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Two composers and music educators describe the forces changing the nature of tertiary music education.

AA When I first arrived in Australia at the end of May 1991 it took only a week to realise that I was in a culture that had certainly not shaken off the shackles of its colonial past. It was the Queen’s birthday—a public holiday. In the UK no-one knew when the Queen’s birthday was, let alone celebrated it in any way.

I realised there was a similar situation in music education. Except for some innovative exceptions such as La Trobe University Music department (sadly, now closed) and Southern Cross University, the model was by and large the traditional English one. Unfortunately classical art music in the UK is a pretty poor example. No English-born composer from the 18th and 19th centuries was considered internationally significant.

In the 1960s, by a series of lucky accidents, England at last discovered its musical creativity with rock music and the Beatles. This music found fertile soil at home and was easily exportable to other English speaking nations (most notably the USA) in a way the English classical composers had never experienced.

Until then music had been highbrow or lowbrow, then middlebrow. The 60s was the start of what John Seabrook called nobrow, “a world where anything goes provided it sells” (Nobrow, Methuen, London, 2000). This gave England the swinging 60s and a newfound confidence.

Not so here. Australia was too far from the epicentre of the music business. In an area where an idea can be 2 weeks too late, the physical time and distance was too great. Of course there were some successes, but nothing like the tidal wave that swept the UK.

Unfortunately the academy largely ignored this change, concentrating more on maintaining so called ‘standards.’ These standards did not respect and therefore did not respond to a public change of preference. Understanding this was left to the cultural theorists. Important influences were technology’s increasing connectivity, the mass media determining and being determined by audience taste, cultural change and the relationship between technology and lifestyle. All of these bring us to the double edged sword of globalisation.

RV One can see these global influences on tertiary music here. Many changes were triggered by the Dawkins Report (Parliamentary Paper: 20/2/1988), which required smaller tertiary institutions with student numbers less than 2,000 to amalgamate with a parent university or combine with other small institutions to form a new university. For the smaller institutions, amalgamation directly affected budgetary control as this was either lost or restricted. Student numbers became the basis for income generation, forcing departments to rethink their course offerings. The university system transformed into a market economy. Departments became competitive and vulnerable to decisions beyond their direct control. External influences needed to be taken into consideration such as industry trends, the mass media and globalisation.

AA The potentially good news for Australian music in the global economy is that we move towards a world where the centre is wherever the centre is. And any part of the surface of a sphere is equidistant from its centre. Most important is connectivity, speed and ideas. This is not, however, a world where classical music is doomed, nor popular music blessed. As Manuel Castells has argued: “Globalisation is highly selective. It proceeds by linking all that, according to dominant interests, has value anywhere in the planet, and discarding anything which has no value or becomes devalued” (“Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society”, British Journal of Sociology, vol no 5, no 1, London School of Economics, Jan/Mar 2000). In a globalised environment, cults can flourish, provided one is networked to seek out similarly minded individuals from around the world. In a networked world, however, you cannot assume to be the spokesperson of a dominant culture.

RV With so much music being made today and a student population well connected to various networks, the pressure on music departments to be ‘relevant’ and at the same time developing musical skills and thinking is enormous. Something must give as there are not enough resources to teach everything, nor staff fluent in all the forms of music-making activity. Consequently, the 90s have seen new approaches to content and modes of delivery.

For some institutions content delivery has been reprioritised. Traditionally, most music courses were based on performance and notation skills and an assumption that western art music repertoire was fundamental. The student population in Australia now consists of people from rock, folk, jazz, techno, rap, classical etc backgrounds. Who is to say that the values of western European repertoire are more important than those of Middle Eastern music?

Larger classes have required changes to the modes of delivery. The rule is: if a department wants an increased budget allocation, then student numbers must increase. In this paradigm, small classes such as one to one teaching are financially unviable. Today, a performance student receives only 26 lessons per year. This affects continuity and qualitative learning issues, and staff become overworked. However, solutions can be found in collaborative, modular and flexible learning, technology-aided teaching, web site access, teaching software exploring interactivity and project based learning. It would not be too difficult to implement and include alternative teaching deliveries to free up staff time and not diminish standards.

AA The focus on skill development is a result of course content being more career relevant. However, does this mean a downskilling of musicians? If viewed through the traditional lens of melody, rhythm and harmony, then the answer is yes. If viewed as a series of specific skills for a particular job then opportunities abound. It takes a particular skill and aesthetic to write and perform for the living room or the concert hall or the church or for film or TV or interactive media.

So we need a broader definition of musicianship and music literacy. We have to acknowledge there are many ways to be a musician and there is no hierarchy of goodness in this. It is significant that the UK’s richest person in 2001 is Paul McCartney, a man whose inability to read music would bar him from most music institutions in this country. The jobbing musicians whose only skill is to faithfully play the notes may be admirable, but their status is diminishing.

Music institutions and departments need to remain indispensable if they want to survive in a quickly changing music industry. There are no safe havens. Every musician has to work towards connecting with performers and audiences in various modes and media by using ideas that have cultural relevance, be that with a home-grown product, or by value adding to a product from elsewhere. It is becoming a truly borderless world. Whether the music is Australian or not is of little practical consideration. All that matters is that we create, not just copy. Our education structure has not been very supportive of creativity. However, encouragingly, the Australian Research Council recently has included Creative Arts in its research funding. If we as teachers can shift our emphasis away from repertoire to creation, we are truly assisting the education of future musicians to be professionals in the field, instead of McDonald’s workers.

RV A slow shift is occurring from copying to creating: a shift from repertoire based teaching (ie studying and emulating the great canon of set works) to generic teaching using cross disciplinary works. The generic approach enables musical understanding via analogy: the student transfers patterns heard in one structure to another, such as identifying various pulse and melodic relationships in an excerpt from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a samba from Latin America and an Aboriginal song. In both approaches creativity is used to facilitate an understanding of musical structure, style and form. However, in the former, creative thinking is confined to one of emulation, such as writing in the style of Palestrina or Charlie Parker, whereas through the converging of different traditions in the latter, creative thinking enables the creation of individual style, new repertoire, new contexts.

AA So, is creativity a free for all? I think not. It demands a set of skills, a knowledge of the buzz of the time, some nous and some luck. Be too similar to something else and you’re dead. Be too different and you are ignored. We are dealing in a market of symbols in what Justin O’Connor says is a “very volatile and fast moving symbolic circuit” (The Definition of Cultural Industries, Manchester Institute for Popular Culture, 1999). Not the classic environment of your average tertiary institution.

RV In order to survive this fast moving circuit, music departments must be adaptable, understand the benchmarks of creative thinking skills in music and identify the relationships existing between these skills, industry and personal vocation.

AA Just as enterprises in general have become information technology-intensive, they now are becoming more ‘creativity-intensive.’ Professor Stuart Cunningham, writing about Queensland University of Technology’s labelling as a Creative Industries university, says “the creative industries concept is a recognition that the future of the new economy lies in the move from IT to content‚ from infrastructure to creative applications” ( Higher Education Supplement, The Australian, June 27).

There is risk in this. Anything that relies on technology is constantly moving towards obsolescence. The recording industry is nothing like the industry of 10 years ago. And the next generation of musicians will need to be able to cope with these fast moving changes. They need to be creative within the market. They need to be connected and flexible. And therefore so do the staff of our music institutions.

RV Flexibility is the answer. In an environment in which industry relevance has become the benchmark, it is now important that staff actively engage with many industry stakeholders. This enables opportunities, peer interaction, the maintaining of relevant technical standards, potential increases in revenue from new sources, and provides dynamic role models for students. The tertiary music education sector engages with the music industry sector and vice versa. However, in conjunction there needs to be some development of a critical practice combining systematic enquiry and analysis into one’s own discipline area with creative thinking, as well as music literacy which embraces and positions new forms and contexts with the more traditional approaches to music making.

RealTime issue #44 Aug-Sept 2001 pg. 10

Suzuki Tadashi, Meme Thorne

At the fifth in the RealTime-Performance Space series of open forums for artists working in contemporary performance, 50 performers, academics in performance studies, emerging artists, students and teachers of a range of skills and body regimes gathered to discuss the meanings, functions, effectiveness and availability of training. Visiting scholars and artists from Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia, and a number of choreographers and dancers, joined in the dialogue which was informally hosted by director and performer Nikki Heywood and RealTime editor Keith Gallasch.

Nikki Heywood I wonder can we feel our training in our body. How aware of it are we? How useful have those training methods been and what particularly attracted you to the particular discipline.

Meme Thorne (performer) My speciality is the Suzuki Method otherwise known as stomping. I started in 1989 doing classes with Nigel Kellaway who was probably one of the first Australians to go to Japan and study with Suzuki Tadashi and his company at Toga. The Suzuki Company came to Australia in 1991 and performed The Trojan Women. What excited me most was that although Suzuki was working with something like 35 people on stage it was possible for me to look at every single person and feel, wow, I’m getting something from every single one of them. What is it that they do that enables them to harness this kind of energy, this kind of presence and make not just the principle interesting and able to engage your attention? Even those who didn’t speak a word. Even the one who stood for an hour and 10 minutes without moving. So I wrote to Suzuki and asked if I could participate in some kind of training with his company which I did in 1991. In 1992 he invited me to go back to Japan and train as a teacher of that methodology and I’ve been teaching it ever since.

I think the difficulty for a lot of performers is that you have an idea of how you want to be received and you have an idea of what you want to say but often the 2 pictures don’t come together. Through the Suzuki training I have found it more possible to arrive at those two ideals and bring them together. It happens to me because through the training I’ve been able to understand what it is my body does at any given moment while I’m on stage. I can do away with extraneous gestures, I can be crisp and precise and I can make a clear picture, and I’m talking not just about what I say and do but the visceral qualities, the aesthetics of the whole thing.

Simon Woods?(performer, Zen Zen Zo, a Brisbane-based performance group) We also found that there were a lot of wonderful benefits in the training which I believe transformed our company and took our work to a whole new level but there were also elements that we found a bit limiting. It’s a highly structured style of training, very formal. We found when we were working only with Suzuki Method, in rehearsals and eventually performance, a lot of the acting was rather stilted, a bit lacking in freedom and vulnerability. Our main influence has been not so much the Suzuki Company of Toga but one of their children, the City Company in New York, run by Anne Bogart. Our training now comprises Suzuki as well as the Viewpoints Training. Viewpoints is about the group. It’s a series of improvisational exercises that allow the actor to take into account their relationship to the rest of the company. It focuses a lot on spontaneity, on creating material in the moment, on reaction to the other performers. There are 9 different viewpoints that enable the performer to create that awareness. There is a book, a collection of articles called Viewpoints, and it was put together at a conference in the states. It’s been a fantastic influence

Yana Taylor (performer, teacher) I’d like everyone to stand up who has found only 1 of their training backgrounds useful in performance, whatever exciting thing it is that hooks you and engages you. How many people have found 2 things in their background that they’ve carried, OK 3, 4, 5, 6 (this is much more than I’d thought), 7, 8, 9, 10. Put your hands up if you think I haven’t reached your point yet·11, 12, 13, 14. Stand up anyone who thinks their training has been totally useless for them.

I did this to see how you might think and partly because of my own experience. I have a range of training backgrounds, the short list of decisive ones÷years of classical ballet, quite a substantial amount of work in corporeal mime, Suzuki, I’m a tap dancer·but in some ways all of those things have a relationship with where I am now. I remember one of my earlier teachers who came from Europe. A very fierce person she was but I worked with her for about 4 years. And one of the things she kept saying about Australians was that we were all dilletantes who didn’t take ourselves seriously and that we would therefore be cast out into the cultural tundra. And something about my rather adolescent and flimsy wavering sense of what I was doing still went no, I’m gonna stick by this dedicated eclecticism as I’ve come to call it, and see if in fact I might find others who are in the same situation because they live here too.

Celia White (director, physical theatre performer) I started performing because I got seduced by circus and the idea of it. Not circus circus but circus tricks as an avenue to doing other things with them in the late 70s. That was to do political theatre, which became feminist theatre, when there was the idea of making the female body strong. There was also the ooh-aah factor, the kind of spectacle that you could access really easily with circus. This is an interesting thing for a body like mine. There was no training. There was make-it-up-as-you-go and probably hurt-yourself-in-the-process. I love Feldenkrais now. Then that idea of whatever circus theatre was, which we never really knew, became very limiting and we found ourselves calling ourselves something different. And in the process I grabbed at anything that was passing by. I’ve invented my own training. But there’s still that little sense that I haven’t had a regime to hook into and perhaps I’m looking for one…but perhaps I’ve missed the boat. The idea of another regime on this body seems impossible now.

NH Where does the aesthetic of the discipline start to shape the aesthetic of the work we make and how does that break new ground and create form?

Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre Company in a Viewponts training session

Gavin Robins (performer, teacher) I felt that the virtuosity that you see exemplified every Saturday at the VFL finals or even any sporting arena around Australia, that risk taking wasn’t apparent in the theatre. But I’d walk down to the Dance block—I did a drama degree at Kelvin Grove in Brisbane—and I’d see virtuosity there and some of the Physical Education people doing it and I’d say, why can’t theatre embrace this and why can’t actors be as developed in their physicality as they are in their intellectual ability and their vocal skills? I was driven by that. When I went to the NIDA Movement Course I saw a lot of stuff and I was involved in a lot of conventional work. It’s a very classical training, and it was boring and kind of anti-physical, and it really got up my nose. Then in 1994 I saw Legs on the Wall’s All of Me here at Performance Space and it was that first step towards a merging of virtuosity and eloquence with storytelling. So part of my experience with Legs has been touring throughout the world and performing and really locking myself into a system, and after a while I thought that’s it, I need to go out and apply these skills in other areas.

And the Bell Shakespeare Company is an exciting company for me to work with at the moment because John has embraced this notion of the ensemble. He has 11 core performers who work with him for the whole year and I teach them Ashtanga Yoga and basic balance acrobatics÷things to empower the actor so that they might be able to lift a person above the chorus or have Ariel run across the backs of people. And then it’s a question of how that language furthers the theatrical aesthetic, does it say the same thing? We see examples of it working in great companies like Theatre de Complicité who have a seamless merging of so many skills. And it is that search for holism that I’m excited by, and the dynamic eclectic training. And I think that’s what we should be striving for.

YT One of the things that afflicts this network is that training regimes are considered an uncreative area and are very hard to support and fund—unless it’s part of creative development or rehearsal—because it’s considered somehow unthought, unconstructed. This is why I respect the project of the Omeo Studio [Sydney] crew because they’re working really hard to create the kind of milieu where training is possible. And without that, these things stall despite all the sacrifices from several generations of performers in a whole range of related work.

One of the things that I think I might be seeing here tonight is that institutional practice is all right÷it’s okay to go to Kelvin Grove or WAAPA but it ain’t enough. And beyond that these tracks are ones of people self-teaching and finding their own path through. There needs to be room for that and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find space for it.

Matthew Fargher (musician, vocal teacher) My training is largely in physical theatre and traditional theatre via Philippe Gaulier and people like him, Yoshio Ida, a Japanese actor in Paris and subsequently a bunch of voice teachers who had a very body-based approach. My understanding of the relationship between the body and the voice came from an accidental moment in the lead up time for a class I did for a Contemporary Performance Week at Sidetrack in which I went partially deaf due to an ear infection. Suddenly I realised that I could hear my body from the inside. I could hear my breathing and suddenly sense the whole voice thing at a kinaesthetic level and suddenly it was like, there’s the clue. You can translate all of that body approach, feel the interaction between yourself and the space and yourself and another, whether that’s from a contact improvisation point of view or any discipline that puts an individual in a space with a degree of sensitivity. You can suddenly translate a lot of that work into voice work.

The tricky thing is getting an individual or group of people to do physical work and then translate that into voice—I’m doing it every week with the choir I sing with. We do a lot of physical work in the lead up. Every time I do a choir that doesn’t do that, they’re like, oh, you mean, you can kind of move before you sing. It’s a revelation. I think it’s easier to bring physicality to people who use their voices already and have an effect than the other way around. Apart from a few individuals who make noise while they perform there isn’t anything like what you might call a school of vocal physical performance. So I’ve had to look elsewhere within Australia to see if there is a cultural lead and the obvious thing for me is the way that the Cook Islanders and others perform because they have a very physical way of singing and the singing and the gesture are one.

Silver Budd I’m a Body-Mind Centering© practitioner and I feel that through that technique I get tools or ways of working with myself. Say right now I’m having to talk and I feel nervous and so I’m looking for my belly and I’m looking for my blood and I’m looking for what connects me more with the earth and I’m going into my body to find what can soften in my organs, how can I make more space in my throat. All the time I’m using this inward vision that I got from Body Mind Centering© which very much has taught me about all the different systems of cells in my body that are making me be here at this moment, the way I’m being here.

Sue Broadway (performer) All of my training from when I was quite small right up to more recently is the exact opposite, starting from the external. I’ve only come to learning about any kind of internal training much much later in my career. I counted 20 training regimes in answer to Yana’s question and I was only counting the ones I’d done for a month or more including some exotic ones like Peking Opera and Balinese mask and Kathakali. I think I’m with Meme, I think they all become so ingrained in the body that when I set myself the task of going out to do the work I feel a subconscious level in the muscles and not in the brain at all. A lot of the things I do are about focussing on getting one throw right. When the object leaves your hand, you know as you take the beat, you know whether you’ve done it right or not. It’s a state of mind that you’ve managed to locate, a tempo in your body that repeats the action for you.

Alice Cummins (dancer, Body-Mind Centering© teacher) You do it in your mind but your mind is in your body. Your intelligence is all over your body.

Lowell Lewis (academic, anthropologist) I agree with what you say although I think it’s a duality. I call it the embodied mind and the intelligent body, and trying to get to a third place which is somewhere in between. Somebody brought up this notion of rapping and hip hop where the vocal and physical do come together. But when they start breaking, they don’t sing. You try singing while spinning on the top of your head. It’s like another degree up. The artform that I’ve worked on quite a lot is Capoeira, the Brazilian martial artform which also involves singing. The best players can actually do Capoeira and sing at the same time. Although they’ll only do certain movements.

Alison Richards (academic, performance studies) I think it’s really important to understand that every training produces a different you and comes in at a different point. It isn’t just static. It’s dynamic and you are making yourself all the time as you do it.

Paul Selwyn Norton Choreographer, autodidact, never went to formal school. I was very fortunate to be taken off the disco floor and put on stage at the age of 23. I just had quite a strong sense of proprioception. this ownership of what we have here.

Andrew Morrish (improvisor) I was taken from a disco floor too but asked to stop doing that.

PSN As a choreographer I believe I’m privileged to be able to manipulate body space time mechanics which is what we all do as artists. That’s my fundamental. So if I was working with, say, a gymnast, someone who had a strong sense of proprioception, I would teach them a sense of musicality, rhythm, timing. There are many, many systems that I’ve picked up over the years. I spent my first 4 or 5 years dancing for other people, not too happily, and ended up having to choreograph by default. I became a hunter gatherer for resources that suited my poetics best. I think the poetry governs the work and you find the tools which will best express the poetics of that work. For me it’s the poetics that govern the work, not actual technique.

KG Nigel Kellaway has said that significant Australian dancers have either been trained by Russell Dumas or Leigh Warren. What do you give to people who come to you in terms of training?

Russell Dumas (choreograper, dancer) Access to an embodied heritage. My own practice embraces the modern and postmodern and I worked with Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp and everyone in between. I think it’s interesting in the last 20 years, for reasons that I think are associated with rationalism and globalisation÷by which I mean Americanisation and free markets and the way this is playing out÷that there are no significant breaks to the canon. It’s habitus, this notion of what you need to forget so that you can have a present. It’s more what you can have—you need to forget the past so that you can have a future. But you also need to have a practice to have a future. And having a practice in Australia is like being a homosexual in a Roman Catholic seminary. It’s all right as long as you’re not out.

You’re talking about technique, but what for? This whole thing is like some Foucauldian notion of bodies and disciplining bodies. About 30 years ago I came across the notion of the thinking body and experiential anatomy. Basically it comes down to the sense of touch. It’s probably the first sense and the one through which we know the other senses. That relationship to touch is distinctly related to the mother’s touch and it’s often denied as a sense of knowing or a way of knowing. You’re also talking about embodiment. There’s a history of denial to do with the body. We’re always talking about the body of knowledge, the body of wisdom, the body incorporated but what’s the relationship of my body to Dance Exchange Incorporated? What’s the relationship of the private and the public of this body. It’s not so much about the visual. You’re talking about wanting people to look at you. I became interested in dance as a homosexual growing up in central Queensland where I did ballet and became interested in the notion of a performance of absence. If people looked at you, you got bashed up. The performance of absence was something that later was quite useful to me. Cunningham asked me to work with him because he was interested in that quality.
Probably the most interesting bodies I’ve worked with have been the untrained ones like Keith March and Nick Sabel. The other ones very often have had ballet training. It’s something that’s barcoded into children’s bodies. I’m interested in the notion of a colonial ballet practice and how people talk about Republicanism in this world of dance.

YT The opportunities and support mechanisms for training have become thinner on the ground. At the same time, the appetite for them is on the increase. We are actually at an interesting point. I can think of some ordinary things to do. When people are making applications to funding organisations, that they see training as part of the creative pursuit and intimately woven into it. At the other level, there’s the way the field’s run for a long time—making do, barter, exchange. But in Sydney there’s less and less infrastructure for that to happen, the space, time and access to it.

–

Body Regimes, RealTime-Performance Space forum, Performance Space, Sydney, June 4.

Read full transcript.

The next in the series of RealTime-Performance Space forums, The Place of the Space, on the relationship between the artists and the contemporary art space. Performance Space, September 3, 6pm.

RealTime issue #44 Aug-Sept 2001 pg. 12

Grease—The Mega Stoush/h5>
On our Post page, Zane Trow spits chips at the Australia Council’s controversial funding, as he sees it, to assist a commercial entrepreneur’s audience development. He and the Council’s Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Bott also thrashed it out on Radio National’s Arts Today last month. The argument has been taken up by others like Lyndon Terracini on ABC TV’s new arts program Coast to Coast. His Queensland Biennial Festival of Music focused strongly and successfully on creatively engaging communities. In the July issue of the Australia Council News, outgoing Chair Margaret Seares expands on the motivation for this project:

“This initiative is targeted at the major ‘disinclined’ group identified through our Promoting the Value of the Arts research, that is, regional males who have rarely, if ever, been to any form of theatre or arts event…. It’s is not about funding Grease, nor about taking money away from arts organisations that might otherwise have received it. It is about getting the disinclined group off the couch and out the door, heading in the direction of positive views about the activities we group loosely as ‘the arts.’ We are not funding the production or the tour itself. Our funding provides 4 modules making up a community outreach program in the 40 locations Grease will be visiting. They are workshops for local artists with the company’s key artistic and technical staff; an education kit for upper primary and secondary students and their teachers focussing on the student’s own creativity and the artistic process; linking with youth through local youth organisations; media relations skills development for local arts organisations. All modules are provided at no cost to participants. Our collaboration with the Really Useful Company has allowed us to in effect ‘piggyback’ on their investiment, risk and tour organisation work, allowing us to provide this program nationally through much of regional Australia at a very modest cost—about $5,000 per town. Most excitingly, it is providing access to over half a million Australians—many of whom would see themselves as disengaged or disinclined to support ‘the arts.’”

The curious thing about the Australia Council’s pursuit of the disinclined is its attitude to the ‘interested’ (the ‘inclined’ of the Saatchi & Saatchi survey)—is this lot already secured as an arts audience?

News on the training front

VCA Discovery Day on Sunday August 19 offers prospective students advice on courses plus the opportunity to see student work in all the schools including a performance by Company 2001, 12 final year VCA Drama students who have been working with Gregori Ditiyatkovski of the Maly Drama Theatre, St Petersburg on a production of Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun, running August 18-September 1.

August 6-12 marks the inauguration of a new partnership between The Seymour Group and the Tasmanian Conservatorium, a 3 year project which will allow students access to a high level performing ensemble, at the same time providing the Seymour Group with an opportunity to develop their national performance profile.

Melbourne Fringe and the Myer Foundation believe the arts desperately need a new generation of entrepreneurial creative producers to ensure their long term health and vibrancy. “Recently, a number of university based arts management courses have been introduced as fee-paying post-graduate diplomas. These courses offer structured accredited learning in a range of arts administration and management responsibilities. But what is desperately needed is hands-on mentor-based training to cultivate producing talent.” An Associate Producer Training Program will be piloted during the 2001 Melbourne Fringe Festival (September 23-October 14). Another significant development is Curatorial Lab, a collaboration between Melbourne’s 200 Gertrude St Gallery and Brisbane’s Metro Arts to encourage young curators.

New Music Week August 13-19, a week long festival organised by the University of Western Australia in Perth features the music of composer-in-residence Gerard Brophy along with performances by Trash, WASO New Music Ensemble, Magnetic Pig, Adam Pinto, we bOp, Guitarstrophe and Spiked. Also featued are works by Roger Smalley, Lindsay Vickery, Dominik Karsky, Richard Thorpe, Cathie Travers and more. Information 08 94841133 or 08 93802054

Collectors on a budget

First Floor is an artist-run gallery which relies predominantly on artists paying to exhibit, the voluntary work of the committee and events such as the forthcoming 1st Floor Fundraiser Exhibition. This is an opportunity to view and purchase artworks priced between $100 and $1000 by some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists including Stephen Bram, Pat Brassington, Martine Corompt, Adam Cullen, Aleks Danko, Kate Ellis, Julia Gorman, Brent Harris, David Jolly, David Noonan, Nat and Ali, Sean Meilak, Callum Morton, Alex Pittendrigh, David Rosetzky, Jacinta Schreuder, Ricky Swallow, Lyndal Walker, Vivienne Shark LeWitt and many more. August 8-25. 03 934734346, email

Fringe Acts

The Melbourne Fringe Festival (September 23-October 14) has nabbed Neil Thomas and The Urban Dream Capsule team who more usually inhabit the windows of the world’s department stores—most recently Sears in Chicago—who regroup as The Museum of Modern Oddities to occupy an old hardware shop in Johnston Street Collingwood for 3 months from August 30. The shop was run by the same proprietor until he retired in his 80s, leaving the contents intact. Also featured in the Fringe is Spencer Tunick, the photographic artist from New York who creates large scale public performances by getting people to drop their gear and lie down in the street. Recently in Montreal, Tunick got 2000 to strip for art. Watch for the stampede to “a very public place” in Melbourne.
Visit the Fringe website

International Successes

From 180 applications worldwide for the inaugural Llangollen International Instrumentalist competition in North Wales, Australian Claire Edwardes was the only percussionist selected. Her performance of Druckman’s marimba solo Reflections on the Nature of Water and Xenakis’ drum piece Rebounds was enough to land her the trophy and the 15,000 pounds.

Pity prizes for radio don’t attract quite the same booty. Nevertheless, given the treatment of artists at the ABC lately, producers Sherre DeLys and Russell Stapleton are probably happy enough with the accolades for winning the Grand Prix for Art and Sound Design in the 2001 Phonurgia Nova awards in France. These prestigious prizes are made for works exploring the creative potential of radio. Their work, Containers, for The Listening Room is composed entirely from recordings made at Sydney Harbour and Port Botany on a single day. You can hear it on ABC Classic FM 402 on September 3. Jim Denley, another regular contributor to The Listening Room shared equal second prize in the Fiction section with For You, Me and the Stars.

Sonorous Bodies, the video-installation/performance by Judith Wright and Liza Lim is going to the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin, September 22-23. Premiered by ELISION at the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial in 1999 this sensual work features Satsuki Odamura on koto. After Berlin, the ELISION soloists tour to Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim in Norway.

Performance Space & MCA live on

In RealTime 42 Fiona Winning, Artistic Director of Performance Space, announced that because of impossibly high rent the organisation would have to leave its home. No alternative venue had been found. However, in a media release of June 13, PS announced that: “After lengthy discussions with NSW Ministry, Performance Space has received a letter from the Director General Roger Wilkins which in summary states: 1. The NSW Government recognises Performance Space as a ‘pivotal part of the performing arts sector’ and a ‘key industry support mechanism.’ They have prioritised the resolution of our venue crisis as being of critical importance. 2. The Premier and Minister for the Arts has approved a one–off grant to assist Performance Space to maintain its current program of activities. The NSW Government is also seeking further funds for next year, to ensure we continue to be able to run Cleveland Street as a venue in the short term while the long term ‘home’ is sought and secured.”

RealTime co-editor Keith Gallasch has just completed a 10 day stint reporting the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music from the Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, a magnificent contemporary arts complex. Not surprisingly he wants one for
Sydney–for Performance Space.

After being submitted to architectural phantasmagoria and crazed talk of relocating the MCA, all lovers of contemporary art took heart from the Friday July 13 announcement that the NSW Government has at last made a substantial and long term commitment to Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Arts at its current Circular Quay-side location.

RealTime issue #44 Aug-Sept 2001 pg. 16

Rachel Perkins, director One Night the Moon

photo Sam Oster

Rachel Perkins, director One Night the Moon

Looking round the Playhouse in Sydney’s Opera House complex, Kev Carmody rests his guitar and ironically mentions that when he’d last performed on Bennelong Point, he’d had to play outside in the forecourt. Next time, he promises, to loud cheers, he’ll be in the main theatre, where all the whitefellas get invited to perform.

With Paul Kelly and the entirely euphonious trio, Euphonia, Carmody was playing at Blak Screen/Blak Sounds, a 3-day festival celebrating the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers and musicians. Celebration was in the air, but politics were not forgotten: the event coincided with Reconciliation (formerly ‘Sorry’) Week.

Just as with Indigenous painting, there are signs that Aboriginal filmmaking is poised to challenge dominant, whitefella filmmaking, and take the artistic lead. Rachel Perkins’ new film, One Night The Moon, which premiered at this event, is a good example. Based on the true story of Aboriginal Tracker Riley in Dubbo during the 1930s, this extraordinarily powerful and startlingly original short film challenges many preconceptions about Indigenous cinema.

Paul Kelly, One Night The Moon

photo George Kanavas

Paul Kelly, One Night The Moon

Starring Paul Kelly as a white, racist farmer, it tells the story of a young, white girl (Memphis Kelly) who got lost in the outback and died due to her parents’ refusal to allow an Aboriginal tracker (Kelton Pell) on their land. With a boldness that catches the breath, Perkins has made a film whose originality lies in its operatic form, its refusal to obey the accepted rules of mainstream cinema concerning verisimilitude and realism, and its focus on the white family’s tragedy. Initially, the story was that of the black Tracker Riley but Perkins changed the focus to the white mother (Kaarin Fairfax). This disconcerts those in the audience who expect a black focus from an Arrente filmmaker. But, as Kelly says: “It is a story of knowledge offered and knowledge rejected, and the consequences that come from that, and that has great resonance for the history of both blacks and whites in this country.” And, as Perkins explains: “I wanted to make a film about the space between black and white Australians.”

Many of the films screened push boundaries in a variety of ways. None more so than those by Tracey Moffatt, whose landmark films—Nice Coloured Girls (1987), Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990), Bedevil (1993)—challenge both societal and artistic conventions and, perhaps, helped create the pattern for the next generation of Aboriginal filmmakers. Not that Moffatt would necessarily agree that she has much in common with filmmakers who proclaim their Aboriginality. She sent a message from New York, where she now lives, saying she didn’t want to be known as an “Aboriginal artist.” While supporting her right to any label (or no label), it’s hard to see why she insists on the disclaimer. All her films screened—Lip (with Gary Hillberg, 1997), Heaven (1997) and Night Cries—display a strong political sensibility in which her Aboriginality, like her feminism, is impossible to ignore.

Night Cries, for example, weaves autobiographical material about the adoption of an Aboriginal child by a white family with a fantasy arising from the plot of Charles Chauvel’s film Jedda (1955). By proposing that Jedda didn’t die in the film’s last frames, but lived to become the middle-aged carer of her white adopting mother, Moffatt shows herself as preoccupied by issues of history, truth, survival and the need for radical change, as are many younger Aboriginal filmmakers.

There were several references to Jedda during the weekend. Darlene Johnson thinks “it’s an amazing film. In places the racism is so extreme that it’s almost laughable. But it also has a special place in our history. When it came out there was still apartheid in Australian cinemas: Aboriginals had to sit in different seats or couldn’t go to the cinema. But many Aborigines loved it. They saw Aboriginal people—stars—on the screen probably for the first time.” She also points to the huge amounts of documentary footage made by white colonialists in which Indigenous peoples had no involvement in their own representation; some of these images are used to powerful political effect in her film Stolen Generations (2000).

Johnson’s films cover a wide range of styles and subjects, from a mockumentary-style film about allergy (Dust Mite Be You, 2000), an award-winning short drama (Two Bob Mermaid 1996), to the heart-searing doco Stolen Generations (2000). But they all have one thing, at least, in common: “I guess they all have a ‘survival’ theme to them. Two Bob Mermaid, about a black girl who tries to “pass” as white, is very much about survival strategy. I wanted to explore that which is acknowledged and that which is disavowed: the conflicts and complexities of living in 2 worlds. Swimming is a metaphor for the need to negotiate these two worlds.” Criticised by some university students for representing Aborigines in a negative light—there’s a drunken female character—Johnson explains that she counters the stereotype by showing this character “as both a caring mother and someone who likes a good time and can get drunk—like anyone else.”

Erica Glynn is another whose films demonstrate a wide range of content and form. She describes My Bed, Your Bed (2000) as a comedy “that refused to idealise present day Aboriginal culture.” Her latest, Minymaku Way (2001), is a documentary about the work of the Ngangyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yankuntjatjara Women’s Council in the remote desert communities of Central Australia. It shows the special malpa (working relationship) between some of the key anangu (Indigenous) women councillors and the white council co-ordinator. Once again, those who expect Indigenous filmmakers to focus on black culture to the exclusion of all white people, some of whom I spoke to during the weekend, criticise the film for its inclusion of a white voice and for its structure which reveals Indigenous community life to be complex. But the film gets its structure from the way in which the council itself works, not from the codes of conventional documentary filmmaking and as Erica reveals: “I don’t choose my films, they seem to choose me.”

The films of another potent filmic voice, Catriona McKenzie challenge preconceptions about Indigenous culture and filmmaking in very specific ways. Her 3 shorts—Box (1997), Road (2000), and Redfern Beach (2001)—have determinedly urban locations. They also attest to a wide knowledge and love of cinema from styles, genres and cinemas as diverse as Scorsese, Truffaut, social realism and magic realism.

Superficially, Ivan Sen’s films might appear to conform to the archetypal Aboriginal film. Journey (1998), Tears (1998) and Dust (2001) all represent Aboriginal teenagers living in outback or rural areas. But, ultimately, these impressive films by this assured, young filmmaker, whose love of the road movie resonates through almost every film he’s made, do not deliver the expected or the conventional. In her essay, “Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television…” (AFC, Sydney, 1993), Marcia Langton describes how myths of Aboriginality are created and perpetuated by filmmakers through the ways in which characters, typically, are de-conceptualised—socially, politically and historically. Sen’s characters all challenge colonialist representation by providing white Australia with a black history—one that shows how the 2 histories intersect or, importantly, fail to meet.

Glynn talks about contemporary life in terms of “juggling two worlds.” Johnson says something similar, discussing the need to negotiate identity and representation in 2 worlds: “I make films to educate my own people and white people about history—because both have been denied access to what really happened. We need to be exposed to our own history too. Many of our mob are just learning about it.” When making Stolen Generations, Johnson says she learned from meeting the 3 Aboriginal people stolen from their families as well as from a white nun who “did a 180 degree turn and now thinks what she did was wrong. I learned that her history is a part of white history too.”

To criticise Indigenous filmmakers for not making ‘typical blackfella’ movies, as some audiences both black and white do, is to ignore what interests many contemporary Indigenous filmmakers, what Rachel Perkins describes as “the space between black and white”, a space that some hope could be filled with a treaty.

On the second day of screenings, a white member of the audience asked, aggressively, why so few Aboriginals were present. Rhoda Roberts, the superb and tireless host, courteously pointed out that the films had already been seen by many, perhaps most, Aboriginals. She added that anyone who’d been at the opening night celebrations would realise how few revellers got to bed before 4am; attending a day of movies and music would be a hard call. As the films we saw attest, they have much to celebrate.

–

Blak Screen/Blak Sounds, part of Message Sticks program, The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, June 1-3

For more Indigenous film see Alex Hutchinson’s review of shorts at FedFest & Teri Hoskin’s look at Kumarangk, a doco about Aboriginal women’s stories from Hindmarsh Island

RealTime issue #44 Aug-Sept 2001 pg. 17

Hidden away in the glorious RMIT Capitol Theatre and screening for one night only, FedFest combined a mish-mash of historical features with the 5 winners of the national Federation Film Festival: Kullifoot (directed by Brendan Fletcher) Warm Strangers (Ivan Sen), Jubulj (Wayne Blair), The Third Note (Catriona McKenzie) and Conflict (Michael Riley).

Curated by Scott Murray, the festival aimed to explore “the relationships between Indigenous and white Australians”, and in the main it succeeded. The inclusion of historical work gave viewers a brief insight into the different ways Aboriginal culture has been represented in film, although the selection seemed overly cautious, geared to only positive representations. Balanced against this, the 5 new films swung from the inspiring and heartfelt to the dull, a situation compounded by the order in which the films were presented.

The evening opened with the ponderous 1981 mini-feature My Country, Djarrakpi, then swung across to the least successful of the 5 new films in Jubulj, before dealing up the challenging and cryptic video installation Conflict. Perhaps My Country, Djarrakpi was meant to give the audience a sense of place, centring as it did on physical space and artistic interpretations of it, but it felt cold, distant. Jubulj had its heart in the right place. The idea of a fair skinned Aboriginal woman confronting both her heritage and the people around her was a good one, but the story was handled in a simplistic fashion and seemed to skate across the issues it was attempting to explore. Michael Riley’s Conflict was fantastic, a series of still images juxtaposing various interpretations of Aboriginal settlements and white occupation, binding them together with a voiceover. It succeeded as a mini-portrait of the festival’s most positive elements, allowing the audience to make its own judgements, never dwelling too long on any image and presenting a wide range of interpretations.

The brightest moments came after intermission with 2 great short films which were original, satisfying and complete (a difficult feat in 15 and 11 minutes respectively). The Third Note gave us a few minutes in the relationship between 2 neighbours, a blind Aboriginal woman and an elderly immigrant man, and their struggles with place and history. The performance of Deborah Mailman was particularly strong.

Kullifoot focused on football, place and family, and managed to run parallel stories inside its quarter hour. Trevor is leaving his community in Broome to play footy for the Sydney Swans, while his cousin Cragie watches on TV. The disparate stories are woven together, running Cragie’s development inside his community alongside Trevor’s success on the field.

Also worth mentioning is the mini-documentary Amy (1976) which followed a young Aboriginal girl in her quest to find work. Insightful, well handled and honest, it was a hypnotic social document which has effortlessly retained its relevance and importance.

Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) in South Australia is a site of cultural significance for Ngarrindjeri people. It is integral to their understanding of themselves and their dreaming. The 26 minute documentary Kumarangk 5214 had its world premiere at Hot Docs in Adelaide to a packed house. In traditional documentary style the story seems bigger than the film (and it is), as though the filmmaker (Jessica Wallace) is not there at all. Jessica and producer Rebecca Summerton worked closely with Ngarrindjeri women, in particular Sandra Saunders and Dr Doreen Katinyeri. This consultative, fluid mapping is the heart of the film, ensuring it remains sensitive to disparate voices. Kumarangk 5214 is very moving—the sadness so big, its truth so obvious. The film makes clear the tragic effects for Indigenous people of the vexed relationship between religion, politics, media and real estate development. Law and Lore.

Events before and since the building of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge constitute an ongoing cultural production that started about 170 years ago. It’s a complex (big) business that has hurt a lot of people and highlights the inadequacies of “impartial” law in cases of gender specific knowledge. Impartiality always serves something. Transparency here is a ruse. It also exposes the anomalies of current land rights legislation for urban Aboriginal communities: “It was the Urban Aboriginal who argued vociferously for land rights for all Aboriginals. And many of whom will never have that right and privilege to be a traditional owner or to be an Elder” (Harold Thomas, designer of the Aboriginal Flag, NAIDOC week speech commemorating 30 year anniversary of the flag, Adelaide, July 7).

The Hindmarsh Island Marina website greets the visitor with an image of still blue waters and a few boats. “From just $21,000 you can live the lifestyle of the rich and famous.” (accessed July 10). Here is the voice of ‘dispossessed’ middle Australia—One Nation territory. “Give us back our possessions, give us back control of our destiny and allow us to get on with the development” (Wendy Chapman, “Chapman and Others v Tickner and Others”, Federal Court Reports, 1995). In this belief structure, those who struggle for Indigenous land rights are elitist minority groups hell bent on getting in the way of ‘progress.’

Though the film is concerned with neither explanation nor expiation, there is a story of events made available, via a few spinning newspaper headlines and screen text. These familiar signs are places to linger—to listen to the women who fought so hard to protect the lands, skies and waters from further destruction.

One of the key elements in the life of the production was a weekend film-shoot. Some of the women gathered at Ngarrindjeri Pulge (house), Kumarangk. They came from their homes at Point Pearce, Croydon, Brompton, Largs Bay, Meningie, Goolwa, Murray Bridge, Victor Harbour. Jessica asked my daughter and myself to cook, keep the urn full and hot and the biscuit barrel topped up.

The women are welcoming and generous, but still, sometimes it’s uncomfortable—we are the outsiders at a place that is not ours among stories that, while not our business, we need to know exist. The women sit and weave, catch-up, yarn, drink cups of tea and Diet Pepsi and eat, argue, laugh, grieve. There are a lot of specific dietary requirements—some feel connections between the denuded body of the land and the bodies of its people—blood sugar levels are high.

Ngarrindjeri women’s weaving is different to the shuttle motion, the to and fro of warp and weft. The movement is more like a piercing, then making firm. Weaving is closely aligned with the telling of stories and the continuance of close family ties. Bundles of fresh water reeds are knotted by an action that loops over and under, through and with the preceding spiral. This method is manipulated to make a multitude of pliable folded forms that can, are, and have been used for holding, carrying, sheltering, and also for relaying stories (eg Ellen Trevorrow’s Seven Sister Dreaming weaving sculptures). The rushes have qualities peculiar to the place they grow in—on Kumarangk, sparsely now.

Some of the women have been given stories to look after, safeguard—an oral history passed from mother to daughter, aunty to niece—only women’s stories amongst women. One of these women is Dr Doreen Katinyeri, genealogist and author, who has made it her life’s work to gather and protect. She has so many names and family connections in her body, in her head. There is not a story here, there are many. Her task as custodian is to hold them safe.

Much has been made of the term ‘secret women’s business’ and alongside it, the charge of fabrication. “Wasn’t women’s business, secret business, it was more than that, it was our lifestyle, Kumarangk is concerned with birth.” (Maggie Jacobs, Ngarrindjeri Elder)

What constitutes ‘secret’ and for whom? Who holds the secrets and who has access? What remains unsayable? What happens to dispossessed oral cultures when knowledge as truth is based on a premise of archiving and recording? Some things shouldn’t be said, some secrets must be held, and the existence of others must be told. There is an intimate alliance between the colonial history of this place and South Australia now—the past is never only before.

Broken faith in ‘impartial’ Law and Justice is palpable at the point in Kumarangk where Sandra Saunders (director, Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement in SA, 1990-97) speaks: “I really believed that the law would protect the women’s interests…I just didn’t believe that society would do that to other people.”

The women are strong, or even “pretty deadly.” They have the strength that family connections and humour gives. At the court’s order, police recently searched Sandra’s house for a floppy disk: “…they did not find a floppy…found her remote control which was very funny as she’d been looking for it for months. All the whoopdido laughing caused the Channel 7 cameras to run in with excitement” (Wallace, email, July 11).

Jessica Wallace has also produced and directed other short films. She is currently a recipient under the 2001 SA Film Corporation Hothouse Scheme for rent-free office space and facilities plus a small living allowance. Here she plans to develop scripts, to “write. Investigate, joy, joy.”

With thanks to Jessica Wallace. The article title is a quote from Maggie Jacobs; all other quotes from Kumarangk 5124, writer/director Jessica Wallace, SAFC and SBS Independent, screening in the next series of Australia by Numbers, SBS, late 2001.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald (August 2) has 2 articles by Garry Maddox. “Black male: the hottest thing in Hollywood” argues that Afro-American actors have never been in a better position, taking on an increasing number of lead roles. This interview with Chris Rock reveals that he sees himself (and is seen) as part of the mainstream now, that Hollywood credits star power as more important than racial background. This is an interesting cultural shift and no doubt has been greatly influenced by the dominance of Afro-Americans in contemporary music and global Top 40 charts. Contrast this with Maddox’s other article: “Audiences slow to appreciate Aboriginal content.” The title sounds pretty definite doesn’t it, casting a negative slant. But what the article is really about is upcoming films featuring Indigenous content, rather than the ‘relatively’ poor showing of recent releases Yolngu Boy and Serenades. It’s getting a bit tired to keep comparing Australian and Hollywood films in terms of weekend box office takings. Surely we can come up with other criteria for judging our own films. The 3rd Indigenous Film Festival in Parramatta this year attests to an eager audience—they cited the 2000 event as “an overwhelming success.”

If there is no audience, why are so many filmmakers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, mainstream and non-mainstream, looking to explore Indigenous themes in upcoming films? The AFC has a slate of productions in the pipeline. Phil Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (with an impressive cast including Kenneth Branagh, David Gulpilil, Gary McDonald, Deborah Mailman) is about 3 part-Aboriginal girls who are taken from their families in the 1930s and their long return journey. Rachel Perkins’ One Night the Moon (see Jane Mills’ review/interview), also set in the 30s, concentrates on the disappearance of a child and a white family’s relationship with an Aboriginal tracker. Fred Schepisi’s Black Magic is a biopic on Len Waters, the only Aboriginal fighter pilot in WW2. Ivan Sen’s debut feature, Beneath Clouds, is a road movie about 2 Aboriginal teenagers. Craig Lahiff’s Black and White (writer Louis Nowra with actor Robert Carlyle) is about Rupert Max Stuart, an Aboriginal man imprisoned wrongly for the murder of an 8 year old girl. Lastly, Bill Bennett’s Bennelong (writer Nick Enright) concentrates on the first years after European settlement and the developing relationship between Governor Phillip and Bennelong. These films are to be released 2001-2003. There must be an audience—all those who walked over the bridges in support of reconciliation for starters.

The Indigenous Branch of the AFC, SBS Independent, CAAMA (Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association), The AFI Exhibition Program and the ABC have been instrumental in preserving Indigenous stories through fiction and documentary. The distributor Ronin Films has a significant back catalogue of hard-to-find shorts and docos like Bedevil, Coolbaroo Club and Land Bilong Islanders. The National Indigenous Documentary Fund is in its fifth year, the only regular production opportunity for Indigenous filmmakers. Visit the CAAMA website for their current projects including a doco on Bonita Mabo and second series of the ABC’s very successful Bush Mechanics. Documentaries released in the last few years have concentrated mainly on personal history, recovering the memories of the Stolen Generations. Recent films like Sissy (screened on ABC) and A Walk with Words (winner WOW Festival 2000) have been more about liberation, through coming out or the power of words. Romaine Moreton, gorgeous provocative wordsmith, talks of her dual love of academic theory texts and art: “film, music, poetry, the arts, are how you translate those theories and put them into the consciousness” of everyday people.

Now a new generation of filmmakers is moving beyond ‘black’ issues to explore, as Rachel Perkins puts it, the “space between Aboriginal and white Australians.” Beck Cole, recent participant in the AFC’s Visual Telling workshop (Sharon Verghis, SMH, April 23) where filmmakers had 5 days to develop a film script, had a new slant on this negotiated space. “The tales don’t simply have to be of the harsher realities of black Australia, endless tellings of deaths in custody or community breakdown…I don’t think it has to be one issue any longer—we’re more complex than that. We don’t want to be forever trapped in all that PC bullshit.” Blak Screen at the Sydney Opera House, one of the most exciting film programs this year, had selections of the best on offer: Ivan Sen, Catriona McKenzie, Tracey Moffatt, Darlene Johnson. Their shorts deserve to be seen like this, as a package, as they are some of the most beautiful and compelling films made here.

If audiences are not going to recent releases like Yolngu Boy and Serenades, perhaps it has more to do with the state of reviewing than content. Nothing sinks a film like the perception that it is ‘worthwhile.’ Rhoda Roberts (in Joyce Morgan, “It’s easy to mix the wrong cocktail in the global village”, SMH, June 13) argues that critical reviewing of Indigenous arts can be softer than on other work: “Often when we see our non-Indigenous critics, they’ll do an overview rather than a review…It might be they’re frightened of being labelled as racist.” There’s no doubt that it can be difficult for a white writer to critique Indigenous work—all kinds of concerns and complexities start to surface—but it’s important to keep negotiating. In this issue of OnScreen, 3 non-Indigenous writers do just that, tackling Blak Screen, FedFest and Kumarangk, a new documentary on Hindmarsh Island. Let us know what you think.

French filmmaker and theorist Agnes Varda is now in her 60s. In her lithe documentary, The Gleaners and I, she explores the often hidden worlds of people who salvage objects that others leave behind: a tonne of potatoes dumped because they’re misshapen, heart shaped, green vegetable leaves under crates at a Parisian market, grapes and apples left to rot, oysters left stranded after a storm. Varda gleans in her own way too, holding a camera rather than a sickle, sifting through digital images rather than metal by the roadside. Scrap crap. Shit bits. Fossicked through and spat out. She buys a clock with no hands and displays it proudly on the mantle. In France, gleaners have a certain nobility, are able to articulate their rights, protected by law. A chef in Burgundy roams the local hills looking for wild herbs. An artist makes “sentences from things.” People glean to survive, for art, by compulsion, or just for fun. Meanwhile, Agnes looks at her elderly hands, her thinning hair, trying to find the same empathy for her aging body that she shares with others she talks to: “I am an animal I don’t know.” Film festival goers become gleaners too, sifting through the rubble for those elusive odds and sods that can be shaped into lasting impressions. It’s harder than ever to get the full picture now that subscriptions only cover films at the State Theatre. It’s like watching the event with one eye covered. So here goes a “sheltered view.

Innocent bystanders

The Werckmeister Harmonies is the masterpiece of the festival, an overpowering look into the belly of the beast, or in this case the eye of a whale. What do you see? Good or evil? There’s the mysterious Prince who incites the members of a Hungarian village to rampage, riot and destroy. But does he exist or is he just a fiction created to justify others’ actions? A witness moves through this cold village. An innocent. He sees all, like the whale he loves to visit, stranded in a corrugated iron truck, tail piercing the village square, the night, like angel’s wings. In one of the most memorable beginnings in cinema, he pushes drunks at the bar into physical revolution, an embodied eclipse, where they play sparkling sun and moon and earth and twinkle twinkle little stars with their fingertips, spiralling and lurching around each other. He is a guardian angel unable to help, bleaker than Wenders’, watching and stepping with care. The monochrome and relentless cold and György Kovàcs’ exquisite music build a feeling of undefinable dread. It settles in your stomach, unnameable. It streams into the empty streets. Then the mob appears and starts to move, quiet except for footsteps. They ransack a hospital, destroying the equipment, beating the patients out of bed. No screams or cries of anguish, just a systematic, ruthless, unstoppable force, the fear heightened by the quiet.

Director Bela Tarr’s style is distinctive in contemporary cinema in that he rarely edits. The camera floats, smooth as a ghost, a dead man walking amongst hardened faces. Each scene is unforgettable: a policeman dances with his lover with a gun pointed triumphantly in the air. Loaded. His kids tear up and blow down the house, drumming with sticks, screaming “I’ll be hard on you, I’ll be hard on you”, each word a response to an inherited legacy of brutality, They control the world. Right now. While a dead whale lies in the village square, exposed, in streets that are burning.

How much profit is enough?

Bob Connolly, giving the Ian McPherson Memorial Lecture, says the best place to see documentary is in a “darkened hall surrounded by as many people as possible” and his methodology of narrative verité, being “prepared to film indefinitely”, results in high drama comic-tragedies/provocations like Rats in the Ranks and Facing the Music (which won most popular documentary at the festival). Anne Boyd is a good subject—frail, increasingly politicised, energetic, courageous, irritating, contradictory—and her love of music, along with the students’ exquisite soundtrack, infuses the film. It focuses on the gradual deterioration in teaching and resource standards of the Department of Music at the University of Sydney, due to the budget constraints meted out under university management and the federal government. The psychological damage on teachers aiming high within these environments is devastating. Staff start working unpaid. In the end, Boyd retires to concentrate on composing and second-in-charge Winsome Evans (“I can’t use the computer…I wouldn’t go to meetings”) has a heart attack. This is good drama but so much more. In a crucial scene, Boyd calls the Commonwealth Bank to try and muster some funding for a scholarship after spending hours composing on the computer—her ever-expanding duties as Head of Department now including sponsorship manager. It’s painful watching her negotiations, seeing her invest so much in her words, because you know that every charity is writing that same letter, every organisation coming up with its own buzz words, trying to entice the corporates to bite. This doco is a must see for every group on the fringes—artists, charities, academics, teachers, students—and anyone who believes, as Boyd quotes Beethoven, that “it is they who should give way to us.”

In August 1999, industrial giant BHP closed its doors in Newcastle. Steel City revisits the site, workers, management and community in the final stages. 2,500 workers are in a state of paralysis, having grown up expecting “a job for life” and feeling unskilled to tackle looking for work in a region as depressed as the Hunter. The documentary lovingly cares for these men and women, the men seen as vulnerable, described in feminine language—suckling on breasts—unable to defend themselves. Sometimes Kris McQuade’s voiceover verges on wartime-like propaganda, gearing into the sentimental—“this is where they lived”—as the camera traces the empty streets. Where the film is most successful is in the juxtaposition of management and workers. The marketing manager keen to get a media spin at all costs—he knows where his next pay cheque is coming from—staging a mock event of the last pouring of steel, inviting old timers to be involved: “it’s good business.” Front page news or bloated rhetoric? While Jack, who worked from age 14-51 at BHP, has no trade or qualifications but is learning to trust himself. And the others, who’ve never been for an interview, who don’t have “much literacy/numeracy skills”, get training from a service provider who says they need to “look outside the box.” The same workers who were told by BHP that “you’re not here to think, you’re here to do as you’re told.” The strangely moving image of a fiery process coming to an end.

Killing off the family

Made for the Hybrid Life series currently screening on SBS (see RT43 p14), The Last Pecheniuk is an unusual documentary in that it focuses on the negative aspects of being the child of immigrants in Australia. No soft-centred reminiscences packed up in a suitcase here. Instead, a tale of disaffection, a woman (the filmmaker Ness Alexandra), who changes her name to avoid the obligations of her Russian heritage, the pressures of being “the last Pecheniuk.” It’s a stylishly made film, Run Lola Run funky, complexly layered. Ness writes to an aunt who also ran away: “you were the big mystery…I imagined I was you.” The weight of expectation is heavy but there is love too. She sees her family as paranoid and isolated, her identity in Australia as trapped, bound and controlled as the Bonsai plants her grandmother so carefully tends.

Under the Sand is also about disappearance and reconstruction. Curiously resonant because of our cultural focus on the beach and the Harold Holt drowning saga, it’s about a middle-aged couple who visits a holiday house and head to the sand. While Marie (Charlotte Rampling in a memorable performance) is sleeping her husband enters the surf and when she wakes he is gone. That’s it. It’s disturbing because of its intangibility; there’s nothing for her or us to grab hold of. Is he just missing? Is he dead? Director Francois Ozon concentrates on Marie’s state of mind immediately after the disappearance and this is the film’s strange strength. It’s not quite grief. It’s not quite sanity either. She can’t miss him because he isn’t really gone. Yet. There are shifting surfaces, and sometimes it’s easier not to know the truth. When she finally relents and takes another lover, she laughs in the middle of making love and says, “you’re so light.” He’s not quite her husband. Rampling embodies in a very physical performance that sense of unreality when someone who touches you every day is no longer there.

Little boy dreams

David Stratton introduces The Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray’s classic black and white films tracing the life of a village boy, with a great story. When he was director of the Sydney Film Festival in 1968, he was approached by Ray to obtain a copy of Peter Sellers’ The Party for a private screening. Ray had just been offered a funding deal with Columbia, based on his script The Alien—an alien is befriended by a peasant—conditional on the agreement that Sellers played the part of the peasant. Stratton was forced to spend an excruciating few hours in Ray’s presence watching Sellers play an Indian After this, Ray withdrew from the deal.

The 3 films of the trilogy—Pather Panchali, Aparajito and The World of Apu—are quite different in tone and style. Pather is beautifully filmed and performed by a group of non-actors. Like Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (A One and A Two) the focus is on a small boy who sees everything but understands only pieces, oblivious to an adult world in which we become implicated. In Taiwan, a small boy takes photographs of the backs of people’s heads to help them see what they are missing. In India, Apu runs to his mother—he runs everywhere—with a letter from a long-gone father, evading his mother’s desperate hands. In Aparajito, it is the father who moves incessantly, in and out of the streets that wind down to the steps of the sacred Ganges, to be cleansed in water that is more diseased than he can know. Like Marie in Under the Sand, Apu becomes defined by absence, the deaths of sister, father, loved wife and an ambivalent relationship with his mother—which comes to haunt him in The World of Apu, when he takes on the role of absent father. Full circle.

There’s a woman who sits in the same seat every session at the State whom I dub ‘Voice of the People.’ After each film she announces loudly to the elderly women behind her a score out of 5. In Silent Partner, David Field and Syd Brisbane give headstrong, occasionally brutal, performances in a 2-hander that is about childish faith eternally unfulfilled. These men are close as family, prefer to buy cigarettes and alcohol than food, and completely naïve in their undertakings with the big boss. Based on a Daniel Keene play, the writing is understandably tough, unrelenting but sympathetic. Shot in 7 days on location at the greyhound races (where people just ignored the camera) and in various actors’ kitchens and bathrooms, it’s very low budget with a gorgeous sustained rhythm. The Voice of the People gives it 1 star out of 5. She says, “why would you bother making a film about 2 absolute losers” and then pauses, reflectively, “but Paul Byrnes seemed to like it.” I give the festival 2.5 stars—I have gleaned a bit but my bucket is half full.

Steel City, writer-director Catherine Marciniak; The Last Pecheniuk, writer-director Ness Alexandra, Dendy Awards, State Theatre, June 8; Facing the Music, writer/directors Bob Connolly, Robin Anderson, distributor Ronin Films, Australia; The Gleaners and I, writer-director Agnes Varda, France; A One and A Two, writer-director Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan; Silent Partner, writer Daniel Keene, director Alkinos Tsilimidos, distributor Palace Films, Australia; Under the Sand, writer-director Francois Ozon, France; The Werckmeister Harmonies, director Bela Tarr, script based on book Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Hungary/France/Germany; The Apu Trilogy, writer-director Satyajit Ray, India, Sydney Film Festival, June 8-22

Divided We Fall

Following on from last year’s festival favourite, Cosy Dens, Jan Hrebejik’s latest comedy is another play on everyday responses to a repressive totalitarian regime; the pressures of maintaining an appearance of ‘normality’ in the face of state-inspired terror, the thin line between resistance and compliance, often measured in tiny increments, and the constant need to watch oneself, and others, for any tell-tale signs of guilt or betrayal.

The catalyst in this instance is David, a member of a Jewish family dispatched to the camps, who returns to his home town in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in order to seek shelter. Taken in by friends and stashed away in the closet, his hidden presence soon begins to infect and inflect the behaviour and relationships of everybody around him. On the one hand, he must be protected and kept alive, like a forsaken reminder of an earlier age, but equally he is someone to be loathed and reviled, even by his protectors who are unable to let him go once they have taken him in for fear of detection. Indeed, roused from an uneasy inertia, this act of resistance ultimately forces them to act the part of collaborators in order to divert suspicion. And when the moment of liberation finally comes, the harbouring of a Jew assumes just as much importance for the same life or death reasons.

Not unexpectedly, ironies and a particular brand of blackish farcical humour flourish in these circumstances where the Nazis act as stand-ins for other traditional authority figures (the outraged father or bad-tempered boss) albeit with extra added evil. Hrebejik imbues the film with a late-summer lightness and warmth which belies the ever-present terror and compounds the comedy; an utterly contemporary film in look and sensibility.

Time for Drunken Horses

This was easily the most numbing cinematic experience of the festival, and not just for its scenes of freezing weather and constant trekking through thigh-high snow. Filmed in Iranian Kurdistan, the film shows the influence of recent Iranian cinema with a specific focus on the desperate, dangerous lives of Kurds sandwiched between Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Here, political struggle is expressed in the sinew-straining work involved in simply trying to stay alive. Whether it’s chopping down trees or hauling contraband over mountains, the hard labour required is a direct consequence of the Kurds’ stateless condition.

The final task, as it eventuates, verges on insanity; a young Kurdish boy, Ayoub, must leave his young sisters and take his crippled brother on a mule across the mountains from Iran into Iraq, risking minefields and ambushes (their father has already been killed attempting to smuggle goods across the border) in order to sell the mule (his only means to a livelihood) in order to pay for an operation for his brother in the knowledge that this will only prolong his life by a few months.

The unasked question is ‘is it worth it?’ and, in other hands, the film would have been about just such a dilemma, tracing Ayoub’s inner struggle to overcome his doubts and fears, followed by an epiphany in which he realises where his duty lies and heads off once more into the snow. There is none of this. No questioning, no wrestling with conscience. The children are not passive agents but they never acknowledge the types of choices being forced upon them and which seem so apparent to the audience. There’s never any doubt about what Ayoub will do.

This is a film about the correctness of ethical action, not so much deciding what is right or wrong, but in knowing what to do and following through regardless of the circumstances. It doesn’t make sense, it’s crazy, but in encapsulating the madness of the Kurds’ situation—they have no choice in being who they are—the logic is lacerating.

The Werckmeister Harmonies

It suggests celestial spheres and the music thereof, a feeling reinforced in the beginning by the spectacle of late-night drunks acting out heavenly movements, rotating and spinning like a stumble-bum universe about to collapse in a heap. Go home, says the barman, and they do, moving slowly off into the darkness.

Bela Tarr’s meticulous monochrome can be read as a dissertation on what is usually referred to as ‘the collapse of communism’ but the forces that he delineates in a single town could apply to any society beset by moral panics and an overwhelming sense of breakdown. The arrival in town of a circus hauling a dead whale, Nature reduced to a putrid hulk, heralds the start of a communal madness in which the thin veneer of civil order is quickly erased.

The fastidiousness of the set-pieces make you ache all over, particularly the scenes of walking men—alone, in pairs or en masse—in which the camera is allowed to run far longer than we expect, and then keeps on going, and going, and going until the thought occurs that it might not end at all and something quite meditative and resonant develops.

There are others as well—2 boys misbehaving, a middle-aged couple dancing, a whirling helicopter—which linger like an after-image on the retina, gently abraded onto the brain, but this unblinking stare extends to all everyday activity—getting ready for bed, cooking a meal—so that the different spheres of civil unrest, personal disarray and private moments gradually intersect and collide with the same slow force of planets falling out of orbit. There is an order in the disorder after all, an irresistible pathos that derives from the carefully observed actions of humans.

Silent Partner

A firm favourite, this one. Good starter, runs on strongly, sure to attract local interest.

A tight 2-hander (and 4-pawer, as every man and his dog will tell you) about a couple of ordinary joes, Bill and John, who get caught up in a dodgy dog racing scheme involving a ‘colourful Sydney identity’ and a greyhound, Silent Partner.

The dependence of the men on the invisible Alex Silver and the focus on just 2 main characters inevitably suggests comparisons with Waiting for Godot but the similarities are more apparent than real. Bill and John are not tramps, although they are just a whisker away from hitting rock bottom. The fact that they are barely holding it together is what makes the drama so acute; and the scenes in which hope does flicker briefly and, for an instant, they imagine a better life, are amongst the most poignant. At heart, it’s a film about people who lack any real power (ie money) but who nevertheless strive to stay in the game, keep on turning up, even though nobody else is playing by the same rules. Bill and John’s relationship with their silent, malevolent partner is symbolic of a wider breakdown in the social contract.

Filmed in just 7 days, it’s a remarkable achievement from director Alkinos Tsilimidos and crew. Two terrific performances from actors David Field and Syd Brisbane manage to make Bill and John instantly recognisable.

Zero points and a copy of Tony Abbott’s memoirs to the questioner from the mezzanine level who wanted to know how 2 such losers could afford to spend so much money on beer and cigarettes.

A One and a Two

It ain’t exactly Reality TV but there’s something about the manner in which this Taiwanese family is filmed—almost always in the middle distance, out of the room, in the street, the office, in corridors, in cars, in the open—which hints at such a voyeuristic impulse. It starts with a wedding, ends with a funeral and nothing quite so momentous seems to happen in between, although there is love and murder and a near-death experience or two.

It could be melodrama, except that it is so well grounded, set against the deliberate blandness of a trans-global decor and mass-produced modernity. The living spaces hum (when they’re not pinging or chiming or beeping) with a suffocating white noise and there is a constant rumble of traffic and buzz of human activity that renders all the emotional turmoil somehow muted, unable to find any satisfactory release.

There’s a sense in which mistakes are repeated across generations with the possibility of atonement, but this is set against the impossibility of anybody ever being truly present in their own lives. There is still ritual to cling to, somewhat debased, but in between the ceremonies life is a string of empty apartments and fractured relationships.

The studied neutrality of Edward Yang’s direction makes this a lot less depressing than it sounds.

Maelstrom

Like when you get sucked into a whirlpool of emotions and it goes round and round for no real reason other than that’s what it does. Like what happens when you take a Drink-Drive Bloody Idiot ad and keep extending it all directions—for no real reason other than you can—and because it looks slick, smart, sassy and sexy.

A young woman driving home drunk runs over a middle-aged man who works in a fish market—and drives on. Armed with this secret guilt (which seems to be associated, disturbingly, with a terminated pregnancy), the film chases down connections and parallels with a gleeful persistence bordering on paranoia. For instance, while having lunch, the woman’s friend complains about the quality of a seafood dish in a restaurant which, as it turns out, buys its fish from the market where…and so on.

It’s a form of hyper-extenuation in which the man’s death becomes the means to the woman’s rebirth, suggesting that on a certain level all the chaos of contemporary life is coherent and meaningful, not socially or politically but merely coincidentally.

Lost and Delirious

Tasteful and Prudish, maybe, Well-mannered and Predictable, but not enough losing it or delirium. The premise shows promise, following the familiar private-school-secret-love-thwarted-by-social-propriety trajectory and setting it down in a Canadian girls’ school, but that’s the only original stroke of the whole enterprise. Superficially the film’s about burgeoning adolescent sexuality and gender identity, as always, but pretty soon it bails out and opts for a heightened notion of romantic passion and a ‘why can’t two individuals just love each other’ approach which flops around rather ridiculously. It’s as if the film is embarrassed by its own lesbianism, but still persists with the notion that it’s everybody else who has a problem. So a lot of Shakespeare gets shouted and there’s a bird of prey that is used quite gratuitously to symbolise a free spirit. Are there any filmgoers left who don’t yet know how to rehabilitate an injured hawk?

Song of Tibet

Curious to observe in this film how Tibet figures in the contemporary Chinese psyche as a kind of aged relative, clinging to its charming folkloric traditions while Young China jets in and logs onto the internet. Old Tibet dies but not before rediscovering its history and culture which it then passes on to Young China.

This is seriously bucolic. Tibet looks ravishing—gotta getaway there—and the Chinese occupation is tastefully kept out of sight. In fact, you’d hardly know that it had ever happened. The local landowner leaves in the night as if going on an extended business trip and there’s a brief reference to how life improved after the serfs were set free. So that’s alright then—let’s all go to the Olympics.

Perhaps we expect Chinese films to be implicitly critical of the authorities, so such a blatant historical elision leave us feeling cheated—this is not the Tibet we want to see! In this case though, what we don’t see is probably more significant than what we do.

Divided We Fall, director Jan Hrebejk, writer Petr Jarcjovsky, Czech Republic; A Time for Drunken Horses, writer/director Bahman Ghobadi, Iran/France; Maelstrom, writer/director Denis Villeneuve, Canada; Lost and Delirious, director Lea Pool, writer Judith Thompson, Canada; Song of Tibet, writer/director Xie Fei, writer Xhaxidawa, China.

One of the comments most often made of film soundtracks is “I didn’t even notice it.” Sometimes this is considered a compliment. Sound is one of the cinema’s most powerful tools, whereby the audience is influenced from below the radar of their consciousness. This is the potent territory explored at the Cinesonic 4 conference, held at the Treasury Theatre in Melbourne.

The Potency of the Soundtrack

This potency is employed in subtle ways, as demonstrated by McKenzie Wark (Macquarie University, Sydney) in clips from E.R. where the beeps, sucks and hisses of life support equipment are orchestrated to create tension with the dialogue. On the other hand, the soundtrack can be turned on its head to reveal the voices it excludes. In Hollywood, the sound of the voice is regulated by the “Hollywood Accent”, from which directors rarely deviate (hear the regional accents in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo for an exception to the rule). Megan Spencer’s (documentary maker/film reviewer, Triple J) presentation “Shout It Out Loud: The Voice of the Documentary Subject” identifies distinctions between the heard and unheard. Megan gives voice to the invisibles: Benjamin Smoke’s croaking, tobacco stained timbres; the speech of ex-inmates struggling with the sound of their voices outside a prison’s reverberant confines; and most bizarrely and beautifully in A Pair of One, identical twins whose voices switch between a call-and-response of identical parts and a perfectly matched unison, as they begin, echo and end each other’s thoughts. Megan’s presentation gives rise to intriguing questions about the relationship between the subject and writer or director: who is speaking through whom?

Language, Nationalism/ Regionalism and Realism

As sound came to the screen, so did nationalism. While silent film spoke mainly with pictures, the voice in the talkies spoke in nationalised languages. It may be that Indian cinema relies so heavily on music because it speaks more universally to an audience divided into more than 300 languages. Kathryn Bird (multimedia producer, Melbourne) describes the effect of this in Hong Kong cinema, where actors, crew and audiences are divided into Cantonese or Mandarin speakers, necessitating complicated dubbing and translation. Extensions of this sonic nationalism, or regionalism, are apparent in further clips from Hong Kong films. Precedence is given to materialising the sound of bodies and objects moving in air, and music is pushed to the background, occupying the space cicadas would in a Hollywood film. An inversion of this sonic ordering came from Philip Brophy (lecturer, Mars) playing a scene from Flashdance where Irene Cara’s body flies through the air and the sound of the physical world is dissolved by the soaring hit single What a Feeling.

Any lingering ideas of the possibility of authentic cinematic realism are dispelled by Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s (film theorist, Bombay) tracing of differences between Indian and western cinema back to their roots in India’s 2 dimensional or flat pictorial representations and western vanishing point perspective. Ashish also explains how the conventionally flat, overdubbed voice in Indian cinema refers to a traditional relationship between the deity and devotee, in which the deity’s voice always issues from a frontal perspective. Interestingly, the phenomenon of the voiceover in western cinema is not given such mystic connotations, though the origin of this omnipotent voice can be explored. In contrast to these metaphysical allusions are Bruce Lee’s animalistic battle cries, discussed by Kathryn Bird, which collapse language, narrative and material into a cinematic inscription of a body’s energy.

Film production

Given that a film is an embodiment of the energies that produced it, the poetics of Derek Jarman’s films were also present in his life and in the methods by which he made his films. This poetry is also made manifest by Simon Fisher-Turner (England), score composer of many of Jarman’s films. Simon intuitively understands the difference between music and music-for-pictures and, handed complete creative freedom by Jarman, worked totally outside the Hollywood model of temp tracks, audience testing and producer’s final approvals. Simon’s unorthodox presentation is an antidote to the regimented and often neurotic world of filmmaking, and proves that it’s possible to have a successful creative career outside the accepted models of professional practice. A direct contrast to this comes from Skip Lievsay (New York-based sound designer for the Coen Brothers, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee) who demonstrates that you can make great soundtracks by working completely within industry conventions.

For the attuned listener, the soundtrack is a rich and detailed terrain of sound and music. Film sound theory, however, is underdeveloped. Texts such as Michel Chion’s Audiovision, which investigates the unexplored reaches of the soundtrack and its relationship to images, develop new terminology, filling the critical void. So too does Cinesonic 4: Between Sound and Music.

Cinesonic: 4th International Conference on film scores and sound design, Cinemedia, Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, June 22-24. Cinesonic 3: Experiencing the Soundtrack is now available in paperback through AFTRS

Interactivity and improvisation were complementary and central to this year’s Fusion, a night of multimedia curated by Sue McCauley as part of the annual St Kilda Film Festival. Largely an evening of young artists’ work, Fusion showed the consolidation of existing electronic arts formats rather than breaking new ground. There were 2 separate programs of 6 CD-ROM works with creator-driven show and tell from computer console to wall screen, and one program of 3 works of video, dance, live music and improvisation. The CD-ROM demonstrations were accompanied by improvised chat about interfaces and the creative and technical processes. While this new media is very dependent on other arts–word texts, film, video, photography and drawing–it restages them in its construction, repetition, fragmentation and delivery of divergent pathways across the visual text.

The first set explored violence and sex. Uncle Bill by Debra Petrovitch uses black and white archival film footage of suburban Wollongong to frame images of childhood violence and sexual abuse. Petrovitch juxtaposes mountains of industrial debris with the human detritus of one household. She commented that there had been some resistance in the reception of her work–images of sex and violence without authorial directives might be read as voyeuristic rather than shock politics. Similarly, Tatiana Doroshenko’s Shot simulates a sex website under the banner “I want you”, with fake emails and video footage of a sex worker on the street, her customers in a car, looking into a mirror in a toilet. Doroshenko confirmed that this was not documentary but dramatised footage. The Exchange by David Barlas presents enticing digital snapshots; cartoons and words in poetic explorations of thwarted desires; virtual robots made of wood in a strangling duel to the death when one knocks the head off the other. Barlas’ confessed his passion for Radiohead’s music and alcohol to fuel his being-in-the-world.

The second program brought together landscapes and stories. Mike Leggett’s very impressive but unfinished Pathscape rolled through and panned around photographic footage of the beautiful southeastern NSW coastline and its salt lakes. Clicks on pristine vistas revealed cultural stories imprinted behind: Captain Cook’s journal about the coast, cinematic cultural anxieties from a ship’s crew in On the Beach, a young girl’s tantrum of environmental angst and a local Aboriginal recounting how his father crossed the lake on a log. Leggett talked of the 5-person team on Pathscape and the budget of nearly $100,000. Ruth Fleishman’s Oink presented drawing and cut-out silhouettes in a visual collage to accompany the spoken reading of Eric Dando’s science fiction novel, featuring Squiggley Fern and a half-pig-half-human who plays chess, living in a future Melbourne megametropolis renamed Circecity. The aural adaptation retained the imaginative writing from the novel, its narrative originality. City of Spare Parts by Sam Fermo, also set in Melbourne, uses the grid of a map to move from drawn images back into video footage of inner city terraces and traffic.

In Program 3, The First Law of Motion (Newton’s) by Opera Somatica had 2 dancers rolling, rising, falling, accompanied by a musician on a steel keg drum, and alluded to cultural crossings of east and west in sound and movement. Black and white film footage flickered to one side throughout the show, simulating a still image of the dancers standing together at the end of the show, with their body length costumes of 3 black and white strips. I really liked this false stillness that exposed the flicker of liveness to the eye and folded film back into photography. In one segment they danced joined around the waist. In another witty section they appeared on a large screen as “fluffy” feminine girls screaming “Oh my god” in conversation. In Edmund Chiu’s Lucid, straightjacketed dancers worked against cinematic images of childhood male violence, adult bondage, churches and cemeteries to techno driven hysterical gesturing. Peripheral Vision by Nadine Allen, Marty Damhuis and Dan Oreilly-Rowe, combined real time prop driven improvisation with live video filming.

