamieson & Scott Rankin, director Andrew Ross, Black Swan Theatre, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 2-5

El Niño, the ‘centrepiece’ of Peter Sellars’ 2002 Adelaide Festival, is the product of a collaboration between Sellars and legendary American composer John Adams. El Niño suits Sellars’ concept for the festival—an event of community and cultural interaction, reconciliation and storytelling, whose official opening was a night of Indigenous song and dance in Adelaide’s Victoria Square.

First staged in 2000, the oratorio El Niño recounts the Nativity, the moment from which we count our millennia. Sellars has transferred the Biblical story to a present day Latino setting. In the way Shakespeare productions are often updated, this transfer emphasises the power and timelessness of the story. Building a libretto from the texts of past and present writers, and including fragments from the Apocrypha, suggests all generations and all people own the story. Texts by Hispanic women, such as 17th century Mexican nun and early feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, emphasise women’s perspective. The rich moral tales are cleverly drawn out—how the Infant is born into straitened circumstances, how dependent He is on the enduring faith of those around Him, how fear corrupts the morals of (great) men and provokes violence and oppression. These observations are directly relevant to our present world.

Adams had wanted to write his own Messiah, and this work seems a homage to Handel as much as his own celebration of the Nativity. Formally, El Niño is more than an oratorio, and includes a video, screened above the performers. The audience must follow the action on screen, the surtitles above it, and the complex polyphonies and competing rhythms of Adams’ mesmerising score. This version of El Niño omits the live dancers of the initial concept, but there are dance excerpts on screen.

Sellars’ video grounds the work in a way that no stage performance could. Looking as if shot with a hand-held camera, and set in an apartment, on a beach or in a car, it’s like a silent home movie, making the oratorio immediately accessible. We see a Hispanic Mary and Joseph driving around, cops as guardian angels, the Infant swaddled in a Mickey Mouse blanket, and “Jesus”, dancing, with a streetlight behind Him forming a halo. The movie is not overtly a depiction of the Nativity—these could be any people, and we make the association with the Nativity because of the symbolic content. Do we read more into Biblical tales than is really there? Rather, we should read more into life, which is itself a miracle. The themes, the mythology, are universally applicable.

This production involved Artistic Director Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices—a mixed chorus of 20 or so seated on stage behind the fabulous soloists: Shu-Cheen Yu (soprano), Kirsti Harms (mezzo) and Herbert Perry (baritone), and 3 countertenors. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, occupying the pit, was nicely directed by Alasdair Neale.

El Niño , director Peter Sellars, composer John Adams, director Paul Hillier, Theatre of Voices, Festival Theatre, March 2-6

Central Market is probably the most diverse site in Adelaide; a rich array of cultural practices operate here. Para//elo has exploited its ambience and pace to make connections between migration experience, trade, exchange and consumption. Stories From the Market Place engages with performance, installation, testimony and tourism to think the place of home. Homelessness at home. “We all leave and arrive from somewhere.”

Drinking coffee or tea is the thing one does while waiting, meeting or simply sitting. Lucia’s is legendary for its consistently good brew. We are offered an espresso cup painted with ships, sea and sky. A waiter fills it with a dark brew and gives us crisp sweet bread. Customers (audience) and performers mingle amongst the (as usual) closely packed tables. Over there someone is writing her shopping list, it’s Susie, we say hello across the tables. A stranger sits at our table near the small door. His coffee hasn’t arrived yet, the waiter assures him it’s on its way. Lucia’s always works at its own pace. The operatic score swells behind us and the customers/audience laugh as waiters signal the switch to performance with slow accentuated movements, out of place in the bustle of 7.30am pre-work chat. I’m glad this doesn’t last for long—this place is too small to be displaced in.

The man sitting at our table (Juha Vanhakartano) lays out 4 sugar cubes in a neat line, pours the recently arrived coffee into the saucer, puts one cube between his lips and proceeds to drink via the sugar filter. In between he tells us this is a Finnish practice. “Finnish coffee is bitter…one is always falling onto ice.” In this way the performers talk to those at their tables, across tables, tell stories; waiters bustle, wipe, collect, as waiters do. It’s a bit like the real thing but we are in it and the performers are performing. Susie (Fraser) is performing too. Her movements slow as the music/mood shifts to something approaching disquiet. It works. The talking stops.

We (we are a group, from beginning to end) are bustled out of the cafe door by a beckoning tour guide (Jason Sweeney). It’s all rather garrulous, as tours are reputed to be. We are shuffled along Laneway #5. Performers weave in and out, carrying luggage. Do those who flee always have time to pack? We arrive at a place adjacent to the Korean sushi stall. Headsets dangle around 3 long rectangular slabs. Like good audience members we climb up to sit on the stools, don the headsets and gaze, stunned and a bit awkward. These seats are high. The tables turn out to be vitrines lined with newspaper clippings, marriage certificates, photos and cartoons. Iconic things arranged down the centre represent the interweaving of 3 traditions, Islamic, Christian and perhaps Buddhist.

The visual aesthetic stops one thinking about this mix of otherness. More successful is the audio (Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud with Jason Sweeney), an ambient and disturbing mix of market sounds and story fragments. These images don’t settle quickly. A man from Iraq and another from Afghanistan offer small sweet things and fragrant tea in gold rimmed glass tumblers. To eat, to serve and be served are perhaps the things we first have in common.

Stories From The Market Place, Para//elo, creative director Teresa Crea, performers Irena Dangov, Susie Fraser, Antonio Gorgone, Jason Sweeney, Juha Vanhakartano, Adelaide Central Market, Gouger Street, March 2-9.

Red Dust Theatre’s first ever production wasn’t part of the original Sellars’ conception for the Adelaide Festival—but it well might have been. For it offers a no holds barred portrait of Black and White relations in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) with a rich vein of metaphor, poetry and song. Steve Berkoff goes up the Alice! But it has a discontinuous narrative that never quite stands up, and a cast that’s young in performance and don’t quite deliver on the promise of Watts’ text.

Throughout, the train is a vital image. It’s the dragon that the young Black Ulysses sets out to kill; it’s a comedic element (as in The Career Highlights of the Mamu) at which ineffectual spears are thrown; it’s the Rainbow Serpent of the White Man’s Dreaming; and, most important of all, it’s the driving, masculine force that gives train-driver Ed, the White villain of the piece, his power. So why symbolise the train with a wheelchair—the ultimate image of disablement?

The use of a name like Ulysses, of course, raises certain expectations. But his role in the play seems not to be the endless journeying as punishment by the gods of the Greek original, but the pursuit of Ed—corruptor and brutaliser of his daughter Violet, Ulysses’ only beloved. Ulysses might succeed in rescuing Violet from the River (the notorious, dry Todd riverbed—another strong image in the play), if only he has time. For it’s there that Mparntwe’s castoffs (including Ed’s wife Molly) go for the nirvana of booze and sweaty, indiscriminate sex that briefly allow them to forget the pain of living. But will he get there before the rains come to wash the town’s detritus away? Or will he be fatally distracted by the hunting of Ed?

And are we distracted from Watts’ metaphysics by Hodder’s lively rapping and Nampatjinpa Castle’s raw balladeering? There’s a rich brew here which is poised to explode. I wish it well in finding the balance that will light its fire.

Train Dancing, Red Dust Theatre of Alice Springs, writer Michael Watts, director Craig Matthewson, performers Steve Hodder, Jacinta Nampitjinpa Castle, Roger Menadue, Barbara Saunders, Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 3-9.

Morgan Lewis, Bernadette Regan, Shannon Williams, Charles Russel, The Longest Night

“It’s about generated fiction that’s based in reality”, said director Alicia Talbot of The Longest Night when she was interviewed (RealTime 47, p 33) in February. My first taste of Urban Theatre Projects was initially clouded by that “generated fiction” idea of the expectation of a more rounded and complete theatrical experience that established the problems of dislocated kids/young adults, and then tried to craft some solutions. After all, UTP hadn’t only been working with Adelaide’s Angle Park community (and Sydney’s High Street Youth Centre in Parramatta), but had had the constant presence of youth and social workers as well.

But the word “protocols” was much in evidence at the Adelaide Festival. It produced a marvellous sense of ceremonial respect at the opening Kaurna Palti Meyunna; it was the excuse for Koori film activists to approve of Ivan Sen’s explicit Beneath Clouds and to mount a campaign against the much softer Australian Rules; and it perhaps accounts for UTP not taking their plays outside the input offered by the primary community they’re working with.

Bernie would love to find a way out of the trap she’s in. Her kid’s in care, and she’d love to be able to prove to the bitch who robs her of him half way through his birthday party that she’s freed herself of dependence on alcohol, drugs and the ‘friends’ who used to share an empty life based around them. But that gut-wrenching loss of her son would weaken the bravest soul. The comfort blanket comes out; Carlos comes in to mend the loo—and the scene is set for some heavy back-sliding.

Where UTP really hit their straps is in making this back-sliding look great fun (at least the first time round); Bernie’s black dog might genuinely have been let off the leash—within the limits of house rules about banging-on only in the unmended loo and no whacking up. But Carlos (Charles Russell) is dealing, Shannon (Shannon Williams) is rapping to oblivion, Lucia (Lucia Mastrantone) is simply twitching for a fix, and Morgan (Morgan Lewis) has the film-making delusions of Cecil B de Mille. As Bernie (Bernadette Regan) withdraws inexorably up the wall, they simply trash the place, and her good intentions.

It’s a really imaginative use of the space; and there’s a strong sense of a Legs on the Wall-style physical theatre to enhance the text. But the problem is that it all happens twice. Second time round it seems as though everybody’s banging a door as they fail to conclude yet another illogical argument. And the music gets louder. Only the front row of little Nunga girls lying on mattresses is still giggling.

It had been lovely to see these girls earlier working with the UTP company in the community centre square—girls tumbling, boys rapping, everybody line dancing. All wore Access All Areas/Artist tags; they were on the team. The audience wore coloured ribbons, denoting a group to be taken on tour by one of the community participants on the project. Ironically, single mum Karina seemed a whole lot better supported by the resources of the Parks Centre than Bernie. Maybe a way out is possible?

Urban Theatre Projects, The Longest Night, director Alicia Talbot, sound Rose Turtle, The Parks Community Centre, Angle Park, Adelaide Festival 2002, March 2-10.

The only real hope for a sustainable future involves a creative synthesis of the arts and the sciences to develop new ways of meeting our needs and our hopes.
Ian Lowe, “Bringing Art and Science Together”, conVerge, catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002.

Lowe’s words are lettered on the wall of the conVerge exhibition highlighting the theme “Where art and science meet” and emphasising the role of artists as explorers, commentators and mediators of technology and its impacts. It declares an interest beyond the simple theme of art influenced by science, and focuses—in theory at least—on the benefits of cross-disciplinarity and the advantages of collaboration. The accompanying catalogue essays all advocate attempts to transcend the traditional boundaries between the 2 fields as they are usually perceived, that is, as opposing and mutually exclusive. This, it is ambitiously proposed, will aid in the development of a more complete understanding of the world we inhabit and the complex interrelationships at work within it.

This holistic approach is illustrated by the inclusion of the large Ngurrara canvas 1 and Marrawarra and Jila by artists of the Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency that introduce the viewer to the exhibition. They are neither visually nor conceptually what is expected in an exhibition about ‘science.’ Characterising “Indigenous Knowledge” as a “science engagement” initially seems a contortion. Their incorporation however makes more sense in light of this conception of science as a culturally specific knowledge system rather than a discrete field of knowledge, although the commitment to such an approach is belied (and the works possibly reduced to tokenism?) by the other works in the exhibition which do not take such a conceptually broad approach.

Many of these works utilise elements associated with popular conceptions of science: light and sound effects, computer-generated images and robotics. The scientific theme is therefore most apparent in execution and their overly technological ‘look’ tends to reduce them to illustrations rather than excavations of their respective issues. Adam Donovan’s Perimetry involves a tripod-mounted camera, sensitive to movement, that swivels to follow visitors as they move around the gallery. It might speak of surveillance and control, but its straightforward presentation, and the fact that it was produced as the result of Donovan’s residency at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, renders the instrument gadget-like, more suited to the curiosities of a science centre. Pig Wings, by Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary, is a recreated laboratory in which pig bone tissue is being grown in the shape of wings. Pertinent as the issues it raises are—the cloistered laboratory could easily be cultivating animal organs for use in humans—the work seems to be merely the simple transplantation of equipment from a scientific location to an art-specific one. Fascinating though the experiment is, the focus remains prosaic.

Patricia Piccinini engages with similar issues in her work Synthetic Organism 2 (SO2): The Siren Mole, though she bridges the art/science divide more skillfully. Her invented creature, the blind and lumpy Siren Mole, is presented in a museum/zoo-style display case, complete with droppings and an artificial backdrop. These specimens are accompanied by 3 large photographs that document the creature in a laboratory, which, as the catalogue notes, is its natural habitat. A (literally) constructed animal, the Siren Mole is presented as a consequence of genetic manipulation, not an abstract “what if?”, but its result. Piccinini has brought the technology to life, and in doing so withdraws the luxury we now have of being able to speculate on our reactions to invented life.

The majority of works are based on current controversial issues. Martin Walch explores the aftermath of mining in Over written/Under written, which profiles the landscape of the Mount Lyell mine in Tasmania. Whilst Walch is more interested in the apocalyptic scenery as the “new wilderness” than an explicit condemnation of the associated degradation, the photographs he exhibits are as strong as environmental campaign images. Their presentation, however, avoids such documentary sensationalism: peering through eyepieces at the illuminated stereo photographs, housed in wall-mounted packing cases, the viewer is transported by the vivid miniature detail of the enclosed world. The convergence of man and nature is undeniably illustrated in the ‘wilderness’ that is left after human intervention.

In a time when emotions have been reduced to chemicals and personality is determined by genetic sequence, Justine Cooper’s Transformers is a dynamic and mesmerising exploration of identity and individuality. Various constituents that distinguish a person—faces, fingerprints, DNA—are projected on the 2 sides of a long tent like structure. These are combined with poetry and statements that explore personality and the factors that act upon it: “I feel more Chinese because I am phenotypically Chinese”; “I believe that over 60% of our personality is determined by genes.”

