Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

Author archive

George Khut

photo Simon Cuthbert

George Khut

George (Poonkhin) Khut is an Australian artist currently based in Sydney after working extensively in Tasmania. His best known sound installation Pillowsongs (see RT24 p46) was first exhibited in Hobart (1998) and has since been re-worked and shown in Melbourne at Temple Studios (1999), Sydney at Gallery 4A (1999) and Darwin at 24 HR ART (2000).

More recently he has been working on a series of commissions and collaborations with performer Wendy McPhee, which will culminate in their new multi-channel video installation Night Shift. The project has received assistance from the Australia Council’s New Media Fund (at the creative development stage and as a new work) for its premiere at the Brisbane Powerhouse in 2002. Khut describes the installation as “incorporating alleged techniques of subliminal media such as split second imagery, sub-audible utterance, and rhythm, in a meditation on solitude and feminine performativity. The sound works are concerned primarily with an experience of sound at a deeply personal level, re-synthesising the ‘silences’ or noises of the urban soundscape into a series of surreal ‘interior tableaux’, and recalling moments of intense and aurally focused solitude and silence such as meditation, convalescence, insomnia, waiting rooms, and late night travel.” I caught up with him during his most recent trip to Hobart where he is working on Censored with McPhee and director Deborah Pollard for the 10 Days on the Island festival.

Poonkhin, how did you get started?

I was born in Adelaide in 1969 and grew up in the inner-city suburbs. I started off noodling around with old cassette players, echo machines and Moog synthesisers in the mid 80s, and this process of tweaking material remains at the core of my creative process.

Your mother is Anglo-Australian and your dad is Chinese-Malaysian. Are there perceivable ethnic influences in your work, and if so, how are they manifest?

Tough question, and without a doubt the answer is yes, but in today’s culture of ‘ethno-fetishisation’ certain aspects could be way over-rated. My father has always pursued martial arts and their associated approaches and disciplines. For example, meditation and notions of ‘chi’ (life force) have been part of my environment since childhood, however they manifest in a very understated and often commonplace manner. Being labelled as Asian carries a lot of baggage that is extraneous to my work. At the moment I’m in a process of transition between cities and a new name. I am changing my first name from Poonkhin to George, my maternal grandfather’s name (laughs)…which is paradoxical in today’s climate of ethnic reclamation. The exoticism can be an impediment to transparent communication when people focus on the messenger rather than the message.

This a pragmatic thing: I call up lots of people in hardware and hi-fi shops, and I’d rather avoid spending 10 minutes spelling my name, explaining how to pronounce it, where it’s from, and where my father’s family (never my mother’s family) is from. Being so linked to the notion of identity, my position on ethnicity is ambivalent and will continue to evolve. I think identity politics were a real issue in the 80s and 90s, and I just want to get on with making things happen rather than constantly being required to describe my position.

Okay, so George, how would you describe your work?

Primarily aural, with an emphasis on developing a sense of presence through atmosphere and spatial awareness. The focus is on aspects of space rather than object. It’s like trying to create a bridge that connects the installation site with the reality of the sound, much like the manner in which cinema establishes a sense of place/character/mood. The works are essentially concerned with various experiences of solitude, and take advantage of the implied solitude of the gallery context. A frequent response from listeners is the observation that the soundscape appears as an analogue for their own internal dialogue, and as such the works deal with the crossover between private and public spaces. They trace the meandering line of the lucid dream, with sounds drifting and emerging/merging. Quiet pulsing sounds, slow undulations and enharmonic drones challenge the listener’s perception, asking whether it is their shifting attention/perception or the work that is generating the ambiguity. I use silence as a dramatic ingredient, exploiting listening habits accustomed to conventional notions of music or an event. It is part of the subject/ground relationship, where the listener waits for something to happen in a conventional musical sense, and not hearing it, the ears become hungry. At this point the listener either decides nothing is happening, or in the heightened awareness driven by expectation they start to enter the work.

What inspires you to create?

Because I have to…(laughs)…no really that’s a very hard question. There are places I just have to be, and making these visual and sound environments is a means of getting there; I am drawn to these places. Each time I revisit them the space unfolds, and there are more corners to turn.