The CD-ROM works allowed spectators to make narrative easily with their hints of familiar cultural plots: the prostitute on the street, domestic abuse. Only when Opera Somatic’s live bodies entered the frame did the ideas slip into less certain territory.

Fusion: Multimedia Program, The George Ballroom, St Kilda Film Festival, Melbourne, June 1

1999, Darwin. The rampage of the pro-Indonesian militia in East Timor shocked us all as we witnessed the building of a makeshift refugee camp which was to house thousands of refugees lucky to get out with their lives. The streets were peppered with United Nations troops dressed in full military gear. It was scary.
At the same time NxT, Northern Territory Xposure, the Territory’s first multimedia symposium, was set to take place. Another invasion—a welcome one, of new media artists who would gather in Darwin to share their skills with the artists living in the NT.

Regional events encouraged rich exchanges at the symposium and offered NT artists real opportunities to explore and experiment with new technologies. The hackers’ tent at the ski club became both an experimental lab and a sanctuary, a place where artists could explore some of the ideas presented by the speakers while Timorese refugees searched for information about their loved ones. At the close of NxT, many NT artists had begun to visualise how they could incorporate these new ideas into their own work.

To encourage such work, the Australia Council offered funds managed by a group of NT artists known as the MMREF Group and dispersed as 8 New Media Arts grants. Over the last year, the works, some live, some web-based, have been realised.

Camilla Lawson’s Cash Crop, in the artist’s words, “…aims to manipulate the audience’s behaviour in the context of public perception of environmental issues. In doing so, the work involves self-examination and critical debate about social complacency regarding a culture of ‘progress no matter what the social and environmental cost.’”

In Darwin’s Wood Street Gallery, 2 off-beat television scenarios are filled with images of red balloons. Red balloons dotting the landscape stand like soldiers at attention, then break away to flee across the barren earth. The vision then switches to a balloon growing. The sound is of the breath that fills it: air/gas/wind. The impression is lush, comical, majestic. Then it bursts—like popped dreams reflecting so many failures to ‘settle’ our environment at any cost.

In the centre of the gallery is Lawson’s skinned “crop” which she has used to cover a long seat for the audience. The skins belong to her balloons…a magnificent quilt that offers a place to rest and ponder the video works. Most cannot resist the opportunity to sit and feel. Are they just pawns chosen to represent the “frontier dominated idea of staking their claims to the land”?

Jichicha is a Shockwave movie produced by Stella Simmering and Wes Wagonwheel. Having spent years hanging out with the Aboriginal fisherpeople of the Darwin fish camp, Stella and Wes set about to create a “multimedia-language” toy. Their script comes from Aboriginal names for fish in the Darwin waters, their sound—Aboriginal voices and tricky noise compositions by Wes—and their images, sea creatures. The result is an original introduction to an Aboriginal language and culture.

The Massacre of the Gija people, a video produced by Jason Davidson and Rohan Fisher in collaboration with the Gija people, reveals a story of shame. Jason, who has close family ties with the Gija people from the Juwurliny Community, describes how “Elder Paddy Bedford tells a story of a poisoning massacre at Bedford Creek by white pastoralists around World War I. The story tells how some of Paddy’s relatives were incarcerated because they killed a bullock. When they were released, they were given ‘tickets’ to wear around their necks. Little known to the Aborigines that wore them, these tickets marked the people that were to be killed. The station manager took the Aborigines wearing the tickets out bush to cut wood. After cutting a lot of wood, the people were given poisoned food. The wood that they had cut was used as fuel to burn their dead bodies.”

The Ticket Necklace story is one of great sadness but one that the Gija people wanted to share. Jason Davidson feels that reconciliation can only be achieved when the history of these people is recognised, digested and the proper amends made.

Elka Kerkhofs’ fascination with the English language began when she migrated to Australia from Belgium. Many words, she discovered, had more than one meaning—virus, cut, paste and contamination. Armed with these words, Elka went to a number of people from different professions and explored their interpretations, which were then used as the script for a collaboration with Tracks Inc. Dance Company. The result is Blood vs Wine, a breathtaking production incorporating projections of intimate images, sounds and movement.

Beyond the Square was an event coordinated by Cath McKay and Georgia Glen and executed by a number of participating artists. This project explored “the relationship between art and life within the context of a shopping mall and its interaction with the culture of the community.” Using Casuarina Shopping Square, the only mall in Darwin, as their stage, these women set out to create an art exhibit for the general public. Shoppers were offered an array of artforms, including live mannequin displays, digital video projections, performances by a troop of well-rehearsed ‘shoppers’, junk sculptures created from shoppers’ trash, and a shopping trolley piece with a monitor ‘head’ that reveals what life is like from a trolley’s point of view.

Catriona Stanton’s Passage is about nostalgia. Collaborating with Sydney poet Tim Doon and Alice Springs filmmaker Declan O’Gallagher, Stanton seeks to explore the “disparity yet intrinsic connection of 2 Australian environments: the inter-tidal zone of the Pacific Ocean, Sydney, and the ancient bed of the Larapintine Sea, Alice Springs.” Images of granular Larapintine fossils are married to contemporary haikus and meditative sounds, then projected across a screen with the McDonnell Ranges as a backdrop. Set in the now abandoned Alice Springs drive-in, this work offers the viewer a true sense of the “remembrance of things past.”

Frances Bunji Elcoate had been working with youths at risk in Darwin through the Big hART project when she applied for a grant. Equipped with a strong multimedia background, Bunji provided these young people with the skills and the support to tell their stories using clay animations. These works were then presented as part of a huge multimedia production. Staged at the Darwin Performing Arts Centre, Wrong Way Go Back is a gritty, thought provoking piece that reveals, in snippets, the lifestyles that ultimately lead young people into criminal behaviour.

bryce anbis and tashidawa eyles’ box project explores the “analogical world of images and emotions—those places that we don’t really have words for.” anbis and eyles created a portable stage that was set in various locations to perform, record and recover the happenings around them.

There is no doubt that that the presenters at NxT helped to inspire NT artists, as have local artists like Trevor Van Weeren who was instrumental in bringing these works to fruition. Van Weeren was recently invited to be a part of Cyber Pow Wow 2K in Banff, Canada. True to their reputation as intrepid explorers, NT artists are undaunted by the challenges of new media technologies.

If d>art was a restaurant, it’d be all-you-can-eat. Very hip, sure, but with plates piled high with pixels; if I was a restaurant reviewer I’d be groaning. Around 50 works by as many artists; film/video/animation, CD-ROM, web and sound; a gallery installation and several nights of screenings. If d>art is dLux media|arts’ annual showcase event, a collection selected from hundreds of local and international submissions, without a curatorial masterplan, what comes out is a thick slice of contemporary media arts practice. While it’s a diverse collection, what’s most noticeable are the clear threads, trends and tendencies
running across it.

One is an interest in space, place and landscape, and particularly space layered with the virtual and informational. Often the focus is on urban space, with the interpenetration of experience, architectural space and data which forms our transnational “city of bits.” In Samantha Fermo’s CD-ROM City of Spare Parts (Australia) we wander through a layered and folded grid of Melbourne urban experience; subjective maps and buildable toytowns. First-person video runs under layers of line drawings to form a rich visual texture; the work hovers nicely between on-the-ground specificity—trying to remember that corner on Flinders St—and an abstracted, placeless urbanity. Jessica Irish pulls towards the latter in her website Inflatoscape (USA)—a network of coolly composed Flash screens exploring cities, crowds, e-commerce and IT through the trope of the bubble—as in bubble economy. One section advertises inflatable warehouses: impermanent industrial architecture, perfect for when your e-tailing business goes to the wall as the bubble bursts. Cute, but not stirring—if there’s a negative aesthetic tendency across this show, it might be the outbreak of Flash-induced vector graphic coolness. How much tastefully restrained monochrome interface design can we take? It’s passable when there’s some conceptual grit behind it, but in many cases—such as Tanja Kimme’s s_p_a_t_i_a_l CD-ROM (Australia) and Greg Lowe’s PLACE site (Australia)—swishy visuals only add to a sense that there’s not much going on.

One remarkable counter-example of that tendency is Stanza’s The Central City (UK)—another meditation on the informational urban. Here too, the aesthetic raw materials are cool shades of grey and neat vector boxes. The difference is in how they’re deployed: Stanza codes these elements into dense, layered atmospheric textures which are smoothly and unpredictably responsive; sprays of translucency, crawling flickering trails, and spinning arrays. Sound triggers are embedded in these surfaces, setting off grimy resonant noises; the artist calls these interactive audiovisual paintings, and unlike so much work in these media, the surfaces are visually rich and dynamic enough to withstand the analogy. The city’s in here, but in pieces, map fragments, place names; it’s flowing, shifting; there’s a sense that we’re dealing directly with its raw material—data. At the same time there are clues tying the work to a specific place, London, and to its particular brand of war-scoured urban redevelopment.

Still more urban stories: Michael Hornblow’s :plugins, drifting (Australia) splices Tokyo into a cyborg-salaryman. Kate Richards’ Darkness Loiters (Australia) takes us back to crime scenes in post-war Sydney; still, quiet shots which piece together into mysterious micronarratives. Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski tell a dark fairytale about surveillance and disguise in a.k.a (Australia). In Parken Verboten (Croatia), Martinis Dalibor parks dozens of shiny new VW Golfs in a marketplace in Rosenheim, lining them up into an obscure string of binary code. Once again the city is shot through with data.

While this urban/digital nexus continues to attract creative interest, and certainly remains relevant, as a theme it’s becoming quite familiar in digital media practice—almost a staple. By contrast the other strong thread in d>art feels like an idea which is bubbling up in several places at once, and still coalescing. Andrew Gadow’s INVERSION (Australia) starts out with some good old video feedback, that sizzling texture of cathode rays and glass, then rapidly turns digital and burrows inwards, stretching out pixels into flat, flickering masses. Gadow sequences retina-burning strobes, drifting block patterns and meshes, ornamented with the odd crunch of compression dropout. It feels like 80s scratch video, but digitally sharpened and purged of that semiotic overload: ‘pure’ digital video—mobile colour data. Not purely visual either; the sound is brutally powerful and fused tightly with the vision. In fact what’s going on here is elegantly simple: the soundtrack is a simple ‘porting’ of the video signal, so the video waveform is also an audio waveform. The 50 fields per second become an audible (and tactile) 50Hz buzz, which is inflected and modulated as the image flickers and shifts. Hearing and vision get wired directly together through a single signal-abstraction.

Myriam Bessette’s Nutation (Canada) approaches the same fusion, though less directly; a vertical band jumps and bends with the audio, twisting, braiding out into multiples and burning to white as noise bursts in the soundtrack. Here the sound/image relationship seems constructed rather than automatic, though the results look a lot like what Finnish minimal noise/techno outfit Pansonic did at the What is Music? festival earlier this year, running their chainsaw-tone generators through a video projector. Ian Andrews, the Sydney-based artist whose work featured in a retrospective this year, is on a related track. Some of his recent Microsound web works are also essentially synaesthetic data; flickers of ASCII and pixels oscillating in sync with jittering clicks and sound spasms (transmission, k-88, channel-11, channel-66). These are simple phase/permutation textures, layers of loops, but they accumulate into frantic, jumpy, surprising masses, with the loops’ internal rhythms full of holes and changes. These works also show, incidentally, that Flash doesn’t need to be dull and overdesigned—it’s a great platform for ultra-compressed online audiovisuals.

So this is audio/visual synaesthesia, one of the touchstones of the electronic arts, a creative aim as old as the hills. More particularly though, it’s a form of synaesthesia imagined or realised through the technical underside of electronic media: it routes signal and data from one sense-channel to another. Earlier versions of the synaesthetic ideal have imagined a kind of sublime sensory fusion or a perfect aesthetic whole—a gesamptkunstwerk. This is grittier, more concrete; a technical transcoding operation. In fact, this emergent digital synaesthesia isn’t so much about sensory fusion, or sound/image, as the common structure underneath both sensory channels—the signal/data itself. Hearing and vision are channels for apprehending that basic, raw material.

Back to data, which is all through d>art. Kawai Masayuki’s video a not = a or For Devatas who Keep on Dancing (Japan) is constantly breaking down into spastic—and artfully degraded—visual signal. Aphorisms damning the mass media are drolly intoned over scrolling, flickering noise: “only the moment when video completely denies itself…is the Art in the virtual image of the Revolution.” I’m not sure that this data.art is self-denial, though, more a symptom of a broader engagement with media substrata, a process where the floods of data underpinning our culture seep into sensory and aesthetic experience. Meanwhile [mez] writes Data[h!][bleeding T.ex][e]ts (Australia), densely encrypted realisations of language-becoming-information. Chris Henschke frames his sound interactive Corroded Grooves (Australia) citing Katherine Hayles, and calling for the breakdown of “culturally-imposed structuralist dichotomies such as information/materiality, pattern/randomness, information/noise.” Corroded Grooves goes about this in the same way as a lot of post-techno experimental audio; noisy, gritty beats and loops, tone and melody submerging under layers of detritus. Digital sound, but soaked in the sounds of material and media-decay. This is a solid addition to the growing genre of mix-and-loop audio interactives, with an intricate interface and a tastefully grubby sound; pity that, when I visited, the amplification was turned down too low for it to be really enjoyable.

Of course these 2 threads don’t account for the whole collection, by any means. Among the highlights on other tracks were Young-hae Chang’s DAKOTA (South Korea)—a stunning piece of online performance poetry; screen-high text (Flash again) stepping past to a fierce soundtrack of looped jazz-drum licks. Beautiful for its simplicity, and sheer impact, this is a wild ride—it’s so rare to feel ‘glued’ to a computer screen. Also notable for visual and interactive suppleness was the Glaser/Hutchison/Xavier project Juvenate (Australia), a textless web of mobile imagery and video on memory, illness and childhood. Still in memory-space, Richard Grant’s videoclip for Japanese dark ambient outfit Maju is superb. Pale Blood Coloured Recollections (Australia) feels like an audiovisual stream of remembrance—8mm film worked into dense, permeable, labile textures, flashes of free association and perceptual noise. It’s digital synaesthesia again, but intricately wrought rather than elemental; this was the most visually luscious work in the collection. Alongside pieces like Stanza’s Central City, it suggests a ratcheting-up of the aesthetic density, sophistication and fluidity of digital media practice.

While d>art was a rewarding collection, it could certainly stand to be smaller and more consistent in quality. There are also serious problems with the exhibition format; the Customs House space is too small to accommodate 30-odd CD-ROM, web and sound works. Packing them onto machines, screens and listening booths got them in, but the result is oppressively dense (the busted air conditioning didn’t help). I haven’t reviewed the sound works here because I didn’t hear them—2 CD players with headphones, in a room already full of people, machines and sound, is just not a conducive way to present audio work. Maybe dLux should consider pressing a CD compilation (cheap, these days) or better yet, put the audio online? It’s a very valuable undertaking, sifting and presenting this mass of work, but the results need to be more easily digestible.

d>art 01, Sydney Film Festival & dLux media arts, exhibition: sound/CD-ROM/internet, City Exhibition Space, June 10 – July 1; screenings: film/video/animation, Dendy Opera Quays, Sydney, June 15 & 19,

Lev Manovich suggests that if it had one, the subtitle of The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001) would be: “everything you always wanted to know about new media (but were afraid to ask Dziga Vertov).” Indeed, cinema is especially privileged in his ambitious examination of the continuities of new media with ‘old media.’ Currently an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, Manovich was born in Moscow and holds advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and visual culture. Working with computer media for almost 20 years as an artist, designer, animator, computer programmer and teacher, his work has been published in more than 20 countries, and he frequently lectures on new media around the world. While working on a new book, Info-Aesthetics, his current artistic projects include Software for the 20th Century, a set of 3 ‘imaginary’ software applications, and Macro-Cinema, a set of digital films to be exhibited as an installation at Cinema Future at ZKM next year. Manovich will be in Australia at the end of November to speak at conferences in Sydney and Melbourne.

Why the language of ‘new media’–which would seem to be a historically variable term–and not, for instance, ‘digital culture’ (given that you suggest that your method might be called 'digital materialism')?

I decided to use ‘new media’ because this term is a standard one used both in the field and in popular media. At the same time, the term is open enough, a kind of a placeholder, and I like this open character. Historically, I think it appeared around 1990. Its emergence marked the shift from understanding the computer as a tool in the 1980s to a new understanding that the computer also came to function as a new medium (or, more precisely, a number of mediums: virtual space, network, screen-based multimedia, etc).

Your book starts with scenes from Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, ends with a chapter called 'What is Cinema?’, and a spool of film appears on the cover. Why is cinema so central to your understanding of new media?

There are a few answers to this question. Cinema has been the most important cultural form of the 20th century, so it natural that new media both inherits many conventions from cinema (similar to how cinema itself inherited conventions from previous 19th century forms, in particular the novel) and also contains a promise of replacing cinema as the key form of the 21st century. Methodologically, I find the theory of cinema is more relevant to new media than, say, literary theory, because, cinema is a cultural form also heavily based on technology; and the evolution of film language is closely linked to the technological developments and changes in cinema's industrial mode of production. Finally, I was originally attracted to new media in the early 1980s (then called ‘computer graphics’ and ‘computer animation’) because I saw in it the promise of being able to create films without big budgets, lots of heavy equipment and big crews–something which tools like DV cameras and Final Cut Pro running on a Powerbook has finally made possible, although it took about 20 years!

Artists, designers, as well as museums and critics, need terms to talk about new media work. We can talk about a painting using such terms as ‘composition’, ‘flatness’, ‘colour scheme' and we can talk about a film using such terms as ‘plot’, 'cinematography’, and ‘editing.’ With new media, the existing discourse focuses on 2 extremes: either purely industrial terms such as ‘Flash animation’ or ‘JPEG image’ (which all describe software used and don't tell you much about the work's poetics and the user's experience of it), or rather abstract theoretical terms created during the previous historical period (between 1968 and 1989, ie between the student revolutions of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet Communism) such as ‘rhizome’ and ‘simulation.’ I would like to help develop a vocabulary that will fill in the gap between these 2 extremes. The focus of my work is on trying to come up with new terms, which can be used to talk about the works–both their formal construction and also the interaction between the work and the user. So, to be more precise, my analysis is not strictly formal as it is also concerned with what literary theory has called ‘reader response’, the user's experience of new media.

One of the distinctions you make in the book is between the database and narrative as competing symbolic forms. What is the significance of this contemporary shift to the database?

The shift to the database can be understood as part of the larger shift from a traditional ‘information-poor’ society to our own ‘information-rich’ society. Narrative made sense for cultures based on tradition and a small amount of information circulating in a culture–it was a way to make sense of this information and tie it together (for instance, Greek mythology). Databases can be thought of as a new cultural form in a society where a subject deals with huge amounts of information, which constantly keep changing. It may be impossible to tie it all together in a set of narratives, but you can put it in a database and use a search engine to find what you are looking for, to find information which you are not aware of but which matches your interests and finally to even discover new categories. In short, a narrative is replaced by a directory or index.

In your archaeology of the screen, a central opposition that you arrive at is that the contemporary (realtime) screen alternates between the dimensions of 'representation' and 'control.'

I think that the opposition 'representation-control' provides a practical challenge to artists and designers of new media. There are 2 dimensions, which can be distinguished here: spatial and temporal. Spatial: how do you combine controls with a fictional image flow? For instance, how do you integrate menus and hot spots in an interactive film screen? (This is often done by not having any menus on the screen but by allowing the user to control the program through the keyboard.) Temporal: how do you combine immersive segments and control segments? Typically the way this is done so far in computer games and other interactive narratives (for instance, in a very interesting Blade Runner game from a few years ago) is that an immersive section is followed by an interactive section, to be followed by another interactive section. More successful are the games where the 2 modes co-exist, such as first-person action games like Mario and Tomb Raider. You are the character and you continuously control it through a mouse or a joystick. There is another way to think about this opposition since we are talking about computer games. Traditional ‘non-interactive’ narratives (books, movies) are more concerned with representation and narrative immersion, what can be called ‘narrative flow.’ In contrast, all real-time games, from tennis to Unreal require the user to exercise continuous control. So the challenge and promise of combining a traditional narrative form such as a movie with a game is how to combine the 2 logics of narrative flow and realtime control into a new aesthetics.

At one point you suggest that the computer is the ultimate and omnipresent Other of our age, and you say that the space of new media becomes “a mirror of the user’s subjectivity”, but for the most part you do not theorise the subjectivities enabled by new media.

In The Language of New Media I am more concerned with formal analysis of new media works and their historical formation than with users' subjectivities. I am hoping to deal with the latter topic in more length in my next book, where I want to think through the common types of behaviour/subjectivity in our culture–information access (for instance, web surfing), information processing, realtime telecommunication (talking on a cell phone, chatting online) and so on.

Can you elaborate on the link you make between the post-industrial mode of production and 'variable media'?

Post-industrial modes of production use computer-based design, manufacturing and distribution to enable massive customisation. This involves constant updates of product lines; large sets of models/variation for a single line of products (think of hundreds of different sneaker design as can be seen in Niketown and similar stores), and the idea that a given product can be customised for an individual customer. Manufacturing involves materials, ie ‘hardware’; since new media is all ‘software’, in new media computers enable more radical and more thorough customisation than in manufacturing. For instance, the user of an interactive site can select her own trajectory through it, thus in effect automatically ‘customising’ a work for herself. Or, when you visit a commercial website, its engine can automatically pull the information about your previous visits and your location to put up a customizsed version of the site for you, including which language version you get, the ads displayed, etc.

Are there any current directions in art or popular culture of particular interest to you?

I am interested in all directions in popular culture and their interactions: dance culture, music, fashion, internet culture, computer games, graphic and industrial design. I am trying to educate myself about electronic music because I am convinced that the logic of digital media historically has always manifested itself in music before visual culture. In part this is because visual culture, in particular popular visual culture, is often representational, ie, photographs, illustrations, movies, all represent visual reality which puts limits on how images may look like. So it is in music that many key new ideas of digital media revealed themselves first: algorithmic composition, sampling and mixing as a new form of creativity, and online distribution of culture (MP3s on the internet).

As far as new media art is concerned, I am very impressed by Lisa Jevbratt’s software which currently forms the basis of the online exhibition Mapping the Web Infome. Lisa invited a number of people (including me) to use her software to create their own Net Crawlers and to visualised the data they collect. In her words, “Just as the Human Genome Project strives to map the mysteries of the body’s DNA, Mapping the Web Infome develops ways of representing the master plan behind the codes that created the Web. The newly commissioned net art project deploys software robots as cartographers of the continually changing internet and the resulting images chart the hidden relationships that lie beneath the screen’s surface.”

If we understand net art as an artistic and cultural practice which focused on a modernist analysis of an early period of the web (1994-1998), it is dead. As an institutional label for new media art as a whole, it is very much alive and gaining more and more recognition. What I don't like is that museums, art galleries, media and other cultural institution often use the term ‘net art’ as a stand in for ‘new media art’ (or ‘digital arts’) as a whole. As a result, the attention goes to net projects while many other distinct digital practices such as interactive computer installation, electronic music, interactive cinema, and hypermedia are ignored. In short, a particular practice is used as a stand in for the field as a whole. It happens in part not only because net art is the cheapest practice for museums to exhibit but also because we still do not have any real alternative to an aesthetic theory based around the idea of mediums. So now along with painting, sculpture, art on paper, film, and video we now have ‘net art’, ie art which uses the medium of a network.

Lev Manovich will be speaking at College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney, November 23, contact Ivan Dougherty Gallery, tel 02 9385 0726; and (dis)LOCATIONs conference, Cinemedia's Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, November 30 & December 1. www.manovich.net

Australians in NY

25 feature films, along with new media works on the internet, will feature in the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) celebration of arts in October, which will focus on Australia. Paul Byrnes has selected some impressive Oz films from the 90s including The Boys, Dead Heart, Feeling Sexy, Floating Life, Looking for Alibrandi, Mabo: Life of an Island Man, Praise & Rats in the Ranks to screen in Killing the Koala. Hopefully the Big Apple will learn there’s more to Oz culture than Crocodile Dundee.

Facing the Music: another hit for Connolly/Anderson

Like the landmark Rats in the Ranks, the documentary Facing the Music (see Kirsten Krauth's review) is doing well locally, getting a cinema release at the Valhalla in Sydney, and winning the audience’s Best Documentary award at the Sydney Film Festival. The film follows Professor Anne Boyd’s fight to save her music department at Sydney University. Commissioned by Film Australia & distributed by Ronin Films, Facing the Music begins Melbourne & Brisbane seasons on August 2-3 & has been invited to a number of international film festivals.

Kaleidoscopic shoots

Metro Screen (Sydney) is calling for entries for its annual film & video festival, Kaleidoscope. It’s a good opportunity for emerging filmmakers to strut their stuff in front of industry judges & audience. Categories include best film, screenplay, cinematographer, director, sound design, female/male actor & editor. Open to any short film under 8 minutes. Entries close September 7, screening Chauvel, October 5. Michelle Hardy, 02 9361 5318, entry forms

Columbia Pictures hits Pentridge Pris

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Producers of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon are shooting their followup, Double Vision, in Melbourne. A Taiwanese thriller, in Chinese Mandarin and English, the film features Tony Leung Ka-Fai (see our interview), David Morse & 3 Australian teams on special effects: The Makeup Effects Group, Phenomena & Kevin Chismall. The film is expected to feature in the 2002 Silk Screen programme of Asian cinema.

Asian film spotlight returns to Sydney

The 2nd Sydney Asia Pacific Film Fest starts in August, screening features from Asia & shorts from local Asian-Australian filmmakers in SHORT SOUP (winning films will be screened on SBS’s Eat Carpet). In 2 seminars, crew from Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American will talk about filming in Vietnam and festival guests Garin Nugroho & Im Sang Soo will discuss the trend towards digital filmmaking in Asia. 15 new features will screen including 2000 Cannes Grand Jury Prize winner Devils on the Doorstep (China), The Land of Wandering Souls (doco about laying high speed internet cable through Cambodia) & Chicken Rice War (Romeo & Juliet, Singapore style). Readings Cinemas, August 9-18; Canberra, August 23-26.

CREATE’s film/TV/multimedia training package

CREATE Australia’s new training package means that, for the first time in Australia, skilled people working within the film, television & digital media industries can acquire nationally recognized qualifications on the job. Training ranges from basic entry level to tertiary level diplomas. For further info visit the CREATE website

Hothouse blooms in SA

The SA Film Corporation announced recently that Kanesan Nathan, Matthew Phipps & Jessica Wallace (see Teri Hoskin's review) have been selected for the Hothouse Scheme, which gives emerging filmmakers an opportunity to focus on their projects by providing rent free office space & facilities & a living allowance of $10,000. This year the scheme has expanded to include the possibilities of attending conferences/courses or employing script editors to help with scripts.

Tony Ayres, Walking on Water

The followup to Ayres’ exquisite & highly successful documentary on William Yang, Sadness, Walking on Water stars Vince Colosimo & Maria Theodorakis & explores the sometimes funny aspects of dealing with death & grief. The film has just completed shooting & will have its world premiere at the 2002 Adelaide Festival.

Calling Western Sydney filmsters

Penrith Valley Video Festival is seeking films to screen in one of the most popular events in Sydney’s west. Festival director Rachel Morley said: “The PVVF is about communities sharing and building upon the tradition of video-making. It aims to bring together schools, neighbourhood centres, student videomakers, community groups & established industry professionals to create a cultural festival that puts Penrith on the filmmaking map.” More than $4000 is up for grabs in cash prizes for 3 categories: Open Top 3 & U18s (videos under 10 mins) and one minute Short Shorts which must explore issues in the Penrith area. All entrants’ films are screened at EVAN Theatre, Panthers Club, October 10, with winners announced in the evening.

A Queensland first for Blurred

Hard to believe but Blurred is the first feature ever to be written, directed & produced by Queensland filmmakers, according to PFTC News (July/Aug). First time director Evan Clarry’s comedy about 9 youngsters at Schoolies Week on the Gold Coast is looking to secure funding from the FFC in the next few months. The screenplay was developed through the Low Budget Feature Initiative, where emerging Qld writers/directors get to work with professional producers & script editors.

WA’s first youth film festival

Imagine Your Australia. That’s the theme for the Centenary of Federation Youth Film Festival, which is open to all filmmakers between 12-25 years in WA. Supported by ScreenWest, the theme is open to interpretation & there are 3 categories: Years 8-10, 11-12 & tertiary/open. Films can be any genre & will all be screened September 23-29 in prominent venues around Perth. 08 9328 9343, email

Docklands complex for Melbourne

As reported by The Age (June 28), over the next 2 years the Victorian government will build a $40 million film & TV complex in the Docklands area. The site is aimed at revitalising the VIC film industry & bringing many industry professionals back from interstate. The government hopes to attract international productions while being affordable & accessible (unlike Fox Studios) to local, smaller budget projects.

Lack of access to cinema in rural communities

According to Karen Meehan (Dramatic Online, May 11), a recent report by Sharon Baker (NSW Film & Television Office) reveals that “in over 50% of rural communities in NSW people have little or no access to cinema.” The bottom line threshold for a commercial cinema operation is 15,000 people, cutting out many small towns. Flicks in the Sticks, organised by Bruce Tindale (Arts OutWest), is a workshop-already held in a number of small towns-that aims to give communities the tools they need to screen films locally. For further information contact Bruce Tindale, 02 6338 4657, email

Indigenous scholarships at AFTRS

The Australian Film Television & Radio School, in joint venture with the Department of Employment, Workplace Relations & Small Business (under a Career Development Strategy) is seeking applications for an Indigenous Scholarship. Awarded to the best overall applicant, the one-year scholarship in film (commencing January 2002) will offer one of the following specialisations: directing, editing, producing, sound, scriptwriting, design, documentary or cinematography. Recent recipients include director Rachel Perkins (Radiance, One Night the Moon): “It opened up a whole new world that I hadn’t known about in terms of looking at other people’s films, learning about adaptation, learning about scriptwriting, having contact with industry professionals in a way that you could directly talk to them & ask the stupid questions that you would never ask professionally on set. Being exposed to a whole range of experiences, being taken out of my context as an Indigenous filmmaker & just being a student within a non-Indigenous environment was quite good for me as well.” Applications close September 11, 02 9805 6444, email

One Night the Moon soon to be released

Rachel Perkin’s latest film, written by John Romeril, with music by Paul Kelly, Kev Carmody & Mairead Hannan, will be distributed by Dendy Films and released on November 8. Starring Paul Kelly, David Field, Chris Haywood & Ruby Hunter, the film is based on the true story of a young girl who went missing in the outback in 1932 (see Jane Mills' review). The film screened at the Brisbane and Melbourne International Film Festivals.

Film Australia wins award for Mabo Project

Mabo-The Native Title Revolution, an extensive multimedia resource produced under Film Australia’s National Interest Program, has been awarded Best Secondary Teacher Reference Category from The Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing and the 2001 ATOM Award for Best Multimedia in the General Category. Combining CD-ROMs with a website & online database, the project brings together documentary video with audio & text from a variety of primary/secondary sources. Developed & produced with assistance from the Multimedia 21 Fund-Cinemedia, the CD-ROM was directed by Trevor Graham whose award-winning film Mabo-Life of an Island Man inspired the project. The website was developed in collaboration with the Aboriginal Research Institute at the University of South Australia & established as part of the Indigenous Online Network.

Digital arts go troppo

The second annual Kick Arts Digital Media Awards are open for business so if you’re a digital artist living in Far North Qld, get cracking-open to anyone north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The awards will be presented at WETFEST 2001: Fed on Film, Courthouse Hotel, Cairns, September 15 & entries displayed at Kick Arts Digital Gallery, September 10-28. All submissions must be presented on CD-ROM and can include animation, interactives, sound, digital artworks & websites. Entries due August 24. 07 4051 2234, email

Electrofringe in Newcastle

Electrofringe is on again, an annual festival of digital, hybrid, electronic & new media arts which offers workshops for artists, critical forums on digital media & screen cultures, & a focus this year on copyright & intellectual property issues. Timed to coincide with This is Not Art & Young Writers Festivals and Electronic Independent Labels & Student Media Conferences, it’s a great time to visit Newcastle. September 27-October 1, email

Carnivale goes online

Carnivale: Multicultural Arts Festival, Sydney, will launch The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu (writer/producer Andrew Jakubowicz, multimedia director Tatiana Pentes) in early October, a multimedia web project where the user can explore the lives & stories of 7 Jewish families who lived in Shanghai, 1930-1960, the narratives emerging from interviews, artefacts & photographs. Watch this space for the web address.

Fat Cow Motel – Australia’s Twin Peaks?

Qld producers Nathan Mayfield & Tracey Robertson (Hoodlum Entertainment) have scored a deal to make a $2 million TV drama in SE Qld. What’s special about the series is that it’s a 13 part multiplatform mystery, the first large scale show to be delivered to an audience through cable TV, radio, mobile phones, email, direct mail & dedicated websites. The viewers will be able to contribute in various ways to the shape of the program & pre-production starts in October (PFTC News, July-Aug).

Digital scholarships – SAE College

SAE International Technology College recently announced new scholarships for their Digital Film Program. Proton Digital & SAE are offering 15 talented students scholarships to the value of $3000 towards course fees for the Digital Film Producer course at the Sydney campus. The 9 month course offers students the chance to fine tune their skills by producing, directing & editing a number of projects, including working with DVDs. The program commences September 17 & applications are currently being considered. 02 9211 3711

IMAP to archive independent media

Independent Media Arts Preservation has launched a new website to help digital media producers & arts organisations catalogue their media works. Concerned that the history of non-commercial electronic media is being lost, the website features a standardised template & preservation information.

Palestinian youth portal launched

Virtual Palestine, a youth project undertaken at Metro Screen, aims to bring together young Palestinians from around the globe to create artistic explorations of their culture & identity. The site features news & current affairs, a gallery, places for personal stories, a map locator & a place to create music. Participants have been trained in digital camera use along with software such as Flash & DASE (allowing people to connect their computers & play music together wherever they are situated).

Fibreculture encourages debate on digital issues

The fibreculture mailing list is a forum for Australian net culture & research, founded by David Teh & Geert Lovink in January 2001. The aim is to exchange articles, ideas & arguments, and be a preparatory forum for an conference in Melbourne, December 6-8. The convenors hope to build a strategic picture of how Australia might support innovation, R&D and the applications & culture of new technology. To join, send an email with ‘subscribe’ in the subject line.

In September 1995, I was in Cairo for the Seventh Festival for Experimental Theatre, a rather tawdry and incoherent affair with official entries capable of boring the pants off all but the most committed cultural tourist. But, on the fringe of the festival, in a tent under the open sky, I managed to catch Hassan El-Geretly’s Tides of Night, in which the El-Warsha theatre group used a mix of actors, shadow puppets, Sufi poetry and a traditional stick duel to tell an enthralling tale of love and violence. When I got back to London, I contacted the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) and told the organisers, Lucy Neal and Rose Fenton, breathlessly about my discovery.

A couple of years later, El-Warsha was invited to be part of the festival, which biennially breathes fresh life into the narrowly provincial London theatre scene. Set up in 1981, LIFT has always been at the cutting edge, championing the work of Robert Lepage, Cristoph Mathaler and De La Guarda when these artists were not even well known in their own countries. But not only has LIFT promoted experimentalists who have stretched the definition of theatre, it has also redefined theatrical space, putting on shows in parks, a deserted railway hotel, on board a bus, at the zoo and in shop windows.

This year, Reich and Szyber from Sweden converted a sightseeing launch and lit up the Thames, while Bobby Baker performed Box Story in St Luke’s church in Holloway. From Italy came Raffaello Sanzio and his evocative, moody Genesi, as well as his children-only show, Buchettino. Meanwhile, the Hittite Empire performed Skeletons of Fish, their startling “urban micro-opera”, just as the aural cascade of Heiner Goebbels’ Sound City woke up music theatre with his group-created sound. Hungary’s Mozgó Ház brought his Romantic state-of-the-nation show, Tragedy of Man, and the Dutch company Hollandia staged their collage of Pasolini’s writings, Voices. Politics featured heavily in Georges Ibrahim’s Al-Kasaba theatre, from Palestine, as well as in a selection of works in progress from new Ugandan writers. More traditionally, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov electrified audiences with its portrayal of sex and power. Discussions, talks and exhibitions turned the ship HMS President, moored on the Thames Embankment, into a daily club for all fest junkies.

Regulars have noticed that, for its 20th anniversary, the festival was a bit pared down. The reason is that LIFT is about to morph into a yearlong event, with Fenton and Neal bringing over new work on a regular basis. Why the big change? “Over the past few festivals,” says Neal, “we’ve felt ourselves pushing at the walls.” Because “much of the commissioning involves collaborations between British and overseas artists, and has a yearlong life, we coined the phrase: ‘LIFTing the skirts’ 4 years ago.” It means “the festival frame was beginning to feel a bit pinched”, says Neal, and that it was time to change. “We were asking audiences to stuff themselves every 2 years—and that brings an extraordinary excitement and energy—but when we looked at it hard, we found that we wanted LIFT to be a crossroads, where exceptional things come together, in other ways.”

For example, when RealTime came to the festival in 1997, “it helped come up with the evidence that a festival sets out to be more than the sum of its parts.” RealTime came up with a metaphor, describing the festival as “interconnecting chambers—which you could explore one after another.” In other words, says Neal, “we are looking for the contradictions, the paradoxes and the fact that theatre doesn’t settle easily in a box.” So “the box of a festival, where everything happens in 3 weeks, now feels very artificial—and it’s not something we need to hold onto.”

“When we started,” says Fenton, “foreign productions just didn’t happen here. Theatre promoters told us we were mad to put on anything in a foreign language. Now, of course, there’s masses of choice: BITE at the Barbican and Meltdown at the South Bank—summer is just bursting with foreign shows.”

Earlier this year, LIFT brought over the heartbreaking Young@Heart show, in which greyhairs play Elvis, from the United States, and Peter Brook’s Le Costume from Paris. But despite their success, there is evidence that London audiences are playing safe, and avoiding new or experimental work by companies they’ve never heard of. “There are various, different audiences,” says Neal. “We have programmed shows which act as a counterpoint to each other, but if the public doesn’t come, that is a very strong signal.” “It’s not a highbrow, elitist festival,” adds Fenton, “but you must always expect the unexpected.” After one performance of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, directed by Declan Donnellan, more than half the audience stayed for the after-show discussion, but then Donnellan is a big name already.

“We are trying to raise the possibilities,” says Neal, “to get people more involved in discourse, using theatre as a prism” for seeing the world. “When we say to people: ‘Come and see this show, it’s really amazing,’ they usually come.” This year, the pyrotechnic production, Christophe Berthonneau’s Garden of Light, was performed twice, creating “a temporary community which we held together for slightly longer, which enables new conversations to emerge.”

But LIFT is still always seeking “a better engagement with the public,” says Neal, who then moves on to bigger questions: “What resonates about theatre? What begins when a play is finished? We have set ourselves a 5-year project to ask such questions.” The artists that work with LIFT may increasingly be part of a season, with evocative names such as “Childhood Dreams.” “Romeo Castellucci is a good example,” says Neal. “Genesi, his show about the Bible, is quite different to Buchettino, his show for children. But, however different, to the company they are the same work. There’s a visceral quality to Buchettino—and for us it’s like planting a seed.” She wants to use such events as “gathering points for ideas.” In the case of Buchettino, LIFT is asking “in what ways can theatre be used to support children’s exploration of very profound issues, like death and abandonment, which the usual bland kid’s theatre doesn’t address.” Neal also wants to give credit to children’s intellect and “not infantalise them with kids’ theatre.” Various workshops and projects will build on the Buchettino show.

With international artists, who may come from Uganda or Palestine, says Neal, “we have fleetingly the opportunity to discuss the world and our sense of place within it in a different way.” With the Hittite Empire’s Skeletons of Fish came a series of events, curated by cultural activist Colin Prescod which, says Neal, “were a chance to oxygenate a much deeper, more personal—possibly not heard before in public—discourse that taps into the more private worlds of black artists in this country.” They addressed questions about “blackness”, and about the “aesthetics of black performing arts.”

Such events are organised with an ethos that Neal calls “conflictual collaboration.” Now that LIFT has shed the festival frame, “we can be lighter on our feet, more spontaneous and surprising,” says Fenton. Neal also points out that “the identity of London is changing; the idea of what is international is changing and the idea of a festival should reflect that.” “People have told us that LIFT has helped them rediscover their own city,” adds Fenton.

LIFT’s ambition to push the boundaries still remains. “We are still asking questions about whether theatre is a real public space,” says Neal. “How does it work? Which members of the public which have contact with it? Does it form public discourse?” She quotes Flaubert: “If you set out on a journey and you know your destination, then it’s not a journey.”

Once upon a time fringe festivals provided formal and political opposition to mainstream arts festivals. Influenced by the Edinburgh Fringe, a policy of open access was adopted (pending availability of venues). Somewhere along the way, the oppositional dimension seemed to get swallowed up in the sheer volume of work presented, a plethora of standup comics, countless solo theatre shows and a beer hall mentality. Mainstream festivals with the financial and artistic capacity to import radical productions and commission new work locally could look more progressive than their fringe neighbours. In recent years there have been occasional signs of incipient change in Australia’s fringe festivals, flirtation with new media, contemporary performance and Indigenous culture. Open access gravitates against thematic programming, but Katrina Sedgwick, the new Artistic director of the Adelaide Fringe manages to convey a clear sense of thematic purpose and curatorial drive while hanging onto traditional fringe values. The focus, as the Fringe theme—”Necessity is the mother of invention”—indicates, is on innovation and newer artforms that have been marginal, experimental and sometimes underground.

The fundamentals will still be the same as to why the Fringe exists in Adelaide and works as well as it does for artists across the board. Anybody can come in and do whatever they want in terms of the presentation of work from any artform and we support them to do that. The Fringe is fundamentally about creating a critical mass of energy and audience for artists to be able to present their creative ideas. For me, particularly coming from a background of the Adelaide Festival over the last few years, it’s great to clarify what the difference is. We are principally a service organisation to assist anybody who chooses to be part of the Fringe.

I do agree that increasingly fringe festivals—a lot of this has been economically driven—have tended to be more media friendly where you know you’re going to get coverage by focussing on the stars and increasingly they tend to be the easily tourable, comedy cabaret big ticket items.

What’s been great for me coming into the job now is that the Adelaide Fringe is in a position of security. It’s respected by government, by the corporate sector, by sponsors and, most importantly, by audiences for the scale of event that it’s become. I think that we can now trust that we are going to get the profile that we want. So we can start exploring new areas.

One thing that perhaps has been lost in trying to build the event is that we are there to support independent and emerging and fringe art. And I think the Fringe has to some extent been caught in an earlier notion of what fringe is—comedy and cabaret. They were the artforms that were marginalised at that time. Now they’re absolutely at the centre of the mainstream and there’s a whole lot of other artforms that haven’t seen themselves as potentially having a voice in this event.

So I’ve been very keen to look at what is fringe, what is underground, alternative culture now and how do we find ways to encourage, showcase and highlight these forms to our audiences.

Our principle focus is the engagement of experimental practice with technology and in particular looking at the relationship between analog and digital, now that we’ve got over the fact that digital exists and it’s not just enough to work with it. We want to start exploring the cross artform choices in using more traditional or analog technologies in engagement with the digital and the aesthetics that are evolving out of that.

2002AD Analog to Digital is an electronic sound and music conference that runs over 3-4 days with forums and workshops. We’re talking to people from What is Music? festival and the National Independent Electronics Labels Conference (Sound Summit). They’re part of the This is Not Art collective of festivals that happen in Newcastle every year. We’re linking into existing networks, using expertise and skill that’s out there and highlighting what they’re doing. There’s a very strong electronic scene here in Adelaide too, particularly in the area of techno. There are 3 of us working on the Analog to Digital program—myself, Martin Thompson and Paul Armor, 2 guys who are based here who’ve been involved in this practice for some time

The conference is actually a curated program. And it’s been funded by Arts SA and the Australia Council. So it’s not part of our core funding. In September we announce our Shooting from the Hip film and video program. Again, we’re working with different organisations who are curating particular programs for us. We’re developing a writing program at the moment. I’m not sure how extensive that’s going to be. All these are curated but they are completely forum and workshop focussed events. Support is not just about helping people to find a venue—it’s about watching other artists and seeing what they do creatively, highlighting areas of practice that we don’t usually get to see.

I think we need to look at the other side, at the audience. What’s important is not being a passive viewer but also having the chance to come to a central space, The Adelaide University Union precinct, where there will be a lot of people milling around who will have all seen work and want to talk about it. It’s been increasingly difficult for the Fringe to find a centralised home. The Lion Arts Centre was a wonderful space but we had to move out so that the University of SA could move in. It came down to the East End but there’s been quite rampant residential development going on there. There just aren’t the spaces there any more. Adelaide University Union precinct offers something unique. There’s an existing infrastructure that we can move into: the beautiful old cloisters where we can have a temporary box office, run bars and catering, and where people can hang out on the balmy Adelaide late summer nights. Adjacent are the union buildings which house the Uni Bar which is going to be our Fringe Club. There’s a cinema, another 8 venues that range from 60 seats up to around 250. Within the Hub we’ll have a very balanced program which, of course, will feature comedy and cabaret but also physical theatre, contemporary dance, music and cross-artform work.

The Mother of Invention competition is about inventors. You’d have to say they are amongst the most passionate, lateral, innovative, creative people working in ridiculous conditions and sometimes coming up with ideas that are hugely important for the development of the area they’re focusing on. I think that’s a creative journey that’s nice to highlight in the context of a Fringe because they operate absolutely on the fringe. It’s a way to engage with the SA Museum and they’re really excited having us there. And it’s a nice way to parallel creative thought in the artistic sense with other areas. I think there’ll be a huge diversity of stuff. We had a preview launch down here recently and a guy came up from Bordertown with this U-type harvester that he’d invented and we had a really excellent performance where he was sitting there on his harvester with all these chicks from Shimmyshock, a performance art group here, interacting with the harvester.

There’s a huge amount of thought and process given to every single element that ends up being presented in the Fringe and to have a theme that is a starting point for discussion is really useful.

Initial research concentrated on examining the physical sensibility of the performers, the primary aim being to develop a training process which, generally, assists in the articulation of the performer’s physical sensibility and, specifically, explores a perceived Australian spatial reality in performance…The company has drawn from a diverse set of forms and disciplines such as dance-theatre, bio-mechanics, martial arts, new media practice, Suzuki acting method and sport.
NYID publicity material

David Pledger is the Artistic Director of the Melbourne performance ensemble, not yet it’s difficult (nyid). Since 1995 the ensemble has presented 8 productions: Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (1995), Nil, Cat and Buried (1995), William Shakespeare: hung, drawn and quartered (1996), Training Squad (1996), The Austral/asian Post-cartoon: Sports Edition (1997), Chicago Chicago System 98 (1998), Journey Into Confusion (2000) and Scenes of the Beginning from the End (2001)—merciless exposés of certain tendencies in contemporary civilisation. Each show is dynamically crafted physically, vocally, rhythmically. Each show has pushed to the edge the performers’ endurance and daring and challenged the audience to deal with the social implications of the issues raised. The works have been acclaimed critically, receiving 4 Green Room awards, mainly for innovative performance.

What are the lineaments of a culture? The company has asked this again and again. Where does its power lie? Where is its energy contained? What are its landscapes—natural and urban? How does it control its aberrant forces? With what forms of violence is that control applied? How is a culture—its content and its discontents—mediated and in what ways do the forms of that mediation shape the very culture it is relaying? The focus is on image, ensemble, performer presence and technology. The basic artistic team consists of Pledger, dramaturg Peter Eckersall, production manager Paul Jackson and the performers (including, consistently, Greg Ulfan, Paul Bongiovanni, Danielle Long and Kha Tran Viet).

In addition to the striking success of its live and technological communication, nyid produces and markets itself with flash and edge. It has a 21st century profile and its aspirations like its critique are global rather than purely local. It has instituted both a series of Independent Theatre Forums (the papers were reproduced in RealTime) and R & D Cubed, a program devoted to research into practice, which has given birth to 2 research projects, nyid tv and The Desert Project. It has also produced one film, The Unmaking of, and Pledger has recently finished a documentary for SBS based on his grandfather’s background in Italy (Cosenza Vecchia, broadcast July 20).

I first got to know David Pledger when he was a member of the 80s group, The Globos, with their slick, kitsch, satirical, witty, live ‘clips’ of pop songs. This interview took place almost 20 years later in his home in Elwood in July 2001.

Technology & perception

I was born in the 60s and I grew up with TV. I’ve never really known a life without TV. Technology is fundamental in the way that I see the world. I think that mediation through technology has absolutely created a shift in our perception of theatre. I never knew anything else.

Scenes of the Beginning from the End seemed to be playing with various degrees of audience involvement, shifting how we were to perceive the action in front of us. The first presentational movement piece shifted to a series of realistic vignettes voyeuristically witnessed by the audience through the windows of cars. This in turn shifted to a suburban family scenario played soap opera style in an open frame house. Finally we were in the theatre watching ourselves being watched.

When there’s a multiplicity of states of reception available for an audience, spectatorship becomes braindancing. The audience as a receiver of the performance is put in a situation where they are really watching how it’s communicated to them and then finally, and most importantly, working out what the meaning of that relationship is, as well as the content and the context. That variety of positions creates a dynamic relationship between spectator and action. The very last scene of Scenes, the surveillance section, gives you another point of view because it places the audience as the central agent.

Spectatorship & surveillance

In the final section of Scenes…, the audience is divided. One half watches, via hidden security cameras, the other half is seduced, engaged with, cajoled and browbeaten by the cast in the roles of members of the bureaucracy. The section culminates with certain members of that audience selected and taken off to be ‘beaten up’ in another sealed off space. The fascination of surveillance becomes a violent act in its own right.

The interplay between spectatorship and surveillance has been a major theme in my work since I started working on the media back in 97 (in Sports Edition). I’ve always been fascinated with movies like Rear Window: the phenomenon of watching someone who’s not aware of being watched, while being watched yourself.

As a mechanism for first world societies this phenomenon is poignant, sad and also titillating. The idea that this kind of social activity is commodified and sold and corporatised—literally institutionalised—has always intrigued me. Watching shows like Big Brother, for example, is sad because you think ‘god, don’t they have anything better to do?’ And yet there’s a kind of titillation about the fact that you’re watching someone doing something ‘real’ as opposed to doing something ‘not real.’

And this titillation, in turn, is connected to your own unexpressed desire to be watched. That is the emotional landscape of my interest in surveillance. Socially and politically there is something seriously dysfunctional in the whole surveillance relationship and its potential—the first world, which is America, is going to look at the farmers in the third world, just to make sure that they’re going about their business.

All of this technology is completely and utterly possible and in between that spectrum of looking at someone when they’re not watching you, and that kind of organisation of power and capital, are these multiplicities of mediation which determine the way that we organise ourselves in space, our emotional lives, our thinking.

We’re going to show the surveillance section of Scenes at the International Media Art Award, ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), in October. It’s very exciting because the whole theme of the award is surveillance.

Technology: real & unreal

I’ve made 2 films now and both are documentary dramas. In a lot of my theatre shows I’m really interested in looking at the documentation of the real. But a documentary is an utter construction. Drama, on the other hand, is a form which says ‘No, we are representing life for you on the stage’ and yet sometimes drama attempts to be reality. And on one level that is simply what drama is and its pretence to be about something else is a lie.

Technology is just another medium for exploring the relationship between the real and the unreal. The gestural choreography in our work is another kind of technology, one in which the abstraction of real action is put together as a way of developing another form of language as text, and also a substitute for text. So if you look at verbal language as ‘the real thing’, and the movement that arises out of it and is abstracted from it as ‘the unreal thing’, then the distance that’s created between text and movement in my work is really looking at issues of reality and unreality.

Placing the audience

I’m so not interested in the actor’s transformation. Transformation is a very old fashioned way of thinking about acting. I think it’s not performative. When you look at performers and actors transformed on stage, the agency of fear is with them and not with the audience and that is counterproductive and unpolitical. The audience may at best be active empathetically and kinaesthetically but they’re not active socially. At all times the audience should be conscious they are in a theatre. You can be engaged and you can be taken away and your imaginative landscapes can be scoured by the presentation of the ideas of the theatrical piece but it is essentially a piece of theatre. The deceptions of illusionist theatre are no longer appropriate and younger audiences just don’t buy them.

The ensemble needs to have an understanding of what the performance means for us. Then what we try to do is give the audience, through the style of presentation, the problem of the thing that they are watching. The audience is not observing our journey as characters through the narrative. We are instead presenting a set of ideas and concepts and ways of thinking which the audience are being asked to piece together every single night, with us and for us.

Going too far

Humour is the point at which the audience’s possibilities are opened up. Octavio Paz once said that humour renders everything it touches ambiguous. This is a very politically active space to be in. Humour is vital in all our theatre.

At the opposite extreme is violence. It closes off options and causes decisions. In The Sports Edition there is a section when we act violence on Kha. This was made in response to One Nation and their targeting of Asians and Indigenous Australians. And the audience is identifying with the fact that here is a guy who’s feeling that every single value in his world is diminishing as a result of the political agendas that are being acted out on the street and that diminishment becomes a problem for us as citizens of Australia. It also becomes a problem for us as members of the company because the working through of that whole process of beating him up and constructing a choreography and language for it can be quite traumatic. You make a decision whether you go on, and obviously the decision has to rest with the person who is at the centre of the violence. We all have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we going too far?’

The paralysis one feels at the moment of witnessing violence is a really dynamic situation in which we find ourselves more and more as the world becomes more overtly violent. But this moment at which the audience decides whether or not to engage or step in to halt the violence is the point at which action, social action, is made decisive.

Whose vision?

When I hear questions like that I feel like the work is diminished because the work is not essentially mine. It is the audience’s. Also, the representation of my work is not just about me in my space because I work collaboratively with other people. And because I work as an artist, I work from the danger zone of the unknown where too much analysis from a personal point of view can close up so many possibilities.

The moment at which you remain within your work is the moment at which you continually leave it. There is no sense in identifying what any single piece means in my personal life, because it is part of a continuum of a series of landscapes in which I live and work simultaneously.

The story within a performance is not about me, but essentially it has parts of me in it. I take the prime authorial role, but the pleasure of collaboration allows my 2-dimensional vision to be expanded into the 3-dimensional world of working with a group of people whose intelligences and imaginations constantly contribute to every facet of every show.

nyid’s annual workshop & research program in August will initiate the company’s social capital fund, which will contribute part-proceeds to an independent social welfare agency. Next year nyid will use the fund as a challenge program to lever an equal donation from targeted private sector and philanthropic organisations. David Pledger has been awarded a Churchill fellowship to travel to Germany, Senegal, New York and Denmark.

Chris Drummond’s directing credits include Play with Repeats by Martin Crimp, Slum Clearance by Vaclav Havel, and Wreckage by Hilary Bell. In his successful production of Yasmina Reza’s Art for the State Theatre Company of South Australia, and the continuing adaptation with playwright Susan Rogers of Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters, South Australian theatre director Chris Drummond is developing an expansive style that celebrates performance as an individual and collective act of conscience.

Theatre that seeks to be expansive both within itself and within its audience. As an audience member I want to laugh and cry and scream and be delighted and disturbed, whatever it takes to really feel alive. I want it acknowledged that I am present there, that I have a brain and life experience and a whole lot of other baggage as well.

In work, I am drawn to theatre artists who bring with them an understanding of their craft and an essential lack of ego, a genuine naiveté about how to move forward, unfailing rigorousness, fearlessness and above all, a sense of delight in their own and other’s playfulness.

If art is “the balance between order and chaos” where’s your personal fulcrum? How do you work at achieving that balance?

I try not to define the specific outcomes of my work. I have a sense of where we are going but try to have the courage to allow every possibility to have a genuine chance of taking seed. In any situation I try to find the most realistic boundaries within which we can encourage creative choice as a precursor to ordering the rhythms, images and tempo of a piece. I’m equating ‘order’ with the rational and ‘chaos’ with the intuitive. If we only ‘think up’ images and stories, then we will only be communicating that which we already know, which is very boring. If we leave everything open to intuition then we end up with a meaningless mess. So we need both.

At the moment I’m still interested in trying to work out how best to work with actors. I am in a very particular period of development, beginning to understand how not to control everything and yet still bring focus to the work. It’s a very long, very slow learning curve. I guess my desire is to create theatre that has true vitality. I love working with all the elements of the theatre but to begin and end with me creating fantastic images doesn’t feel enough. I am definitely not interested in being an auteur. I am sure I have certain ‘fingerprints’ in terms of my aesthetic but I try to respond afresh to each project in terms of the text, the cast or the social context.

It’s going very well! Susan Rogers (playwright) and I have been working on this since early 2000 and we hope to have a full draft by mid 2002, and looking towards a production in 2003 or thereabouts. It’s a huge undertaking. Thank God for Rosalba Clemente and STCSA’s Faulding On Site Theatre Lab. Their belief in this project has given Susan and me the resources and the time which is so necessary if we are to succeed in adapting this book with all the complexity required to realise its full potential.

In the first place you have to have a very clear reason about why you’re even doing it. What is the point of transforming a work of art from one medium into another? In the case of an adaptation, the new work has to have its own purpose, both in its own right and in relation to the original entity.

Night Letters talks about a very special quality of experience in which a dying man has burrowed down into the essence of his situation and found meaning for himself in an age where meaning has lost its, well, meaning! I believe it also communicates something very profound about humanity’s relationship to nature and something new about Australia’s identity to the rest of the world.

Adapting Night Letters came about because I wanted to access the meaning in the book experimentally. I wanted to understand it at a gut level. The internal journey towards one’s death is such an individual experience and yet the experience of grief is a collective one. It appeared to me that re-creating Dessaix’s internal journey within the community of the theatre might allow insight into both spheres of experience. Night Letters is also about existing within the moment. The theatrical medium could become a transcendent metaphor for that very theme rather than it simply being realised theatrically.

Practically, there are huge challenges in adapting this work. Night Letters does not have a traditional narrative structure and many of the characters have not been fleshed out in a dramatic sense. The fact that this work is semi-autobiographical presents its own set of unique issues. Robert has utterly floored Susan and me with his fearless generosity and his commitment to allowing us our essential creative freedom. He has made himself available in a vast array of senses and has asked for no control in return. The genuineness of his personal courage and honesty represents the very essence of what makes Night Letters such a unique work.

Personally I am conscious of my own political apathy. I would love to see more theatre artists working beyond their own creative concerns and finding inspiration in the fabric of our society. Within this I would love to see a fearless pursuit of excellence and a holistic approach to all that is unique about the theatrical medium.

Ultimately, I would love to see those artists who actually have ideas being realistically supported to bring their vision to the fullest fruition.

In September Chris Drummond is heading to Europe for further research on Night Letters before returning to direct graduating students from Adelaide’s Centre for Performing Arts.

Deckchair Theatre’s recent touring production Black & Tran transports us, theatrically speaking, to a pub in Carlton (Melbourne) while transforming the performance space into a cabaret venue with its own bar—an invitation to settle down, relax and get into the swing of things. It worked for me and I hate pubs, particularly the ones evoked in this production. It’s the old fashioned kind that comes with a telly for watching sport, a pool table and a dartboard—the true blue, Aussie bloke kind of pub. I don’t drink beer, hate watching sport on TV, can’t play pool or darts and loathe the aggro and punch-ups that I associate with the beer guzzling, poofter bashing, sexist and racist stupidities of the dinki-di Aussie. Well that’s the way it was when I was growing up.

In general, I don’t like stand-up comedy either and for many of the reasons cited above, so I should have hated this combination of pub culture and stand-up, but I didn’t. I can’t tell you whether or not pubs have changed but in Black & Tran, you get the impression that these old fashioned bars are now a positive haven—given the tidal wave of gentrification that has swept over most cities—for those who don’t want to participate in the white majority middle class culture of wine bars and brasseries. In this pub, instead of a big white bloke with a red-neck and a gut wearing a singlet and stubbies with his crack hanging out, there—glued to the cricket on telly—is a lanky, bespectacled Vietnamese man. When his nemesis arrives, far from a head-kicking skinhead, she’s a cheerful Aboriginal woman who swings into the bar with a friendly, “Hey Tokyo, ya wanna game a’ stick?”

While Ningali Lawford takes some convincing that Hung Le, whose Australian accent is so broad you could thwack it with a cricket bat, is in fact Vietnamese-Australian and not Japanese, Hung Le himself has a bit to do in coming to terms with an Aboriginal Australian. As they trade tall tales and true and tell lots of totally tragic jokes about eating dogs and snakes in sometimes hysterically visceral detail, the audience cacks itself in recognition of all those racial slurs and cliches. Perhaps surprisingly, this first generation migrant and original Australian have a lot in common. Neither of them spoke English until their late primary years. Neither of them is seen to be a ‘real’ Australian and, of course, they share a loathing of Pauline Hanson and those of her ilk. Hanson—referred to throughout as the “Oxley-moron”—is the target of merciless satire.

Despite the trading of racial stereotypes and cultural misconceptions, this is an amiable piss-take rather than a savage satire. And unlike a lot of stand-up, its message is inclusive rather than exclusive, its thrust mildly educational and its concerns humanitarian. In this infectious and light-hearted production there are serious issues raised but, in the end, this show suggests that one solution to the problems of injustice, prejudice and intolerance, at least at street level, is to be found in humour and a willingness to engage with the regulars at your local pub.

So maybe it’s time for me to throw off my ingrained prejudices and head on down to the local for a game of stick. My pool playing would surely test the limits of anyone’s tolerance!

Black & Tran, director Jean Pierre Mignon, created by & starring Ningali Lawford, Hung Le, Deckchair Theatre, Victoria Hall, Fremantle, May 15-23, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, May 24-26

I was raised on a steady diet of Chekhovs performed in the manner and dialect of langorous English tea parties. It was a relief then to encounter the Benedict Andrews-Beatrix Christian version towards the end of its Sydney Theatre Company season (Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, opened May 11), angular, impassioned, unpredictable—a good test of a production for a play we know only too well. It remains curiously faithful for all its lateral moves, disk-spinning, occasional (if sometimes just too out of whack) contemporary references and magically eccentric, full-bodied and frightening performances—not without the requisite moments of reflection and interiority the playwright demands. “Hyper-real” is how the collaborators describe the characters, and I think they’re right. It’s the astonishing range of emotion and its moments of sharp visible embodiment that fuelled me. This contemporary playing doesn’t feed everyone in the audience. The familiar made strange got a bit too much for some: Irina’s insistent “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow…” at the end of Act II was quietly met with “To Mosman, to Mosman…” by one disgruntled patron. But the performance manner is now, it is the future. But whose? Why is Masha singing Joni Mitchell’s paean to Woodstock—she can’t get it out of her head. It’s awkward, it jars, but it says that the dreams of 1968 have failed utterly. Act III looks uncomfortably like Bosnia. I’d just read Michel Houellebecq’s manic-depressive novel Atomised, so I was edgy about any more baby-boomer bashing (we get enough of that in the Sydney Morning Herald) and the denunciation of 400 years of less than humane humanism. So I went home in a spin, fuelled by the playing, emptied by an Andrews-Christian vision grimmer than any Chekhov I’d supped with before.

Guillermo Gomez Pena’s The Museum of Fetisihised Identities (Performance Space, July 5-14) was one of the most remarkable experiences of recent years, pulling my disparate atoms into fractal coherence across the 3 hour performance. The San Francisco-based Mexican artist and his cohort Yuan Ybarra collaborated with Australian artists for 5 weeks to create a set of living, recycled, sometimes mutating tableaux that transform an increasing number of the audience across the season into performers. As RealTime’s Kirsten Krauth put it: “It’s hard to maintain a passion for theatre-with-boundaries after experiencing The Museum of Fetishised Identities. A venue done up like a rave with performances fluid and revolving and great thumping music, where you can rove with a drink in one hand and a machine gun in the other is pretty hard to beat”. This tightly choreographed production moves from museum (a collection of bizarre cultural types, partly constructed from the performers’ lives) to ritual, culminating in the crucifixion of Ybarra with ‘Chicano’ scrawled across his chest (how does, Gomez Pena repeatedly asks, a Mexican become a Chicano).

Despite the cross, the skeleton that hangs above, the density of colour and sound and the specificity of Gomez’s own images (punch drunk Third World boxer, beggar dwarf, sculptor of terror tableaux using the audience) the whole feels less Mexican than aberrantly and creatively global ie not corporate. The Australian collaborators produce images that evoke constellated local subcultures (feminist lesbian warrior dj), public transgressions (a naked woman climbs into a perspex display box and smears it with breast milk), cultural caricature (someone in a kangaroo mask in a flailing dance with a cricket bat), foreign experience (the ritual of an Indian street beggar turned into an appalling fashion parade using the audience). Valerie Berry, Barbara Clare, Brian Fuata, Victoria Spence, Caitlin Newton-Broad, Rolando Ramos, Claudia Chidiac and Agatha Gothe-Snape perform with commitment and precision, some revealing surprising, new dimensions when deprived of their usual means of expression. Digital artist Jorge Cantellano (satirical, animated images of branded synthetic humans) and video installation artist Vahid Vahed (dark imagery of political torment across the last century) complete the picture—an exhilarating expression of difference in the age of globalism that sometimes stops you in your tracks. A bit like partying your way through the Apocalypse.

Urban Theatre Project’s Asylum (director Claudia Chidiac; May 31-June 9), in a disused shop in a western Sydney suburb was not at all celebratory. Its more familiar assemblage of monologue tales of the refugee encased in a fragile narrative nonetheless had power and poignancy because of the great strength of some mature performers and the immediacy of the political situation in Australia’s atrocious handling of refugees. We entered the performance area as refugees, hassled by officials we couldn’t understand and we watched the performance through wire as projected images (Denis Beaubois) and unfamiliar sound worlds (Rik Rue) disoriented us, as we tried, pertinently, to read the writing on the walls that these inmates patiently worked at. In the end a refugee is forced to go home, presumably to death. As heavy as the hand is that hits you with this, the truth is as horribly light as Kundera’s: it’s hard to walk from the space, to drive home in one piece.

Critical Mass Theatre’s HAZCHEM (May 18-June 17) is bewildering and mysteriously affecting. A pre-show guided tour through the Wollongong City Gallery doesn’t prepare you for the council chamber balcony view through a mist of a yellow car atop a mound of sea-rounded rocks, a body flung across the car roof. It’s an image of beauty and of horror, the end of a story we’ll never know. What we witness seems to be some kind of aftermath in which perhaps a family is pulled apart, atomised. But HAZCHEM refuses such guessing and goes the way of reverie as headlines of crime and corruption and crashes and vast oceans wave across the chamber walls. A work siren sounds, grabbing everyone’s attention. So does rock’n’roll and the footy. There’s a brief sentimental evocation of a 60s holiday in the car, a trip to the Kiama blowhole. We’re sliding back. Trite memories and short-lived suspicions about pollution jostle, a comic but touching courtship is expressed in local terms (“you’re my smelter’), a slow death is mused over, and a running panic grabs thesel individuals (pulling them out of their cages, off their bikes, out of their preoccupations), until they unite atop the mayoral bench, yelling, punching the air, powerless. There’s been a car crash, a city has crashed, something has been lost. Deborah Leiser’s precise, visually intense direction yields focussed performances from a mostly experienced cast (Janys Hays, Bruce Keller, Jeff Stein, Bel Macedone, Ian McGregor) who know how to stretch time and contract space as well as how to act as the work switches between the imagistic demands of contemporary performance and fragmentary sketches of the everyday. I missed the significance of many of the local references and I wasn’t certain how HAZCHEM added up, so I wasn’t always at one with it and its sometimes cut and paste structure, but it’s a striking and worrying work. I hope Critical Mass Theatre (made up of artists with an association with the city) and its gallery partner persist in building contemporary performance in Wollongong.

David Williams’ 100 Confessions in PACT Youth Theatre’s Forked Tongues (PACT Theatre, May 16-27) featuring 3 emerging directors (Williams, Cindy Rodriguez, Briony Dunn), is a chaotic party cum game cum social experiment that requires improvisational skills and timing that are mostly beyond its players. Even so, recurrent gags, playing with labels, dodgy confessions, shifting allegiances, outrageous scenarios, some strong indiosyncratic performances and seriously escalating tension yield a surprising level of coherence. Rodriguez’ Picasso’s Blood is the most assured work on the bill. As with Melbourne writer-director Jenny Kemp’s play with gesture, group movement, iconic text and obsessive behaviour, Rodriguez creates a dream world where characters split and multiply and the relationship between a Bluebeard Picasso and Dora Maar goes to pieces. Knife play, a blood obsession, a pair of limping marionette legs, and sound waves of ocean, soprano and vocalise female chorus recur with nightmarish intensity, evoking a labyrinth of love.

Verity Laughton’s Burning (Griffin Theatre Company, June 15-July 14) unfolds like a staged novel, explaining its way forward, labouring its cluster of secrets and the predictable revelations of a well-worn theatrical model. For a ghost story it lacks the dynamic of stillness and alarm that yield eeriness and fright and a hoped for epiphany. Laughton is at her best when poetic. In Burning the dialogue is for the most part too earthed, the scenario uncomfortably middlebrow, the naturalistic to-ing and fro-ing too busy. Yet the writer is onto something that white Australians need to engage with, their relationship with the land (even if it is someone else’s) built up over 200 years. Cloudstreet awkwardly explores some of this terrain (though not with Burning’s explicit Celtic focus) and Miriam Dixson (The Imaginary Australian, UNSW Press,1999) and Jennifer Rutherford (The Gauche Intruder, Melbourne University Press, 2000), among others, provide rich insights. I wanted Burning to work some magic on me, to answer, however poetically, however intuitively, a big question, but I couldn’t see past its mechanics (some of which, like the ramped, enclosing wall of photocopies were in fact magical). I left as I had come, incomplete. Atomised.

Kate Champion’s About Face (The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 5 -16, see Erin Brannigan’s review) may have suffered from an overly episodic structure and a bits’n’pieces soundtrack, but its account of a personality attempting to reintegrate itself was powerfully conveyed by the interplay of the performer live before us and on 2 screens. A horizontal screen above revealed a slow motion, suicidal fall; a large vertical screen behind a door yielded an encounter with multiplying selves. On the screen above a survelliance camera caught Champion at the door of her apartment—trying to gain access to herself. Brigid Kitchen’s film and Sydney Bouhaniche’s lighting gave About Face increasing cohesion. In scale and focus they struck the perfect balance between live and virtual bodies.

We’re driving out to the edges of Sydney. It’s cold and still. I’m going to see a performance in a remand prison for young men at Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre. The piece is called Wild Knights. The steady drive toward St Marys has me feeling like the event has started already, there’s that twist in the guts, a transaction is looming between me and…a Wild Knight, a young prisoner.

I know I will be a fleeting visitor to this veiled place, a nervous stranger who will leave, free. These young men have been consigned to the remand centre because they may have done something serious. They got caught and are awaiting sentencing. I am imagining these Wild Knights, compelled by the promise of a face to place alongside the cliches and stories of criminal youth, trouble, the violence in our lives and imaginations. I don’t yet know that my curiosity will not be indulged. It sure is cold. I dig deeper into my coat pockets.

Wild Knights is a performance event about ‘encounter’—with institutions, with myths, between human beings behind bars, those who are their jailers, family and strangers. It’s not a representation of prison life but plays with the palpable space between other and self, with real implications.

Wild Knights is a collaboration between Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre, High Street Youth Health Service and erth Visual Theatre, directed by Alicia Talbot. In a 2-hour show, devised by 10 young men (whose names are not revealed) with a host of professional artists and collaborators, the audience is sent on a privileged journey—to look at and momentarily experience a calculated initiation into this environment.

We are offered roles as “Detainees’, “Official Visitors” and “VIP Guests”, and taken on different paths through the complex and silent world of the juvenile justice system. While we encounter the mechanisms of discipline, evidenced clearly in the rituals of entry, we are privy to the defiance, incursions and exuberant gestures of the inmates and workers who populate the physical space of this prison.

Each audience member is asked to hand in their personal items at check in. Our phones, jackets and other items are sealed in a holding bag and we’re given an identity for the duration of the performance. I am a ‘detainee’ and loaded on a docking bus with tinted windows and plenty of locked chambers. All detainees are asked to don white suits for the initiation of a model prisoner.

A lot of the pleasure and dis-ease in this 2 and a half hour performance came from observing the reactions of audience to the protocols and impact of the place. At one point we were herded into individual cells, while a performance was conducted outside for “official guests and VIPs.” We gathered at one point to listen to a range of beautiful original songs, from rap to acoustic, in one of the many courtyards. A group of Wild Knights conducted a mysterious meeting; a mock court was held with corrupt officials and manic lawyers dancing around the defendant. Performers loomed overhead on harnesses, flying from the corridors through the space. A rhinoceros was admitted to a seedy nightclub while young men were savagely excluded. Others were presented with cups for bravery and imagination in a Hollywood-styled red carpet procession. Finally, in the glare and spectacle of fireworks, the Wild Knights ran across a dark field at a great distance from the audience.

Alicia Talbot, director and performer, talked to me about the making of Wild Knights, taking me through the minefield of making performance within a highly coded and patrolled institution. This short extract from her description of the project offers insight into a powerful collaboration between people in an extraordinary environment.

“When did art and the penal system come face to face? All the time. Constantly.

“Say, for instance, if anyone had said in January that in 6 months time I would have a group of young men, some of whom have been held 10 months without trial, wearing satin capes, in leotards and tuxedos and wearing latex masks of their own creation, walking on stilts, flying in harnesses and standing in front of fireworks, people would have said no…

“I believe that people are partially what you make them. From the very beginning I worked with the participants as a band of astounding young men, like the X-Men or Neo in Matrix. Society’s mutants are on the loose but if they go to this special school, and use their talents in a special way, they actually become the saviours of the world. Neo’s code and moral honour is something that he understands and fights for.

“I look for the opposite of what we expect. In a place like prison you may find a band of holy men. Does anyone who drives along the highway realise that a 14-year-old boy is in his underwear in a holding cell for 6 hours?

“That these men survive the system and are still alive makes them heroes and that does not make me blind to their faults. In fact, residing in all heroic figures there is hubris, leading to nemesis.

“When we were having a party after the show and a young man said to me “So, what is it like to be working with criminals?” I looked around at the workers, artists and young men and said, “Oh my lord, are there criminals here?” I don’t know how I would have worked from that starting point. I like to think of them as outlaws.

“My challenge to those young men is—how can you be an outlaw and still go home at night? How can you fight for what you believe in and still go home at night?”

Wild Knights, presented by High Street Youth Health Service and Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre; directed & co-devised by Alicia Talbot with 10 young men from the Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre and erth Visual Theatre (Scott Wright, Margie Breen, Cathrine Couper, Sebastian Dickins, Phil Downing, Sharon Kerr, Adam Kealy, Adam Kronenberg, Morgan Lewis, Johnathon Krane). Co-ordinator of Programs and Staff Development Carolyn Delaney; art teacher Keira Minter; music produced by Phil Downing; lighting Neil Simpson & Clytie Smith; video Finton Mahony & Clare Britton.

An image of the soles of Lisa O’Neill’s feet has stayed with me for some time after seeing Double Vision. Their wrinkled, abstruse folds seemed to convey an interaction between the interior secretive world and something made far more explicit, a dynamic that framed the more complex cross artform elements in this work. The manner in which those feet, seemingly possessed, drove the splayed torso of O’Neill across the stage confirmed the marionette-like status and powerlessness of that childlike figure. The feet moved in the direction of a little heart shaped red pincushion, a gift referred to in Maryanne Lynch’s text as given by one ill-fated mother to an ill-fated daughter. The child moves to re-embrace the mother. A memory revolving around the nostalgic symbols of pathos, love and loss surges hopefully towards some kind of reconciliation.

Double Vision, a performance-installation driven by writer-director Lynch, involved singer Christine Johnson, composer John Rodgers, percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson, dancer Lisa O’Neill, sound designer Brett Cheney, designer Selene Cochrane and lighting designer Matt Scott. The performance and creative development was funded and resourced principally through the Queensland Performing Arts Trust. Normally associated with mainstream productions such as the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, this kind of commitment from QPAT to contemporary Australian work merits high praise.