The predominance of technology-based works mean that certain others do not fit. Jason Hampton’s small illustrative paintings such as Kidney Problems in Aboriginal Australia have now Reached Epidemic Proportions, combine intricate Aboriginal imagery with computer graphics. Although his illustrations of a biological analysis of Aboriginal health are engaging, the works are too small and too detailed to be carefully considered amongst the many large installation works. Fiona Hall’s Cell Culture is also in alien surroundings, with its quiet, expressive and decidedly un-technological exploration of DNA modification. Hall has created beaded and plastic animals whose various body parts have been replaced with Tupperware containers, highlighting the focus on ‘usefulness’ that directs much research.

The disparate nature of the works undermines the coherence of the exhibition, though this is possibly the result of its being organised by an 8-person ‘working group’ (rather than curators). While the stated focus is both pertinent and commendable, the works fail to accord with it. It is interesting, and enlightening, to compare the 2 disciplines, their associated structures of knowledge and methodologies, and to realise the potential that collaboration offers. In conVerge, however, the meeting of art and science remains conflicted.

Adelaide Biennial, conVerge: Where Art and Science Meet, Art Gallery of South Australia, March 1 – April 25

OTIS looks like a piece of glorified junk. Soldered out of salvaged scrap metal, it is an instrument that epitomizes analogue in the raw, demands to be played and necessitates the gesture of performance. Yet as musician mik la vage begins to draw his electric drill towards the iron strings, it is the hidden mechanics that reconstitute the sound we hear, replayed and looped with delays and harmonies created out of sight. This is analogue-metal-machine-noise: stretched, tortured and affected by technology. It was one of the more graphic images of the Analogue 2 Digital (A2D) Electronic Music Conference in Adelaide Fringe 2002.

Machine sounds, whether music, noise or function, have infiltrated the sonic landscape in the way that Front 242 back-ends a Nutrigrain advert, the Rolling Stones have sold out to Microsoft and before you know it Dead or Alive have given a motorcar manufacturer the rights to their one-hit wonder, You spin me right round baby. Too many TV ads can spin anyone’s ideas around, but where the soundtrack to our lives ends up cannot be taken for granted.

A2D explored not so much the where or the why, but how electronic music got to be where it is. Running over 3 days at Adelaide University, it was divided into forums (Talk the Walk), artist presentations, (From Blips to Beeps) and workshops (Digging in the Digital Dirt).

If one were to create the soundtrack to A2D, held at a tumultuous time in Adelaide’s cultural calendar, it must include the shiver of the visiting Queen’s wave, the stomps of Indigenous dance performers on the Adelaide Festival opening night, the whoosh of the stunt trapeze and the beer-swilling rock rumblings of university Orientation week.

The presentation by participating artist Kaffe Matthews emphasised even more these all-encompassing elements of our acoustic space. During her improvised performance, the boisterous O-week enthusiasts could be heard loudly through the cinema walls. Whilst the audience were obviously distracted by this ‘interruption’, Matthews finished by explaining that she hoped her mikes had picked up the sounds and incorporated them. She creates her performances by taking minute recordings of her surroundings, whether they be Danish squats or London art galleries, effecting them live using a laptop and LISA (a program created at Dutch music institution STEIM) and creating lush sonic soundscapes permeated with crackles and techno-esque beats.

Matthews spoke about her journey through music, from her early MIDI violin performances to her collaboration with acoustic pioneer Alan Lamb and her current work. She has been ‘playing’ LISA since 1986, and despite only working with a laptop, has been ‘studying her instrument’ just as one would an acoustic instrument.

A recurring and, for many, redundant topic was: can electronic music be played live and debated in such forums as Attack of the DAT? Kate Crawford put it well when she said electronic music demanded to be appreciated as a new aesthetic. But for most of the already tech-savvy audience, machine-made music is not a lightbulb idea, and certainly not fleshy enough to be debated for an entire session.

A more interesting area of contention is the changing nature of the recording and mastering process in the digital age. Stephen Wittington, Eyespine and Jesse Reynolds discussed this in a Digital Sound Formats forum, pointing out that the process of digital recording has, on the one hand, eliminated the mistakes (or glitches), yet numerous musicians are still hell bent on recreating the hiss of a faulty speaker or the crackle of vinyl. Many fetishists out there are still obsessed with incorporating the ghost in the machine.

Wade Marynowsky gave a refreshing presentation of his audio-visual software created using MAX and NATO. Performing as Spanky, his sounds are accessible and beat-driven, triggering images of post-apocalyptic environmental destruction, colonial bravado and mutated textures. Here we can see the music.

Wax Sound Media and Andrew Kettle joined festival hopper Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, in the Soundscapes discussion about audio installations and sound ‘art.’ I was lucky to catch Scanner’s Stories form the Market Place commissioned for the Adelaide Festival. With performance group Para//elo, Scanner captured the energy and vitality of the Central Market, a wonderful piece of Adelaide’s cultural history.

The forum Collectives with Kate Crawford, The Bird and Kenny Sabir, discussed issues addressing the culture of music. In places such as Sydney, rivalry and politics can lead to the sad demise of many inspirational music initiatives, but the Adelaide participants felt their city was small enough to not necessitate any formalised electronic music collectives. The forum debated the rapid rate at which tools, especially computer-based programs, are created by large companies. Are the people who create these products actually using them? Do composers have time to become proficient on them before the next model is churned out for a quick buck?

Far from breaking any rules, the Electronic Concert Series, held in the stately Elder Hall, showcased the diversity of electronic musical instruments from an almost historical perspective. In a fantastic collaboration, Brisbane’s Topology and Loops combined an orchestral piece with recordings of radio transmissions, tracing the medium backwards from seminal voice recordings of Lindy Chamberlain, Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill to Marconi’s 1901 broadcast: contact through the ether.

Another ‘historical’ performance, synapse, dating back to 1976, used a PDP-11 computer ‘interacting’ with a live performer. Composed by MIT founder Barry Vascoe, it was an interesting precursor to his current project audio spotlight which projects sound and image onto the viewer from a narrow spotlight. Other performances included wish, by Stevie Wishart and her hurdygurdy, as well as Tristam Carey, Jon Rose and synergy by Martin Ng and Jim Denley.

It was at the closing night party, 2002AD, at Adelaide’s Minke Bar that the current state of digital music was ultimately celebrated. Held in collaboration with the trickster VJ class, the night showcased over 20 acts including Scanner, The Bird, Ollie Olson, Spanky, Sub Bass Snarl and a host of Adelaide acts such as DJ trIP, froST and Kristan Thomas. During a dance performance a few days later, the speaker exploded three quarters of the way into the piece. To be honest, I didn’t really notice. I just thought that the composer had succeeded in replicating speaker hiss exceptionally well. Long live the new flesh.

Analogue 2 Digital, Electronic Music Conference, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 28-March 2.

Originally conceived of as an annex to the more ‘legitimate’ Adelaide Festival, the Fringe has this year seemingly surpassed it in both popularity and visibility. While the Adelaide Festival had attracted controversy since it announced that there would be no specific visual arts program, the Fringe’s visual arts content was, as usual, plentiful, dynamic and varied. Though its all-welcome policy can result in a notoriously hit-and-miss program, in which the works are as diverse in standard as in content, the anything-goes atmosphere aroused a sort of undiscriminating enjoyment in which critical analysis became almost redundant.

Fringe exhibitions were hosted in unorthodox locations: hotels, cafes and pubs, public spaces, shop windows, attached to the bars of carparks, the gardens and driveways of people’s homes. Oscar Ferreiro’s Skidmarks was based in various suburban service stations, where viewers directed by a list on the internet could examine patterns of tyre marks left by speeding cars. The Driveway project involved private driveways and backyards displaying works viewed on a walking tour. Held over 3 weekends, viewers visited houses around Adelaide, watching artists cutting the lawn with scissors or transforming garden sheds with lightboxes and webs of plastic.

In its own version of the lonely hearts database, Fringe organisers connected prospective exhibitors with venues—the ensuing assignations ranged from successful to dubious. Hindley Street and its surrounds were the focus in the city, which is demonstrative of the success of recent pressure to re-create the formerly seedy west end as the “Arts End.” Not for white cube devotees, exhibitions were held in hotels, shops and clubs, in the cinema and in shabby, disused buildings. Results were mixed: a venue such as the Novotel was eminently suitable for the classy Passion Pop, a collection of ceramics and glass, as well as the beautiful Anangu Pitjantjatjara silks that floated in its foyer. In contrast, the many cafe and club settings, as they often do, tended to undermine the artistic merit of displayed works, relegating them to decoration.

The Fringe’s ability—and willingness—to incorporate a variety of work saw it encompass such diverse showings as the Helpmann Academy exhibition of art school graduates, and From The Inside, a collection of works by Aboriginal people in jail. Exhibitions such as the rigorously theoretical, concept-driven photographs of Polyopia’s Mise au Point contrasted with the emphasis on technique and naturalistic aesthetic of the many craft-oriented shows. All the exhibitions reinforced this sense of diversity, as the viewer indulged in an almost gluttonous consumption.

Having already revealed her circus talents in the Lunar Tent at the Garden of Earthly Delights, Sue Broadway, one of the founding members of the internationally celebrated Circus Oz, now takes us back through the generations of her vaudeville family. The show is part tribute and part parody. As her great-great-aunt Elsie used to say: “A mistake is an opportunity.” There are lots of those, and lots of manifestations of the versatile ancestor appearing as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and tripling as Miss Muffet, the spider and the tuffet.

Elsie, Australia’s own Lola Montez, shone during the Gold Rush days of Bendigo, and in a variety of tights, boots and unusual corsetry, Broadway makes her entrances and strikes an attitude. Here we have an elaborately laced Black Swan drowning in her crinoline to the strains of Tchaikovsky, only to emerge from a tent metamorphosed into a saucy little beach-belle. Jeff Turpin plays straight man, or in this case horse, to her increasingly outrageous antics. She balances peacock feathers on her nose, makes her belly do awful things and starts the juggling acts and ‘object manipulations’ which are the show’s core.

But it’s when she strides on as a horned Valkyrie with a few additions from Oxford Street that schoolchildren, sober matrons and scribbling critics howl with laughter, a collective fit only increased by the appearance of Jeff in similar gear styled for gents. Together they make wicked music on their steel naughty bits, Sue teasingly tickling a tin breast to make it chime, and Jeff innocently experimenting with the number of cones he can remove from his phallus until they fly though the air and get a good juggling. The combination of Mozart and Fellini produces lovely echoes of Papageno and Giulietta degli Spiriti. It also reminds us just how vital the tradition of music hall has been. The stage set, a lush little affair of red velvet curtains and peacock feathers, readily adapts into a screen on which other great vaudevilleans strut their stuff. George Wallace does his celebrated falling dance. Roy Rene crashes Society. Little Tich performs his marvellous leaning routines, and Broadway demonstrates how he did it with his special shoes. Slides of her own family on the road also blazon out the trademark name, besides alluding gently to personal pains and cute little mothers with bobbed hair.

The penultimate act is a tearjerker from another dimension, where primly costumed housewives pour themselves tea from pots, saucers and cups on the head, predictably ending up with brown liquid pouring in a fountain-effect over the face. The slightly miffed performer consoled herself by taking no chances with the sugar bowl. I’d say she got in at least 2 lumps before politely offering iced vovos to the audience. The WOW FINISH deserved its name, with both performers animating the whole stage with spinning plates, flying clubs, magic dishes and their pure Variety.

Sue Broadway & Jeff Turpin, Eccentric Acts, The Union, The Hub, Adelaide Fringe 2002, February 22 – March 16

Director-General of the Arts. It’s a grand title. Its possessor, Roger Wilkins, doesn’t, however, sport epaulettes but rather, a bow tie and a quiet, urbane demeanour. He once studied and taught law and philosophy. His burning arts passions are music, mainly classical and jazz. He learned piano and the pipe organ. He has a particular interest in German literature, poetry and plays. He is Cabinet Secretary to the NSW Government and Director-General of Arts, heading the NSW Ministry for the Arts. My primary interest in meeting Wilkins is to gauge his awareness of the health (or not) of the arts in NSW and to see how policy shapes the government’s vision for the arts. It seems I’ve come to the right man.

Policy & action

“My pre-eminent background is in public policy,” says Wilkins. “I’ve been head of the Cabinet office for about 7 years and I’ve worked across a huge range of public policy issues for the last 10-15 years, from policy on greenhouse gases to health and education. In the Cabinet office I have special units on biotechnology, on drugs strategy, salinity and branches involved in social policy, legal policy, justice, competition.” What excites Wilkins about his role is “the capacity to influence major directions in terms of the future of Australia and New South Wales…If I didn’t I would have gone back and practiced private law or something like that.”

Wilkins still reads philosophy: “I’m excited by ideas and my interest in taking over the Ministry for the Arts was precisely that. I approached the Premier and said I wanted to do this job…I think it’s an index of civilization how the arts and culture fare in a society, and governments, particularly in this country, haven’t recognised the centrality of arts and culture. By that I mean not simply some of those arguments about increasing gross domestic product and economic activity, tourism potential, getting more people through the gate and so on. You’ve got to drill a bit deeper to understand…The arts really is the forum in which important values and ideas play themselves out and that’s a bit of an imponderable, difficult to explain to Treasury.”

Mapping the arts

Clearly Wilkins thinks he can do something for the arts: “it’s an issue which over the last 12 months I’ve been talking to a lot of people about, pre-eminently the Premier of course, as he’s Minister for the Arts. The first thing you need to have is some fairly clear sense of direction. That doesn’t mean you sit on your hands for 3 years while you plan, but it does mean that you need to rebuild your boat while you’re floating a little. You need to develop a framework for action. The arts is no different from a lot of areas of policy which I see from where I sit. There’s a degree of the ad hoc, a degree of isolation from other activities in society just because people build boundaries around bureaucratic territories…

“So, it’s important to build better frameworks for policy so that when you intervene…for example, do something about the MCA or Performance Space…it’s not simply because somebody came through the door with a problem. You need to understand how that fits into a much larger picture…what the issue was that they came through the door about. Ostensibly it might be a question of money but that’s the symptom. You need to understand where that’s coming from and how it fits into a total picture. So I think the challenge for arts agencies is to get that picture. What I’ve been doing for the last 12 months is trying to understand the topography of these issues a little better.”