So is it fair to say that it’s not actually the space of first encounter you are trying to evoke, but rather a refraction of the real world seen from an internal space?

Yes. In a way I am trying to provide a portal to a space that was inspired by first hand experience. I start with the raw material, then I tweak it, watching how things change and transform. It becomes a journey where I follow the effects and transformations until the work arrives at a particular sense of place that feels complete. It’s a bit like meandering through the terrain, and reaching certain points along the way where, I might say, I can hang there for a while. Completeness really is a flexible notion in light of contemporary music/remix culture and there is no longer that concrete sense of finality and authorship…(laughs again)…I’d love to see visual artists remixing each other’s work.

In previous conversations you’ve mentioned duration as a key element of your work. Can you describe how it functions?

When you are with a particular piece of sound material for long enough, say between 10 and 30 mins, it will begin to sustain itself well after the actual physical sound has ceased (that’s one of the challenges in an installation context—getting the audience to stay!). It continues on in your head, and in the way you hear your immediate environment…you walk outside and the sound is still ringing in your ears…you actually perceive all the nuances of the material, but now it’s constructed from a combination of your own memory and the noise of your environment. Maybe this has a lot to do with the urban/industrial environment, all those fans and combustion engines, creating this rich blanket of noise that we can build sounds from. Actually I’ve been driven to total distraction sometimes, working in my studio late at night, building these extremely quiet situations and then realising that all the cooling fans inside my equipment are probably making more noise and complex resonances than my own recordings.

Collaborations form a significant component of your recent output. What do you gain from that working dynamic?

The key to a successful collaboration is a sense of mutual and shared intimacy with the material at hand. The best collaborations I have been involved with have a strong rapport as their foundation. I’m genuinely fascinated by my collaborators’ work, and vice versa (I hope). There is such a dominant culture of ‘hot housing’ projects (especially in the performing arts) that it is great to get the opportunity to let projects evolve organically at their own pace. This is important because long term partnerships can nurture details and nuances that don’t get the chance to appear in fast track projects.

RealTime issue #42 April-May 2001 pg. 37

Pan Sonic (Newtown RSL)

photo netochka

Pan Sonic (Newtown RSL)

The Australian What Is Music? festival, directed by Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim, has become a regular outlet for new and experimental music since it began in 1994 (see RT 35, p24). This year’s event was the biggest and most well attended festival so far and can be seen as a coming of age, attracting a huge audience and an impressive line up of both local and international performers.

From the first night it was clear that there is an audience for such a festival. Last year was let down by an appalling venue in Kings Cross which caused many to stay away. This time the festival moved around; in Sydney at Imperial Slacks gallery, Harbourside Brasserie, Chauvel Cinema and Newtown RSL; in Melbourne at an array of venues including Punters Club, Revolver, Rechabite Hall and numerous pubs. The events spanned 6 nights in Sydney and 11 in Melbourne. The audience in Sydney was impressive, from 200 on the first night to over 500 on the last. The sheer size of the festival was like nothing ever seen in this part of the world for experimental, and predominantly Australian, performers.

The opening night saw well-known local Pimmon (who played a beautiful and well received solo set) paired with Hecker, the German laptop-er from the Mego label. Their sounds bounced around the gallery veering towards the grating and complex sounds that the Austrian label Mego is known for. Other highlights included Dworzec from Melbourne who played an incredibly fragile set, the audio hanging by a thread. Their sound, produced by guitar/electronics/synthesiser/accordion, felt like it could easily slip into lost noodlings or, as is the case here, hold a captivated audience on the edge of their seats. The final set by Minit brought a long evening to a wonderful come down, as their fine electronic sounds played out through electronics and a harmonium. The harmonium gave texture and Torben Tilly added an interesting visual aspect, sitting at the keyboard, dancing along to the beats that briefly appeared. The opening evening saw the electronic end of the contemporary experimental music spectrum, a definite aesthetic emerging as these artists seem to work closely with what can only be described as beauty, juxtaposed with a smattering of harsh noise to wake the dreaming head.