The stated intention of the work is “an exploration of motherhood—as viewed by daughters and lived by mothers.” Lynch is fascinated with iconic crime and, in this instance, Double Vision utilises 2 texts drawn from mothers whose lives are marked by the murder and misfortunes of their children and the subsequent judgements of society: Mary Murphy of the Gatton murders incident and Bilynda Murphy of Moe in Victoria.

I have often seen performance installations or cross artform projects which dissolve readily into a set of perceptions: ‘oh, the musician is moving an object again or playing at being a visual artist.’ Thankfully that was not the case here. The dense and complex structure, as the title suggests, allowed the audience to shift their focus between multiple events, in and out of the visual details of any one moment or the physical interiority of any one sound. I appreciated the ambition.

Two crinoline-like structures dominated the stage. One seemingly eviscerated and ribbed provided a birdcage littered with various percussion instruments and 3 gutted pianos, symbols of female domesticity, of soirees to entertain friends and family, the mark of bourgeois education and learning. They seemed and sounded rotten. Tomlinson acted upon their destroyed innards as a graveyard caretaker might to an old wooden coffin.

At the other end, Christine Johnson was immobilised upon a covered crinoline that thrust her upwards towards the lighting grid. The head of Johnson, like the feet of O’Neill, seemed divorced from the rest of her body. But her voice readily enveloped the audience and in one section the tearing agonised refrain of a mother seeking her lost child hammered out. The folds of the crinoline seemed as if the child could have hidden there and emerged at any moment. This was not to be. Mary Murphy is quoted in the text: “The pain is piercing me until I could die.” These were the moments that attempted to pierce the audience, to give some intimation of what that pain could be.

Recorded voices of women and children told their stories. A long necklace of jewelled lights snaked out behind one of the crinolines. A balloon was performed upon. A lot of small details, the symbolic minutiae of torn lives, emerged when I appreciated this work in hindsight. The strength of Double Vision lay in a cohesive integrity that refused to signal every moment to the audience or tell them what to think.

This is a group of artists that I would like to see together again in a future collaboration.

Double Vision, writer/director Maryanne Lynch and collaborators, Merivale St Studios, Brisbane, July 10-14

The Brisbane Powerhouse’s push to develop a live arts community locally, nationally and internationally is reflected in the breadth of programming on offer in 2001. The Queensland Sacred Music Festival, a public artworks program focusing on the still-growing venue and Transmission, a community and arts development program, have all boosted attendances by creating new audiences. All this work and more takes influence from both Australian and international contexts. It seems a healthy community is growing which is absorbing and reinvesting these experiences to alter the cultural ecology of Brisbane.

The millennium year saw an inaugural program of work from Queensland-based independent contemporary dance, performance and installation artists, bracketed in a season titled l’attitude 27.5&deg (the name refers to the geographical location of Brisbane, distinctive if somewhat French/exotique/nothing else). The 2000 programme hosted a triple bill evening of work by Brisbane choreographers and a site specific hybrid work, Bonemap, from Cairns-based artists. The success of this season encouraged the Powerhouse to build overseas links with Glasgow’s New Moves Festival which not surprisingly has picked up Lisa O’Neill’s FUGU SAN for their next season.

Now established as an annual event, l’attitude 27.5&deg in 2001 is marked by a variety of collaborations. As assistant directors for the Frank Austral Asian Performance Ensemble, Caroline Dunphy and O’Neill are teaming to create a new hybrid work, Rodin’s Kiss. Both are contemporary performers drawing their experience from Suzuki Actor Training alongside a more traditional western-based dance and drama training.

The collaborations are not just local. In 1992, Vanessa Mafé and artist Jondi Keane formed a group in Geneva with Markus Siegenthaler and have continued to make work across continents—both Mafé and Keane are now Brisbane based. Durchblick/(Entre)voir Land(e)scape began its life during a 3 week workshop between Mafé and Siegenthaler in Switzerland in early 2000 and together with Brisbane lighting designer Jason Organ, French dancer/choreographer Marc Berthon and French composer Dominique Barthassat, the group has collaborated to develop this work which will have performances in Geneva, Zurich and Neuchatel after its Brisbane premiere. The excitement for these artists as they meet across space and continents lies in sharing past experiences, the reconfirmation of self and the exploration of new territories. For Mafé, problems only occur when an artist remains static, locked in zero growth.

A similar cross-cultural collaboration drives L’autre et moi which explores the differing cultural socialisations as experienced by 2 choreographers, the Taiwanese-Chinese Lin Yuan Shang and the Swiss, Anna Huber. Closer to home, a foyer installation reveals the collaboration between Australia and England that was La Bouche, a mixed media group operating in Europe and the UK during the 80s. Many of the artists involved now live in Brisbane and this is a retrospective look at their ground-breaking work.

IGNEOUS, a Lismore-based multimedia movement theatre group, will be company-in-residence for 6 weeks at the Powerhouse leading classes and developing performances. Co-artistic directors Suzon Fuks and James Cunningham will be joined by South Indian Kalaripayatt master, Vinildas Gurukkal, who they started collaborating with during a recent Asialink residency.

At a national level, other attractions include SPRUNG with choreovideography by Cazerine Barry from Melbourne and the playfully clever Andrew Morrish, with his improvised Relentlessly On creating late night l’attitudes!

Post-show forums are becoming increasingly popular with Brisbane audiences as artists unpack their works for those new to contemporary practices. With the new media potential of the 21st century, new forms and disciplines need fresh eyes to appreciate the poetics of such works. Seasons such as lâattitude 27.5&deg provide rich and varied approaches to creative processes.

In a world of chronic consumption of the new, many of the works refuse the urge for instant gratification. Instead they offer complex collaborations, not only cross-cultural, cross-genre and cross-discipline, but also across time and space.

l’attitude 27.5&deg, curators Gail Hewton (project manager) & Zane Trow (artistic director), Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, Brisbane, September 24-October 15

The 3 finalists in the General category at the Dendy Awards this year—Blowfish, Sunrise at Midnight and In Search of Mike—all involve dance practitioners. Neither fiction, nor non-fiction, these films sit somewhere else amongst the traditional categories of cinema, probably most closely affiliated with the historic avant-garde. Dancers or choreographers and filmmakers who have previously worked with dance are the only characteristics these 3 shorts have in common, and each needs to be considered for its very individual approaches to the short film format.

Sunrise at Midnight, featuring Melbourne dance-makers Yumi Umiumare and Tony Yap and directed by Sean O’Brien, is a cinematic study in the most poetic mode. Introduced by Umiumare in voiceover as she makes herself up in traditional Japanese style, the film is based on the story of a troupe of female Japanese performers who travelled around Australia early in the last century, and a woman who lost her way in the desert. Shot in black and white, it recalled the pace and certain attention to texture in the producer Sophie Jackson’s early short, Swing Your Partner, which featured a middle-aged couple in their wedding clothes dancing to a country love-song. While that film focused on the rhythm and progression of the dance, Sunrise at Midnight focuses on the stasis of the characters as much as, or perhaps even more than, their movements. Umiumare and Yap both have Butoh backgrounds, and this aesthetic is ingrained in—almost in the grain of—the film. The peculiar and terrifying darkness of the Australian outback collides with this Asian dance method to literally and effectively illustrate the story which is at its heart; a Japanese woman alone in a landscape that is intensely foreign and cruelly unforgiving.

But this simple reading of the film doesn’t really stick, and it’s the temporal dimension that squeezes more out of the situation depicted. Umiumare has spoken of Butoh as a dance of darkness but more than that, a journey through the darkness toward the light. The Japanese character doesn’t appear to be fighting or struggling with her situation, but absorbing it and experiencing the landscape she finds herself in, almost becoming a part of it through the framing of the camera. The appearance of another figure (Tony Yap) doesn’t break her isolation but oddly fills out the environment.

South Australian choreographer and dancer Tuula Roppola co-directed and stars in a film that can be more simply labelled a dancefilm due to its style and content. Blowfish features a solo performance by Roppola (if you don’t count the rubber blowfish) accompanied by a voiceover describing, in very banal terms, her actions. She works mainly against a wall and is framed quite tightly so that her physical articulations are very much at the centre of the film. The stop-motion creates an affect where the transitions from one position to another are elided and Roppola appears to be moved by an exterior yet invisible force. European filmmaker Pascal Baes had great success on the dancefilm circuit some years ago using this technique in his films Topic II and 46 Bis which featured dancers gliding down the streets and around courtyards in a bizarre and muted ‘dance.’ Baes went on to make ads for the Philip Starck hotels which featured a weary traveller gliding into a hotel foyer, up the stairs and into bed.

Roppola’s film, co-directed by Ian Moorhead, doesn’t really do anything new with this technique, but Roppola’s performance is compelling and her apparent lack of agency evokes a characterisation of sorts—a woman who is merely going through the motions, or, moved by another’s commands.

The winner of this category and the overall winner of the Dendy Awards, Andrew Lancaster’s In Search of Mike rides across a variety of forms or genres from music video to dancefilm, fictionalised documentary to queer screen. Writer/performer Brian Carbee (see interview, RT41 p27) plays himself and his mother—both young and old—in a bravura performance that is the real heart and soul of the film, even though objects, characters and domestic spaces (bedroom, kitchen, loungeroom) have almost equal resonance throughout. This film conjures the temporal shape of its story through its material details: a doll, a cowboy dress-up set, an oxygen tank, a set of false teeth. These objects stand out against an environment that is at once recognisable and then a surreal any-space where the young and older versions of the male lead overlap in a succinct coming-of-age scene. This particular scene features the only dancing per se, and even this is more like a cross between a tantrum and a frenzied nightclub scenario. The skills of Carbee the dancer and choreographer can be found more in his regular actions—dressing, sitting, gesturing while on the phone; there’s a kind of grace and ease there.

And then there’s the language. Lancaster has spoken about his interest in creating films to existing or specifically devised scores, for example his videoclips for Custard, Lino, You am I and Midnight Oil and his soundtrack driven shorts Palace Café and Universal Appliance Company, and has described the appeal of Carbee’s voice and script to his aurally-obsessed tendencies. Carbee’s grainy tone and American accent and his rhythmic writing style combine with a film score by Lancaster’s band Lino, to add another level to the film that is as rich and varied as the visuals. Carbee’s skill in evoking the intriguing character of his mother through her words may be inherited. In the film he says: “My mother doesn’t so much turn a phrase as flip it on its back and fuck the shit out of it.” Combine this kind of talent with Lancaster’s innovative and eclectic approach to short filmmaking and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Dendy Awards, opening day of the Sydney Film Festival, State Theatre, Sydney, June 8.

Nerve 9 is a work by 4 women—solo dancer/choreographer Tess De Quincey, audio visual artist Deborah Petrovich, poet/performer Amanda Stewart and writer Francesca da Rimini—whose contributions have been collected under the banner of De Quincey Co. Nerve 9 comprises 9 movements, each with a title—”Archaic domains”, “Tensile zones”, “Flesh of everyday speech”, “Porous matter”, “Tongue of sacrifice”, “Enigmatic hallucination”, “Black continent”, “Infinity emerging”, “Decentering”—mostly from the writing of Julia Kristeva, around which the artists’ materials have been arranged. The fifth title, “Tongue of sacrifice at the edge of the other”, was provided by Stewart. The work is a tight weave of dance, sound, text, sonic and visual imagery, and although De Quincey’s subtle movement often steals the visual focus, her work is really more of a thread which runs throughout the complex totality. Nerve 9 exists by virtue of all elements together; even the printed program which elucidates the work’s 9 sections is in the form of a visual score.

Nerve 9 is hybrid in essence and pushes the creation of visual, sonic and dance scores out from the far corners of the imagination, creating an intellectual arena within which all the ideas can grow and mingle. It synthesises some quite rarefied elements—Stewart’s shimmering sonic and visual poetry and De Quincey’s enduringly watchable portraits of attenuated human frailty. The different sounds (both text and soundscapes) and movement are entwined, as if De Quincey’s body can be shot through with those textures, human and electronic, structured and hanging on shafts or webs of sound, animated sometimes entirely by those vibrations.

The filmic and visual imagery provides a kind of harder-edged structure for the work, delimiting the 9 sections as they shift and change. It further expresses and clarifies a central theme, that of textual richness and diversity—of language, and the cultures from which it springs; of the flesh, which simultaneously grows into, out of and away from those cultures; and of the environment, seeping in, penetrating, escaping from, deflecting.

De Quincey’s performance has a depth and lucidity that is immensely readable and challenging. Her movement is neither naturalistic nor mimetic but often particularly expressive of human frailty and sensibility. Emotional qualities are strongly captured, but not with an overt sense of drama. Sensibility is expressed through highly and minutely wrought body language. She seems to work with ideas, particularly internalised and embodied, rather than with overt and consciously planned movement. It’s possible to see a physical narrative unfolding through the work—the flowering of a peculiarly acute register of human sensibility, the medium through which a person experiences the world.

As the work opens, a slim needle point of light pours downwards, as if from the darkness of a cave, light seeping out through a pinhole in a membrane, a tiny opening in the blackness, a stain imperceptibly widening, a deep drone. Then there is wind, whispering, bird sounds, the dancer’s body quivering, flinching, almost doll-like. A feeling of animation and coming to life. She opens her eyes with the sounds of water and whispering. Later there is singing, and the sight of a city—electric lights, signs, letters, neon. She is sensing, sentient, responsive, a grain of humanity, light and sound pierce her body. Blocks of light tilt behind her; she walks, looking back from where she’s come. There are people here. She has a wilted staggering gait, hands limp, “a body called flesh.” And then sometimes she seems not so much a person, more a passive idea, some other form of life. Then, on the screen, there are mouths speaking, foreign languages, texture in the sound, the lips sticky with lipstick, the skin, the eyes, all female. What are they speaking about? All those words, behind and in front of her, all those letters, that sound, becoming part of her. And could there be, among all this, a simple act of listening, an act of seeing, or of speaking?

Nerve 9, De Quincey Co, Tess De Quincey, Amanda Stewart, Deborah Petrovich, Francesca da Rimini, The Performance Space, Sydney, May 27

Sydney audiences have recently seen substantial new programs by 2 experienced practitioners who have returned to Australia after working with the 2 companies most associated with the dance theatre genre: Michael Whaites (Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal) and Kate Champion (Lloyd Newson’s DV8 Physical Theatre).

Dance theatre is an interdisciplinary approach combining movement and dance with theatrical elements such as narrative or drama, characterisation and spoken text. This type of dance is distinguishable from other contemporary approaches such as deconstructed or abstracted ‘pure’ dance (Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe) or more research-based, less theatrically-oriented work (Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson).

What rises to the top with dance theatre, and is common across the 2 divergent schools represented by Bausch and Newson, is an investment in the potential of gesture to both produce and subvert meaning. Combining dancerly skill with the gestures of everyday to create ambiguity, provide commentary or deconstruct social and cultural norms, is the most common methodology.

In Oysterland, directed by Whaites and performed by Kay Armstrong, Julie-Anne Long and Jan Pinkerton, a dramatic, gestural kind of movement is used to fill out a rambling meditation on the female experience. We’re introduced to these women via the sort of frenzied and loose solo that reveals people’s truest moves and makes an immediate impression. From here on in things are much more carefully articulated, deliberate and pointed. Pinkerton in full ski gear parades the stage, shaking her hands, which rattles the clasps on her ski gloves, chattering like a rat; Long slides along a wall and across the floor in sensual delirium (or is it merely exhaustion). Talk about flabby upper arms, weight problems, menstrual mythology and face creams slips around uneasily and is gone, but the quality of a familiar movement that’s been forced off kilter, like the simple swing of Long’s bob as her head drops pathetically sideways, fills me in and opens things up.

Reading the gestures of Champion’s character in About Face, we find ourselves in a vacuous urban life, drained of any meaningful relations, memories, clues. A treadmill walks her to nowhere, tentative steps check out her apartment and locate the furniture, desperate and repetitious gestures of frustration erupt at the kitchen table, yogic balances, wobbling tip-toes, a choreographed inventory of her physical self…Everything points in one direction and it’s off the map. While these gestures manipulate and transform everyday activities and actions, their messages are clear, creating a definite thematic of lost identity.

Another key element of dance theatre is the workshop process which draws on the experiences of cast members to construct a piece from the ground up, building it around the particularities of the performers’ bodies and lives. Whaites’ Achtung Honey was created with another Australian, Allison Brown, while they were both working in Germany and circles around the theme of displacement. In one section, movements from other works in other places bubble up accompanied by the names of European cities. A game of hide and seek in lederhosen, a melodramatic solo with telephone, and an intimate—perhaps cheekily Romantic—pas de deux all bristled with homecoming joie de vivre.

While the connection between the performers and the theme in Achtung Honey is clear, Champion, as with her previous solo work Face Value, has us speculating about the boundaries between art and life. The physical inventory described above is obviously an account of her body, yet this character is caught in a surreal no-man’s-land. I wonder what kind of exploration led Champion to this work. The thematic choices she makes find their voice in her body, and the 2 things become thoroughly entwined.

The proximity of the performers to the theatrical material, and that material’s close connection with the gestures and postures of everyday life, brings us to a third driving characteristic of dance theatre—an emphasis on social and cultural relevance. Both Oysterland and Face Value trace out intensely feminine spaces, suggesting that these artists have something to say about the contemporary female condition, but the dimensions and nature of the worlds depicted are very different.

There is an odd sense of order in Champion’s world despite the apparent chaos. Isolated, disorientated and stressed as she is, the neat and effective design elements, slick projections and seamless performance frame the characterisation with a sort of comforting control. How is this isolated woman going to operate beyond the parameters of her home and the security of her competent, exploratory movements? How does her state of mind project beyond this surreal domestic enclave? The general thrust of the work is more inward and singular than a general commentary.

In contrast, Oysterland seems at times to be opening up to infinity. Kay Armstrong explores the particularly feminine ploy of dressing-to-please. Jan Pinkerton often retreats into intimate activities at the back of the stage such as eating, bathing or reading. Julie Anne Long sometimes trudges around the stage and leans against its supports as if she is at home. And then there are trolleys and historical texts that open up yet more spaces where the feminine lurks.

Champion and Whaites, Long and Armstrong, as well as other Sydney artists including Brian Carbee (see page 35), Jenny-Newman-Preston, Lisa Ffrench and Dean Walsh, all explore the terrain of dance theatre which has room within its general form for the various approaches they represent.

Kate Champion is currently working with Michael Whaites on Stir, a 5-week 1st Stage Development produced by One Extra involving 3 choreographers (Whaites, Julie-Anne Long & Rosetta Cook), 9 dancers (including Champion, Kay Armstrong, Narelle Benjamin and Linda Ridgeway) and 7 dance students from CPA, QUT and WAAPA.

Achtung Honey, choreographer Michael Whaites, collaborator Allison Brown, performers Michael Whaites, Celia Brown; Oysterland, director/ choreographer Michael Whaites, performers Kay Armstrong, Julie-Anne Long, Jan Pinkerton, One Extra, The Seymour Centre, May 23 – June 2; About Face, deviser/ performer Kate Champion, composer Max Lyandvert, filmmaker Brigid Kitchin, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 15-16.

People make work for different reasons. What unites these 3 pieces is a strong sense of artistic concern, especially in terms of content. Pervert, by Louise Taube, has been a long time in the making, reflecting Louise’s intent to explore and represent issues of spectatorship, desire and sexual difference. There are 2, perhaps 3 protagonists to this tale. One I shall call misogyny (the man), the other narcissism (the woman), and the third a Jungian anima, archetype of the female.

Through clever use of multiple video cameras, screens and curtains, a great deal of observation occurs on the part of both the characters and the audience. The setting is contemporary grunge, perfectly evoked in the HiFi Bar and Ballroom, which consists of several rooms, bars and a stage of sorts. Several young dancers do party-club impersonations, mirroring the narcissist’s kinaesthetic pleasures. A narrative develops between the man and the woman. Their interaction is always mediated, whether by video, telephone, time or space. In fact, they never really meet. The feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray would be pleased, for she thinks there is a vast difference between man and woman.

In the end, the man is killed off, the woman preferring the company of women to wolves. Although we cannot be too sad about this (he was revolting), there is something unsatisfactory here. For this was not just about a bad man. It was also about the woman’s subjectivity, especially her narcissism which was represented through the pleasures of movement. This bespeaks the need for more outside direction, not merely to direct the traffic of virtual and real images, but also to work through the nuances of the female character.

Simon Ellis’ Full is a delicate piece in comparison. Set in the tiny Glass Street Gallery, North Melbourne, it begins with the sounds of Simon’s grandmother. She speaks with simplicity of her life, nearly over. She tells us of her work, the loss of her husband, the cat she misses. Ellis lies in a glass box, suspended over the onlookers. Naked almost, he is born unto this piece. We hear more about the grandmother as Ellis descends amongst us to dance a life over time. Slides of her are projected onto his white shirt, words spoken by a young voice, displacing the logic of time just enough. The final image ensues from her remark that the dead are outside, wanting in. Ellis places himself against the roof’s skylight. The cold pink of the sky beckons his silhouette. The dead are there, amongst us. Whether we see them depends upon whether or not we look.

Chamber by Shaun Mcleod is a meditation on maleness. Not your standard ocker masculinity but the kind of men you might know and like. And yet, they cover each other’s mouths, cutting off speech. When they are nice, they nestle heads, they echo each other’s movements, creating a kind of harmony. When they are not, they move out of synch, forming an uneasy dance.

Chamber is substantially improvised. The focus of the performers is great. Mcleod sits at the back of the theatre watching these young men play out the echoes of his imaginary reflections. How much was this about masculinity? It is hard to say, in that this was not about stereotypes. So, in a sense, just because it was danced by men, it was about men. How then to move beyond that? Is this a reflection of how things are or a dance into the future of possibility? The ending, which juxtaposed poetry with Jacob Lehrer’s comedic meanderings, seemed to suggest a future. But it was hard to make out. The light was fading. The words were disappearing.

Pervert, xn, music Mik La Vage, performers included Shona Erskine, Taube & Gred Ulfan, Hi Fi Ballroom and Bar, June 6-13; Full, creator/performer Simon Ellis, music Jacqueline Grenfell, installation & design Elizabeth Boyce, Glass Street Gallery, June 20-30; Chamber, Shaun McLeod, performers Simon Ellis, Martin Kwasner & Jacob Lehrer, video Cormac Lilly & Christina Shepard, music David Corbet, Dancehouse, Melbourne, July 7-9

This is the fourth version of Garry Stewart’s Birdbrain and the second version I’ve seen. It begins with a portable, plastic record player sitting on the empty stage. Kristina Chan sits and plays snatches of the overture to Swan Lake. The record crackles. Stewart’s endeavour is established. This ballet classic will be sifted through contemporary technology and responded to by contemporary bodies.

Tchaikovsky’s music triggers memories of that celebrated ballet of love and deception but there is no time for nostalgia. The overture is intersected by a different music, designed by Jad McAdam and Luke Smiles. This music pumps. The company enters. The dancing in this section is tight, presentational and formal but there’s something electric about these dancers. They are wired for fast, exacting shifts of position, line and spatial orientation. I recognise moves from ballet, Cunningham technique, yoga, acrobatics and breakdancing. But each move is transformed through juxtaposition and the way in which these dancers’ bodies are organised for risk and range. (Stewart loves extreme stretch and moves that require phenomenal strength.) Fiona Malone and Tanja Liedtke appear at one stage in school uniforms. This image is disquieting—ballet as a schoolgirl fantasy, ballerinas as male sexual fantasies. Finally, terms associated with ballet flash at the back of the stage, the video screen framed by panels designed by Gaelle Mellis, each bearing a Renaissance image of a ballet dancer which is barely visible, silver on grey. Ballet history is present but fading. This opening treatise on ballet ends.

Then the real ballet begins. Ideas, images, references to Swan Lake flash past us in the movement, as words printed on T-shirts, as images behind the video screen and in Tim Gruchy’s video footage. The use of language to denote aspects of the original ballet makes the commentary hard-edged. For instance, at one stage a dancer labelled “royal disdain” duets briefly with a dancer labelled “peasant joy.” However, this hard-edged wit plays second fiddle to the dancing. A few of the highlights are: Larissa McGowan’s solo in which she turns herself inside out, shuddering and quivering as she transforms from a swan into a woman; Antony Hamilton’s ‘the story so far’ and ‘dying swan’ dance behind a pulsing, slow zoom in on a photo of one of the famous Odette/Odiles taking a bow (strangely moving); the linked-arm quintet of Queen, evil Rothbart, Prince Siegfried, Odette and Odile, making these characters an entwined entity; the ‘drowning of the lovers’ in which the dancers run in, perform spread-eagled leaps, face to the floor and then roll.

This company is hot. This piece might have started as a tongue-in-cheek critique, as suggested by the title, but the dancing no longer relies on quotation for effect. The virtuosic physical material has a thrilling kinaesthetic and expressive logic that I found riveting.

Birdbrain, ADT, conceived/directed by/choreography Garry Stewart, dancers from Thwack and ADT: Anton, Craig Bary, Kristina Chan, Roland Cox, Antony Hamilton, Tanja Liedtke, Lina Limosani, Larissa McGowan, Fiona Malone, Matthew Morris, Craig Procter, The Playhouse, Adelaide, June 29

Following on closely from 3 weeks of research and development—and new work for PICA’s Putting on an Act and a curated exhibition Tactical Intervention Strategies—I spoke with PVI (Performance, Video and Installation) Collective directors, Kelli McCluskey and Steve Bull, and performers Katherine Neylon, James McCluskey and Chris Williams, about humiliation, discretion, paranoia and behavioural
analysis software.

Your work a watching brief, for Tactical Intervention Strategies at PICA, challenges the gallery visitor not only to perform certain potentially embarrassing tasks in public, but to invite themselves to be watched closely by outdoor surveillance equipment. Did you expect anyone to take the bait?

KM We really didn’t think that people would take the costumes out on the opening night of TIS. We were almost daring the audience to follow through with the instructions, and they did. They have to choose a briefcase, a character, and call a number. They’re given coded instructions for the kinds of gestures they’re expected to perform in the cultural centre outside the gallery, like doing something at the traffic lights or covering their faces.

SB After they’ve received this message they have to look at the dictionary that’s posted near the phone to decipher it. The code steers the telephone conversation away from any potentially loaded ‘key words.’

KM What we try to do is to stretch the boundaries of a given space, then network it back into a performance. For our 3-week research and development at the Blue Room theatre we wanted to focus on surveillance technologies. Our work for TIS specifically came as a response to this report we had found. Do you know that Australia is the second largest distributor of CCTV systems in the world?

KM No it’s actually the UK. They’re incredibly paranoid. The technology that’s available is astounding, like behavioural analysis and facial recognition software.

This leads on from your performance deadspace that referred to telephone monitoring practices.

KM In deadspace we were investigating what constitutes a subversive word, and how language can be misinterpreted. Now we’re looking at gestures and the ways they can be misinterpreted by these cameras, equipped with behavioural analysis software. Something as simple as masking your face with your hands, smoking a fag or scratching yourself fits into surveillance criteria.

KM It came out of the UK and basically questioned the successes and failures of CCTV, finding that it hadn’t really been fully investigated. So an independent report came up with some really interesting facts about the people watching CCTV monitors, and how untrained they were. They brought their own prejudices to the interpretation of events, mostly linked to cultural stereotypes. So they would look at young people, or ethnic minorities, or just for the hell of it they’d pick-up on a good-looking woman and follow her around.

The extent of your research is broad; what performance outcomes did you expect to achieve through this R&D process?

KM We wanted the guys working on the project with us to perform surveillance tasks on the general public in public places. This is how trigger happy: private lives public spaces was developed. We set-up a workshop space with a scanner and a CB transceiver for walkie-talkies. We could hear them communicate with each other, and we gave them tasks each day to track somebody making certain gestures.

KN We also used our own prejudices, like the CCTV operators, to pick out the people that we would follow.

KM The guys have to try to ‘blend in’ and be discrete which is quite difficult, because the walkie-talkies don’t quite look like mobile phones, so we finally got them some hands-free devices.

SB They walked along speaking a very odd language, and anyone who clued into it gave them strange looks.

KN What we found was that everybody else noticed what we were doing, except for the person we were following.

JM It changes the way that you associate yourself with a space. As a watcher, as soon as you start reporting on people, you become really distanced.

SB It’s interesting how the coded language makes what you’re describing much more loaded. It’s pretty banal, but somebody walking to a bus stop becomes an incredibly over the top performance. So we’ve taken on the idea of Kate, Chris and James blending in in Northbridge, along with the notion that CCTV cameras ignore anyone in uniform. We’re having them dressed up as Santa Claus.

So how does the dynamic operate between Kelli and Steve as directors and you Kate, Chris and James as players? Do they give orders that you have to follow? How much personal choice or input do you have?

CW I find the work really satisfying because you’re constantly challenged to do things that you wouldn’t normally choose to do. The first time we started to workshop with Kelli and Steve they made us sing and dance, like “here’s some music, just dance in front of us.” It was humiliating, but you step over that.

JM Because Kelli and Steve work with so many different layers of research, it seemed like we were performing a lot of disassociated tasks which was exhausting, or else talking for hours to extract information from each other. Then, when everything came together with certain elements filtered-out, we would start to hear our own lines coming back at us. Since our first project, we’ve become a lot more involved in their processes, instead of sitting back and being meat-puppets.

CW Also, quite often we’re not aware of everything that’s going on in a performance. I can’t see everything, but Kelly and Steve have the eyes to see.

PVI collective: a watching brief, showing in Tactical Intervention Strategies, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, July 4; trigger happy: private lives public spaces + Putting on an Act, PICA, July 13. PVI are currently in residency at The Performance Space, Sydney, July 30 – August 20

John Meade’s Propulsion integrates the enigmatic moment of perception by revealing the body as a permeable surface. A video installation of the senses, the first thing to penetrate you is sound. To be precise, it is the sound of a distant piano motif which could be Satie or some other early 20th century romantic—but which is actually a looped series of Glen Gould variations, isolated and slowed down by emerging Melbourne artist, Jophes Flemming. The sound immediately installs us in a certain psychosomatic state—namely, melancholia—prior to the viewing of the video imagery.

Emerging from the darkened gallery space, 2 large perspex panels suspended from the ceiling emit bright, almost hallucinatory images. They face one another as floating apparitions that we can walk around and immerse ourselves in. Their ever-flowing images present 2 carefully staged, hyperreal scenes. One shows a man on a sparkling motorcycle, superimposed over a moving background of saturated green countryside and blue sky (as well as a mass of electricity and telephone wires). With no helmet or gloves, and with exposed hairy arms, he appears naked, or at least vulnerable. While he stares ahead for the duration of the video loop, our attention is drawn to his organ of sight, exaggerated by makeup or a certain camp tenderness. Occasionally we see a close up of his eyes, in profile. Eventually, a tear forms, and as it rolls off his cheek it unexpectedly transmutes into an ephemeral explosion—a subtle jouissance, rendered as an animated firework-like white spray.

The screen opposite depicts an equally dream-like configuration of time and space, with even less narrative drive. Another man flies through the air, his body outstretched horizontally, desperately struggling to maintain his position by clutching on to 2 handrails. His billowing T-shirt reveals a toned stomach and arms, but essentially these are ordinary, fragile bodies on display—actively passive. The imagery and music combine to produce a theatrical space, a potential bond of socialisation which dramatises the affective relation between the bodies and the viewer. A strange longing results, somehow nostalgic, overflowing the perpetual present of the video imagery.

Meade’s work—his sculptural objects and images—can be understood as meditations on the capacities of our gaze and of our bodies, conceived within the limits of human finitude. Inevitably, his art returns us to the idea and operation of the unconscious—desire, pleasure, repression and drives. Propulsion solicits our identifications in a subjective experience of duration. We are seduced towards a sense of meaning, figured as an excess. The work leaves us both melancholic and affirms a positive intensity, elegantly figuring the body as a source of desire and fear, sadness and joy, agent of the self to itself and to the outside world.

Propulsion, John Meade, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, June 8 – July 15. This exhibition originally appeared at the Art Gallery of NSW.

If you soften your eyes, relax, let go of hard-edged purposes and intentions, you can look at objects differently—their textures, timbres, rhythms, how they have sat or walked in the world; not just their alliances and fights with each other; but also their gentler kinships, potentials, hopes to evolve.
There are forms of art which rely on the agon—a testing of object versus object, a gladiatorial match. And there are others which remember both the salt-taste of memory and the hopeful recombinant geometries underlying form. Although Neil Roberts’ work is largely sourced from objects-in-the-working-world (workgloves, cables, funnels, pizza trays), the weight of their uses becomes only a molecular part of their inherent qualities—and the cries for recombination that their edges yearn for.

Roberts in the studio: patient, peripherally scanning, hearing the cry of the object to mate differently, create a new creature, shift DNA.

So, when Roberts welds together a hoe and large caliper so that they lean into each other, strength resting in their paired fulcrum, teeth just touching the floor, they are both objects of labour (memory of sweat), and a black-bodied dance crossing air and time. Mantis and mantis coming to mate. Sweat and soil become proportional in a larger matrix which, like love, kisses into another space.

Take some umbrella frames—6 vacant hats, pincered pinnacles, girders for a seagull’s nest, perhaps; have them crouch atop 24 spidery long tubes of glass, messengers from the ground. Exquisite insects, aliens hovering; we stumble into a delicate world.

A long vein of old trowels hang along a wall, rusting diamonds embossed and flecked with fossils, millipede whorls, stones, glass fragments, a wallpaper rose, coiled wire like Rapunzel’s hair beginning to unfold. This series utters a quiet archaeology—echo of a building-site, childish trespass amongst grandfather’s toil, perhaps; but its thisness is stronger than sentimental memory: a tramline of tools, small meetings, shape within shape, what can a diamond hold. This is amplified by a roll-call of some 40 chalice-shaped petrol funnels along the parallel wall, their angular double-cupping echoing the negative space between those blades.

This sump-oiled Arthurian feast starts a reverb which connects to other objects in the room, most of which comment with soft inflection on men’s work/masculinity. The figures implicitly related to these objects are heroes, less so for their brawn or the violence of their strength, than the delicacy of the motion within their muscles, as the eye traces the necessary line of movement to a goal, and the arm and body fulfil their trajectories.

Roberts talks of “parallel universes…existing outside our perception, spending a blink of their existence in our known world.” This applies to actions both within and between people and objects, as well as to inherent qualities. At times, a nascent activity states itself (O2 drawn on a rusting tool). At others, the lines of energy between 2 boxers, or the swing of a punching-bag, becomes a drawing translated into leaded glass. Half Ether, Half Dew Mixed with Sweat wraps a carapace of Tiffany glass over a leather punching bag: fragile strength, harsh virility yoked in an embrace. “Go on, hit me,” they both seem to say. And how they might have moved, been moved, is also part of the piece: in its making, molten glass “flows slow”, as does the mind of the boxer punching sweet. Traditional church glass’s function was to “make visible the energy of God”; Half Ether’s leather, glass and lead literally hold each other’s lines of inspiration and flight. Their differences do not so much play out as dis/splay a new animal being formed.

Other works wrap wire, mesh or chain around cable, insulated wire, or bottles crushed by a goliath (a bikies’ night in). Baudelaire’s Rope (based on a short story about the rope used by a suicide which becomes an object of collectors’ desire) ponders how strangely a fetish-object is kept alive, the rope perhaps providing a link of relatedness that was missing in the suicide’s life; in this strange way, the suicide is held, perhaps for the first time. There is both astute social observation and a challenge to judgmentalism in this leaded posie whose cut lengths are only half-displayed. As with the head-banded cables of For Those Who Suffer Uncertainty there is a kind of sanctuary, a continuity of substance in the metallic embrace of something which has, or wants to, die, bequeathed to a livingness in the meeting of these wires.

Perhaps poignancy hits most in the blacksmithing aprons suspended from another wall: tired at day’s end, hung upside-down, the leather is patched with a splayed football opening like a flower. The aprons bare both gut and heart, hope and loss, an exquisite questing emanating from beneath the protective skins of work and toil.

The Collected Works of Neil Roberts, part of Metis 2001: Wasted, curated by Merryn Gates, Canberra School of Art Gallery, May 5-June 10

With thanks to Barbara Campbell for a transcript of Neil’s talk given for Artforum, Canberra School of Art, June 6.

A simply lit trunk sits in a corner. It’s reminiscent of something you might find washed up on a beach, or pushed aside by a lava flow. Faded, but still intact, it has a history. It may well have been the thing you grabbed, stuffing it full of clothes as you tore out the door, just before the volcano erupted. Maybe you dropped it, and by a twist of fate, as you were incinerated, it survived, the slow moving lava taking a different path from where it was hastily flung.

The shape of the island is strange, nearly circular—a mountain like a ring in the sea.

While the experience of Volcano has a similar, touching appeal to wandering the ruins of Pompeii in Italy, there’s also something gently humorous about Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark’s new installation piece, on the island of Stromboli, at Sydney’s Artspace.

The debris spilling from the trunk is not the legs of stockings and arms of sweaters, but the substance of the volcano itself, remembered by the trunk and now transformed as memories often are. Through technological aids we are given a trunk’s memory of the volcano…And because the trunk has seen many lives, so the memories are from many different times.

The trunk is lit by a spot of yellow. From it spews a mass of tangled cables, a lava flow of plastic and wiring, which lead to a collection of lava rocks—in the form of computer monitors, out of which spill and shake various images.

‘What!’ I shouted. ‘Are we being taken up in an eruption? Our fate has flung us here among burning lavas, molten rocks, boiling waters, and all kinds of volcanic matter; we are going to be pitched out…vomited, spit out high into the air…in the midst of a towering rush of smoke and flames; and it is the best thing that could happen to us. Shot out of a volcano at last!
Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Stones are falling around your ears—they sound like rain on a tin roof, in Neumark’s accompanying sound design. At strategic points around the monitors the roar of the flow has come down through time, down through the wires, as a static hiss, in and out of which fade voices—the gabble and chatter of people and bodies before, during, after. They’re speaking in the Stromboli dialect, something like a siren’s call, urging you closer, drawing you through the rubble, to tease out the meanings. It’s a trick—by now they have nothing particular to say, but to cry out their grief and love, inarticulate but still genuine, over time.

It seems that Hephaestus, being displeased one day, had taken the island of Thira in his hand and thrown it some distance, like a stone.

Maria Miranda has manipulated a series of static pictures, playing with the moment when you’re really not sure whether or not the earth has moved, if the trembling you’re feeling is lust or fear.

As you move in closer to the volcano, the images shift, and texts circle around, shifting between screens/stones. The radioactive heat has rendered them distorted, but the message is clear. We’re discovering the seductions of the notion of ‘volcano’, as did Krafft and Krafft, the vulcanologists who were famously consumed by Unzen in Japan, erupting in June 1991 just as they were taking photographs. The images could be, like the trunk, what remains, the camera thrown clear…

Eugène Ionesco also felt the pull of the volcano, and wrote the preface to Krafft and Krafft’s famous book of the same title as this installation—he tells us the myth of Stromboli’s birth in fits and grabs, while Jules Verne’s adventurers occasionally emerge through its centre, relieved, after their travels underground. And Stromboli’s also the island where Miranda’s grandfather Giuseppe Russo was born. Russo left for Australia as a young man and never returned, the tip of the volcano the last thing he saw. But in an ironic twist, as his eyesight disintegrated, he was left with an impression of the world somewhat in the shape of a volcano—a ring of clarity around a blurred centre.

It had fallen in the sea not far from Italy giving birth to the volcanic island of Stromboli. But in uprooting the center of the mountainous island, Hephaestus had left its edges, with the volcano in the middle. They say that if one were to put Stromboli back in its former place, it would take up precisely that part of the island that was pulled up.

Part showman, part shaman, bricoleur and self-confessed brigand, Barry Schwartz jolted the art world in America and Europe with his high-voltage hot-wired performances. He is now brought to Australia by the Arterial Group for a residency at the Brisbane Powerhouse to collaborate on Electrosonic Interference, a multimedia project for the Centenary of Federation. Belgian artist Bastiaan Maris, a longtime collaborator, has accompanied him as technical director and soundmeister. Here, Schwartz describes the project to Douglas Leonard, Brisbane writer and collaborator on the project.

Half a million volts

The audience is going to see an electrically charged wet environment for starters. The Powerhouse will mirror the process emanating from the sculptural elements with which I work: high voltage energy, liquids that represent motions of hydro electricity or turbines, certain kinds of mechanical impressions which tie in with aspects of the conceptual and visual ideas derived from archival material. What you see you may also think you feel. It won’t be a direct feel, but a manifestation of electricity like translating electricity into sound, the tactile impressions of energy, tangible energy.

Electricity is considered very dangerous. We make it visually user-friendly in a way that it becomes beautiful, so you get this real beautiful danger that people see. Sort of romanticise it in a way. We’re going to take the gantry crane in The Powerhouse and use it to represent a high voltage transmission tower which will move within the space and also within a liquid environment consisting of a basin or reservoir of non-conductive mineral oil. A hydro electric energy waterfall will provide a projection surface to feed in a lot of text and visual information. This high voltage tower will be turned into an electrical high voltage instrument, sort of a harp, which I am going to physically attack and play, respond to and be re-manipulated by as a physical conduit myself.

We’ll also use Tesla coils, high voltage frequency lightning generators, something like half a million volts. The average is something like 60 milli-amps, but it’s the resonant frequency which actually creates the voltage. It will actually charge the room, but I don’t want to get too technical about that because I’ll put my foot in my mouth. I’m more intuitive, you know, a scientist/researcher by trial and error. I don’t read a textbook to get it. I have to consult with somebody for the larger concept.

Sculpting sounds and energy

We channel the sound through our custom built sound monitoring system which will be 2, maybe 2 and a half metres in diameter, large satellite dishes. Because they’re parabolic in pitch they will act as directional speakers which will project the sound emanating from the sculptures. The system ties directly in and the sound will be fed back and projected towards any given person in the audience. The idea is not to import a sound system; it’s all part of the sculptural coherence.

Sources of sound include the vibration of other objects such as a large polished stainless steel disc that creates the impression of a record with a small ice stylus. I create the sound through reactive chemicals such as dry ice and liquid nitrogen and when it hits the plate it causes thermal stress. Minus 200 degrees. The sound actually is almost like a voice, it howls: on aluminium it’s screaming and shrilling; with stainless steel you get deeper undertones. It’s semi controlled and semi random. Like a lot of my sculptures, instead of building up a fully automated robotic environment—that’s not so much my ultimate interest—I like to come in there and intervene bodily. Come in there and disrupt, because then you find other ways to bring about a new process, sort of like experimenting and going through a process in real time.

It’s a body of sculptures that question and answer each other within an environment that I create. It’s like the relationship of matter and energy, how it relates to and influences the next sculpture. I’m also very interested in that intervention process because I have a difficult time with being just cyber-spatial and sitting on my bum. I think there’s a real tactile approach to your relationship with your sculptures and the process. And that’s where the collaboration to me becomes interesting—bringing in other ideas which give you other parameters to deal with the relationship between objects.

Digital divination

Technology has created a lot of objects that most people never get to see and they are actually incredibly beautiful, but they are only beautiful once you take them out of their function and maybe recombine them with other things in ways that they suddenly become very special.
Bastiaan Maris

It’s called the ‘digital divine’, a play on the ‘digital divide’ and not being able to provide computers for certain people, notions of access and lifestyle. Like being a pirate.

I’m very interested in the way things I create are viewed or not viewed, which brings me to other issues, of people who don’t have privileges to see it and, second, I’ve become more active in dealing with homeless people or people at risk in recent years. I don’t just like to be considered as doing a “white male boys’ thing” in terms of having “everything on my plate.” I’ve struggled really hard sometimes to make the work, and had to find my own employment by going out and scavenging materials in order to provide the means. And that became my job instead of having to, say, work in a restaurant like theatre people would.

Strangers on a train

A lot of my work in San Francisco has been in the art context, and that becomes incredibly stale after a while. At one time we hopped a train to Utah from California, completely bareback—a couple of sacks of clothes and shoes and video equipment—and it’s kind of absurd that, because of running out of time, we paid for the passenger train back. We met some young kid there who was really good at picking locks so we had a kind of little party with some candy and beer. And then I look over and I hit this one cabinet that had a VCR, and the VCR was hooked up to the lounge car upstairs so I said, “Hey, pop this tape in.” All of a sudden we had commandeered this train—there were 50 people up there—suddenly they were seeing this raw footage we’d made the previous day—stuff like wires, making sound out of it, tumbleweeds, and counter wires attached to the belly of the train—and I’m sitting there watching everybody and it really hit me, like WOW!, this is such a natural process of showing a different context, and why it’s really important how you present the work.

Electrosonic Interference, Arterial Group, Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, September 6, 7 & 8 at 7pm, free.

In may this year IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory provided a mentorship program under the direction of visiting composer and performer Graeme Leak. Three emerging Tasmanian composers, Lisa Morriset, Joe Budgen and Rosemary Austen, were commissioned to develop scores for music theatre.

Morisset’s Sway, Bugden’s Death by Defenestration and Austen’s Eden’s Bequest respectively take a 50s song made famous by Julie London, the Freudian triad of loss, memory and desire, and a suite of poems by American writer Judy Grahn as their starting points for score and story.

This mentorship occurred in the context of a music theatre laboratory, which implies consideration of their projects from both musical and theatrical perspectives. These composers are at an early stage in their theatrical development. At what point in a mentorship program should new artists be challenged to move beyond the known and understood, to the place of heresy and theatrical inventiveness?

Sway, Death by Defenestration and Eden’s Bequest all have heretical potential. The shift from literal interpretation to a locale of invention, surprise and shock remains to be addressed by future mentors in association with these music theatre composers.

Graham Leak’s Happy New Ears provides a strong model of musical and theatrical joie de vivre. Taking rhythm and noise as the starting place, Leak contrasted elements of high and low, thick and thin, noise and silence to develop an innovative synthesis of sound, rhythm, and silence. Happy New Ears emerged from an intensive 10 day workshop program with the IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory.

Leak’s sense of space and theatre, coupled with his directorial skill, enabled the ensemble to explore sound and body as boundary and opportunity. The elements of subtlety and quirkiness invigorated the IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory which responded with a confident music and movement dynamic of lightness and finesse.

The ensemble performed a percussive body motif with tight synchronicity. Whoever missed the gradually increasing tempo of the pattern dropped out, generating a frisson of anticipation among the audience. The hilarious balloon orchestra was breathtaking in its conceptual simplicity. Leak’s direction provided members of the Music Laboratory with an insight into the less is more axiom of music theatre.

Leak’s strength as a composer is the aesthetic he generates from simplified sound sources including customised conductors’ batons, balls revolving on a plate and the ethereality of breath through copper piping. The Peacock Theatre resonated with the twirling of a delicate pseudo bull roarer. The audience suspended its breath, listening with new ears to spilling silence and music of the spheres.

Hector Berlioz’s song cycle Les Nuits D’été (The Summer Nights) Opus 7 (1834) provided the musical impetus for The opera Project’s production of The Berlioz—our vampires ourselves. Winter solstice wind roared around the timbers of the Long Gallery enabling an imaginative connection with Bram Stoker, Count Dracula and the shadow-seep of Transylvania.

The performance by Nigel Kellaway, Annette Tesoriero and Paul Cordeiro was preceded by weeks of warnings about operatic sensationalism, nudity, and adult themes. The other considered warning was: ‘beware, you will either love or hate this show.’

Kellaway’s production features his pale and trance-like appearance (a homage to Nosferatu?), the matching opulence of gown and jabot, the waft of perfume, and the performer’s intoxicatory responses to a Grecian urn brimming with scarlet rose petals.

The lure and fall of notes from Kellaway’s Bösendorfer is assured, and captures the lushness of Berlioz’s score. Les Nuits D’été is both fantasy and romantic song cycle. Sound mesmerises and tempts Cordeiro in his alternating role of victim and seducer. The performance is a pulsation of vulnerability and dominance. His languid looks, panting breath and sexual allure inevitably seek the double snarl of rose and wound. Tesoriero’s potent mezzo voice fills the performance space. She is an able partner in collusion.

Our vampires ourselves recreates and exploits the territory of fantasy and affirms familiar (homo)eroticisms. Opera is traditionally associated with the realms of desire, obsession, love and death. Melodrama invites parody and our vampires ourselves uses a panoply of theatrical clichés to enhance the ridiculous. The enactment of vampiric obsession through gorgeous music, stylised movement and over-statement hovers at the border of comfort-zone theatre.

There is room in this production to lull the audience, then introduce serial inversion to destabilise the familiar. If vampiric obsession is a parody then conversely it can be used as a theatre of relinquishment which involves letting go and settling accounts with both the parodic ease and the musical sumptuousness of a former century.

Happy New Ears, director/performer Graeme Leak & IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Sway, writer Lisa Morriset, performer Georgina Richmond, Death by Defenestration, writer Joe Budgen, singers Rachael Guy, Craig Wood, performers Alex Dick, Thomas Hogan, Eden’s Bequest, writer/composer Rosemary Austen, soprano Sarah Jones, performers IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Peacock Theatre, Hobart, May 31-June 2; The Berlioz—our vampires ourselves, The opera Project Inc., director Nigel Kellaway, scenarist Keith Gallasch, performers Paul Cordeiro, Kellaway, Annette Tesoriero, music Hector Berlioz, Long Gallery, Hobart, June 19-23

Melbourne is home to a healthy electro-acoustic movement drawing upon ‘glitch’ aesthetics in which various sonic ruptures mesh with dense nets of noise and stochastically rhythmical, airy hiss. Phil Brophy’s RMIT Media Arts course, the annual Cinesonic conference, the ((tRansMIT)) collective (hosting Liquid Architecture #2 this year) and the students’ recent Dorobo release Document 03: Diffuse (curated by Darrin Verhagen) have helped promote this sensibility.

During a discussion regarding the material featured on Diffuse, one artist suggested that when listening to such leftfield material it’s best advised to “go with the flow”; to let it just “wash over” you. Electro-acoustics asks auditors to question how to read these sounds; what are you listening for, what structures, and why? The May Australian Centre for Contemporary Art/Association Française d’Action Artistique showing Chases Through Non-Place provided a revealing cross-section of ways of dealing with this issue of sonic reference.

Proceedings opened with Michael Graeve’s experiment utilising aged stereos. Graeve scattered speakers from numerous op-shop turntables throughout the venue. The sounds of phonograph needles on naked turntables were amplified and distorted in a deliberately lo-fi fashion. Each unit was added and later subtracted from the mix separately, creating a dense crossroads of spatially distinct yet layered sounds within the venue. This produced a raw, semi-randomly distributed, dirty pulse—the sound of pure electricity or motors—engulfing the audience from multiple discreet sources. Graeve’s work harked back to earlier traditions of sonic terrorism, to Cage’s self-conscious games of chance or even more venerable ideas about electricity as pure, unadulterated spirit.

Graeve’s approach is refreshingly ‘old-skool’ compared to that of the Diffuse artists. The latter’s sparse, disconnected sounds make it difficult to distinguish their pieces from the noise of urban life and electronic mechanisms. At the Diffuse launch in RMIT’s Kaleide cinema, the audience was a model of respectful attention. Such a hushed, cinematic listening aesthetic implies that to confuse the external rumble of a passing tram with the controlled sonic environment inside would be an error. These noise-art recordings paradoxically operate best in the absence of actual noise.

Lazy however explicitly engage with noise, error and chance. Musicians Dave Brown and Sean Baxter extol improvisation as the key to dancing on the pin-head of self-indulgence, a complete lack of control, and masterfully uncontrolled music. Blending avant-jazz, anarcho-rock and sonic art, Lazy’s Alliance Française offering was an exercise in “microsonics.” Baxter and Brown come from too hardcore a heritage to perform quietly throughout. They nevertheless play on the rock temptation to indulge in continuous sonic explosions, setting this against breaking down ever smaller units of time, emotion, energy, structure, music and sound. Using electronica-activating guitar licks (Brown) and a very funny bag of naturally amplified percussive tricks (Baxter’s standard drum kit, metal fragments, sticks and a wonderfully squeaky chair), Lazy threaten to leave the audience either frustrated, over-stimulated, or satisfied by the impossibility of resolving such a resolutely chaotic/non-chaotic piece. In refusing both structure and anti-structure, Lazy render errors impossible.

Paris/Melbourne duo Battery Operated approach noise differently. The performers allude to architectural theories of the “non-place”: a standardised realm like the airport or 7-Eleven designed to facilitate maximum social and economic traffic. Battery Operated use the metaphor of the “chase” to dramatise the de-territorialisation of sound and space affected by such anonymous non-places. The central compositional structure is a stuttering, stumbling drum’n’bass beat, erratically shifting in tempo. The video projection moves from abstracted montages of bus stations, trains and footpaths to images of confusingly mobile architectural schemas which morph as the music shatters. Noise reasserts itself before one runs on again.

Chases Through Non-Place reaches equilibrium in a region beyond both social space and that of the disinterested travel facilitated by the non-place. You enter an environment of funnelling and extrusion, of multiple bleed-throughs between different sonic and architectural spaces. Anonymous muzak environments like the elevator are designed to normalise and contain human and economic traffic. Battery Operated however end with a profoundly disturbing sensorium of noise (disorganised sound and space) and spatio-sonic interpenetration (flow). The artists cinesonically depict the spatial violence the non-place effects, returning the local patois of noise and its disturbingly chaotic nature to our movement through social and sonic space.

Perhaps recordings, unlike performances, cannot fully engage with noise. Schooled in both punk anarchism and avant-garde reading strategies, I however do not wish to “go with the flow.” I revel in such structured noise which nevertheless exceeds our capacity to define or control it; not simply a flow, but an illimitable excess of ambivalent electro-acoustic significations.

Chases Through Non-Place, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art/Association Française d’Action Artistique, Alliance Fraçaise, Melbourne, May 11

This concert proved a fine example of a hidden jewel in Melbourne’s winter cultural world. Buoyed by an enthusiastic and substantial audience eager for that magic which breaks the bonds of musical convention, the second of the from the lip concerts (produced by Chamber Made Opera) tackled issues of authenticity, integrity and originality. In an historical sense it was not experimental but each work contained elements that seemed to reference the idea of the experimental, while being set within essentially conventional contexts.
The concert began with Narcissus and Echo, an opera by Robin Fox and Elizabeth Parsons. Here the myth found a sympathetic interpretation through a range of challenging sounds and performance practices. Rich in detail, the work utilized a bewildering array of sound sources including pre-recorded sound, traditional instruments, turntables, fans with records on them (yes, vinyl!), a tape loop, speakers and singers. The theatricality of the performance effectively suggested ‘too much’ and, of course, ‘obsessiveness.’ The visual feast and complex sound established a compelling momentum of excess with which the audience could readily empathize, perhaps to the detriment of those moments of subtlety.

In stark contrast, Ania Walwicz’s solo reading of her text, Diana (a reference to Princess Diana), was equally spellbinding. As a delirious, self obsessed, verbal barrage, punctuated by changes in tone and subject, Walwicz’s accomplished performance was clearly a part of the experimental performance tradition of the last 30 years. Solo readings by Chris Mann came quickly to mind because of the musical treatment of the text. In many ways, Walwicz’s performance was both refreshing and passionate and moreso through the raw and powerful experience of witnessing the composer as performer.

Finally, The Broccoli Maestro. This visual and aurally impressive chamber opera in 2 acts, for 6 voices, 6 players and tape by Slave Pianos, unfolded as a challenge to contemporary musical thinking. An aesthetically complex work and perhaps exemplary of how the reputation of Slave Pianos is spreading as their working methodology becomes more widely appreciated and understood. This methodology may be summarized as: the use of re-composition, in this case, composing with other people’s music; the use of other art forms and intellectual subjects including literature, painting, philosophy, religion and politics; explicit reference to other artists (in this case Tony Clark) and a complex performance context which forms a nexus and crucial point of originality. All of this adds up to a sophisticated means of substantiating and legitimating the immediate work.

The effect in performance was as a massed force which advanced on the audience from all directions, forming a convincing experience through the sheer weight of the artistic evidence. The musical component was reminiscent of digital sampling, which is often a crude and frequently short-lived experience in comparison to the juxtaposed instrumental material found in this performance. As a collaborative enterprise, The Broccoli Maestro was a formidable example of aesthetic recycling with its many levels of reference and representation. A product of an institution, or society in this case, it was also a fantastic work of synthesis, of the moment and worthy of further discussion.

ChamberMade 2001: from the lip, Concert No.2, The Experimental, North Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, June 22

Dear Editors

What does the astounding success of “reality show” Big Brother say about us? There’s a bunch of “ordinary people” pretending not to be self-conscious in a comfy fish bowl. Zero production values. Negligible editing. Give them silly things to do. No real challenges except throw everyone else out and tell the camera some lame reason why they nominated whoever, other than the truth that they want the $250,000 prize or short of that, to survive for sufficient TV coverage to ensure some subsequent product endorsement, magazine pin ups and advertising revenue. We’ll soon see Sara-Marie endorsing PJs, chocolate and lingerie.

What’s the motive? Evict people we don’t get along with? Who wins (apart from Channel 10)? Ben, the shy boy in the footy jumper, who didn’t bother anyone. Could he be the Australian taciturn archetype? Why doesn’t Channel 10 just plug us into the TV surveillance of our so-called refugee camps and interview deportees about how they feel about it?

I remember a cartoon about a hangman who comes to town and just starts lynching people. Nobody puts up any resistance because he executes them in the order of the least popular/most different (minorities, blacks, Jews) until finally there’s no one left but the hangman.

The Big Brother host, Gretel, was looking more like Morticia. How many times do you hear “There’s only one winner” in spectator sport? Pat Rafter’s defeat is the first time I can remember Australia give “the loser” a break.

Big Brother is the prototype of a commercially successful new Australian program—eviction by personality, living vicariously, illusory Truman Shows and the triumph of nothingness.

Miranda Devine (Sydney Morning Herald, July 19) gives an interesting international context. 27 countries have aired versions of Big Brother. According to the article, “In the end, the Australian public redeemed Big Brother. What had obviously been intended by its producers to be a smutty, slutty, trash-fest of reality TV was redesigned by the 3 million viewers who phoned the eviction line each week into a sweetly innocuous show about platonic love and friendship.” In contrast the overseas variants, which were rocked by protest, sex and controversy. What does that say? We’re a nation of unsophisticated bores.

Miranda says we selected the good guy Ben who epitomises Aussies as uniquely “sport-loving, hugging, blokes.” She glosses over the significance of the process, EVICTION—we evicted “the cads, the interlopers, the crass, vulgar, sleaze, smug, banal, pushy, bratty, drunk, loud-mouthed, leering.” Who are these people? Oh no…That can’t be right…what’s the story…it’s you and it’s me! Andy, the discipline mistress, boasted she was “gonna shag at least 5 people” before she left the house. I wish she had.

Dear Editors

I represent a group called ‘divergence’, which seeks to encourage werdwurk (electronic writing) in Australia.

In a recent conversation with an arts administrator attached to one of Australia’s major festivals, it was suggested to me that a number of other groups are ‘doing the same thing’ as we are trying to do. Further research revealed that these groups are for young adults or adolescents.

I am wondering whether there is a common perception in Australia that werdwurk is not a properly adult artform. This perception tars both sides of the age divide with the same insult, that is, that it’s not serious or worthy. This is not the perception of the genre overseas.

I suspect that if such a perception exists in Australia it is because the criteria used to ‘judge’ it are derived from analysis of traditional forms of literature.

In another context I was talking to Anna Hedigan, who edits the online journal Overland Express. Anna says she can’t get enough contributions. I think the reason why is that Australians werdwurkers are so accustomed to looking for support/opportunities overseas that they don’t even bother looking in Australia.

From the OzCo’s Literature Fund, it would appear that there is little comprehension of werdwurk. An indication of this is the requirements for examples of applicants’ relevant previous work. There needs to be an understanding that werdwurk is a different genre.

Relevant statements about werdwurk may include: it gets ‘published’ differently; it gets ‘distributed’ differently; therefore capitalism doesn’t work for it; it is engaged with constantly changing technology, which means there are some different concerns/ways we spend our time; it ultimately resides within a coded environment; it has a different ‘metaphysic’; the people doing it have some sort of relationship with the network; either the network is actually essential in their work, or they at least base communication with their peers on it; it often fuses a variety of traditionally distinct artforms; it can engage the user in a variety of potentially quite different ways; it encourages a collaborative approach, if only because the variety of skills necessary can be so daunting; it can include the user within an ongoing collaboration; that is, it can be performative.

All these things add up to a fundamental challenge of the concept of the author/writer/artist. Indeed, the distinction between these concepts is fading partly as a result of electronic wurk. However it would appear that Australian arts administrators sometimes rely on popular definitions, and this means they don’t actually engage with what’s really going on.

As a result, I do wonder how to create a recognized space for this artform in Australia.

At the recent Electronic Literature Organisation Awards in New York, one third of the finalists were Australian. Australians were easily the second most represented nation among the entrants (after Americans). Australian werdwurkers have won various international awards and their wurk is recognized throughout the world as best practice. It is regularly featured in international exhibitions and on international websites. Some of the writers/artists concerned are Komninos, Mez, Linda Carroli, Teri Hoskin and Adrian Miles.

In a small way, the writers and journal editors themselves are trying to address this marginalisation. If you want to learn more about divergence, email me.

Dear Editors

The Australia Council for the Arts has recently announced funding of $200,000 for a community outreach program to accompany a regional tour of Grease—the Mega Musical. The reaction from artists and organisations all over the country has been shock and disbelief. Shock that such a decision could emerge from the “Promoting the Value of the Arts Campaign” and the Saatchi & Saatchi survey. Disbelief that a good Australian work could not have been found. La Boite Theatre’s latest venture into the bush—the tent show Way Out West–is surely a good example of a such a work.

To suggest that the Grease “community outreach” is innovative disregards the fact that there are Australian artists and communities—Circus Oz, Flying Fruit Flies, Chunky Move, Bangarra Dance Theatre, to name a few—already working all across the country who are very good at it. Many of them do it for much less than $200k, sometimes they do it for free.

The Australia Council in one of the country’s most vital and vibrant public institutions. The policies and decisions of the Australia Council have historically grown from consultation with artists and communities and are always hotly debated and contested. Within the ongoing clients of the Australia Council lie some of the most creative, innovative and strategic thinkers and makers in the world.

Throughout the Major Organisations and amongst the triennial, ongoing and project-based clients of the Theatre, Dance, Music, Community Cultural Development, Visual Arts, New Media, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders Arts Funds and Boards, to individual artists, youth arts projects, regional arts organisations and community art groups there is a commitment to creative partnerships with industry, community ownership and empowerment, new technologies and new audiences.

Most of all there is commitment to the development of a vibrant and exciting contemporary Australian culture that speaks about and shapes “how we live today.” For this vast and constantly struggling national resource to be effective and to realise the monumental potential that it holds, strategic initiatives of the Australia Council should, as much as possible I believe, enhance, develop, push and build on the strengths and successes of 20 odd years worth of public investment.

But very often these days, new initiatives (and their new money) are tied to a particular twist of a particular Federal Government wanting to see particular things “delivered.” This scenario is dangerous and inhibits the arm’s-length independence of the Australia Council Boards, who are in the main peer artists, involved directly in cultural industry development.

So, over time, a policy vacuum appears between Australian contemporary arts practice as it actually is, and the sometimes twisted assumptions of men in grey suits waving the results of a “focus group” survey like Chamberlain returning from Nazi Germany.

So in the same month that we are sending some of our best contemporary companies to New York for the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival Down Under, we are also funding “community outreach” for American popular culture—Grease, produced by one of the largest (multi-national) entertainment companies in the world, Really Useful, with the show’s copyright owned by the richest man in Great Britain, Sir Paul McCartney.

I simply can’t believe that between ‘em they couldn’t pay for it themselves. Or with a product so well known as Grease, find a corporate or philanthropic sponsor for the entire outreach project.

These things just do not compute. Australia Council, we love you. Please consider.

Dear Editors

I am concerned at the emotive misinterpretation in various articles of recent changes to ABC Classic FM scheduling, and your editorial of June/July is one such. It would be good to examine who set you up for it actually.

It is true to say that Soundstage is no longer heard on ABC Classic FM, but it is not true to conclude that drama production at the ABC is suffering as a result. It continues and can be heard on Radio National. I have never had any influence over the Soundstage budget, and I should add that I wonder what you mean by a “homebody” audience? Are ABC Classic FM listeners not homebodies? However, a fair question to ask is why I removed it from ABC Classic FM. The answer is that our listeners have sought better definition for what ABC Classic FM stands for. If it is a music network, then why is ninety minutes a week of drama on it, and they’ve asked the same question of why the Margaret Throsby repeat is there as well. This explains the change.

You then allude to The Listening Room, implying that “workshopping” it is to use a euphemism for axing it. That will not happen. But answer me this: how many creative artists in Australia are doing work that is suitable for the Acoustic Art brief for TLR, but not being heard? I’m interested to put that question? How many people listen to TLR, and could there be more? Are there fields of acoustic art that do not have their roots in musique concrete and the extended forms of poetry found in the last century? Do we ever hear music, say Mozart or Cipriano de Rore, in the way it is intended? Could we assert a different way of hearing by virtue of context, or contrast, or can we change things by examining the cultural moulding of our ears, actually create a different context? If you don’t know, then take my assurance that I am interested in putting the question. And through The Listening Room. I think you have misinterpreted my intentions completely and I would have been happy to answer your points if you had asked.

There is one more thing you might find hard to understand, and I include this passionate statement because a letter from Timothy Daly published by you in the same issue refers to “fine music boffins.” Sorry mate, it’s our turf. Our listeners like music. They’ll fight to the death for it, because it matters to them. It is a field people who do not love music cannot comprehend. It is about understanding the movement of sound, the organisation of sound. It is a language of its own. That applies no less to Mozart or Josquin than to Robert Iolini. But music is not words, it is not visual, it is not associative (mostly), and is not always psychological narrative (in this it is a far more radical and successful art form than writing). It is about sound. The organisation of abstracted sound for its own sake. Soundstage could only rarely be about sound, and TLR is nearly always about sound. That’s why it will stay on ABC Classic FM and why I want to ask what it could be that is not being at present.

Freud-bashing has become almost as big an industry as Freud himself. Perhaps that’s inevitable for a man who, like Darwin and Marx, began by shaping our minds and ended by dominating our small talk. His ideas are so much part of the furniture we feel we know all about them without, er, knowing all about them. Or rather we think we know one important thing. In psychoanalysis, Catherine Belsey points out, “everything means something else.” And that something else is, of course, sex. Find yourself fiddling with your pen? Dream about tunnels? Think your partner looks like your Mum? Once these things were coincidences. Next they were insights. Now they are grist for every gag-writer with a line in blue humour who can spell ‘abreaction.’

Emma’s Nose is either a brilliant addition to the anti-Freud industry or a blatant exploitation of it or both. The story doesn’t so much develop as hang like a poisonous vapour over a series of boot-to-crutch skits most of which involve the word ‘penis.’ Emma Eckstein was one of Freud’s patients, a young woman suffering from cramps, hysteria, compulsive masturbation and, according to nose and throat specialist Wilhelm Fliess, ‘nasal reflex neurosis.’ Jacek Koman’s Fliess is a mad-scientist-with-frazzled-hair figure, who’s got a glottal-stop and a theory that abnormal sexual preoccupations (undefined) are linked to noses. He and Freud (Tyler Coppin) shared a belief in the curative powers of cocaine and a 17-year correspondence, most of which involved stroking each other’s egos. In 1895 Freud invited Fliess to operate on Eckstein’s nose. It was his first attempt at major surgery and he left half a metre of gauze in her nasal cavity, to cause in the short-term near-fatal hemorrhage and in the long term, permanent disfigurement. The 2 men parted company but in a gesture bound to impress future researchers, never blamed themselves for Eckstein’s predicament. Amazingly neither did she, going on to become one of Freud’s first disciples and write a book on child rearing.

Paul Livingston (Flacco to you) has mined correspondence between the 2 men to revive a genre harking back to the days of The Legend of King O’Malley: biographical vaudeville. Freud with a German accent and Groucho Marx moustache fingers his cigar and wonders how to greet Fliess. Fliess appears in a puff of smoke, ejected from a side door of Stephen Curtis’ sloping-floor set, waving an antiseptic spray, to harangue spectators with his theories about noses. The humour is relentless, a comedy of bludgeon, the wielding of a single, heavy weapon (the sex reference) over a small area with maximum force: Freud and Fliess sniffing each other’s butts, exploring an olfactory dimension to proboscidal thinking; the doctors two-stepping with canes and top hats; Freud brandishing a talking cigar; and some plain old fashioned clowning (Willy belts Sigmund. “SF: What was that? WF: A Freudian slap!”).

During all this Emma (Meaghan Davies) doesn’t say much because she is swathed in mummy-like bandages. Apart from waddling and waving her arms about all she can do is watch–and bleed. After Fliess operates a considerable amount of the latter goes on. Blood pours, literally, from Emma’s mouth, staining her bandages a deep scarlet and making visible the bottom of her agonised face. She crawls up the sloping floor to escape, but slips on her own fluids and hemorrhages some more. Which rather takes the shine off Fliess’s reputation as a surgeon, although matters calm down after Freud offers him a brandy and the 2 men sniff more cocaine.

I am in some professional awe at the way Company B has managed the risk element of this show. The thin-ness of Livingston’s writing is evident; you can hear the ice cracking behind each line as the actors’ deliver it. Koman and Coppin’s work is a tour de force. If there was any let-up in forward momentum the production would flounder. That it never does is a tribute to the audacity of the whole creative team. To succeed with material like this needs nerve, skill and brains. The best example is the handling of Emma herself. Despite her ‘abject object’ status, she is an electric presence on stage, her eyes registering shades of feeling the slapstick seems to exclude but ends up highlighting. When the blood flows it says more than words ever could about the damage inflicted on an innocent by a couple of obsessed experimenters.

At that point the production goes further than the play. After all, Fliess is the focus of the story, such as it is. Freud gets in only on a guilt-by-association ticket. Knowing a loony isn’t the same as being a loony while the step from a fixation about noses to a theory of sexual drives is a big one, and this play doesn’t take it. Can shows about serious matters succeed if they are just fun? The answer is, of course. It is the worst kind of presumption to criticise a drama for not realising what it never sets out to do. But the production’s stunning handling of Emma’s predicament raises expectations that it might broach the big questions. If it doesn’t, for most spectators that isn’t a problem. The laughs are enough and one can sit back and applaud Company B for pulling it off (in a non-Freudian sense) once again.

Emma’s Nose: A Comedy of Eros, Company B Belvoir, writer Paul Livingstone, director Neil Armfield, performers Tyler Coppin, Meaghan Davies, Jacek Koman, Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, May 18-June 14

Belvoir St theatre seems to be the hippest performance arena in Sydney. Upstairs and downstairs attracts different crowds and the recent slot of shows–Imago, Hamlet and Four on the Floor–have showcased up-and-comers and established theatre folk.

It’s hard to maintain a passion for theatre-with-boundaries after experiencing The Museum of Fetishized Identities (see Keith Gallasch’s review). Hamlet and Imago seemed so far away, unreachable. The concept of a venue done up more like a rave (The Performance Space) with performances fluid and revolving and great thumping music–do it to me baby–where you can rove with a drink in one hand and a machine gun in the other is pretty hard to beat. I don’t like performances where as they speak their dialogue they look above your head into an imagined distance that we the audience can’t turn around to see. I like contact, especially downstairs at Belvoir, where the newly renovated space means you are so close you can smell the sweat of the performers. So back to Imago, the final stages of a beautiful butterfly-made, which featured some tough performances, in particular Sara Zwangobani as Cleo and Michael Gwynne as Jon. Its content–a woman who wants to be a man–is just too close to the film Boys Don’t Cry and it suffers in comparison. There is no ambiguity–perhaps this is the point–but as a first-time writer, Emma Vuletic’s first-time play-off-the-ground shows talent. More crossovers of characters’ dialogue, more silence, less posturing, would help it gel, and the good thing about the producers Kicking and Screaming (Chris Mead, Veronica Gleeson) is that they are dedicated to developing new writing and encouraging their writers to continue to work, so Emma’s next one will get some careful nurturing.

All the works in Four on the Floor (produced by Legs on the Wall) are strong physical theatre tableaux on relationships and desire, but Where is this?, a challenging piece about the difficulty of creating performance works, doesn’t quite fit in the programme. It’d be good to replace it with another double-hander as the other 3 are about erotic relationships between 2 people. The most audacious, Sentimental Reason, is a genuinely disturbing tale of foreplay and liaisons between a woman and a horse (and what a gorgeous horse he is as he pisses loudly and slowly into the front row of the audience) and lolls about, patiently watching us walk in. The use of straps hung from the ceiling, which Lee Wilson bridles, fights and reigns himself in, adds hellfireclub cred and Mirabelle Wouters, decked out in tartan tucked up into her knickers, and later naked astride her bareback plaything, is funny and kinky at the same time. Knots, which opens the night, is a great interplay of rough-and-guts between 2 girls, Ingrid Kleinig and Alexandra Harrison, asking those questions that are deadly serious, intensely physical, broaching power and sexual play. Like most conversations, and unlike most theatre dialogues, most of the time they fail to connect. One asks a question the other never answers. One answers a question the other never asks. And so it goes on. And there’s tension as a head is pushed into a bucket–there’s a hole in my–and water lashes the floors, to be maneuvered around and slid through, wishy-washy as girlie words.

The current trend is to promote your theatrical wares to groovy types by emphasising the soundtrack. Imago features Dirty Three while Hamlet has the very funky and talented Aya Larkin, lead singer of Skunkhour, in various guises including the player king, while cast members have a go at the turntable, DJing into the night. This music can take away from or give to the performance. In Imago it’s just plain irritating, like the musicians have never seen the production and the actors have never heard the music. Dirty Three has a cumulative often awesome power but here they just kind of plonk into the proceedings. Sacha Horler as Ophelia does an offkilter version of Lover Man in Hamlet, Billie Holiday’s lament curiously appropriate to her desperate desires: “I go to bed / with a prayer / that you’ll make love to me / strange as it seems.” In Desire Lines, amongst the angled-legged tango and tender dreamings, Ben Palumbo performs the most gorgeous falsetto, soaring into the rafters. The ending is particularly beautiful, his small red-back to the audience, singing as his partner and his own emaciated shadow slide imperceptibly, the sweat from Paul Cordeiro’s bald head staining and scraping the wall as he falls, feather-light. It’s a performance I wanted to see more of. Just a glimpse of shadow.

Four on the Floor, B Sharp 2001:Where Is It?, performance/ choreography Rowan Marchingo, director Simon Green; Desire Lines, devisers Ben Palumbo, Paul Cordeiro; Sentimental Reason, concept/choreography Mirabelle Wouters, Lee Wilson; Knots, writer/director Alexandra Harrison, performers Harrison, Ingrid Kleinig, July 19-Aug 5; Imago, writer Emma Vuletic, director Chris Mead, performers Michael Gwynne, Clogagh Crowe, Emma Jackson, Sara Zwangobani; Hamlet, Pork Chop Productions, director Jeremy Sims, performers include Sims, Sacha Horler, Deborah Kennedy, Company B Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, July 5-August 5

I like this title very much and–as the token critic on the panel–I sense a duty to acknowledge in my comments the hovering ghost of Roland Barthes. It was after all this eminent French cultural theorist who, in a 1968 essay, first coined the phrase: “The death of the author.”

It’s a phrase that, to this day, is largely misunderstood and often misrepresented. To come to grips with his extravagant claim, there are however 2 meanings of the word ‘dead’ we need to consider here.

There is dead as in ‘buried.' If you look up ‘death of the author’ on the net you end up downloading hundreds of novelists’ obituaries. That is not the kind of death Barthes was referring to. There is no question that writers are still needed to actually write, whether it’s novels or playscripts

What Barthes intended was a challenge to the habit among critics of his day (and still today) to look for the ‘meaning’ of a work of art in the writer’s so-called ‘intentions.' He claimed you could never know a writer’s intentions; even the writer cannot know what truly drives a book. The author’s history, education, sexuality, what he had for breakfast, is ultimately of little relevance.