Whole of government

Perhaps then, thinking of maps, Wilkins’ role as Cabinet Secretary gives the arts a better route than it’s had before between ministry and minister? “I don’t think that’s the point of it. Evan Williams [the former Arts Secretary] and the Premier were always closely co-operating. The value I think I can probably add as a Cabinet Secretary is the ‘whole of government’ approach, which means that for whatever reason I probably have better entree to other CEOs and I can readily talk to and get co-operation from people like State Development, Education, Planning and even the Justice Department. You can begin to examine areas of common interest and mutual benefit. You can begin to build joint programs and to think, for example, are we really making the best use of the money that we’re spending in the arts from an educational point of view and vice versa.”

Wilkins sees his position as presenting opportunities to explain that the arts is not simply for an elite and is not marginal to government policy. He points to the Premier’s crime prevention initiatives emerging from analysis of specific problems in different communities: “a lot of the solutions don’t just come from more police and better law enforcement, they come from a variety of programs designed to address a whole bunch of social issues…part of which is getting people more involved in cultural and artistic activities and using that as a lever of policy. Not that I’m advocating a purely utilitarian approach to the arts but there are areas where you can get a win win.”

Initiatives & policy

I ask Wilkins where arts initiatives emanate from and how they relate to policy. Western Sydney received $23.6 million earlier this year for the arts, primarily in capital development—refurbished theatres, arts centres and galleries, new multi-arts spaces—building on earlier funding and paid for this time from a stamp duty surplus.

For Wilkins, policy development has many sources. “Initiatives about arts and culture almost inevitably do come through the Ministry but that doesn’t mean that the Ministry necessarily thinks them all up. You might be responding to some problem, the Premier and the Premier’s office ring down and say that they want something to happen. They may come out of Cabinet. They may come out of the Parliamentary system and the Ministry system, from the private sector…or the arts and culture sector.”

Wilkins sees the Ministry as providing a framework in which these initiatives can operate, where the ideas behind them can make sense. The Western Sydney initiative he sees as “a nice mix…it’s policy opportunism in a way but it’s informed by the fact that you had done your homework and you did understand what infrastructure was required out there. And people in the Ministry had done that [work] over a period of time. Policy development—and I’ve seen a lot of it—is having a good appreciation of the topography, having a framework of policy within which you want to act, but then spotting windows of opportunity and when you see them, you go through. That’s very important. There’s a degree of entrepreneurship and opportunism in policy.”

In Sydney’s west it must also involve new levels of involvement of local councils in the arts, especially once the new facilities are up and running and require content. Wilkins sees the initiatives as providing leverage to encourage local government not only to make sure the venues are used, but to be involved in cultural planning more generally: “So it gives you entree into a whole extra level of policy development.”

At this point in the conversation I’m sensing an apparent gap between, on the one hand, the broad principle that the arts is good for a society and, on the other, the pragmatic responsiveness of arts initiatives. There are countries that have arts, even artform policies (as Denmark has for music), realised as acts of Parliament. Wilkins is disapproving: “there is a danger in hankering after what’s called ‘the arts policy’ as if it’s some tablet handed down from Mt Sinai. That’s not the way good policy develops. [I’ll give you] a couple of good examples from outside of the arts area, both with this current government. One is natural resources policy. The Premier has actually pushed a lot of initiatives on things like salinity, native vegetation clearing, water reform…In a sense, they start off as separate instances of initiatives that people want to embark on. You begin to see that they come together. There’s something that all these things have in common. There’s a story you can tell about how they coalesce into a coherent policy which then drives further work. So there’s a type of iterative process between doing sensible things in particular areas, then drawing them together and saying, hey there’s an overall direction we want to move in. This has been successful. We want to push it further. Very rarely do you see it…

“With the drug strategy, it was ready to happen, if you like. It was ready when people and politicians started talking about the demand side rather than the supply side of the drug problem, which is what the Drug Summit was all about. That’s how policy gets made. It’s sort of like a big jigsaw puzzle where you begin to discern what the puzzle is about and then you begin to discern what the gaps are about. The major difference from a jigsaw puzzle is that it’s not static, it’s dynamic. It keeps moving about.”

Giving direction

“Having said that, I think there is a need to give leadership and to articulate policy directions…It would be to say, for example, that we think we really want to spend the next 5 years concentrating on all aspects of the performing arts. We want to actually get that jigsaw of problems and issues and opportunities sorted. If you give that sort of signal, a lot of people will start coming out of the woodwork, talking to you about it. Opportunities will begin to make themselves. Particularly if someone like the Premier gets behind it. I just use that as a hypothetical example. So it’s a question of giving policy direction more than anything else. And you do it by example. You don’t just say things, you do things.”

A Ministry for the job?

The question then arises, is the Ministry for the Arts sufficiently well equipped for Wilkins’ vision of responsiveness and policy-making? He thinks so: “It’s an impressive organisation that I inherited. What I’ll say about it is not a criticism. It’s actually just saying where I think we could crank things up a notch. First of all, I think it should be basically about policy, and good public policy. It probably is a bit short of staff. It has been preoccupied with processing grants at the expense of people having time to spend on policy. I think it needs to be a little more active in terms of making an agenda…at a national level…and within State government, across portfolios.” Wilkins would like the Ministry “to get interested in curriculum and syllabus and what the education department is doing. I think we need to do a lot more work with local government in terms of looking at the opportunities there to broker regional cooperation. I think we need to talk to institutions and give them more strategic leadership in terms of the government saying what they expect…” He is concerned that without precise time frames and numbers “you end up with memoranda of understanding which are sort of motherhood things.” He would also like relationships between the Ministry and clients to be on a firmer footing: “I don’t see in a lot of cases why we don’t have longer term funding arrangements with people. Once again, that’s another example of where things are a bit ad hoc. People come in year after year and get a little bit of funding and they don’t know even one month before the end of the year whether they’re going to make it. That strikes me as an odd financial arrangement if nothing else.”

Artform survival

While federal and state government initiatives in areas of youth, touring and regional and suburban development have been significant, there has been no increase in funding for basic artform activity for many years. In effect there are insufficient funds for survival let alone growth, with greater and greater gaps between projects for many artists and infrastructure organisations becoming less and less capable of offering support. It’s something that the late Richard Wherrett, who sat on the Ministry’s Advisory Committee, felt very strongly about; that basic artform funding had come to a standstill for a decade. Although sympathetic to the various initiatives (and some participating in them), many artists feel that support for research and development, the work in the laboratory, is an area governments are not interested in; it’s simply not politically opportune. Is this true?

Wilkins is sympathetic. “In essence, I agree with you…On any analysis of the way in which artforms prosper and develop you have to say that if the R and D end of the spectrum, the laboratory, if you like, is having problems, then the artform has a problem. So I think when you ask does government understand that, I certainly understand that and I think the Premier appreciates that. We understand where the R and D end of the spectrum fits into the overall health of the artform and how it can contribute to a pluralism of ideas and of activity.

“What you do about the current problems is fairly clear cut. And in another sense, that would just feed into a conventional government funding program. What you need to do, for example with the performing arts, is to look at infrastructure—but it’s an expansive concept. It means basically making sure that everything from the space in which to perform to organisations to help produce, organisations to help create marketing opportunities and audience development, that all of that is in place for people to take advantage of.”

A case in point: Performance Space

“And you know we’ve been talking to [Artistic Director] Fiona Winning and Performance Space [about the future home of the organisation]. It’s about finding some key organisations of that sort [to work together] which you then say, well, we are comfortable that you know what you’re doing and we’re going to back you on this. And I think that that is really one thing that government should be doing, and one thing that we are trying to do.

“We’d like to do something about Eveleigh [the former railway Carriage Works in Redfern including Technology Park and an undeveloped site formerly managed by Company B Belvoir and now temporarily housing some small performance companies]. I think the boss will be keen to do something on that. It’s a question of money, of budget priorities. I can’t forecast…But we’re certainly keen to do something about it if possible.”

Recently, Rupert Myer, who is chairing the Visual Arts Inquiry, announced that there would be “no pot of gold” at the end of the inquiry. Similar noises have been coming from the Small to Medium companies and organisations inquiry. There have been more than hints that the solutions to arts problems will be found in improved networking, improvements to infrastructure (did any mergers come out of Nugent?) and tax deals for artists. While these could be valuable, I insist to Wilkins that they simply don’t address basic artform funding levels. While it might be good to have a new building for Performance Space and other organisations dealing with the contemporary arts (Wilkins interrupts: “Not only a building, Keith. I would like to see them playing a much more active role in the development of that sector”) the issue currently is what work can Performance Space program when so many projects go unfunded?

Falling between governments

For Wilkins this raises a key issue, the relationship between the Australia Council and the state arts ministries. Once upon a time the former looked after the product and the other the infrastructure, but those lines have long blurred as the states have taken on more and more arts responsibility. The pressure is on for the states to make up for what the limited budget of the Australia Council can’t do and there’s widespread feeling, especially in NSW, that Council and the states are quite out of sync. Wilkins thinks that “there needs to be an accommodation, an agreement at federal level. The Nugent Report was an example of the first time anyone’s thought, in a sense, about the roles and responsibilities of different levels of government in relation to arts practice. So it’s a move in the right direction. You need to get some sort of arrangement or agreement like that in relation to the small to medium companies and in terms of the visual arts as well…At the moment, you have inefficiency between different levels of government. And I’ve done a lot of work on federalism in a lot of policy areas and I’ve got to say that at its best it’s a whole bunch of people sitting around and saying they should cooperate more. At its worst, it’s a whole bunch of people sitting around saying they’re not going to cooperate…If [the states are to provide] infrastructure, there’s got to be some arrangement about the production and the projects that are going to be given life through that infrastructure.”

Although he won’t be drawn on what plan of action he’ll recommend if the various inquiries come to nought, Wilkins thinks “it’s probably true that the answer lies in doing things more efficiently between levels of government and some injection of extra funding…At a state level we’re looking at getting more money into the grants system. That’s going to be an issue worked out through the budget process. So I don’t know if there will be extra money, but really the critical thing I come back to is public policy, good frameworks and an understanding of what you want to do.”

On the plight of small to medium dance projects and companies in NSW (a distinctly sensitive pressure point in the federal-state relationship), Wilkins pinpoints the issues of sufficient studio space and “the capacity to allow the development of choreography in this country. So probably we need another 1 or 2 small dance companies where people can get more opportunities…That probably won’t break the bank…A propos of that, what you find in arts and cultural policy is how much you can actually achieve with a very small amount of money compared with a lot of the other policy areas I work in.”

Off the map

A little buoyed by some of the possibilities that Wilkins has hinted at I say, “So we can look forward to art that nourishes and challenges and is not only sustainable but grows?” Wilkins reply is interesting, if unexpected, taking us back into unmapped terrain—what can be done for the arts outside of direct funding. In his experience in other areas of public policy “the point of funding people is normally not so they just stay on the government teat. What you normally would try and do would be to find some way of setting them free. I would have thought especially in the arts more than anywhere else that people would be suspicious of government funding, given the track record of some regimes. So it’s a question, Keith, and I’m not talking about withdrawal of funds or making the pie smaller, of how should we interact in terms of grant funding? I’ve said to my people we’re sort of picking winners…One of the things I’d like to investigate without threatening anybody is to look at what other models there might be. I don’t feel comfortable choosing what people put on.”

This takes us back to the arts map and how to read it in order to make the most of it. It’s something that Terry Cutler, the Australia Council Chair, raised in our RealTime interview with him [RT45 page 6]. Cutler’s involved in the federal government cluster study of new media infrastructure and networking in Australia. Wilkins says that, “One of the people who’s impressed me in the last few months is Simon Roodhouse [Research Professor, Faculty of Arts Science & Education, Bolton Institute] from the UK. He came out here and talked about what seemed interesting to me at the time…Looking at the [arts] topography, audits of artistic or cultural activity…you begin to find that there’s a great deal more activity than you actually understood was going on. Then you can begin to see ways in which people can cooperate to their own mutual benefit. And we don’t do enough of that here. We don’t do enough lateral thinking.”

The good news

A few weeks after I’d interviewed Roger Wilkins, it was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (Bryce Hallett, “Railyard becomes arts central as theatre companies roll in”, March 21) that, “The Eveleigh Carriage Works in Redfern is to become a new inner city performing arts hub with the State Government’s announcement that it would buy the site from State Rail for $15m. The Carriage Works and blacksmith’s shop will become a permanent home for companies such as Legs on the Wall, Theatre Kantanka and Stalker Theatre…In addition to offices and rehearsal studios, a contemporary performance space is also planned for the site.” This is exciting news for the performance community, now eagerly waiting to hear what kind of role Performance Space might play in this significant development.

Kathryn who is thirteen years old, is staying after school at her grandparent’s house. It is nine o’clock on a November evening. She has escaped the company of her grandparents to play with her grandmothers’ cat, which is a queen named Lucy, by moving into the sunroom of her grandparent’s house. After some minutes of happily petting the cat it has turned on Kathryn, penetrating the skin of her left index finger with its fangs and raising three lines of skin on her left wrist with the claws of its left paw. In response to Lucy’s attack, Kathryn has grabbed at the cat in an effort to disentangle herself from it. She has been fortunate enough to find the cat’s collar with three fingers of her right hand. This has allowed her sufficient purchase on Lucy’s slippery form to remove the cat to the carpeted floor of the sunroom. Kathryn has placed her injured finger in her mouth so as to contain her pain and her blood. She has then recognised that she has wet herself and has, simultaneously, taken the finger from her mouth. 2001. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Artist Profile: Kristian Burford

Burford makes life-size, hyperrealistic sculptures of figures, installing them in often painstakingly constructed ‘sets’, usually creations of domestic settings. These figures typically appear naked or only very partially clothed, and might all…be seen as having in various ways lost or given up, if only for a moment, their self-control. ….

So far as Burford wants us to look at his work as if it is life, rather than art, he places us in an awkward situation, witnessing, discovering typically private sexual acts in an intimate situation. Still, it’s hard to think of this as voyeuristic since the depicted figures do not answer, even unwittingly, the gaze of the voyeur with their own. They are self-possessed, their awareness is directed inwards. Michael Newall

Kristian Burford received an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 1998 and is currently undertaking the graduate program at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He was a finalist in both the inaugural Helen Lempriere National Sculpture award in 2001 and the inaugural National Sculpture Award at the National Gallery of Australia. He was recently included in Morbid Curiosity at ACME in Los Angeles and will be exhibiting at New York’s 1-20 Gallery in April.

Excerpt and biographical note from Michael Newall, “Kristian Burford: Wish Fulfilment”, Broadsheet. Vol 31. No 1, March-May, 2002. Reproduced with the permission of the author and the publisher, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.

The 2002 Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) was the third in Director Sean Doran’s quartet of themed festivals based upon the elements (Water in 2000, Earth in 2001, Air in 2002 and Fire completing the cycle in 2003)—a somewhat banal thematic structure, but one broad enough to allow for lateral interpretation. This year’s theme of Air inspired the title Slipstream for Visual Arts Manager Sophie O’Brien’s second consecutive PIAF visual arts festival.

O’Brien faced a considerable challenge curating a program relevant to a city whose visual arts scene is currently suffering something of a lull, due in part to a severe lack of art criticism combined with a dearth of exhibition spaces after a year fraught with gallery closures. In keeping with the general state of all-pervading apathy, Slipstream was the least-hyped visual arts festival in several years, but perhaps the most ambitious in terms of content, with a focus on research-based projects and ephemera. O’Brien seemed to have interpreted the theme primarily in terms of space—the marginalised and changing social spaces we inhabit and the space between things.

Slipstream featured a marked focus on large-scale audio-visual installation, headlined by War and Peace, at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. Comprising 2 installations by Lyndal Jones— Aqua Profunda, produced for the 2001 Venice Biennale, and 1996’s Spitfire 1,2,3—the exhibition was so good it’s difficult to believe the works were not created to be shown together. This was my first encounter with Jones’ work, and I was blown away by the sheer scale of the undertaking, combined with the relative novelty of an audio-visual installation requiring more of its audience than passively watching a screen. Spitfire 1,2,3 demands its viewer engage physically with the space in order to switch between 2 alternate soundtracks (one ambient music, the other spoken word) heard through headphones. Featuring dizzying aerial footage of the British countryside taken from the cabin of a Spitfire fighter jet, the work is remarkable in drawing the viewer’s attention to their own body in space. Aqua Profunda’s footage of constantly shifting reflections on water and the vertiginous bobbing of ferries, contrasted with intimate imagery of a woman speaking abstractedly of love and desire, effectively renders any single reading of the work impossible. Rather, Jones creates a space for shifting meanings, an abstract meditation on states of desire.

Research-based projects inevitably run the risk of falling short in a gallery context, as was the case with Multiplicity (Paris-Perth) at the Moores Building, part of European collective Multiplicity’s ongoing documentation of the changing use of urban environments. Despite only having 4 days in WA in which to work, the group successfully tapped into some of the specific racial tensions of Perth’s surrounding suburbs. In particular, a series of surveillance photographs following an anonymous Asian man from a non-descript suburban house, across town to his workplace in an industrial area, cleverly played upon the contradictions of racial otherness in a city that is closer to South East Asia than the rest of Australia. Ultimately, however, the cavernous Moores Building seems to have proven simply too vast a space for the group to fill in 4 days.

At PICA, Elvis Has Just Left the Building explored contemporary urban legends. I was disappointed by the show, given the subversive potential of the theme in a climate of post-September 11 global paranoia. Despite an intriguing mix of international exhibitors and highlights such as Ann-Sofi Siden’s mock horror-movie preview, The Clocktower (presenting her iconic protagonist, the Queen of Mud in an inner-city setting), the exhibition as a whole was not especially engaging.

Slipstream proved notable in showcasing emerging West Australian talent, with the majority of local contributors still in the early stages of their careers. Parallel Worlds, showing consecutively in an inner-city high-rise office space and International Art Space Kelleberrin in the WA wheatbelt, primarily featured recent graduates. Whilst the 2-venue curatorial premise was intriguing, I felt the show was unresolved in contextualising its venues—the capitalist associations of the metropolitan venue worked well, but there was something a little obvious in setting this up in opposition to a country town. Despite this, exhibitors produced some of the best works of their collective careers. In particular, Susan Flavell’s mattress landscapes and Pearl Rasmussen’s collaboration with illustrator Danny Armstrong were some of the most ambitious works yet produced by these artists.

The high point of my festival was unquestionably The Divine Comedy at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, which juxtaposed the work of 3 highly disparate artists: Francisco Goya, Buster Keaton and William Kentridge. Curated by AGWA’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Trevor Smith, the exhibition successfully linked 3 artists who really have very little in common, bar the project of social critique through surrealism. AGWA and Smith wowed the masses last year with their Robert McPherson Retrospective, but wisely chose to go low-key for 2002. The Divine Comedy was an intimate exhibition, reliant upon subtle juxtaposition (the raucous musical accompaniment to a Kentridge animation providing a weird soundtrack to Keaton’s silent films projected in another part of the gallery, for example). The exhibition was a major curatorial accomplishment.

As an integrated visual arts festival, Slipstream proved a somewhat flawed, yet remarkably ambitious undertaking in the context of a festival (and city) that has traditionally held a performing arts focus. A slipstream is “an air current”, O’Brien tells us in the festival guide, “one that moves in a forward direction behind and with a moving object, creating an airflow strong enough to pull you in its wake.” While a more cynical writer might suggest that being pulled along blindly in a cultural vacuum is an apt metaphor for the current state of the visual arts in Perth, there is much to be said for the sheer ambition of Slipstream, and with O’Brien moving on to new projects this year, I hope that the legacy of her vision will be evident in the Fire festival next year.

Slipstream: 14 exhibitions across 12 venues: War and Peace, Lyndal Jones, curator John Barrett-Lennard, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Feb 8-March 31; Multiplicity (Paris-Perth), The Moores Building, Feb 2-24; Elvis Has Just Left The Building, curator Boris Kremer, PICA, Jan 25-Feb 24; Parallel Worlds , curator Kate McMillan, Carillion City Arcade, Jan 20-Feb 24 & International Art Space Kellerberrin, Jan 20-Feb 17; The Divine Comedy, curator Trevor Smith, Art Gallery of WA, Feb 7-May 26; 2002 Perth International Arts Festival, Jan 26-Feb 26.

One of the innovations of this year’s Adelaide Festival was the inclusion of a number of new Australian films. The major triumph in the season was undoubtedly Ivan Sen’s first feature Beneath Clouds, one of the strongest and most deeply affecting films produced in this country.

The success of the film at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won awards for best debut feature and best new actress (for Dannielle Hall), signals Sen’s rapid ascent to international prominence. This rise has not been unearned, given his body of short and medium length works that also screened in Adelaide and provided a rich background for the feature film.

Another viewing context was the festival’s emphasis on Indigenous films and films on Indigenous issues. Beneath Clouds is a road movie dealing with the unlikely travelling companions Lena, a young woman running away from her Aboriginal background in search of an idealised Irish father, and Vaughn, a young Aboriginal man who breaks out of detention to see his dying mother. Over the course of little more than a day, they hitchhike from Moree to Sydney.

Sen is clearly conscious of his status as an Indigenous filmmaker, though he is also anxious to position the film as broadly accessible. He refers to his Aboriginal background as “something to be proud of, but also just a tag, a hook.” While his films represent a strongly personal and coherent insight into the experiences of Aboriginal youth in country towns, Sen also wants to generalise beyond this. He claims to be “always interested in people searching for something that makes them believe they belong somewhere.”

In discussions after the screening, Sen emphasised his interest in a sympathetic emotional engagement with characters: “I find it easy to see other people’s point-of-view,” he said, adding that his starting point for the film was that he “felt very close to both characters.” His aim was to “intensify the emotional journey of the characters to such a level that the audience will have no choice but to join them.”

The explosive emotional response to the film bears out the power of his filmmaking in bringing home the ways in which racially-derived pain is internalised. Sen says that, “I knew I wanted to create an emotion at the end of the film, but I didn’t know what the emotion was.”

Sen spoke of Beneath Clouds in terms of personal history and catharsis. Lena’s denial of her racial background has an autobiographical element, Vaughn’s character draws on the experience of a cousin. Themes, narrative fragments, and stylistic elements return from the earlier short films in a tightly condensed fashion. The 1998 film, Tears, features 2 characters named Vaughn and Lena walking a country road while the camera tracks laterally beside them. Sen wrote the feature script 4 years ago, and the retrospective of his shorts showed us the ways he has been sketching around it and honing the power of his craft.

Everything about Beneath Clouds speaks of sparseness and strength of vision. The characterisations are simple but unyielding. Lena and Vaughn suffer no bullshit. They have the close-mouthed scepticism of those on the margins. Anger chokes other emotion, but the project of the narrative is to ripen that anger to include emotions that will help the protagonists to re-find the possibilities for life.

Given the state of the world, and the way it leads you to withdraw from it, there is no neat or hopeful ending here, but there is the ability to understand your pain. This film emphasises the relevance of this to an understanding of Aboriginal youth culture: it also wants to help a broad audience imaginatively inhabit these situations and emotions.

In this light, Sen is clearly achieving work that is much more important than the liberal guilt melodrama prominent in some other recent films on Indigenous themes.

Stylistically, the film is equally uncompromising. Sen’s filming of conversation demonstrates his sureness of touch. No wide 2-shots, no over-the-shoulder shot-reverse shot. He symmetrically juxtaposes big bold close-ups. You access this film through faces. In discussing his casting decisions, Sen keeps on returning to the look of the people, their non-verbal aspect. Like Pasolini, or better yet Bresson, it’s an effective way of dealing with non-actors, but it’s also a strategy that’s about direct honesty. There is nowhere to dissemble or conjure away the harshness of the truth.

Those who have seen Sen’s 1999 film Wind, will know that he has the strength (rare among Australian filmmakers) to substitute a single reaction shot for 10 lines of dialogue. He refers to the substitution of other elements such as looks or diegetic sounds as a wish to “start simple before you introduce dialogue,” so that dialogue emerges as “a focused substance.” The 1997 AFTRS short, Warm Strangers, is the clearest example of this, building to the point where a single word is uttered at the climactic moment.

There is perhaps something of Sen’s own behavioural style here. The quietly-spoken director likes to tell the story of his High School yearbook that summed him up thus: “Ivan saw all, heard all, said little.” The publicity materials for Beneath Clouds source his interest in film to “the ability to represent the complexity of life in a whole different realm to that of the word.”

When pressed to generalise about his formal methods, Sen spoke of avoiding contrivance to achieve a more direct realism, but then qualified this to say that he was interested in forms of contrivance which produce something uncontrived.

The productiveness of this paradox is evident in his handling of landscape. He plays with the angular abstraction of the wide-angle lens, and compositions with the horizon ostentatiously low in the frame. The opening titles sequence, shot by Sen himself (he was also composer and musician for the soundtrack, as well as writing and directing), lays out this interest in finding patterns in land and sky in order to see it afresh and emotionalise it. He has pared down his methods of achieving abstraction from those found in earlier films which included fast motion, dissolves to an unmoved camera position and the manipulations of colour balance which are so striking in Wind.

Ivan Sen’s success is doubly important if it provides evidence that institutional policies aimed at producing new filmmakers in this country are working. He comes out of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, where he has become the central figure for a group of collaborators. These include cinematographer Allen Collins, producer Teresa-Jayne Hanlon and editor Karen Johnson. Sen and Collins, in particular, have built up a strong rapport. This has resulted in a very quiet set, according to Sen, where “our language becomes as simple as a look.”

Australian filmmakers rarely get such a chance to work consistently, and while we hear a lot about development pathways for emerging filmmakers, it is encouraging to see such a resounding example of success in development policy. This validation was particularly important given the controversy surrounding Australian Rules, which also premiered at the festival. We all know the problems of a film industry administered by government institutions, but it’s important to remember that every now and then the system works.

Sen is not so much shy as self-possessed. He has detailed plans for the future, which include several films to be shot in the US, and which he promises will be “totally different” now that he has emptied his sketchpad with this film.

Beneath Clouds stands as a summation; a moment when a group of people working with a sureness in their art have come together to produce something fine and deeply moving.

Beneath Clouds, writer/director Ivan Sen, distributor Dendy Films, premiered Adelaide Festival, Her Majesty’s Theatre, March 3-4, released nationally May 23. Also screening as part of Message Sticks, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 14 – June 2.

This year’s Adelaide Festival premiered a number of films hotly contesting a range of issues including, implicitly, whether white Australians can make truly representative films about Indigenous subjects. Australian Rules has been particularly controversial but this subtext is also read in Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker and Phil Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence. In our Watchdog column, Jane Mills takes a critical look at the latter and its relationship with Hollywood filmmaking. Director Phil Noyce and Indigenous filmmaker Darlene Johnson (director of the insightful making-of documentary Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, screened Channel 9, Sunday Feb 3, which should be seen alongside the film) offer their perspectives on the issue. In WriteStuff, Hunter Cordaiy interviews Christine Olsen, who adapted the original story to screenplay, about the film’s evolution and the commitment and obsessiveness that was part of the process.

Ivan Sen is Australia’s finest maker of short films with a series of outstanding and award-winning works including Tears, Dust and Wind behind him. Now he has won the award for best debut feature film at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival for Beneath Clouds, which continues Sen’s exploration into young Indigenous people living outside cities. In an incisive report Mike Walsh looks at the new film in the context of the earlier works and what Sen has to say about his work.

Keeping track

In Sydney and Melbourne it can be hard to gauge what’s happening in film in other states. OnScreen keeps up with reports on the WA Screen Awards, digi-docs (digital documentaries at the Adelaide Fringe) and the South Australia Zoom Awards. Plus there’s my take on the My Queer Career Awards which featured a strong field of shorts screened as part of Sydney’s Mardi Gras Festival. We also introduce a new mini-review section, critical bytes that encourage you to see new Australian and international independent films doing interesting things on celluloid. This time we include Walking on Water, The Tracker, The Circle, Mulholland Drive, Promises, No Man’s Land and Paul Cox’s eagerly awaited Nijinski, based on the dancer’s diaries and featuring Adelaide’s Leigh Warren Dance Company.