All that exists, claims Barthes, at the end of the process of writing is the book, the text. At that point, the author and the work part company, a new union is formed between the text and the reader. Barthes rightly observed that in literary criticism from the Classical age up to the end of Modernism, the role of the reader had never been considered relevant in any discussion of the ‘meaning’ of a text.

“To give a text an author,” Barthes wrote, “is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

Barthes observation was that in seeking out ‘the intentions of the author’ we were not only attempting the impossible, we were also denying the text an infinite number of other equally valid meanings. As many meanings, in fact, as there were readers. As many meanings in fact as their were readings. This is true of the experience of theatre too. Anyone who goes back to see a production a second or third time knows what I mean.

We might be going the long way round here, but this does take us back to today’s topic: ‘Why be a playwright when the play is dead?’

Strictly speaking the play is not dead, it will never be dead so long as there is theatre. But we must, in the service of good work, accept that the play is no more or less than the architecture holding the work of art together. Playwrights are architects. Directors are, in this analogy, the design consultants. And actors are the inhabitants–owners not renters.

The play is not dead, in my view. But what about the playwright? As an author–whose intentions we attempt to seek out–the playwright is as dead as any novelist, in the sense that Barthes originally observed.

As a critic not currently employed (though ‘retired’ or ‘resting’ sounds better) I could be seen as ‘dead’ — as in buried.

As a dead critic I feel I am uniquely honoured to be asked to participate in this panel. It makes a kind of bizarre sense: critics are, when in work, theatre’s ‘undead’–wrapped in our capes, fangs barely concealed, we only emerge after nightfall to frighten baby NIDA graduates and leading festival directors of indisputable good taste.

Only after we have been stabbed several times through the heart with a crucifix by the likes of an emboldened Schofield or a vengeful Macintosh– today’s ‘holy cross’ looking uncannily like a dollar sign–can society safely allow us out for an appearance such as this one. As the legend has it, quite correctly, only a truly dead critic, as in buried, is safe in good society before sundown.

It was a casual conversation with Deborah Franco who works with Katharine Brisbane at Currency Press. We were, like far too many people with time on our hands, discussing the fallout of a Richard Wherrett's speech at the National Performance Conference in Sydney in January, which has lead to a cascade of commentary including responses from playwright Louis Nowra, dramaturg May-Brit Akerholt and emerging director Benedict Andrews.

Running through the responses has been an argument, by no means a new one, between playwrights and directors as to who is more important in the process of creating a work of art for the stage.

As a critic I have been confronted with this many times. It’s a version of the old chicken and egg conundrum. Directors these days are ‘up themselves’ because they take liberties with the text. They do not adhere to the playwright’s intentions. Directors, on the other hand, see playwrights as prima donnas who don’t know what’s good for them or their wayward scribbles.

These arguments get more complicated when the playwright is ‘dead’, in the ‘buried’ sense.

There was a panel discussion a year or so ago in response to Barrie Kosky’s radical production for Bell Shakespeare of King Lear. A host of senior academics–including Leonie Kramer–argued that Kosky had done Shakespeare a disservice in his ‘interpretation.' As Barthes would rightly ask, how are we to ever know what Shakespeare intended? All a director can do today with a classic text, or any text for that matter, is help his actors find meaning in it for themselves and their nightly audiences.

In my view, the recent kerfuffle cascading down from Wherrett’s first assault has been akin to the two ugly sisters of fairytale arguing vehemently over the glass shoe. Who’s more important–the writer or the director? When forlorn in the ashes in the corner sits Cinderella, otherwise known as the ‘actor’ or the ‘troupe of actors.'

In my view the true work of art we call theatre exists in the empty space between actors and audience. It is born as it dies, leaving (if the work has any cogency) an imprint on our souls. The Tuesday night performance is, strictly speaking, a different work of art from the one presented on Wednesday night.

If Tuesday night was the opening night then, we might ask, where are the writer and director on Wednesday night when the work of art is being recreated entirely afresh? They’re probably not even in the theatre building. Where are they? Most likely down the pub drowning their sorrows over the ‘hot-off-the-press’ scathing reviews.

It’s something a good critic should remember: whatever you have to say, don’t forget the performers have to get up and do it again in front of more people. If you’re hard, that can be a very big call. Meanwhile all else involved can write themselves off in a sea of valium and cask wine.

Of course writers and directors can be very helpful in the construction of the work’s preparatory architecture and design. But on the night, they actually have less a role to play in the making of the work than–dare I say it–that frightening bank of critics in the stalls, fangs flashing occasionally in the light, who do form part of the evening’s audience.

Actors/Audience/Time and Space are the fundamental components of the art form we call performance (theatre, opera, ballet, mime, stand-up comedy, all being no more than genres).

To propound that not only directors but actors too serve the vision of playwrights can result in a playwright’s death. Their professional or artistic death. They will never write a very good play if they ponce around in a delusional state of misplaced self-importance–if they believe they the true ‘authors’ of the work of art.

Good playwrights–and I cite Shakespeare and Pirandello here among the best examples–know they are mere handmaidens in the service of the actor-audience relationship. And they acknowledge, as household staff, they have usually well and truly knocked off for the day before the art form ever comes to life. Unless, like Shakespeare, they don a bonnet and take on the challenges of a minor role.

If playwrights are to maximise their contribution to the art form–and a good deal more could be said about this if we had the time–they should reconsider what a playscript is–or can be.

This too is a whole other topic, but let’s just say most bad playwrights think their job is to create dialogue. That’s it—dialogue–whether serious or witty or both. When really there is much more to creating an over-arching architecture of potential meanings which the actors and audiences can take up and explore.

Barthes is largely out of fashion these days when it comes to post-postmodern critical theory. Much of what he had to say in terms of ‘writing designed for reading’ has been worked through. But he made some superb observations about the nature of theatre which have largely gone unheeded by participants in the form. Brecht’s so-called ‘alienation’ theory was, in fact, one of his biggest influences.

Bathes also saw ‘texts’ everywhere–in the shining lights of Tokyo, in wrestling matches, in the silence of a rose in a vase. And when it came to the art form we call theatre he observed that the text was composed of much more then just words.

To finish, let me here just offer a glimpse of this in this quotation from an essay by Barthes titled “Baudelaire’s Theater”, written way back in 1954, a good 15 years before he killed off the author.

I think his comments best embrace, whether dead or alive, the still extraordinary potential of the playwright’s role. The subject: those resources available to the playwright as architect, which he groups together under the banner of ‘theatricality.'

“What is theatricality? It is theatre-minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up on stage starting from the written argument; it is that ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice–gesture, tone, distance, substance, light–which submerges the text beneath the profusion of its external language. Of course theatricality must be present in the first written germ of the work, it is a datum of creation not of production. There is no great theatre without a devouring theatricality–in Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Brecht, the written text is from the first carried along by the externality of bodies, of objects, of situations; the utterance immediately explodes into substances.”

Does god see geese? And if SLEEP PEELS then do bells of loveliness ripple like rays of stars? It’s unfair to begin with questions; I take them back. Excuse them as mere rhetoric–a stupid way to write (stupid as…). The reverse of ‘stupid’ is diputs, almost ‘dispute’; a small matter of adding one letter and rearranging another. The matter of language itself; writing begins in the midst of a duel/dual, a dispute or doubling.

SLEEP PEELS is a palindrone. It clings, word to word, paused, like a quiet love affair. Still, Louise Haselton’s modest exhibition, Act Natural, at Greenaway Art Gallery had this pausing effect, a moment held still (breathless) before dueling with language. Can language be other than dual, double, two-fold–and more and multiple and ‘times’-this and 'times'-that, etcetera. So, when Haselton took the word LONE she asked for trouble, because ENOL is “any organic compound containing a hydroxyl group attached to a doubly linked carbon, usually in the form -C=C-OH” (Macquarie Dictionary). I have no idea what this means, but you can see the hidden message, the clue: ‘doubly linked’. A little toxic something, perhaps.

Every time I walk up the steps to the mezzanine space in the Greenaway Art Gallery I anticipate something. It’s a simple bare staircase which functions like a pause; you know the work up there will be of a different type and scale. It’s as if the staircase prepares you; it keeps you visually connected to 2 spaces simultaneously. Its bareness is a lone-ness, and yet it's intimate somehow, in the way the LONE ring was (bronze knuckleduster); a ring so intimate it “would lift the flesh from the face” (Lisa Young, catalogue essay). I’ve often thought of this staircase as an element of whatever work is up there, a path, passage, caught up, tangled, in the artist's intention (but never mentioned).

There were 6 works (3 bronze, one acrylic on board, one silkscreen, one paper and pen). They were singular, but played off one another, creating vector lines. The centre-piece, or anti-centre-piece, and almost ephemeral, drew everything to itself–a star–I mean ‘a star’ in shape and a-star in performance, like a character actor (Harvey Keitel) who simply takes the cake. The ‘star’ is paper, a length of paper folded into a star. It sits like a crown on a white plinth. And written around the star in pen was: dennis/sinned/do geese/see god/eva can I stab/bats in a cave/name no/one man/rats live on/no evil star/wont lover/revolt now. You can see language reverse itself, dispute/double itself. Whether language, me, you, means to is another matter. Usually we don’t. Yet we always manage to mis-mean. Lovely. Alarming.

It is difficult to say how quiet this exhibition was–as surely quiet as having 2 fingers cut off. What to say? It’s over. It hurts. Lone hurts. But, what to tell? Gone. Too late. There was a bronze tree of fingers, delicate fingers, not a child’s, fingers that had been around. Two were missing, broken off. Yet, there they were curled around each other on another plinth. It was, they were, sad, and comforting. Dead, in each other’s 'arms'. This was LONE; and while a-LONE, all around is a-LONE-ness. The works together witnessed LONE, as a community. They belonged somewhere, no particular place (and specific anyway), 6 things in view of each other.

In these days of ‘illegal entry’ Act Natural was a concise political work which in stillness evoked the overflow (the silent screams, the touches which generate ‘infinite’ possibilities), the excess sorrow that has no voice. And which points up the impossibility of acting natural; each occasion, event (here, artwork), requires separate attention, each has its own story, history, time. It is painful, as (L)ONE-liness is, it is hope, as setting out a-LONE is, it could be hopeful, if 'welcome' is offered.

The dual in Haselton’s work was (the pause) between language and object. It hovered, without desire for resolve, like an interval (a staircase), and in that interval imaginary refreshment came, food eaten, opinions exchanged (this is the land of language). The dual is rhetorical, within the beauty and despair of the word LONE (solitary, isolated, as a house: evoked in Lisa Young’s essay by the figure of Robert Indiana slouching in a door frame–architecture shows off at every chance): “Dragging on a cigar he gazes nonchalantly out…A lone renegade…” Later in Young's essay: “In counterpoint to the wistfulness of her text pieces, is the weightiness of her objects…; intended to be picked up and held, they have the authority of their traditional material…Curious human remains severed from the corpus delicti, they speak of an obsessive duality and the psychotic act.”

Haselton was generous, she made hard isolated works which reached for each other through small incisive moves, as if not wanting to disturb you (pausing before you). Their 'belonging somewhere', and their 'being in one place', their small party of melancholy, made one want to belong, be in solace (paused), with them, naturally, acting.

The gallery is nearly empty–a mixing desk, projector and a few pedestals turned sideways to form seats are in the rear room. A long, sky-blue screen is unrolled like a blind in the middle room, and there are tiny loudspeakers on the walls in every room. Lengths of speaker cable are taped to the wall in the shape of arches and angles, like an architectural drawing, or nerves mapping the body.

In this, the third in the Domus series of artists’ interventions into the CACSA building, a video is projected onto an entire wall. Meanwhile, Stevie Wishart slowly walks around wearing her hurdy-gurdy, whose transmitter signals its sound to the mixing desk and speakers. Wishart blends recorded, sampled and live sounds, exploring the resonances inherent in the gallery, a converted 120 year-old, inner-suburban, blue-stone villa.

Artist Joan Grounds has worked before with Wishart to create sound and performance installations. They make an environment, an arena. The video is a long, slow-motion close-up of Wishart’s hands playing the hurdy-gurdy, so slow it is nearly still, so large it overwhelms, transfixes. A primitive form of musical notation is painted in henna on the palm of one of Wishart’s hands–the ‘cheat sheet’ used by monks when singing, the hand as language, readable.

The sky-blue screen formed the backdrop for making the video. At times, Wishart rests the hurdy-gurdy on the screen so we can see, in one room, the props used for making the video and in another, the video itself. Throughout, the speakers emit taped sound. This sound becomes a drone, an arrhythmic, trance-inducing, electro-acoustic chant. In this environment, time seems slowed or stopped.

Wishart makes sound by poking and prodding the hurdy-gurdy rather than playing notes. It becomes an object of experimentation as well as a musical instrument, a site of multiple potentials (as is the building). The ancient script and the harmonies of bygone cultures that infuse the instrument are transported into the present. Wishart’s hands could be 1000 years old. The taped sounds, heard at the speed of the slow motion video, become guttural, demonic. It’s as if we’re inside the hurdy-gurdy, as if the gallery is a virtual instrument we’ve entered. Grounds and Wishart collapse the virtual, the medieval and the present into one moment.

Jonathan Dady’s Construction Drawings, the first Domus exhibition earlier this year, comprised scaffolding that replicated the CACSA gallery. Painted to look like a CAD drawing and wrapped around the building, it was a physical manifestation of an architect’s representation of the building, the real as virtual. In Domus 2, Ariane Epars’ Piece of Land 240, the gallery was again empty. Epars’ pulled up some floorboards in each room and placed lights underneath, illuminating the ground below and thus illuminating the origin of this colonised site. In the Domus series, the gallery is no longer neutral space.

Domus 3, Stevie Wishart & Joan Grounds, Contemporary Art Centre
of SA, May 11 – June 3

MEZ [Mary-Anne Breeze] has been described as one of “the original net.artists” who is “…without doubt one of the most consistent, prolific, innovative artists working in new media today. Mez’s work with language has had a considerable effect on the language of many…” Since 1995, she has exhibited extensively via the internet and in ‘realtime.’

Can you tell me a little bit about the history of this text/language you’ve developed?

my “mezangelle” style of writing/textual construction][ that has at its base email dialogues and network exchanges][ underpins all my net.artwork, even the more image intensive versions. the format evolved from a series of emailed collaborative pieces carried out with m@ ][Matt Hoessli from the CADRE Institute][ on the 7-11 mailing list from 96 onwards. At the time, I was into switching avatarian cloaks ][the most regular being ‘ms post modemism’][ which is another defining criteria of my net.artwurk][“net.wurks”][. my particular ‘angle’ was to take various information text tracts and ‘mangle’ them through free/multi-word associative techniques and repost them–hence the term, mezangelle. this technique has developed since, with computer code conventions and regular chat/email iconographs contributing to its formulation.

i sometimes wish i hadn’t termed the style mezangelling, as it directs the language m.phasis 2wards the authorial side, and i’m not sure if this fits in2 its gradual enveloping nature…”mezangelle” was used for the obvious reasons, splitting the term in2 angel][le][, mangle, gel, mez etc…but it also had as a trigger JG Ballard’s adoption of his own name in his novel Crash; it seemed such a deliciously jarring concept that i decided it would fit with the fragmenting of narrative and auteurship i had in mind, considering the avatar swapping i usually n.gage in…now, though, i’m not so sure][…

Did you program a generator to translate english into hybrid new language or how are the translations made?

the text is purely self][human][-generated within a framework of mezangelled conventions and the net.wurk overall, with the aim b.ing 2 partially indicate a mechanised or hybrid organic/computerised feel.

it’s always a numbing process, trying to concretely describe the gradual shifts n.herent in mezangelling ][numbing in that i have 2 actually stop and cogitate for a while:)][. currently, the use of the double/inverted square-pair-bracket is the main distinguishing feature, and this is ][in part][ reactionary; after c-ing several of the more distinguishable features b.ing adopted in2 widespread usage ][well, widespread enough to realize its n.fluence, such as in various x.hibition “titles” & other new media work using key elements similar to mezangelle, etc][, i consciously d.sided 2 shift the emphasis 2wards a more polysemous approach. the use of the double bracket ][i like to think of it as triptych bracket][ is part compromise on my part, in that for a brief while i toyed with using the reversed bracket *only* but after trying it in one piece decided–for the sake of readability–that it was a no-goer. ][c, i *do* consider my audience 1nce in a while:)][ the trip.tych bracket allows for a cushioning of the enhanced/added meanings i m.bed fairly heavily in2 my texts, but when used extensively becomes quite complexly layered.

it was a smooth evolutionary process, utilizing email and chatlines as traditional correspondence techniques, then decompressing this to include more performative aspects–the collaboration elements were crucial, in that they opened up a previously bland informatic space into producing new artistic forms and genres.

no, as the “net” ][in terms of net.art][ was largely formalizing into being around the time i first started my chat/textforays ][95][, so the process was more intuitive rather than prescriptive.

Did you have extensive previous experience with language/linguistics/syntax?

strangely enuff my professional arts career was kick-started as a hybrid writer/painter, though I was never satisfied with the medium][s][ and how my work was embraced within the umbrella-label ‘installation’. i had the urge to use the notion of scientific order to mask/covertly highlight another type of ‘random’ order and this led to the computer, 2 play & integration ][play is absolutely crucial to my work, if I don’t allow myself the time to absorb and digest and information-trawl, I’m lost][.

What was your method in choosing certain letters or symbols to replace words?

the method was based on absorption via my m.mersion in the basic components of networked communication via chats, the use of computer coding, emails, gaming etc, and so the incremental units of these exchanges became embedded in my net.wurks.

Was it based more on phonetics or on the similarities of the symbols to letters? Whenever I read your texts it seems almost easier to read aloud then just in my head.

neither; though initially it relied stylistically on grabbing from computer language/html whereas nowadays it seems more lyrically and structurally based ][which explains the ease of reading aloud][.

i’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the tandem process of language shaping reality and vice versa ][cf the whorfian, or sapir/whorf hypothesis][ and although i didn’t consciously have this theory in mind, i’m sure it’s influenced the way i want my texts 2 be consumed by the reader; also, barthes notion of re][thinking][writing of the author raises its ugly head in my overt intention to give the reader/audience various meaning/learning cues that must be actively pieced together.

Where do you think these “net.wurked” texts stand as far as the internet is concerned?

they don’t stand, they creep over netwurked tendrils, pop up spam-like ][but r very different to spam in content][ in many unusual places, and are archived for all 2 plunder in substantial email list/chat archives.

many and various; some people find my work too conceptual or plainly inaccessible whereas others equate it to the likes of Shakespeare, Greenaway and James Joyce. Some moderators can’t get a grip on the open source tone of my artistic practice and take actions to unsubscribe or ban me from their mailing lists, as happened on the Australian new media list recode recently. the fan mail is amusing and touching, though, and helps balance these negative actions.

Mez is the 2001 Resident Artist at the WCG, has been awarded the 2001 VIF Prize by the Humboldt-Universitat in Berlin, was shortlisted for the prestigious 2001 Electronic Literature Organisation’s Fiction Award, and is currently in the running for the JavaMuseums’ Artist Of The Year 2001 Award.

At the fifth of the RealTime-Performance Space series of forums for artists working in contemporary performance, 50 performers, academics, emerging artists, students and teachers of a range of skills and body regimes gathered to discuss the meanings, functions, effectiveness and availability of training. Visiting scholars and artists from Victoria, Queensland and Western Australian joined in the dialogue which was informally hosted by director and performer Nikki Heywood and RealTime editor Keith Gallasch.

This transcript records most of the discussion, but not all of it. Tapes had to be changed and we ran out towards the end.

Nikki Heywood
I wonder, can we feel our training in our body. How aware of it are we? How useful have those training methods been and what particularly attracted you to the particular discipline?

Mémé Thorne (performer)
My specialty is the Suzuki Method otherwise known as stomping. I started in 1989 doing classes with Nigel Kellaway who was probably one of the first Australians to go to Japan and study with Suzuki Tadashi and his company at Toga. So I found the classes most enjoyable and useful. The Suzuki Company came to Australia in 1991 and performed The Trojan Women. What excited me most about seeing that show and the demonstration of the method of training afterwards on stage was that although Suzuki was working with something like 35 people on stage it was possible for me to look at every single person and feel, wow, I’m getting something from every single one of them. What is it that they do that enables them to harness this kind of energy, this kind of presence and make not just the principals interesting and able to engage your attention? Even those who didn’t speak a word. Even the one who stood for an hour and 10 minutes without moving! So I wrote to Suzuki and asked if I could participate in some kind of training with his company which I did in 1991. In 1992 he invited me to go back to Japan and train as a teacher of that methodology and I’ve been teaching it ever since.

There was a moment of realisation that it was possible to find a training method which would prepare me for performance in such a way that I could harness that energy and translate it so that audience members would look at me. That, after all, is what we’re after as performers on stage. You want to stand there and you want to say to everyone look at me. And I believe it worked. LAUGHTER

NH
Had you gone to performance before that and not found that sense of presence?

MT
I use the word “presence” but, of course, the word encapsulates so much more. If you stand on stage, you want to be able to say something and have it received in the way you mean it. And I think that’s a difficulty for a lot of performers. You have an idea of how you want to be received and what you want to say but often the two pictures don’t come together. Through the Suzuki training I have found it more possible to arrive at those two ideals and bring them together. It happens because through the training I’ve been able to understand what it is my body does at any given moment while I’m on stage. I can do away with extraneous gestures, I can be crisp and precise and I can make a clear picture and I’m talking not just about what I say and do but the visceral qualities, the aesthetics of the whole thing. To me it’s much more possible to bring that to fruition through this methodology. I think you can do that with other regimes as well. This is what worked for me, but in conjunction with other training. I don’t do Suzuki exclusively when I prepare for any performance that I do but that is my main focus.

Simon Woods (Performer, Zen Zen Zo, a Brisbane-based performance group)
I think MéMé has summarised what the Suzuki Method can give you in a really fantastic way. We also found that there were a lot of wonderful benefits in the training which I believe transformed our company and took our work to a whole new level but there were also some elements that we found a bit limiting. It’s a highly structured style of training, very formal. We found when we were working only with Suzuki Method in rehearsals and eventually performance, a lot of the acting was rather stilted, a bit lacking in freedom and vulnerability. We’ve looked for other systems that might complement the Suzuki Training and bring out other elements of the performance. Our main influence has been not so much the Suzuki Company of Toga but one of their children, the City Company in New York run by Anne Bogart. Our training now comprises Suzuki as well as the Viewpoints Training which is much more improvisatory and much more freeform.

SW
I thought how am I going to describe this if I get asked. It’s like all of these training systems, very difficult to describe. Suzuki is very much focussed on the individual, on your sense of concentration, your energy, your focus and your relationship to the audience. It certainly takes into account the group dynamic but it’s much more about you as a performer. Viewpoints is about the group. It’s a series of improvisational exercises that allow the actor to take into account their relationship to the rest of the company. It focuses a lot on spontaneity, on creating material in the moment, on reaction to the other performers. There are actually 9 different viewpoints that enable the performer to create that awareness. There is a book, a collection of articles called Viewpoints and it was put together at a conference in the states. It’s been a fantastic influence for us. And as well as that, we do yoga and some Butoh exercises to work on the emotions more.

Alice Cummins (dancer, teacher)
I enjoyed the first part of your response because I was thinking oh, your approach and discipline has gone straight into performance. I think mine is doing something else but I’m not sure. In 1985, I think, thanks to Russell Dumas I first met Lisa Nelson [an American teacher of Contact Improvisation] in Melbourne and in the process of working with her she said one day, you might like to read this article on Bonny Bainbridge-Cohen [Body Mind Centering] from Contact Quarterly and I was smitten. I saw the light. Something tucked itself away and I was deeply curious. But I had to wait until my children grew up and I got Australia Council funding to go to do the study because it’s hugely expensive, especially from Australia. And I did that study, as Silver Bud did who’s also here, from 1995-98. I think one of the things to say about Body Mind Centering is that it’s an approach, not a technique and it’s really hard to be specific. It informs all of my work. I don’t necessarily always teach a Body Mind Centering class but it informs everything because it’s part of who I am now, part of my bodily intelligence and how I approach both working with people one to one or in a group or in a performance situation.

Yana Taylor (performer, teacher)
There are people of many different ages here today and that’s fantastic. And people with many different experiences both in Sydney and around the world. Physical practitioners are a very mobile mob and they go lots of places and come back. So I take you all as members of this broad church, this grouping made up of a set of networks taking in contemporary performance and physical theatre and that whole gamut. I have a series of questions related to that so we can all see who we might be.

I’d like everyone to stand up who has found only 1 of his or her training backgrounds useful in performance, whatever exciting thing it is that hooks you and engages you. How many people have found 2 things in their background that they’ve carried? OK 3, 4, 5, 6? (this is much more than I’d thought), 7, 8, 9, 10? Put your hands up if you think I haven’t reached your point yet…11, 12, 13, 14? Stand up anyone who thinks their training has been totally useless for them.

I did this to see how you might think and partly because of my own experience. I have a range of training backgrounds. The short list of decisive ones: years of classical ballet, quite a substantial amount of work in corporeal mime, Suzuki, I’m a tap dancer and I’ve done a lot of other things but in some ways all of those things have a relationship with where I am now. I remember one of my earlier teachers who came from Europe. A very fierce person she was but I worked with her for about 4 years. And one of the things she kept saying about Australians was that we were all dilettantes who didn’t take ourselves seriously and that we would therefore be cast out into the cultural tundra. And something about my rather adolescent and flimsy wavering sense of what I was doing still went ‘No, I’m gonna stick by this dedicated eclecticism’ as I’ve come to call it and see if in fact I might find others who are in the same situation because they live here too.

KG
Celia White, your background is in physical theatre. When you wrote to us you said when a regime becomes “useless” it should be thrown away. This is quite different from everyone else so far who’s spoken as if they’ve found heaven.

Celia White (director, physical theatre performer)
I started performing because I got seduced by circus and the idea of it–not circus circus but circus tricks as an avenue to doing other things with them in the late 70s. That was to do political theatre that became feminist theatre when there was the idea of making the female body strong. There was also the ooh-aah factor, the kind of spectacle that you could access really easily with circus. This is an interesting thing for a body like mine. There was no training. There was make-it-up-as-you-go and probably hurt-yourself-in-the-process. I love Feldenkrais now. Then that idea of whatever circus theatre was, which we never really knew, became very limiting and we found ourselves calling it something different. And in the process I grabbed at anything that was passing by. I have a dance background and I rebelled, unfortunately perhaps, and stopped because my teacher was my mother. So it’s interesting I don’t have a training as such. I’ve invented my own training. But there’s still that little sense that I haven’t had a regime to hook into and perhaps I’m looking for one…but perhaps I’ve missed the boat. The idea of another regime on this body seems impossible now.

KG
You can train in these methodologies and these are often about getting into a state of being or certain preparedness for a work but they can be quite different from the work itself.

CW
I think that’s an interesting question. People can be working on particular skills but when they take them into performance there’s something missing in terms of how to create the performance of the work. There’s a sense that your training won’t quite give you all the things you want for a particular performance. We’re opening things out all the time and creating new work that we’re not perhaps comfortable with. It is that sense of visiting as many things as possible to find for yourself what resonates for performing of your skill.

NH
There are so many layers here. One of them is where does aesthetic of the discipline start to shape the aesthetic of the work we make and how does that break new ground and create form?

SW
In Zen Zen Zo we’ve found the relationship between performance and training to be a very circular one. You go from training into performance and that creates problems and issues and question and then you’re back into training to address those issues and back into performance to test the answers. One of our founding members has been in most of our shows since 1992 and every time we do a show together it’s almost like we’re asking fundamental questions. He’s very good at the work, the best person in the training room in terms of ability and skill level, but when he goes into performance it raises for him a whole lot of new things which he has to address in the training.

NH
The training becomes the research and the performance becomes part of that research.

SW
It’s nice to have that ongoing context outside of the performance space where you can address performance issues.

Young performer
I’m just learning. When you’re starting out, is it better to go into these techniques and be totally open to them or do you try and gauge it in terms of your own person?

AC
You’re constantly making decisions. Unless you have no ego at all, you would be making decisions about what it is you enjoy, what it is makes you physically strong, what stimulates you intellectually, makes you curious, makes you a better performer. You’re not just going be a blank piece of paper that constantly stays blank. It’s not possible. There’s interaction.

Shannon Bott
I'm Shannon Bott, a dance-theatre maker from Perth and really new to it. I remember back to my training in dance at the WA Academy of the Performing Arts–the one question for me the whole way through was, who am I in this technique and is anybody going to ask me that for the 3 years I'm here? I’ve found a way into the self and the emotional self behind and with the movement. But I can see that you can be encouraged to separate yourself so that you become rigorous. So as someone asked earlier, when are you ready for performance? For me, I don’t know if there’s ever a “I’m ready now” but if I’ve been asking those questions and the awareness is there as the development and the process is taking place, then you’re ready when you’re ready.

Amy Salas (performer)
Could I combine a couple of things with the idea of when you are ready for performance. I came originally from a very strict gymnastics background with an Eastern Bloc-style coaching that was very intense. I found through that and through the subsequent acquisition of skills in circus performance that once you are starting to accomplish life-endangering skills, that your ability to turn on and turn off in a conscious performance mode refines itself. So I have found when that question is asked of me, when am I ready, the answer has been since a young age–always. What happens in the performance is another matter. [WAVES HER CRUTCHES. LAUGHTER] If you’re ever hesitant about whether you’re ready for performance, the best thing you can do is to develop the ability to put yourself into a physical position where you’re in danger of falling and then prove you can catch yourself. It’s not necessarily the rigour of training that pushes you to that point. You push yourself to that point, no matter what training you have.

KG
Gavin Robins, you’ve worked with Legs on the Wall but you’re also working on movement with actors in the Bell Shakespeare Company. Why are you doing that and what do you hope to achieve there?

Gavin Robins (performer, teacher
When I think what attracted me to physical theatre it was also about what I wasn’t getting in my training and the kind of theatre that I didn’t see and I wanted to see. I felt that the virtuosity that you see exemplified every Saturday at the VFL finals or even any sporting arena around Australia, that risk-taking wasn’t apparent in the theatre. But I’d walk down to the Dance block–I did a drama degree at Kelvin Grove in Brisbane–and I’d see virtuosity there and I’d see some of the Physical Education people doing it and I’d say,, why can’t theatre embrace this and why can’t actors be as developed in their physicality as they are in their intellectual ability and their vocal skills? I was driven by that. When I went to the NIDA Movement Course I saw a lot of stuff and I was involved in a lot of conventional work, as you are there. It’s a very classical training, and it was boring and kind of anti-physical and it really got up my nose. Then in 1994 I saw Legs’ on the Wall’s All of Me here at Performance Space and it was that first step towards a merging of virtuosity and eloquence with storytelling–the text maybe wasn’t as well integrated as other things but it was a step towards a vision. So part of my experience with Legs has been touring throughout the world and performing and really locking myself into a system. After a while I thought that’s it, I need to go out and apply these skills in other areas. I think you know when that time comes. It’s a gut feeling. Just as you’re attracted to something on stage or you’re not. You just feel it.

And Bell is an exciting company for me to work with at the moment because John has embraced this notion of the ensemble. He has 11 core performers who work with him for the whole year and I teach them yoga and basic balance acrobatics–things to empower the actor so that they might be able to lift a person above the chorus or have Ariel run across the backs of people. And then it’s a question of how that language furthers the theatrical aesthetic–does it say the same thing?

GR
He’s attempting to and I’m attempting to and I’m on this other learning curve about how that works with text. That’s why he’s got me there, to train the actors on the one hand and to look at the theatrical challenge of making a Shakespearean work something other than head acting. That’s where it’s brought me and that’s my desire. We see examples of it working in great companies like Théâtre de Complicité who have a seamless merging of so many skills. And it is that search for holism that I’m excited by and dynamic, eclectic training. And I think that’s what we should be striving for.

YT
Physical theatre has become a bit of a genre in Australia and it’s kind of different in other parts of the world, and in the ways people have reflected on it here. And I think what I’m hearing from you, Gavin, is that it’s Bell’s commitment to the ensemble, ie bodies in space and places, that actually provides the ground for any of that sort of exploration to take place. That's one of the thing that afflicts this network, that training regimes are considered an uncreative area and are very hard to support and fund unless it’s a creative development or rehearsal because it’s considered somehow unconstructed. This is why I respect the project of the Omeo Studio [Sydney] crew because they’re working really hard to create the kind of milieu where training is possible. And without that, these things stall despite all the sacrifices from generations of performers in a whole range of related work.

One of the things that I think I might be seeing here tonight is that institutional practice is all right–it’s okay to go to Kelvin Grove or WAAPA but it ain’t enough. And beyond that these tracks are ones of people self-teaching and finding their own path through. There needs to be room for that and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find space for it.

Fiona Winning (director Performance Space)
Omeo is a really interesting example in that there are a range of artists who have decided to have an ongoing practice and through this very fundamental decision are able to link a whole lot of training and research and performance imperatives in the one place. Unfortunately, too many artists who have all sorts of excellent training don’t have that opportunity or drive to make their practice ongoing.

YT
Some of it has been by subterfuge. A lot of people have been very creative in how they’ve used creative development and rehearsal.

KG
One of the most contentious areas of contemporary performance is the voice. You have the situation where you have a marvellous rhetoric of the body which is trained and a funny little voice pops out. It’s not always the case, but companies will employ a dramaturg if they can but not very often will they address the issue of voice.

Matthew Fargher (performer, vocal teacher)
My training is largely in physical theatre and traditional theatre via Philippe Gaulier and people like him, Yoshio Ida, a Japanese actor in Paris and subsequently a bunch of voice teachers who had a very body-based approach–people like Linda Wise. I feel like I have absolutely no light to head towards. There’s no really interesting physical vocalists performing that I’ve come across anywhere in the world probably because I haven’t had time to go and look for them. A lot of my time over the past 10 years has been spent really just saying, okay I have these disciplines side by side in myself, as a musician and an actor and a singer and someone who has a physical training and someone who does a lot of work with physical performers. I work a lot with Stalker Theatre and that’s recently taken me to be working with Aboriginal dancers and singers in the Marrugeku Company.

My understanding of the relationship between the body and the voice came from an accidental moment in the lead up time for a class I did for a Contemporary Performance Week at Sidetrack in which I went partially deaf due to an ear infection. Suddenly I realised that I could hear my body from the inside. I could hear my breathing and suddenly sense the whole voice thing at a kinaesthetic level and suddenly it was like, there’s the clue. You can translate all of that body approach, feel the interaction between yourself and the space and yourself and another, whether that’s from a contact improvisation point of view or any discipline that puts an individual in a space with a degree of sensitivity. You can suddenly translate a lot of that work into voice work. And subsequently, I feel like everything that’s come in since then has made sense in the context of that discovery. I feel like I don’t need to say I follow such and such a training. It’s just me and everything that comes in and then everything that goes out. It sort of changes a bit depending on where I am at the time.

The tricky thing is then deciding what you can actually do with it in terms of performance. And maybe this is yet another question. The discipline of getting an individual or group of people to do physical work and then translate that into voice–I’m doing it every week with the choir I sing with. We do a lot of physical work in the lead up. Every time I work with a choir that doesn’t do that, they’re like, oh, you mean, you can kind of move before you sing? It’s a revelation. I think it’s easier to bring physicality to people who use their voices already and have an effect than the other way around. And maybe it’s because I haven’t really had the opportunity. Even in the work I was doing with you Nikki, there was an emphasis on the voice in where we said we were going but in the voice and the training I was the shag on the rock making noise all the time amongst these beautiful performers for whom the noise was limited to what comes out of the body by shlapping about on the floor.

I would love to see it as a discipline and find a way of using it but part of the problem is what do you look at to give you an example of where to head? And part of the problem with all the disciplines that have sprung up in Australia in the last 20 years is that they have created some specifically Australian languages of physical performance and you could say that there’s this school and that one. But apart from a few individuals who make noise while they perform there isn’t anything like what you might call a school of vocal physical performance. So I’ve had to look elsewhere within Australia to see if there is a cultural lead and the obvious thing for me is the way that the Cook Islanders and a lot of islanders perform because they have a very physical way of singing and the singing and the gesture are one. So there’s a lead. There’s probably a number of examples like that.

Interestingly, a lot of the other places where there is a strong vocal tradition and a strong dance tradition, like Africa and the Aboriginal traditions, often voice and movement don’t go together. I’ve had to develop another understanding about the relationship between the sound and the performer, another traditional form. I think there are examples of that where you have someone doing physical performance and somebody singing and the relationship that can develop between the two. There’s myriad traditional examples of that throughout the world and I think quite a few good examples in performance here. But it’s the other one that's the issue– people moving in space and doing physical performance who yack on as well or sing or whatever.

KG
Mémé, in the Suzuki Method you've said the approach to voice was of muscularity rather than relaxation.

MT
It’s quite contentious. I don’t know how many people here have any idea of how the voice is used in the Suzuki Method. In terms of talking about training “regimes”, the Suzuki Method fits. It is quite militaristic and the vocal work tends to be that way too. It’s the way you apply it that tends to be completely different. It’s a means of arriving at a certain point of preparation as a performer. That’s how I see training, it doesn’t matter what the regime is.

In terms of the use of the voice, the basis of the Suzuki Method is to place yourself physically in a state whereby all your means of vocal production is harnessed in a powerful and dynamic way. For instance, while I’m speaking now, I’m placing my body in quite an arduous position. I’m holding myself in such a way that my thighs, my abdominal muscles are actually being held. What happens while I do that is that my diaphragm is engaged and for me to create the sound, I have to use my diaphragm quite strongly to push my words out. In other words, to use my body physically, strongly, I free myself to project because the means of vocal production are being utilised. You’re training your muscles to memorise the state in which you are able to produce that sound, or that emotional quality or whatever it is. You use the training to prepare but when you walk on stage you leave the training behind and you take with you onstage the sensibility and the sensitivity that has brought you to that point from your preparations. I’ve worked with Linda Wise, Bill Pepper with Mathew Fargher and most vocal training relies on learning how to breathe in order to accommodate and facilitate the sounds you want to make, whether you’re speaking or singing or just breathing. They generally work from a point of relaxation and opening up and allowing your lungs to fill up. It’s the same in Suzuki except that you also harness your physical strength as the base from which to create the sound.

Silver Budd
I’m not sure whether I leave my training behind when I go on stage. I’m a Body Mind Centering practitioner and I actually feel that through that technique I get tools or ways of working with myself. Say, right now I’m having to talk and I feel nervous and so I’m looking for my belly and I’m looking for my blood and I’m looking for what connects me more with the earth and I’m going into my body to find what can soften in my organs, how can I make more space in my throat and all the time. I’m using this inward vision that I got from Body Mind Centering which very much has taught me about all the different systems of cells in my body that are making me be here at this moment, the way I’m being here.

I was interested in the answer to the question about when you might be ready for performance, when you can do life-endangering things, and I just immediately had the response, oh yeah life-endangering is also about psychologically and emotionally life-endangering. I’m an improviser. I don’t actually do cartwheels with no hands or triple somersaults or anything but I think performing is about wanting to give my presence and my self, my very specific self which can also be life endangering.

KG
You speak about differentiation, about relaxing or controlling certain parts of the body. How do you reach that state?

SB
It’s really quite simple. Whenever you read descriptions of Body Mind Centering, we always go through the system–the fluid system, the bone system, the nerve system, the glandular system, the muscle system. The thing I love about it is that it gives you a total full-time practice which is to learn about those systems and drop into them any time all the time. So I jump, not always in a disciplined way. I check out my ligaments and then I think are my glands all working together to really help me produce myself, project outwards. Am I being more central, am I coming out to the periphery? Tons of different questions that I can ask on any level.

KG
Sue Broadway, what happens to your body in performance? You’re calling on everything from tap dancing to whatever?

SueB
All of my training from when I was quite small right up to more recently is the exact opposite to Silver’s, starting from the external. I’ve only come to learning about any kind of internal training much, much later in my career. I counted 20 training regimes for Yana and I was only counting the ones I'd done for a month or more, including some exotic ones like Peking Opera and Balinese mask and Kathakali. You can learn a duet in Peking Opera where 2 people learn it in different rooms and then stand opposite each other, someone says go and it works. And you don't hit each other with the sword! I think I'm with Mémé, I think they all become so ingrained and in the body that when I go out to do the work I feel all of that at a subconscious level, in the muscles and not in the brain at all.

I started training as an actor. In fact, I failed NIDA at 17 and in the last 5 years I've come back to talking–I didn't talk as a performer. Surprisingly, all of that voice training actually returns. It's amazing. I haven't touched it for years. I had to dig it out but it was there waiting for me. So that was good. Now I take risks–the risk of making a complete idiot of myself. I do things where I can be standing in front of an audience with broken glass all over the floor. A lot of the things I do are about focussing on getting one throw right. You know when the object leaves your hand, you know as you take the beat, you know whether you've done it or not. It's not in the body but in the state of mind that you've managed to locate, a tempo in your body that repeats the action for you.

AC
You do it in your mind but your mind is in your body. Your intelligence is all over your body. That the Body Mind Centering training. Intelligence isn't just from the head up–this is this thing that reacts and responds unconsciously. It's bringing it into differentiation and consciousness so that it can do whatever it needs to do–save your life. That's what your reflexes will do for you. That's how you know when you throw at that moment, you know it hasn't come together the moment it leaves your hand.

Lowell Lewis (academic, anthropologist)
My embodied theatrical practice is university lecturing, an unusual form of physical theatre but somebody's got to do it. And I'd just like to return to this idea of voice in motion. For me there's an interesting dynamic in the strength of vocal training. Can you run across the room while holding the tongue, for example. And you can learn to do that. It's a strength thing. So that you can run across the room and not go ah-ah-ah-ah. There's also an aspect of vocal training that is the relaxing part. Some bits have to relax while others are tense. And different trainings work with different dynamics to do with how much tension and relaxation. It becomes embodied in your intelligent body. By the way I agree with what you (Alice) say although I think it's a duality. I call it the embodied mind and the intelligent body, trying to get to a third place that is somewhere in between. Somebody brought up this notion of rapping and hip hop where the vocal and physical do come together. But when they start breaking, they don't sing. You try singing while spinning on the top of your head. It's like another degree up. The artform that I've worked on quite a lot is Capoeira, the Brazilian martial artform which also involves singing. And the best players can actually do Capoeira and sing at the same time. Although they'll only do certain movements. They won't do the really strong acrobatic movements–because nobody has that degree of strength–where you can go into a headstand or handstand and still be singing.

The limits are kind of interesting. Could you do a breakdancing routine while rapping at the same time? That would be a big ask. So there are reasons why these have been divided and some interesting limits that are involved in that.

MF
Absolutely. I think the big question there is the appropriateness of training. There has to be a different training involved in trapeze work from certain softer forms of performance that require an incredible sensitivity. And an incredible sensitivity is difficult in certain kinds of circus because it just hurts too much.

CW
I remember there was certain work we were doing in Legs on the Wall in a show like Hurt. A physical action takes an incredible amount of focus especially in balance acrobatics or trapeze–whenever someone's holding you and you're supporting someone else. Whenever you're responsible for somebody else as well as yourself, there's an incredible amount of concentration required. Then there's the performance–your interaction with the audience with your co-performers. Then there's the speaking, the text, the song. And it was like, choreography, words, concentration and it was like…and it took…time. To do this kind of work you've got a 4 week rehearsal period if you're lucky you might be able to stretch it to 6. In that time you've got your training as well as rehearsing. You're finding repertoire and training and putting it in performance. Somewhere in there you're speaking. You're thinking how the hell do you find the money or the time to train plus integrate all those things together to make it work effectively?

David Williams (performer/producer)
That's actually where a lot of trainings came from, from performance, from trying to work out how it is possible to do all of these things at the same time. For instance, the Suzuki training came out of the SCOT (Suzuki Company of Toga) performances and it developed over a long period of time and it's constantly being updated. Simon Woods was talking about rehearsal feeding back into training and if you do look at the history of Suzuki for instance, it came out of the actual work. So if the training is not about the work, then why train?

Alison Richards (academic, performance studies)
I wanted to address the person who was asking, well what should I do? I was interested in Yana's experience talking about her first teacher who came from a really structured tradition and for whom that was the only gate–‘No person cometh unto performance but by me.’ And then Mathew talking about putting different trainings together. I think it's really important to understand that every training produces a different you and comes in at a different point. It isn't just static. It's dynamic and you are making yourself all the time as you do it. So in a way, it is really interesting to hear from people who are all at different stages of their journeys because in some ways it's always a dance, if you like, between certainty and uncertainty and at different points in your life, you're ready for different things. You can only ever respond to what is calling you and sometimes you can only respond to what's there.

GR
I think whether you've got an eclectic approach or if you follow one path, whatever style it is, you follow it right to the end. You're in it for the long haul. And you've got to polish the diamond yourself. No one else is going do it for you. And it takes a long time.

MF
The thing that I come to more and more in body training the voice is that the best practitioners for what I want to do are the under-3s. I've just been watching my 2 year-old doinging up and down on the bed and singing “doinga doinga doinga.” It's such a perfect synthesis of movement and sound and joy and everything wrapped into one. There's a whole school of vocal and body teaching that very much focuses on that state of being of very young children who have a strong sense of connection with the base of the brain and the systems we have evolved that produce sound and movement etc. If you start bringing disciplines together, the root of everything is that we have these systems that function within the body that can go places. There's things that you might want to do with them that we weren't designed to do like ride on unicycles, or throw each other around at extreme velocities.

MF
Or do co-ordination things that babies weren't designed to do. And in a way, if you start with those 2 things in mind, it doesn't really matter whether you start with an internal approach and try and re-find something or you learn tapdancing and become so perfect at it that it's just a state of being. It almost doesn't matter. In music you find a lot of people who've gone beyond their training or people who are way before their training and they're just like poetry. And in between is agony for years.

Paul Selwyn Norton
Choreographer, autodidact, I never went to formal school. I'm interested in what you say. If your kid said Dad, I really want to perform, where would you send the kid?

MF
Because I live in the eastern suburbs, I'd probably send him off to do Capoiera because it's a very integrated form that encapsulates a spiritual tradition as well as a martial arts one, as well as a musical one, as well as a body one. And I like the people who teach it and they play soccer.

MF
Yes. It almost could be anything. It would probably be easier to decide what instrument to start a kid with. If I wanted to lead them towards music I'd say look, sing all the time, but probably start with anything you can get a sound out of quickly. Don't start with a bassoon. Start with a piano and it's probably a similar thing with performance. Choose something you can get your teeth into and jump somewhere.

NH
Paul, what, would you put your performers through if you wanted to make work and they weren't trained dancers? You work mostly with highly trained dancers?

PSN
I was very fortunate to be taken off the disco floor and put on stage at the age of 23 so while I didn't do any formal training. I had quite a strong sense of proprioception, this ownership of what we have here.

Andrew Morrish (improvisor)
I was taken from a disco floor too but asked to stop doing that! LAUGHTER

PSN
You are asking what training I would put dancers through to be able to approach the poetics of my work. Well as a choreographer I believe I'm privileged to be able to manipulate body/space/time mechanics which is what we all do as artists. That's fundamental. So if I was working with say, a gymnast, I might teach them a sense of musicality, rhythm, timing. If I have a room full of gymnasts and I want them to approach my sense of choreography, I would have to reorganise them. That's what I do. I just put them through different spatial, body, time modulations or ways of moving in order for them to be able to approach my way of choreographing. There are many, many systems that I've picked up over the years. I spent my first 4 or 5 years dancing for other people, not too happily, and ended up having to choreograph by default. I became a hunter-gatherer for resources that suited my poetics best. I think the poetry governs the work and you find the tools which will best express the poetics of that work. For me it's the poetics that govern the work, not actual technique.

KG
Nigel Kellaway has said that significant Australian dancers have either been trained by Russell Dumas or Leigh Warren. Russell Dumas has yielded a body of very distinctive work over the years. What do you expect of people who come to you in terms of training?

Russell Dumas (choreographer, dancer)
Access to an embodied heritage. My own practice embraces the modern and postmodernism and I worked with Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp and everyone in between. I think it's interesting in the last 20 years, for reasons that I think are associated with (economic) rationalism and globalisation–by which I mean Americanisation and free markets and the way this is playing out–that there are no significant breaks to the canon. It's habitus, this notion of what you need to forget so that you can have a present. It's more what you can have–you need to forget the past so that you can have a future. But you also need to have a practice to have a future. And having a practice in Australia is like being a homosexual in a Roman Catholic seminary. It's all right as long as you're not out.

You're talking about technique, but what for? This whole thing is like some Foucauldian notion of bodies and disciplining bodies. About 30 years ago I came across the notion of the thinking body and experiential anatomy. Basically it comes down to the sense of touch, the fundamental, or lexical sense of touch. It's probably the first sense and the one through which we know the other senses. That relationship to touch is distinctly related to the mother's touch and it's often denied as a sense of knowing or a way of knowing.

You're also talking there about embodiment. There's a history of denial to do with the body. We're always talking about the body of knowledge, the body of wisdom, the body incorporated but what's the relationship of my body to Dance Exchange Incorporated? What's the relationship of the private and the public of this body? It's not so much about the visual.

You're talking about wanting people to look at you. I became interested in dance as a homosexual growing up in central Queensland where I did ballet and became interested in the notion of a performance of absence. If people looked at you, you got bashed up. The performance of absence was something that later was quite useful to me. Cunningham asked me to work with him because he was interested in that quality. It also got me jobs with any number of people.

The notion of when you're ready to perform I think is something that is profoundly about when you lose yourself, when you're not there. So that someone looking at what you're doing is not in this didactic relationship. It's like fascism. The notion of a text that involves an audience and how they might respond and the way that text is created and where the meaning is created is what interests me more. So I don't care about the number of bodies I work with and the different bodies. Probably the most interesting bodies I've worked with have been the untrained ones like Keith March and Nick Sabel. The other ones are either very trained, who have had ballet training. In a sense I'm interested in the notion of a colonial ballet practice and how people talk about Republicanism with this world of dance. It's something that's barcoded into children's bodies.

But anyway, the thing that interests me is a sense of touch that is not suppressed by visuality. I think the relationship of visuality to patriarchal society is the issue. We have a room full of practitioners who are on the edges. Meanwhile you have all these companies that all do ballet. The dancers all applied to the Australian Ballet School and the ones who didn't get into the ballet companies then become the contemporary dancers.

KG
At university you might get a semester or a class or a module in some aspect of physical theatre or voice. Elsewhere various artists and groups offer short term courses. What about the lack of availability of ongoing training?

Performer
I rediscovered performing last year through the Impact Ensemble at PACT. I'd been studying at the Centre for Performance Studies which has also fed what I'm beginning to see as a practice. I've subsequently started up a group meeting once a week to continue practicing and pooling our money to have tutors come in on a needs basis, depending on what we want to work on at the time. By feeling what we need we try to access that through who we know of the more established practitioners. I've had an incredible support from those practitioners.

AS
I've struggled with this since I finished with gymnastics because I found the process of doing gymnastics 6 days a week 30-40 hours a week both fearful–I was scared of it–and painful. And I've tried to be a producer and I've discovered something wonderful that has helped me. It has to be integral. I find it hard to get motivated for all sorts of reasons and I have to start right from how I get up in the morning, how I have a shower, and how I organise my day to day practice, I need to stick to repetition. While I'm ironing, I'm doing my knee evaluations. When I'm in the shower, I'm waking up my system turning the hot and cold and giving myself a vocal warmup at the same time. For me it has to be continual consciousness.

DW
As a young person, who doesn't always feel very young, I can feel my current embodied practice of lifting heavy things professionally in continual lower back pain. I used to find it very easy to train, to go and pursue workshop training extra-curricular to my studies. I studied at the University of Western Sydney at Nepean. Yana Taylor was a pivotal teacher in a way because she addressed my dissatisfactions with what I was learning and said, go to these other places. Subsequent to leaving university and subsequent to the Contemporary Performance Week milestones that I had come to know, these are all disappearing. We all know what they were–Open Week at Performance Space, Contemporary Performance Week at Sidetrack. There were structures, people practicing who had workshops so I could do a workshop with Mémé Thorne and then several workshops a week with Mémé Thorne. They were good. More recently, I'm interested in putting on shows. I have to earn money to pay for these shows, so I am engaged in lifting heavy things professionally. This really compromises my ability to train. And this is not a sob story. This is just observation. There is no ongoing practice. There's a series of influences, a series of trainings that I draw on in particular circumstances. But no ongoing practice and I feel the loss.

YT
The opportunities and support mechanisms around them have become thinner on the ground. At the same time, the appetite for them has been circulating. So we are actually at an interesting point. I can think of some ordinary things to do–when people are making applications to funding organisations, that there is some support for the idea that training is part of the creative pursuit and intimately woven into it. At the other level is the way the field's run for a long time. Making do, bartering, exchange. But in Sydney there's less and less infrastructure for that to happen ie space, time and access to it.

Lyndal Jones is a leading multi-disciplinary Australian artist who has produced performance works, installations, site-specific and video works and impressive permutations of all of these. Jones was selected to be Australia’s sole representative at the Venice Biennale in 2001. For this event, the Australia Council commissioned a new site-specific, video installation, Deep Water/Aqua Profunda. The exhibit’s curator is John Barrett-Lennard and the commissioner is Leon Paroissien. The handsome catalogue includes essays by Barrett-Lennard, Margaret Plant and Lesley Stern (“Let ‘Lyndal Jones’ be the name that we give to a body of work, a body that mutates as it traverses”). At the Australia Council’s Sydney launch, after which we interviewed Jones, we noted the number of times the speakers stressed the weight of responsibility which attaches to participation in such a prestigious event.

The power of buzz

If it’s a failure, then I’m on my own really. Who’s responsible but me? If it’s a success, then it could have a lot of ramifications for artists. But we’re all used to that, aren’t we? If you start to think bigger than that, then you fry. The Venice Biennale is a big event, but lots of little countries show work there, and big countries. Everyone makes sure they see the American pavilion and then it really does depend on how the work is picked up. Some works are of-the-moment and no-one can predict what they will be.

There’s a sort of a buzz that goes around the Biennale that a work should be seen. It’s the same as the Biennale here. That’s how (American video artist) Doug Aitken became really well-known. His work, From one side of an Island to another was shown at the last Biennale—it’s kind of about alienation really, very hip, dark, wonderful piece. It was the work in a sense. And what was fantastic was that, unlike a lot of video work, it wasn’t just a single ‘action.’ As artists we watch other artists and identify or not with a single, potent action—that’s kind of the rule for making video. People don’t necessarily have the confidence to just see that some of us work in a different way until someone like Doug gets the stamp of approval for making a much more narrative work. And suddenly it all opens up.

I work with video from a subjective, experiential position for the viewer. Consequently, a certain type of critic has difficulty with it because they can’t stand outside and analyse it. But for a lot of people just watching it, it’s quite straightforward. They’re just in it.

Make me wait

There’s a particular state in making work that is really exciting, whatever it is. And for me it has to respond to things that are important at the time. And they’ve usually been political things. From the Darwin Translations (1994-98) is really about an erotic voice. What really drove that was that whole feminist debate about pornography. There was the anti-pornography group. Then there was the group who basically, like myself, thought well, what are you trying to say, we can’t have thoughts and fantasies? And so it was about trying to find a woman’s very vocal fantasies. So this work is a kind of shift from that, I’m not sure where to…

Desire’s there at an emotional level. And the erotic, putting off the pleasure. At one point in Aqua Profunda the woman on the screen says, “Make me wait.” It’s based on the refrain of her counting to 10, sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian. And it’s about the way we count. As a kid I used to sit in the bath and Mum would tell me to get out and I’d count to 10 and when I got to 7, I’d go 7 and a half, 7 and three quarters…I’ve since discovered just how prevalent it is. Another line in it is, “It’s about restraint.” So she’s saying “Make me wait” and the narrator/gallery guide is saying to the audience, on the soundtrack, “She’s waiting, wouldn’t you say?” “She’s practising restraint.” It’s my voice. The gallery guide is just a voice. It’s a discussion about the image. The woman’s face is increasingly close-up, sometimes she’s looking at her audience, sometimes just waiting, in a sense, and counting.

All my work implicates the audience. And that’s to refuse being an object. So people can’t just simply, safely watch her. So in a sense it starts with us safely watching her and, in fact, discussing and analysing her and she turns around and says, “No, I’m not doing that. I’m waiting.”

Immersive

The images are floor to ceiling. And basically the size of the space is pretty much the size of Wharf 4 (Sydney). It’s a little bit narrower. So where the cameras were placed is in fact where the images will be placed in the room in Venice, 3 along one side and 1 at the end. And that looks across water to those 50s Sydney buildings. And you can see similar ones in Venice. There’s a line of flats. Then on either side, there are close-ups of the sides of ferries and sometimes bits of people depending on how close the ferries are. They’re like screens really or curtains, so you can see the other wharf and it’s almost continuous, because it’s the farthest away that we focused on. Then the Manly ferry will come in, a great big green curtain with a stripe. And you see it from the end one. It’s beautiful. Then there are little ferries that come in front, backwards and forward, faster. There you see bits of people. It’s simple.

I love the ferries. There are ferries in Melbourne too but they’re not everyday working ferries. They’re not ordinary, they’re not about transporting people to work. So in both cities, Sydney and Venice, it’s the ordinariness of the ferries that’s important.

Site specifics

I knew the site. I made the work for what I knew. I had footage—shot on an earlier visit by hanging over the water from the back of a gondola. I also had footage of Howard Arkley’s show. Then John Barrett-Lennard and I went back to Venice a couple of months ago to measure everything so that all the walls could be built before we got back—saving a lot of money. And I was really pleased that I was right about the space, that it wasn’t just a fantasy. I had to do a complete breakdown and a floor plan for the application and I submitted a video showing some of the footage and I talked. Because there’s talk in the piece, it seemed appropriate. And I showed bits of other works. If you really want it, you treat it seriously.

We’re building some extra walls, mostly to make the spaces discrete. They’re only sections of walls—there’s one space up high and there are steps down to the lower space. I’m building a wall around the upstairs space to cut that off, so that it’s like a square room. I don’t want the viewer to have any analytic possibilities. Yes, the associations become aural rather than visual.

Water and sound

I grew up on the Murrumbidgee and my perspective was always water on the edge of a desert. It makes sense. Otherwise I don’t understand why I work on such a big scale. And I’ve always worked with the idea of a field of events so that you can have a choice about where you look.

And sound has always played a part. In From the Darwin Translations, on one side is Freud and on the other side is Darwin, and of course, the intellectual debate surrounding those 2 men is so completely fierce. And I was intrigued that in art you could be watching the finches (live and caged at one end of the installation), being a naturalist in a sense, but you had to hear the confessions to an analyst. And on the other side (in an adjoining room), you could be listening and watching and being a voyeur, as an analyst is, but you had to hear the finches. So art creates a synthesis that you can’t possibly do intellectually.

Aqua Profonda in Fitzroy

There’s a sign in the Fitzroy Swimming Pool: “Danger. Deep Water. Aqua Profonda.” It’s so big at the end of the pool on a blue ground. It’s fabulous. It just dominates the pool, the atmosphere. It’s right near Carlton (Melbourne) which is the area where all the Italian immigrants were housed when they arrived. It would have been written in the 40s or 50s and has been kept I suppose because it’s so iconic. In the pool you sense that you could really be in Italy. You look up and see the writing and you hear people speaking Italian and you’re in Australia. It’s ordinary. That’s what’s intensely pleasurable.

The other thing is that they wrote the sign as “Aqua” which is Latin, not the Italian “Acqua.” And “Profonda” is Italian and not the Latin “Profunda.” And I thought, to be truthful, I really should keep this but I can’t do it. I’ll just look like a drip. I went with the Latin because I wanted the association across languages a bit and because of the way contemporary Italian writers are using Latin as a language.

Shooting

You mostly see the water in Venice when you’re on the vaporetto. It’s a single viewpoint looking down. And that starts on one screen and moves to the next. Whereas the Sydney wharf material is on 5 screens, so it’s a complete experience of being there at the time. But, as I said, not all that representational, it’s like closeups. It’s just extraordinary. Sometimes it looks like paper…it’s really abstract. There are moments in the first two thirds of it where you see a boat go past and you think, oh, water. It suddenly becomes three dimensional. After that it becomes much more abstract. It becomes like marble paper and like this flat, grey surface. Absolutely not manipulated.

The Venice stuff I shot myself. The Sydney stuff was a 5 camera shoot Garry Warner organised. Basically we just turned the cameras on and I ran around and lined them all up and people minded a camera and we let them run for the half hour. And we did that twice.

The upstairs footage I had a cinematographer do, Patrick Byrne, with a sound recordist. It was Patrick’s idea to use a mixture of blue gels just behind the performer (Tanja Bulatovic). It’s so closeup and the first two thirds of it just with a locked off camera and she does the work. She can find the lens. It’s fantastic. Then there’s a whole section in which I used real closeups, like a mouth or an ear and you see some of the wildness of the colour, all out of focus, just this bright background, kind of like a painting. We spent a whole day shooting and there’s this one continuous take which I repeated I liked it so much. It has a voiceover as well as her speaking and counting. Then there’s an intercut section that I’ve dissolved of the really closeup stuff. Then I’ve re-used this piece but with a different story. So there are chance relations between the language and the images.

Writing

It took a long time. I found it very hard. It’s taken me months and it’s only 4 pages. I don’t know how I wrote it. It went through a stage of being highly embarrassing. I read it to a friend and he looked at me and you know how when you read something aloud you think, oh my God, this is really…You have to be able to do that, of course. So I went back and pulled it in and I was very happy with it in the end. I think it could sit quite nicely almost as a sort of poetic piece with some images.

Cycles

It’s basically me talking to the viewers about the image, the narrator, not me. The narrator becomes more and more implicated in a sense. And the counting is the basis of it. And each piece is cyclic rather than narrative. It’s a scene rather than a narrative. It’s a moment or 2 moments.

The downstairs piece is 30 minutes and upstairs is 20. So they’ll cycle differently against each other. So I’ll never be able to control it fully. But again what we do is work within a field of constraints that allow it to have meaning, otherwise it would be arbitrary.

The counting is important. Tanja counts in a teasing way or with a sense of desolation. In the end she’s just sobbing, snot running from her nose. It’s very simple, not acted.

It’s cyclic—people have to be able to come in at any point. And you have to be able to enter a meditative state.

How it all happened

Before the Keating Fellowship I was doing a mixture of performance and video work. And when I got the fellowship, I thought, here I had an amount of money to work full time but, in fact, it was an amount that a writer or a painter or a person working by themselves could use but certainly not someone working with performance. You couldn’t live and make performances on it. I made one performance, Spitfire 1 2 3 (1996), but that’s when I really started to focus on video. My work now, for all that everyone says about it, is actually much smaller in scale than some of those performance things I did.

At the same time I made Spitfire 1 2 3 as a film. Lynn Cook wanted the installation version for the 1996 Sydney Biennale. But that was all cut back because of equipment. So she ended up showing the film, which was also shown at the Ian Potter Gallery (Melbourne) at the end of that year. Then it was picked up for Video Positive 9 in Liverpool, UK. And it was a huge hit there. As a result of that, within 6 months it was invited to show at the 15th World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam in 1997. It was in Fotofeis, an international photography festival in Scotland where quite a lot of Australian art was shown. I was invited to work as artist in residence for 6 months in Ayr, just outside Glasgow. I was invited to show other work in Coil, a film/text magazine in London. I was also invited to a Belgian festival but in the end I just couldn’t do it. And the work was already going to Berlin in an Australian show, selected by a German curator. That was the only Australian show I was in. All the rest came out of showing the film.

Liz Anne Macgregor had wanted me to show Spitfire at the Ikon Gallery when she was there, but, again, I couldn’t because it was already being shown somewhere else. So we talked about showing other work and I said I’d like to show the new work Demonstrations and Details (2000). So it was shown there and in a regional tour—just a few weeks ago it was shown at the Newland Gallery in Cornwall. You see how it works. They just kind of come off one another once you start.

Life

I haven’t had one. It’s been quite hard. I was running the sculpture course at RMIT for the last couple of years while Robert Owen was away. He was away again this year but I couldn’t even contemplate doing it. So I’ve got no idea what happens to my life at the end of June. None whatsoever. And that’s looming very fast. I just have to have faith and know I can pick up my Feldenkrais work, but it takes a while to get a clientele going again, a couple of years usually. So, we’ll see.

It’s very hard. With a partner, that’s fine. But for me to be away for 5 months from friends and family and by myself…You live very sparely. It’s too hard. On the Ayr residency I had a cottage way out in the Scottish countryside. I bought an old Zephyr that had been used in a Ken Loach film. I’d drive for 35 minutes to get into the school at Ayr, then another 1 and a half hours to Glasgow. And once a month to London. It was winter and bitterly cold. I’ve been invited by this place up outside Dundee. By the sounds of it they do fantastic projects. They want to show the Spitfire piece too, because there’s an airforce base there. It’s so apposite to show that work all through Britain and Holland and Germany. It makes sense there. Whereas in America, I don’t think I’d bother showing it. There’s no point. And there’d be the censorship. It’s just a romantic piece.

Wish

A lot of my work was enabled by the Keating Fellowship. There are 2 things that I’d really like. One is for the reinstitution of something like that for artists. And the second thing is to have an equipment (DVD, video, computer) source for artists and galleries in Australia. They’re 2 things that I think would be significant contributions, that I’ve had the benefit of, or difficulties with in the latter case.

It feels wonderful doing the Venice Biennale. It’s a big moment for anybody. It was the same when I got the Keating Fellowship. I’ve been very privileged.

Lyndon Terracini is an eminent opera performer. He has worked extensively in Europe, with Peter Greenaway and David Freeman among others, and committed himself to new Australian music theatre, appearing in Michael Smetanin and Alison Croggan’s The Burrow, Paul Grabowsky and Janis Balodis’s The Mercenary (which he commissioned), as well as touring his own music theatre production of The Cars That Ate Paris. He established NORPA (Northern Rivers Performing Arts) in Lismore NSW, a breakthrough in regional arts, presenting a year-round international arts program alongside locally produced work (like The Mercenary and The Cars That Ate Paris). We celebrated Lyndon’s first Queensland Biennial Festival of Music with a bottle of red wine as the ebullient Artistic Director described a unique event designed for musicians, urban and far flung communities, and all music lovers. (eds)

The festival is like a great tree, under which musicians from everywhere meet every 2 years to play. Ever since the first arts festival I went to, in Adelaide in 1973, I thought yes, festivals are places for audiences but they’re also for artists to get together.

Salvo Terracini

I started playing in Salvation Army bands and then I played a lot of jazz in pubs around Sydney when I was young. I grew up in Dee Why. Went to Manly Boys High. I remember doing Music for the Higher School Certificate and I actually didn’t have a music teacher. I sat in a room on my own! For a year! With no-one! I started doing a lot of concerts with the Renaissance Players. It was great. I played the knackers (a medieval percussion instrument) in that because I played timpani in the Salvation Army as well. And did a South-East Asian tour. We did 35 concerts in 5 weeks plus travelling. 1974. It was a really hard gig. Michael Atherton was on that tour. Graham Pushee, Jonathan Rubin. It was a great band but people got really sick and it was really hard work. I was at the Opera School, then I went to New Opera in South Australia. Justin Macdonnell offered me a contract there. It was the first job I’d had that was longer than a week. And I sang in Janacek’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek as my first gig. And loved it. Then the Australian Opera offered me a contract and then James Murdoch asked me to do Henze’s El cimarron (about a runaway Cuban slave) at the 1976 Adelaide Festival.

El cimarron

I got the score and I thought, God, I know how to do this piece. It was a combination of having been an instrumentalist and performer in a number of areas—I’d played in orchestras and bands as a trumpet player, did jazz, sang medieval music. I’d also worked as a session singer when I was at the Opera School and in fact sang at the first variety concert at the Sydney Opera House—a duet with Rolf Harris. I did commercials, did backings for Kamahl, Olivia Newton-John, Helen Reddy. And I came to El cimarron and all of those things were in it and I knew how to do them. The only difficulty for me—well, not the only one, it’s a very very difficult piece—I was frightened about just getting through it. And I’d never done a piece like that before, as big as that, singing flat out on your own for an hour and a half. Extreme stuff. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. I turned the page for the last section and the first line was “Maybe I will die tomorrow”, and I looked at it and the first thing I thought was, shit, I’m gonna make it. It was a great concert, a fantastic time. Hans Werner Henze was there and he directed it.

He invited me to sing the premier of Don Quixote later that year. It was the first time I’d been to Italy and I remember getting off the plane in Rome. The first thing I did was take a photo of a car with a Roman number plate! I thought I’d never get back. But it was a great experience and really conceptualised for me what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.

Lismore

We were living in Italy and Liz, my wife, got really sick with lung problems and I was singing in Switzerland a lot and we went to a specialist there and he said, look we need to take a lung out. I thought that was pretty drastic and so we asked what the alternative might be and he said, well, I suggest a hot, humid climate. We were coming out to Brisbane because my brother was getting married and it was Christmas time and I’d had to dig the car out of a snowdrift in Zurich to get to the airport. We got off the plane in Brisbane at Christmas and drove down to Byron Bay through Bangalow to Lismore. And that time of year, you think, what is this place. I mean this is Paradise. And it was hot and humid and so we thought we’d try it and Liz has been a million times better. [And you happened on a place with an Italian history?] Absolutely. It was incredibly fortuitous and it’s been a really happy time. [And you’ll stay there?] I love living there. [And it’s still the centre of your performing universe?] Yeah, it is.

The job

They offered me this job as director (of the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music), I didn’t apply for it. Initially, I got a phone call asking if I would be interested. I thought about whether I wanted to do it and what it meant. I wanted to do it for a number of reasons. One, because I thought I could do a festival that was about 20th century music and new music and make it work and get an audience for it and do pieces that had a lot of substance that people would really enjoy. And secondly, I was really attracted to the fact that, because it was statewide, we could do something about connecting regional Queensland to Brisbane and connecting community music making to concert music.

In Lismore we’ve programmed a lot of work that’s got larger audiences than in Sydney—like ELISION for example. And I was heartened by that. And I still believe that there’s a huge misunderstanding from the larger arts organisations about audiences outside of capital cities. It’s presumed for some reason that your IQ is a lot lower than if you live in the metropolitan area. There are a lot of people who now make lifestyle choices about wanting to live in the country and they don’t have the same access to cultural activity that you do if you live in the city. So a festival like this gave me the opportunity to do that. I like to think we have a reason for doing a festival and that people will feel connected to it.

Barcaldine

Part of the theme of the festival is about making music and what that means. I’m suggesting that it starts with composers, the people who are the original makers of the music, and obviously performers who make music together in the concert hall or pub. But it also has to do with instrument makers. So in Barcaldine, in a town of 1500 people, 200 have signed an agreement to make marimbas and learn how to play them. They do it from May right through ‘til when the festival’s on. They don’t pay for the tuition or the workshops and then, at the end, they get to keep the marimba. Barcaldine is 6 hours drive west of Rockhampton. You can only go as far as Longreach and the road stops. It’s way out.

Chermside

I’ve asked Stephen Leak to write a new piece, a musical round for the people of Chermside, a suburb of Brisbane. 400 kids from the schools have signed up to sing it and I’ve asked him to base it on the bird calls of the Brisbane wetlands belt. So if they do that and then ideally, when they see that Messiaen’s Turangalila (Reinbert de Leeuw conducting the Queensland Orchestra, July 21) is based on bird calls, hopefully they’ll make a connection too. We’re bringing 150 people from Barcaldine to Brisbane on the Spirit of the Outback and they’ll play at Southbank and they’ll also play in the Chermside piece. We have an instrument-makers expo in Curroy. And really what brings all those threads together is Experimentum Mundi (the artisans from an Italian town who play the tools of their trade as instruments) which is about music making being connected to everyday life, not divorced from it. So there are cobblers and pastrycooks and coopers.

Rockhampton

Elena Katz-Chernin is writing a symphony for Rockhampton. I think that’s a first. There are 400 people on stage and I had to say no more because we can’t fit any more. They’re really excited about it. Elena came up and talked to them and I took her to hear the Capricornia Silver Band—they can really play. They were preparing for a big competition and they started playing a hymn tune. It was so beautiful, we were both sitting there with tears in our eyes.

Rockhampton has a tremendous history of choral music, brass bands, and an orchestra. And they also have a really beautiful botanical garden with a lot of rare trees. It’s a gorgeous place to be with a lagoon with water lilies, with different performances (like the Song Company) happening throughout the gardens so people can spend the day there with their picnic hampers. At the end of the day they go into a valley, sort of like a natural amphitheatre, and they hear the big symphony. Elena and Roland Peelman, who’s conducting, will be there 10 days before the premiere. Elena’s written in 7 short sections. They want to have one of those sections as a kind of anthem for the City of Rockhampton and would like to keep the score and have it in a display case. And I said, do you know how big it is? For 400 people, it is HUGE. But they’re right. A score is an artwork. I want to have a score for the Turangalila in the brochure. So people can actually see it and think, my god that is music.

Mackay

In Mackay there’s a street spectacle created in a collaboration between Opera North, Circus Osmosis and the QTC. There’s a new piece in the local church hall where Sherbet once played—a kind of installation music-memory-piece of that building. In The Lagoons area, Indigenous singers and dancers will be joined by the Dutch percussion group Anumadutchi.

Logan

In Logan, in the bible belt of Australia, there are a lot of new age Christians and new churches. When I first went through there I saw all these churches and I thought, maybe they’d like a gospel music festival. They fully embraced it. It’ll feature Tony Backhouse and the Cafe at the Gate of Salvation choir, the Heavenly Light Quartet and some young Christian based rock bands with the most un-Christian names, like Dumpster.

Guys and Twins

In Rockhampton there’s a great pub called the Great Western and in the pub they’ve got a rodeo ring that seats 3,000 people. It is massive. So you’re literally sitting at your table, eating your steak and there’s a rodeo ring. So I’ve put the Topp Twins in the rodeo ring. They’re also playing in Townsville. The Scared Weird Little Guys from Melbourne are like the Marx Brothers. They’re going to Townsville too, because there’s a Barrier Reef Orchestra there and a big choir. The Guys do a version of the Hallelujah Chorus where they get a kid out of the audience, ask him his name and sing it. Rus-ty Thom-as. Tim-my Bry-ant. It’s fabulous. You see kids of 7 years of age, going “Yes!” The audience love it. The Guys are great musicians too. In Lismore we had an audience of 600 for them, they went ballistic. Overnight they learned all the local landmarks around Lismore and put it in their show. It was extraordinary.

Powerhouse

The Brisbane Powerhouse is at the centre of the festival. Paul Grabowsky’s Australian Art Orchestra and the Indian percussionists Sruthi Laya Ensemble are doing Into the Fire (ABC Classic CD 465-705-2), Synergy are doing Steve Reich’s Drumming—it was one of their great concerts I heard last year—and Orkest de Volharding from the Netherlands will play the Louis Andriessen music for Peter Greenaway’s M is for Man, Music, Mozart—as the film is being screened. The International Critics Symposium is there. Local groups Topology and Loops are doing a new piece, airwaves, a show about the history of radio.

We’ve got an interesting late night gig called Playing by Numbers. It’s for all the musicians in Brisbane and in Queensland. They turn up and take a number out of the hat and the number determines who they play with. You could get the most fantastic combinations. As we all know, there are some serious rivalries in music circles so ideally people who wouldn’t speak to each other will have to play with each other.

We have a film night, Notes on Celluloid. There’s a film about Paul Bowles whom I’ve always found a really interesting character. I was reading The Sheltering Sky when I was in Barcaldine and it made a hell of a lot of sense out there. There’s a documentary about Venancio Mbanda who’s one of the percussionists with the Anumadutchi percussion ensemble from the Netherlands. He’s a really interesting guy. Runs his own festival right in the middle of the jungle in Mozambique. You have to trek for a couple of days to get there. He’s a revolutionary, leads workers, an incredible character. We’ve also got a DJ festival at the Powerhouse and a festival club.

Elsewhere…

We’ve only got 2 shows at QPAC (Queensland Performing Arts Centre ) —Turangalila (there isn’t another venue where we could do it) and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. There’s Brisbane City Hall where we’re presenting Anumadutchi and the Queensland Orchestra playing a new piece by Gerard Brophy. The Song Company is at St Mary’s in South Brisbane, ELISION at the Customs House, Core Ensemble at QUT, the Stuart Series at QCC Auditorium. The rest is at the Powerhouse.

The Critical Mass is interesting. I asked Stephen Stanfield to write a piece about homeless and marginalised people. A lot of those people go to St Mary’s Church in South Brisbane. There’s a soup kitchen and the priest there is sensational. Middle class people go there as well. When they go to the mass, they’ll experience this new work. The congregational songs they will sing are part of the piece and the liturgy that Father Peter Kennedy is delivering is about homelessness. Stephen’s been with the social worker from the church to interview homeless people and snippets of their conversation will be in the music installation. (Performed by Symbitronic Electro-Acoustic ensemble with the QUT Academy of Arts’ Student Choir.)

The music of criticism

Andrew Clements from London’s The Guardian will be here for the Critics’ Symposium. His specialty is new music and, apart from the Song Company program, nothing in this festival was written before the 20th Century. In fact Turangalila is probably the oldest piece in it. Elmer Schonberger is coming from the Netherlands. Roger Covell (Sydney Morning Herald) is going to give a keynote address. I had lunch with Chris Mitchell (the Editor of Brisbane’s The Courier Mail) and said, I’d like you to speak at the Critics Symposium and I’ll tell you why. Basically, I’d like to know why reviews are regarded like race results and why music is not discussed in a serious way and why music reviews are only 250 words. It would be great if you would speak about those and other issues related to arts criticism and commentary from the perspective of Editor in chief of a major daily paper.

We’re calling for papers to be submitted from the general public too. It seems to me that the role of the critic isn’t perceived to be as important as it used to be and I think we need to say, as artists, that this is an important issue. We want serious criticism, we welcome it. The newspapers all seem to be playing to the lifestyle crowd.

It’s interesting to read reviews from Germany. It’s a completely different cultural attitude. As a performer, if you’re lucky, you might get your name mentioned at the end. And that’s fine because there’s a really serious discussion about the piece, philosophically speaking as well. Not just ‘the orchestra played shithouse and so and so was good.’ That’s why I wanted to get Elmer to come to give that perspective and how it is writing for a European journal as opposed to….Why is a review like a race result here?

Driving the festival

I’m in Brisbane during the week. I drive home to Lismore on the weekend. It’s about 2 and a quarter hours away. I can listen to music, like Turangalila and all the music I need to listen to for the festival. Doing this festival is like doing a new piece. I don’t see it as being a festival director. I see it as doing a new show. It just so happens that the show stretches over an entire state.

Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, July 20-29, bookings QTix, 136 246, Brisbane Powerhouse, 07 3358 8600

Totally Huge New Music Festival 2001 was a truly significant Australian sound/music event. We asked the festival’s technical director and RealTime writer, Andrew Beck, to step back from the controls and tell it how he saw and heard it. Eds.

This year’s Totally Huge ranged over 12 days with 26 events and 100 artists, the Perth-based festival had local, national and overseas artists from across the new music spectrum.

The festival opened with Melbourne sound artist and academic Phil Samartzis and Danish performer and programmer Rasmuss Lundig. Samartzis, known for his work in immersive sound environment installations, also has a history of collaboration with Lundig in a live performance environment. In the Performance Space at PICA, Samartzis’ liquid ambient soundscapes rose and fell against Lundig’s percussive and edgy live and sampled sound manipulations. The marriage in performance of their distinct styles heralded much of what this year’s festival was to produce.

The teaming of Canadian multi-instrumentalist duo Joanne Hetu and Jean Derome with Ikue Mori’s sequenced electro-percussion, and local artists Chris Cobilis, Hannah Clemen and Rachael Dease with Jon Rose on the Australian variations of Rose’s Violin Factory, stimulated similar reactions to the co-billing of Rose and Rik Rue—issues of musicianship and performance were re-visited.

Several days into the festival, talking about audience expectations of live performance, Lundig said, “I have heard the arguments here in the last few days…It is not so important for me to see a ‘performance.’ I guess it’s a matter of temperament. I don’t have to have a lot of action to enjoy the music. It’s what comes out of the speakers.

“When I am live onstage it is always very nervous whether the robots will work or not, or even my computer; sometimes my guitar (playing) is not so good. These are the things that make a live performance, regardless of playing a traditional instrument or a computer…What Phil (Samartzis) does is an art in itself. All those CDs and minidisks. His choice of sound, his control of the mixing into 4 channels, particularly when we are playing together. I suppose Phil is not a musician, more of a sound artist. But, if you fuck up and you’re playing live, it is the same for everyone. Sometimes it is very hard work…I enjoy a virtuosic performance, people pay to see a performance. It’s in our comprehension of what a stage is, what it is for. But, whether you play a laptop or a kazoo, it’s what you do with it.”

While Samartzis’ presence at the festival continued as the installation Soft and Loud at the Central TAFE Art Gallery, Lundig later performed solo at PICA with his robots. A result of ongoing research and development based on the Lego Mindstorm RCX processor and microcontroller at Aarhus University’s LegoLab in Denmark, Lundig’s robots beat out percussive patterns in response to external stimuli.

Lundig, with guitar, sat bare footed on a small area of the stage floor in the centre of a circle of his robots and effects processors. The tiny robots played on found surfaces, soft drink cans, cardboard. The various found surfaces were equipped with contact microphones to pick up the sounds from the minuscule drummers. Surrounded by what appeared to be rubbish connected by wires and held in place with tape, Lundig performed a most remarkable and frenetic set. The sight was strangely affecting. The only problem was that the PA was not loud enough. The FOH engineer was trying to avoid broadcasting “extraneous noise” from the contact microphones picking up sound through the stage floor—Lundig’s turning and spinning as he switched processors in and out of the loop, and the backwash of the other instruments. It all added a depth and musicality to the performance. Afterwards, when asked about the extraneous noise, Lundig replied: “Yes, I like this too. It is another layer and it has its contribution to make.”

While Derome and Hetu performed at various gigs, their first collaboration with Ikue Mori was an impromptu trio at the Subiaco Theatre Centre. Originally programmed as separate performances on the one bill, the 3 decided to play as a trio. The plasticity of performance line-ups within the overall programming structure was one of the festival’s ongoing strong points. At first, the exuberant and vigorous acoustic style of the Canadians and Mori’s programmed electro-percussion sequences failed to find a point of mutual engagement. But common ground was found and explored within a soundspace that evoked a vast marshland populated by strange rhythmic creatures. Often interrupted and temporarily silenced by squealing, wailing and ululating interlopers, the creatures evolved their own complex patterns. If you can imagine Les Gilbert’s Kakadu Billabong set on a wild metallic planet, you may be halfway to the experience. Quite remarkable.

The Young Composers Night provided a public platform for local composers and musicians at the beginnings of their careers. While there was much to be enjoyed, some material was simply pretentious. James Lee’s short cello piece was an exception as was Rachael Dease’s cross-genre chamber music composition for voice (her own) and strings.

Returning to the audience expectations of live performance, Rik Rue commented: “I was playing with Ikue Mori at the ABC for John Crawford’s new music show. During the recording the joke was that we were like 2 bad typists with laptops…It is a problem. I’ve developed a stage presence, but performing, for me, is sometimes difficult. I wobble around, knock things over looking for things…it’s not a stage act but it seems to have developed into that. I’m not a poser turning knobs in a theatrical manner. I don’t artificialise…Being myself, that’s my theatre.” His Sunday performance was broadcast live-to-air on Bryce Moore’s Difficult Listening (RTR FM 92.1, Sundays, 9-11pm). Sitting behind his machinery, Rue delivered a distressed urban soundscape. Modulated as if it were the soundtrack to a modern silent-movie, the piece continually shifted from familiar house beats to threatening, antagonist samples and assaults of random static. Reflecting both the horrors and comforts of contemporary, western, amenity-based lifestyles, his performance was ultimately quite disturbing. Rue also had an installation, the open ear, at Artshouse Gallery.

Other installations included Sound Spaces, curated by Hannah Clemen at PICA, and Natasha Barret’s Rain Forest Cycle, overseen by Rob Muir and installed in the Garden Week site in King’s Park. The latter, a 10 metre triangular pyramid with 4 speakers set one at each vertice—emitting sounds recorded in a Costa Rican rainforest—was a mixture of success and failure. Walking through the Garden Week site, a retail plant nursery and allied industry promotion, the audience had little reason to focus their attention, and more importantly their time, on the sound pyramid. Against the surrounding commercial bustle and the diverting smells from the catering area nearby, the subtleties of Barret’s work disappeared.

Jon Rose premiered Violin Factory II at the festival. While Lindsay Vickery conducted the string orchestra, Rose both manipulated live samples and conducted the percussion section. This performance in Winthrop Hall lacked in commitment. The string orchestra was adequate but the percussionists were tentative. The video projection, onto 2 large screens either side of the performers, was erratic. Lely Evans, who played the part of a Chinese guard alternatively berating and exalting the workers/performers below her scaffold platform, worked hard in her very first performance of the piece. There had been no prior rehearsal by the complete ensemble. And this was reflected in the performance.

Very different was the variation, Violins in the Outback, at Wogarno Station, 600 kilometres northeast of Perth. An audience of almost 700 enjoyed a vigorous and flawless performance. Chris Cobilis, one of the percussionists, remarked of the Wogarno experience, “We could see the light at the end of the tunnel. We knew where we were going. Before (at Winthrop Hall) we were playing blind.” Energised and confident, strings, percussion and voice all performed with depth and precision against a backdrop of outstanding video projection across the walls and roof of the shearing shed.

On performance and musicianship, Jon Rose commented “I think an audience does need a set of parameters, like, OK, here’s a guy with a violin. We know what a violin sounds like. Now, what can he do? He can’t go any lower, he can’t go any higher. He can’t go that much faster, he can’t go that much slower. He’s only got 2 arms, 2 legs. Like, there’s the setup. The 4 strings. What can you do with that? And that’s a level of scale that we’ve lost. Now, with MIDI you can just hit return and have 16 channels of anything. It becomes meaningless. I think scale, physicality, is something we require as a musical expression. That’s why the voice is the last thing on the budget to go. Because people will understand that more than they’ll understand anything.”

The Totally Huge New Music Festival, Perth, March 30-April 8, Midwest, April 14-18

Hanging onto the tail of a goat. A Tibetan Journey is not just another migrant story. Tibet has been decimated. Its people scattered. Its beliefs increasingly embraced in the West. To be Tibetan has a certain cachet and thus, with great anticipation and generosity, the full house at the Gasworks Theatre received Tsering Tsewang’s poignant but playful solo work.

The senses were delighted. On entering the space I could smell the fragrantly acrid presence of incense; hear the near, far, approaching ring and clang of bells—a different tone for each goat in the herd; and hear also their bleats and cries and stampings. Around the stage a circle of instruments and effects: a Tibetan lute, a drum hanging in space, cymbals, a flute, banners suspended and emblazoned with that eternal knot, ritual beakers, a small silvery white shawl. Towering behind, a huge greenish projection of the sacred Mount Kailash. The form of a man appeared in the core of the mountain, moved slowly towards us as a deep chant of invocation—“May Tibet be a Zone of Peace”—emerged and filled the space.

Writer Jan Cornall has worked with Tsering’s stories to produce a cyclically anecdotal (perhaps overly long) reflection of this man’s life. The tale loops between recollections of a happy child on the cold desert plateau of Tibet, to a refugee fleeing the Red Chinese, to the student of Buddhism and musical monk in Dharmsala, to migrant and factory worker in Australia. Serene and profoundly distressing visual imagery accompanies the narrative, crafted with fluidity by director Brian Joyce. Tsering Tsewang moves between each instrumental site offering us a suite of traditional and modern Tibetan folk songs, chants, invocations and dedications. He is a truly beautiful musician and it is clear that this is where his talent lies. Tsering is also an excellent mimic who amuses us with witty and no doubt accurate portraits of his beloved grandfather, an assortment of Aussie work mates and the Dalai Lama.

Hanging onto the tail of a goat uses humour and lightness to tell a story redolent with loss, injustice and suffering. As my companion observed, “A whisper can be louder than a scream.”

The jaded postmodern eye is surely confounded by this ingenuous, peaceful and honest work. There is very little theatrical drama, no tension or angst. With all the injustices and atrocities, hardships and disappointments that this man has suffered you’d expect to see anger, grief, resentment or questioning in the face of the loss of his country, wife and child. But there is none. Instead, a gentle recount delivered with respect and equanimity. Tsering Tsewang demonstrates rather than tells the practice of Buddhism and refuses hectic and exhausting emotionalism. Under floating video clouds he allows us to contemplate the paradox of happiness, injustice and impermanence. Almost infuriating, but not.

Hanging onto the tail of a goat. A Tibetan Journey, created & devised by Tsering Tsewang, Jan Cornall & Brian Joyce, performer Tsering Tsewang, writer Jan Cornall, director/dramaturg Brian Joyce, Gasworks Theatre, Melbourne, May 2-20

Virginia Hilyard and Varsha Nair’s first collaborative project your hand opens and closes and opens and closes grew out of an opportunity to work together in Bangkok. There are 3 variable elements: 2 video projections with sound, woven mats from Thailand, and the smell of linament. This scent overlays the significance of the visual imagery and the material of the woven mats with particular reference to certain kinds of cultural practices. The video projections are slowed down sequences of Thai boxing and massage, where lyrical imagery transposes the conventional meanings of these events: the force and speed of boxing, and the nurturing, medicinal connotations of massage are manipulated to imply their opposite. The boxing becomes a delicate, graceful dance, drained of violence. The passivity of the hand being massaged is almost painful to watch as the viewer hears the quick heavy slap of hands and fists on the body.

Firmly located in the trajectory of experimental film, the subtle formal and technical processes—the treatment of the original video, including a positive/negative reversal, and the draining of the colour back to duotone—are seductive. They direct the viewer from an almost abstract movement of tone (carefully framed details that add layers of signification to the imagery such as the boxers’ decorative arm bands, the flecks of sweat flickering across the screen, the background text) to a questioning of the location, particularly the cultural location, of the work. The mats provide a reference—the arena specifically and Thailand generally—and even to the scale of the massage table, folded as they are to body size on the floor. As with all their work, the space of installation, here Darwin’s 24HR Art, is a working part of the experience of the piece.

screen, the second collaborative work, is made up of 2 large scale black and white duratrans. (A duratran is a photographic transfer process where the image is developed on opaque plastic: it is designed to be backlit and has a luminous quality when lit that diffuses the light through the image.) The first is a close-up of a mouth held open for the inspection and intrusion of the dentist’s tools, confronting the viewer with the border between inside and outside, and with the vulnerability of an open mouth—open to the violence of a medical apparatus—and the simultaneous sensation that at that moment the body shuts down, protects and closes in some internal way. Redolent with filmic reference, and medical and even sexual violence, the image refers us to the heroine’s scream on the one hand and our own personal trauma on the other (in Buddhist terms, always just outside the frame, the suffering of the human condition at the least).

At the centre of this image is the figure of the filmic frame, the fade to black: the perfect circle of the dentist’s mirror reflects only the grain of the film and the play of black and white, a cypher for the abyss, the frozen moment of breathless anticipation through which interiority is marked, an identity constituted, sense made of interpretation. The mirror does not reflect, signification is not transparent but distorted and ‘open’ to our individual reading.

The companion image in the piece is a blown up reversed x-ray of a pair of hands, held up for the medical gaze, but in that gesture both open to receiving and closed to shield, and again protect. Do they cover the vulnerable mouth, ward off a blow, contain signs of age or illness, or are they caught in the moment of coming together in prayer? While almost body size there is a delicacy and fragility about them, and a conceit about a Western will to knowledge and mastery that, even when dissecting the body, misses the unseen or the non-material.

The duratrans are lit from behind by the careful placement of linear fluorescent tubes, which echo the structure of the images: 2 hands held up moving outward from the wrists, the horizontal of the mouth flanked by the handles of invading instruments. This draws the images into the space and into an awareness of a physical relation to the work, at once inside and at one remove. Indeed, what lies behind is a crucial metaphor: what is hidden, what is beneath the skin, what is beneath our understanding, is the substance of the work’s allusions.

screen is accompanied by an intense and insistent soundtrack, the slowed down syncopated rhythm of crickets droning and humming: a piercing sound that insinuates itself into the mind and echoes in the body. This oppressive aural attack extrapolates the work of the images in leading the viewer to a very physical experience of open and closed, inside and out.

The third installation in the exhibition is Hilyard’s The Room which, located in close proximity, extends screen into other visual and rhetorical domains. The images are backlit duratrans of 2 drawings: the rubbing of a large antique steel security door, its solidity, strength and heavyness translated into the translucent lightness of a sheet of paper, and its form fractured, torn and lifted from its past use and materiality. Again, it serves as a sign for open and closed (the internal relation implied by a door—never simply open or closed), the physicality of exit and entry, the space of containment and security, and as a metaphor for the body under the impact of a psychology and an emotional terrain.

It is accompanied by an image of a multilayered rubbing of a coat, structured along the axis of a row of pebbles in the place of a spine, and a frenetic coil of rope in the place of internal organs. The disparate elements come together in a seamless and coherent weave of signs, alluding again to interiority and a range of emotional and psychological identifications. The Room, this room, is a claustrophobic space, anxious, frantic even, which has been set in thin sheets of opaque light-permeable plastic, confounding ideas about external and internal, imposed constraint and self-imposed strictures, resonating across a cultural divide to Buddhist ideas of impermanence, suffering and the illusions our minds create.

The work of Hilyard and Nair requires and rewards time and attention and is a series of visual, aural, olfactory and spatial encounters that play on our ideas of introspection and interpretation, always refering richly outside their frame. A range of visual codes explores the particularity, detail and personal encounter, as well as what it means to encounter culture, and the culture of another. The viewer is led through an identificatory process, physically at least, if not emotionally, psychologically and then, perhaps, spiritually.

Virginia Hilyard and Varsha Nair, your hand opens and closes and opens and closes; screen; The Room, 24HR Art, Darwin, April 27–May 19

In late April, Rosalind Crisp’s Omeo Dance Studio celebrated “5 years with 5 days of dance”, a mini-festival including new work traffic and et al. (billed as “a part-y of embodied history”), a forum, and the eleventh Rushing the Sloth, a monthly improvisation event curated by Andrew Morrish.

traffic and et al. represent 2 facets of the activity that Omeo Studio has been supporting over the past 5 years. Firstly, it has provided the space and environment for Crisp’s continuing production of finely honed and consistently developing choreographic work, represented by the piece traffic. Secondly, the profile of the studio—having grown organically from Crisp’s own vision and needs as an artist—is a distinctive one within the Sydney arts scene and has become a base for dancers, choreographers and affiliated artists with shared interests. With regular classes and showings, Omeo manages to be many things to many people and this was well represented at the Saturday night, shoes off, wine guzzling party, et al.

traffic has an accumulative structure which has become a signature of Crisp’s group works for her company stella b. The economy with which this is processed (22 minutes) intensifies its structural motif both in terms of the movement of bodies in space and the composition of the choreography itself. Nalina Wait begins creating simple, clear shapes at the back of the room as if feeling her way into the space, marking out trajectories with the dimensions of her body as she goes. This is a ‘beginning’ physically written through with all it must establish. As the work intensifies with flurries, shimmers and twists replacing the carefully delineated, static poses of the opening, the driving techno score by David Corbet makes itself felt. The work suddenly takes off at this point and expires just as quickly, leaving me wondering what hit me. stella b. have taken another leap with this work, towards the concise, hard-hitting and neatly packaged.

et al. was a party with occasional performances scattered inside the studio and projected outside the windows onto Gladstone Steet. Food and wine passed around the room, Andrew Morrish hosted the evening in his disarming style, and animated conversations petered out as attentions were focused in this corner or that. I admit to not catching it all—due in equal parts to the crowds, apparently uninterruptable conversations, and a kind of general party-induced fatigue. Highlights included The Fondue Set (Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan and Elizabeth Ryan), party girls who wriggled their way through the crowd with plates of food and wine and put their duties aside for a nifty dance of combined social gestures and party moves. Fonduette McKernan presented a neat and minimal little solo before a microphone stand that evoked the sometimes fascinating gesticulations of pop singers.

Eleanor Brickhill baffled and bewitched with a comfortingly incongruous display of sleeping positions. She reappeared, rehearsing postures before a mirror manipulated by Crisp, and there was also a presentation of her writing read aloud by Morrish. It was satisfying to see Brickhill being recognised in this way for her significance as a passionate commentator on Sydney’s dance culture. Helen Clarke-Lapin showed off her always impressive contact skills with David Corbett, drawing Morrish briefly into the mix. And Nikki Heywood stole the show, shuffling into the room in a borrowed suit with plastic covers over her shoes, postulating poetically on the studio space, evoking the bodies that have worked there and making them resonate, while providing a schizo-commentary on her own performance.

traffic, stella b. (Rosalind Crisp, Nalina Wait, Katy Macdonald); et al. various artists, sound design David Corbet, lighting Mark Mitchell, Omeo Dance Studio, Sydney, April 25-27

War is noise. Tactical land warfare reconfigures space as an amplified terrain of threatening sonic occurrences whose indistinction and multiplicity confer sound as noise—as a complete collapse of decipherable sound. From faint rustles in the bush to simulated bird calls in the jungle to rebounding echoic gunfire on mountains, the key signifiers of sound—its origin, source, perspective, orientation, content and purpose—are rendered invisible and hidden; disguised and undisclosed. In its life-threatening and death-affirming din, war thus becomes the penultimate dislocation of sound from image. It is no surprise, then, that so many survivors of the battlefield suffer a variety of forms of shock. Their psyches still reverberate, wrack, shudder and flinch with psychoacoustic replays of military ‘noisefare’ encoded into their being and looped into uncontrollable and unpredictable cycles of playback and feedback. From the actual sonic event in the past, to its acoustic resemblance in the present, to its imaginary recall in the mind, all sounds can trigger the same disorienting asynchronism advanced by the audiovisual dislocation in war.

The postwar body—from the aged veteran to the youthful discharge—experiences the sonic landscape of peaceful territories in a way deeply removed from our non-militarized comprehension of urban, suburban and rural space. We have little collective understanding of how the sound of what one has experienced on the battlefield can transform one’s inhabitation of the space beyond. Shallow understanding of the relation between sound and psyche irresponsibly verges on ignorance in the hands of so many healing sciences of the mind. Unmitigated dismissal of the importance of the sonic and psychoacoustic in audiovisual media plays its part in painting a landscape of deafness in which psychology maintains its scopic mandates of inquiry.

When Francis Ford Coppola embarked on the making of Apocalypse Now (1979) he outlined a swelling body of documentary footage from the era as a field from which to paint an intentionally accurate picture of the American intervention in Vietnam. One key documentary cited was Eugene S Jones’ observation of US Marine field combat with the Viet Cong in 1966, A Face Of War (1968). Coppola even requested a print of the film to screen to his actors on location in the Philippines. Their contact prompted Jones to provide what was to be a revealing document that precisely described what it was like to hear the sounds of war. Jones submitted a 26 page letter to Coppola’s film company which included 16 pages of detailed sono-spatial notes on just about every piece and component of weaponry and ammunition used in the Viet Cong field and jungle conflicts. This information undoubtedly formed a valuable aural topology for both Coppola and sound designer Walter Murch. It has taken decades for their collaborative work on this landmark cinesonic film to be openly acknowledged as a major force in the shaping of American modern film sound—but little has been noted on how important Jones’ sound documentary was in guiding Coppola and Murch’s work. The Vietnam era has been historically mediarised as a McLuhanesque rupture of the domestic by the electronic image (televised images with little location sound and maximal voice-over reportage), leaving us to presume that the sonic, acoustic, spatial and psychoacoustic had no role to play in ‘Nam and interventionist conflicts around the globe since.

If we are deaf to how the post-war terrain betrays a silence wherein sonic memories, vocal traces and aural scars operate beyond our emotional and psychological listening range, we are just as likely deaf to the importation and exportation of music and song in the shattered shuttling between zones of war and spaces of peace. Heddy Honigmann’s Crazy (2000) has grasped this in an intuitive and exploratory way. Soldiers, aid-workers and counselors who have spent military duty and/or peace-keeping time in places like Seoul, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Lebanon, Kosovo and Rwanda are interviewed about what songs they cherished from their time spent in those places, and what memories the songs bring back. Then, in a recall of the camera gaze shared by Warhol and Ackerman, we watch their faces as they listen to the songs. The beauty of the film is not in what many will probably misinterpret as a humanist celebration of the will to survive beyond the ravages of such hellish experiences, but in its foregrounding of how song—in its most consumerist guise and outright commodification—can transcend just about every damning critique of pop music written by stodgy old farts who think Bob Dylan and Van Morrison define the pantheon of modern song form.

The film opens with the phased churning of a chopper intermingling with strains of The Three Tenors singing Nessun Dorma (from the Puccini opera Turandot). Despite the oft-ignored fact that opera is about the clash of beauty with death (and hence a grand template for all modernist audiovisual destructo-narrative), Coppola’s use of The Ride of The Valkyries from Wagner’s Ring Cycle is specifically about the bombardment of death with beauty. The music is blasted at the Viet Cong from the choppers, freaking them with European bombast to disorient their aural landscape. But in Crazy, it is revealed that Nessun Dorma is less a musical projectile and more an aural impression which maps the face that listens to it. As we watch the ex-soldier listen to one of the 80s’ most kitsch grotesqueries of High Art super-group bellowing, it is as if the pores of his skin exude with all the space between the laser-burnt pits of the CD recording. Eyes open, occasionally blinking, audibly breathing, he—like most of Crazy’s subjects—does not fit the desired romanticized semi-religious icon of the ecstatic listener, enthralled by harmonic rapture with eyes wide shut. His face is removed, ungiving, transported. The effect is undeniable: we bear witness to the phonological materiality of the song as inscription; as that which is listened to rather than encoded, recorded, produced or performed. The transparent psycho-sonic skin which wavers between objectivity (the song as music) and subjectivity (the song as experience) shimmers and fluctuates.

How can I say this? Because all the songs played hold no particular significance or pleasure for me, yet I am moved by their presence in the film. I am not pathetically responding to an overtly emotionally loaded situation. (Dumb humanist identification is predicated on the puerile Pavlovian response to only the grossest displays of emotion.) I can actually hear the architecsonic impact of the song as it guides its listener (simultaneously the film’s on-screen subject and me) in a way that transports me beyond my taste in music. The songs, then, are possessed by an ownership far greater and more powerful than my relation to the music. Even if the music did reflect my taste, my relation to the song would most likely feel trivial compared to the clinging lifeline it provided to the film’s subjects.

Is this axial shift in identifying music possible with anyone? And with any music? Is it an event of experiential revelation or a linkage in a developed sensibility? For as long as I can remember, 60s recordings of slow-paced cabaret crooning with reverberant voices cooing in a manner reminiscent of 50s doo-wop have struck me as achingly empty in their echoic rendering and stylistic somnambulism. To many (especially film people) such songs are camp, tacky, kitsch and great to use in send-up situations. As I hear those swooping violins, that muted ‘lounge’ rhythm and the self-mockingly maudlin voice, I associate the songs with Korean vets and their metal implants, withered penises, dysfunctional marriages and psychosexual cracks, alone at a bar and gripped in a sodden existential stasis. Powerful songs can be those within which you can sense the navigational path for someone’s potential empathy with the song, irrespective of your preferences or reading of the song’s importance.

Cinema is a wonderful machine for generating this effect. The laying of music ‘on top of’ someone’s face on a screen can not only project an emotional reading of the character’s state of mind, but also externalize the interiority of the imagined person. Crazy outrightly documents this. Each song states: I am what is inside this head, behind this face, within this listener. Crazy also proves that any narrative can embrace any song for any purpose. It is in this rare documentary that song and music raises this issue while virtually all fictional film dramas engineer the film score as if music and song has to control, shape and dictate the emotional energy maps of its characters. This notion of film music is typical of the authorial delusion which governs the act of writing in general and cinema in particular—that all elements in the fictional scenario are there to reinforce the power of authorial voice which places them there. Film scoring—the act of laying a particular piece of music ‘on top of’ a face—is a desperate claim for the selective power of music and how it can be used as a controlling force within narrative. Crazy evidences music—in the receptacle of songs—as an uncontrollable force, both from the song-writer/singer’s intention and in the film subjects’ reception of the song. The ex-soldiers all fix their songs to precise incidents and moments, which did not call for the songs. Such music—as one guy puts it in the film—is “weird stuff.” In the end, all the songs perform as talismans against the craziness in which they found themselves gradually sinking. Crazy is a testament not merely to the human spirit, but to the power of song.

When Tom Logan (played by Jack Nicholson) slits the throat of Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando) in Arthur Penn’s Missouri Breaks (1976), Logan invokes and externalizes Clayton’s own crazy (psychotic) disposition. Leaning over him and breathing into his nostrils, he says “You know what woke you up? Lee, you just had your throat cut.” Face to face, they mirror each other not with symmetrical precision, but through a resonant balance. Logan lives out the impulse to bear witness to the death of his nemesis less as a classical gesture of narrative closure, and more as a will to discern whether the aural bears any witness to its visual encoding on the face. It doesn’t. Sound exists in the much deeper recesses of the mind. The face is but an iced-over veneer of still pools whose traumas operate at frequencies beyond registering of troubled waters. The blank face of the traumatized is not an impassive countenance; it is an impassable terrain, saying “If you could only hear how I hear…”

Crazy, directed by Heddy Honigmann, screened at the 2000 Sydney Film Festival and is currently touring as part of the AFI’s European Film Festival.

To take something at face value is to take it as it comes or as it appears, without prejudice and expectation. How possible is it to take something ‘as it comes’, especially our faces, when they are so coded, inscribed and readable? Of the abstract machinery of faciality and facialisation, Deleuze and Guattari write, “the face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps around a volume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that are now no more than holes” (A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

So, our faces are subjectified, signs and signifiers: currency in various exchanges, caught between the value and virtue of beauty, residual eugenics and the sexual selection of Mr Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Artist John Tonkin explained that eugenics is a close relative of evolution, having been developed by none other than Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, in the late 19th century. Tonkin, speaking at an Artist’s Talk at the Queensland Art Gallery about his life as an artist, described eugenics as an enlightenment project that developed a “real obsession with working out the interior of things from the exterior.”

For Tonkin, there are sinister comparisons between the ‘sciences’ of eugenics and physiognomy and the Human Genome Project. “It seemed to me that there were parallels with what was happening a couple of hundred years ago and what was happening now…Today’s science is tomorrow’s bad science.” Since 1992, Tonkin has appropriated these sciences for a body of work comprising elective physiognomies, elective masculinities and personal eugenics. As he speaks, he quotes from various texts: about “traits of industry, integrity and genuine piety” and how “physiognomy takes cognisance of races and nations as well as of individuals.”

When Tonkin appropriates the tropes of eugenics and the Human Genome Project in his programmed and installation-based interactives, he makes it all about YOU—your imperfections, your survival, your readings, your prejudices. Entering into a game of portraiture with the user, there’s a give and take of data which the artist collects for ongoing analysis. The data is averaged to create a “public consensus” of sorts. Tonkin’s practice tests the assumptions (and practices) of science, subjectivity and technoculture. In this era of an emergent ‘posthuman’, eugenics is something we do to ourselves, caught up in the rush of ‘self-help’ and ‘self-improvement’, to become something else or to invest ourselves with other qualities.

In personal eugenics, exhibited at the QAG as part of A Centenary of Faces, users manipulate images of their faces to become someone else. It’s as easy and as fast as changing an online nickname. Each user has their photo taken and decides how they want to “evolve” (eg become more considerate). Then the work produces several variations and the user decides which of those s/he wants to evolve. “When you choose one of those you choose which one survives to the next generation…You can actually do as many generations as you like—there’s nothing stopping you going to a total extreme.” As in eugenics, behavioural qualities are translated into physical traits. The user receives 2 hard copies of the result: one goes onto the wall of the ‘kiosk’ and the other is for the user, a souvenir of their foray into ‘identity tourism.’

Similarly, with elastic masculinities users can construct a body, manipulating a digital image to develop a picture of a ‘sensual’ or ‘vulnerable’ body. “With this piece I was also interested in how fluid our sense of our own body is…How day to day your sense of shape changes with your state of mind.” In a survey, you put your perceptions to the test for elective physiognomies. In accordance with a list of qualities such as ‘trustworthiness’, the user categorises 5 manipulations of the artist’s face.

During his 2 year Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowship, Tonkin commenced work on a grand unified theory of self, focused on the correlation and collection of ‘data.’ Again driven by user interaction, this work will let users correlate their own behaviours (eg how much coffee they drink) with global activities such as share performance on the stock market. Engaging chaos theory to a degree, individuals can monitor how their actions and habits are impacting on the world. Tonkin’s works occupy the juncture of the subjective and the scientific, poking fun at some persistent ideas about determinism, reductivism, empiricism and perceptual systems.

John Tonkin: Artist’s Talk, Queensland Art Gallery, March 23; personal eugenics, part of A Centenary of Faces: Celebrating the Centenary of Federation, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, March 29-June 3

Convention dictates that the central characters in a feature film reveal themselves to the audience in such a way that we may share their ideals and problems. This process of identification applies even to unlikable characters. The need to understand evil in a personality is almost a sub-genre in cinema.

While these journeys to the dark side might not be historically new—there is a tradition that goes back to Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) where we had to be aware of gangster James Cagney’s mother complex in order to understand his predilection for shooting people locked in the boot of his car—it does suggest that cinema is now more interested in the shady rather than the wholesome.

But what happens when the central character is both a lost personality and so interesting that we come to genuinely care for him?

Ana Kokkinos’s film Head On turns this into a compelling advantage. Her hero Ari, played by Alex Dimitriades, hardly responds to experience in a way that progresses his personal story—in fact, the final sequence of Head On deliberately denies the idea of redemption in the life of the central character.

There are several strategies employed. The first and most important is that Ari is always on screen. It is a technique borrowed from classic detective stories—we know only what the private eye learns and experiences—and we must deduce and digest the same information as the character. There is no allowance for a wider interpretation. This confines us and the character into a tight relationship of mutual knowledge.

Having established this, Kokkinos then allows Ari to progress from incident to incident in his 24-hour journey, while we can only guess at the ‘map’ he might be using. Each event does not, on the surface, advance him towards any specific destination. Later we realise this might be an acceptance of his destiny.

In dramatic terms each scene is, in some sense, a structured failure. All relationships that might stabilise Ari result in argument and escape. In succession he is asked to accompany his parents to a Greek club, has several failed attempts at seduction, and is arrested by the police and subsequently beaten. To confirm the dramatic intent of the film, the only thing that is in any sense successful in this day-in-a-life is anonymous tough sex with strangers in alleyways. These encounters are presented as a risky addiction, whereas everything else in Ari’s world is an obligation to be rejected or avoided.

In Ari we are shown only the need for oblivion, and the frustration we sense in him has the potential for violence. Kokkinos cleverly contrasts this with black and white images from his parents’ early days in Australia as they took up the political cause of opposing the Junta back in Greece. They at least had ideals and a cause, a channel for their beliefs and anger at their personal and collective condition.

Head On clearly says that one generation later, the children of those idealists are adrift in an Australia that does not politically engage them. There is only a dwindling tradition of weddings and afternoon card games where English is not spoken and the old songs are sung. These are not major scenes, but their cumulative effect is a major narrative strategy of the film. Small incidents, repeated with slight variation, building to a statement about the absorption of immigrant values within the wider Australia.

Ari’s brother does have political discussions in cafes but the language used is deliberately presented as hollow rhetoric. These discussions are also shown to be the province of the articulate and the employed. Both are conditions that Ari fervently eschews.

By showing the tensions within Ari’s family, particularly between father and son, Head On also depicts the fracturing of that traditionally important structure which in turn confirms the ‘drifting’ of Ari as a personality, cut loose from the values that would have reinforced his identity within a specific community.

Head On does not conform to a classical feature script structure and, as such, should be seen as a courageous piece of writing. By using incidents rather than major set events, and by forcing the audience to interpret Ari’s thoughts about his condition from what they see rather than what they’re told through dialogue, the script proposes a less literary form of Australian film writing and instead espouses the value of the visual as primary content.

Head On, director Ana Kokkinos, writers Kokkinos, Andrew Bovell, Mira Robertson (adapted from the book, Loaded, by Christos Tsiolkas), distributor Palace Films, currently available on video from Roadshow Home Entertainment.

The project started off with my interest in some wooden towers and concrete structures in the wasteland area near the West Gate Bridge and my background with Loophole Cinema (UK). When I was with Loophole we used to do a lot of filming with Bolex cameras for site specific installations and performances which we did around Europe and where we met a lot of people with kinetic machines and expanded cinema.
Paul Rodgers

There is a scene in the great Brian De Palma film Blow Out where the main character, sound artist Jack Terry (played by John Travolta), tries to reconstruct an earlier crime scene of a fatal car accident which he heard and partially witnessed. He cuts out from a magazine the still images of this accident, which were apparently captured by a photographer working on location when the car spun out of control. Jack edits these still images together, turning them into a montage of movement as he adds his own sound recording. He then projects his film, bringing this earlier scene back to life, reanimating this moment and the magic of cinematic projection.

The installation Projection Machines also plays with the magic and meaning of film projection. Paul Rodgers’ work crosses the mediums of experimental film, video, site specific performance and installation, digital media and construction-based projects. Projection Machines presents 2 kinetic machines—The Dome and The Beacon—which (in their own ways) project captured images of Melbourne’s industrial wastelands. The experience they offer is of an expanded cinema that encourages contemplation of how we read and understand images and their referents in all of their fleeting, magical, incandescent materiality.

The Dome dominates the space, as if it were the centre of a darkened cube, a multi-projection machine allowing many points of view. Its hemispherical, translucent structure functions as both container and contents: projector and reflector. Rodgers describes it as a “biosphere: a container of select Melbourne landscapes” whose surface also plays host to a scattered montage of fragmented wastelands and refracted industrial scenes. The images are projected from within, sweeping across the dome’s skin, like interrogating search lights. Yet the interior workings, its logic, remains opaque. What is left of these emanations are confounding, swirling and fleeting images, partially recognisable as a pylon or a neglected, overgrown patch of earth. They defy our efforts to read them into complete images, or to recognise them as narrative or formal patterns.

This relationship between the machine and its projected images reveals a number of interesting contradictions, the most obvious being that between the container and its contents. While the biosphere represents a life-affirming force, what it projects are places that have been left behind, remnants; a vision that has run its course or remains incomplete and unresolved. What is preserved and archived is the evidence of decay or dissolution. The second contradiction has to do with the beauty of light projections that render fragmented images of emptiness somehow magical and whole. And so, quite surprisingly, the refracted looping projection of endlessly repeating and abstracted images creates mesmeric, though fleeting, beauty out of ephemeral records of waste and desolation.

The Beacon represents a sentinel at the entrance to the cube (gallery) and offers an alternative way of entering this space. In appearance it is like a projection booth, pieced together from found material. It is a private site, unlike the communal circumnavigation of The Dome, and it works on the principle of exclusion—a projection machine for one. Inside The Beacon a small 4 to 5 second loop of grainy 16mm footage of industrial wastelands can be viewed by hand cranking the machine’s projection forwards or backwards.

As we enter, a heat seeking surveillance detector toggles on the machine’s power, illuminating its projection. And then, just as we settle into viewing the loop of film, our stillness, our physical inaction, suddenly turns the projection off and disrupts the process of reading.

With its hazy, indistinct and intermittent projection, The Beacon returns us to the age of the kinetiscope, as if it were a time machine. But its primitive mechanism simultaneously renders us outside of, and lost to, the process of projection itself. The result is that this sentinel, this portal to the past, remains essentially mysterious. Is this a time machine from the future where the past (today) is so wasted that we would not want to travel back to our time, or is the future so opaque and uncharted that we hesitate to go there? In the end it is only our action (activity) that keeps the promise (of projection and vision) alive.

These kinetic machines remain landmarks on a map—locations meant to help us find our way, or to discover where we are. Yet they equally dislocate, separating us from the images they project. Despite circumnavigating The Dome with its visions of a post-industrial future, and stepping inside The Beacon to journey into an industrial past, we are no closer to reasoning the bits and fragments that are seen and heard, remembered and projected, into a history beyond our own; we are left stranded amongst these magnificent machines.

In Blow Out, Jack Terry believes the film that he has so dexterously pieced together provides an answer, a revelation about the accident that took place. But the film disappears. It is erased by mysterious conspirators leaving behind only the static of the screen. The message in De Palma’s film is that the more we try to employ images and sounds as evidence, solutions and answers, the more that resolution will escape us. What we are left with is the dissolution of those images and sounds; hazy memories of something that has now passed us by. It is in this dissolution of images and sounds of a world of waste that Paul Rodgers’ Projection Machines so precisely places us.

Projection Machines, Paul Rodgers, producer Keely Macarow, Mass Gallery, Melbourne, April 4-21

Following the complete course of 10 Days on the Island, I became increasingly aware of both the divisions that beset Tasmania and the various ways in which Robyn Archer’s festival sought to heal them. It had opened at Risdon Cove, an Aboriginal massacre site, welcomed by the Cape Barren Island music of the Palawa exile. At Port Arthur, the aerial gyrations of Strange Fruit offered a weird challenge to associations with convict brutality and the Bryant massacre. In the convict city of Launceston, a grimy, deserted railway workshop echoed with the sounds and memories of a heyday blotted out by its harsh 1970s closure.

And right at the festival’s end, hippies and loggers met across that other great Tassie divide in an east coast sheep paddock. Sea Chant wasn’t always an easy encounter, its knife-edge balance sharpest as bass Gary Rowley sang the almost militaristic Jobs, Jobs, Jobs by local Imogen Lidgett, while we looked on clear-fellers doing their worst. Somehow lines like “Now we can all feed our families” sounded less than thankful, more an excuse, by a community, both on and off stage, which depends on the chipping port of Triabunna and its atomised eucalypt mountain of chips looming over the ships being loaded. Not surprising when the East Coast Regional Development Organisation, sponsored by Forestry Tasmania and North Ltd/Gunns, had commissioned Con Koukias (IHOS Opera) from Hobart to make the show in the first place!

Sea Chant was not an opera, by the way. It was a carefully inclusive community pageant in the manner of those created by Gilbert Spottiswood as Queensland’s State Pageant’s Officer in the 80s. Does such an indispensable position exist today, I wonder? Local schools, choirs, shearers, companies and historians had all contributed the bricks which the IHOS team cemented loosely together. Koukias contributed a catchy mock-Medieval chant celebrating the botanical names for eucalypts, recorded by local artist Louisa Ann Meredith. Other music included a Victorian lullaby, ‘we’ll all be rooned’ ballads by land and sea, a marvellously choreographed tribute to fish-packing, and a moment to be treasured as maestro Michael Kieran Harvey belted out Bach on a harmonium fit to madden any merinos within hearing.

Meanwhile, back at Launceston’s derelict Inveresk Railyards, life is springing anew thanks to the Queen Victoria Museum. Eventually a National Heritage Museum will make use of the whole site where (locals recall) 2000 workers knocked off promptly at 5 every afternoon until the 70s, flooding local streets with their bicycles. Overheard at Inveresk was the first twitter of Spring, a sound installation by Melbourne composer David Young incorporating both industrial noise and the words of workers from the Blacksmiths Shop, recalling the labour they were proud of in conditions that were rugged before being rationalised out onto the street.

Four performances of a miniature opera by Young also took place on sunny afternoons that created positive blocks of light in this smoke-blackened negative world. Soprano Maria Lurighi and percussionist Tom O’Kelly reflected both worlds, O’Kelly conjuring crystalline sounds from the rusted rollers of a 3 metre ex-industrial gamelan; Lurighi somehow combining a libretto using (amongst other sources) the Tasmanian Government Railways’ Book of Rules and Regulations from 1950 with the role of Naucrate, mother of the flighty Icarus. That story never really emerged from my necessarily partial viewing of events around the big shed; the safety limit of 200 was reached at each of the scheduled performances, requiring a bonus fourth to be added.

It was mainly the setting, therefore, that transported me thousands of miles to Midland in Perth—to another railway shed where 7000 had been tossed out by the same benevolent National Rail Authority. There, at the 1997 Perth Festival, I’d endured and been profoundly affected by the premiere of Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth. ELISION’s recorded performance brings it all back chillingly—one of the Brisbane group’s finest (ABC Classics CD 465 268-2).

But back in Tasmania, it was exciting to travel the surprising length and breadth of that isle to find people in garages, internet cafes and wineries talking about their first international arts festival. Could it have been because the effort conjured by magician Robyn Archer was—as all good art should be—a necessary one? Had she somehow collected island art from around the world that really meant something on this island? And what will she come up with in 2003—having been instantly confirmed in her position by Premier Jim Bacon—now that she knows the territory that much better?

10 Days on the Island Festival, Artistic Director Robyn Archer, Tasmania, March 30-April 8: Sea Chant, Tasmania’s East Coast Regional Development Organisation & IHOS Opera, Grindstone Bay Merino Stud, Triabunna, April 6-8; Overheard at Inveresk, David Young, Michael Hewes, Inveresk Railyards, Launceston, April 5-7, installation March 30-April 8

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, Low attention span/high curiosity rate (portrait of Peter Elliot)

Entering Gallery4A in Sydney you see 30 VHS tapes displayed on the wall. You select one, Low attention span/high curiosity rate (portrait of Peter Elliot) by Taigo Carneiro da Cunha, and step back and place it in the VHS player behind you. You seat yourself on a couch. On a large screen is projected the image of a corner in a white room. In that room are 3 boxes and a man. A very chunky man. This man has short crutches attached to his arms which he uses to walk and run on all fours. Occasionally he screeches and, jumping up, runs at the camera, arms and crutches flailing about in the air. You watch—is this a recording of some kind of behaviorist experiment? Some bizarre private fantasy? Then you realise. This man is not a pantomime act—he IS a gorilla. Every pause, gesture and vocalisation perfectly mimics the animal’s behaviour. Peter Elliot is a professional ape appearing in many films including Greystoke—The Legend of Tarzan Lord of the Apes and Gorillas in the Mist.

This work (amongts others in the programme) is indicative of a kind of radical anti-aesthetic in much contemporary video art. Actions and events are presented and left unexplained. What we have are tapes with the quality of documents—documents of actions and everyday events which problematise the act of viewing and the perception of the world from which they were taken. There is no obvious attempt to be ‘creative’ within the medium. But this video raises all kinds of uncertainty about mimesis. For a split second we have no idea what we are looking at. We don’t have a framework for what we are seeing.

Rotator (by Volker Eichelman and Ruth Maclennan) presents a series of shots of an ideal European romantic garden accompanied by a soundtrack of kitsch filler music. Like so much contemporary photography which seems to objectively render people, landscapes and buildings, it seemingly documents without comment. Different shots are part of a hyper-real catalogue in which everything is rendered in absolute detail. The romantic being emptied of romance, leaving behind the banal shell of hyper image. However the low resolution video image has trouble competing with the high resolution of the large photographic prints of much contemporary photography (see Bernd and Hiller Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth et al).

Time is indeterminate. Most of the works are loops or of an indefinite duration. You may watch them for as long or as little as you want. Exhibition space is also indeterminate. These works could be individually installed in a gallery, appear as a segment screened on TV, or projected in public spaces. Like a pop song or an ad they can exist in any situation. Charles Saatchi says simplicity is one of the qualities of great advertising. This kind of video art shares this simplicity. The concepts are so simple that they transcend context.

New Releases: An International Survey of Recent Works on Video,curator Emil Goh, presented by dLux media arts, Gallery4A & the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, March 15-April 14

Botched attempts at family ritual, the absurd or impossible ‘noughties’ relationship, conceptual flights and schoolyard racism—I struggled to find neat thematic links between films at the FTO Young Filmmakers’ Fund (YFF) Festival. The films shared only their difference—in approach, form, style, genre and content—and their popularity; the (over) capacity crowd was lounging in the aisles on the plush Chauvel Cinema carpet the Sunday I attended.

The Beach Story, written and directed by Kathleen Drayton, is a spare and quietly amusing drama. Artfully shot, it peels raw the idiosyncrasies of family dynamics which a trip to the beach can intensify. Mum puts the SLAP in slip slop slap when partner Frank (Russell Dykstra) gets fresh during sunblock application, his hands like blowflies busy over her flesh. Bored and embarrassed, daughter Holly wanders off to practise a Popstars-style dance routine on a rock pitted with dark pools until she’s interrupted by a (literal) wanker reclining, naked, behind her, one hand moving in sleazy applause.

Holly flees one erection to find Frank busy with another. She watches him mould his blokey sandcastle—a replica of a car (his Triumph)—then kicks dents in the chassis. We almost feel her shudder when he reveals his serial-sculpting history: “I reckon it’s the best one I’ve ever done.” Frank meticulously photographs his sandcastle, getting greater pleasure, we suspect, from souveniring the moment, than from his ardent sculpting. Meanwhile Mum, who has dozed, sunbaked and flirted with a nearby beach-ball enthusiast, announces with delicious, ambiguous gravity, “It’s over.” She trudges wearily back to the car, her limbs draped and tangled in beach paraphernalia, like something weedy dragged up from the sea. The playful script, adept performances and lulling cinematography made this trip a memorably visceral one; I could clearly imagine their journey home: the sting of seat vinyl on sun-crisped thighs, sand in previously unexplored crevices of flesh, the old car sizzling with too much heat…

From the ocean to the concrete, spray-painted ‘burbs of Newcastle, Intersectionz is a grungy, skater drama in fish-eye focus set to the sound of local bands. The action-versus-adolescent-torpor narrative takes an awkward turn in the final moments, but the intriguing (and puzzling) inclusion of a dad who’s half-mad professor, half Big Kev, means the work escapes the neat formula of My Old China. Written and directed by Linden Goh, My Old China explores the theme of racist schoolyard bullying and is stylishly shot with a fight scene in which saliva is threateningly dangled and drooled. Yet for me, Goh’s film lacked the complexity which might have intensified and enriched the depiction of the Chinese boy’s experience.

A video documentary about the life and decline of a young, HIV-positive woman, Chrissy, won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival (and screened on SBS last year). Chrissy’s friend Jacqui North directed, produced and wrote this record of a life punctuated with fistfuls of medication and an acute awareness of approaching death. North doesn’t shield us from discomfort as she dwells overlong on Chrissy, battling nausea at the family dinner with a wrenching, empty smile, one sister quietly departing to return with a plastic bucket; or sister Adele, recalling Chrissy’s proud boast that her cardiac arrest was the biggest ever: “when she does anything, she does the full thing…” Despite predictable home-footage of an unsteady toddling Chrissy on a stretch of Queensland lawn, the small and intensely particular moments of Chrissy’s adult life and her family’s acceptance of her grim future are compelling and moving.

Contemporary Case Studies, directed and written by Janet Merewether, is an assured and overtly stylised exploration of a 30-something, hetero, single woman’s lament. The series of neatly designed, crisply scripted segments are intensified through the adroit use of small details. A woman mines for a splinter in the soft flesh of her foot with tweezers; another twitches with shame while coming out to her analyst as a…heterosexual!, venting her feelings with an inflatable, phallic punching bag; 2 friends commiserate on the state of contemporary men—one makes pastry, the other recites verses from poet Gig Ryan’s early 80s tirade, If I Had a Gun, while a dog whinges and gnaws at thrown scraps of dough.

If I Had a Gun…I’d shoot the man…/who comments on my clothes. I’m not a fucking painting/that needs to be told what it looks like./who tells me where to put my hands, who wrenches me into position/like a meccano-set, who drags you round like a war…

In another scenario, 2 friends exercise while discussing their romantic failures; the fervency of these musings, not their physical gyrations, seems to propel their workout, generating heat and sweat. Pithy psychological theories and depthless new age myths are mobilised; early woundings, father difficulties, soul deficits are worked over, but not worked-out. Merewether’s adept use of the split-screen exaggerates the tension and humour by forming unusual and ironic connections between disparate sources.

Ink Runs Out describes a couple’s break-up through a series of claustrophobic interior close-ups, shot with video which suits its shaky realism. The punch-line to the couple’s argument is literally inscribed on flesh and worth the wait, despite an at times wordy script. Similarly concept-driven, but with an Alice in Wonderland feel, Desire Lines details a woman’s flight/fall from a building during which she glimpses the inhabitants’ lives. Unfortunately the film’s impact suffered from being scheduled after the 52-minute Chrissy. The only appropriate follow up to Chrissy (which culminated in a funeral) seemed the reflective space of an interval. Directed by Annie Beauchamp, Desire Lines was slick, seamless and whimsical even if its imagery seemed derivative of Massive Attack’s video Protection and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

The NSW Film and Television Office grants up to $25,000 toward the production cost of films shot within NSW by artists aged between 18 and 35 years. Since the YFF’s inception, 58 films have been produced; 15 of these were featured in the 3-day festival. Next year, I’ll be arriving extra early to grab a seat.

Gig Ryan, If I Had a Gun, Contemporary Australian Poetry, edited by John Leonard, Houghton Miffin, 1990

Ruined Dreams

Man Ray’s photograph of dust drifting like grey tumbleweed on the surface of Duchamp’s The Large Glass perfectly evokes the death of aura that might once have determined an artwork’s status as reified relic or authentic original. Part of the Veronica’s Revenge Perspectives on Contemporary Photography at the MCA, Dust Breeding reminds me that dirt and time can transport once vital, precious objects to a fuzzy, faded netherworld. For Walter Benjamin, who famously diagnosed photography’s link to the death of the aura, dust is a metaphor for the ruined nature of dreams in modernity. No longer able to evoke the romantic state of imagination, dreams, he proposes, are doomed instead to enter the degraded sphere of everyday life (Celeste Olalquiaga on Benjamin’s “Dreamkitsch”, The Artificial Kingdom. A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, Bloomsbury, London, 1999).

By documenting exactly this degraded sphere—a kind of domestic, low art performance-without-subjects—then elevating it to high art status, Man Ray transports us from the realm of sight to the space of thought and imagination. Both Dust Breeding and Mike Kelley’s 1994 interpretation—a frieze of dust balls in close up—symbolise the concerns of Veronica’s Revenge and the Art Gallery of NSW’s World Without End, Photography and the Twentieth Century. Photographs are not presented in either exhibit as a means for capturing ‘the real’, but as a springboard for contemplating the internal life of dreams, the imagination and subjectivity within specific historical, cultural and political contexts.

From the death of the aura to the death of the author, issues of reproduction and representation are evident in the postmodern works of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman at the MCA. Levine takes a leaf from early photographer Karl Blossfeldt’s oeuvre and kills the author at the same time. His contemporary reproductions of Blossfeldt’s intricate plant studies of the 1920s (featured at the Art Gallery) are some of her many reappropriations—she also rephotographs works of Walker Evans and Edward Weston. Levine’s ‘stylized kleptomania’ is often considered deconstructive (in the way it highlights the impossibility of originality, inserting herself into a predominantly male canon of modern art) but more interestingly as an enthusiastic, devotional act of fandom. (See Susan Kandel’s “Stalker”, Art &Text, 59)

Sherman and Prince reframe familiar gender types from advertising, film and TV. Prince enlarges details from Marlboro cigarette ads to subtly expose unseen aspects of the original, giving them fresh significance. A sepia close up on the cowboy’s hand reveals his skin is more leathery than the gloves he grips but also emphasizes the smoking cigarette between fingers; this tough guy’s nicotine dependent. Prince’s bucking horse-and-cowboy composition reveals another version of freedom that’s literally being reined in; the cowboy’s lasso makes a halo round the animal’s head.

These works suggest the curatorial agenda of Veronica’s Revenge—a kind of incandescently-lit, jam-packed trip through a contemporary art supermarket; pause at Warhol’s Brillo boxes, race past Sherman’s festering foodstuffs and Barbara Kruger’s sloganeering ‘I shop therefore I am’ and abandon your trolley at Matthew Barney’s cultish fiestas (Goodyear Chorus). These are worlds drenched in the grainy pixels of TV stills or the sleek, over-bright articulations of film and advertising. Fully aware of the vicissitudes in trying to capture a singular reality, many of these artists seem more interested in providing new frames through which ideas and associations might accumulate. Knowing that to represent is to conceal as well as reveal, theirs is an aesthetics of excess (Janine Antoni’s pregnant, three-legged Momme in 70s cheesecloth) and humour (Damien Hirst’s cadaver portrait With Dead Head, Paul McCarthy’s Girl with Penis) as much as it is of loss.

Prince and Sherman suggest the performative rather than the essential qualities of gender ‘types.’ As does the work of Claude Cahun, the French photographer (regarded as an early Sherman) featured in both shows. Cahun’s theatrical cross-dressing and playful interpretations of character from the 1920s-30s were the private activity of herself and her female lover, never intended for public consumption, while Sherman’s photographs are a most public series of acts. Sherman’s take on the Madonna-with-child suckling a plastic breast (Untitled No. 223) from 1990 continues to resonate. I think of toxic residues from leaking silicon appendages passed to the child through breastfeeding. From this corrupting view of maternal nurture, it’s no big leap to contemplate Sherman’s over-sized, candy coloured abject matter, congealing and mouldering on a nearby wall and then reflect on Kruger’s gnomic warning (and exploding cigarette?), You are an experiment in terror (1983).

The Unhomely: Rites and Rituals

Personal exposure is both the subject and fascination of Nan Goldin’s narrative sequence featuring the life of her friend, Cookie Mueller, at the MCA (Goldin’s accompanying text in a childish script begins, “I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough…”). Shot with the flattening blare of flashbulb in claustrophobic interiors, Goldin exposes with great tenderness the social rituals of a very specific life, and death. After the image of Mueller in a coffin, the final print reveals the empty, familiar interior of her loungeroom, a space that requires human presence to dream it into homeliness. The fishbowl sits without signs of life, and 2 stuffed unidentifiable animals perch as if in eternal vigil at either end of the couch.

Goldin’s work has all the tender empathy that Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1968-71) lacks in its frank sequence on heroin addiction. Emerging from an interest in the anti-sublime of the everyday, such exposures might invite the voyeur’s impulse but suggest to me how rituals, whether productive or destructive, reveal our difficulties with contemporary life and our great capacity for it. They call up what Susan Sontag calls the photograph’s talismanic quality, its capacity to “contact or claim another reality” (On Photography, Penguin, London, 1979).

A close encounter with the ‘Other’s reality’ is the subject of Nigerian Fatimah Tuggar’s blended first and third world scenes. These digitally composed, inkjet prints pick at problematic rhetorics on ‘globalism’ and the liberating power of new technologies to break down cultural borders. In People Watching (1997) the double meaning of the title is played out through the superimposition of a jeep full of camera-laden tourists on safari who gaze back at a duplicated figure in tribal costume. These grainy shots of tribal life evoke the 60s colour and style of that armchair traveller’s guide to ‘otherness’—National Geographic. Tracey Moffat’s Up in the Sky offers a less clear cut, but just as politically pointed, narrative about black/white relations in postcolonial Australia, though these remote, dusty settings, dreamy inhabitants and nightmarish scenarios evoke the anywhere of a Paris Texas.

Gregory Crewdson and Barney offered glimpses of the underside of the real at the MCA. Crewdson’s abject, unhomely landscapes (Natural Wonder, Mutated Gourd), leaking stickily or butterfly-plagued, have all the mortifying drama of museum dioramas. (Bizarrely, a billboard promoting the Sydney Morning Herald’s property liftout features a butterfly infested front lawn of a desirable property and seems to have taken its cue from Crewdson.) Barney’s fauns, nymphs and extravaganzas of corporate uniformity in Cremaster I: Goodyear Chorus and Orchidella investigate the secret excesses of underworlds whose exteriors promote propriety and restraint.

False Documents

August Sander’s Blind Children of 1921 represents as much about the nature of photography as it does about its subjects. Sander’s portraits of human ‘archetypes’ hang at the Art Gallery alongside Blossfeldt’s gelatin silver prints. Where Blossfeldt’s plant studies are architectural and sensual, Sander’s work is more ennobling than it is classificatory (and was sufficiently sympathetic in its treatment of both Jews and Gentiles to be confiscated by the Nazis). The arrangement of these works highlights photography’s roots in the endeavour to objectively record, its links with science and its paradoxical relationship to the real.

Despite a staunch belief in his own objectivity, Sander is of course doomed to capture only what blindness might look like to him; what it feels like, its particular sensory nature can only be suggested. Neither sympathetic nor ‘scientific’ in her depictions, Diane Arbus’ vision is harsher, less elevated. Her New York subjects from the late 60s (Teenage Girl on Hudson Street, Two Women Smoking at the Automat) might ‘compose’ themselves for the camera, yet Arbus’ gimlet eye famously seeks out that which they might not wish to reveal.

Curator Judy Annear does not attempt a comprehensive survey of 20th century photography here, but represents aspects of particular artists’ works within the context of photography’s proliferation in recent history. Glass cabinets containing historical, theoretical and journalistic texts on photography jut through the exhibit prompting us to consider the role of the photograph throughout history—as convicting evidence, a tool for propaganda, an instrument of power and conquest in anthropological studies, and as part of art and popular culture.

The photograph as widely circulated record of atrocity comes reappropriated by Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura who transforms Eddie Adams’ famous 1968 photograph of the street execution of a Viet Cong soldier into an illuminated memorial inside a wooden cabinet (Slaughter Cabinet II). Morimura restages the original with himself playing soldier and executioner. Opposite and blown up wall-sized is Adams’ original (Vietnam Execution) and Australian Frank Hurley’s composite works from WW1. Hurley’s sepia drenched, bombed-out buildings or sludgy fields beneath spectral clouds present war as stunning spectacle; theatrical and almost sublime. They remind me of the Futurists’ description of war as “beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns…creates new architectures, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages…” (Marinetti in Walter Benjamin, Illustrations, trans. Harry Zohn, Collins, London, 1970). Their proximity to Morimura’s cabinet and the oversized original makes the Adams shot look stagy. Interestingly, Hurley’s composite arrangements are not revealed as such in their labelling—perhaps to suggest the composed nature of all photographs…

Morimura’s funereal frame with its carved hearts has the ornate claustrophobia of a coffin (a kind of final frame in itself) and functions like a miniature stage. It gives Adams’ famous shot a new gravitas and suggests Maurice Blanchot’s warning—that what is truly disastrous about the disaster is the process of forgetting, the dissipating evidence of our passivity to events. Slaughter Cabinet II counters the dulled sensory impact (compassion fatigue) of widely reproduced images.

The world opens up in works that document the experiences of childhood and old age. American Weegee worked in the cloying darkness of cinemas to capture the unconscious gestures of rapt young thumb-suckers and chair-grippers mesmerised by the screen. Like Walker Evans’ surreptitious Subway Portraits of the same period (late 30s early 40s), the subjects here are caught unaware and appear suspended in a halfway place—less brutal, gentler seeming than William Klein’s gritty child-dramas taken a decade later on rundown New York streets.

Wendy Ewald’s works also have a dreamlike aspect—but Ewald gives cameras to children to capture their intense rituals and preoccupations. The resulting view is direct and unsentimental and records the delicate attention that kids across cultures pay to all areas of their lives. Denise Dixon depicts the cocooned, flattened features of her twin brothers, their stockinged heads dreaming themselves up as aliens in an armchair spacecraft. This intimacy is also evident in Donigan Cummin’s Pretty Ribbons (1988-91) which depicts the last stages of an elderly woman’s life. Framed in a context which suggests both the accumulation and sloughing off of life’s last moments—stranded objects, a stained bare mattress, ornately beaded eveningwear—the subject of Cummins’ rich colour and black and white portraits reveals the bone-shapes of her ageing body in a series of frank exposures. All these works evoke Sontag’s dictum that “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability…all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” (Sontag, On Photography).

Relics and Traces

The MCA title Veronica’s Revenge refers to the woman who wiped the brow of a suffering Jesus and came away with an imprint of his face on her cloth. Now a holy relic (in St Peters, Rome) this transfer of bodily emission retains only the trace of Veronica’s (and Jesus’) visceral, sensory experience. Like the photograph, which according to Marguerite Duras, “promotes forgetting” by replacing the physical, sensual realm of experience and memory with a “fixed flat easily available countenance…a confirmation of death”, Veronica’s reified cloth with its trace of bodily suffering can’t evoke the sensory aspect of Veronica’s encounter (Duras, Practicalities, Flamingo, London, 1991).

Which brings me back to Sander’s Blind Children posed in concentration over the white leaves of their braille books. One girl faces the camera to reveal only the opaque parts of her eyes, a blank stare reminding me of what can’t be represented or retained, what lies beyond, beneath and inside.

Veronica’s Revenge. Contemporary Perspectives on Photography, curator Baroness Marion Lambert with Susan Kramer, LAC-Switzerland, MCA, January-March 4; World Without End. Photography and the 20th Century, curator Judy Annear, AGNSW, Sydney, December 2-February 25

Television viewers feeling jaded by the interminable parades, day-long political re-enactments, and formal gatherings with worthy speeches (that seem to have comprised much of the TV component of this Year of Federation) should look forward to Hybrid Life, the contribution from SBS television which goes to air in June. Instead of stodgy and longwinded celebrations of the past, they’ll see something that in its very energy, diversity and multiple viewpoints, delivers a much more representative idea of what it means to live in Australia today. Back in 1999, when SBS was deliberating on their contribution to the national celebration, they decided not to look back as everyone else seemed to be doing, but instead to compile a portrait of a contemporary Australia, where 40 percent of its inhabitants were either born elsewhere or came from families where one or both parents were born overseas.

Hybrid Life is a series of 13 short films, personal stories from filmmakers from distinct ethnic communities that, in an exhilarating accumulation of style, story, and personality, present rapid fire snapshots of a generation of Australians who live in and try to make sense of 2 different cultures—maintaining the language and mores of the country where they or their parents were born, while adapting and settling in to their new home, new school, new ways of living.

From a mother coping with the demands of a new baby and reliving the obsession with Bert Newton that began when she was growing up (learning English from the television) to a woman of Russian descent whose connections to her family are re-activated by a sudden call from an aunt missing for 22 years; from a teacher in an Islamic school at last learning how to talk to his father to a wedding photographer who helps young couples create their fantasies in images that will keep forever; from a Vietnamese orphan airlifted to Australia at the end of the war who returns to Saigon as a young woman inquiring into her past to a young Vietnamese schoolgirl whose mother wants her to skip school to help get the sewing finished in the backyard clothing factory; from the young people who congregate in the shopping mall in multicultural Parramatta to the son who has to pick up a relative from Croatia for his father on the night when he already has big plans with his mates; the characters in these stories have complex relationships with their families, their communities, and both the past and the future.

But it’s perhaps the cumulative effect that’s most powerful as you watch the series. Each half hour program is personal and intimate, with the filmmaker working through complex feelings about families and the conjunctions of different cultures, and yet they combine to weave together a portrait of an immensely rich cultural tapestry that spreads out from the crowded inner-city to the sprawling outer suburbs and into the regions. And, in several of the films, when the filmmakers go back to the country they came from as young children, or from which their parents came, what is learned contributes to their lives in Australia.

Given its audience and remit, it was natural for SBS to want to ensure that a range of ethnicities and backgrounds be reflected in what it chose to produce as its component of the year of Federation, and Brigid Ikin, then head of SBS Independent, decided that that hybridity should be inherent in the styles of the programs as well. Since its establishment in 1994, SBS has commissioned more than 400 hours of quality Australian production, ranging from low budget features to drama series, animation, and single documentaries and documentary series from independent filmmakers, but Hybrid Life has been one of the most challenging projects undertaken.

Series producer Megan McMurchy was appointed and a national mailout was sent to the database SBS had compiled of all those filmmakers with a migrant background it had had dealings with or knew of, while the project was also advertised in the industry press. Two page proposals for a documentary or drama concept were asked for, and from the 200 applications received a short list of 17 was given development funding, and finally 13 were chosen to go into production through 2000. Final selections were made by McMurchy in consultation with Documentary Commissioning Editor John Hughes for the 9 documentary programs, and with Debbie Lee for the 4 short dramas. Financial support for 8 of the documentaries came from the National Council for the Centenary of Federation. For McMurchy, this was a special and unusual working experience and she’s pleased that what looked to be an exciting series has more than lived up to its promise. A number of the programs from Hybrid Life have already become finalists in both the Dendy and the Atom (Australian Teachers on Media) Awards.

Hybrid Life screens Fridays, 8pm, on SBS from June 8: Dear Bert, Sparky D Comes to Town, Wee Jimmy; June 15: Parra, Delivery Day, Saturn’s Return; June 22: The Last Pecheniuk; June 29: Always a Visitor; July 6: Missing Vietnam; July 13: The Brides of Khan; July 20: Cosenza Vecchia; July 27: Islands; August 3: From Here to Ithaca

Delivery Day, Islands & Sparky D Comes to Town have been nominated for ATOM Awards; The Last Pecheniuk & Sparky D Comes to Town are nominees in the Dendy Awards, Sydney Film Festival, June 8-22; Wee Jimmy was a Certificate of Merit Winner in the Shorts for Kids Category, Golden Gate Awards, San Francisco International Film Festival, April 19-May 3

Until this year Tasmania had never held a major international arts festival. After much planning, 10 Days on the Island became a reality in March and April. The festival was strongly supported by locals and a significant number of interstate visitors. The theme of the festival, “the island”, provided open-ended inspiration for a range of artists, groups, works and events, including international imports.

There were many highlights amongst the performance-based works. A Tasmanian physical theatre event CENSORED, devised and performed by Hobart dancer and choreographer Wendy McPhee, played to sell-out houses. The pseudo-autobiographical tale of a classical ballet dancer who never quite made it, CENSORED is a risk-taking combination of drama and stand-up comedy plus recontextualised ballet and modern dance.

Confessional in tone, the work seamlessly crosses the boundaries between artforms, showcasing the comic talents and acting abilities of McPhee who already has a solid reputation as one of Tasmania’s best classical and contemporary dance performers. Set in suburbia, CENSORED explores the dancer’s love-hate relationship with her art and the sacrifices and traumas—notably body-image issues—it involves. To this end, McPhee spends a third of the performance virtually nude, heightening the already well established vulnerability of her character.

The work expands McPhee’s extensive repertoire as actor, dancer, raconteur and comedian. Her willingness to push the boundaries and her fearless ability to confront the kinds of demons and insecurities we all recognise gives this young woman’s story a genuine universality.

The show is noteworthy for its tight direction by Deborah Pollard and high production values, particularly the sound design by George Khut, one of Tasmania’s most innovative sound and installation artists, recently relocated to Sydney (see interview RT#42 p37). It is possible that CENSORED will tour interstate; don’t miss it.

Within the visual arts, the festival offered an engaging range of choices. The City of Hobart Art Prize has established a reputation for presenting the best in cutting edge contemporary artforms, Australia-wide. It concentrates on 2 media/techniques annually; this year the categories were fashion and photo/digital media.

The fashion section was by no means conventional. From 14 finalists the award went to Melbourne designers Denise Sprynskyj and Peter Boyd, aka SIX, showing a recycled man’s shirt inserted with laser-cut polyester, a hand-painted organza square tailer dress and a handbag made from a man’s jacket.

Hobart-based Sarah Ryan, formerly of Brisbane, won the photomedia section with her trademark, a digital lenticular photograph, using a technique she has developed as part of her current PhD research. Her large, shimmering image, The Real Escape, is of an eerily neutral, almost empty, modernist space—it could be either interior or exterior—dominated by a similarly unreadable metal screen. The illusionistic qualities of her lenticular technique give unremarkable subject matter a disquieting resonance.

Held on beaches and private property on the Tasman Peninsula, an hour from Hobart, Sculpture by the Sea featured 60 works pre-selected from over 120 applicants. Part of the pleasure of visiting is engaging with the rugged coastal scenery of the region and following sculpture trails in the 3 venues. A full-on, full-day experience. Some works responded to the natural environment in which they were placed; others, particularly those in hi-tech/man-made materials, intervened in—and provided a strong and often thought-provoking contrast to—their surroundings.

Anna Phillip’s monumental Doily II, fashioned from crocheted recycled plastic bags, explores the medium’s mutability and continues the artist’s exploration and deconstruction of symbols that form and inform the female condition. Helene Czerny’s Victory Roll captures real human hair in perspex tubing—a juxtaposition both abject and aesthetic, exploring “hair and its journey…”

Poets and Painters is another established event incorporated into the 10 Days program. The concept involves the pairing of 15 visual artists with writers of poetry and creative prose, each duo producing a collaborative work. Participants are free to work together in any ways that seem appropriate: sometimes an existing work or idea is the catalyst, other pairs work together from scratch, and so on. The exhibition’s opening, hosted by Robyn Archer, was performance in its own right, with spoken word renditions from most of the writers—and Archer moved to burst into impromptu song.

Two other noteworthy exhibitions were Response to the Island, a craft- and design-oriented blockbuster curated by Grace Cochrane, and Island Postcards, over 130 pieces wittily and irreverently referencing and re-inventing the form, or concept, of the postcard.

For a first festival, remarkably few glitches were evident, no doubt due to Archer’s professionalism and the enthusiasm she inspires. There were so many events and attractions that it was not possible to view them all in the 10 days available. Happily, many of the art exhibitions were extended beyond the festival.

The festival generated a palpable buzz, exciting for a place that so often misses out on touring shows from interstate and overseas. There was a stimulating menu of music, dance, puppetry, drama, physical theatre, visual arts and more. It has been confirmed that the festival will continue as a biennial event; we look forward, then, to what 2003 will bring.

Censored, Wendy McPhee, director Deborah Pollard, Theatre Royal, March 29-April 7; City of Hobart Art Prize, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, April 1-May 20; Sculpture by the Sea, curated by Dick Bett, Tasman Peninsula, March 23-April 8; Poets and Painters, curated by Dick Bett, Bett Gallery, March 23-April-18; Response to the Island, curated by Grace Cochrane, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, March 28-April 29; Island Postcards, co-ordinated by Penny Carey Wells, State Library of Tasmania, Hobart, March 28-April 29.

Clara Law was born in Macau and graduated from Hong Kong University. She studied filmmaking at The National Film and Television School in London. Her feature films include The Other Half and The Other Half (1988), The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (1989), Farewell, China (1990), Autumn Moon (1991) and The Temptation of a Monk (1993). Floating Life (1996) was her first film after re-locating to Australia and was co-written with her partner, Eddie Fong. The Goddess of 1967, also co-written by Fong, has garnered a number of international awards including Best Actress for Rose Byrne at the Venice Film Festival and Best Director at the Chicago Film Festival.

I heard that the inspiration for The Goddess of 1967 came from a road trip you and Eddie did in 1997.

It was our first trip to the outback. We came to Australia in 1995 and when we finished Floating Life we realised we didn’t know very much about Australia. So we bought a 4-wheel drive and went into the outback for 18 days. Out of that trip I got stuck in my head 2 places: Lightning Ridge and White Cliffs. So Lightning Ridge is Goddess and White Cliffs will be The Mechanical Bird (Clara’s next film).

Did the story for Goddess come while you were in the outback or did you have the idea before you set out?

At that time we wanted to do something on the dark side…because what Eddie and I had been doing was more to do with the positive side, nothing to do with what is irrational and hurtful to people. I think that is part of human nature and we wanted to look into that. So that was the idea, the first stage. Then we went to the outback. We thought somehow Lightning Ridge, and people who have the kind of existence where they work underground, seemed quite probable to fit into this idea of the dark side.

It’s an interesting metaphor that reflects the theme of the film—people burying their past and their secrets. Did the characters emerge after you had discovered the location?

We slowly developed the characters. The Japanese man came first and then the blind girl. We felt she had to be blind, we didn’t know why, but we just felt she had to be physically handicapped. If she’s blind and living independently, then she is connected in a way to something higher than what you can normally feel or materialise. We thought it would be interesting to put that type of character against a guy that comes from a society that is totally materialistic, a guy who has nothing to do with the spiritual side, who is very disconnected, very departmentalised. We thought if we put them against each other something interesting would happen.