Digital profiling

RealTime+OnScreen is the only Australian publication that regularly profiles digital artists and keeps you up to date with events and conferences. This time we turn our attention to WA artist Michelle Glaser. Juvenate, on which she collaborated, was co-winner of the prestigious Mayne Multimedia Award at the Adelaide Writers Festival. We visit Tasmania’s Maria Island for the Solar Circuit gathering and continue to look at works that cross the film/digi boundary including the already mentioned Digi Docs conference. Emma-Kate Croghan (Love and Other Catastrophes) takes her Desire to the web and David Varga looks at opportunities for filmmakers using DVD distribution. We also introduce a new section where artists describe their digital works-in-progress, a snapshot of ideas in development in the digital arts arena.

Exit

And with that smorgasbord, I bid you adieu. This is my last OnScreen. I’m leaving RealTime for a position at the Australian Film Commission. It’s been a wonderful 4 years (with 2 as OnScreen editor) and I’d like to thank, in Academy Awards style, Managing Editors Keith and Virginia, for offering me the opportunity to commission some of the finest writers working in the arts in Australia, and for keeping the standards of RealTime so high. Thanks also to Gail Priest, Designer and Sales Manager, for always being positive, capable and willing to lend advice and a hand with anything. And thanks to all the OnScreen editors and writers who continue to make this section of the magazine an insight into what’s happening in film, screen culture and digital media nationally. Where else can you get this critical information, and where else can you get it free? I look forward to receiving it on my desk at the AFC.

How many South Australians does it take to change a light bulb, how many to change a government, how many to make a film industry? All good questions as we gathered for this year’s election night Zoom! awards, designed as the centrepiece of SA’s film development policy.

Despite continuing problems of defining what constitutes an SA film, the good news is that the awards brought together a solid collection of contenders. Most of the winners impressed with their intelligent understanding of the possibilities of the short film. Rather than Big Themes Hammered Home or Smartarsefest gags, we saw filmmakers discovering what they can do with stylistic tools—light, framing, staging, sound—in order to explore the power of creative imagery.

The main prize of the evening went to Jack Sheridan for Day Dreams. Sheridan’s previous film, Solipsis, also featured in last year’s Media Resource Centre craft awards. It was good to see the SAFC encouraging a filmmaker who is working consistently in an environment that gives little support to his kind. (When people describe SA as the driest state, they are not just talking about water.)

Sheridan’s film also won craft awards for screenplay and performance. The protagonist is ferociously bent on self-destruction to the exclusion of any distractions in the real or imagined world. Even when these coalesce to conjure up an attacker, none of it impinges on her heroic daze. Sheridan’s sureness of touch matches his dark humour.

If last year was marked by women’s successes in these awards, this year the boys were back in town. It was a coincidence that the second-place encouragement award went to another film in which women were targets of sexual assault. Having said that, Zane Roach’s Dark City combined a keen sense of the strange economies of guilt and redemption with an eye for the pleasures of low key lighting and noir mise-en-scene.

The most striking film of the evening was Matthew Bate’s Turbulence, which took out the award for sound design. (Sound people are on the money with films about the hearing impaired, just as actors can count on roles about the mentally ill to put awards on the mantelpiece.) The film deals with a boy’s realisation of the violence within him and of the forces that separate and then reconnect him to the world.

Christian Keefe’s The Worst Day of My Life won the Best Design prize. It treads familiar territory in dealing with the anomie of the salaryman, but it works this terrain with rich visual inventiveness, converting the protagonist’s spiritual isolation into a formal game of spatial manipulation. Underplayed performances combine with careful staging and inventive use of off-screen space to explore the texture of alienation rather than simply the narration of it.

As ever, the minor part of the awards happens in the present. The terror of the future looms over the evening. Let us enjoy the moment and commend the winners to the savage and indifferent gods who rule the lives of young Australian filmmakers.

Zoom! SAFC Filmmaker of the Future Awards + Media Resource Centre Craft Awards, Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, Feb 9

Even before I’d seen a single frame of Rabbit-proof Fence I was drowning in a sea of marketing spin-offs and moral blackmail.

First there was the book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, the daughter of Molly Craig—the oldest of the 3 Aboriginal girls to walk the 1500 miles back home from the River Moore Settlement to which they’d been sent in 1931 by AO Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia. Then came a film tie-in edition (interestingly called “a fictional account” by the publishers) with the cover showing the, by now, familiar sepia-tinted still of Molly (Everlyn Sampi) carrying her younger sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury). The legend ‘A True Story’ appears just above the girls’ heads and under the author’s name, the inevitable ‘Now a major film…’

You’ve read the book, seen the film and yes, there is a T-shirt. There were also 2 trailers, a website, a ‘making of’ documentary by Indigenous filmmaker Darlene Johnson, a massive Channel 9 promotion that included free tickets for 1500 competition entrants to meet Noyce at a Fox Studios special screening, a study guide for schools from Australian Teachers Of Media (ATOM, supported by Qantas), free postcards, posters, the CD of Peter Gabriel’s score, and Christine Olsen’s screenplay from Currency Press (see interview p16).

I was reluctant to write about the film partly because I felt uncomfortably close to several people involved: I’d met Noyce socially, Olsen is a friend of a friend (we also share the same publishers), and Johnson is a former student and now friend. Mostly, however, I had grave misgivings about Noyce as a filmmaker.

I admire his early Australian films—Backroads, Newsfront and Heatwave—which skilfully critique aspects of Australian society by their formal marriage of innovative style with radical content. But I find his more recent Hollywood action-thriller movies—Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games and The Bone Collector—uninspired, politically conservative examples of a genre I normally enjoy. The Bone Collector is a particularly nauseous combination of necrophilia and misogyny.

Everything about Rabbit-proof Fence sounded so worthy that my bullshit antenna was working overtime. Mambo was giving a percentage of the T-shirt sales to the Jigalong community where Molly and Daisy still live; a trailer stressed that OA Neville had the Aboriginals’ best interests at heart; first-time scriptwriter Olsen wrote how privileged she was to meet the girls and grannies of Jigalong; stories abounded about how both Noyce and international star Kenneth Branagh had accepted massive income drops and/or deferred payments because they were so moved by the story.

Was this another representation of Aboriginals as victims to assuage whitefella guilt? The quote from Noyce on the cover of the tie-in book summed it up: “This is a marvellous adventure story and thriller, celebrating courage and the resilience of the human heart.” This sounded straight out of The Player, Robert Altman’s parody of Hollywood manipulation.

I could not have been more wrong. I saw the film and was profoundly moved by the politically thoughtful approach taken by its white screenwriter and white male Hollywood director. I saw Johnson’s documentary and was profoundly moved all over again. I now believe the whole package that Rabbit-proof Fence has become offers a site to explore reconciliation from a place where emotion, truth, fiction and fact all merge.

Noyce thinks in an ideal world the film would be made by a black woman director who would have said something different to another audience. But he wanted to reach black and white audiences about a contemporary need for white Australians:

When I make a film [on a political subject] I wet my finger and put it up to the wind. Will it be blowing in my direction when the film comes out? In this case the wind was already blowing. The audience wanted a vehicle…to get beyond the rhetoric, the politics. I hope it is part of the reconciliation.

It’s no longer possible to…sweep it all under the carpet. It was genocide…it has to be genocide. It was deliberate and people were once in denial about it. But, since Bringing Them Home, there’s been a sufficient martialling of opinion opposing the view that the general population were simply confused. We almost destroyed Australia’s greatest resource. There is a need for white grieving.

To achieve this, Noyce admits to something seldom openly included as part of film art:

Hollywood knows how to reach audiences. I’ve learned the lessons in marketing and casting that Hollywood teaches. Now I have to use these skills to sell an Indigenous story into the mainstream. It’s not overtly political, but covertly. Hollywood can do this and can do it well…

I’m a sort of ‘migrant worker’ in Hollywood: you’re tolerated as long as you service the big machine…Rabbit-proof Fence is an antidote to what I’ve done in the USA. That was ‘escapist entertainment’ first and foremost. [Rabbit-proof Fence] has a story that could be the best of any Hollywood movie. Basically it’s an escape movie.

Noyce’s description of his film as a genre movie helps explain its potential for widespread appeal: here is a movie about a long denied subject using film language filmgoers are familiar with. But how to attract audiences reluctant to face up to historically repressed facts? This is where Johnson’s finely-wrought documentary enters the scene:

Phillip’s film is an emotional journey about a basic human right to be with your mother and live in your own home. My film is about getting a bigger audience for Rabbit-proof Fence.

Johnson focuses on the transformation of the 3 young actresses to mirror the transformation of the 3 girls who rejected the role of passive victim to white man’s well-meaning but racist designs for them. She made a bold structural decision to end her documentary not with the post-production process as many ‘making of’ films do, but with the filming of the scene where Molly, Daisy and Gracie are forcibly removed from their mothers. It makes this scene more emotionally distressing than it is in Noyce’s film where it takes place near the start, before we are attached to the characters. Johnson took this decision because she hoped it would deliver viewers to Noyce’s film.

Cinema plays a role in winning the hearts and minds of the Australian people to accept, understand and ultimately reverse the consequences of white assimilationist policy. In their own ways, Charles Chauvel’s Jedda and Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy also do this better than documentary, perhaps because they’re fiction and, unlike documentary, rely upon the mimetic for audiences to become absorbed and incorporated into the narrative. Johnson agrees:

Rabbit-proof Fence is better than a documentary which is always too actual, and can be too confronting. Fiction allows people to identify better. It makes for emotional attachment. Fiction uses storytelling devices…it allows us to get caught up in the story emotionally in a way that documentary doesn’t.

This slippage between fiction and actuality is too hard for some. Tabloid journalist Piers Akerman attacked Noyce for “playing fast and hard with the truth” (The Sunday Telegraph, March 3 2002). Responding, Noyce quoted Doris Pilkington: “Recognise what happened to us, so that we can all be healed.” Paradoxically, recognition requires the understanding that comes with the sort of emotional assimilation that Hollywood cinema can offer its audiences.

Paradoxical because, as Laleen Jayamanne points out in a thoughtful essay (“Love me tender, love me true, never let me go: A Sri Lankan reading of Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy” in Toward Cinema and its Double, Indiana University Press, 2001) the definition of ‘assimilation’ is: “to make like, to adapt, to absorb and incorporate, to convert into a substance of its own nature; to absorb into the system.” For audiences, the mimetic, involving assimilation in a way that makes it an essential element of fiction, can lead to awareness of truth, rather than a denial.

By exposing cinematic mimesis, Johnson’s reflexive documentary reveals how Noyce uses the cinematic experience of audience assimilation into the emotions of a fictionalised narrative to arrive at a recognition of what really happened. This way grieving is possible for white Australians, and greater understanding is possible for all.

Rabbit-proof Fence, writer Christine Olsen, director Phillip Noyce, distributor Becker Entertainment, currently screening nationally. See page 16 for Hunter Cordaiy’s interview with screenwriter Christine Olsen. Darlene Johnson’s Follow The Rabbit-proof Fence, a companion documentary to the making of the feature film, was screened on Channel 9, February 3.

Christine Olsen’s documentary production credits include Riding the Tiger and the award-winning Hepzibah. Her screenplay for Rabbit-proof Fence is an adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book about her mother’s story, Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence. For Olsen this a double first—a feature film as co-producer and her first screenplay.

Rabbit-proof Fence is an adaptation from a book. To write the script you were confronted with one text and then had to turn it into another—can you describe how that process worked?

I knew that the book would provide the story for the film—it seemed to me to be a classic story; 3 little girls taken away from their homes decide to run away and walk back home. A very simple structure, and I think these stories make the best films.

It was like a classic fairy story actually, even down to the number 3, which you quite often find in fairy stories—3 sisters, 3 brothers, 3 witches—and it was about 3 little girls stolen from their home by the wicked witch and taken to her house where everyone is under a spell, and it’s a spell of forgetting. The longer you are in the house the stronger the spell becomes. It was imperative for the girls to get away as fast as they could before they fell under that spell.

This is the first screenplay I’ve ever written and now, looking back on it, the process of writing is the process of finding out what that story really is…and what you have to do is find out what that story is within you, why is it that you are completely obsessed…being completely taken over in your mind…constantly making notes, having thoughts about it at the kitchen sink, and why that strength of story carried you through 3 or 4 years of writing.

At various points I thought I knew what the story was—yes, this is what the story is, it’s a classic fairy story—you keep working on it and then you think…maybe this is an escaped prisoner story, a world war story; this is a script about a land taken over by invaders, they’re now reaching far into the hinterland and are stealing the children and taking them back into their own territory to train them as domestic slaves. The children escape as in any prisoner of war story and make their way home through enemy-occupied territory. Then this becomes a layer within the story. I think when I finished the script I knew this was film about home and what home means.

From there you developed the script and you weren’t necessarily being faithful to that original text?

Not at all…I felt completely free to do whatever I wanted with this story…there’s very little drama in the book and I didn’t know how to make a film about 3 little girls walking along a fence…But the moment I realised that the central idea is an argument between Molly and Mr Neville—who said ‘I know what is best for you’ and Molly says no, ‘I know what’s best for me’—I had my dramatic argument.

The book was told very quietly, almost passively, and I knew instinctively that I actually had to work out why this film was important to me, why it obsessed me, and what drove me…

This suggests that writers must engage with a story on a very deep and personal level in order to sustain the vision.

Absolutely, otherwise…there won’t be any lasting interest. If a story is going to reverberate with people, that’s where it must come from…there’s something there that is universal, the extreme becomes the general.

So the process involves a couple of years of writing, and then you send the script off to Phil Noyce in LA and wait…How do you keep the writer’s obsession with the project over that length of time?

I did heaps of research…historical research. I went to Perth, I read everything I possibly could about the Stolen Generations. I knew that the key to this was actually going up to Jigalong and spending time there, and until I had nailed down Molly and Daisy I was going to be writing a white person’s film based on the whites in the film…I always thought I knew those people…they are our grandparents…they’re my family but I didn’t know the little girls.

I’m very proud of the way we handled the Indigenous issues in the film, consulted with the Jigalong people. We were very careful to take notice of their concerns, and their major concern was who would be playing Mardu people on screen. That process has enriched the film and it’s been such a positive thing to have done…it’s easy…it’s important to tell people it’s not hard to do this properly…you just have to listen.

Is there something about the production process that threatens or supports the holding of this writer’s vision?

One of the things I did was to be co-producer…and this meant that I was there the whole way through…

No, but because I had my experience as a documentary producer I was determined to have a creative input. And one of the things that happened that was vital to this whole process was that in June 2000, when Phillip had committed to the project, we spent 10 days working on the script.

I think what happened was that we heightened the story…he was always saying ‘take it as far as it can go and if it’s too far we’ll pull it back’…that was his mantra. And also because he is such an experienced director he could say what we didn’t need and how things could be done…it was an immense learning curve.

In the last shot of the film we see 2 of the women whose story it is, and you suddenly come out of the fiction to living people…was that abrupt change always in the script?

Yes…in a sense that image says it all…we are still here and living in this land…what’s happening is that you’re confronted with a multitude of emotions at the end of the film and the lasting one is that these people have survived.

Rabbit-proof Fence, writer Christine Olsen, director Phillip Noyce, distributor Becker Entertainment, currently screening nationally. See p15 for Jane Mills’ commentary on the film and Darlene Johnson’s ‘making-of’ documentary.

The WA Screen Awards (WASA) have moved from the wintry months of the last couple of years to a summer date. It is a time when balmy evenings beckon, international travellers succumb to summer’s lure and outdoor screenings are de rigeur in the West.

The move scheduled WASA hot on the heels of the national touring short film festival, Flickerfest, not to mention the newcomer on the WA short film circuit, the Grass Roots Short Film Festival. This gave the dedicated filmgoer the opportunity to soak up international, national and local short films, and come to an understanding of where WA filmmaking sits on the international stage.

Grass Roots ended up with a shortlist of mostly comedies while the exquisite cinematography and serious themes of the WASA entrants were more representative of the skills and depth of WA filmmaking. It appears that the judges of Grass Roots recognised this and the beautifully crafted and stylish film by Christopher Kenworthy, The Dreamer, took out first place.

Stump (which won 3 WA Screen Awards) is a comedy with a ‘gag’ ending but still a stylish piece of cinema. The film looks superb, the cinematography taking full advantage of the clear light of country WA. Structured in meticulous detail, each frame serves the final purpose, building to the payoff. Writer/director Robert Forsyth has an eye for detail and for what will work in a tightly written comic piece: the final product engagemed powerfully with the audience. It was no surprise that the film took out Best Short Film Under 30 Minutes, Best Writing for Forsyth and Best Acting for Talei Howell-Price (who also performed in The Dreamer).

Chris Frey, who has worked hard for years creating films that challenge the viewer, has done it again with Sol, a complex journey of spiritual investigation and confrontation. Rather than forcing a narrative on the viewer, he creates a montage of images. His strong focus on film as a medium outside conventional narrative made him a deserving winner of the best directing award. Sol also took out the best editing award for its seamless construction, but the strangely captivating Civilian Maimed must have created some great editing challenges for Ian Reiser which saw it deservedly shortlisted. However, it was the richly evocative work of Glen Knight which eventually won Civilian an award, Best Sound Design.

Pierce Davison was WA Young Filmmaker of 2000 and this year, with his brother, won the award for Best Animation and New Media with The Cows Side; unfortunately their equally bizarre My Mrs Tingwell didn’t make the shortlist.

Sue K’s Daz07/02/012038 was voted Best Experimental Production but was somehow overlooked as an entrant in the editing category, surprising given that the editing actually creates the film which is a series of stills cut together to create movement and the passing of time.

The John Butler Trio are a dynamic band who could make a video worth watching just by sitting around performing. That John McMullan took their song Pickapart and made a video for only $1500 speaks volumes about their dynamism. The shaping and the droll humour evident in this award-winning music video makes you appreciate what can be achieved with a great song, engaging performers and a man with a camera.

There was no chance that Sophie McNeill’s film, Awaiting Freedom, winner of the Triple J Independent Spirit if Award, was going to be allowed to pass unnoticed at WASA. A high school student, Sohphie knew a good story when she saw it, and created an Australian Story-style documentary about East Timor. She won Best Student Film and, with the strength of documentary filmmaking in WA, she will be in a position to pursue a career with some great mentors.

Bad Cred & Aliens is a detective story with a difference, and the production design by Shari Amber Finn (which took out the Open Craft section) sets the mood with precision. It seems strange that a film called Sightless should win Best Cinematography. The story of a blind man, April Ward has not shied away from the difficult shot, choosing darkness and reflection to create an uneasy feeling in the viewer with the warping of perspective.

This year, Andelko Jurin was named Young Filmmaker of the Year after receiving the Australian Writers Guild Award for writing in 1999 for Redman and the WASA for directing in 2000 for The Ballet’s Floor.

The diversity of subject matter and the uniformly high production values in the shortlisted films and the winners at this year’s WASA augurs well for the future of short filmmaking here.

WA Screen Awards, finalists’ screenings, Princess May Park, Fremantle, Feb 18-19; awards night, Novotel Langley, Feb 20, www.fti.asn.au

The Mardi Gras Film Festival has grown into a massive event examining existing trends in queer cinema. One of the highlights this year was My Queer Career, a short film competition open to gay and lesbian short films from Australia and New Zealand. What’s best about the screenings is the option of seeing either all 42 of the shorts submitted or the judge’s shortlist of 8 films. I go for the latter—and it’s one of the strongest lineups of shorts I’ve seen in recent years. Themes have moved beyond coming out stories or tales of teenage whimsy, to stories of generations (father/son relationships highlighted in particular) and drag queens after the lights have dimmed; no Priscilla triumphs here. Surprisingly there’s no stories about women—the lesbian component is entirely absent—and no finalists from New Zealand. This is a real shame and hopefully will be turned around next year.

Everyone’s born naked and, after that,
everything is drag

Tales From the Powder Room is the tragic tale of a drag queen who’s hit rock bottom. Directed by Darren Burgess and shot on 35mm, its animated hero/ine starts off high-camp bitch and spirals into a drug-induced self-delusional monologist, remembering glorious bygone days of stardom, juxtaposed with the POV of witnesses who were ‘really there’. Witty, nasty repartee flashes back into animated home movie footage of inauspicious beginnings—mother moans: “he’s just about sucked my tits off”—and a small boy’s smiling face as he dons a floral hat. And then his father gives him the boot. As Lola Lick stares, glazed, into her past, there’s a great musical segue from Twinkle Twinkle to Kylie’s Confide in Me, and you almost feel sorry for this tough bird with a heart of steel. But not quite. Darren Burgess’ animation is imaginative and his writing at perfect pitch.

VCA filmmaker Mark Robinson takes a similar theme but moulds it with a gentler touch. Sweet Thing starts in a caravan park: children abused by a drunken mother heading off to their school to talk about her non-existent career; bullies behind the sky-high fence taunt a young boy. We enter the caverns of a drag queen, Tom Candy (Iain Murton), living in this trailer city surrounded by masks and wigs, dresses, mannequins and feathers. The bullied Jacob (Brock Jays) finds family here, someone who can play the roles of both mum and dad, cooking him a well-balanced meal, then belting out Marcia Hines’ I Got the Music in Me. In a whimsical ending he masquerades as Trent’s mother, dressed in Dorothy-checked-pinafore, escorting him to school. The placement of this fantasy makes the film disappointingly anti-climactic, as if the funding suddenly ran out.

It’s good to see our tertiary students well represented in these screenings: Dale Burke’s (UNSW College of Fine Arts) Pillion was my favourite on the night. A strange, melancholy, at times erotic, meditation on male energy and aggression it reminded me most of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail: actors-as-soldiers camouflaged and choreographed, their lovemaking and fighting ritualistic and almost beautiful. Technically, it’s the most innovative of the films, with clever use of splitscreen, highly stylised performance and a great sound design by Debra Petrovich. A scene of men skulling huge stubbies of beer while shaving each other’s heads under glowing neon signs and graffiti is unnerving: sensual, moody, affecting, getting to the heart of men’s intimate spaces, what they share, but not with the world. This film puts you off balance, crossing that no-man’s land between pain and pleasure; a kick in the guts.

You don’t have to clean up after him any more…

Saturn’s Return and Tanaka explore similar themes of death and reconciliation. SBS’s Hybrid Life series has been significant in demanding that families be shown in all their illuminating complexities. These shorts don’t just tackle gay issues but inter-cultural and generational ones as well. There’s so much going on here. From the opening moment of Saturn’s Return—a hand floating on air currents out the window of a moving car—the late-twentie-something viewers know where they are. Isn’t this the archetypal image of a filmmaker on a road trip? If you’ve had a camera in your hand, on the open road, you’ve probably done it. The title too carefully targets a certain viewer. I once worked with an astrologer who talked endlessly of Saturn’s Return, a moment that occurs around the ages 28-29, which she blamed for life-changing yearnings and being unsettled in those few years approaching 30. As Barney (Joel Edgerton) and Dimitri (Damian Walshe-Howling) hit the road from Melbourne to Sydney, there’s clever dialogue about intercity rivalry, and the chance to drop in at Bonegilla (a migrant camp where Dim’s Greek parents met and where my own grandparents experienced harsh conditions). As we reach Sydney we meet the parents, ageing products of the hippie generation. It’s not all rosy: Barney’s father is dying of AIDS, both parents have been heroin addicts, and Barney was given LSD as a birthday present when he was 13. Like many of his generation, Barney grew up feeling responsible for the welfare of his parents rather than the other way round. But there’s no moral judgment here. Writer Christos Tsolkias’ usual fine touch adds a dash of sympathy to every character and highlights similarities as well as differences. In a pivotal scene, Sheila (Barney’s mother) says that she would like a grandchild and her expectations aren’t so different from Dim’s Greek parents. The combination of superb acting by Edgerton, Walshe-Howling, Harold Hopkins and Tina Bursill with excellent direction by Wenona Byrne shows just how much can be achieved in a short film.

Tanaka, directed by Clayton Jacobson, also has an interesting premise: a Japanese man, Hiroshi, dies in Australia after living with his male lover, Ron, for 30 years. Ron writes to the brother in Japan inviting him to the funeral and Hiroshi’s nephew Mori arrives in his place (the transition from back of a cab in Japan to back of a cab in Australia is particularly effective) armed with the firm belief that his uncle is heterosexual and married. Struggles are played out between traditions and cultures in subtle ways: Hiroshi wants his ashes to be scattered in Australia while his nephew is expected to take them home; Ron has a previous family including daughters and sons (making it even harder for Mori to understand the homosexual relationship). As in other festival films, the importance of home videos within the short is fundamental, contextualising Hiroshi’s love and life, changing him from phantom to family man. What I particularly like about this film are its compromises: little deceptions, things done for the sake of obligation, with evasive action often a necessity; and a winning ending as Mori smiles in the backseat of a cab on his way back home.

Other strong contenders among the finalists were: Into The Night, director Tony Krawitz, somewhat topical in its depiction of a rich older man cruising the streets for a rentboy, or maybe a son; and Turn Me On, director Catherine Chauchat, an exhilarating documentary on the history of the vibrator (did you know it was the 5th electrical appliance invented, well before the vacuum cleaner?). High Street Love Story, director Rob Leggo, about unrequited love on the streets of Penrith, seemed somewhat anachronous and needed a lot of work. Overall, the My Queer Career selection was excellent, revealing a maturation of short films as a genre of their own. Keep an eye out for them on the festival circuit, and hopefully at the Dendy Awards and Flickerfest this year.

My Queer Career, Australian and New Zealand Queer Shorts, Mardi Gras Film Festival, Palace Academy Twin, Sydney, Feb 19 & 22, www.queerscreen.com.au

The recent re-release of Emma-Kate Croghan’s short film Desire didn’t raise an eyebrow compared to the hype generated in the promotion of her 1996 film Love and Other Catastrophes. Prior to the release of the latter, oversized posters were pasted across available city surfaces, ringing scaffolding on building sites and lurking in the half-light beneath bridges. The gigantic font announced the release as an event not to be missed. But it was not only our eyes that were targeted in the promotion of Croghan’s first feature. The film is mythologised as every independent filmmaker’s dream come true. Financed initially by credit card, it was rescued by a last minute investment. In contrast, Desire is a low budget film that slips into the viewer’s home unheralded. It travels via the magic of communication cables, making itself available on the computer screen with the click of the mouse. The exhibition of Desire on the internet potentially allows it to be viewed by a global audience.

Desire is one of the films screened on the Atom Films website. Parent company, Atomshockwave, is an independent entertainment provider with an archive in excess of 2000 films, animations and games. It lists Ford, Intel, Warner Brothers Online, HBO and Showtime as sponsors and syndication customers. A look at its homepage gives an idea of the eclectic collection of films on offer. Categories include animation, comedy, drama, documentary, extreme, thriller and world films. In the animation section you can click on flash or stop motion categories and watch short films like the intriguingly titled Osama Sissyfight. Desire can be found beneath the Australian film banner in the World Films category.

Conventionally, film viewing is characterised by a voyeuristic distance between the viewer and the big screen, offering a cathartic connection through identification and immersion in the fantasy. But how does this experience compare when watching films on computer screens? With films like Desire available online, viewing becomes more immediate and controllable. Whilst the dimensions of the screen are obviously smaller, the distance between the spectator and the screen is also diminished. Watching Desire on the small screen offers an uncanny sense of disjuncture. Disguising itself as early cinema, its exhibition on the computer screen produces a collision between the ultra-modern and the primitive. Originally shot as a silent film, Desire could be viewed on plasma.

Desire is cinematic, highly stylised and filmically literate. The flickering images are contrived to replicate the effect of silent cinema. Desire is without dialogue, primitive in its elliptical narration and Croghan uses rounded iris framing reminiscent of silent film. In the place of dialogue a soundtrack underscores the suspense. Croghan also infuses her films with an elegance and suspense characteristic of film noir. Her romantic, card-like title sequences remind us of the aesthetic decadence of the American studio system when even the fonts were art. The central unifying force is desire signified by the gaze. Furtive glances bind the anonymous characters, but are rarely returned. Whether it is in the carriage of a train, or in a laboratory, the atmosphere is charged with longing. Croghan highlights this with the inclusion of a scientist who analyses minuscule particles through the lens of a microscope, but who lacks perspective in his immediate environment.

Even though Desire appears to be a homage to the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, in the insistence of unrequited love and the link between children and danger Croghan’s film is clearly influenced by Fritz Lang, most particularly M (1931). This is acknowledged with the inclusion of a spiral-patterned ball, a motif that associates childhood play with danger in the adult world of both films. This clash of eras, styles, influences and technologies is utopia for a postmodern theorist.