His attraction to the car (The Goddess) is because it’s a physically beautiful thing whereas her attraction is its history, its emotional, intangible presence. The 2 characters have a very different relationship with the one car. How did the car come about?

We were looking for something for him to collect because he comes from an affluent society. Material stuff is easily accessible and it defines you as a person if you have collections. In a way that is what to us is the Japanese image. When we saw a friend’s Citroen DS we knew it had to be this. What we found out later fitted into the story. The fact that it’s an icon, that it’s such a futuristic car, its legends with (French President Charles) De Gaulle and French movies. Totally not part of Japan. It fits into this whole thing of modern technology and how man can behave like God, and he can actually be God when he creates something so perfect, and yet it’s still only a car. It just fit so perfectly with this guy who’s looking for a goddess in a car and finds a goddess in a girl. It was a coincidence but also a stroke of fate.

You have a very organic approach to scripting. You start slowly and then build the story.

We are never story driven. I think we are more character and theme driven. Sometimes we will just start with an image or something that’s been nagging me…if you start from a story it can become very superficial, very external, and that’s not something we’re interested in.

In a lot of ways you remind me of a painter. You’re so interested in composition and images, very much the art of cinema.

This is what I believe. I think cinema is telling a story through the images, images are very very important. I would rather rely on images than dialogue. I think they complement each other but I like to use dialogue in a poetic way rather than just disclosing information. I hate trying to describe through dialogue. If you want to describe something you do it through visuals.

Both Floating Life and The Goddess of 1967 are films where characters are taken out of their natural environment and placed in alien landscapes. Is this theme of displacement something that has particular resonance for you?

Probably, because that’s what I’ve felt. Even before I was living in Australia…when I was living in Hong Kong and in Macau, where I was born, I felt the same…always there are 2 people in me, one that goes through the emotional trauma and pain that everybody goes through, but there’s also another side that is very strong in me, that sits outside and looks at myself. I’m never very attached to things so most of the time I like to observe. I don’t like to possess. I don’t need to possess anything so I like to observe and react.

I think I’m attached to things in bigger terms, things that are beautiful…but I’m not especially attached to any place. You’re attached to your memories but then you’re also aware that memories are in the past and you have to keep going forward. At the same time, there’s this strong awareness that life is very transient, there’s a beginning point but also an ending point…Probably that’s because I have a very traumatic memory of my brother. My eldest brother died when I was very young. So, mortality and the feeling that nothing is forever was very strong in me as a kid. Instead of going away it grew in me, this feeling that nothing is forever.

It’s interesting that you became a filmmaker because by making films you create a permanence. Your films will last beyond you.

Exactly. This is something very revealing about my character. When I was a kid I loved doing theatre, I loved directing plays. When I was in my last year in high school I directed a play that was an adaptation of Joan of Arc. It was entered into an open school competition and I won all the awards. We were delirious with happiness and I went backstage when it was all finished and we were packing and talking about where we would go to celebrate and then I felt really down, very depressed, and I didn’t go anywhere that night. I went home and I wanted to have a great cry. I suddenly felt very empty that it was finished. All this energy that you put in, all finished. From then on I didn’t do any more theatre. I stopped altogether. I started writing poetry and prose again, trying to find a means to express myself. But I knew I would never do theatre again because it was so sad for me.

You moved to Australia 6 years ago. Was this because you felt you could grow more freely here as an artist? Did you feel confined by the expectations placed on Hong Kong filmmakers—the martial arts movie genre?

That was a very big part of it. We felt a pressure in Hong Kong where you had to make a certain kind of film. A genre film and there was no alternate, independent cinema. Then my fourth film Autumn Moon, that won the Golden Leopard in Locarno, was ignored. In Hong Kong they just want movies to make money and entertain. When you try and walk the other path you are not looked upon with respect or support, and all that time Eddie and I felt trapped. No one around you is thinking like you or working like you or thinking you should be working like that. You’re trying to grow and move forward as an artist but you have to always pretend that you are part of this mainstream. We were not part of the mainstream and we knew we would never be. In 1993 we came to Australia to do post-production on Temptation Of A Monk and the more we stayed here, the more we felt that this is the place we could spend half of the year writing and recharging, while we spent the other half working in Hong Kong. At that time Autumn Moon was being released in Australia and received very good reviews. While we were working here we wrote the first draft of Floating Life which we showed to producers and they were interested in developing it. So slowly and gradually we stayed.

You said Hong Kong doesn’t support artists beyond commercial interest. Do you think Australia is any different? Do you think this country supports filmmakers throughout their careers?

Everything is relative. I won’t say that it is heaven here but I think to a certain degree you have a lot more channels to turn to and to do things that are different. This is what I felt when I first came here. I know now it is getting a bit more conservative but probably that’s not just Australia, it’s a worldwide thing. It is very unfortunate and depressing. The big money is now getting into arthouse films. A lot of arthouse films are not arthouse any more. It’s degenerating into something else.

You have to challenge yourself to keep getting closer and closer to what you hope is a work of art and you just have to try to keep doing that because there is no other choice.

With Mechanical Bird we are exploring a different space and time. What Eddie and I share is a concern with the meaning of our existence…the spiritual side…if you look up there and then look down and see all these people —and us. Why us here on this planet? So it’s what’s out here on the planet and what we are, actually, inside. The macro and the micro is what intrigues both of us and why we move from one story to another in different ways.

The Goddess of 1967, distributor Palace Films, is currently screening nationally

A Sarai is an enclosed space in a city or beside a highway, where travellers and caravans can find shelter, sustenance and companionship; a tavern, a public house, a meeting place; a destination and a point of departure; a place to rest in the middle of a journey.

Sarai: the New Media Initiative, Delhi, works with these readings of the word Sarai to create a space where old and new forms of media, their practitioners and those who reflect on or critically examine these practices, can find a convivial atmosphere, and enter into shared pursuits that will create a renewal of public cultures within and across city spaces.

In Delhi, there appears to be amazing access to “new media space”, signs point to small cable operators, hundreds of public call offices, low cost media such as music and videotapes, reasonably inexpensive “grey market” computers and internet cafes evident all over the city. However the vast majority of the urban population is unable to gain access to these resources.

In establishing a small Sarai, a space for debate, dialogue, refuge, production of work and generation of ideas, the team of artists, activists, filmmakers, theorists and thinkers behind Sarai have taken on a huge task. The friendly and ebullient team may not be able to provide new media access to all the people in Delhi, but they will certainly influence public debates, raise awareness of work being done in this area and provide access to a significant number of communities who may not otherwise have had this opportunity.

The Sarai New Media Initiative emerged out of a collaborative vision between the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies (CSDS), a non-profit institution (funded in part by Indian Council of Social Science) and Raqs Media Collective who have since been joined by a group of independent artists, programmers, historians, web designers and documentary filmmakers. Their intention is to foster collaborative work and partnerships as well as to provide a space in Delhi where people can develop ideas. Its establishment has been supported by the CSDS, the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Netherlands government, assisted by the energetic partnership they have established with the Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam.

We translate the term ‘connectivity’ to mean much more than internet access. For us it connotes the means and desire to forge links, build affinity groups, crystallize networks and enter conversations around/through our intellectual activity and creative work.

The research agenda of Sarai is organized around 2 core areas: “understanding the place of the media in urban public practice and consciousness, and reflections on the city as constituted through representations and technologies.” Their current core program centres around explorations of the city and the lives of people in Delhi in terms of ecology and technology; the concept of a media city and how that reflects, and also writes, the lives of those who inhabit it; an engagement with the Hindi language and its representation in the physical and virtual worlds. Sarai is also committed to an exploration of the free software community in order to design applications and hardware configurations so that they are truly accessible and allow for low connectivity and authoring tools.

In line with this agenda, the 3 day opening event, “Enter: the Public Domain”, addressed topics as broad as cinema and the city, access and censorship, social justice and the city, free software, and global new media, art and the city in contemporary literature and cinema. Artforms presented ranged from film to installation, internet to sound, photography to writing.

In reflecting on the notion of a Public Domain various speakers including Rajiv Bhargava, Geert Lovink, DL Sheth, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta discussed possibilities for tracing and imagining decentralized versions of the formation of public opinion through contemporary technologies. Discussion centred on issues of providing spaces for disparate voices and concerns.

Monica Narula presented Global Village Health Manual, a recent interactive screen-based work developed by Raqs Media Collective. The work is an extensive digital archive of research undertaken on popular print materials from 19th century India juxtaposed with contemporary medical research from the internet. The combination of sources posed a range of questions about the body in a digital age. Meena Nanji, a filmmaker from Los Angeles who is currently working in Pakistan, Afghanistan and North India, focused her presentation on strategies she is employing to develop work about the experiences of young Muslim women in these countries. Samara Mitchell, representing the Australian Network for Art and Technology and Ngapartji Multimedia Centre in Adelaide, showed Australian work and focused on interdisciplinary discussions and collaborative practices between artists, practitioners and philosophers in Arcadia, an ANAT research project exploring philosophy, theology and approaches to human/machine interactions.

Issues of access, freedom and censorship across various media forms were also central to a number of panels which sought to open up debate. Rehan Ansari, a freelance media critic and writer from Pakistan also undertaking research through CSDS, spoke about the physical space of Karachi and how the city geographically exists in mutually exclusive zones. Juxtaposing the physical with the virtual, Ansari also spoke of the website Chowk, an online space of discussion, dialogue, reviews, journalese and general chat for people living in Pakistan and India as well as people who have connections with Pakistan, providing a space of exchange for residents currently living in, and diasporas living without, South Asia. On the same panel Siddhartha Varadrajan, a journalist with the Times of India, discussed ways the news is produced in mainstream media and Arun Mehta, president of the Society for Telecommunications Empowerment, suggested that the sheer size of the internet ensures that there are adequate spaces to “bypass” censorship in traditional media forms.

The task of the Sarai team will be to remain relevant to the many communities in Delhi, ensuring that they can attract the young and disadvantaged audiences that they intend to serve, and remain networked into a supportive international community. If the opening event “Enter: the Public Domain” was anything to go by, I have no doubt that they will live up to the task they have set themselves.

In Moghul India caravansarais (inns for merchants and travellers) were found at regular intervals along major highways and in cities. …Constructed by the great for reasons of charity, religious duty, and fame, they were open to merchants, scholars, religious specialists, and other travellers, but not to soldiers. The average sarai had room for 800 to a thousand travellers, and housed barbers, tailors, washermen, blacksmiths, sellers of grass and straw, physicians, dancing girls, and musicians…

The caravan sarai erected by Jahanara Begum near the entrance to the garden on Chandni Chowk was the outstanding example of its type…Jahanara wrote, “I will build a sarai, large and fine like no other in Hindustan. The wanderer who enters its court will be restored in body and soul and my name will never be forgotten.”

In Delhi, the reason Jahanara Begum’s name is remembered is the infectious energy of the Sarai Institute for New Media in their drive to establish a contemporary version of an Indian Sarai. I will remember them all for their generosity, their intellectual rigour, and their amazing dedication to the philosophy of establishing a site for the exchange of ideas and the development of new work. While this Sarai does not currently have room for a thousand ‘travellers’, the extraordinary commitment of the Sarai team to making tools and knowledge available to many Delhi artists, young people and communities who do not currently have access, and their integrated approach to cross disciplinary dialogue and debate, will undoubtedly have an effect on thousands of artists and communities in Delhi and beyond.

Sarai New Media Initiative, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi, India, February 23-25, “Enter”, Sarai: the New Media Initiative/Society for Old and New Media, Delhi/Amsterdam 2001,

It starts in a bar. I’m standing alone at the back of the crowd clutching my glass of vin ordinaire. Yes, I have been here before. Suddenly in focus, a woman perched on the bar top—her voice is husky and flirtatious. She asks: “What’s your poison? What do you want?”

And before I have time to think of an answer, to define my role in this most familiar of settings, it’s Sex and the City, it’s you and me babe, out on the prowl. It’s Brigid Jones’ Diary. It’s most of us at some time, looking for something and ‘love is a four-letter word.’

Do you want me?
my body? my heart? my soul?
Just sex!
How do you want it?
Do you want it hard, fast, slow, soft, kinky, tender?
How long will we go for?
Will your libido match mine?
Will you fall in love?
What do you want?
A hard on, a slippery nipple, quick fuck, orgasm, pink pussy, 69er, flaming orgy, ecstasy?
How much do you want?
Will it be great?
It better be!

Shannon Bott’s The Morning After, the Night Before was first presented at the Blue Room Theatre in 2000. In an attempt to attract private support to tour the work interstate, she has reprised the show in PICA’s black box space. She’s a compelling and engaging performer, physically and vocally articulate, and unafraid to engage directly with her audience. This, her first solo work, is very much in the tradition of Wendy Houstoun or Kate Champion with its emphasis on the play of languages—spoken, theatrical and choreographic. What differs is the content which has yet to extend beyond the personal but then, she is a much younger artist.

The Morning After, the Night Before is accessible, polished and fun. It takes a familiar experience and translates it into a kind of cut-up, where fairytales, dirty jokes and a sense of personal experience happily co-exist. The design is simple and effective. On the one hand, a flock of cute handbags suspended in space, holding anything and everything a girl might need for a night on the town. On the other, a pristine column of white pillows that end up tossed across the floor in orgiastic abandon.

As a performer, Shannon Bott is charming, engaging and vital. She is also talented, tenacious and ambitious. And if this work doesn’t really stretch the parameters of either form or content—well, there was a lot to enjoy and the audience loved it.

The Morning After, the Night Before, created & performed by Shannon Bott, collaborators Sally Richardson & Sue Peacock, lighting Andrew Lake, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, April 24-26

Over the last 2 years, emerging Adelaide musical collective The Sty have been harboring a discreet warehouse in the Adelaide Hills, proliferating a collection of works ranging from free-form psychedelia to cinematic audioscapes, punk, funk, rock, desktop-techno and lab jazz. Wading into the voluminous archive of Sty remixes is to trawl the marvels of an untapped universal audio sub-consciousness. Thankfully, a portion of this amassed range of phenomenal musical exploration has been chosen by the collective for public release, soon to bathe the inner ear of the sleeping.

The 4 core members are Jolon Van Santen, Andrew Herpich, Ryan Davidson and James Bagley. The band is gathering popularity on stage through its charismatic performances of laconic rock tunes I fell in Love with Yello and Girl on Horse. Bursts of frenetic laughing-gas vocals in Criminals, putting away Criminals (delivered by Van Santen) are not unlike the bizarre voice-box gymnastics executed by US band, Ween. Although differing somewhat in style, both Ween and The Sty place a level of importance upon revealing the experimental process during recording. A studio bungle or conversation places emotional randomness against the threat of over refinement in the home-studio digital editing process.

In contemporary composition there are notable advantages for digital technologies which permit a quality of production previously unattainable to most independent musicians. Creator and key sound designer for a short film titled Buggin, James Bagley, with creative assistance from other members of the collective, devised a complex cacophony of orchestral strings to provide the on-screen avatar of an omnipresent fly. Using a keyboard as a primary means of composition, Bagley recorded individual violin notes and worked them into convincing baroque phrases in a digital edit. The result was uncanny: an immense weave of hovering strings, like a colony of musically manic flies honing in on one traumatized human actor. Buggin won Best Sound Design and Composition at the 2001 Media Resource Centre awards in South Australia.

As satellite member of The Sty, Iain Dalrymple’s first 2 unreleased albums, There’s a Planet on my Tongue and Acrylic Car, lodge an irresistible appeal to the delta waves of the brain. In particular, the tracks on There’s a Planet on My Tongue are dense with physically affecting atmosphere, like that hanging over a live orchestra. Both albums are afloat with sound bites of aural sci-fi phenomena and the periodic siren song of one homesick beacon. Dalrymple searches the vast data-pool of the internet’s audio archives to borrow power from collective social responses invoked by warbling operatic divas, nostalgic films and national anthems. Under the guidance of an animist’s ear, Dalrymple’s masterful works capture the simple aura of domestic environments—birds, alarm clocks, brewing coffee (I could almost hear the laminate on the kitchen benchtop), wind in trees—arranging them with an increasing intimacy of consciousness from natural to organised chaos.

The emotional range in Dalyrmples’s gorgeous concertos and in the enigmatic work of The Sty are but a few examples of the many triumphs of high quality, low budget productions emerging from dedicated and intelligent musicians. Refreshingly, the breadth of musical influences, skill, and diverse styles apparent in much of emerging independent music in Australia is able to resist any automatic clumping within the limitations of genre.

10 Days on the Island, Tasmania’s first international festival of islands, offered a feast of physical theatre, visual arts, dance, music, literature, film, cuisine and sculpture installations. These elements combined to generate a frisson of excitement across 32 towns and
80 venues.

Robyn Archer’s program design enabled her to negotiate Tasmania’s fraught politics of localism while modelling the shape and energy of a festival decentralised away from Hobart. Her strategy introduced Tasmanian audiences to the excitement and diversity of the arts experience through performances by assured companies with immediate and accessible programs.

From this plethora of performances, CoisCëim Dance Theatre’s Ballads, Compania Segundo’s No 2 and Theatre Talipot’s The Water Carriers stimulated our desire for lost voices through reclamation of the orality and alterity of Irish, Pacific and La Reunion Islander cultures.

Books scattered, bundled and piled in dishevelled heaps provide the central and recurring motif of Ballads. Cellist/dancer Diane O’Keeffe lies covered by her cello, emblematic of a coffin lid. Rising from the grave on an angled board she scrapes and bows the sound of her diminished and famished self. Choreographer and director David Bolger unequivocally situates the audience in the grey unfolding of the Great Irish Famine and the Irish diaspora. CoisCëim dance the space of hunger, death and dispersal. Bolger’s choreographic style is that of narrative abstraction, fully utilising the devices of physical and dance theatre.

This production encouraged speculation on the globalisation of the book as a theatrical device. The Irish tenants of English and neo-English landholders were illiterate. Their narrative mode was the voice of story. Books codified morals and registered land holdings, weight and tonnage, profit, births, deaths and marriages. In Ballads the frenzy and fluttering of leaves of paper provides a record of both the dead and departing; the inter/leaving of stories.

Dancers Muirne Bloomer, James Hosty, Lisa McLoughlin, Jonathan Mitchell and Katherine O’Malley are finely honed in their physical responses to score and story. The finesse of their ensemble work, the staccato and stutter of their isolations and contractions invoked power and subtlety. Theirs is a dynamic of gravitas. The emphasis on each dancer’s audible breath provided an extra sound pulse as a reminder of the physical demands of dance and accent to the horror of death by starvation.

Ballads resonates with the wreckage of lives; of the broken blatherers and botherers of Ireland dispersed across aisles of ocean in a diaspora of phytophthora, the blight that caused the potato’s withering. Islands continue to disperse and receive peoples for whom old alliances are severed. The story lies mute in the mouth, furled for resurgence into another frenzy of word, a continuing record of the misplaced, unclaimed and differently named.

Writer Toa Fraser’s compassionate and humorous script is brilliantly enhanced by Madeleine Sami’s solo performance about family life in No 2. A single red spot on a solitary red chair establishes the domain of Nana Maria, the elderly matriarch of a rambunctious Fijian family. She moans and mourns her age, her departed husband and living in a house without singing, dancing, feasting and fighting. She decides that today she will name her successor. Her grandchildren will prepare a great feast day like they do in Sicily. Through a succession of deft movements Sami adroitly establishes the mannerisms of 9 characters as they prepare for the feast, cook the pig, discuss, dismiss and establish their claims to be named as Nana Maria’s successor.

Fraser and Sami reveal their lives through a performance which imbues each character with the fullness, foible and failure of family story. References to former and present colonising influences and icons are scattered: the royal family, the Catholic church, rugby, hip hop, race and class distinctions. No 2 is engaging theatre. The joi de vivre of Sami’s characters capture the weaving of English, Fijian and Maori cultures, inflecting each character’s aspirations; from Tyson’s dream of rugby fame and educational achievement to Hibiscus’ posturing as a wannabee model, to Sol’s seductive hip hop routine. Madeleine Sami is a young performer retelling the space of old story and familial connections through contemporary idiom and gesture.

A recurring motif of 10 Days is the turn and return of voices, as fragments of sound and utterance are shaped into theatre that wounds our logic and shifts imagination. Theatre Talipot’s The Water Carriers claims and renames Indian Ocean myth, memory and magic through physical theatre of intense immanence.

The Water Carriers is potent and prescient theatre for an increasingly water-starved world. The stark stage design establishes the vertigo of deep thirst. A river once provided the connecting thread between people occupying the mountains, the valley and the sea. The river as bearer and supporter of life has dried into a gorge. “Sing again water”, the dancers intone, “are you sleeping?” A shifting repertoire of voice and body is established through the precision and energy of the performers. Four dancers hallucinate across deserts, summon water from dried springs, and convincingly cross gender at the well of women.

The absence of water projects the performers into an obeisance of ritual and practical strategies. These include dance, percussion, and the weave of harmonic voices to entice the sky to deliver water through invocations of memory, fragments of song, sayings and dances. Their success will enable the roots of the talipot tree to glisten, moistened throats to resume the story, and a river to flow renewing peoples and their worlds again.

Water surrounds, connects with and separates all island cultures. The journey across water is an informing motif for all island inhabitants. 10 Days on the Island showcased international companies alongside high calibre Tasmanian visual artists and performers. Robyn Archer’s strategy of dispersing representatives of island cultures around the island state will hopefully ensure a strong and enthusiastic audience base for the 2003 celebration of islands and arts diversity.

Ballads, CoisCëim Dance Theatre, director/choreographer David Bolger, Theatre Royal, Hobart, March 30 – April 2; No 2, Compania Segundo, writer Toa Fraser, performer Madeleine Sami, director Catherine Boniface, Peacock Theatre, Hobart, April 4-8; The Water Carriers , Theatre Talipot, writer/artistic director Phillipe Pelen Baldini, composer/ interpreter Ricky Randimbiarison, choreographer Savitry Nair, Princess Theatre, Launceston, April 5-6

A Warning

I am not impartial. I am a practitioner in the theatre scene about which I write. Because I practice I don’t get to as much theatre as I would like. But when I do go I feel that I have a stake in it; and, in the face of the omnivorous imperialism of mass communication, I care about how it reveals the world to me. I go, as Tim Etchells of the British performance ensemble Forced Entertainment puts it, as a witness not as a spectator, “because to witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s own place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an onlooker.” I don’t sit there waiting to be transformed or uplifted or provoked into action. I know that all of those will result from the contract between me and the performance. We both have to work at it. The late American actor Ron Vawter described the feeling of riding the wave of energy from the audience like a surfer. Well, when it works, the wave is shared, we’re all on it; and we know how fickle waves can be. They soar and they dump, but even when they dump you are surrounded by energy, whereas in the theatre, when it’s not working, there is a cold energy-less atmosphere. Oh for the return of impassioned disagreement.

The view overall

There are 2 broad aspects to the Melbourne theatre scene: one, the theatre that goes on in Melbourne, the product, the productions, the one-off, or intermittent shows that are mainly, though not exclusively, gathered around the various arts festivals that have developed over the past 10-15 years; two, the theatre of Melbourne, the ongoing, year-round theatre culture connected either to companies or performance spaces. These are not mutually exclusive, the line is being crossed all the time, but the distinction is worth making, partly because for so long the emerging festival market and its supermarket way of presenting art has been seen as a threat to the fragile local theatre ecology; partly because, in the face of festival influence, it may be time to recognise the shift in local theatre that they have helped bring about.

The Independents

The festivals are healthy. I don’t have the space to deal with them here. The non-festival one-off scene—what the funding bodies call Individual Projects (a lot of which also happen in the festivals)—is also healthy if not wealthy and certainly numerous. I get about 2 invitations a week to new shows opening in the various independent venues around town: Theatreworks, The Storehouse, The Carlton Courthouse, Gasworks, the Trades Hall, North Melbourne Town Hall, or various warehouses or lofts around the inner suburbs. In these shows, limited as they are by funding, interesting creative trends can be discerned. This is the work of performance artists, young and old, seeking to delight, engage and, in Peggy Phelan’s words, “ignite the conscience of an ethical observer.” The artists have something to say about the world around them or inside them and the genres and traditions of the various performance disciplines stretch and strain to accommodate the complexities of their responses to a complex world. There is a constant output by artists and small groups which attempts to rewrite the visual grammar of theatre.

There are many emerging independent groups and artists that I’ve seen or not yet seen. Chris Bendall and Victor Bizotto’s Theatre @ Risk opened in May, a season of works at the Blackbox Theatre in the Arts Centre. Robert Reid’s Theatre in Decay is prolific, mounting at a variety of venues the punchy contemporary pieces that flow from his pen. I hope to cover these 2 groups and others in more detail in later issues.

The New Agenda

The agenda is now being set by the independent work, unlike the case in days of yore when ensembles and medium-sized companies and spaces were the avant-garde. The reason is economic of course. Who can afford an ensemble these days? A few months ago, in the North Melbourne Town Hall, a packed room of small company directors, administrators and actors, and a sprinkling of independent artists gathered to form a network of theatre professionals, Theatre Network Victoria. The purpose was to gain strength in numbers, to accumulate a supportive database, to set up a lobby group that could argue for the return of the middle ground of Melbourne theatre—that area that operates between the independent projects and the larger companies like MTC and Playbox. There was general agreement that the loss of that middle ground was causing a real lack of depth and breadth in the city’s theatrical culture. There was a range of opinion as to how to address this but an agreement that a congregation of effort was better than trying to go it alone.

But there is no denying it: the theatre culture has changed. My friend, the director Kim Durban, coined the term “the necklace theory” to describe a way of working in these times. I hope she won’t mind if I share it here. It arose in response to her attempt (successful finally) to mount a Masters production at the VCA—a radical reworking of the 16th century domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham. With no money to pay the group of professional actors she wished to work with, she worked out a schedule in which she would always be present at rehearsals but she would work with whichever of the actors was able to turn up. She got different combinations every week. No actor was able to turn up to all rehearsals. Some dropped out half way through. Some joined late. The show kept developing. She had a source text but the text they were building for performance was original. There was a loose ensemble of intent but no continuity. Except for her. She was the jeweller, threading together the pearls that were formed at each meeting. What was significant, I think, apart from the fact that the work went on to success, was that instead of bowing under the pressure of circumstances, Kim reasoned for herself another way of working. “The age of the ensemble working all hours in the old church hall has gone,” she said, “this is the age of the necklace.”

The Melbourne theatre scene is now like a necklace. To keep up with the trends, to be there at the breakthroughs, you can no longer pop down to the Pram Factory or Anthill or even Handspan. You’ve got to move around, picking up the pearls where you find them, threading them for yourself, trying to make sense of the whole pattern. Attendance at La Mama has always been like that—potluck; that, in addition to the space itself, is its charm.

THREE COMPANIES

Keene-Taylor Project

There are a few companies that are bucking this trend. Ariette Taylor and Daniel Keene (Keene-Taylor Project) have gathered around them a group of actors who, whilst continuing to work in the wider profession, keep returning to perform. This is a loose ensemble of sorts. It enables Keene-Taylor to draw off a wide variety of generations, styles and experience. Their youngest performer is still in her teens. The oldest are in their 70s. What draws them is that Keene’s closely wrought, dark and sympathetic studies of those at the margins of our society are wonderful actors’ pieces. The company is run by a director and a writer but in many ways it is an actors’ theatre. The genre may look to be social realist, but the recognition in the writing of an unpredictable transcendent dimension and Taylor’s idiosyncratic direction create instead an aura of magic-realism. The focus is deliberately narrow. It is the consistency of the target and the pursuit that is its power. Here are poverty, prejudice and loneliness, three of the huge social monsters that still need slaying; here too is the humanity that may yet do it. Keene-Taylor draws a devoted audience because there is the strong sense that to be there is to be a witness to a vital social event. These may be character studies but when they work (and they risk skirting close to a reductive sentimentality when they don’t) the real event lies in the depth of understanding reached between actors and audience as the world unfolds. Keene-Taylor has performed at a Brotherhood furniture depot, at the Trades Hall and at the Malthouse.

Ranters

The Cortese Bros, Adriano and Raimondo, formed Ranters Theatre several years ago and have had success here and overseas with Adriano’s direction of Raimondo’s plays. Interestingly, both they and Keene-Taylor work with one director and one writer. “Boutique theatre”, a friend called it; the model is European and has the advantage of intense focus in contrast to the extensive charter that a writers’ theatre like Playbox accepts. The Corteses have attempted to organise the company along lines more recognisable as an experimental ensemble: a group of young or youngish people devoting most of their professional time to relatively long rehearsals and a consequent shared performance language. The performance style is intentionally rough, the mise en scene loosely organised, so that the line between world and theatre is blurred. This is obviously well suited to, in fact is built out of, the style of Cortese’s most recent work: gritty, contemporary urban fables. These are stylistically recognisable works—they are low-tech, not cross-disciplinary, the form is open and seeks to question the ways an audience may perceive the reality they are presenting. They throw focus onto the human and therefore onto the actor. Like some of the contemporary British playwrights, Cortese is looking anew at human relations in the lights of a fin-de-siecle city. Ranters has performed at La Mama, Napier St, the old Economiser and Playbox. A review of their latest show, St. Kilda Tales, follows.

not yet it’s difficult

David Pledger’s group, not yet it’s difficult, is not an ensemble but over the half dozen or so shows they have created in the past few years, several of the same performers have appeared. The group works with a highly articulated physicality, influenced by Pledger’s exposure to Eastern training methods. The work is non-narrative, non-character based. The early shows worked almost purely off a choric physical language—on one occasion applying Eastern modes and rhythms to familiar Australian sport behaviour—and that element is still present. Recent work, however, has included some more traditional dramatic encounters and dialogue and the introduction of fairly sophisticated video and sound tracks. nyid theatre is conceptual as well as experiential in intent and there has been a growing complexity of concept over the arc of their shows. nyid has performed at Theatreworks, in the plaza outside the Arts Centre, at the Athenaeum Theatre and in an old indoor parking area in West Melbourne.

In RealTime 44, I’ll continue this survey with an interview with Pledger, before moving onto look at some of the newer companies.

Seen fleetingly in a suite of photographs last year, SO2 is Patricia Piccinini’s latest synthetic creature. A highlight of the visual arts component of the Melbourne Federation Festival (“The Australia Projects”, May 9-27, curated by Juliana Engberg) Piccinini’s Superevolution featured SO2 both as a set of zoological images at RMIT and as an animatronic ‘live’ version at the Royal Melbourne Zoo which could be visited in its habitat. Uncannily platypus-like, the work was intended to represent “all that was primordial about the ancient continent of Terra Incognita.”

Meanwhile, LumpCD, co-authored by partner Peter Hennessey in their Melbourne Drome studio, represents the culmination of many years’ labour, incorporating a series of Piccinini’s ideas and images and translating them into an interactive form. LumpCD was included in the Posthuman Bodies component of the CyberCultures tour, and was recently exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Photography’s e-Media Gallery (March 16-April 12), and during May in the CCP’s regional Victorian CD-ROM program, Click.

Patricia Piccinini has been enjoying considerable international success lately. As well as group shows such as the Australian media art show Hybrid Life in Amsterdam in March, she was one of 4 Australian artists selected for the Kwangju Biennale in Korea last year, one of 2 for the Berlin Biennale in April, will hold a solo show in Lima in June and will be returning to Tokyo in July. Among other projects, Piccinini is currently working on Blast, an interactive environmental work for the new Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Melbourne’s
Federation Square.

How do you see Superevolution and LumpCD in the context of your overall art practice?

PP They both deal with the issues that have always inspired me—how we look at the definition of ‘life’, and how it’s affected by new medicine and technology. SO2 (synthetic organism 2) represents the dream of creating something really new, the ultimate creation—life itself. For the Federation Festival, Juliana Engberg suggested I work with a public institution and I chose the Zoo. It’s been challenging because zoos have a specific goal, which is not only to look after the animals but also to create encounters between humans and animals so that people will go away with a sense of connection. Zoos are totally self-conscious about the way they need to enclose their animals. So when I said to them that I wanted to put an artificial animal in the wombat enclosure, there were clear implications of a critique. Nevertheless, they agreed for me to go in there and create an animal that questions the nature of life—that draws attention to the idea that the zoo is totally artificial. What does the idea that we are now able to create a new life form say about the zoo’s main purpose, which is to preserve life? What does it say when the artificial and real animals of the zoo hold the same fascination for people?

I looked at lots of animals for SO2 and came up with drawings of a creature that kind of looks like a platypus, has the mouth of a stingray, but ultimately I feel is a relative of the naked mole rat. It’s now called the Siren Mole, or that’s its common name. Peter Stroud, curator of mammals, got me in touch with Paul Andrew, a taxonomist from Taronga, who gave SO2 a proper Latin name, Exallocephala parthenopa, a wonderfully romantic name from Parthenope, a siren said to have been cast up and drowned on the shores of Naples. Philip Miller from Puppetvision took my computer drawings and gave them a 3-dimensional form. The illusion of life is crucial for the work, otherwise the ideas wouldn’t be able to jump across, people wouldn’t engage with it. Now hopefully they’ll think: what’s this thing doing here, in fact, what’s this whole place doing here?

As well as indulging in the pleasure of pure creation, SO2 is about asking questions. Why would you create new life? Where would it belong? Could it affect other life forms that are indigenous to our environment? This whole project was inspired by a real life event—the creation of SO1 the world’s first synthetic life form, a micro-organism. This project is a fiction that, in this world of cloning and transgenic babies, is totally conceivable. It’s about cute, loving and adorable creatures that ask to be looked after and inspire feelings of nurturing. Ultimately this project could be a spark that might trigger off ideas in the public realm, amongst those who don’t see art very often.

And what about LumpCD? Can you tell me about your experiences producing and distributing it?

PH Patricia started making Lump works in 1994 for an exhibition at the Basement. Around 1997 we received a grant from the AFC to develop a CD-ROM version. We collaborated on the script and structure, and then I worked on the production with Patricia involved at more of a distance. We wanted to produce a work that people could take home, which makes it perhaps too huge and complex for an exhibition context. To see and hear everything in LumpCD would take 6-7 solid hours, but your average exhibition encounter is maybe 10-15 minutes. As for selling CD-ROMs, we’ve sold a few, but it’s tough. There’s no culture for it and it’s difficult to place; it works within a gaming mode, but it’s art and doesn’t have ‘game-play.’ We describe it as a virtual narrative environment.

LumpCD is also quite funny. Can you tell me about your strategic use of humour?

PP When I make these life forms, I believe they’re endearing and quite attractive. I don’t set out to make something repulsive that would shock people. I know some people don’t find them cute, but that’s hard for me to understand. I certainly don’t see the humour in my work as something that detracts from its seriousness. It’s just a way of making difficult ideas more palatable. I struggle in life to find a sense of joy in things. If there are moments in my work when people find joy and humour, that’s a real bonus for me. And I don’t connect accessibility with lowest common denominator.

PH There’s a lot of faux seriousness in contemporary art that’s there to signal its value, depth and profundity. So part of Patricia’s humour is about refusing to work with that particular mode. The work avoids simple moral judgements, and the humour sets something up and then cuts it down a little bit, so that it doesn’t stand on that edifice of seriousness.

PP It’s easier to do something that’s seen as being serious because people accept it right away, they don’t question what you do, they just accept, because they think you must be right. Equally, I feel there’s hardly any irony in my work; there’s sincerity, which people sometimes find hard to deal with, but I would say my work is anti-ironic.

PP I keep up and am absolutely vitally interested in it, but really just as a lay person. The Protein Lattice work was inspired by a TV segment; seeing the mouse with the human ear…was so phenomenal it made me think I had to do something.

PH What’s frightening is how little we keep up; we’re not looking anywhere obscure, just New Scientist and The Herald Sun. I feel that it is like catching that little flash that happens and holding it up for a little while, so that it doesn’t disappear into the background noise of the world so quickly. Patricia’s work demonstrates that these bizarre things are not in the future, they’re already happening. In this sense it’s social realism if anything…the current political condition of people living in our world today.

PH The filmmaking model is the one that is closest to the way Patricia works. My role is one of many collaborators working towards a conceptual goal that is usually developed by Patricia. It is a collaborative process, but not necessarily democratic!

PP The production of my work requires a team of people. And luckily I’ve a strong association with Peter and Dennis Daniel and everyone else at Drome, who are always credited for the modelling, rendering, editing, video and production work that they do. I tell people straight out that I conceive the work and then bring together the pieces. How do people perceive that? I don’t know, and it doesn’t interest me. If I didn’t have great people working on the projects, it wouldn’t work. I don’t want the ideas to be limited by what I can physically do. The ideas come first.

Do you think your recent international success is related to the ideas being quite universally accessible?

PP Some of my work is very Australian—such as the SO2 series in the carpark with the Holden—which is intriguing for people, but on the whole I’m dealing with international issues that are not specific to the Australian art world. I guess different countries are interested in works for particular reasons; it was interesting that Lima specifically requested The Breathing Room which is a work that looks at the idea of panic, because they thought it related well to their political situation. Plasticology was exhibited in Tokyo even though my work was not known there because Japanese people have a deep interest in the idea of nature.

PP My father is a photographer, so it was always around. I was trained in painting so I learnt a lot of skills about composition, light, colour, the formal attributes of images. I started thinking of digital imaging, not photography, in 1994 as it seemed the most appropriate way to deal with ideas of biotechnology and advertising. My practice is conceptual—I use whatever media I think will best express my ideas and therefore I don’t have a lot invested in the idea of photography specifically. I am more interested in art.

Patricia Piccinini is currently exhibiting in Lightness of Being—Contemporary Photographic Art from Australia, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, May 22-July 7; Superevolution, 2001 Federation Festival, wombat enclosure, Royal Melbourne Zoo, May 11-27

There are so many rooms in this work; rooms of earth, water, milk and salt. From the moment we enter from backstage we are stepping into rooms, witnessing an evocation of emotion through these elements.

There is the image of despair, with a woman siting naked on the floor, arms around knees, long hair pasted to shoulders, a shower streaming water over her. We look by stepping up to a strategically placed hole in the wall, take it in momentarily, and step away for the next in line.

We walk through the stage to the seats of the theatre; taking in other rooms that are more implied than constructed. A woman is on her hands and knees, writing furiously the words “I am listening” around the edges of a square trough filled with milk. We are voyeurs to her distress.

Blocks of ice hang suspended from a metal structure, dripping away throughout the work, their original form diminishing as they become ever-expanding puddles of water on the floor.

A mound of earth lies in a corner of the stage. The performer looks at it, warily, touching it with a toe. Then resentment and irritation seem to set in as she kicks at it destructively, scattering it across the space.

A rectangular shaft of light is projected on the back wall of the stage and a solitary figure walks from left to right, painting black circular forms, first in the light, gradually drifting out of the light’s reach; less and less contained. She leaves the stage and the door to that room closes.

Salt pours onto the stage in a steady stream from above. A woman is standing in front of it, oh so slowly moving forwards and backwards within a square of light. The movement becomes less gentle and more twisted. The salt begins to take its own form on the floor. Later, another woman stands in the salt, head bowed, arms outstretched, imploring.

The 2 women stand in a trough of milk, whispering, tenderly embracing and supporting each other. This scene of comforting grows quite forced, with one pushing against the other and the milk splashing outside its pristine boundary. The scene closes with one performer, left to scrub out the words that have framed their struggle; “I am listening.”

These fragments of the work echo the themes of grief, anger and loneliness; all emotions that accompany the death of a loved one. The objects Clare Dyson uses help us to reflect on our own experiences—the mound of earth a grave; the milk a symbol of the nurturing and care that we put into relationships; the dripping water perhaps our own transformation on the other side of grief.

With an original score by Damian Barbeler and the reverential music of Zbigniew Preisner and Meredith Monk filling the space, intimate drowning moves from solemnity to anguish, with an almost celebratory ending. And the objects are left to stand alone, forever altered by the performance—pools of water, splashes of milk, scattered earth and salt.

intimate drowning carries us through a journey of grief and loss with beautiful, lingering images and riveting moments of movement and stillness that pierce the soul. It’s another compelling, affecting work by Dyson, and will stay with me for some time.

intimate drowning, creator/choreographer Clare Dyson in collaboration with performers Meg Millband, Julia Gray & Carrie Fowlie, ANU Arts Centre, Australian National University, April 6-13

Emerging artists and new venues are making an impact in Adelaide. Shop_70 is a new gallery, run by James Dodd and Josh 2K in a converted shop in Marlborough Street, Henley Beach. Specialising in new and experimental work, Shop_70 provides an alternative outlet for emerging artists. Its first exhibition Hot Dog with the Lot, opening in June, includes work by Katrina Simmons, Peter Franov, Alan Houghton, James Lillecrapp, James Crabb, Andrew Best and Store.

Dodd, Josh 2K and Store held an exhibition of painting, Shoes, in the Shed at the Contemporary Art Centre South Australia (CACSA) in February. They painted the Shed’s spacious interior walls with Manga-influenced cartoons, where fashion jogging shoes are fetishised objects of teenage sexual play, highlighting the consumerism in pop culture.

Dodd participated in Gleam, a show of emerging artists at the Experimental Art Foundation last October. Gleam tours to The Physics Room in Christchurch, New Zealand, in June. Dodd was also in the group show Endzone at Brisbane’s IMA last December-January. His wall-paintings for Gleam and Endzone are abstract forms painted gigantically, suggesting a mural, graffiti or a disco backdrop, emblems for the 21st century.

Graduating Victorian Michael Kutschbach won a residency at Adelaide Central School of Art in 1997 and is now a lecturer in painting there. His recent work comprises spray paint or photographs on boards of various sizes. On these surfaces, he draws a single line, a misshapen circle, either with paint or by removing the still wet under-paint with a fingertip.

In his December exhibition Roundhouse at 220 Hindley Street, Kutschbach painted the wall purple and then covered it with small, repeated forms. These forms, recalling fruit or coloured bubbles, become wallpaper, mocking that disdainful description of bad painting. They are traced from an original ‘blob’ painting he made by squashing paint with the palm of his hand against a ceramic tile, the ultimate gestural stroke. By tracing the blob over the top of other paint or photographs, the motif becomes a symbol for painting. The unbroken wiggly line also symbolises endless, circular rumination. By using the forms on a wall, on small and large boards and to permeate the boundaries of these boards, this musing appears portable, infecting all surfaces and display forums, unconfined by painting’s conventions. Kutschbach has also made ceramic blobs, painted white, or chromed to cast strange reflections. He is exhibiting at the Riddoch Gallery, Mt Gambier, from May 25 and at the Greenaway Gallery, Kent Town, from late June.

Realism, unpopular in recent years, is James Cochran’s language and he is making an impression with it. His exhibition at BMG Gallery North Adelaide in May dwells on the themes of the lonely, alienated individual, temptation, revelation, and the religious parable. In Francis in Ecstasy, a young man lies supine on a disco floor, eyes closed, surrounded by dancers oblivious to his condition. A friend cradles his head. Is he overcome by substances or experiencing a vision? Cochran nicely establishes the ambiguity, posing crucial questions about religion and contemporary (youth) culture. In Revelations, 7 young people in everyday clothes sit at a table. Before them are a hamburger bun and some beers. The central figure has a Christ-like demeanour, but are they (and we) listening? Hindley St and the Temptation of Anthony is a self-portrait in which the artist navigates a seedy world of sex, drugs and hopelessness. Cochran’s work is strong, committed and developing in interesting directions.

Renate Nisi and Roy Ananda, 4th year students at Adelaide Central School of Art, exhibited at Flightpath in March. Nisi’s most striking works are those in which she has taken wire or a branch and bound it tightly in cloth to create a form resembling a tortured, mummified human. These ambiguous figures seem like moths trapped in their chrysalises. In another work, pieces of black rubber tubing sprout from a tall frame, suggesting a tree of industrial materials. Though simple, these forms are carefully made and highly resolved, creating a dark poetic.

Ananda’s work often employs the outline of the momentary splash of an inkblot. His Template, in the Helpmann Academy’s 2001 Graduate Exhibition, is a 2.4m x 2.4m bright yellow room divider, hinged down the middle, with a metre-wide splash-shaped hole in the centre. Ananda is also interested in the record groove which contains much (musical) information. He cuts a groove through a series of objects, such as bricks, and threads through a string steeped in a coloured oxide, to make “master disks.” At clubs such as the Minke Bar, he draws abstract shapes on a large sheet of paper while the DJ performs, producing gestural works that reflect the mood of the music.

The Minke Bar is a new venue crowded with artists, filmmakers and musicians. Movies are shown while DJs perform. There are art exhibitions and the attraction of artists drawing live. Joe Novosel draws here. He and Ananda use a 2.5 x 2.5m piece of heavy paper taped to the wall (with a small rectangle cut in it to leave exposed the goldfish tank embedded in the wall). The energy and the intelligent discussion here promise artistic revitalisation.

At CACSA’s Shed in May-June is a group show of installations by 2 recent graduates and a student. Kate Benda’s Still comprises 3 mesh-covered frames, on stands, with objects suspended inside the mesh. Naomi Williamson’s What makes you think you can start with a clean slate is a stack of cardboard file-boxes forming a mountain, with tiny ladders cut from the sides to enable the ascent of a minuscule figure. Emma Northey’s sensuous She felt he felt comprises 2 tall, tubular forms covered in pink felt, like figures interacting.

An exhibition entitled The Land of Milk and Honey: Emerging Victorian Artists at Adelaide Central Gallery is a survey of work by 11 Victorians, all recent graduates. The exhibition provided the setting for a debate on the proposition That the Artistic Grass is Greener on the Eastern Seaboard. Though pitched as an entertaining panel game, the debate had a serious theme—that artists fare better there than here. While the Debating Society awarded the affirmative team the prize, audience sentiment was with the negative. The audience may be right. New venues for emerging artists, like the Shed, Shop_70 and the Minke Bar, are encouraging artistic development, and we’re seeing significant new work.

Upholster, Ballet Lab’s latest work, has those qualities I have come to identify as typically ‘Phillip Adams.’ First, there is the complex partnering. This form of action is both impersonal in manner and interdependent in terms of body mass, obviously requiring input from the performers in the development of the choreography. I rarely tire of watching these activities because they are often surprising and intricate. Then there are the weird dances: waltzes, mazurkas and polkas that twirl and weave through space. These compositions exhibit the traces of ballet, as remembered perhaps in an acid flashback: time is collapsed, heterosexuality decentred, no smiles, just an ironic twist. Both these styles lend themselves to large group work.

Upholster has 7 performers. The piece is divided into 2 Acts—Renovate and Upholster. Renovate is more episodic than connected, purporting a “dystopic Kama Sutra performed on futons.” Naturally Adam’s partnering work was well suited to the convolutions of coital knot-tying. Most of the positions were sexually suggestive, except no-one seemed to have any feeling for anyone else. I guess that’s the dystopic element. I felt a slight sense of the mechanical about these interactions, in that the timing only allowed for a perfunctory shift from one position to the next. Perhaps this is the logic of the orgy—no time for tea and a biscuit, just a quick change of the rubber sheet and onto the next. Nonetheless, the entrance of Erskine, Heaven and Van Dyke (experienced performers) introduced a satirical edge which seemed to subsequently infect all the others. Simple enough, their menage à trois consisted of a “Twister” game involving buttoning each other’s knitwear into a tripartite body.

My favourite section in Act One involved a series of foldings of people and futons, rolling, covering, turning, exposing, conjoining. This worked exceedingly well, for the viewer’s eye was woven into the fabric of the dance, watching the futon fold over a body, and unfold to reveal another. The experience of surface becoming depth, becoming surface again, spoke well to the theme in that upholstery is the process by which the surfaces of furniture are constructed and shaped. On the one hand, it is an interior materiality (stuffing, foam, springs); on the other, it creates surfaces (the final façade).

Act Two was more straightforward and literal. Here, there was a set, a protagonist and a narrative of sorts. Michelle Heaven played a daggy, whimsical character who, like Pinocchio’s dad, made things with her hands. This time, it was the couch that came alive, animated by 2 performers. The ensuing dance with Heaven’s character was really interesting, calling forth imaginative physical solutions to an unusual duet. Like the folding futon section, the interaction with an inanimate but mobile object created stimulating morphologies. Heaven was turned, carried, twisted and transported. Whirling Dervish dances and post-alienation pile ups on the couch in front of the TV followed, leading to the final tableau—love-in between hippie boy and girl— flower power scene of redemption.

Lynton Carr’s vinyl mixes were great, including modern and classical moments. There were also some good atmospherics leading up to the last scene. Overall, Upholster was very rich in movement terms, obviously the result of a great deal of creative work. It was also fun. Thematically, I’d question the role of upholstery. If it was as inspiration for the design elements of the piece, the objects to be played with and the costumes, it played its part. What it didn’t do enough is investigate the nature of upholstery which, like flesh, covers bones, shapes bodies, yields to the touch. Can we think of human bodies as upholstered objects? There was an inkling of these issues in the folding futons section. There are also connections to be made between the wrapping of bodies and the wrapping of furniture. I also felt, perhaps mistakenly, that the Kama Sutra theme, and its decorative Hindu arm gestures, was a bit of an add-on, to give an exotic flavour to the whole. Because I saw it as more superficial than integral, I felt there was an element of “Orientalism” here, use of the exotic other to reflect western ethnocentric concerns, rather than as an engagement with that other.

Upholster covers a lot of ground. It is intricate and detailed, manifesting Phillip Adam’s deep-seated interest in design (see RT#37). While 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.

Upholster, Ballet Lab, choreographer Phillip Adams, dancers Michelle Heaven, Gerard Van Dyke, Stephanie Lake, Shona Erskine, Brooke Stamp, Ryan Lowe, Kyle Kremerskothen, Athenaeum Theatre II, Melbourne, March 15-25

The flâneur hails from the mid 19th century. Poetically depicted by Baudelaire, and discursively dressed by Benjamin, the flâneur strolls the streets of Paris. His emergence coincides with that of capitalist industrialism and urbanisation. Somewhat at odds with these developments, the self-styled flâneur parades the marketplace, strolls along the boulevards, and glides across the arcade, passing all that he sees in review. The arcade becomes for the flâneur a world in miniature, a cosmos of the commodity form.

Chunky Move’s Arcade is an invitation to stroll amongst the vestiges of a past century. It is ingeniously staged on the 1st floor of Melbourne’s Nicholas building, whose ground floor still boasts an L-shaped series of quaint shops. Located in the heart of the city, once home to the Jewish schmutter trade, Arcade hovers above the trams and the heroin, in the ether of the 21st century. The period is grimy Edwardian; old heavy lifts, stained glass ceilings lit milky white, tiled floors, beveled glass, small shops.

We, the audience, are also relics of the past. Time is splintered here. We line up, awaiting regimented entry into encapsulated moments of performance, ready to consume our prey, like Moira Finucane’s black widow piece The Dress Shop. The work of several directors, most of the pieces have titles that relate to the theme of (art as) commodity: 100% Off, Massive Reduction, The Dress Shop. Quaint (Lucy Guerin), weird (Moira Finucane), dark (David Pledger), romantic (Stephanie Lake) and startling (Gideon Obarzanek), the night belongs to the hallways.

Marx didn’t think much of commodity production, in part because it represents the reduction of labour into anonymous items of exchange. In 100% Off, Obarzanek offered tactile glimpses of naked bodies, boxed up and lit by neon morgue lighting. The sensual pleasures on offer agitated some audience members who felt morally bound to leave well alone. Others delighted in the curve of a breast, or the roll of a testicle. What are the moral sensibilities of today’s audience? Are we ready and willing to consume anything? How did these people in boxes feel? Will we ever know? I found myself drawing the line at the gyrations of the Johnny Young Talent team, not because these sexlings were there for our amusement, but because the made-up faces of children signals sexual danger.

Lucy Guerin’s 1950s period piece was witty and well packaged, involving the comic actions of 2 shopkeepers who enticed then shrunk their customers. Moira Finucane gave a demented performance, her prey swinging and sewing for her carnivorous delight. David Pledger created a photographic pastiche, disturbed and disturbing, and Stephanie Lake came up with a warm and trippy corseted dance to the music of Bob Dylan.

Because Arcade breaks with the linearity of perception, and the pieces themselves were unconnected, it is hard to draw it all together under some single judgement. Perhaps there is no more to be said. I don’t think Arcade is meant as a critique of commodification. Rather, it is what it is, a manifestation of the seemingly inevitable consumerism of our times.

Arcade, Chunky Move, created by Gideon Obarzanek in collaboration with Lucy Guerin, Stephanie Lake, Moira Finucane and David Pledger, cnr Swanston St and Flinders Lane, Melbourne, May 9-19

Art>Music is full of visual and aural images connected at some point with the music world, specifically with music and popular culture. In presenting such a show, the MCA is stating that the connection between art and music is important, and the ideas and concepts around such a practice worth pursuing. Perhaps the biggest problem with this exhibition, and the MCA itself, is that a number of issues and questions have been raised that require answers and discussion, but there are no avenues for such conversation. An open forum is needed where the gallery can answer questions and detractions face to face, with the art community, academics and the various satellite cultures which cross in and out of the area covered by Art>Music. This has not happened and many are left thinking that the MCA does not understand (critically) what is happening within the art/music scene.

The basic tenet is an exhibition presenting works by “visual artists who make and record music, collaborate with musicians or whose work is strongly influenced by the styles of rock, pop and techno.” The show simply does not do this; it breaks away from its brief almost instantly. At points of possible rupture, the exhibition is at its weakest displaying a lack of research into sound art, 20th century audio and rock/pop/techno.

Questions must be raised. What is the point of having such a show? Who is it for? What does it mean for an institution to curate such a show from the outside (are they on the outside)? Curator Sue Cramer has written the sole catalogue essay. Does this mean that we have one viewpoint in an environment filled with outsides and nearbys, insides and arounds, squeaks and mutterings, squeals and feedbacks? Where are the other voices in the catalogue—the sound theorists, art critics, the artists even?

In her catalogue essay, Cramer states that the connection and interaction between art and music is not new, fine, but then goes on to state that Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground are “perhaps the most famous example.” Do the general public really know the work of the Velvets, do they even know the Warhol project?The Velvets must come way down the chain. What is this art pop, this art rock?

The question then is who is this show for? Is it meant as a groundbreaking museum piece, opening the minds of the masses to new ideas, and even the possibility that there might be a connection between art and music? If so, why use Warhol? If not, then in whose terms are Warhol and the Velvets the most famous example?

If we are to make any sense of Art>Music we need to ask what the terms of reference are. What is ‘techno’ for example? The way it is positioned in relation to contemporary dance culture is all over the place. Does techno relate to the whole genre of electronically generated music or does it specifically relate to a sub-genre within electronic music. The difference is huge and the term is often used in both settings. The same goes for the ongoing shift in the meanings of ‘pop’ and ‘rock.’

Finally, why was so much left out and so much included? Was the brief simply too large? Did it need mural sized record covers (how does Julian Opie interact with Britpop beyond merely painting the cover of a release)? Do we need to see a painting of Nick Cave (how did Howard Arkley interact with post-punk and Nick Cave beyond a portrait)? If this is included, then what of the thousands of portraits of musicians? Where were the photographs? How does the Kylie fan room fit next to the Sonic Youth room? How was the music box selected and why were there artists in the box and not in the show? Why include all those records/CDs in one room? What makes them art, more interesting than hundreds of thousands of other releases, and how has this moved on from Broken Music, part of René Block’s Sydney Biennale in 1990?

These questions have been asked in relation to sound and art for many years, yet this show seems to add little in the way of answers or understanding.

Art>Music: rock, pop, techno exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March 21-June 24

In the beginning, slow moving bodies silhouetted against footage of fast moving roads. Compelling and beautiful athletic bodies but crouched; they are not yet human and definitely not yet car. Are we going to or coming from (looking back at) a landscape of orange dust, blue sky, cloudy green river water and sand? The roads lead to all-grey cityscapes, then a suburban street with colour, from a red car and a blue car, as if these have stolen colour, driving out through the landscape and bringing it back. I loved the sensory wash.

At the end the audience was divided; one half allocated name tag messages by a ubiquitous corporate security company and videoed for the other half to watch. The show ends (or begins) with scenes of bodily confinement, surveillance and a street intersection filmed from panoptic video cameras. Scenes of the beginning from the end consists of intersections of live bodies and filmed (e)scapes, physical talk and verbal football; cars as cultural fantasies of freedom set against fears of social monitoring. Echoes of Foucaultian regimes but not punishing dismemberment in this Australia. Performed in Melbourne’s Public Office car park, NYID’s show becomes high-octave realism as the remaining parked cars are driven out during the performance. The soundsc(r)ape of cars parking, electronic pips, feet pounding.

Fleshed bodies, motionless, breathing audibly, and intermittent hisses and pips from the bush, intersect with grumbling cars that mutate into the traffic of continual electronic noise. Three cars star–a white panel van, a green Torana LX 1976 coupe with the mega-sound system and a gold Renault. They resonate cultural difference if not clashes. Safety regulations aside, I want these metal bodies to move around us, to perform, as cars do in circus rings.

NYID successfully recycles the grand contemporary performance traditions of moving the audience around, car parks as performance spaces, and directed spectator participation intersecting here with television studio audiences. What failed to interest this spectator, however, were most of the spoken dialogues about life in suburbia, which remained like workshop exercises from 1970s Australian drama without 1990s irony. Why were these scenes not delivered as body texts? NYID’s bodies in motion are skilled, dynamic and captivating. Admittedly, feet pounding unforgiving concrete surfaces is a reminder that too much movement in spaces designed for other body-types wrecks fleshed bones.

There is wit to be found though with a potent, playful televised sequence of dialogue as if it taken from Neighbours, performed in English by Kha Tran Viet and Yumi Umiumare (as Charlene)–instantly recognisable to the younger audience members around me–and then repeated in Vietnamese. This provides the harbinger of the show’s last sequence about televisual simulations that reflect back falsely; a reminder that screen images speed over live realities and their collisions.

Not Yet It’s Difficult, Scenes of the beginning from the end, director David Pledger, dramaturg Peter Eckersall, producer Paul Jackson, performers Paul Bongiovanni, Greg Ulfan, Tamara Saulwick, Louise Taube, Tony Briggs, Natalie Cursio, Cazerine Barry, Public Office car park, March 20

It’s some time since a young performance artist has achieved major recognition. It’s also a while since an artist violating the boundaries of the skin even got a mention. Unlike others a la Stelarc and Epizoo who explore the futuristic body in relation to machines and technology, Monika Tichacek’s work is very much engrained in the now, but also in the nostalgic past.

She recently won the $40,000, 2001 Helen Lempriere Travelling Arts Scholarship with her work Romance, exhibited at Artspace, Sydney. Tichacek completed her Honours (Bachelor of Fine Arts) at COFA (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) in 2000 and has exhibited at various Sydney galleries and at IPS in New York.

When you meet the 26-year-old, take heed of her words: “It may not taste as sweet as it looks.” But instead of the shock value of much extremist art, her installation performances are extremely beautiful.

Tichacek’s interest in plastic surgery and medical procedures is very specific: “I’m not for or against these practices, it’s more a fascination. When you look at how science has taken over, especially genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, it’s frightening.” Although technology may be the subject, it’s not the medium. Earlier pieces like Once Mother Read Me Rapunzel (1999) were made of latex, dolls and hypodermic needles.

She began invading her body with pins in I am not my mother 2 (1999). Together with Lisa Cooper, she inserted whitetipped pins along the contours of her body as part of the Dissonance exhibition at Performance Space. “I had been making objects, but really wanted to use my own body. I became interested in fashion-patterns, trying to cut to body shapes along set lines. I also went to medical libraries, and was fascinated with how they would draw lines all across the body before operations.”

Monika claims to be more a part of the installation than a performer. She consistently sets up the space as a walk-in environment. It’s not performative, but almost decorative, with all the trimmings. “I see it as interactive sculpture as opposed to inanimate objects. It’s a live body in the space, and usually I’m extremely passive, there’s not much action.”

By their very nature the works are personal. In Lovesick (1999), the tattoos of Tichacek and her partner, artist Emma Price, were illuminated by light boxes. This is not the first project she collaborated on with Emma. Homecoming King (2001) was an installation made for the Mardi Gras festival. “It was based on our tour to Memphis, and was a reaction to the shabbiness and sadness of the Heartbreak Hotel.” In this piece, the room was decorated as the ideal bedroom. It’s here that the motifs in Monika’s work are seen again, the exquisite needlework in the immaculately sewn headboard, and the towels emboidered with “Elvis” and “Priscilla.” In the video component, the 2 artists played out the couple. “I am also fascinated by drag and the constructions of heterosexuality, including male sexuality. I love mainstream romance. The old soaps. Kitsch love hearts.”

In I Wanna be loved by You (2000), Tichacek lay inside a long box, a Rapunzel-like wig fastened to her forehead with needles, with long blonde locks that spread throughout the gallery space. The audience could look through a glass peephole showing Tichacek’s distorted and heavily made up face, reminiscent of pixilated TV: “TV is very important to me. I get a lot of inspiration and disgust from it.”

The TV was an integral element to the winning piece Romance. In the live version of the 2-hour work she lies still, in the traditional reclining nude pose. The room is a white surgery with white chocolate moulds on the walls. Her face is pulled and threaded with separate needles, in post surgery positions. Puffy, freshly siliconed lips, high cheekbones, flared nostrils. It’s only via a video monitor that the audience can see her. The space is un-enterable.

So, are these actions necessary for her art—and there’s no denying it’s for the sake of art—or is there an element of personal satisfaction? “I hope that the audience won’t just focus on the piercings. In my work I’m dealing with the body, so it seems useless to use fake props like latex.” But what about the pain—it’s hard to ignore these instruments of cruelty when taken out of the hospitals and stuck in the gallery: “They add an extremity and urgency to my work that contrasts with the serenity and sterility of the surroundings.” As with much so-called ‘Mutilation’ art—a term she eschews—it’s an issue of transforming the pain into something else. Her work alludes “to changing the past, making it become good. The body stores many precious and sentimental things.”

So what about survival? “Funding is difficult…sometimes it’s as though I don’t fit in. There is some money out there for performance and theatre, but it’s difficult to sustain any art practice, especially one that is not a commodified piece.” Monika is also very involved in the Imperial Slacks Gallery, one of the few artist-run spaces in Sydney. As part of their policy, they try to encourage as much performance and experimental art as possible.

With her prize money Monika hopes to travel and learn with Mathew Barney in New York. “I think Barney is the ultimate in this type of practice. There’s total excess of all levels in his performance installations.” It’s this area especially that intrigues her. “His works are productions, massive big-scale events. I would like to be involved and work in that environment.”

If you think of a Handel opera as something akin to an excellent German car model, then El Inocente resembles the aftermath of a car smash where the fragmented bits are creatively reassembled, somewhat Frankenstein-like given the mad results. Or, with the campery involved, should that be Frank’n’furter?

The Burgermeister here is of course Nigel Kellaway, our avant-garde’s own Colonel Sanders/Krusty the Clown, all Bumptious Bravado, Buggery and Baroque, who decided some years ago that he wanted to cut up the tuneful bourgeois meal we call opera into tiny bits before devouring and then regurgitating it with relish in front of a paying public. ‘B’ is the new ‘D’ cup that runneth over in the consuming passion we call cutting-edge theatre, where a whole lot of B for Brawn, Brains, Braggadocio & Bullshit is laid at our table in a bedazzling feat of D for Deconstruction.

I know this for a fact because a couple of hours before the final performance of El Inocente I drove straight through an intersection and into the side of a flash BMW. I staggered into the Performance Space (a bit like a stand-up comedian in search of a skit) only to walk back through the experience under the august helmsmanship of the bewigged Burgermeister himself.

El Inocente collides the spirit of the baroque (more exactly the music of Handel reconsidered by Richard Vella) with the tragic tale of an innocent girl who could well be Erendira from the famous Marquez short story. In the very least, Kellaway admits the ‘fabulist’ story-line has a South American literary influence.

Collaborating closely with Kellaway in the creation of this new work are performers Regina Heilmann, Katia Molino and Lynn Murphy; composer Richard Vella; Simon Wise on lighting design and production; with Melita Rowston and Paul Cordeiro assisting. Most have worked with him before, along with several other substantial talents, on this series of productions exploring the nature of the artform we call opera.

One attends a Kellaway event with a very real sense of anticipation. He has been one of the leaders of our avant-garde for at least 15 years and in that time participated in the creation of some astounding events. Among them I would include his work with Sydney Front (The Pornography of Performance, 1988; Photocopies of God, 1989; Don Juan, 1992), The Nuremburg Recital, 1989; This Most Wicked Body, 1994 (a 240-hour performance marathon involving among others restaurateur Gay Bilson, and in a shorter version at the 1998 Adelaide Festival). He also directed for the Song Company the opera, The Sinking of The Rainbow Warrior (1997) and has worked with a range of other companies including Stopera, Stalker and Urban Theatre Projects.

Since 1997, he has been working on this series called The opera Project. With co-founder Annette Tesoriero and dancer Dean Walsh, they began with The Berlioz – our vampires ourselves, a production I still think to be one of Kellaway’s best ever works. It was successful because the story was played out in the actions, the action vivified the story. Even the overt campery had a vital role to play.

Remarking on the inspired convergence of dramatic idea and physical gesture in that work, I noted that Kellaway had “never shied away from risks and on many occasions he has been punished for the results. While never less than imaginative, it is understandable that not all the experiments would hold.”

For days since seeing the last performance of El Inocente, I have been struggling with what to say. It is easy to be smart and parody Kellaway’s felicitous imagination and taste for over-the-top imagery (see my introductory paragraphs).

But scouring through dozens of pages of commentary and reviews of his many works I see few have ever been able to adequately grasp what is actually going on. That’s fine when we like the work—praise rarely demands (certainly from the artists) the same level of critical interrogation (they’re just so relieved someone liked it!). But when a new production seems less successful than others we have seen, it’s quite a daunting challenge to speculate: why?

Having only a short time earlier just missed killing myself and possibly several other people, I could not be sure whether I had been professionally alert enough to pass judgement on this work of art. Was I paying enough attention? Was I really there? The short answer of course is: If the production had enough going on, it would have insisted itself upon even the most distracted imagination. It did not.

What characterises this latest production is the heavy emphasis on story-telling. Large slabs of the action are literally read by the actors sitting at a long table. These segments actually hold most of the key elements in the narrative which, if enacted, would be seen much more clearly and convincingly to push the story forward.

The displacement might have been deliberate but, so disorientating is it for the audience in this instance, we leave the theatre wondering if we have actually seen anything true. The secret to the art of the stage lies in its 4 dimensions—actor/audience/ time/space. Despite thousands of plays written over the centuries, words are not a ‘core promise’ when budgeting for a work for the stage. Even in Shakespeare, the words decorate and dance upon the ever forward-moving ‘pattern action.’ While comparing one with the other can prove illuminating, it’s not what people say on stage that counts, it’s what people do.

We are convinced of a work’s veracity because we see the events enacted. We have all experienced bad theatre and wondered why it made so little impact. Denying the audience living breathing ‘evidence’ of what happened is, unwittingly, an attempt to deny the existence of time as a fundamental component of the artform. And why call on time if you don’t need it?

Okay, the material has been ‘deconstructed’, but in this context what is that supposed to mean?

Deconstruction is a very powerful tool which calls on a philosophical system to be judged by its own terms. It is based on the idea that no system can embody ‘absolute truth’ no matter how often this claim is made. And the only way to test the authenticity of such claims is to turn the internal critical mechanisms of the system (such as they are) on the system itself. Inevitably the system’s grandiose claims at infallibility fall short, and the relative nature of all truths is the only truth confirmed.

To apply such an endeavour to a genre, as in ‘opera’, is not so different to the current meaning of ‘deconstruction’ in the fashion industry where it indicates the showing of seams, flaunting rag-bag assembly and op-shop scraps posing as haute-couture. The theoretical ‘application’ really means ‘applique’. What we have in both the frocks of Michelle Janke and El Inocente is collage—show and tell, an endeavour of a much lower intellectual order.

I am also bothered by the claim that The opera Project is a project. It implies that some useful by-product exists outside or alongside the actual works produced. If project implies progress, how do we explain that the final work is so much weaker than others in the series? What are we, those of us in the stalls, meant to have taken away from this research experiment?

This work identifies itself as brave, radical and cutting edge. Unfortunately, it’s bogged down with formalist cliches—quotation, parody, dislocation, collage, collision, distancing, camp.

To return to the car crash, vehicles are made these days to crumple on impact. So even when one does run straight into a late model German vehicle, there is actually very little impact on one’s own body. I drove straight into that car at a considerable speed, but I felt almost nothing. The shock was absorbed by the design components. That is how it was with El Inocente. It made almost no impact, almost no lasting impression. This is a far cry from The Berlioz, which still lives in my body/mind.

A few days earlier I witnessed an incident on the Jerry Springer show that will also remain burned in my memory (alongside the Mike Tyson ear-bite which I saw live—the still shots were not able to capture the full horror of this momentary descent into the animal kingdom!). On Springer was a man who had, after being turned away by the medical system, cut off his own penis in a desperate attempt to have a body that even faintly resembled the woman he felt himself to truly be.

It wasn’t the theatricality of that gesture which stuck me as so extraordinary (he had rushed from the family dinner table and hacked it off with a steak knife). It was his preparedness to face his ranting and abusive wife and family, Springer himself, Springer’s ‘doctor’ (a PhD in TV journalism, I think), and a hostile and mocking studio/world-wide audience.

El Inocente is about a young girl, Helena, also forced to suffer at the hands of society (personified by her cruel grandmother and the many men to whom she is sold for sex). But never once during the production did I feel for her or her predicament. This man who cut off his penis had suffered so much in his life that nothing more could hurt him. He had moved to a new level of existence beyond pain. He went on the show clearly in an act of revenge, to humiliate his wife and family in front of the rest of the world to expose them for what they were. It was an extraordinarily courageous, dare I say it, cutting-edge performance.

In these times of post-handover politics and crouching tiger opportunities, the Hong Kong Film Festival has faced a tough time to maintain its position as the major showcase for new Asian cinema. What we got this year, with few premieres but a range of diverse seasons, was an opportunity to consider the dispersed achievements of East Asian cinemas.

If there was one masterpiece, it was Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (A One and A Two). This is the work of a great filmmaker with an enormous sureness of touch. The small business people of earlier Yang films such as Taipei Story have done well out of high-tech, though they are not sure how. Events nudge them into an unaccustomed introspection. This film has a much warmer tone than most of Yang’s work. Eight year old Yang Yang takes photos of the backs of people’s heads to help them see things afresh. There is a reference to Yang’s own methods here, which have always been based on indirection and distance. Dialogue scenes are done in extreme long shot, or from behind, or through narrow openings, or in reflection. This holds you away from characters and ensures that your relation to the narrative isn’t straightforwardly emotional. When the emotion does emerge, it is mature and contemplative, and hence stronger for it.

The great thing about the commercial Hong Kong industry, on the other hand, is that it works so hard to deliver a maximum of force with the minimum of waste. I like to see the ads for contra deals in the credits. Here is a cinema that carries its own suitcases out to the car. Let’s take Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s Needing You. It’s a romantic comedy, a genre for which fan-boy culture has never had much time. It often seems that the couple in a HK romance don’t want to go to bed together so much as to play together. Johnnie To keeps the camera close in to the action and then moves the characters around quickly so the camera whips after them as they snap through the frame. This is filmmaking intent on exploiting every ounce of kinetic possibility.

Juliet in Love is a small triumph. It pulls off the difficult combination of sentimental love story (complete with chubby baby) and hard-edged observation of globalisation in southern China. Sandra Ng is a waitress who lives in a New Territories development where the concrete was poured yesterday, across the road from the shanty town. She faces a losing battle to keep her grandfather off the bottle—the Coke bottle. This sad but inspiring film uses Coke as a motif which establishes the parameters of the characters’ lives, before killing them in the end.

Gen-Y Cops also represents a dive into the global. It is that happy combination of popular film which kicks arse while having every bit as much to say about the new world order. Cool Canto-dudes take on evil homies with robots along with the arrogant Americans who think they own the world. Have I mentioned the latest in crime-fighting technology developed by the People’s Republic? If only they can stop the arms from falling off. And the French robot, named in honour of Jerry Lewis? There’s all the geopolitical allegory you could want here and then some. The central question for popular youth culture—and for the Hong Kong film industry—is how to be hip, how to be hot, how to be chilled out bro, and yet how to be proudly and identifiably Chinese at the same time.

Tsui Hark is back from a season in Van Damme and ready to show us how bad dudes really do things. Don’t expect to be able to follow the story of Time and Tide. The film doesn’t want to narrate, it just wants to smack you silly. As far as I can make out, it has something to do with a Latin American gang, a mercenary whose wife is heavily pregnant (I’m sure you can see where that one is heading) and a pretty boy wannabe. Those who have seen The Blade will have a sense of the dark, jagged vein in which this film works. Tsui doesn’t move the camera—he thrusts it, accompanied by the whoosing sounds that normally go with martial arts moves.

If I can open a parenthesis concerning narrative incoherence and global politics, I’d like to mention Miklos Jancso’s Damn! The Mosquitoes from the international season. From a Hungarian perspective, the grand narratives of history have lapsed into a confusing opacity. So what kind of films do you make? Perhaps something like this, which resembles the Three Stooges performing a Brechtian improvisation. Some critics have tried to read this as allegory, but it seems more like an attempt to capture the texture of an historical moment rather than its linear trajectory.

One of the most interesting emergent sources of Asian cinema is Korea. Barking Dogs Never Bite might become its breakout film. It works the familiar territory of the soulless centre of Asian economic miracle, but it does it with humour and vibrancy. To pull this off through a story about eating dogs is no small achievement. It balances its urban distopia against the idealism of its young female protagonist. Girlpower might not rule, but at least it endures.

The more prestigious Korean film was Chunhyang. This big budget film screams national culture. Subtract the Shaw Brothers martial arts film from Crouching Tiger and you might get something like this. It is a relentlessly picturesque folktale interspersed with on-screen narration by a pansori singer. The aim is to revitalise national culture by stressing its power to connect with a contemporary audience.

On to the Japanese youth film with Ryuichi Hiroki’s Tokyo Trash Baby. Let me type that again: Tokyotrashbaby, tokyotrashbaby. Of course, no film could ever be as cool as this title. What we’ve got here is a solid character study of a young woman who attains her fantasy only to find out that she has no fantasy left. The film is well constructed and certainly not trashy—which may be good or bad, depending on your aesthetic.

In this brief sampling of Asian cinema, if Hong Kong wasn’t at the cutting edge, it still did a pretty good job of filling in a lot of the recent and historical background. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to see more of these films in Australia riding on the back of the current crop of arthouse successes.

Yi Yi (A One and A Two) is screening as part of the Sydney Film Festival, State Theatre, Sydney, June 8-22

For a nation that likes to think of itself as a bit cheeky, a bit exuberant, something of a larrikin, we do a great line in po-faced Federal Institutional architecture. Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle is all restrained greenery, manicured lake foreshore; the elegant neo-Classical-whatever of the Library, the High Court peeking through the trees, and the buried centrepiece with its very earnest and very shiny flagpole.

The building which has recently appeared on the opposite shore of the lake could hardly be more of a contrast—a gaudily coloured riot of loops, grids, portals and stripes, it turns its back on its neighbours, focusing energy inward on a mad plaza, a kind of backyard of the national imaginary. Other than a predictable minority of nay-sayers, it’s been well received. People seem to recognise its energy, its multilayered semiotic gags, and particularly appreciate the way it invigorates, and messes up, the carefully constructed stateliness of its surrounds. John Howard could barely conceal his displeasure at the building he called “almost un-museum-like”; I swear I heard a gleeful chorus replying, “Exactly!”