Efforts have been made in recent years to elevate short film beyond its association with student experimentation. Tracey Moffatt enjoyed success as a short filmmaker before being financed to make a 90 minute feature film. She overcame this expectation by splitting beDevil (1993) into 3 discrete parts, effectively producing a trio of short films that combined to exceed the duration of a feature. Jane Campion attempted to change exhibition protocol in linking the first release of Sweetie (1989) with Alison McLean’s dark noir short film Kitchen Sink (1989), introducing her compatriot New Zealander to an Australian audience. But it is on the small screen that Australian shorts are finding an alternative home. The success of Desire at Atom Films is an encouraging sign extending the range of exhibition possibilities for short films to the computer screen.

Mulholland Drive

a smouldering david lynchian film-take on the starlet time|grind machine. the film presents the viewer with a dream|character-crossed plotline divided decisively according 2 a saccharine 50s vs a gritty late 90s version|comment on the hollywood circuit|circus, focusing on the twinned character incarnations of Australian actor Naomi Watts. Think: an amnesiac alice-in-wonderland plot constructed via de chirico detective-story-drenched cinematography.

The Circle

A tightening loop of restrictions and oppression as we trek along Tehran’s streets with women shackled but strong, evading brothers and fathers and policemen and lovers and doctors, men who must sign to guarantee these women’s dreams. Signs of rebellion link them: letting their traditional headwear drop to reveal lively intelligent faces, smoking cigarettes desperately in the night. A woman abandons her child on a busy city street, crouching behind a car, desperate. We flow slowly, evenly, from one character to another, with Panahi’s elegant linking narrative device beautifully revealed at the film’s end.

Writer/director Jafar Panahi, distributor New Vision, currently at Dendy Cinemas, Sydney, other states to follow.

The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky

Jane Mills
Based on one of the best accounts of the experience of entering psychosis ever written by a major artist, this often glorious synaesthetic mix of poetry, dance, music and movement tiptoes round the edge of the romantic nonsense of the ‘mad genius.’ Like Cox’s film about Vincent van Gogh, this is neither documentary nor drama but a genre of its own and at times reaches extraordinary levels of beauty and compassion.

Australian Rules

Mike Walsh
The controversies surrounding the production of this film find their parallel in its thematics: the triumph of the Sensitive White Guy is central, while black people suffer nobly around the margins. The recessive Aussie protagonist gets another workout, as does the country town as vision of hell. Mix two parts Black Rock with one part Wake in Fright.

Director Paul Goldman, writers Phillip Gwynne, Paul Goldman; Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2002, March, national release mid-year.

No Man’s Land

Mark Mordue
Set in a trench in ‘no man’s land’ during the Bosnian War, the film focuses on 2 soldiers—Ciki, a Bosnian and Nino, a Serb—playing cat and mouse with each other in between uneasy recognitions of a common humanity. Tanovic worked as a documentary maker for the Bosnian Army and much of his work was used internationally as news footage, so he knows how to capture the clumsy needs and dark banality of the war experience: a fog where no one can see, a kicked metal bucket, a cigarette without a lighter, a soldier who wears glasses, the sweaty frustration of what should be a serene summer’s day in the countryside. As Ciki and Nino, Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac argue their way towards nowhere much at all, a circus of media sensations and international politics dances around them. Tanovic’s perspective is bitter but darkly humorous (“Rwanda, what a mess,” observes one soldier reading a paper) and the acting in this mostly stunning two-hander is extremely tight and convincing; a fierce display of prejudices and cynicism triumphing against all common sense. The hopelessness is mitigated by Tanovic’s taste for laughter, often absurd, finally sour, and a deeper, restrained sadness that lingers in the film’s last hovering image. No winners here.

Walking on Water

Brendan Swift
Drawing on personal experience, Roger Monk’s confronting script tackles the big questions—grief, infidelity, jealousy, and betrayal—without being pretentious enough to answer them. Interspersed with touches of black humour, the film captures the struggle of Charlie (Vince Colosimo) and Anna (Maria Theodorakis) after they help a terminally ill friend die; a journey ably complemented by the naturalistic direction of Tony Ayres.

Writer Roger Monk, director Tony Ayres, distributor Globe Film;Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2000, March; national release mid-year.

The Tracker

Mike Walsh
Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker addresses itself to the contradiction between land and history in Australia. Natural beauty c alls forth cultural ugliness, and epic landscape produces a banality of cultural response on the part of European settlement. The film is unfailingly beautiful, but the insertion of paintings at moments of violence suggests that the aesthetic is what we invoke when we can’t bear to watch.

Writer/director Rolf de Heer, distributor Globe Film, Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2002, March; national release mid-2002.

Promises

Promises brings the opposing discursive histories of the warring sides of Palestine together, distilled through the experiences of children. While Hasidic Jewish boy Moishe quotes the Torah to legitimise Israeli occupation, Mahmoud the Hamas supporter offers title deeds. A documentary that subtly subverts humanistic optimism, revealing the intractable nature of the Palestinian conflict.

Directors Justine Shapiro, B. Z. Goldberg and Carlos Bolado, distributor Ronin Films.

The REAL: life on film festival has finalised its program for 2002, and has been given extra oomph from new director Hilary Blackman, who has worked previously with dancer Cazerine Barry and as digital media coordinator for the Melbourne International Film Festival last year. The festival now tours to Melbourne (May 2-8), Sydney (May 9-15), Perth (May 16-18) and Adelaide (May 23, 25, 27) and focuses on innovative documentaries, Australian and international—mostly premieres, and rare to see on the big screen.

This year’s meaty selection includes Dark Days, Marc Singer’s underground film about the underground, the lives of NYC’s displaced people living beneath Penn Station (winner Audience Awards at Sundance 2000); Melissa Kyu-Jung Lee’s A True Story About Love (see our feature interview with Melissa, RT47 p15); Darlene Johnson’s documentary about Ray Cott’s personal discovery tour, Everyday Brave—Stranger in My Skin; and Catriona McKenzie’s profile of leading Aboriginal activist Naomi Myers, Everyday Brave—Jetja Nai Medical Mob. Other highlights include Megan Spencer’s guided tour through transgressive documentaries such as The Annabel Chong Story; and doco legends Pennebaker, Hegedus and Doob’s celebration of the acclaimed soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou in Down From the Mountain.

Qld TV series tackles new technology

Queensland producers, Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield (Hoodlum Entertainment) are working on Fat Cow Motel, a 13-part multi-platform mystery series in the style of Twin Peaks. The show will be delivered to its audience thought Austar cable TV, radio, mobile phone, email, snail mail and dedicated websites, and is the first of its kind in Australia. Throughout the series, participants will be sent SMS messages giving clues to weekly mysteries.

Robertson commented on the writing process: “The challenge is finding writers who can do it. Firstly, they have to bear in mind all the platforms while writing the script. Then they have to not only write the material for each of those platforms but also co-ordinate the writing of all those platforms so they link together in the most effective way possible” (PFTC news). For more info visit www.hooligan.com.au/media/fatcow/.

Asian feast

Short Soup, a national short film competition offers filmmakers a cash prize and the chance to have their work shown on SBS’s Eat Carpet. Part of the Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival, the competition is open to documentaries, animations and experimental works by, or about Asian Australians. The films can be up to 26 minutes

All the films entered in the competition will be shown throughout the festival, which runs from August 8-17. The finalists’ films will be screened on August 8.

Eat Carpet’s executive producer, Joy Toma says that by encouraging films from both Asian and non-Asian directors, the festival acknowledges that, “It’s not just Asian Australians who can tell stories about Asian experience. In multicultural Australia there are a wide variety of stories and telling them is part of our lives.”

At least one film will be purchased and screened on Eat Carpet. Last year 5 winning films were screened, including Linden Goh’s richly coloured drama My Old China depicting the joys and strains of cross-cultural schoolyard friendships.

Entry deadline May 30. Application forms and entry conditions available at www.sapff.com.au or by post: Short Soup Competition Co-ordinator, PO Box 339, Darlinghurst, NSW 1300.

Rachel Griffiths rules

For anyone who hasn’t caught it yet, don’t miss Six Feet Under. Written (and produced) by American Beauty’s Alan Ball, and featuring the same caustic humour, it is a breathtaking, surreal genre piece on all the good things: death, honour, love, sex, loyalty, family—in the funeral business.

Rachel Griffiths, in her winning speech at The 2002 Golden Globes, called her producers “you crazy bastards” for trying to get the show off the ground, and you can see why. This series breaks the mould, more like Dennis Potter than any US show I can recall. It is harrowing and funny; and Griffiths does a gorgeous contemporary turn as the woman who won’t commit, spouting psychobabble to ward off any advances: a sexually charged, strong and just damn cool female character. More please!

Six Feet Under screens on Channel 9, Monday nights, around 10.30pm (but usually about half an hour late). Hopefully it won’t be bumped around too much like The Sopranos. KK

Juvenate (Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson) was 2002 co-winner of the Mayne Award, the Multimedia category of the SA Festival Awards for Literature, and was recently exhibited in the Perth International Arts Festival Celestial City Visual Arts Program. It has featured in several other showings internationally including the 2002 Ninth New York Digital Salon (touring internationally), and the European Media Art Festival 2001, Osnabruck, Germany. Felena Alach spoke with Michelle Glaser.

What was the genesis of Juvenate? How did your role as a writer sit within that process—especially given that it’s not a text-based work?

I was co-curating an exhibition called techne some years ago, and Juvenate was presented in an early form by Marie Louise Xavier and Andrew Hutchinson. It came out of an experience of serious illness, and provided a way of working through that experience. I became involved as a writer from there.

We were seeking to find a way to tell a story, without relying upon any spoken language and using minimal written text. The work is essentially about celebrating the ordinary, the extraordinary in the ordinary, so we wanted to keep it domestic, homey and familiar. As you move through the work you have that binary opposition of moving towards morning/summer/health/vitality or moving into evening/winter/sickness. We tried to recreate that fevered sense of reality that you have when you are ill, where memories and reality start intermingling, so you are not quite sure at what point in the experience you are. Also the images are very hyperreal, as if in response to certain drugs, or as a response to the feeling that life is finite and the most has to be extracted from each minute.

So in working with such polarities that guide the flow of the work, what are the bonuses and the difficult points? How do you find writing towards a less linear narrative within interactive screen-space?

Basically the writing is about the structuring of ideas and images and putting them into play, writing them into existence. You use language where it needs to be used, or images or sound or even an event (like the home delivery of art in Pizza Surprise)…I like working with interactivity, because the formula isn’t set the way it is within the existing forms of linear narrative, so you are really free to explore, and you feel like you are an adventurer in a new realm of storytelling. With each new project I feel like it’s a new game for all the collaborators to play. You have a project that everyone brings their ideas to and it becomes a much richer and better project for all those ideas. Whatever input you have is only ever a part of that final work.

What’s hard is that you actually don’t have a map yourself. So it’s trial and error. You are often a long way in before you can figure out whether it’s working or not. I found doing Juvenate that although it works in many ways, in terms of navigational paths it’s really hard to keep track of where the audience is, and whether you are delivering them a really satisfying experience in terms of continuity between scenes, or an experience that includes highs and lows…I like the sense of a structured experience with stages in the work that you pass through.

With interactive media, because you can’t tell the satisfying linear story that audiences are used to, you need the big narrative hooks that the user can fill in. You need a simple but strong story or premise where they can fill in the gaps themselves…learn to navigate the work, and relate the various elements to each other. And there’s the question of what your viewer might bring to the work, because the thing with interactive work is that it opens up many cracks…for as much story or information as it ever gives you, it opens up many more questions. If it’s an engaging work the user should be bringing a great deal to that work. The hard part of making interactive work is putting the lights along the landing path that create a strong sense of journey and outcome for the user, that they’re going to get something that’s not going to be a clickfest where they won’t know what they’re actually triggering, or like an IQ test that’s too hard to pass.

One of the hazards of much multimedia work is the loop, unintentionally getting stuck in the sense of ‘hang on…I’ve been here; hang on, I’m stuck; hang on, I’m sick of this…’ and you can lose your viewer.

Exactly. Unless you use really obvious menu systems to let them know where they are going and what they are doing, but you can’t weave that into a work usually, and it’s not a very satisfying answer. The idea of ‘intuitive navigation’ is not that satisfying as a solution either, because what you think is obvious is never obvious to someone else.

The new interactive project you’re involved with is Dr Pancoast’s Cabinet de Curiosites (developed with Nic Beames and produced with Mia Lalanne, Marie-Louise Xavier and Chris Wells). What are some of the interesting features of this 19th century phantasy?

The essence of Dr Pancoast is that it’s a work for the child in the adult, it appeals to that furtive sense of seeing-what-you-shouldn’t-see. It’s also picking up on the fun with images you had when you were a child, when things were just gorgeous and glorious for you to look at and play with and use to tell a story yourself. We’ve tried to make it really physical, so that everything you operate you drag and touch and do, rather than an abstracted intellectual process…it’s very tactile and highly textural rather than digital in feel. Something we’ve also had lots of fun with has been 19th century games like rebuses, labyrinths and all sorts of little gimmicks. It’s been good to revisit those technologies that started in the 19th century, like the early computer, photography etc. It features illustrations by Helen Smith, Gina Moore and Richard Giblett (see RT41). Also, the time machine featured in the work actually exists, and has been made by Philip Gamblen. So, for exhibition, the idea is that it’s not just a cold little work on a computer, but we can actually make much more of the space, where the time machine is a ‘working object’…

Another way of looking at the work is as an exploration of the colonising of sexuality: that process in the 19th century where sexuality became categorised. It’s also about the procreating couple, and where sexualities became defined in terms of acceptable and deviant sexualities. It’s quite text-heavy as a work, but while the text is intrinsic, it’s designed so that there are a lot of keywords, so that you don’t really have to read it all through. If you glance at it you’ll get a sense of what the text says. The expectation is that lots of people don’t like to read, but it’s a richer work if you do read the text.

Recently Perth saw the Pizza Surprise project, where you and fellow curator Katie Major (a delivery team known as Art To Go) were serving up pizza-box art-packages for a mere $19.95 (see RT46).

The idea of it was to do something that would take art out of the gallery and make it more accessible to a much wider audience than the usual arts public. Thanks to media coverage on Triple J and the like, it did reach a much wider audience who really hooked into the idea of art priced and sold like a pizza…We were in the front line delivering the work, so we saw how the work actually functioned as an object for people…What was funny was that a lot of people thought that $20 actually covered our costs. I couldn’t believe it…that it would cover the costs of paying an artist…Without grants to pay people we wouldn’t have been able to do it. But what’s great is that where there was nothing there’s suddenly all this work being made, and all these people, the audience, hooking into that idea…On the strength of the project we got an Asialink residency, so we’re going to be doing a joint project between Taiwan and Perth, which will develop the same ideas of commodification and taking art out of the gallery, direct to the audience.

How does the sense of work as a surprise sit in how you are delivering art to the people? How does this intersect with your interests in creative work?

That’s multimedia too isn’t it? You just can’t control what’s going to happen, you have to hand it over and let the chips fall where they may…I think essentially I’m interested in surface appearances, and the contrasting underside to those appearances, like with Pancoast where there is a polite surface and a filthy underbelly. Pizza Surprise is much the same thing: on the surface it’s a very simple gimmick about taking work to the public, and underneath it’s actually much more about how we view artists, the artists themselves being sold as a kind of brand, as well as the commodification of art, where structures in the art world decide how much a work is worth. The neat little surface and the seething mass underneath…I like projects that have an accessible face but have other levels to enjoy. Works that are accessible in a way that the general public can enjoy…but then maybe get hit in the face with another layer. I mean, that’s every storyteller’s dream isn’t it?…that they convey something that on the surface is very simple, but has levels of complexity that build toward something greater. That’s the hope.

The other joint winner of the Mayne Mutlimedia Award was Poems in a Flash on the Stalking Tongues website by Jayne Fenton-Keane, www.poetinresidence.com

The 2 day symposium conVerge—where art and science meet was developed to complement the 2002 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art of the same title, part of the Adelaide Festival 2002. In the words of the organisers, “the intention of the symposium [was] to broaden dialogue, generate ideas and raise awareness of the contributions both artists and scientists can make to the larger challenges of our times.” To facilitate this, a series of 6 significant topics were identified, with each headlining a 2 and a half hour session delivered by key speakers and followed by extended discussion. I must declare my vested interest, being both a speaker at the symposium and an artist represented in the 2002 Biennial.

The sessions ran under the banners of Partnerships, Bioeconomics, Genomics, Image and Meaning, Knowledge Systems, and Ecology. The depth and diversity of the material presented generated strong debate and the range of discussion included bio-ethics and representation of the human body; analysis of the relationship between art, language, empirical science and nature; transgenics and gene-environment interactions; social justice as individual responsibility; as well as the impact of GM technologies and the universality of DNA as code. Significantly, a strong grounding was maintained through insights into the ethical responsibilities inherent in indigenous knowledge systems and cultural values, and the importance of recognising and respecting the inseparability of a culture from the environment in which it is embodied.

Running as an under-current to the symposium was an interrogation of the structure, function and results of collaborations between artists and scientists and their industrial and institutional patrons, and an investigation into the ways artists and scientists may contribute to culture through “project-based organisation of multi-disciplinary contributions” (Dr Terry Cutler, Chair, Australia Council for the Arts, “The Art of Collaboration”, conVerge catalogue essay).

In an era when the arts are reforming themselves into an industry which must now “duke it out” with the rest of corporate Australia on a level canvas, much can be learned from the experiences of creative people already working as double-agents in the empirical world. From their insights it appears that in the techno-mad “noughties” there will be new and expanding opportunities for artists and the arts in general, particularly as science works to re-establish its aesthetic kinship with art in order to lift its flagging public profile—and expand its access to funding.

It also appears that in order to survive long term in the new research environment, funding availability will only be maintained if the arts can learn new ways to evaluate their outcomes and provide empirical proof of the value of their cultural research. Such a detailed approach to understanding the ecology of culture would also increase the value of the public perception of the artist and their training, qualifications and experience, and deliver a strong argument for providing realistic budgets for artists and their projects. Artists must now also learn to negotiate contracts which clearly define the role and responsibilities of the artist and co-contributors, and which also adequately protect them and their access to the intellectual property they create. Sadly some artists have lost access to equipment and expertise when a good idea evolved into a good earner.

From experiences recounted it seems that developing face-to-face working relationships with co-contributors is a key element in the long term success of any project, and that strong and open channels of communication are essential to successful art outcomes which avoid the artist functioning simply as a window-dresser for glamorous new science and technology. Australian society faces a number of significant ecological and environmental issues over the next few decades, and artists and scientists are uniquely placed to make major contributions to public awareness through non-linear approaches to the visualisation, analysis and eventual solutions to these issues. I am convinced that opportunities have never been better for real collaborations between artists and scientists that produce great art and great science, and also demonstrate that, just as artistic practice is a mode of research that evolves through experiment, so too science employs processes that may be driven by aesthetic considerations.

Information about the conference and speakers is available through www.adelaidebiennial.com, which will also host an ongoing forum aimed at extending, developing and maintaining the debate.

New media artists recently gathered on Maria Island, off Tasmania, for Solar Circuit.

Maria Island: Frying the Solar Circuitry

Understandably most hairdressers are psychic. Hair is your cosmic antennae after all, only one head-click away from the information supergooey. Yet monks are bald, so one has to wonder about the benefits of separation, of cutting connections with the rest of the known universe.

The rest of the known universe

Tasmania’s Maria Island, as visiting new media artists find out quickly, is without easy net access. Options include park ranger seduction, or tapping into the global hive while dodging all those pesky Californian patent-pending pop-up banners. Tassie’s East coast more than makes up for this of course, with raw disk island power. Easily enough to feed the 30 or so Solar Circuit artists gathering to mesh their southern and northern hemisphered antennae in this data wilderness.

In this data wilderness

Used to connecting machines with fun(k), the deeper opportunities of a remote residency seemed to be the chance to synthesise new thoughts/approaches to the triangle of technology, culture and ecology. And maybe the lush location lured a little too. Great place to kick zen outta beta. As we drift towards the great global uncontrollables, wondering whether radical preservationism or sci-tech ecology management will save the day, perhaps remembering our own place within it all, can provide the clarity we need.

The clarity we need

As the days revealed the layers, an exquisite collection and calibre of people and projects emerged. Introducing the mountains of Europe to the mountains of Tasmania, spanking machines (Tulle Ruth), solar powered insects sound-blurring the natural artificial soundscapes, jobless robots (Ken Gregory), light painting in the midnight forests (Lalila), stretching the Tassie devil’s growl into sub-satanic terrain (Spanky), inventing languages derived from the local surrounds, convincing a village to do nothing for a week and making a film about it (Mex & August), retracing tales and journeys of Tassie Aboriginals, the redcoats and the Tassie tiger (Leroy Black & others), and so on. Eco-themes were well threaded through these projects, and the tailors were soon out sampling the island raw with camcorders, mini discs and all-weather microphones. Mood-capture on the island happened slow, but even with lazier heartbeats, most itchy kids were soon ready to remix.

Ready to remix

Verandah tea stories at some point revolved around plans to reintroduce the Tassie tiger with the preserved DNA of a foetus in the Tassie museum. A museum representative on hand relayed the plans, related camps of thought and its slim likelihood of success. Better perhaps than the 2 convicts chained to each other who tried to swim to freedom from Maria Island, one drowning halfway and the other taking a literal dead weight to the other side only to die himself from exhaustion. Better, but still slim.

Still slim

Did a lot of walking on the island. Stretches of beach, forest paths, mountain trails. Isolated places. Wild places. Is this wilderness? What is wilderness? At the remotest point of the island, chewing a fish caught by Spanky from Sydney, soaking up the fire and ambience, we were reminded of the human touch in all places as a satellite passed overhead in the dusky sky. Hours later a fishing trawler echoed its engine through the evening, undoubtedly a few short of their catch quota from legal fishing areas. Park rangers boasted the availability of electronic tracking methods that could trace a penguin to within a metre. Cost enough to buy a small car every week or so, but it added to a gradual sense of awareness that nothing is untouched despite its seeming isolation or rugged good looks.

Rugged good looks

Someone emailed me the other day: “Do you think a productive new media arts residency would involve a structured exchange of skills and technologies? Or do you feel that a more informal, friendship-based exchange of language, culture and ideas is sufficient to create a productive residency?” Solar Circuit was definitely the latter, though I felt it could have benefited from some on-site provocation with debates, forums or presentations to tickle each day’s exploration. To measure the productivity of an informal residency we should look at the long term conversations begun, the (re)combinations of cultures, skills, styles, experiences. But in the short term there was a snapshot available, Hobart exhibitionz, screeningz and island-glitchez.

Solar Circuit is an International New Media Arts Workshop and residency comprising workshops, WILD 2002 new media exhibition, forums, the OUT@NIGHT experimental film festival and a 10-day residency at a wilderness location with 35 artists from around the world. Project conceived and produced by Antoanetta Ivanova in partnership with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, School of Arts and CAST Gallery, Hobart; Jan 29-Feb16

Interested in the future of Australian documentary? Curious about the worlds of hacktivists and viewsers? The 2-day Digi Docs event was the place to be. With sessions costing less than the price of a Tuesday Cineplex ticket, Digi Docs broke new ground in bringing together, for the first time, a range of new media practitioners, broadcasters and critics to explore the effects of the digital revolution upon the world of documentary. Co-funded by the SAFC, the AFC, the Canadian Consulate and DFAT and curated by documentary maker Heather Croall (with assistance from Chris Joyner), Digi Docs was underpinned by two assumptions. One is that there exists an underexplored yet fruitful relationship between documentary and digital media, whereby the social impulses of the former are served by the participatory capacities of the latter. As became increasingly clear throughout the weekend, many digital practitioners are already behaving in ways that documentary practitioners always have–for example, acting as watchdogs over processes of information dissemination. The second assumption was the power of the national funding bodies to drive changes in the current Australian mediascape.

Friday’s events, entitled “Through Australian Eyes”, especially looked at this theme, with presentations from SBS, ABC, AFC, FFC, Channels 7 and 9 representatives about developing opportunities for practitioners, like the scheme for soon-to-be-completed on-line docos from ABC and the AFC. Issues practical and philosophical were hashed out, such as the role of the public media re: the digital divide and the real meaning of “interactivity” (more, presenters insisted, than the mere clicking of a button)–all of which I took as a sign of the still flexible state of play in both digital media policy and function.

If “Through Australian Eyes” was long on national developments, Saturday’s sessions surfed an international wave of digital arts, information, and activism. Co-curated by Banff Executive Producer for Television and New Media Sara Diamond and documentary practitioner Peter Wintonick (director of Manufacturing Consent and the more recent Cinema Verite), “Windows on the Real” identified 4 prevalent new media themes: the participatory culture of new media, surveillance, activism, and the potentially disruptive agency of some digital practitioners. New media showcasing old agendas were foregrounded (for example, the Witness site, www.witness.org; the Universal Rights Network, www.universalrights.net), while DIY and tactical sites also attracted attention. Want to put together a new flag (call by netflag.guggenheim.org/netflag/)? Or perhaps psychoanalyse your harddrive (visit, at your peril, www.maryflanagan. com/virus.htm)? Sites were shown evidencing these and other activities, as well as one that apparently re-directs Disney visitors to a local porn site (check out www.RtMark.com, though that site’s as much about future interventions as it is about realised ones—so you may have trouble finding it). Indymedia’s yet-to-be-launched Woomera 2002 site, which will automatically turn ordinary citizens’ telephone reports into printed text and then record the reports on to the site, promises to take notions of interactivity into brave new democratic terrain. Semi-autobiographical work by YH Chang (www.yhchang.com/), Melinda Rackham (www.subtle.net), and Sara Diamond (www.codezebra.net—with John Tonkin) rounded out the day, all in all making for an excellent and informative bringing together of what is arguably Screen’s very oldest formation with its very newest one.

Adelaide Fringe festival, Digi Docs, curator Heather Croall, Union House, Adelaide University, March 15-16

CD-ROM, once the medium of choice for ‘multimedia’, has lost much of its lustre in the past 5 years. In a catalogue essay for the MCA’s 1996 show Burning the Interface, curator Mike Leggett held out the CD as bronze sculpture for the 21st century; a new and replicable form for artistic expression. At the time, technological novelty, marketing hype and creative energy melded into a flurry of activity which quickly subsided. A new technological form caught hold: the net, and in particular the web—and the idea of the CD as the new coffee table book, drawing a paying audience of domestic digerati, proved too good to be true. The CD was revealed as just another storage technology, and not a great one at that: only moderately capacious, and slow, too slow for high-resolution video or really dense hypermedia.

Now the hot disc is DVD, and the CD is an everyday utility item, having survived because it’s still the cheapest and most convenient way to publish a large, static, self-contained chunk of data. Phone directories and reference books work well on CD. As an interesting consequence, a space opens for creative practice as the new Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus on CD shows. It includes Roget’s Circular, a work by Tasmanian artists Lisa Roberts and Melissa Smith. Not just filling spare space on the disc, the work is tightly knitted into the Thesaurus, such that Macquarie bills it as an “illumination.” An appealing thought, why shouldn’t all our databases—search engines, encyclopedias, phone books—be digitally illuminated? Digital art weaving itself into the grids of everyday, utilitarian computing, gold leaf and curling vines gone hyper.

Roget’s Circular takes the form of a collection of fragmentary images and texts, derived from the artists’ travels and correpondence over 2 years. The fragments are filtered through Roget’s own 12 categories of meaning, the architecture of his quest to order and organise the chaotic tangle of the language; the Circular is a personal network of memory, experience and association which is entwined with the officially constructed network of the Thesaurus. Another appealing idea, yet it just never takes off. The fragments are often beautiful, and sometimes interesting, but the networks of significance are mostly obscure and the urge to keep clicking wanes quickly. The work’s integration with the Thesaurus proper is mostly effective; portals to and from the Circular are linked to relevant entries. A shame, though, that the massive hyperstructure inherent in the thesaurus, the network of links from every word to countless others, goes unexploited by either the thesaurus itself or the Circular. (For a counter-example, see Plumb Design’s Visual Thesaurus, http://www.visualthesaurus.com/)

Roget’s Circular, Lisa Roberts and Melissa Smith, as part of Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus on CD-ROM (PC only).

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