Inside is a collection of exhibits which, luckily, live up to the promises of their extraordinary shell, and an organisation that seems to be thriving on the buzz. The presence and impact of that shell can never be underestimated: in particular, the National Museum of Australia’s deployment of digital media really begins with the building. This is a scheme that is hugely informed by, and enabled by, digital media technologies. The site is conceptualised as a tangling of the axes of Burley-Griffin’s Federal layout: they form a complex three-dimensional knot, which expresses itself as both solid forms and voids in the building. The design takes on the spatial plasticity of computer-aided design and applies it to a meaningful conceptual task: rather than just conveniently permutating floorplans in a multi-storey Meriton monster, the CAD system gets a 3D-workout. It’s no surprise to find, in an exhibit detailing the design process and philosophy, references to complex systems sciences, and figures such as the Lorenz attractor—the original “strange” attractor. Like these sciences, the Museum project uses visualisation technologies to turn abstract complexities—in this case layers of spatial and semiotic data—into sensible forms.

Inside, the initial impression is of the sheer density of media-surfaces. There are screens literally at every turn, in all shapes and sizes. Discreet and very sleek touchscreens, installed PC-based kiosks, video projections, arrays of flat-panel displays, a full-size cinema and a VR theatre. No visual monopoly, either; individual listening stations and installed speaker arrays are widely used. There’s an overall balance throughout the space between museum-type objects (there’s even the odd display case) and dynamic media elements. That balance is striking in that it’s remarkably even: the media elements are never secondary to the objects or vice versa. The 2 are more and less prominent at various points, but work as equal partners in forming the exhibitions.

There are 5 big nodes in this media-field—what Stephen Foster, Head of the Museum’s Content and Technology Division, calls “musclemedia” elements. They are ciRcA, a revolving theatrette; kSpace, kid-oriented interactive VR; Imagining the Country, an interactive map-based display; the Welcome Space in the Gallery of First Australians, an interactive corridor of video projections; and a huge video-wall at the other end of the same gallery.

While there’s something slightly comical about the idea of a revolving theatrette, ciRcA carries it off well. The installation is clever. A small slice of seating moves in stages through the 4 quadrants of a circle, over the course of around 10 minutes. The quadrants house 3 video installations, corresponding to the museum’s themes of Land, Nation and People; each is a multi-screen, multi-channel linear video. The video content is bright, snappy, very accessible and cleverly organised. There are hints of that high-production-value TV-ad Australiana which has been prominent recently—iconic landscapes, intense colours, exhilarating helicopter shots and snapshot montage—but here, thankfully, there’s no sun-browned Aussie narrator trying to sell us airline tickets. There is an eye-opening gimmick: in the Land installation, 5 big plasma-screens are mounted on vertical tracks, so that they slide in front of a huge rear-projected video wall; their motion is computer-controlled in sync with the video. They almost look silly, whizzing up and down with robot precision, but are saved by some neat integration with the video content, as when a rainforest stream cascades gently across the wall, from one screen to the next. The other 2 installations are less startlingly kinetic, but both generate rich, multiplexed video textures, and present material conveys a diverse, self-conscious and self-critical nationalism, leavened with a wry sense of humour.

kSpace, by comparison, is straight high-tech; this kid-focused exhibit was created with input from the Vizlab visualisation team at the ANU Supercomputer Facility. As you enter, a digital camera snaps an ID photo. Touchscreens in lime-green plinths offer you the chance to design a vision of the future, in the form of either a vehicle or a building. Through a simple series of choices (this chassis, those jets, that antenna) a custom-designed form appears—in my case a purple and fawn possum-headed rocketship, in glorious 3D, wobbling on the screen. On to the little VR theatre, don a pair of LCD shutter-glasses, and fly through a lurid fantasy city, studded with custom-kid-designed buildings and buzzing with weird flying objects, each of which proudly bears the mugshot of its creator. There’s some nice tongue-in-cheek VR Australiana here—including a huge silhouette of a Nolan Ned Kelly—and the B[if]tek soundtrack is seriously funky. Great fun, and I imagine it has the target demographic climbing the walls in delight. The fact that it was still all fully functional after a busy opening month of visitors is a sign of some bulletproof design and engineering.

Upstairs, the Gallery of First Australians is devoted to Indigenous history and culture, and the space draws visitors in through a wide corridor lined with shimmering video projections of Aboriginal dancers. This Welcome Space functions as a transitional zone, announcing Indigenous culture and identity, but it’s also a sensory oasis—a drop in the density of the museum experience. Hurrying through, you may see the figures dancing—sometimes in tribal dress, other times in street clothes; dancing traditional or contemporary moves—richly overlaid with painterly textures. Slow down, and some subtle interactivity becomes apparent: walking in front of the figures sends the image rippling, and triggers transitions between sequences. There’s a quiet invitation to engagement here (on several levels): interaction is designed to require a certain proximity to the video-figures—if you want to play, you’ve got to get up close. The system design is by the Interactive Modelling and Visualisation Systems group at CSIRO, and it’s strikingly effective.

The most iconic of the musclemedia spectaculars is Imagining the Country, otherwise known as the Big Map. The concept is relatively straightforward: a huge map of our wide brown land acts as a screen for a constant stream of interactive video-projected sequences. Some are info-overlays for the map, showing geographic data on land-use, rainfall, population density, and so on. Others are thematic montages or snippets of archival footage, tied to a particular location—like surfing at Bondi in the 60s. It’s visually snappy, clear and informative, and it unrolls in a continuous stream mixing hard data with cultural and historical artefacts. The map silhouette shifts roles: at times it’s an almost-kitsch backdrop (think of those wooden Australia-shaped clocks), and at others it’s a geological terrain, a dwelling-place, a set of historical location-points. The constant stream of material creates a sense of residue, a layering of different imaginary countries. The interaction occurs through a set of high-res touchscreens mounted around the viewing area for the map: they carry a parallel set of content, also based around the map and its historical, social and geographic layers. Every so often one of these screens is given the option to trigger the next set of content on the large map—so a personal process of interaction can open out into a shared, public display.

While these high-profile elements are important, the proof of the museum’s commitment to interactive and electronic media comes in its wider integration into the collection as a whole. Stephen Foster describes the museum’s approach in terms of exploring the relationship between object and media—that balance described above. It’s a fruitful partnership: the object retains its rich thing-ness (the form and fibre of an Arnhem Land fish-trap) while media elements contextualise, expand, and animate that object. Linear and interactive media are used to draw out the strata of story and experience which the object only hints at.

The museum’s work in the media sphere isn’t limited to its permanent collection; Foster promises an ambitious program of media-rich temporary exhibitions following the current Gold show. With built-in TV and radio studios, the site can act as a broad- or narrow-cast source, as well as a venue. As Foster points out, things get even more interesting when this capacity is combined with broadband internet and the existing, and growing, database of artefacts and media content. The museum may come to form an online repository of cultural memory and social history—a national mediabase, a keyword-searchable electronic attic. There’s significant promise here for local producers, who will be called on to keep up the supply of fresh content, but also for local museum and media culture and the wider public.

My childhood memories of the neighbour’s house are marked by a slightly edgy fascination. Just next door, and yet completely unfamiliar, full of unknown lives and strange smells, un-homely. It proves the difference between the house, a plan or structure, and the home, the setting for experience and memory.

Bronwyn Coupe works with both layers—plan and memory—in this interactive installation. Five pressure mats, snugly illuminated by 50s desk lamps, form an interface which reveals corresponding rooms on the plan of a remembered house—the childhood home of the work’s composer, Mary Anne Slavich. The rooms in turn lead to video-memory snippets. The dizzy-making swing in the backyard; piano practice (and Greensleeves, and the ice-cream man); the toybox; drives in the car. Basic, common-currency evocations which send us all back to a suburban childhood, even if we never had one. What makes this more than simple nostalgia is the quiet, drifting, slightly eerie quality of the video—in one sequence time-lapse shadows creep across a box full of stuffed toys. Slavich’s piano-based score is warm, lyrical, simple, and evocative in itself.

The work as a whole is marked by a quite beautiful sense of lightness and simplicity. There isn’t a mass of content, or a deep, multilayered structure, and that’s just fine. The mapping between memory-house and gallery floor means that unlike many installed interactives, the piece works well with multiple users. It also places us squarely inside the neighbour’s house, walking from bedroom to lounge, watching someone else’s memories, and thinking of home.

Bronwyn Coupe, The Neighbour’s House, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, March 24–April 21

In the Sydney Morning Herald’s The Guide, May 28-June3, ABC Classic FM’s new programming manager, John Crawford, “outlined his plans for the network, which include dropping…Soundstage and reworking The Listening Room.” This leaves radio drama with the half hour Airplay, Sunday afternoons at 3pm, and a new 1 hour 8pm slot, Saturday Night Drama, both on Radio National. Saturday Night Drama is broadcasting British imports for the moment, presumably because the 30% budget cut won’t allow for much new Australian product in the short term. In the long term 60 minute Australian works will be commissioned, but nothing longer.

Crawford has effectively banished radio drama to mono transmission, to diminished duration, to a lower budget and to a Saturday night homebody audience —“he would like to broaden the station’s demographic from 55-plus to attract the 40-to-50 market”, says The Guide, “as well as those he calls the ‘grey nomads’—the retirees traversing Australia in their camper vans.” What ambition!

Soundstage and The Listening Room are consistent award winners with international reputations. That one has been destroyed and the other is to be “workshopped” (in the context that word has never sounded so chilling) smacks of cultural vandalism. Crawford is damaging audio artforms that have a rich history and which have employed and nurtured an enormous variety of writers, actors, directors, composers, sound designers and musicians.

Ironically, Crawford has not been hostile to the new. He has consistently supported contemporary Australian music for over a decade, even when Classic FM inclined in recent years to easy listening. You would think that he would be supportive of 2 programs that offer composers other ways of working and take up little of his air space.
In a new century where there’s a substantial interplay between art forms (of which The Listening Room has been prophetic as well as exemplary) it seems odd that innovation counts for so little. And as the possibilities for radio performance writing expand, that radio drama should be deprived of quality transmission with aural breadth and depth.

Why so draconian? In reference to Soundstage, The Guide invokes ‘costly.’ Crawford cites listener requests for less “spoken word.” Two hours of drama is two hours too many in a 168 hour week? Of course, writers and other artists will continue to find work on Radio-eye and, Crawford’s workshop pending, The Listening Room. Nonetheless, a significant artistic terrain has been laid waste.

Perhaps because audio art seems fundamentally ephemeral, we tend not to regard its demise with the same alarm we might experience over the destruction of a painting or a Buddhist statue, or a favorite building, or the environment. You can’t see the damage. You can’t tour the ruins. There are no CDs. There’s just silence.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña creates what critics have termed “Chicano cyber-punk performances.” He uses his art and writing to reveal the labyrinths of identity and the precipices of nationality. He is internationally renowned for developing multicentric narratives from a border perspective.

Gómez Peña and his collaborator Juan Ybarra will be in residence at Sydney’s Performance Space in June to produce a multi-disciplinary performance utilising an “ephemeral troupe” of Australian artists. During the residency, the Australian artists—Valerie Berry (performer), Caitlin Newton-Broad (performer/director), Rolando Ramos (performer/multimedia artist), Victoria Spence (writer/performer), Vahid Vahed (video artist), Jorge Cantellano (multimedia artist), Claudia Chidiac (performer), Barbara Clare (sound artist) and Brian Fuata (writer/performer) will be exposed to Gómez-Peña performance methods and asked to develop a “hybrid persona” based on local history as well as their own complex identities and personal sense of race and gender. At the end of the residency a season of 6 performances will take place. Eds.

Tecnofobia

Mexicans are simple people. They are happy with the little they got…They are not ambitious and complex like us. They don’t need all this technology to communicate. Sometimes I just feel like going down there & living among them.
Anonymous

My “low rider” laptop is decorated with a 3D decal of the Virgin of Guadaloupe, the spiritual queen of Spanish-speaking America. It’s like a travelling altar, an office and a literary bank, all in one. I spend 70% of the year on the road, it is (besides my World Link phone card of course) my main means to keep in touch with my agent, editors, collaborators spread throughout many cities in the US and Mexico. The month before a major performance project, most of the technical preparations, and last minute negotiations and calendar changes, take place in the mysterious territory of cyber-space. Unwillingly, I have become a techno-artist and an information superhighway bandido. I say “unwillingly” because, like most Mexican artists, my relationship with digital technology and personal computers is defined by paradoxes and contradictions: I don’t quite understand them, yet I am seduced by them; I don’t want to know how they work; but I love how they look and what they do; I criticize my colleagues who are acritically immersed in las nuevas tecnologias, yet I silently envy them. I resent the fact that I am constantly told that as a “Latino” I am supposedly “culturally handicapped” or somehow unfit to handle high technology; yet once I have IT right in front of me, I am tempted and uncontrollably propelled to work against it; to question it, expose it, subvert it, and imbue it with humour, radical politics and linguas polutas such as Spanglish and Franglais.

Contradiction prevails. Two years ago, my main collaborator Roberto Sifuentes and I bullied ourselves into the net, and once we were generously adopted by various communites (Arts Wire and Latino net, among others) we suddenly started to lose interest in maintaining ongoing conversations with phantasmagoric beings we had never met (and that, I must say, is a Mexican cultural prejudice: if I don’t know you in person, I don’t really care to converse with you). Then we started sending a series of poetic/activist “techno-placas” in Spanglish. In these short communiques we raised some tough questions regarding access, identity politics and language. Since at the time we didn’t quite know where to post them in order to get the maximum response; and the responses were sporadic and unfocused, our interest began to dim. For months we felt lonely and isolated (it’s not hard to feel marginal and inconsequential in cyber-space). And it was only through the gracious persistence of our techno-colleagues that we decided to remain seated at the virtual table, so to speak.

Today, despite the fact that Roberto and I spend a lot of time in front of our laptops (when we’re not touring, he is in New York and I’m in San Francisco or Mexico City) conceptualizing performance projects which incorporate new technologies and redesigning our websites, every time we are invited to participate in a public discussion around art and technology, we tend to emphasize its shortcomings and overstate our cultural skepticism. Why?

I can only speak for myself. Perhaps I have some computer traumas, or suffer from endemic digital fibrosis. I’ve been using computers since ‘88; however, during the first 5 years, I used my old Mac as a glorified typewriter. During those years I probably deleted accidentally here and there over 300 pages of original texts which I hadn’t backed up, and thus was forced to rewrite them from memory (some of these ‘reconstructed texts’ appeared in my first book Warrior for Gringostroika, Greywolf Press, 1994). The thick and confusing user-friendly manual fell many times from my impatient hands. I spent many desperate nights cursing the mischievous gods of cyber-space, and dialing promising “hotlines” which rarely answered, or if they answered, provided me with complicated instructions I was unable to follow.

My bittersweet relationship to techology dates back further to my formative years in the highly politicized ambience of Mexico City in the 1970s. As a young ‘radical artist’, I was full of ideological dogma and partial truths. One such ‘truth’ spouted that high-technology was intrinsically dehumanizing (enajenante in Spanish); that it was mostly used as a means to control “us”, little techno-illiterate people, politically. My critique of technology overlapped with my criticism of capitalism. To me, ‘capitalists’ were rootless (and faceless) corporate men who utilized mass media to advertise their useless electronic gadgets, sold us unnecessary apparatuses which kept us both eternally in debt (as a country and as individuals) and conveniently distracted from “the truly important matters of life” which included sex, music, spirituality and “revolution” California-style (meaning, en abstracto). As a child of contradiction, besides being a rabid “anti-technology artist”, I owned a little Datsun; and listened to my favourite US and British rock groups on my Panasonic importado, often while meditating or making love as a means to “liberate myself” from capitalist socialization. My favourite clothes, books, posters and albums, had all been made with technology by “capitalists”; but for some obscure reason, that seemed perfectly logical to me.

Luckily my family never lost their magical thinking and sense of humour around technology. My parents were easily seduced by refurbished and slightly dated American and Japanese electronic goods. We bought them as fayuca (contraband) in Tepito neighbourhood, and they occupied an important place in the decoration of our “modern” middle-class home. Our huge colour TV set, for example, was decorated to perform the double function of entertainment unit and involuntary postmodern altar—with nostalgic photos of relatives, paper flowers and assorted figurines all around it; and so was the humongous sound system next to it with an amp, an 8 track recorder, 2 record players and 17 speakers which played all day long, a syncretic array of music including Mexican composer Agustin Lara, Los Panchos (of course, with Edie Gorme), Sinatra, Esquivel, Eartha Kitt, tropical cumbias, Italian opera and rock ‘n roll (in this sense, my father was my first involuntary instructor in postmodern thought). Though I was sure that with the scary arrival of the first microwave oven to our traditional kitchen, our delicious daily meals were going to turn overnight into sleazy fast food, soon my mother realized that el microondas was only good to reheat cold coffee and soups. The point was to own it, and to display it prominently as yet another sign of modernidad (in Mexico, modernity is conceived as synonymous with US technology and pop culture). When I moved to California (and therefore into the future), I would often buy cheesy electronic trinkets for my family (I didn’t qualify them as “cheesy” then). During vacations, to go back to visit my family with such presents ipso facto turned me into an emissary of both prosperity and modernity. Once I bought an electric ionizador for grandma. She put it in the middle of her bedroom altar, and kept it there—unplugged of course—for months. When I next saw her, she told me: “Mijito, since you gave me that thing (still unplugged), I truly can breathe much better.” And she probably did. Things like television, short wave radios and microwave ovens and later on ionizers, walkmans, crappy calculators, digital watches and video cameras were seen by my family as alta tecnologia, high technology, and their function was as much pragmatic as it was social, ritual, sentimental and aesthetic.

It is no coincidence then that in my early performance work, cheap technology performed ritual and aesthetic functions as well. Verbigratia: for years, I used video monitors as centrepieces for my “video altars” on stage. Since then, fog machines, strobe lights and gobos, megaphones and voice filters have remained trademark elements in my low-tech/high-tech performances. By the early 90s, I sarcastically baptized my aesthetic practice, “Aztec high-tech art”, and when I teamed with Cyber-Vato Roberto Sifuentes, we decided that what we were doing was “techno-razcuache art.” In a glossary which dates back to 1994, we defined it as “a new aesthetic that fuses performance art, epic rap poetry, interactive television, experimental radio and computer art; but with a Chicanocentric perspective and a sleazoid bent.”

Mythical Differences

The mythology goes like this. Mexicans (and by extension other Latinos) can’t handle high-technology. Caught between a preindustrial past and an imposed modernity, we continue to be manual beings: homo fabers par excellence; imaginative artisans (not technicians); and our understanding of the world is strictly political, poetical or metaphysical at best, but certainly not scientific. Furthermore, we are perceived as sentimentalist and passionate creatures (meaning irrational); and when we decide to step out of our realm, and utilize technology in our art (most of the time we are not even interested), we are meant to naively repeat what others—mainly Anglos and Europeans—have already done.

Latinos often feed this mythology by overstating our “romantic nature” and humanistic stances; and/or by assuming the role of colonial victims of technology. We are always ready to point out the fact that social and personal relations in the US, the land of the future, are totally mediated by faxes, phones, computers and other technologies we are not even aware of; and that the overabundance of information technology in everyday life is responsible for America’s social handicaps and cultural crisis. Paradoxically, whether we like it or not, it is our lack of access to these goods which makes us overstate our differences: we, “on the contrary”, socialize profusely, negotiate information ritually and sensually; and remain in touch with our (still intact) primaeval selves. This simplistic and extremely problematic binary world view portrays Mexico and Mexicans as technologically underdeveloped, yet culturally and spiritually superior: and the US as exactly the opposite.

Reality is much more complicated: the average Anglo American does not understand new technologies either; people of colour and women in the US clearly don’t have “equal access” to cyber-space. Furthermore, American culture has always led the most radical (and often childish) movements against its own technological development and back to nature. Meanwhile, the average urban Mexican is already afflicted in varying degrees with the same “First World” existential illnesses produced by high technology and advanced capitalism. In fact the new generations of Mexicans, including my hip generacion-Mex nephews and my 8 year-old fully bicultural son, are completely immersed in and defined by personal computers, Nintendo, video games and virtual reality (even if they don’t own the software). Far from being the romantic preindustrial paradise of the American imaginary, the Mexico of the 90s is already a virtual (and therefore mythical) nation whose cohesiveness and fluctuating boundaries are largely provided by television, transnational pop culture, tourism, the free market and yes, the Internet. But life in the ranchero global village is ridden with contradictions: despite all this, still very few people south of the border are on-line, and those who are wired tend to belong to the upper and upper middle classes, and are related to corporate or managerial metiers. Every time my colleagues and I have attempted to create a binational dialogue via digital technologies (ie link Los Angeles to Mexico City through satellite video-telephone), we are faced with myriad complications. In Mexico, the few artists with ongoing access to high technologies who are interested in this kind of transnational techno-dialogue, with a few exceptions, tend to be socially privileged, politically conservative and aesthetically uninteresting. And the funding sources down there willing to fund this type of project are clearly interested in controlling who is part of the experiment. The zapatista phenomenon is a famous exception to the rule. Techno-performance artist-extraordinaire El subcomandante Marcos communicates with the “outside world” through a very popular web page sponsored and designed by Canadian liberals (it is still a mystery to me how his communiques get from the jungle village of La Realidad, which still has no electricity, into his website overnight). However, this web page is better known outside of Mexico for a simple reason: the Mexican Telephone Company makes it practically impossible for anyone living outside the main cities to use the net, arguing that there are simply not enough lines to handle both telephone and Internet users.

The cyber-migra

Roberto and I arrived late to the debate, along with a dozen other Chicano experimental artists. When we began to dialogue with US artists working with new technologies, we were perplexed by the fact that when referring to cyber-space they spoke of politically neutral/raceless/genderless and classless “territory” which provided us all with “equal access”, and unlimited possibilities for participation, interaction and belonging, especially “belonging” (in a time in which no one feels that they “belong” anywhere). Yet there was never any mention of the physical and social loneliness, or the fear of the “real world” which propels so many people to get on-line and pretend they are having meaningful experiences of communication or discovery. To them, the thought of exchanging identities on the net and impersonating other genders, races or ages, without real (social or physical) consequences seemed extraordinarily appealing and liberating (and by no means, superficial or escapist).

The utopian rhetoric around digital technologies, especially in California, reminded Roberto and I of a sanitized version of the pioneer and frontier mentalities of the Old West, and also of the early century futurist cult to the speed, size and beauty of epic technology (airplanes, trains, factories etc). Given the existing “compassion fatigue” regarding political art and art dealing with matters of race and gender, it was hard not to see this feel-good philosophy (or theosophy) as an attractive exit from the acute social and racial crisis afflicting the US.

Like the pre-multicultural art world of the early 80s, the new high-tech art world assumed an unquestionable “centre”, and drew a dramatic digital border. And on the other side of the tracks, there lived all the techno-illiterate (and underfunded) artists, along with most women, Chicanos, Afro-Americans and Native Americans. Those of us living south of the digital border were forced to assume once again the unpleasant but necessary roles of undocumented immigrants, cultural invaders, techno-pirates and virtual coyotes (smugglers). We were also shocked by the benign or quiet (not naive) ethnocentrism permeating the debates around art and digital technology, especially in California. The master narrative was either the utopian language of Western democratic values (excuse me!!!) or a perverse form of anti-corporate corporate jargon. The unquestioned lingua franca was of course, English, “the official language of international communications”; the theoretical vocabulary utilized by critics was hyper-specialized (a combination of “software” talk; revamped post-structuralism and psychoanalysis), and de-politicised (post-colonial theory and the border paradigm were conveniently overlooked); and if Chicanos and Mexicans didn’t participate enough in the net, it was solely because of lack of information or interest (not money or “access”) or again, because we were “culturally unfit.” The unspoken assumption was that our true interests were grassroots (and by that I mean, the streets in the barrio, our logical place in the world), representational or oral (as if these concerns couldn’t exist in virtual space). In other words, we were to remain painting murals, tagging, plotting revolutions in rowdy cafes, reciting oral poetry and dancing salsa or quebradita.

This essay originally appeared in -cross, a quarterly magazine of visual arts and contemporary culture published in Milan, Italy and is reproduced here with the generous permission of the writer and the publisher.

I’m recovering from the excesses of a film festival opening. Beginning to understand the appeal. Free grog and food. Everyone re-created equal. Well-lubricated vultures picking at the red carpet. Sometimes the films seem less important than the glass in your hand, the silver plate parading past too fast.

The community film festival scene in Sydney and Melbourne (and around Australia as festivals are increasingly touring nationally) is just too vibrant. Every week a new one is announced. In the past month we’ve had European, Spanish and a taste of Greek and earlier, Arabic and French. Coming up at the Sydney Opera House is the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander celebration of film and music Blak Sounds/Blak Screen. Last year brought us Sydney Asia Pacific, Hong Kong, China, Italian at Goat Island and a sold out Tibetan festival. Films clash. Festival guests parade. It’s feverish.

I’m sitting in Cinema Paris. A chorus of “que tal?” echoes. A Hoyts executive makes a well-rehearsed attempt at a new language and all-round talent Monica Trapaga’s Spanish is guttural and grand. Her mother Catalan, her father Basque, she recounts San Fermin fiesta recreations (including the bulls) in a suburban backyard, to the surprise of the local Seventh Day Adventists. Her passion for the cultures of Spain and Latin America extend well beyond the music she’s famous for, as she cites Spanish shoes (I look lovingly at my San Sebastian boots), Picasso’s Guernica and Almodovar amongst her inspirations. As she walks out, elegantly wrapped in a floral shawl, she says to the crowd: this is the quietest Spanish theatre I’ve ever been in.

Soon I become a part of the screen, swallowed up by the Spanish film festival’s opening night flick, Carlos Saura’s Goya en Burdeos (Goya in Bordeaux), a rich play on subconscious desires where (as with the impressive Love is the Devil about Francis Bacon), Goya’s paintings begin to live, confronting him too with the fear and joy they inspire at close view. As Goya recounts memories with a younger self, I drift into weary-legged days at the Prado in Madrid, tongue-tied attempts at ordering a Rioja—increasingly easy as the night wears on—and the intensity of Dali in Cadaquez, Picasso in Barcelona, El Greco in Toledo. Watching Goya my body breathes within his paintings, like wandering into the water lily pond at Giverny, breathlessly stunned. I surface from this bold and beautiful film into a swarming sea of hands reaching for Freixenet and tapas trays. But I remain in Spain.

Maybe this is the secret to the popularity of film festivals that revolve around specific communities. If I was only in Spain a few months, imagine the experience of such films on people who were born there, spent most of their lives there, speak the language. Film helps re-inflect and recreate our own memories, the intense ones of travel, too.

At the Greek film festival in Norton St I bum out completely. Of course, I’m paranoid that all the films I miss will be really good, but Cheap Smokes and Female Company look like they might have been made 20 years ago. Cheap Smokes is full of quirky characters spouting poetry and men talking about why they want to date supermodels and a woman in a neckbrace. Horrendous. Female Company deals with 5 women who, tired of their husbands’ affairs, hire a room to get off with local hunks. Meanwhile, their amorous activities are being filmed and broadcast on the internet (via a surveillance camera). A pretty interesting topic considering Big Brother but this film reeks of hypocrisy and, let’s face it, misogyny. It’s all apparently about women reclaiming their sexuality by finding a room of their own, but in every conflict situation the tension is resolved by a man beating a woman. And, worst of all, this is not questioned, the women get beaten and the men keep beating.

I’m sitting in the gorgeous old Roxy Theatre. The Arabic community is the largest ethnic community in Parramatta (and NSW) but their representation on our screens and in the arts is limited, summed up in 3 words: the bad guys. Doris Younane, a popular face on Australian TV from Sea Change and Heartbreak High, opened the proceedings. Born in Parramatta, she spoke of her experience as an actor with an Arabic background: “we do not exist in Australian TV/film.” In 15 years she has only played one Lebanese character. She supported the Arabic film festival as a chance for Arabic-Australians to challenge negative stereotypes and question a lack of representation: “I hope many of the future storytellers will come from this room.” An interesting selection of shorts featured on the opening night including Paula Abood’s satire on “image distortion disorder”, a reconsideration of the media’s portrayal of young Arabic men in gangs in Western Sydney—Of Middle Eastern Appearance—as a threat, as racialised ‘other’; and The Wall, starring an expanse of virgin-white wall, a canvas in action, framed so we can’t see the top, the characters choreographed in a gritty Les Ballet C de la B style. Funny, frightening vignettes: a paranoid man yells “what are you staring at”; two kids draw around each other, frozen in time; a chicken squawks; a man lets loose with a pickaxe; another dangles bleeding. A truck arrives and whitewashes all traces of the everyday away. An effective portrait of a community struggling to have its voice(s) and culture(s) heard.

The popularity of such film festivals reflects the gaps in popular culture—TV, Hollywood film—offering a chance to hear new voices. Although SBS regularly screens films from around the globe, even here there is a great deal of repeated programming and a degree of sameness in content (also reflected on cable Tv’s World Movies). Lots of old men ogling nubile wenches. Saucy and schlock horror seems to be the current fad. It can be hard to get a fix on contemporary cinema outside the English-speaking world. In Sydney, there’s surprisingly little choice between the mainstream and ‘alternative’ cinemas. Dendy and Palace appear to be playing pretty much what’s on at Hoyts. In some ways this is good because it means that challenging cinema has hit the mainstream in the past year. Just look at Traffic or Memento. On the other hand, this infiltration by defined ‘independent’ cinema (which really isn’t) has meant fewer and fewer foreign language films. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is an obvious exception but it’s a Hollywood-style film, a Mills and Boon action story. The Chauvel and revived Valhalla are important because they screen older films that deserve to be re-aired and promote smaller Australian offerings like Cunnamulla. However, they too seem more reliant on English language films, usually with a sexy edge to get the punters in.

Film festivals can have a political edge and this spices things up, a reaction against the dominant culture, and a bid for communities to reclaim their own portrayals. They’re also a good chance to screen the works of a range of filmmakers from Australia exploring notions of identity within these communities. Hopefully more of the festivals, taking the lead of the Arabic and Sydney Asia Pacific festivals, will open the floor to discussions about place and hybridity, and encourage us all to get out of our armchairs and turn on new worlds.

Books translated to films can be an easy bet and highly successful. Looking for Alibrandi, American Psycho, All the Pretty Horses have already garnered an audience who go along knowing what they’re in for. Then there are the duds. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. Oscar and Lucinda. Sometimes you dread to hear that a favourite text is being transported to celluloid. E Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is on its way, as is Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with Nicholas Cage. I guess Barbara Kingsolver will be next. My favourite writer of the moment, her novels The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer have large-show-off-ensemble-cast stamped on every page. Then again, mum and I had a great few hours casting Kingsolver’s characters—it’s a delicious egoistic delight, manoeuvering our fantasies off the page and onto the screen.

The Monkey’s Mask—the book—is a rare treasure: a verse novel with sparse design that punches you in the guts. The 1998 theatrical adaptation downstairs at Belvoir Street was disappointing (RT#26 p42) and the film too, elegantly designed, shot and acted, lacks the raw, stomach churning power of Porter’s detective text. Too slick. No suspense. A travelogue of NSW. From the misty Blue Mountains to slippery shiny highrise sex, it’s beautiful one day and perfect the next. Where’s the dagginess and the real dirt? Susie Porter as Jill doesn’t look like she (or her heart) would ever wear pink tracksuit pants, as her monologue suggests. Her face is carved, toughly vulnerable; she doesn’t fit into this imagined poet’s world, where everyone seems to be a high flier, but who would? These types are monstrous; little Johnny will use this film as proof of the elite arts he no longer wants to fund. Thank god for Mickey—a wonderfully self-obsessed and insular performance by Abbie Cornish from Wildside—who disappears off the screen all too quickly.

Dorothy Porter can hit a raw nerve because she’s an observer from within and her eagle eye and ear capture perfectly the resonance of poet wannabes: the young female victim dying to be Sylvia Plath, the born-again poser keen to take advantage of his own moral goodness, the middle-aged bore at every pub reading who keeps saying ‘just one more’ as he sinks into his own sunset. Everyone’s shady. Deborah Mailman, playing Lou, the least sympathetic character in the book, does a surprising turn and rounds out this nasty piece of work, finely tuning her comic talent with a neat sinister edge. Kelly McGillis, who I was admittedly skeptical about after her Take My Breath Away days astride Mr Cruise-Missile in Top Gun, is magnificent in the role of Diana. Powerful, androgynous, sharp, she sucks us into her life/death world where the boundaries are unclear; a great modern day femme fatale.

The Monkey’s Mask is mostly about obsessive love between 2 women where the upperhand is determined by how much they know. For a relationship that revolves primarily around the physical—sex/games that go too far—their shared scenes are cold, uninvolving, behind glass. It’s rare these days that a sex scene moves the audience. (Praise is the last film I can remember that experimented with the usual roleplay.) Tear clothes off. Pash. Get on bed. Touch/kiss breasts. Camera pans down naked woman’s body. Actor on top moves slowly down, kissing. Camera follows then discreetly stops at waist. Pan back up naked woman’s body. Her face experiences delirious delights that we all know she isn’t having. Yawn. What am I after? Big Brother bondage thrills? Well…maybe. Not necessarily explicit (although why not in an R-rated film like this) but honest or imaginative or, well, sexy.

To enjoy this film, you need to not read the book. I was mouthing the lines before the actors did; not a good look. Better still, grab the paperback instead, settle into bed with a good red, and cast your own characters in a sexy, witty thriller that sets a pace this film can’t match.

The Monkey’s Mask, director Samantha Lang, writer Anne Kennedy, adapted from the book by Dorothy Porter, Arena Films, national release May 10

Ranters’ earlier show, Features of Blown Youth (premiered 1997), was set in a share-house, open to view, filled with chance meetings and relationships developing through proximity rather than commitment, and underscored with a menace not easily absorbed or dealt with by a loosely organised group of urban youth. Their latest show, St Kilda Tales, which opened at Playbox in May is less spatially defined. Anna Tregloan’s set is a field for action, at times interior, at times street. With its various levels, its steel constructions and soaring girder-like poles, and backed by the rear of a line of huge flats, the stage looks like an abandoned building site. Within it, a motley group of inner city dwellers wander, prowl, wait, seeking or avoiding the chance encounters that gradually weave them together in a careful choreography of event disguised as haphazard. Here the menace is internalised, spread in more evenly divided shares in a dog eat dog world where finally life itself is the menace without pity. In this context, it is less easy to locate the malevolent force within one character, although yet again Robert Morgan’s irresistibly evil stage presence does the job of corralling the disparate energies into a vitally contained theatrical force.

The Cortese brothers are charting new horizons of what can only be called ‘reality-theatre.’ The piece is plotless in any conventional theatrical sense, although the stage-field provides a fertile plot within which these vignettes of low-life can take seed and grow. The writing, much of which emerged in response to ensemble improvisations, draws no attention to itself. RaimondoCortese is growing in skill and confidence in the economies of this pared-back style. Adriano’s direction is loose-limbed in its attempt to suggest the randomness of real street life. At times it was reminiscent of the kind of stage occupation practiced by Les Ballet C de la B in shows like Iets Op Bach. It certainly had that same rhythm of alternating slackness and static electricity, breaking through expectations of the well-organised play or performance piece.

If St Kilda Tales is about anything it is, finally, about avoidance—of commitment, of care, of self-fulfilment, of sex, even of violence carried through to its final conclusion. Alcohol and drugs are the substitutes, of course, and a nervy hysteria of mood grows as the evening progresses. The ecstatic Tasso and the hopeful Lucy seem like the possible positives, but Cortese is not so sentimental as to leave us with them. We end on Olivia’s yearning: “I wanna great orgasm! Eh?! Where?! Am I dreaming?!” and with the hysterical laughter that she and Pan cannot control in the face of the hopelessness of it all.

This is a very particular cross-section of ‘St Kilda’ life. It contains no Aboriginals, no ethnicity, no senility, no yuppies, no backpackers. The suburb is the ‘springboard’ for a stage event. Its power is deliberately presentational rather than representational. In the context of Playbox, the critique it presents is finally less of society than of the way that theatre has represented it. The Playbox management should be congratulated for supporting the venture. The joy of the young audience attending is the invaluable payoff.

St Kilda Tales, by Raimondo Cortese, director Adriano Cortese, Playbox, Melbourne, May 15-26

version 1.0, The second Last Supper

A bunch of multinational corporation hondos gather, adopt the names of saints (name tags available on the table) and transform global capitalism into religion in a Last Supper of seductions, pratfalls, vigorously declaimed hypocrises, careless contradictions and violence. Like the bourgeoisie of Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (where wealthy, partying citizens find themselves locked in a mansion by a hidden force and turn on each other), these saints are nasty, cynical, and easily diverted (“is the armed struggle possible when the cricket’s on?”).

It’s a provocative show. Some loved it, some hated it. I was in the former camp on opening night. It was a real pleasure to witness a new work with more new faces than old, a discursive scenario, a show that actually ran longer than an hour, and one that was eccentric, even surreal. And it was full of talk, wild, wilful, provocative, cheap talk, ranging from hilarious stand-up from a chameleon host (Stephen Klinder in brilliant form) to spontaneous exchanges and mock manifestos delivered over the monstrous corporate dinner table that traversed the performance space. Performance loves risk and endurance. In The second Last Supper, real wine is quaffed by the cast from beginning to end. Perhaps this added to both the ease and, sometimes, the intensity of the performance. Whatever, the improvisational tone, always a hard call, was sustained, vocal projection carefully contained, yielding a strong sense of ensemble reinforced by a physical ease in the space and with each other. Sam James’ sublime video projection of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper was a constant, slowly overlaid with shopping malls and other imagery and, later, flickerings portending storm and collapse.

For all its many strengths, The second Last Supper still feels like an evolving work, perhaps it always will be, it has to be that loose to be what its brave and talented cast make it. However there’s room to tighten, to focus, to reduce the volume of much too familiar pomo quippery, of performance cliches (if modern theatre is 90% cliches acquired over 400 years, performance too has accumulated its fair share over the last 30), and of times when it seems it just doesn’t know when to stop…or when to sustain an image, a thought, a monologue just a little longer. This is a show to keep in repertoire, a refreshing new vision in performance.

Devised & performed by Stephen Klinder, Jana Taylor, Chris Ryan, Daniele Antaki, Rohan Thatcher, David Williams; Performance Space, Sydney, April 5-15

Leiser, Heilmann, a room with no air

It’s an anxious pleasure to encounter this demanding work again in which the Jewish and German children of WWII parents live out a ‘would you hide me if it happened again’ scenario. The set (Leonie Evans, Clarissa Arndt), a beautiful but oppressive, brilliant red wall, is like the relationship, full of doors, cupboards, nostalgia and horrors. The everyday, in the form of shoes, potatoes and an exchange of recipes (for the same dish), becomes terrifying in a dance of aggression and intimacy. Heilmann and Moore are physical and vocally dextrous, funny and frightening. Nikki Heywood’s direction is a perfect act of visual composition. A room with no air is a more coherent work than its 1998 premiere, and much improved, although at some loss, especially when the magically lateral turns doggedly literal. Those few moments aside, this is an enduringly powerful work.

Kropka Theatre, Convict Women— Lifetime Exile

A “seance in 14 acts” (that yields the utterances of angels), Convict Women begins eerily and inventively enough before settling into a more conventional, illustrative documentary theatre when the women arrive in Australia. Director Anatoly Frusin makes admirable use of the performers’ bodies and some especially evocative lighting (Stephen Hawker) to generate changing place and mood as the women are cut off from their cultural roots and learn that their terms are in fact life sentences. Jolanta Juskiewicz, Angela Bauer and Janine Burchett play the women with simple intensity and an unexpected and rarified gentility. The text is over-elaborate, short on the cultural specificity it promises, but rich in detail and incident. Transforming historical documents into theatre is always a challenge: this production suggests the need for another level of editing and synthesis.

What are the implications of teaching about live contemporary performance when students cannot view performances and cannot read about the productions in what they perceive as the ‘exciting’ theory texts from overseas? This article is concerned with the way that the available resources–publications and productions–might implicitly impact on students’ perceptions of Australia's performance cultures. These comments are based on teaching performance studies, subjects on postmodernism and embodied performative identity, and a decade of incorporating some study of Australian contemporary performance into theatre and drama subjects.

This discipline field is three-fold: the study and making of contemporary performance, applications of performance theory to widely varied cultural practices, and research questions addressed through performance outcomes. I assume that I do not need to give yet another justification as to the validity of these processes or their distinctiveness from theatre as professional craft for colleague readers. While contemporary performance is experimental, its practitioners would recognise an artistic momentum if not also a movement. Pedagogy needs to convey a sense of a milieu to students as well as considering specific texts and forms. In the extreme, perhaps it should facilitate access to networks something like the intention of the theatre ‘industry.’

I have been wondering what an introduction to, and the study of, contemporary performance means for most younger students who enter our courses as undergraduates attuned to theatre and with little prior exposure to performance? If applications of performance theory or performance research seem to be more successfully taken up at present by individuals in fourth year and postgraduate study, there are undergraduates who gravitate to making performance pieces. However, does performance studies have a lasting effect on these students even if only to become educated audience? Or does it remain university praxis? It seems easier for students of dance and music to engage with a contemporary performance culture.

It is arguable as to whether pedagogy about performance that has happened, and that our students will not see, is teaching about a contemporary milieu. At times I have found myself juggling this odd hybrid of theatre with elements of performance in order to provide students with some sense of the immediacy of live work. Opportunities to see contemporary performance do not necessarily coincide with subject offerings, semesters or geographical location. Copyright problems and financial costs restrict the use of video resources for teaching. Like the study of theatre, the understanding of performance is greatly enhanced by viewing the work. Admittedly, students can see other students' work developed in class so does it matter if they do not have much opportunity to see performance in the wider artistic context? It may be self-evident but opportunities to see innovative professional performance can impact profoundly on the work students create.

Certainly, contemporary influences on artists are not straightforward, and there can be major restrictions on viewing of innovative performance by other artists. In one extreme example, the Russian director Kama Glinkas told John Freedman that he had created his image-based theatre from his conceptions of Western performance, derived from seeing (still) photographs rather than productions (John Freedman, “Russian Theatre is Not a Time-Killer”, TheatreForum, No. 12. 1998). This is the approach of a mature artist and cannot be assumed to be viable for novices. My colleague, Meredith Rogers, describes this as rendering visible a performance work process, which is common enough but not usually acknowledged.

Here is the crux of my concern. Performance has evolved as a particular specialisation, in that it is very rare for the text to be produced again by anyone other than its original creators even if there is the occasional opportunity to remount it. For the artists involved in performance making this presents particular challenges since each show will be a progression but remains a new work. It may also involve different combinations of artists. By informing students about previous Australian performance works, which they will not see in production, they are studying what has become like a history of Australian contemporary performance. (In theatre, however, dramatic texts are often restaged, and although it may be argued that this is not the case for many new Australian plays, scripts of these are often published as a result of one season.) If lecturers like myself encourage students to study contemporary performance from available photographs and, at most, script extracts of what were often movement based and extremely visual texts or installations, there is an implicit message that these are fragmented parts of a larger, original text. Admittedly, if students workshop these fragments they are learning about the process of performance making as assemblage. However, what students encounter are ghostly traces of an absent whole text. Therefore we implicitly communicate an idea that most contemporary performance is elusive, existing in the memories of those who saw it. How can students move beyond this to an understanding that such texts belong in a larger milieu or movement?

Despite students’ apparent fascination with performance making projects and available videos or other resources on contemporary performances, given the opportunity to make their own work without a lecturer guiding otherwise, in my experience most undergraduate students return to making theatre. I have been trying to make sense of this tendency over several years. At first it seemed attributable to theatre’s dominance of the form. These days I wonder if it is difficult for students to conceive of the momentum of performances grouped together like they encounter repeated theatre productions. While students might make short performance pieces as a component part of a bigger project or program–pieces akin to performance art–the possibility of making a longer sustained complete text remains much harder to envisage.

In some ways the practice of performance making in pedagogy is easier to effect than undertaking pedagogy about Australia’s performance cultures since the early 1980s. The practice might be neatly understood in the doing and making with students working together to create their own performance work or working with an experienced practitioner. However, if we are to encourage experimentation after university, students need to engage with a milieu that might also be a movement. If we do not teach at least some of its artistic legacy, which is an ongoing influence among experienced practitioners, we are restricting the capacity of young practitioners to contribute to its progressive development. But this is not the same as exposure to a contemporary milieu.

Some students in major centres have opportunities to work with leading practitioners who can offer an overview. Performance Space (PS) in Sydney offers a tangible ongoing focus for work that is not always available elsewhere. In 1991, 17 of my students were involved in 2 weeks of performance making in the PS gallery, but to my knowledge only one of those students had performed there again by 1996. Until 1996, presenting the concept of a performance milieu was a somewhat disjointed process dependent on a lecturer's personal resources and knowledge. Since 1999 we have had Performing the Unnameable, with which to consider an accumulated body of works. While I welcome even the inevitable canon, I am left with the same concerns. It is crucial to teach about previous work, but I am concerned that the study of Australian performance making does not become elusive, fragmented history. Thankfully RealTime has revolutionised communication about contemporary performance as it happens nationally.

However, resources like RealTime provide written records but not written texts and pictures. These are intended as supplements to participation in the event. This raises concerns similar to those found in the study of theatre. For example, there are problems with teaching about certain kinds of theatre when the most accessible resource is a drama script, even if it is workshopped in class. The written mode, which is invisible in theatre, continues to dominate perceptions of it in pedagogy, and recent productions are accessible only through written reviews.

The performance milieu may not need productions by young ensemble groups emerging from our institutions. Such processes may belong to the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Angharad Wynne-Jones observes about transitions at PS. Yet it is difficult to create even solo performance work without a network of interested artists. The impact of the Australia Council’s emphasis on project funding means that artists are brought together for one project and this compounds the problems of the one-off performance culture. Ironically, for a time in the 1990s, young performance makers would probably have been more likely to get an Australia Council grant than anyone submitting a conventional play script. How do young performance makers develop the track record to be successful with funding applications? Perhaps this means that we need to be developing solo performer, writers or directors, which invariably undercuts any effort to establish networks of performance makers.

There are 2 other complications as to why the potential of performance making eludes interested student practitioners. Firstly, the writing process in acclaimed contemporary performance often remains invisible. I suggest that it is very difficult to make performance if some entity, the director or group (or even a writer), is not undertaking this writing process in the development of the work. In making performance, students become aware that ideas seem to evaporate or become simplistic in a process that does not structure and/or concentrate them into layered significances. For example, the effectiveness of Virginia Baxter's What Time is This House (Australasian Drama Studies Association Teaching Texts, 1992) for pedagogy is that it provides a complete script with which to begin conceiving of, or even making, performance.

Secondly, the problem of perceiving a milieu for performance lies with the paucity of contextualisation of Australian performance. Important references by overseas theorists that engage our students, and particularly those who are drawn to make work using theory, do not cover Australian work. Yet the milieu that nurtured our performance cultures, while subject to international influence, has its own perspective and this has regional variations. The availability of these publications undercuts the Australian artistic milieu. Journals that allow for theoretical analysis like the seminal Performance Research or the extremely useful TheatreForum, which gives wide coverage of contemporary performance internationally, have alleviated this problem in recent years. The contributions in these journals about Australia are selectively dependent on academics and critics who will do extended analysis of texts, and cannot also be expected to contexualise this work. Recently, as I edited a volume on the available research on Australian contemporary body orientated performance (Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance) I became aware of huge gaps in our own unique and original performance culture.

I teach performance to students in Melbourne while my knowledge is influenced by what I have seen from the 1980s to the 1990s at PS. Melbourne has an extremely rich performance culture of its own, much of which I did not see. While performance cultures may be city specific, practitioners are not. Individuals work between these different cities, which raises a further set of interesting concerns for academic knowledges and the documentation of performance cultures. The interdependence of artistic collaborations in the production of performance texts should be recognised and the possibility of artistic influences from individual practitioners tracked down. Performance analysis needs to accommodate this mobility to make sense of influences and developments in city specific cultures.

Is it possible for academic writing to capture a sense of a milieu given its dominant discursive approaches? Like theatre, performance cannot be studied as the work of one author even if the director is the seminal force, but involves a number of artists working in collaborative ways. All these artists should be acknowledged. (Solo performance is definitely easier to study.) Performance projects that bring collaborators together in unique configurations mean that each contributor has a performance past as well as that of the production, which delivers a metatheatrical configuration with its hybridity of form. A multiplicity of interpretative significance seems an inevitable consequence of the instabilities of 'good' postmodern performance in its theoretical reception. This may mean that theoretical interpretations cancel each other out. Admittedly, meanings that slide through the gaps in fixed interpretations can be problematic in academic analysis unless they are accepted as co-existent. The difficulties presented by research that combines the work history of practitioners delineated as the problematic authorial intentions alongside efforts to conceptualise the reception of the text might be alternatively considered co-existent. Perhaps they can be written as a separate section even if to only mention the names of comparable performance makers. This would present ways of acknowledging a momentum of contemporary performance.

At the 2000 Australasian Drama Studies Conference, Brazilian colleagues from the Drama Department at the University of Brasilia claimed that during the 1970s and 1980s they were more likely to see a British Council funded production from England touring to Brasilia than one from Rio. Do we have similar problems in Australia? It may be an exaggeration but these days it seems like we are more likely to see an overseas performance production in Melbourne than one from Sydney or Brisbane.

Lecturers in performance usually have some practice that spans the theoretical pedagogy and theory in performance making. Because universities barely recognise theatre as an 'industry' let alone extending to one of contemporary performance–if these are industries they are both subsidy dependent–performance lecturers tend to emphasise what will be recognised within university culture, that is; investigative research with performance outcomes. Moreover, I am not convinced that weekend conferences that suit this performance with research outcomes convey a sense of context or milieu for contemporary performance. Festivals like Melbourne’s Next Wave are useful if students can afford to attend more than one production.

Performance cultures vary regionally and student performance makers are caught up in even greater dispersal. The possibility of knowing the work of other students is serendipitous and unpredictable. This might appear to be a sort of postmodern fragmentation in the field but it is counterproductive to perceptions of a performance milieu.

I am considering how we might interest a wider cross section of our students in continuities in Australian contemporary performance. Our efforts to nurture an appreciation with locally produced work might be momentarily engaging but it loses significance if it remains isolated within the institution rather than linked up to work happening elsewhere. I would argue for a concerted effort to bring an experience of performance happening in other places to our students, even in other parts of the same city. They need to do more than read about performance although reading about student work might assist this process.

I'd like to suggest a strategy for facilitating student exchanges. Recent developments with new technologies and electronic arts might alleviate some of these concerns outlined above although not necessarily access to a complete text. I appreciate the problems with new technologies in class work as my efforts have not been continuous, and remain contingent on circumstances. However, finding ways of using new technologies to capture aspects of the larger live work might alleviate some of the fragmentation and limited access to different types of work. For example, a Melbourne production in June 2000, The Secret Room, directed by Renato Cuocolo and performed by Roberta Bosetti, was talked about enthusiastically by our fourth year students. This was encountered either as a live show and/or as it was broadcast on the net. It was referred to frequently in discussion about our 10 minute prerecorded performance available on the net. These students who usually make theatre have been talking about The Secret Room, which is recognisably performance. The potential of new technologies as a broadcast medium for this type of open-ended viewing is exciting. Granted it requires an extra adaptation for the camera and perhaps some theoretical investigation into its qualities of live bodies and liveness, and reconfiguring the spectator and performer relationships. Given that students will not reproduce past performance cultures, and these seem to have become like a history lesson for them, it is important to develop approaches that open out new exchanges in Australian contemporary performance.

Wild Blue: Notes for Several Voices is the sort of title that conjures up images of vast skies or oceans or ephemeral things that cannot be pinned down. Belgian filmmaker Thierry Knauff admits to choosing the title deliberately so that the audience would not come to his film with preconceived notions.

Knauff was recently in Perth as a guest of the AFI and has been touring Australia as part of the European Film Festival, which touched down in most Australian capital cities during May 2001. Wild Blue picked up an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, was selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2000 and was in the running for the Camera d’Or.

Knauff is cautious about describing his film as either documentary or drama and seems happier to use the word poetry. There is almost no point in trying to pin down Wild Blue as it doesn’t fit neatly into descriptions usually applied to film. It has an internal rhythm, juxtaposing beauty with violence, images of stillness with the movement of the wind.

“Violence and beauty exist side by side in the world,” explains Knauff. “That is what I was trying to show. I didn’t set out to make a film with a theme of violence or of beauty and I don’t really like to talk about the film in terms of themes. I’m not trying to provide people with the answers, but I do think they should be asking the questions.”

Knauff takes you on a slow meditative journey through the history of violence around the world. His film draws you in by concentrating on images, almost as though you are looking at a still photograph, the camera tracking at a slow and even pace until you are face to face with the object under observation. There is no violence depicted in the film but it is discussed, in different languages and circumstances, by a chorus of women from around the world.

In Ireland they kneecap the disloyal. In Vienna the anti-aircraft gunneries built by the Nazis to last for 4000 years still stand against the skyline but are not referred to on any maps of the city. A young girl is raped and put to death in Asia for writing in a journal that she hated the government, and the Hindu shrine desecrated by Portuguese Jesuits 400 years ago in India is photographed in all its damaged beauty.

Knauff uses black and white film to create stark and beautiful images: African children and Irish men on crutches, damaged buildings and damaged people, are shown in exquisite detail and with a resonance that can only be achieved with black and white film stock in expert hands.

Motifs of women, children, hands and music recur mesmerically throughout the film. Repetition of the stories of violence and hatred caused by religious and political difference drives home a nail of misery. The question reverberates: “Will we ever learn?”

Knauff is not only interested in exploring the nature of violence, but also reactions to it. As he says, almost as soon as a massacre occurs it is ‘media-tised’–the statistics of death are broadcast around the world. It seems, however, that the higher the number, the more people dead, the less ability we have to actually take in the loss. “It’s not the journalists’ fault that they can’t identify the life that each individual lived, and be aware of the pain of loss, but it is something that we need to recognise in ourselves, when we react with indifference to news reports.”

The pace of Wild Blue doesn’t allow you to dismiss the deaths, whether of an individual or whole village. It is not a recreation of a 3 minute news item, but a contemplation of the constant repetition of the brutality and violence that co-exists with the natural splendour of the world.

Wild Blue, director Thierry Knauff, toured nationally as part of the
AFI's European Film Festival

The ABC’s worst enemy

Dear Editors
Regarding the slashing of the ABC's Radio Drama budget, it's time to be brutally frank and say that this action is the work of cynics or fools. And they're not all politicians. Consider the following: The ABC once had a Radio Features department. I wrote radio features, thereby learning how to use radio to tell a story, as well as working with professional actors for the first time. This activity was cut over eight years ago. The ABC used to commission writers to translate foreign plays. I did this, thereby coming into contact with, and learning from, some great foreign theatre and radio plays. I couldn't have written my best theatre work without this apprenticeship. This activity was stopped about seven years ago. The ABC used to encourage long radio plays on big issues. I wrote one with Peter Garrett, called Outlanders. It won an Australian Writers' Guild AWGIE for best radio play. A few years previously, Michael Cove won for his play The Robe.

The ABC has put an end to all Australian drama over 60 minutes long. Both of these plays would have been ineligible for broadcast. I learned my writing craft from the opportunities the ABC gave me. But over the last 10 years, funding cuts have caused the ABC to end or curtail every production outlet that formed my skills as a playwright or radio writer. I am lucky. I learned my craft before Armageddon. What about new writers? The sad fact is, we don't need vicious politicians any more. Like a house-trained poodle, the ABC does it to itself. For example, five years ago I put to the ABC that they should seriously consider marketing radio plays as a sellable series of audio tapes, much the way that the BBC did with both radio plays and the interminable Talking Books that clog up the average ABC Store. It was “too hard.” Now, Radio Drama's budget has been slashed, no doubt because it doesn't pay its way. But were they ever helped to pay their way through the promoting of Australian writers and their work? It's also been known within the ABC that the FM “Fine Music” boffins have intensely disliked any “spoken word” programs like plays or experimental sound-pieces. Given a dreadful budget situation, the ABC ends up turning on itself. It's widely agreed in the general community that ABC TV is stagnating. The rot is only disguised by comparison with the irredeemably bad commercial stations. But what's less well-known is that the ABC once trained the future stage, film and radio writers of this country. It also used to enculturate its listening audience with a diverse range of fictions and documentaries. The experience I've outlined above suggests that audiences and artists alike should realise how bad the situation has become, and protest accordingly.

The MCA and the elite

The saga of the Museum of Contemporary Art's (MCA) future seems to have . The winning designs (by the one team) for either a new building or a new building partially encasing the old 30s government-department-deco building (the old Maritime Services Board Building at West Circular Quay) are unimpressive. The eagerness of Lord Mayor Frank Sartor and others to banish the MCA to some other site, the low regard the Premier has for the gallery's collection and the public's fear of even more damage to Circular Quay, have stalemated progress. The MCA's Director, Liz-Anne McGregor, emailed MCA supporters about the Sydney Morning Herald's “unbalanced reporting” and urged protest, declaring that “All the public briefings [about the new designs] so far have been positive.” Detailing the issues, she writes: “The MCA's mission is to bring the work of living artists to a wider audience. It's not just for specialists. People drop in here now in their lunch hour which is what we want to encourage. Moving us to a site where people have to make a special journey would reinforce the message that art is only for the elite.” ( Eds.)

Dear Editor
I am sending you my reply to the list-serve notice of Liz-Anne McGregor's call 'to all MCA supporters' as a “specialist”—a group that was sadly maligned in her email, and composes a reasonable section of the intellectual, academic, and art community. It has always seemed a shame to me that the MCA's principal mission—at least under Liz-Anne's directorship—has been to bring art “to a wider audience.” And she is prepared, in her role as Director, to publish her preference for attracting 'lunch hour' visitors instead of determined art seekers. And thinks that the message that 'art is only for the elite' is a bad thing. In the first place talk about elites in terms of an overview of Australian society is a misnomer. Even a casual, or anecdotal, glance at recent Australian history will tell that a consolidated cultural elite still doesn't exist here—even if there is a sort of exclusive caste slowly forming (around capital and poor taste probably). Where is that group of people–wealthy or no—who are prepared to voice their constant and vociferous disdain for second rate cultural production? Or a publishing infrastructure that addresses itself in a high-minded way to a high-minded audience? Or an integrated institutional infrastructure—that consistently presents work of a high calibre (don't forget Opera, Ballet, Theatre, Orchestral, and Chamber Music)? Or a small set of critics who occupy a solid ground and have a real determining sway over broader cultural opinion making? Or an intelligentsia who have the ear of Government? Or a Government with an ear for that matter? They don't exist. Meanwhile an institution like the MCA could, theoretically, act like a beacon for agressive cultural aggregation. The formation of an elite, if you will. Or at least founder the site of a forward looking cultural consensus. By it's very nature Contemporary Art as we have come to understand it since the mid-19th century has been produced as a deliberate counter-point to Bourgeois taste (maybe the terms broad, conventional, conservative, traditional should be thrown in). And its leading critics and advocates (since Ruskin and Baudelaire) have taken this in stride. It is exactly at the point that Art becomes lunchtime fare for besuited strollers that it dies in a sense. The Museum as Boulevard is a 'nauseating' concept indeed. So I see no good reason for necessarily keeping the MCA at the Quay. (And governance issues as to what might appear in its place are another separate argument altogether. That can probably left in the hands of the heritage architects). In fact we need to ask, what service is done for Art when its specific and often elegant language has to be wreaked for an illiterate audience? And what can be learned from that illiterate audience by artists, curators, and writers? Nothing much. And this is the audience that proliferates at Circular quay, and seems to be held dearest in the minds-eye of the MCA and its collaborators. I would rather see and read arguments for the necessity of the existence of a high-culture in Australia for its own sake. (With a reminder to Bob Carr that the Manets he loves in the Louvre in Paris were once the stuff that caused a stir. They were Contemporary Art). In the last 10 years, governments and the arts “industry” have been gripped by museum and gallery building (even contemporary art houses). Convinced that edifices to culture are concrete proof of their dedication to it. But this has in fact been a deleterious affect—built on ideas about artefacts, and collections, and paintings on walls, a sort of safe-house mentality. When in fact art is more than all of those things and now comprises a range of more ephemeral moments and objects that can exist without million dollar architectural structures. And if every dollar that was poured into concrete had been given to existing institutions, and artists, writers, and curators themselves, I would suggest a whole lot more would have percolated. Art builds audiences over long periods of timeÑthere is no quick fix here. So putting them at the forefront of cultural debate is useless. I frequently attend concerts by composers like Schoenberg, Debussy, Berlioz, Weber (when they are played at all) that receive tepid responsesÑparticularly from the corporate and subscriber section of the audiences. Their response always indicates they thinck this non-canonical work is a little bit difficult or risky. For fuck's sake they've only had a hundred yearsÑthe whole of the 20th century – to get used to it. Go figure! Forget the building. Forget the mass audience. Argue forcefully for “multi”-culturalism to rightfully include an elite, to commensurate “high”-culturalism. Bludgeon government with the fact that it is their moral obligation to support the expansion and telling of national narratives. One of which happens to be Contemporary Art attended by Contemporary Art Audiences.

The Sydney Morning Herald isn't the problem, it's a symptom. The skewing of the MCA-debate is the problem. Give me a public transport nightmare trek across town to see some daring art in the quiet-white of a well designed gallery/exhibiton space, rather than a salt-air and espresso experience (that includes dumb architecture and dumber programming) anyday. More to the point I would rather get my art from a nest of intelligent white mice than a dumb White Elephant.

Business columns and programs are cropping up everywhere, slicing into ABC TV news, offering investment advice and share sale panics, so why not in RealTime.

The Australian Taxation Office provides extra tax information for some occupations. These publications are simple summaries of taxation rulings and they explain claims that you can and cannot make by looking at the common expenses you might claim as a performing artist. You may find this information helpful when completing your tax return. To get a copy, see the ATO website or ring their publications distribution service on 1300 720 092 for the cost of a local call.

Business 2: The Australia Business Arts Foundation

(AbaF) has received increased half a million dollars extra federal funding to a total of $1.6 million. According to AbaF Executive Director, Winsome McCaughey “Australia's growing pool of creative talent can return business, artistic, social and community benefits but neither government support nor box office returns are enough to sustain the arts. With only 1% of business supporting the arts, there is huge potential to grow corporate commercial and private philanthropic support for the arts.” So far some 160 cultural organisations have attended AbaF business case training workshops in all capital cities, part-funded by the Australia Council. Corporations are being assisted to develop and complete their business cases for cultural investment. Information:
Brian Peck, 03 9658 0211 or 0417 587 932

Business 3

Innovative Adelaide cross-cultural performance company doppio-parallelo has linked with global technology giant Motorola in a business-arts partnership “designed to boost the skill sets of both organisations.” Motorola has donated its time and $32,000 worth of computers and related technology to help doppio upgrade its infrastructure for projects and artists working with new media. Richard Burford, Managing Director of Motorola sees the relationship as “based on synergies of creativity, innovation and community access via technology and cultural diversity.”

Business 4

In further trickle-down effects from the collapse of the HIH Insurance Company, Marian Street Theatre has lost its $250,000 sponsorship which theatre director John Krummel describes in SMH (May 30) as “a catastrophic blow”. AbaF's Brian Peck, however, sees this as “a crucial lesson for arts companies to diversify their sponsorship sources … It's imperative they spread their risk, to use an insurance term. Companies should also do plenty of research into their potential partners,” Peck said. Yeh, right.

Business 5

Meanwhile, arts organisations work overtime to invent ever more imaginative services to the corporate sector. Bell Shakespeare has taken some creative steps to extend “the breadth of product offering” (Nugent, 1999:23) organising “Shakespearian leadership workshops in which actors from the company perform a scene from Henry V while actually sitting among participants at the pseudo-board table. Later the scene is analysed, applying a conventional behavioural model to theinteractions…”

And the New Zealand Orchestra with its corporate partners has offered “Music Paradigm” created by American conductor Roger Nierenberg in which corporate executives learn about 4 management principles (communication, co-ordination, team work and leadership) sitting amidst the orchestra performing. This item came to us via www.fuel4arts.com who got it first from the Australian Financial Review. If you join the dots (Telstra Adelaide Festival, Emirates AFI Awards etc) we should perhaps prepare ourselves for the suits as permanent fixtures on our nation's stages. Forget “Is this a dagger I see before me ?” and make way for Macbeth, assailing a staffer clocking up overtime in excess of his workplace agreement with “Aren't you Duncan from Accounts?”

INTERNATIONAL MOVES

Frank in Croatia

And while we're on the Bard: following their participation in 2 previous festivals in Frank Austral Asian Performance Ensemble, directors John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll return in July to Pula in Croatia for the 6th International Festival of Youth Theatre to conduct another 10-day International Suzuki Actor Training Workshop. This year, as well as the workshop, Frank actors will join Croatian workshop participants (who also come from Czech Republic, London and the US) to present a bi-lingual version of Frank's production The Tale of Macbeth: Crown of Blood in Pula's fully preserved Roman arena. Arena…everywhere

Speaking of which, Arena Theatre Company's multimedia production Eat Your Young which toured the Taipei Arts Festival in May, travels to the Singapore Arts Festival in June while their kids' show Schnorky the Wave Puncher! tours to Vancouver. Arena's General Manager Katherine Crawford-Gray says, “To have 2 productions playing almost simultaneously on opposites sides of the globe is pretty wild…especially when you consider that Arena is a small to medium-sized producer.”

In Moscow…In Repertoire

Simon Barley and Melbourne's well-travelled BAMBUCO are in Moscow this month building a Ship of Fools on the River Moskva. You can check on their progress from around June 18. BAMBUCO, Arena and some 50 other Australian companies of similarly small scale and big international ambition are featured in the forthcoming In Repertoire: Australian Contemporary Performance, another publication (edited and produced by RealTime) from the Australia Council's Audience and Market Development (AMD) division which will be distributed initially at the Singapore Arts Festival's first ever Performing Arts Market.

Breaking into Europe

AMD and the Music Fund of the Australia Council are behind the International Pathways program to assist export-ready contemporary Australian musicians to tour overseas and develop international markets. 5-piece improvised jazz ensemble theak-tet toured Scandinavia, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK during April and May and live electronic music group Rhibosome will tour 9 UK venues in June. “These international sectors are unable to be reached without leaving Australia,” says Fremantle-based band member David McKinney. With a number of Australian jazz festival appearances already under their belt, the long-term goal for theak-tet, says band leader David Theak, is “participation in the European Summer Festival circuit and a recording contract with a European record label.”

WA writer trains with trAce

The trAce Online Writing School has recently opened its doors to students around the globe and, with its history of encouraging web/creative writing of all kinds, it's a good place to start. The tutors include some of the best writers on the web: Talan Memmott (RT#42 p22) on advanced literary hypermedia, Canadian novelist Kate Pullinger on writing short fiction, Alan Sondheim on cyberculture & literature, Liz Swift on writing an online family history, Carolyn Guertin on textual machines, & Peter Howard teaching animated poetry in Flash. Courses in development include screenwriting, becoming a playwright, novel writing & writing for children.

RealTime has selected WA-based writer Jo Gray to do the course in exchange for a detailed report on the experience. She will start in early June. 23-year old Jo has recently commenced her PhD at the University of Western Australia in the department of English. Her work is centred on the use of metaphor as communicative tool on the internet. We wish her luckÉand look forward to her responses.

Australia Council vs Sweeney

Australian audience support for the performing arts is greater than it has ever been according to figures released in April by the Australia Council. So there! The record number of attendances and the healthy rate of growth stand in marked contrast to the grim conclusions of the Sweeney Arts Report which signalled a fall in audience numbers based on a survey of 1500 people. The most significant growth for the major performing arts companies occurred in contemporary dance and ballet. Comparable comprehensive data is currently being gathered for Australia's small and medium-sized performing arts companies as part of an overall examination of the sector. The Chair of the Council's Theatre Board, David Whitney, already reports that of 12 smaller theatre companies across Australia 10 increased audiences in the last year. These include Fremantle's deckchair theatre, Brisbane's La Boite, Adelaide's Vitalstatistix and The Flying Frutifly Circus from Albury-Wodonga. The same was true of dance with Melbourne's Chunky Move doubling its audience and Perth-based Buzz Dance showing a healthy 25% increase.

Full in Melbourne

Full is the new dance performance devised by choreographer Simon Elliswith sound by Jacqueline Grenfell, light by Alicia Hervey and photography and design by Elizabeth Boyce. The work examines the internal world of an 87 year old woman who is uncertain whether she is walking or being pushed. At Glass Street Gallery, North Melbourne,
June 20-30 at 8 pm.

Fierce in Darwin

Tracks Inc premieres Fierce, a new outdoor performance event at this year's Darwin Festival in August. Featuring the Warlpiri Yawalyu women of Lajamanu, local performers Tania Lieman and Nicky Fearn and guest artist Trevor Patrick with other community members, Fierce is an evocation of the eccentric artist, anthropologist and naturalist,
Miss Olive Pink.

Artificial snow

snow.noise is an installation featuring performance, scientific experimentation, electronic music, drawing, photography and video by young German contemporary artist Carsten Nicolai aka noto. This artist's work mixes new technologies with old, recreating in this case the first invention for the production of artificial snow from the 1930s as its centre-piece. “Constructed from metal and glass, this object is slowly surveyed by a camera, against the crackling and buzzing of Carsten's computer generated music. His paintings, drawings and photographs recall images from science manuals or are abstractions suggesting barcodes or angiograms that parallel the looped rhythms of the music.” It opens with a 40-minute performance of Carsten's electronic music based around the theme of snow crystals. It's free at the Art Gallery of NSW,
6 pm, Friday 29 June.

Talan Memmot

If you followed up Tatiana Pentes' review of Talan Memmot's work in RT#42, you might want to check out the new heap of art at Nio featuring some suggestions on new forms of music/multimedia, “hopefully a new, popular alternative to the music video”. Nio is a commission of New Radio and Performing Arts Inc for its Turbulence website.

DVD-ing

SAE International Technology College is taking enrolments for their new Digital Video Director course starting in June, the only course in Australia to teach DVD production. The 9 month DVD Director course will take students through the entire film-making process. Each student will learn to fine tune their skills, producing, directing and editing a number of projects, using the state of the art equipment and technology at SAE. Students will also learn the art of making documentary and music film clips. SAE is a training institutions which combines hands on experience with theoretical training from industry professionals. The DVD Director course starts June 25. For more information contact Lyndall Farley,
02 9212 2444.

Successfully SciFi-ing

It's a rare thing for a sci-fi writer to win a literary award. So nobody can have been more surprised than Adelaide writer Sean Williams when he picked up the 2000 SA Great Award from the SA Writers Centre. Others have seen it coming. This young writer's short stories have been published around the world. All of his novels have been nominated for awards, his collection New Adventures in Sci Fi won the 2000 Ditmar Award for Best Collection and last year he landed a substantial grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council to complete 3 young adult fantasy novels to be published in September. And now Sean and co-writer Shane Dix have been contracted to write the next 3

Star Wars novels. The 2 attracted attention in the US after making the sci-fi best seller lists with their Evergence trilogy for Harper Collins. “Every year I think it can't get better than this”, he says to Tim Lloyd of Adelaide's Advertiser, “and every year it does.”

CCP goes German

Continuing their commitment to showcasing and critically engaging with contemporary documentary practice, the Centre for Contemporary Photography is presenting The world as one, an exhibition of 1990s documentary photography in colour featuring 17 groups of works by 19 photographers from Germany born between 1955 and 1971. The exhibition consists almost entirely of independently researched projects devoted to complex themes including the effects of German reunification and the precipitous pace of economic and social change in the Far East . CCP Gallery, June 8 – July 7

Performance Space a Gay winner

In announcing its glittering prizes this year the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras gave a Special Festival Award to Performance Space as “an important space in the Festival for dangerous and innovative work.” The Mardi Gras has had a continuous relationship with P Space since 1995 co-producing works that, according to Festival Director, David Fenton “access an audience that delights in extremely diverse work with a particular commitment to emerging artists.” P Space hosted 4 visual arts exhibitions and 2 performing arts events for Mardi Gras including Queensland artist Stacey Callaghan 's when I was a boy which took out a prize as “a dynamic piece of physical theatre that explored why we separate our bodies, minds and spirits and how we can learn to trust again.” Awards also went to Hey Hetero!, a witty public art work by

Deborah Kelly and Tina Fiveash highlighting the privileges of heterosexuality and to Brian Carbee and Dean Walsh for Stretching it Wider—”a sexy, beautiful and intelligent production.” Festival David Fenton stressed the importance of Performance Space as a resource for artistic communitiesÑ”Mardi Gras would be the poorer without their contribution”. And so say all of us.

Denmark's Hotel Pro Forma, remembered here for their Orfeo, premiered a new work Site Seeing Zoom in March. The work reflects the complex nature of human memory using the digital medium as tool and artistic idiom. “We travel in the landscape of memory, zoom in and out, change angle, speed and height. We map and catalogue human ways of expression. We use the navigation in a virtual architecture as the composition and the narrative style. The movement of the journey is projected on screens as sequences of images that are doubled, reflected and repeated like living memory itself. The audience walks around the cross-structure of the screens and experiences the performance from different angles. A guide finds himself between the physical and virtual worlds. He is seen as movement, as shadow, and as scale in relation to the projected images. Everything is virtual, he says, smiling as the pot plant strikes the skull.”

Hope

Radio Eye 2-part special, writer Mary Zournazi talks with philosophers around the world about their idea of hope and how it can, and must, be sustained in the midst of cynicism and despair. In the program are Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Serres, Chantal Mouffe and Alphonso Lingis. Part 1 is broadcast Sunday June 17 at 8.30 pm, part 2 on
Sunday June 24.

Radio Throughout June

The Listening Room is on the nose beginning with Nostalgia's Nose, Paul Carter's adaptation of the novel Baroque Memories; followed by Schnoz by Natalie Kestecher, featuring readings from Gogol's The Nose and excerpts from the musical version by Shostakovich; Odourama, Robin Ravlich's sonic spectrum of odour in the world and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered in which Gregory Whitehead navigates among other anatomies, the bloody nose of Casanova. ABC Classic FM Monday 9 pm.

Self-Accusation,Peter Handke's key work in the German speaking anti-Theatre movement of the 60s, has neither character nor scene nor narrative. Instead it is a deconstruction of the societal, political and physical forces that shape the identification of a self. The play is performed by Adelaide's Brink Productions. Music by Christopher Williams, Soundstage, ABC Classic FM, Wednesday June 13 at 8pm.

A leading Australian figure in the area of electronic and multi-media music, Ian Fredericks died in March this year. Performance artists Tess De Quincey and Stuart Lynch worked with Ian on a number of projects. De Quincey recently dedicated her eloquent Nerve 9 performance to Fredericks while Stuart Lynch, currently working in Europe, sent the following, an excerpt from a personal obituary:

“The day I met Ian I had the most extraordinary dance experience of my life. It was in February 1997 and within an hour of us being introduced I had heard and danced to Requiem for a Planet. Until that moment I had always doubted dance. At the age of 20 I broke both my legs in a motorcycle crash and 3 years later I changed careers for dance. This was deemed ludicrous by my doctors, considered a result of some latent madness, or the inherent inability to make right choices. I persisted dancing all through the 1990s, always accompanied by doubt. The exception was when I was dancing that first time to his compositions. Then, I had no doubt about dance and its potential. Then, I was clear about its beauty and godly grace. Then, both of us were in tears. Be sure, that in the music of Ian Fredericks, one hears the voice, and love of God.”

Angus Grant, Alice McConnell, Catherine Moore, Jodie Harris + Rita Kalnejais, Dolores in the Department Store

Many things happen at once in Dolores in the Department Store, which is difficult to get clear in the mind because it is not about clarity of mind. Richard Murphet’s text is poetry, rap, witness statements (“I, Dolores…”), dream images, psychoanalysis and chat, shopping lists and bills. The setting is contemporary culture–half stage, half catwalk–with a doctor on one side and an actress on the other, with the store above and the domestic scene below. The swamp, the deep pit that we all walk past, is sensed somewhere under the stage.

Story, soundscape and movement go in under the skin in pieces, not caught in the sieve of reason. Music, ads and original songs full of irony flow thick and fast with feeling. Cultural images and theatrical portrayals of the crazy woman (from “Out, damned spot” onwards) flash past.

There is more than one person being one person who is more than one person: Dolores is 4 actors who are all Dolores, who has multiple personalities. Dressed alike, wigged alike, they are the same but different as sisters, clashing, speaking in each other’s minds. This small flock of Dolores illustrates tension and flow within one person. She moves up the steps towards the doctor’s door, split within, changing her minds. There is the violence of an iron in her hand as one tries to throw it and one pulls back. What is she trying to smooth out, burn away? Dolores 3 stares deep into the pit, seems drawn in. The story is that something came out–a swamp man, her father–and pushed himself into her 11 year old self. Swamp man dead inside her. She split.

Consumption returns in multiple forms, an appetite for things that at the same time devour us. The store has everything: bright lights, culture, all the endless lists of stuff bought and brought home to fill an empty place. The store sells people as they should be, smiling and whole, desirable people who manage, dressed in Chanel, with little assistants at their feet. Dolores 2 wants red stilettos and a vamp dress. An appetite to devour or damage another is sexualised. Her husband desires something in Dolores, but his appetite consumes him as well. He is filled, animated with a surging violence that aims at Dolores 1 but seems to hurt him, to empty him. He has no self-control, perhaps no self, perhaps only control of her. Maybe the dress gives Dolores power over somebody who has power over her, but only if she can split. Being 2 allows her to stand behind him while he empties himself into 1. A puppet-child, cut from the same cloth as her mother, floats around these dangerous adults. There is no help
for her.

Images of the sexual woman, red dress and stilettos, or smoking in her satin wrap, in a boudoir, blend sickeningly with the ‘incest survivor’ as vamp, drawing violence to her. Very film noir, very spider woman, dressing the commerce of her sexuality as his trap.

The other consumption is one we participate in. We watch actors empty themselves to be others for us. A young soapie actress tries to reach an audition to play the part of this woman with many parts. Making her way through the department store–or her career or drama school–she is lost, clutching the wig and dress, wanting someone to come and take her home. The appetite of audience and industry devours young performers in their own success, to be desired, losing the self to other temporary inhabitants pushed into them. At the end, the Dolores approach the audience, not acting any more. But we can’t see them because this is theatre and they are performers we only watch being others.

Richard Murphet, Dolores in the Department Store, directors Leisa Shelton & Richard Murphet, Company 2001, performers Alice McConnell, Catherine Moore, Rita Kalnejais, Jodie Harris, Angus Grant, Luisa Hastings Edge, Simon Aylott, Amanda Falson, Peter Cook, Patrick Brammall, Aaron Halstead & Luke Mullins, VCA School of Drama, Grant Street Theatre, Melbourne, April 6-11

Angus Grant, Alice McConnell, Catherine Moore, Jodie Harris + Rita Kalnejais, Dolores in the Department Store

She is one woman bruised into four. Dolores is a work about a woman so disturbed in childhood she seems to have leapt to the side of herself and sent 4 emissaries thereafter to negotiate the world. This is a prismatic work where not only Dolores splinters, but every image that has accompanied her since childhood seems to as well. Does her nightmare revolve around a ditch, or a swamp? Was there a bridge she crossed every day, or not? Whose bloated body was that hauled from the mud–a lover of her father’s, on which he committed necrophilia? Or was the body hers, the corpse a metaphor for her own death and her psyche’s traumatic dismantling?

The 2 produced versions of Dolores (the first being October last year) effect an unnerving of our perceptions, of the way we might measure our place in the world. A child approaches a bridge; a hand approaches a psychiatrist’s door; the psychiatrist’s eyes reach towards her knees. He watches “the pad of her finger trace the stockinged skin of her knee”, the distance to her mysteries. Such is his care-taking. Dolores is a violated entity: the 4 of them can hold together the parts. Her body speaks herstory, fabricates it too, is both truth-teller and liar. Who can be an adequate mirror to this prism? Her “mentors” look-after, look-into her with selfish desire. Does her body ever know itself as its own?

And yet there is a unifying consciousness, a singular Dolores who holds herself at the apex of the pyramid. The four D’s cradle, implicate, cajole, antagonise, yet ultimately support each other in an overarching dialogue, both uncovering and ultimately discarding memory, helping themselves survive.

Indeed, she does better than her stuttering husband Frank, tragically inarticulate, so virile and volatile; a jumpy phallus, his only constancy the marauding of her body, his lording of their home. He is undone by her miscreant spending, her pleading “not tonight” is enough to rive his mountain. His lava almost erupts just speaking to his worried child. He first appears folded behind sliding doors in a tiny dumb-waiter space crouching his nerves. His wife is a snowflake breaking, his head starts to cave; his only respite is watching television, climbing women and poles.

The shopwalker, too, is a tragic figure, despite the pseudo-glamour of his role. What is a would-be Trojan warrior without the myth? It is this man, slippery across the department floor, promising a kind of immortality of outline. He doubles as a TV producer in a weird but psychologically-right ploy, as the department store is elided into a casting studio and Dolores’ ironing board takes a starring role.

What I find in version 2 is an undoing more Brechtian and brash, the former production’s psychic vortex replaced with an initially more ironic commentary and detachment; and yet in both versions we end up, moist-eyed, accompanying the Doloreses down a forest path, elms, willows (is it Ophelia’s re-emerging?), their synchronised bodies wavering like water. The backs of their hands vein like leaves, they speak as part of the pattern of all things.

Dolores’ survival is exquisite, powerful, but ambiguous: in what way is that soft merging a real survival in a world full of Frank and Trojan’s manquees? And what is redeemed of the relationship with her daughter, who has spent much of her young life combing department stores looking for her mother? There are no answers; ambiguity remains strong.

Both times, I wept on seeing Dolores, for it captures how raw and humiliating it is to have fallen apart, and know oneself as fallen, and yet somewhere, within a truth that cannot quite reveal itself, one’s soul knows the reason. I am astonished at the merging of emotional verisimilitude and stylish structure in the piece. I remain amazed that it has been written.

There’s a just-vacated feel to the Metro Gallery the afternoon I walk in. A spooky sense of things in motion, time running on, but no flesh-and-blood body to explain the heavy presence of something in the air. Sun streams through the long windows and falls onto the wooden floor and a rumpled bed. A picturesque interior almost, but not quite. I am unnerved.

Moving further into the space, I hear as well as see and feel the resonance between the artworks comprising Fader, a show (curated by Sandra Selig) featuring the work of 5 young Brisbane visual artists. It is these works that inhabit the space, murmuring and whispering and beckoning to each other in a language that is familiar but again, not quite. This conversation is equal to its parts; it is compelling–chilling–seductive. It is the play of sound, light and space; it is the absence of set pieces and the weight of intangible connections; it is 5 artists who are refusing representation while presenting the unrepresentable. I feel as if I have stepped into a scene from Double Indemnity crossed with a time-and-motion study.

I am focusing on the collective effect because it hits me hard. Selig had this as her aim, although not in these words. She speaks in her curatorial essay of a desire to draw together different explorations of time, in particular technological times and the “more unpredictable bodily or conceptual durations”, and their relation to installation practice. Although she acknowledges this is her fit rather than the artists', I don’t think she is straining to make the point.

The first experience in the gallery is an aural one–the weird keening sound that gives the space such a palpable spookiness. This turns out to be from several sources, the nearest to the entrance being Mat Fletcher’s sonic installation, Interrupted Fields (on the stratification of the analogue), visually tagged as 4 small speakers hung from the walls at hip height. Out comes what might be the music of the spheres except that harmony is not the principal effect. Instead, like wind through telegraph lines on a big brown plain, the off-key ‘singing’ thins out and also fills up the space around it without leaving a trace. Here Fletcher turns away from the history of representation with one small movement. (As for the analogue reference in the title, that’s another discussion.)

Jess Hynd follows this idea through with a visual demonstration. Less is More includes a familiar motif of her practice, the ‘house-box’, in this instance constructed as a small house-shaped white object at an angle to a mirror. On an opposite wall sits a larger wooden cut-away looking like a doll’s house with upstairs and downstairs and the rest. In front of this interior is a chair, made of the same wood, situated at eye-level for the sitter. The two ‘house’ moments are separated but mutely speak to each other. It is as if looking should give up an answer to something but fails the task completely.

Hynd carries her work further into the space with 2 rumpled beds at either end of the gallery and a TV monitor in between. The latter is a little superfluous in that it describes what she has already depicted through absence. The screen shows her and another performer moving through the installation spaces without finding a ‘comfortable’ resting-place. Hynd emphasises this uneasiness with written text (Full or Loose/Move or Win) at one end of the gallery but, again, I’ve already had my fill of emptiness.

Domestic interiors are also a visual reference in Chris Handran’s open sky (2001). The most obvious feature is the installed white venetian blind, through which sun is falling as ideally as any Stepford wife might wish on the day I’m here. Another monitor, facing this, is blank but I suspect not intentionally–I am looking, rather literally, for my sky. (Later I’m told that I should be seeing cumulus clouds slowly floating by on a sailor blue background.) Again there’s nothing to hold onto here but nonetheless no space to move–I am inside this moment but it doesn’t exist. Another installation by Fletcher, sound, a circular speaker set in the wall nearby (with CD player on the floor underneath), shudders and thuds and sonically enforces this idea with its disruption of any sense of careful composition.

Around the corner, a constantly forming dialogue between video projection and speaker in quick long rhythms that never quite fulfil the promise. This is to by Chris Comer, and I am caught up viscerally in the scintillation of the aural and visual a/rhythms. The projection catches the attention, sliding across the wall at an angle and offering the occasional glimpse of a detail, but it’s not the detail that’s important, or at least that’s how it seems to me. I am distracted, situated, not sure. Palpable presence but what, where, when?

And finally, tucked away in a little space all of its own is the most perfect discovery to make as I am leaving: Krissy Collum’s sill–a tiny moment of caught time. White sand spills from a window sill into a white room, like light, like poetry. One of the 2 windows (not this one) is covered with what looks like rice paper–enough to obscure but not conceal the natural light outside. There’s a deliberate confusion of experience: I can see and (if I’m bold) touch this pearl of an installation but it trembles on the edge of being– I know, a bit overblown, but this is the effect it has on me.

Fader is one of the last exhibitions instigated by Metro Arts Artistic Director Joseph O'Connor before his departure in March of this year. Metro Arts is now working without a curated artistic program, and its activities are being watched closely by people in the arts concerned about the future of one of Brisbane's major alternative art spaces.

Fader, curator Sandra Selig, artists Krissy Collum, Chris Comer, Mat Fletcher, Chris Handran, Jess Hynd, Metro Arts Gallery, Brisbane, April 5-May 25

Great composers typically get started while still students. Kat McGuffie's student recital and the number of commissions she receives portend greatness.

The recital opened with Cumulonimbus, a gentle, rhythmical work for 2 guitars, flute, violin and cello, whose minimalism is punctuated by developing layers of brief, lyrical gestures to evoke tropical rain. Selected for the Australian Composers Workshops in the 2000 Darwin Guitar Festival, Cumulonimbus encourages the virtuosic performer, despite its deceptively simple form and light mood.

24 for String Quartet creates tension through radical shifts in mood and metre. An intense, slow, dissonant first movement gives way to a faster second movement. The quiet third movement recalls the pace of the first, with mournful violin passages. Opening powerfully, the fourth progresses to a series of competing solos. McGuffie used chance, by throwing dice, to create variations on the initial, improvised theme. Despite the chance elements, the work has coherence and final resolution.

Doon for James Cuddeford is a solo violin work written for and performed by the eponymous 2nd violinist of the Australian String Quartet. Cuddeford is a new music enthusiast, and here he can demonstrate his capabilities and love for the genre. It includes alternating and sometimes simultaneously bowed and pizzicato notes, the voices interplaying through a series of sharp gestures and thematic statements to create an idiosyncratic language reminiscent of Ysang Yun's complex, passionate ruminations. This is mature work that invites repeated listening.

For the Cameo Trio was commissioned last year by that trio and was performed strongly here by another–Louise Nowland (clarinet), Sarah McCarthy (violin) and Leigh Harrold (piano). Beginning brightly, the piece develops more reflectively with prolonged, introspective solos for the clarinet and violin. The disparate voices coalesce before the finale's return to the forms of the opening.

Most interesting is little coins are put here, written last year for cello, theremin and vocoder. Live readings by McGuffie of the text from a TV show on Buddhism, superimposed over tapes of that TV show and the work's first performance, are blended by the vocoder to create a low mumble, which underscores the dramatically gesturing cello line. The theremin's electronic whine heightens the work's neurotic feel.

The haunting Sharcoon (1999) is for 2 flutes, clarinet, violin and cello, the flutes and clarinet producing a piercing blend of tones with building tension and abrupt shifts. The Three Short Solo Piano Pieces (2000) come to life in the assured hands of Leigh Harrold, their quirkiness and teasing structure combining enchantingly with the piano's rich tonality.

The recital concluded with the dramatic Elizabeth Smith for saxophone quartet, based on a gaming machine tune, which was performed at the Montreal World Saxophone Congress in 2000. Whether composing for assessment or for commissions or for fun, McGuffie's work has an inherent musicality and strength.

A student of Flinders St School of Music, McGuffie has been commissioned to write for a major SA theatrical event, celebrating Federation, in October. She has already accepted numerous other commissions, and was Vocational Student of the Year and a finalist in the SA Youth Awards Showcase in 2000.

Kat McGuffie and numerous ensemble players were at the Performing Arts Technology Unit, Adelaide University,
April 30

Cinesonics conference: the line up

Cinesonics enters its 4th year as the only annual conference on Film Scores & Sound Design in the world. Organised by RealTime columnist, Philip Brophy, this year’s guests are Skip Lievsay (NY sound designer who’s worked with Scorsese, Spike Lee & the Coen Bros) & Simon Fisher-Turner Skip (composer for Derek Jarman). An Australian industry panel will include Clara Law & Jamie Blanks (Valentine). Local speakers include Megan Spencer, McKenzie Wark & Jodi Brooks. For information on the last 3 conferences, there is a complete archive. A new book to be launched at the conference, Cinesonic: Experiencing the Soundtrack, features transcripts from the 2000 conference. RMIT, Melbourne, June 22-24.

QLD stars of the future

Warner Roadshow’s 15th Queensland New Filmmaker Awards were announced in April with The Big Picture (Peter & Michael Spierig) winning best overall film, Best Producer, Best Actor (Robyn Moore) & Best Independent Drama (shared with The Irving Hand Prophecy). Their film screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival earlier this year. The new Reconciliation Award was won by Cairns filmmaker Greg Singh for Breakdown. Robin James, CEO of Pacific Film & Television Commission, commented: “the response from the public has been tremendous. People lined up the Queen St Mall to watch public screenings.”

Fast filmmaking BIFF style

The BIFF Fast Film competition has been launched & the special ingredient is the number 10. The national short film competition gives competitors 50 days to write, shoot & edit a 5 minute film, which must include ‘10’. Finalists’ screenings are held during the Brisbane International Film Festival so get cracking! All entries must reach BIFF office by July 12. Entry forms can be downloaded, 07 3220 0333.

Akira! Akira! Akira!

Silicon Pulp gallery is celebrating this anime classic with an exhibition of rarely seen cells, artworks & manga. (It took 160,000 animation cells to make the film.) An installation by Italian artist Ludovica Gioscia—combining Akira’s soundtrack with digital footage—will accompany the exhibition. 176 Parramatta Rd, Stanmore,
02 9560 9176,June 8-August 4

Tracking a director online

Rolf de Heer’s new film The Tracker is in post production & you can read his diary online for insights into shooting on location in the Flinders Rangers & the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary. The film premieres at the 2002 Adelaide Festival of the Arts.

Local screenwriting achievement

Linda Aronson’s book Scriptwriting Updated: New & Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen has been shortlisted in the Australian Awards for Excellence in Academic Publishing. The book has been a huge hit in the States, with the UFVA (the leading conference of screenwriting teachers) organisers trying to schedule a special session on Aronson’s parallel narrative theories. Next year Aronson will join Linda Seger & interactive expert Carolyn McQuillian in Australia for a lecture series on new narrative forms.

Indigenous filmmakers hit Berlin

A festival of contemporary Australian Indigenous films, organised by the AFC & Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade, will screen at the Anthropological Museum in Berlin, June 7-17 as part of Ethnifest. Rachel Perkins’ One Night the Moon will open the festival & Perkins will attend along with Sally Riley, Warwick Thornton & Erica Glynn. The festival will then travel to Munich & Frankfurt.

ACT filmmakers’ network

Launched June 6, the network aims to be the link between filmmakers & industry & offers members access to events & meetings, an online database, equipment for hire & training. 02 6251 6936

Funding increases for Victorian film industry

Victorian Premier Steve Bracks recently announced an additional $12 million to be invested in Film Victoria over the next 2 years, with direct production investment increased by $3.9 million each year. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), due to open in Federation Square in early 2002, will receive $13.2 million over 4 years for operations & $13.8 million next year to complete the technological infrastructure. ACMI will feature a screen gallery, specialist cinemas & lounge areas for watching animation, games, film & digital work. How about one in
every state?

Serenades at Byron Mapp Gallery

Mojgan Khadem’s Serenades is the latest Australian film to be supported & distributed by Palace Films. Opening May 31, it traces the little known history of Afghan camel riders & their liaisons with Aboriginal & missionary communities in Central Australia. Coinciding with the release is an exhibition of the film’s stills by Mark Rogers at Byron Mapp Gallery Sydney. Lvl 1, 18-24 Argyle St, The Rocks, 02 9252 9800

Chabrol emerges from the woodwork

Opening the recent European Film Festival, Claude Chabrol’s taut new thriller, Merci pour le chocolat is one to look out for, getting under the surface of that bourgeois musical-genius genre we know so well. For more than 40 years Chabrol has “delivered a devastating series of pathology reports on provincial France.” A retrospective of 6 of his films is touring nationally. Brisbane, State Library, until July 1; Sydney, Chauvel Cinema, June 11; Melbourne, Cinemedia, until June 7; Adelaide, Mercury Cinema, June 4-25; Canberra, Electric Shadows, June 14-20; Perth, FTI, June 6-20. For session times call 1800 069 009.

VCA students hit Cannes

Keep an eye out for Martin Four, an exploration of a son & mother’s love & fantasies, selected for the cinefoundation category for Cannes this year. Produced by VCA students Ben Hackworth, Tim Symonds, Anthony Pateras, Katie Milwright & Joan Kelly, the short screened recently at Popcorn Taxi & will no doubt be doing the rounds of film fests this year.

AFI’s big changes

The AFI has recently announced a number of changes including a new logo, corporate image & adjustments to feature film judging in the awards process. The film community has been either outraged or relieved at the new process, which limits films nominated to those with a theatrical release. Features will not be re-screened so it’s up to members to see Aussie flicks at the cinema. It’s bad news for those indie films struggling for distribution, with theatrical release defined as “publicly exhibited for paid admission in a commercial cinema for at least 7 consecutive days in a minimum of 3 Australian cities, including Sydney & Melbourne, throughout the awards year.” Meanwhile, paid-up members are waiting months for their new membership cards—come on guys!

Moral rights bill finally passed

The Australian Screen Directors Association announced in its Autumn newsletter that as of December 2000, directors & producers are officially recognised as authors under the Australian Copyright Act, a real victory for Australia’s creative community: “…while copyright is about the protection of ‘economic’ rights, moral rights are about protection of ‘creative’ rights. Moral rights exist to protect the completed work, ‘the film’, from being altered without the permission or consent of the authors…They are about ensuring that the reputation of the film & the film’s authors are maintained…”

Off the Edge—ScreenWest winner announced

Emerging WA writer Vanessa Lomma, producer Melissa Hasluck & director Melanie Rodriga were awarded $500,000 recently as winners of the ScreenWest/SBS Independent Off the Edge initiative, for their script Teesh & Trude, a low budget feature on the lives of 2 hardened women on a diet of soapies & sarcasm. The initiative was established to give filmmakers the chance to move beyond short films & create feature-length scripts.

Looking for women’s shorts

The WOW International Film Festival is calling for entries for their short film competition. A grand prize of $30,000 in goods & services is a good incentive. Cate Shortland, director Flowergirl & Joy, is a previous winner. The winning films screen at the WOW festival in October at Chauvel Cinema, Sydney, & tour to regional & city centres nationally. For entry forms, phone 02 9332 2408. All entries must be under 40 minutes & either directed by a woman or, if directed by a man, both written & produced by women.

The apocalypse according to Herzog

The MRC in Adelaide is screening 9 films from Werner Herzog. Screening every Thursday night, 7pm from June 7, the series includes Fata Morgana, Signs of Life, Even Dwarfs Started Small, Aguirre, Wrath of God, Heart of Glass & Strozeck. It’s a good chance to see Herzog eating his own shoes. And it’s free!

Filmmaker with a new vision of Indonesia

As reported by Vivienne Stanton on scoop, filmmaker Tony Sarre went blind at 16 and at 19 hitchhiked solo around Australia with a white cane & a camera. A Murdoch University film student, he recently received a ScreenWest grant to make a 6-part doco series about Indonesia, where he handed the camera to locals he met along the way. Sarre says that being vision impaired can be an advantage: “Because I couldn’t see, people would talk to me, tell me about what they were seeing, give me their slant…In my mind the world was so varied, it wasn’t just me seeing it, it was everybody that I travelled with. It was very exciting & I wanted to put that experience into film.”

Online asylum seekers

MIME Migrating Memories is a new website where refugees & asylum seekers tell their stories. With the help of teachers & museum staff in their newly adopted countries, participants relay their adventures online. MIME, co-ordinated by Malmo Museer (Sweden), Museucentrum Variikii (Finland) & trAce online writing centre (UK) consists of 4 parts: workshops with young immigrants, a dramatised travelling exhibition, a website & a 2 day seminar.

New cinema spaces at COFA

We’re used to sitting in the dark with strangers watching films. But what if the environment changed? Evidence of a Viewer—Cinema in the Unexpected Space, presented by College of Fine Arts & Sydney Film Festival, looks at cinema in new spaces, often impacted by digital technologies: multiple screens, with surround sound, the internet, in an art gallery, & how different spaces alter audience perceptions. Kathy Cleland evaluates The Gallery Space, Amanda McDonald Crowley explores The Public Space & John Conomos questions The Cinema Space. A number of experimental works will also be screened. COFA Theatre, EGO2, Selwyn St Paddington, June 16, 2pm. Contact: Carolyne Gilbert,
02 9385 0734

Interactive storymaking in Perth

FTI is hosting a series of nights on writing/designing interactive games. Jackie Turnure returns to her home town (after 9 years in the US) to talk on “The Agony & Ecstasy of Interactive Games for Kids”, a seminar presented to a packed house at the Australian Special Effects & Animation Festival. June 22, 7-10pm. She will also look at Writing for Interactive Games, June 23, 2.30-5.30pm, & Designing Interactive Games for the Global Market, June 24, 2-5pm. 08 9335 1055

Digital resources

Newcastle groover Sean Healy from Octapod has just updated their website with lots of interesting digital pickings including visuals for raves; interviews with Phil Jackson about Fractal Music; Ian Haig on Web Devolutions; Kat Mew on electronic arts & Flash wiz Braingirl; & grabbing my interest, Greg Jenkins, who composes & makes music
with a cactus.

National digital access initiativ

e
A new scheme launched by Arts Minister Peter McGauran will equip state film resource agencies OPENChannel, Metro, Media Resource Centre, FTI & QPIX with the latest in DVD computer software, hardware, digital video camera & sound recording equipment in state of the art production units, designed to teach filmmakers how to complete projects on DVD or for web streaming.

Aussies take over ELO nominations

Wollongong writer Mez, Gold Coast based Komninos Zervos & SA’s Geniwate have been shortlisted for the 2001 Electronic Literature Awards. 16 judges chose a shortlist of 12 works from 165 entries. Scott Rettburg, director of ELO, commented: “Collectively, these works represent the efforts of a nascent literary movement that takes the electronic media not only as a new means of distributing literature, but also as an interactive space that can be utilised to create entirely new kinds of literary art.”

In this edition, 2 interviews focus on the working lives of artists. Composer-musician Stevie Wishart and dancer-choreographer Kate Champion describe the inspiration for their work, the challenges faced over many years in creating it, including the way they live, and the attempts to reach a balance between their overseas and Australian realities.

Stevie Wishart is a leading Australian musician, a member of the renowned Machine for Making Sense, and a composer for and performer in installations created in collaborations with Sydney’s Joan Grounds and New York’s Lisa DiLillo. Wishart’s medieval music group, Sinfonye (on the Glossa CD label), plays across Europe and is recording the complete works of Hildegard of Bingen. Wishart performed and improvised on her score for Richard Murphet’s play Slow Love for the 2000 Adelaide Festival and a tour of Belgium and the Netherlands. Out of artistic and material necessity she is constantly on the move, but such a life needs points of certainty. Wishart spoke to RealTime with the kind of ease, passion and fluidity so evident in her music, about what places and cultures mean to her and how they relate to her survival as an artist.

Beyond the great divide

My partner, the musician Jim Denley, and I have come to the realisation that if we’re going to carry on as fully professional artists without teaching or the other sorts of income that artists can draw on, we’re going to have to focus quite a lot of our attention overseas, especially Europe. So we’ve actually got a small base in Brussels. I still feel Australia is my home and the interesting thing about moving to Brussels is that it’s made us both feel how Australian we are and, overseas, people still see us as being extremely un-European, which is good and bad.

I think it probably always gets harder the older you get. When you’re younger you’re more flexible. You don’t have such high expectations. But I do expect a certain standard of living now and in Australia it feels a bit like being on the dole, being an artist. I felt that the only way I was going to get gigs was by getting grants which doesn’t always feel good. I don’t feel we’ve got the artistic climate here where curators are going to ask me to do what I do. I think we’ve also got ourselves into a situation—and I suppose this is quite a controversial comment—where artists who live here all year round, have had to take other jobs. I don’t know anyone in Australia who’s surviving purely from their art. We’ve got very good artists who are on salaries and therefore when it comes to their art seem to be prepared to work for very low pay.

The Belgian government has realised that an artist needs time to prepare and develop work. So they’ve brought in a new rule for social security that if you’re “unemployed”, ie you’re not working in a theatre but you’re composing or preparing for the next gig, you can actually get unemployment benefits or some equivalent. They actually have a special status for artists so you don’t have to pay the big national insurance. And when I went to my bank manager to get a loan, and I said I was an artist, he said, oh interesting and he’d actually seen some of my shows. I just feel there isn’t this great divide over there. Of course, it’s easy to compare…but it’s almost impossible to exist here as a freelance artist, especially if you’re a composer who’s not able and not interested to do more commercial work. I kind of ran out of energy and got seriously despondent, wondering if I had anything to offer.

Things fall into place

In the early days of Machine for Making Sense, when we were getting annual funding from the Australia Council, we had money to put whole shows on ourselves. And we got good audiences and I think we made it work because often artists are very good at knowing how to promote, who to employ. But now that that sort of funding has pretty much disappeared in Australia, artists aren’t empowered very often to have their own idea of how to do it without the backup of some organisation. We’ve occasionally thought well, damn it, we don’t care about the money, we’ll just try and put on a gig and do a door deal. We did it when we were 18, we’ll do it now we’re in our early 40s or whatever. Then, you’re dealing with rents. I mean, just forget it!

I had an amazing experience in Belgium. I went to an old converted theatre. I wanted a place that was quiet but with a nice wooden old theatrical acoustic, and they have these things—and this would be good for other Australian artists to apply for—where you have a residency for a week, there’s no rental, and then you do a concert at the end and they pay you to do it.

I have an agent in Spain but mostly we look after ourselves. What you find is that there’ll be a few curators and as long as you keep in contact with these people and carry on producing decent stuff things fall into place. That’s something we’ll probably never have in Australia. My mother in Cambridge helps me with contracts and keeping the accounts together. You have to be very good with small business stuff.

A repertoire for survival

You have to be very flexible. Like I’ve got to go to Spain for about a week in a couple of weeks and I don’t wanna do that. It’s crazy that I can pay the airfare to go to Spain and earn enough money to do 2 concerts. And I’ve got no work like that in Australia at all.

I hardly do any medieval stuff any more because I just find it conflicts too much with my contemporary work. I just do 4 or 5 concerts a year max and a couple of albums. I’m doing mainly 14th century instrumental fiddle music which I love and still trying to develop this show mixing data projections of Renaissance Italy with some simple triggering—it was such a multimedia age then. I want to somehow capture that in performance.

Actually it would be much easier to survive with the medieval stuff. There’s just so much more money put into the European bourgeois classical music scene. It’s in Australia too. But in fact, that’s one of the reasons why I decided to become an Australian, got my citizenship and decided this was my home. It was because it really stopped me with all the medieval stuff. That’s what Australia does. It kicks you up the arse and says, we’re not in old historical Europe. You’re a woman of today and I mean stuff like that you can’t quantify. So I decided I would never do Sinfonye in Australia because it felt absolutely wrong to be doing this weird European stuff that had nothing to do with the landscape.

The other thing about having spent some time in Brussels is that there’s a huge Moroccan and Turkish community. So having said that I’m not doing so much medieval music, I’ve now met some fantastic Moroccan musicians. So, for my next record I’ve got a very good Moroccan percussionist and also a very good ud player.

Hanging out for sound

Belgium is phenomenal for the arts compared to say London. Real estate is really cheap. There’s loads of fantastic spaces. In my street there’s 2 and I live in a small street. There’s lots of room for curators and artists to do things. That’s how you educate people. In Brussels, there are so many things—and not all of them are good but they’re there and you meet people, you network with the audience….where would you hang out as a sound artist in Sydney?

The NetworK

One of the reasons we chose Belgium is that it’s got one of the best arts sponsorship scenes and it’s very multicultural. You’ve got the whole Moroccan-Turkish refugee/immigrant population which is incredibly interesting, the whole Flemish community whom I mainly work with because they mainly do the contemporary stuff. Then you’ve got the French community. It’s multilingual, but a lot of people speak English and they’re very open to foreigners.

I’ve been asked next year to curate quite a big festival based around Sinfonye and my work in Spain with the 13th century court of Alfonso Assabio which was very political. It was the time before Spain really became divided—Jews, Moors, Christians, women—a really multicultural court. So the idea of the festival is to have a mixture of medieval and Moroccan. The festival is planned for April next year.

The other project which has gradually been taking shape is called Escape. I was playing in Switzerland last year and DJ Scanner [UK] was there and David Shea [USA]. Lisa DiLillo was working with them. She does real time visuals, mixing. It was one of those wonderful festivals—a bit like Adelaide actually. There are a few popping up like this in Europe which have the idea that it’s very important to get artists to stay for the whole of the festival. And they’ll actually pay you to be around and see all the shows. So Lisa and I saw each other’s work and decided we absolutely had to work together. So that was a year or so ago. Then we got invited by the Walker Centre in Minneapolis to present our work there. You see it’s this network again.

Lisa lives in New York so we don’t get together that often. We’re still working on the show and developing it but some of it is pre-sequenced video. Her work uses very fast, flickering movements. There’s lots of rhythm in it. So part of the show will be doing a live soundtrack to that. Another part will be a film that she’s started to make about a girl walking through a city. She’s got a little set of props on her desk in the performance and she’ll move from pre-recorded film to live filming, but you won’t know it. What I love is I do everything from foley sound to playing pieces, to sound effects, sounds from movies, throwing little bits in. We have a long pre-recorded sequence of our faces showing different expressions. Lisa’s looped that and I match very different sounds to those same expressions. The Festival van Vlaanden, which is the main arts festival in Brussels, and Argos, a video distributor in Brussels, loved the work and immediately asked if they could distribute it. They’re putting in for a big grant so, hopefully, we can really develop it in Belgium in October.

The US experience

I always think that Australia is a real mixture of America and Europe artistically. So I’d say, America is at the furthest extreme and something I probably find most difficult. Europe I find the easiest and Australia is somewhere in the middle. So, with America I really only know New York which, as we all know, is very cut-throat but very good. We did a Machine tour for 5 weeks at the end of last year and the last concert was in New York at a really interesting new space called Engine 27 which was started by a philanthropist who made a lot of money designing speakers in the 70s I think, and he’s now bought this warehouse in Tribeca. He realised that, apart from the major concert venues, there wasn’t a small concert venue designed purely for sound. So he decided to do it. It’s a room about half the size of the Performance Space with state-of-the-art surround sound speakers. Everything is controlled through a G4 computer but all the machines are downstairs so it’s beautifully quiet. You can completely move the space how you want. And they recorded the gig and sent us each a copy and it’s a fabulous recording. So that was a joy to find New Yorkers open to ideas and a place that only wants to do experimental electronic music.

The Walker Arts Centre is a big institution. And I guess what was incredible was to have my airfare paid from Australia to go and do one concert. A fantastic technical team. Put up at the Hilton, all expenses paid. With that type of venue, they just treat you very well. That’s their whole thing. It felt a bit funny to go all that way to play for 200 people. What is great about the Walker, and we haven’t got it here, is that there’s a gallery which is always a wonderful space but it has a whole dance thing, a film and video part, there’s a whole music thing, a whole lot of stuff going on around you which is always great.

More sights, more sounds

The other project I’ve done is called Tracking which started with an ANAT Research and Development grant I got many years ago when I wanted to look at different ways of triggering stuff. I never really found the right person to do it with here but in Belgium I saw Ludo Engels—in a sort of underground squat venue, of which there are many in Brussels—an artist who just works with colour and slides. He has 3 projectors and he overlays abstract images. And as soon as I saw his work, I really wanted to do sound for it. I met him through something called Unter Anderen (Among Others), an international artists’ network involving Germany, USA, Japan, Italy, Belgium…Through that we got to work together and for the last concert I did in Glasgow for the National Year of Live Arts I invited Ludo to be part of it.

In Tracking I’m miking up all the projectors and fans and screens and treating them electronically. Sometimes the MiDi controls from his screens control my sound and sometimes vice versa and we’re playing that against how we improvise with each other. The problem is when you have an instrument it’s so much perceived as ‘music.’ I mean, a lot of what I do on the hurdy gurdy is just using the mechanics of it and the key clicks. And you also grab a lot of the attention with this instrument. And so to do something that’s truly multimedia I need to find other ways to create sound.

You have to be very tough

Part of the hard reality of this life is the travelling. It’s horrible. And in Minneapolis, during the day it was minus 20 and absolutely no humidity and I’d come out of a grey drizzly European winter and during the day the hurdy gurdy just started to shrink. All the moving parts started to collapse. 48 keys I had to take out and put little bits of paper between them, completely re-set the instrument. So you have to be flexible and, actually, I don’t mind that. I mean, you have to be very tough. Last year or the year before I did too much and I got bronchitis followed by really bad pneumonia and I was on my back for 6 weeks. All this air conditioning, bad air for hours. I’m not incredibly strong. And you’re lugging 35 kilos of gear…and you can’t afford chiropractors. I’ve started doing yoga and taken up swimming because you have to be physically so resilient. That’s something I do find a bit scary.

Project DOMUS

I’ve always wanted to work with Joan Grounds and to do a sound installation which is also a performance. All of the things I’ve been talking about so far have been sort of one-night stands. You’re in Brussels, Glasgow, Melbourne and you never get a chance to review the architecture of the space where you’re performing, which I really miss. So I thought one way to do this would be to try and get some sound installation work where you’re in a space for a few weeks and you create the piece for that space and you get a chance to review it and do a series of performances in the same space, perhaps for as long as a month which, as a freelance musician, is a real luxury. So that was my initial inspiration and when Alan Cruickshank at the Contemporary Art Centre in Adelaide invited me to do something I suggested this project.

It’s a very nice, quiet space, CACSA. I want to play with making sounds but having them projected in another part of the space. And we want to play with memory a bit. So perhaps something that you’ll see in one room, you’ll hear in another. You carry things with you as you go through an exhibition. Joan’s also making some sort of costume from paper which she got in Thailand which I’m building contact microphones into. But I’m not sure what we’re going to do because we very much want it to be a process. We’ll be in there for about a month and I’d like to have performances throughout. So what we’re hoping is that we really can be in residence and have people come to us.

Outback recording studio

Then we’re going to Alice Springs for a week to do a more video-based work as a workshop for the Watch This Space gallery. We’re just looking at some different ways we might approach recording the environment. I love this idea of basically using sound to manipulate how we see and possibly vice versa. All these projects are so fantastic—much better than anything I could do in Europe—but there’s just no money. You know, we’re talking about $200 a week and I’ll probably go through at least one minidisc player because of the dust! But I’m gonna do it. That’s partly why I’m going to Spain—so I can finance stuff here.

The last thing I’m hoping to do in Alice for the rest of July is a piece at the Araluen Arts Centre. The last CD Jim Denley and I did on Split Records called Tibooburra had very good responses in The Wire and in Europe and it’s the first time Jim and I have done a duo project. One of the reasons I keep coming back to Australia is that you go to the bush or the outback and it’s a recording studio once the wind drops. It is so good…a richness of resource that is unbelievable.

Performing en route

Another thing that’s happening is that the guitarist Fred Frith is now at Mills College in California and he’s inviting various people to do residencies. What you have to think about if you’re in Australia is that America is a very good stopping off point. I could do Minneapolis on a ticket that went from London to Sydney. You really have to think like this because otherwise you’re going to be spending all your profits on airfares. So, travel but do something en route.

Stevie Wishart and Jim Denley’s Tibooburra and the Wishart, Julian Knowles, Chris Abrahams album, Azerliz, are available from Split Records.

Copies of Stevie’s Azerliz, with its marvellous synthesis of medieval, pop and jazz (The Necks’ Chris Abrahams is on keyboards) go to new subscribers to RealTime. See page 39.

When I spoke to Kate Champion she had just returned from a showing at The Development Site in Adelaide of a group work she has been directing. Working with dramaturg Victoria Spence, composer and sound designer Max Lyandvert, lighting and set designer Geoff Cobham, and performers Ros Hervey, Veronica Neaves, Kirstie McCracken, Nathan Page, Shaun Parker, Ben Winspear and Byron Perry, Same, same But Different is scheduled to premiere at The Sydney Festival 2001, co-production funding pending. She has just finished working with Neil Armfield on La Strada, part of a triple bill for the English National Opera in which she choreographed 30 children to the score by Fellini’s favorite composer, Nino Rota. In June, Champion will present a solo work, About Face, at The Studio, Sydney Opera House. When I last interviewed her, she had just returned from a position as rehearsal director for a tour of DV8’s Enter Achilles.

Working with DV8

So I’d done Face Value [a solo show] and directed Legs on the Wall’s Under the Influence and the ball was starting to roll regarding my own work. Then I got a call from Lloyd Newson offering me a 3 month gig as rehearsal director for a tour of Enter Achilles. I was very flattered because no one had ever taken his work on tour but him. Then he asked if I’d be interested in doing another month on a workshop. Consequently, what was a 3 month job offer turned into 2 and a half years of DV8 commitment, making and touring The Happiest Day of My Life and then assisting Lloyd on his Olympic Festival work, The Cost of Living. Working with Lloyd is rigorous and pushes you to all sorts of physical and emotional limits, and I found it hard living in London where I didn’t have any support from family or friends. We did 6 months of touring The Happiest Day…70 shows and I was onstage for 2 hours of the show…What’s hard is that we did all that, and often DV8 make a film of their work, but because he had to start the Olympic programme he didn’t have time, so it was never documented. So you feel that when you come back to Australia, no one knows about this experience that was so monumental in your history and career.

1999 was the hardest year of my life for lots of reasons, including my father dying. From a young age working overseas in Munich, my biggest fear was that I’d be away when an accident happened to a loved one. And that happened…I was barely coping. When I came back from my Dad’s funeral Lloyd decided to re-write the show completely—to swap the 2 male leads. It was just horrible. But I was pleased with what I did and it got better and stronger and that’s the thing, as much as the touring is gruelling: Prague, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Paris, Munich, most of the UK…

The Remo Years

I had always wanted to make a piece with Lloyd from scratch and I didn’t know if that opportunity would come up…I thought it may be when I’m 50, seeing as he uses a lot of older people. Then he asked me and I’d begun to establish myself here and you never know how quickly people are going to forget you or what’s going to happen here with funding and you’ll have to start from scratch. Because that’s what happened when I got back from working with DV8 the first time at the end of 1992. I worked in a shop for 2 and a half years and it took ages—like 5 years—to get to the point of having my work funded. So just the thought of going away…

1993 to 1995 was a wasteland—I was working at the Remo shop on Oxford St with Annette Evans and Katrina Sedgwick. Over the Remo period I did a creative development with my brother and Ros Hervey and others called Twist, but we didn’t get subsequent funding. Then Leisa Shelton started the first Steps programme at The Performance Space and Ros was involved and suggested I do some solo work. I ended up doing 2 pieces from the material I’d discovered during the development of Twist—Going Nowhere Fast and Slipping Up. The good thing about Steps was that Leisa took over producing it. If she hadn’t…I would have found it hard to get work up; even the confidence to think it was worthwhile. And then Leisa did Steps #2 and I did a longer piece, Of Sound, Body and Mind.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to do my own work. I’ve only really been a dancer because I wanted to create work, and I was always surprised that people kept offering me performing work because I never really felt I had strong enough technique. During Steps #2 my friend Meredith Kitchen sent my CV to Philippe Genty for a show they were casting here, and I’d gotten through all the stages of this complex audition process. I got the call and I said, “I can’t, it’s the tech week for my 15 minute piece at The Performance Space that I’m losing money on”…I hung up the phone and fell on the floor and thought ‘what have I done.’ I just realised that if I didn’t take myself seriously about creating my own work, how could I expect anyone else to…It was a real fork in the road.

About face

So I came back from London last year, and after all the years of complaining about not getting funding and heading down the ‘bitter path’, the Sydney Opera House approached me and asked for a work for 2001. But I had pledged my group show to premiere at the Sydney Festival and Brett Sheehy has been unwavering about helping me get a show up. So I thought about doing Face Value at the Opera House Studio, but decided I couldn’t do it for a third time. And here they were offering me the theatre for nothing, the lights, the ushers, they were covering box office and putting in thousands of dollars. So my lips started moving and I found myself saying, ‘well I could do another solo show I suppose.’ I felt so flattered that someone was coming to me and offering, rather than having to go begging and door knocking…

There is something incredibly challenging about doing solo work—it’s not the same as directing. And it’s that 2-way responsibility of being the performer and the creator which I find very useful when I go in to direct other people…I can be on both sides and I feel empowered. I was quite scared before doing Face Value because it was something I’d never done before, and I ended up very pleased with how it dealt with the idea of facade. But that very theme meant that I didn’t delve into a lot of the issues—the piece did remain very much in front of that facade, that set. So going in through the windows and turning the set around to look at what’s internal excites me. And I’m quite interested—I’ll have to see how my body goes—to tour it overseas and do the 2 shows by rotating the set or getting the audience to walk around.

I’m working with Chris Ryan again [ex-Sydney Front, former Artistic Director PACT Youth Theatre]—he just comes in and talks about a book I might want to read, or something I said that I’ve forgotten; we just chat. So he’s good on that level and at that stage of bumping in. He came up with the ‘outside eye’ title. He’s a sounding board, a hand-holder, someone to have coffee with. He doesn’t bring a lot of ego into it. Brigid Kitchin, who I’ve made films with, she’ll be working on the video material for projection. Because the thing with a solo show is, how can you make more than one of yourself? Robert Lepage did it in his Sydney Festival show this year—he brings a lot of people into the piece who aren’t actually there through phone conversations. Another thing I’m interested in for About Face is how many selves live within the one person, and that lends itself strongly to the use of projections.

I find it interesting that people are criticised when their various works have similarities. There are so many great artists like Woody Allen or Pina Bausch that I’m happy to see keep delving. How many more things can you see when you dig further? It’s like Lepage said: “I like to think of my shows as needing a teaspoon of the old yoghurt in order to make new yoghurt.” So I’ve suddenly become unashamed about self-referencing and borrowing from myself rather than thinking, ‘God, I can’t make anything that looks like my previous show.’ And I’ve decided to really tread that line between what’s autobiography and what is not. That’s why I’ve chosen the vehicle of a woman who’s forgotten who she is, because if you can’t remember who you are, then it can go into fiction. But you are yourself, you are your body…like when I watch Wendy Houstoun’s work, it’s still Wendy [UK dancer/director].

Same, same But Different

So I’ve been presenting my work Same, same But Different at The Development Site in Adelaide which was set up so that shows weren’t just being seen at one festival. Most of the work is only at its very first development stage; you begin with the interest of one festival—in my case Sydney Festival—that gives you the initial support for development. All the Australian festival directors are there and there was someone from Shanghai and someone from Singapore. If more than one festival is interested in something they can co-produce it. What excites me is getting off the Australia Council teat, where your work is being recognised enough so that you don’t have to keep going back…even though they have been fantastic for me. It’s just that feeling of liberation.

I’ve wanted, for a long time, to direct a group show unattached to a company. It was good timing for me to do Under the Influence, but it was still Legs on the Wall and I didn’t get to cast people. It turned out very well but I didn’t initiate the project from scratch and it wasn’t under my name, and you have to consider a particular audience each time you work with a company. So this is why I did Face Value, to lead to this. I appreciate my association with DV8 a lot, and it has been traumatic and enriching and everything you could imagine, but I’m so relieved to be back in my own boots. If shit happens I can take responsibility for it. It was weird accepting the praise and the shit with DV8—being in that middle position.

I feel like I’ve arrived at a point that I’ve been waiting for a really long time. I think I always wanted to direct but until I did a stint on DV8’s Strange Fish as production assistant, I thought I could only serve my apprenticeship by performing. I learnt so much from being on the outside—it was the best thing. As a performer you can’t deny your egotistical point of view; you’re the centre of your universe in that piece and you take things very personally. I feel very comfortable directing, even though every time I start a project I feel like I know nothing. That used to freak me out, but now I find it a very true place to be because the information that sits within you isn’t tangible but is there from years of experience. It kicks in when you’re in a situation needing to make decisions. I never went to an institution, I never graduated from anywhere…some people leave institutions feeling that they have all the equipment. But for me…it’s an ongoing process and I’ve accepted that. I feel really well equipped to go on to this stage…a lot of people feel it should have happened to me sooner, but I’m glad it was a slow burn because hopefully it will be longer lasting.

Making Australia a base

It’s perfect for me to be here, making work with the people around. I don’t feel any need to be overseas. It’s quite easy to tour stuff now with things getting picked up from the Australia Council Arts Market. Fifteen years ago I felt I had to make a decision about whether I lived here or overseas, but now I feel that Sydney is a fine base…The Arts Market can be a hideous experience with this dot system where red dots are the buyers and green dots are the sellers and you see 2 green dots talking and suddenly they realise they can’t ‘mate’ and they move on…I’m very fortunate with my relationship with Performing Lines. I don’t have to represent myself. Artists actually need a Performing Lines in every state…I just happened to have this association with [General Manager] Wendy Blacklock from 20 years ago through Suspense, a show I was working on with my brother. So when I wanted my grant auspiced, instead of going to One Extra or Performance Space, I walked into Wendy’s office. And she knows a lot more people could use her help but she hasn’t got the manpower.

I don’t have a problem living in Australia with this beautiful climate because I feel I have enough darkness within me. I suppose some people find that Australian life can lead to a sort of apathy. I don’t. I’m really relieved that it’s out there and I can get to it, and when I don’t want it I just shut myself off in a dark room or the movies or with my inner voice.

This sounds daggy but my driving force to make dance is that, from a very young age, not a lot of things about being alive made sense to me. I had absolutely no religious upbringing, so going to theatre and seeing works of art were the only spiritual things in life that allowed me a connection to other people that I didn’t know personally. They spoke to me of my life and my dilemmas—you can feel terribly isolated when you’re going through things. Art offers a level of communication that exists alongside our everyday lives which is able to transform and enrich our existence. It’s that poetry of the artistic experience which is the only thing that makes sense to me about being alive, that and the love of a lover or of family. So I would find it incredibly soul destroying to exist in any other profession. And this is true of film or any art, but when live performance works—and it works so rarely—I find it more potent. And that’s what happened with me when I saw DV8. I was ready to give up when I saw them and that’s what my trip to London was all about. And as difficult as Lloyd can be, his rigour and the way he pushes buttons and his questioning nature I find very stimulating to be around.

Who am I going to be?

Same same But Different is basically about how many points of view there can be on the same event and I’ve been thinking about this idea of the different selves existing within the same person. So you go to an interview and it’s like—who am I going to be in this hour? I may have woken up a bit bleary eyed this morning and that gets written down and becomes a documentation of who you are. And of course you are yourself…but it’s interesting the little windows we have into understanding who someone is and the ramifications of that one experience… sometimes the accident of being non-articulate is interesting so I hope I never get that much control over my own voice…

About Face, choreographer/performer Kate Champion, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 5-16.

Sydney artist Guo Jian, in conversation with novelist and China scholar Linda Jaivin (see facing page), reminisces about his reaction to the revolutionary modern ballet The Red Detachment of Women—one of the ‘8 model works’ of the Cultural Revolution which inspire him still, although not exactly as intended by their creator, Madame Mao.

I loved it. We all did. Why? Thinking back, it’s got to be all those women in shorts! At the time, you never got to see women’s legs. But you could go to The Red Detachment of Women without anyone calling you a hooligan or suspecting your motives. In China, sexuality carries a negative connotation. You don’t admit to sexual desire. But even army propaganda used subtle sexual imagery to draw us in.

In Guo Jian’s recent exhibition, Mama’s Tripping, these strictly licensed legs appear, among other more ‘explicit’ imagery, in a series of kitschy, carnal tableaux (which wouldn’t be out of place in a 1960s soft porn magazine feature spread) under the title Madame Mao’s Red Detachment of Gals and Gags. Meanwhile, Jiang Qing has re-surfaced in Anchee Min’s latest book Becoming Madame Mao where, in the opening scene, she sits thinking aloud, as though contemplating her own performance, rather like Norman Bates sitting in his cell demonstrating for an imaginary audience that he wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Well, I won’t surrender. When I was a child my mother used to tell me that I should think of myself as grass—born to be stepped on. But I think of myself as a peacock among hens. I am not being judged fairly.

At least we hear her side of the story as the young revolutionary Li Yunhe (Cloud Crane), the Shanghai actress Lan Ping (Blue Apple), and the designing woman of Yan’an, Jiang Qing (Green River) mesh to become, for foreigners anyway, ‘Madame Mao.’ She is a character of “historical fiction” we are told on the front cover, which shows a raven-haired and ruby-lipped beauty, wrapped Manchu concubine-style, in a red blanket sequined with glittering Mao badges, awaiting her elevation to the head of the imperial couch. The Emperor Mao takes his concubine impatiently “like a tomb robber grabbing gold”, Anchee Min tells us, and in time the pair will fuck with the minds of a billion people. If there’s ever a collaborative Linda Jaivin/Anchee Min/Guo Jian rock opera about Jiang Qing, I want to see Cher come rolling out of this blanket, hoist herself astride a PLA tank barrel and belt out Believe for an ecstasy and coke-fuelled mass audience of Red Guards in Tian’anmen Square.

Anchee Min has a way with beginnings and endings, closely related to the Chinese stage. In her last work, Red Azalea, she began: “I was raised on the teachings of Mao and on the operas of Madame Mao, Comrade Jiang Ching.” Jiang Qing tells us on the final page of Becoming Madame Mao:

Don’t be surprised to see my name smeared. There is nothing more they can do to me. And don’t forget that I was an actress, a great actress. I acted with passion. For those who are fascinated by me you owe me applause, and for those who are disgusted you may spit. I thank you all for coming.

As we learn in a stage direction for this very theatrical book about a very theatrical person, Jiang Qing never did learn the trick of escaping criticism for “the crime of the century.” There is some sort of truth in her observation about being smeared. She was wickedly cruel and ruthless and may well have deserved everything she got and more, but she still got one of the bum raps of the century, consistent with the twin calamities of being a Chinese woman and an actress. As she maintained at her famous trial/performance, she was Mao’s dog and when he said to bite, she bit, but no one wanted to hear about responsible dog ownership in those days.

If Anchee Min and Guo Jian (not to mention Linda Jaivin) are anything to go by, the China arts field has produced some fun people in recent times. Red Azalea was an ostensibly autobiographical work into which Anchee Min inserted a character who could only have been Jiang Qing (see Trevor Hay RT#1 & #10). Are we to think from Red Azalea that the author was actually rescued from exile in the countryside during China’s rustification movement by some sort of lesbian cross-dressing relationship with none other than Madame Mao, or is she pulling our leg and taking advantage of the fact that this is one of the last literary frontiers, a ‘Fabulous Woman’ that Westerners still don’t know much about yet? Good luck to her if she is having us on. We richly deserve it after all those wild swans and falling leaves. I half expect her next book to be called The Peony Drops.

The ‘True Story of Mao and Jiang Qing’, whoever tells it, will have a lot to do with sex—sex, drugs and revolutionary modern opera. Ironically, Jiang Qing, during her campaign to reform Beijing opera and create the genre of ‘8 model works’, had a bit to say about unwholesome sorts of addiction created by foreigners:

Capitalism has already had several centuries, but its output of so-called ‘classics’ is negligible. The capitalists have produced a few works modelled on these ‘classics’ but they are stereotyped, unappealing and therefore in total decline. On the other hand, there is a great torrent of mind-numbing poison, like rock and roll, jazz, strip-tease, impressionism, symbolism, abstract art, fauvism, modernism and so on, endlessly. In a word, there is enough corruption and obscenity to poison and paralyse the people.

Guo Jian has produced scatological satire out of the iconography of the puritanical Cultural Revolution, but Jiang Qing’s words reveal that she is not so far from him in her preoccupation with the link between propaganda and popular culture. The difference between now and then for people like Guo Jian is that he is free in all matters of indifference to our political masters, such as art and culture, and can let his head go. As a result, he goes in for the joys of overkill. He uses a very strong solution of satire to dissolve a very flimsy outer layer of hypocrisy. The point Guo Jian may well be making is that the inside layer of violence and corruption in Party propaganda always was at least as obvious, and yet as secret, as the contents of the Red Detachment’s Bermuda shorts.

In Nicholas Jose’s introduction for the Mama’s Tripping catalogue he refers to the “mind-fucking drug” of the Cultural Revolution and the “images that were used to sell a society to its people.” These images were present in incomprehensible profusion and variety of form. But no propaganda was more carefully crafted and contrived—and few things gave a greater sense of illicit pleasure—than Jiang Qing’s model works, in particular The Red Detachment of Women and The White-haired Girl (the 2 very popular female protagonists are combined in one of Guo Jian’s works, Trigger Happy XII).

The model works were meant to reproduce in their audience the kind of conversion and revelation taking place on Madame Mao’s revolutionary modern stage, or at least the outward appearance of it. Those in the audience who interpreted her works correctly, as a performance text for the Cultural Revolution itself, quickly transformed themselves into true revolutionaries, who could readily be distinguished from counter-revolutionary revisionists by the way they hated and persecuted anyone they called a revisionist after passionately identifying with the persecuted heroines. If you are wondering what kind of mind produced that kind of logic don’t miss Becoming Madame Mao. The women of these ballets were among the most memorable of all Jiang Qing’s creations precisely because they, unlike the principal heroic figures of other works, could be both persecuted and fallible. Perhaps Jiang Qing’s life experience got in the way of her dramaturgy.

Meanwhile, Guo Jian confides to Linda Jaivin how he once decided if he ever survived the PLA he was going to get “the prettiest girlfriend.” I just hope for her sake she doesn’t mind being dressed up as a peasant slave girl in long braids and red pants and chained to a post for not paying her cruel and exorbitant rent while the blood-sucking, evil tyrant landlord brandishes his whip as she stands with head and chest high, her eyes blazing with indomitable hatred at the outrageous injustices inflicted on the workers and peasants of China for a thousand years.

Guo Jian, Mama’s Tripping, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, September 9-October 21; Anchee Min, Becoming Madame Mao, Allen & Unwin, 2001.

Guo Jian is a Sydney-based artist with an international reputation. Born in China in 1962, he trained as an artist, became soldier, participated in the Tiananmen protests of 1989 and came to live in Australia in 1992. Linda Jaivin interviews Guo Jian, and Trevor Hay (facing page), writing about Anchee Min’s second Jiang Ching-inspired work, Becoming Madam Mao, puts Guo Jian’s nightmarish, parodic and erotic model opera and ballet fantasies in context. KG

You used to employ a very personal iconography in your work—you painted your dreams and nightmares, the view from your hospital bed from when you had a broken leg, things like that. But over the years you’ve turned increasingly to a much more political and general symbolism. Why is this?

I used to have nightmares all the time. Violent nightmares. On reflection, I realised that there was something dark in my subconscious, something that was profoundly disturbing me. Then, in the library, I was looking at some pictures of China during the Cultural Revolution and I realised what was triggering these nightmares. Since coming to Australia 10 years ago, I’d pushed memories of my years in the Chinese army, and of Tiananmen, out of my mind. But seeing these images triggered memories, and once I started to use them in my paintings, I stopped having bad dreams. I felt compelled to continue. And it has worked; I’ve liberated myself.

Before my last trip to China, I wasn’t fully aware of my family’s history. My grandmother told me that the People’s Liberation Army had executed my grandfather. I had no idea. I was shocked. When the army arrived in Guizhou they accused my grandfather of being a landlord. He fled into the mountains. The soldiers trapped him in a cave. At the time, everyone in the mountains carried guns. My grandfather fired a shot, and hit a soldier in the leg. He was terrified and pleaded with the soldiers, many of whom were locals and knew him, to vouch for him. No one did. But they said, if you come out, we won’t kill you. The moment he stepped out, they shot him. Right in front of my grandmother.

My father was a soldier. He had to denounce his own father, knowing he’d be killed too if he tried to defend him.

And then in 1989, there I was, a former soldier, nearly killed by the PLA myself on Tiananmen Square.

Yet the images of the PLA in your painting have no hint of violence there at all.

That’s a really important point. Why did I become a soldier? Why did my father become a soldier? The army was a way to leave home, become independent. When I was little, all my toys were guns, and I had a miniature army uniform to wear. I was attracted by the image of the PLA. At the time I joined, the propaganda called soldiers “the most lovable people.”

Then there was The Red Detachment of Women (revolutionary model opera). I loved it. We all did. Why? Thinking back, it’s got to be all those women in shorts! At the time, in China, you never got to see women’s legs. But you could go to The Red Detachment of Women without anyone calling you a hooligan or suspecting your motives. In China, sexuality carries a negative connotation. You don’t admit to sexual desire. But even army propaganda used subtle sexual imagery to draw us in.

It was only after you got into it that you realised soldiering was all about violence. But the violence was legitimate! Revolutionary! It was exciting. I was just out of puberty. I thought, if I survive this, if I don’t get killed, I’m definitely going to get the prettiest girlfriend!

Many of your recent paintings are done with the deliberate crudeness of propaganda poster art. Could you talk about that?

When I was little, my dad also made propaganda art. He made a Mao that glowed. We didn’t have TV. We’d just watch Mao. It wasn’t just us, either. Everyone in the village crowded in to stare at our glowing Mao. There were so many propaganda posters around when I was a kid, and I loved them. They were so colourful. Later, as a student at the Minorities Institute, I hated them, I thought they were vulgar. Then when I got into the army, the first thing they asked me to do was paint propaganda posters! Fuck me dead! (Laughs).

Now, I look at kitsch art and realise that’s what I was doing for years! The posters I was exposed to in my youth were very proper, very revolutionary, but the ones I’m creating are improper and satirical.

Not so long ago, you were rejected by prominent Sydney galleries including Sherman and Legge. Ever since showing at Tin Sheds in 1998, and winning first prize in the open section at the Fisher’s Ghost [a Campbelltown Art Gallery award, NSW] the same year, you’ve enjoyed extraordinary critical and commercial success. Your paintings have even decorated the main stages at the Big Day Out. How has this changed your life? Has it changed the way you think about your art?

The biggest effect it’s had on my life is that I don’t have to do any more labouring jobs! But I’m too busy working on my painting to think about how others see me. I rarely think about it.

When the Big Day Out asked me to design some posters on the theme of ‘chaos’, I didn’t know what to do. I’d seen a lot of pub rock, but I’d never been to one of those really big rock concerts. So they gave me a video of the last Big Day Out and the first thing I thought was—it’s like the Cultural Revolution! We didn’t have Woodstock, we had the Cultrev. But I still couldn’t come up with anything; I can’t paint to order. I have too many of my own stories to tell. So in the end they just chose images from paintings I’d already done.

Since coming to Australia, you’ve travelled around the country, hung out in pubs, gone to hear bands, played the pokies at RSL clubs, lived in sharehouses, listened to Triple J, and have friends who don’t speak Chinese. Why haven’t you incorporated any aspect of your Australian life and experience into your art? Or have you?

The paintings with water and the beach are influenced by Australia. I was knocked out by my first sight of the coast, of the beach. We don’t have any ocean in Guizhou. I love the sea. I still feel I’ve been here for too short a time, and I haven’t digested my Australian experience. Besides, I have to finish one stage in my life before I can start on the next. But you can see how bright the blues are in these paintings—that’s all from Australia.

Three words? Let’s see. Tacky…3 words? Where do you come up with these questions? (Laughs). Fun…and releasing. Tacky, fun and releasing.

This article appeared originally as part of the catalogue for Guo Jian’s exhibition Mama’s Tripping, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Sept 9 – Oct 21, 2000. The interview is reproduced with permission of the author and CCAS.

Three blonde-wigged miscreants, too fast-moving to be pinned with loitering, too low-impact to be considered vandals, and far too conspicuous to be running a covert operation, baffle the local police and media with a sticker campaign targeting the Ford Falcon, the Holden Commodore and the Mazda 626 in several Perth car parks. Somewhere between interpretation and the act lies True Crime for responsible artists, the PVI Collective, as each easy-peel sticker is printed with instructions on how to break-into and drive-away the car to which it is stuck.

On a larger scale, influencing the actions of others is a primary function of do it, the readymade concept exhibition initiated 8 years ago by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. At the Lawrence Wilson Gallery, the Perth version of do it is characterised by a kit logic that permeates most of the work on a number of levels, pointing to the necessity of expediency and economy in problem-solving and free interpretation at short notice. Comprising a series of instructions from prominent names including Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, Boltanski, Bruce Sterling and Diller + Scofidio, the do it challenge for each host gallery is to exhibit at least 15 existing instructions using local talent.

do it is quite pointedly the signature piece for Perth International Arts Festival’s (PIAF) visual arts program this year, though less of a mammoth undertaking than either Robert Macpherson at the Art Gallery of Western Australia or Stan Douglas and Bill Viola at the John Curtin Gallery. The involvement of Sophie O’Brien as both program manager and co-curator of this exhibition marks something of an ideological shift towards the inclusion of more discursive curatorial practice within the festival. do it is by no means new in this sense, but its placement in the Lawrence Wilson Gallery, an institution that has positioned itself rather conservatively for some time, is an indicator of change at a local level.

Of the 16 works produced, several dominate within the gallery space. Tremaine Egan’s response to Annette Messager’s Untitled (Signatures) (1996) is either a glorious celebration or a cynical tribute to the supremely vain. Egan’s interpretation is a far cry from the humble investigation of signatures suggested by Messager; instead a scaffold stands covered in streamers and confetti like the aftermath of a pep-rally. This cheerleader aesthetic is followed through with sequined college style t-shirts and jeans (designed by tsubi of Sydney) emblazoned with the artist’s name and strewn over the structure and the floor. Its soundscape, a looped phrase of a pop song drifts over the audio component of Jurek Wybraniek’s work, making for difficult listening.

Mike Kelley’s Untitled (Voices), instructing a recording and playback process for supernatural sounds, is pushed to an interactive outcome by Wybraniek. His audience has the options of dancing to the gathered noises on a constructed, green dance floor (with nasty yellow party lights), or noting on paper the presence of voices on the tape. The PVI (Performance, Video and Installation) Collective’s re-working of True Crime by the Critical Art Ensemble specifically locates the act of making “…an image of an illegal object” within the context of a very Western Australian media-fuelled, car theft anxiety.

As for critical anxiety, I gnaw my fingernails while watching the staged exodus of small things in Simryn Gill’s Roadkill. Something about the touched, greasy viscerality of this work and its reference to minor human addictions is a little close to the bone, compelling me to stop right away. An all-wheeled mass of objects, led by copper pennies, little brooches and ring-pulls, alights like a swarm from an alcove in the PICA main space. Followed closely by coloured bottle-tops, beer caps, plastic forks and crushed cans, these grubby remnants have passed effortlessly from hand, to mouth, to pavement and gutter after satiating at base level the cravings of consumer culture.

From an adjacent room, the smell of paper archives permeates the surrounding air. Pooja-Loot (worship-plunder) is an installation dedicated to obsolescing streams of knowledge and reference. Books including an Atlas of the World (circa 1950), Forestry for Woodsmen, a Heroes Annual and Pattern-Cutting Tips become frames for old, rotting plastic toys, ceramic ornaments and party favours. Ornamental windows cut away from their covers and pages nestle the objects that stand as sentries to nostalgia, or like a collection of relics where the Word, the bone and the gilded frame are replaced by trinkets and tales of the past.

Gill’s A Small Town At the Turn of the Century is a large suite of square-format photographs that line the walls of the PICA main space. The artist’s compositions take the many, generic forms of the family photograph, her subjects at ease in their numerous Malaysian environments. All, however, have their faces obscured by masks of exotic fruit; rambutans, mango skin, bananas and the ever pungent durien distancing them from the viewer. Gill’s reference to exoticism and otherness in these works draws further attention to a basic presumption that we can somehow gauge the personality of a person in the single moment they are photographed. Gill forces the viewer to look into their habitats, at their posture and gestures, for clues. Simryn Gill’s work is deeply engaging, commanding a gentle seeking of her audience, and a willingness to explore that is no less compelling than the immersive, sensory video installations of Stan Douglas and Bill Viola that I have been so connected to for the past month.

The surprise of the festival is Robert Macpherson at the Art Gallery of Western Australia that I admit to holding reservations about, having installed a major exhibition of his work at the John Curtin Gallery only 2 years ago. The exhibition is the triumph of a well-considered design and curatorial process on the part of the gallery, that Macpherson’s installations and predominantly painterly exercises occupy the entire ground floor in such a way as to completely own it. Chitters: A Wheelbarrow for Richard, 156 paintings, 156 signs, completed last year by the artist, is the most stunning work. Installed in a many-sided room, the black and white Dulux Weathershield paintings on masonite are mounted from floor to ceiling, filling the space and the eyes of the viewer with large white text, gleaned from landscape and a gardening supplier’s signage.

do it, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, February 9-April 29; A Small Town at the Turn Of The Century, Simryn Gill, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, January 26-April 3; Robert Macpherson, Art Gallery of Western Australia, January 25-March 18; Perth International Arts Festival, Jan 26 – Feb 8.

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty And Being Just,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999

What is a drawing? I’ve been itching to write that down for ages. Because, I can’t draw. And yet I do, at home, at my kitchen table, and I use coloured pencils…and then I call the ‘drawings’ other names (they’re so bad, yet they make me happy), because I dare not say ‘drawing.’ There’s something very sensual about making marks on paper—whether writing or drawing. There’s a particular sensuality about ‘working-drawings’ and ‘working-writings’—those drawings and writings which contain the feeling of thinking as it tries to make itself appear, still vibrating as it comes, doubtful and tense, onto the paper. What I have no love for however is auto-CAD produced ‘drawings’, they seem executed, like a problem (except in exceptional cases). An architecture student’s response to Jonathan Dady’s Construction Drawings at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) was that the clamps and bolts holding the scaffolding together detracted from the ‘overall effect.’ But that’s what scaffolding (drawing/writing) is—bits of stuff/steel held by other bits of stuff/steel; it’s not a smooth process or result. Architecture is a poetry of joining, an awkward, difficult, demanding, beautiful engagement. It’s messy when you build something. And what is an ‘overall effect’? Can there be such an effect, overall, after? Is there ever a single unified thingness about ‘the thing’? Overall.

A CAD drawing of (the possibility of expanding) CACSA is realised by Dady in one-to-one steel outline. That is, you see schematically what expansion (an elbowing even) means in terms of real space. Space takes up space. You take away space to create other space. Is it worth it? You can see this drawing on the cover of Broadsheet, Volume 29, no 4. It was made by Steven Mitchell, from the company SPUD (Special Projects Under Development), based on a working-drawing by Dady. And it’s pretty much how it really looks, glowing in bright luminous colours—as if the gallery/house strides out, eager, to meet you; it ‘draws’ you in and then keeps you from its ‘real’ inside. The 3D realisation though is not faithful, it’s a move sideways, not least because the sleekness of CAD is impossible. Actual turns and seams must be really made. The scaffold performs at these moments, producing the stride, a looming, loping, quality. (You think it’s going to reach out and kiss you. True.)

At the opening, which was big, and bigger because of the taking-up of space, we were crammed along the driveway, all of us outside and to one side, as there was no element of the exhibition inside the gallery. There we were, crushed along a narrowed path—which had been, until ‘drawn’ over, a generous paved driveway—trying to get to the wine and the barbecue, and to the project space where 3 more artists (James Dodd, Josh Trenwith, and Simon Burt) were showing (strangely compelling and difficult work), and rubbing against bodies, apologising, talking over the guest speaker: banned from setting foot inside the ‘drawing.’ This policing mimicked the drawing. You have to look at it; there it is; you can (must) not cross into it, into the inside of drawing.

I resist the work’s advances—but not the work—just as I resist the CAD process. I resist its appearance, yet I love this realisation, the beyond of the drawing; it’s like the drawing at the kitchen table, it has the bumps, the bald joins, the gushing colours. It plays with what it is to draw. And while it shows the coldness of computer design, in a considered way, in a conservative way too, it argues with that in translations.

Translation is an integral and complex issue here—like memory. The drawing, made sculpture, does not function as ‘addition’, even while it expands the building. It’s more like a rippling from within, from the past (and the future) of the house—the bricked-in windows, the fireplace—from deep restless memory. It’s dressed up and danced out, swirled, and suddenly, just as it ‘fell’ back into place, as echo, it’s been frozen (recall that old warning: if the wind changes you’ll stay like that). And we, visitors, can see (imagine) a diagram-of-knowing, a map, ordered and excessive; an externalising face/facing of an already internalised longing. One beat of the house’s heart, one exhalation. The Dady thought, measured, translates as sketch/drawing, an initial analogue. The CAD drawing translates this drawing plus the existing structure into an outline outside the structure. The scaffolding translates this into hard cold material in real time and real space, as temporary taken-space for no programmed use, blocking contact with the gallery/house’s own materiality. Useless space. Tempting space. Space for contrary contemplation. Busy reckless dangerous space (like each potentially last heart beat is). The scaffold (usually aiding, abetting, the practice of building) translates as sculpture, as art. And in so doing translates/dematerialises the house ‘behind’ it into questions of duration and endurance. From the empty repleteness of the sculpture one is aware of the compact solidity of the gallery—even of its smallness. The sculpture shrinks the building. Maybe when the sculpture is removed the gallery will remain as after-effect (as if it too has gone forever), itself a lasting translation or transformation, small, dark, and bleak as it seems now.

Is drawing an after-effect in its own right? Does a drawing make its subject (overall) a completely different thing(?)—a thinking thought-of thing, a point of transition, from which it desires to be the effect of ‘afterwards’; after-the-fact of presence comes another presence (over and over) from which the thing cannot recover, it’s there ‘anew’, however slight the change might be—perhaps changed only by acts of thought.

Dady has, in a poetic-relational-sense, brought drawing to the party, made it ‘leap’ off the page, as they say (or threaten), made its language enter the matter of our space. His drawing takes up the world. Yet the taking-up has no meaning, and is available for meaning. And for that reason my resisting both the advance and the appearance is pointless, it’s like resisting what has arrived.

Dady is such a fine, considered, reflective artist that one (collectively) is quiet about his work, as if it’s (he’s) a secret held close, like a favourite book. And this is telling because ‘writing/drawing’ pervades all his work. In a sense Dady wrote the building; instead of showing ‘work’ he exhibited a stilled moment of the building’s tightly kept (now busted) pleasure.

For an overview of Jonathan Dady’s work see Chris Reid’s feature in the latest Broadsheet, Volume 30, Number 1, 2001. In this text Dady’s connection with architecture is clearly made, particularly through his collaborations with architect Simone Vinall.

Jonathan Dady, Construction Drawings, the first of 3 exhibitions in the Domus project curated by Alan Cruickshank, director of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, February 16 – March 25

Disparate elements come together to great effect in L’Ambiente, a multimedia installation show held in February at Hobart’s CAST gallery. L’Ambiente is a collaborative work exploring the emotional potential of light, sound and materials and their interaction, re-woven into a new design and, consequently, a new context. The 4-person installation creates a tangible ambience, enveloping and redefining space-within-space and, inevitably, influencing and involving the gallery-goer’s response to the work (I hesitate to use the word “viewer” here, as experiencing L’Ambiente is all encompassing.)

This manipulation and exploration of spaces can be seen in a series of large-scale screen-like woven structures, in the intervals between various objects that make up the installation, the structural spaces inherent in the materials used and the way the sound element fills and is maximised by the spatial arrangements. The neologism ‘sense-surround’ springs to mind as the most economical way to describe the physicality.

As for the participating artists, their arts practices are eclectic and varied. Richard Skinner is a furniture and lighting designer; in collaboration with artists in other media his aim is to contribute a new perspective on contemporary living space. Matt Perkins is an electronic media artist recently returned from living in Japan; his current work explores perception and consciousness. He found the project a liberating process as he was set goals not related to his usual concerns, allowing him to focus on the “poetry of vision” and how things occur in time and space. Matt Warren’s practice encompasses a prodigious range of time-based media. For 5 years he has been working through the concepts of absence and loss, producing numerous works linked within ‘the on-going absence project.’ He finds collaborative ventures significant in initiating new directions and ideas. Vicki Sauvage has a background in textile art and has been exploring weaving and woven structures in a 3-dimensional way. She has a particular interest in the interplay between form and structure and the language used to describe the interconnectedness of disparate elements.

The most obvious elements of the installation are the large, curved screens created by Skinner and Sauvage, made from materials new and discarded—polyethylene foam, aluminium welding wire, acrylic rods and halogen lights. The seductive snow-white polyethylene foam—recycled packaging material—of which the screens are woven has an eerie beauty when put to this unlikely use. Shown the prototypes of these structures, Perkins produced a complementary video responding to the notions of light and space, with the added element of pixellated images. His videos, projected onto screens, combine visuals taken from his Japanese sojourn with more abstract investigations of colour and pattern. At this point, Warren added his sound component, a unique reverberation, not quite music/unstructured noise, the final piece in the installation jigsaw, filling the gallery space, linking the physical works by its all-pervasive presence.

The gallery visitor enters L’Ambiente to be greeted, or enveloped, by a powerful and compelling ambience; as the door swings closed, one is left in semi-darkness. Beacons of light pulsate here and there—from within the enormous glowing screens, from the flickering video projections and the floor-based “lamp voices”, small, humming lighting fixtures largely made from ordinary drinking straws and evoking the retro fascination of items such as the lava lamp.

As one negotiates the objects and spaces, the environment is ever-changing; the video projections bombard the senses with different images, the insistent yet strangely soothing soundwork is infinitely varied and intangible, the shadows change, the visitor discovers that taking different paths between the physical installation elements leads to unexpected views and impressions, even visual illusions.

The whole is an immensely satisfying and engrossing experience, unique but owing something, perhaps, to the haunting experience of visiting a darkened temple or cathedral, crossed with the novelty of finding one’s way through a maze. The visual elements are strong and the soundwork complements them well. The artists explain, “We feel that it is important to see this installation as having the potential to evolve and incorporate new elements such as new video material from Japan, new sound elements and new screens. It is not just fixed in time when it is presented in a gallery space, but can continue to develop and evolve.”

L’Ambiente, a collaborative installation, Richard Skinner, Vicki Sauvage, Matt Perkins & Matt Warren, Contemporary Art Services Tasmania (CAST) Gallery, North Hobart, February 3 – 25.