The second night showed off the other end of the spectrum, that of old-school improv. We heard Cor Fuhler (Netherlands) play prepared piano, Tony Buck with a drum solo, Loop Orchestra with tape loops, the sax/laptop combo of Max Nagel and Josef Novotny (Austria), and a computer piece by Julian Knowles, an audio work played to a slow-mo video of a long drive in the rain. The last performance, an interesting listen from the grouping of Tony Buck, Chris Abrahams (both from The Necks) and Jon Rose. Rose yet again felt the need to have a go at computer generated music, stating that his violin was a personal computer. His position is absurd and shows a strange sort of bitterness, no better than the crazy idea that one instrument is better than another.

The third night was held at the Chauvel where Farmers Manual (Vienna) played a 2 hour set of sound and video. Farmers Manual ask the audience to literally change their expectations of what music is and how they approach a performance, both in the sense of perception and entertainment. The work was created in real time through a network of data flows that utilised a vast array of data and information, much of which was never intended for music, let alone sound. The results are a long process that ebbs and flows from what sounds simply like noise through to a highly developed and structured audio output. The set ended on a high of strobing visuals and loud bass driven audio which left the audience in near shock. In Melbourne they played to a packed club but the basic, although shortened, outcome was very similar.

Makigami Koichi (Japan) was the biggest surprise of the festival for many. In performance he used a startling array of vocal techniques, veering from khoomei (throat-singing) to mock opera to Jews harp. The style was cut-and-paste with Koichi juxtaposing funny sounds with perplexing tones, theatre and dance. During his performance in Sydney, the audience was in fits of laughter, cheering at the end of each piece and demanding an encore. This style is not new to free improvisation; the difference here was the reaction from the audience, not usual for improvisation. In Melbourne the audience treated the work with awe-struck respect and in return were treated to a number of extended khoomei and Jews-harp pieces.

The final Sydney night at the RSL in Newtown was packed, at least 500 people through the door, for what turned out to be much removed from easy listening. This was by far the loudest evening of the Sydney leg of the festival. Smallcock and Nasenbluten played at volume and even the DJ packed a punch. The key performance was Pan Sonic (Finland) who stood behind their instruments, looking very blank, as they blasted out analogue bass from their ancient equipment. Pan Sonic audio is full to the point where it really hurts and many ears had fingers pushed firmly into them. The band have a long history in minimal electronic music which often borders on dance. Their current set gives up much of their experimental history for an easier to cope with 4/4 basis.

We can only hope that next year’s What is Music? festival continues to grow and open the vast range of experimental music to a quickly developing audience.

What is Music? 2001, Sydney, February 18-23; Melbourne, February 25-March 7; www.whatismusic.com

RealTime issue #42 April-May 2001 pg. 39

Few contemporary music concerts today seem distinctly contemporary without reference to technology. Even fewer concerts present both local technological prowess and creativity in such balance with traditional instrumental performance as did AUTONOMIC. In addition to a refined sensibility towards both practices, there was a certain synergy among the works compelling us to believe in the progress of music and the appreciation of those valued attributes of virtuosity and historical knowledge. All of this unfolding in the kitsch industrial space of Melbourne’s Public Office.

AUTONOMIC sat squarely in the arena of a contemporary music presentation. Although the relaxed clubby atmosphere had people enough to populate all the comfy chairs, a larger audience might have raised the dynamic further and with some scheduling adjustments, tightened the overall impact of the music. But Melita White’s program was both subtle and challenging.

Ross Bencina’s Dreamscape Resonances opened the concert with live computer-based sounds diffused through an 8 channel ambisonic surround sound system assisted by sound engineer, Steve Adam. Bencina developed the system on which he both composed and presented his music. Its complexity and sophistication spoke of the creative talent that Melbourne fosters and, perhaps, takes for granted. Each of the 5 works displayed a number of stylistic influences including ambient, electroacoustic and world musics.

Immediately contrasting the electronic and sample base works, Melita White’s hydra threads addressed the instrumental and overtly live nature of music. Five water filled glass jars and a tenor saxophone, played by Keith Thorman Hunter and Tim O’Dwyer respectively, continued the sonic delicacy of the electronic works but added what was to be an increasingly visceral edge. The work, derived from a hymn, unfolded in the chiming jars and the melodic assertiveness of the saxophone.

The one + one—live improvisation again found Keith Thorman Hunter on percussion, but this time paired with Melanie Chillianis on flute, in a virtuoso display of extended flute techniques and a tableaux of percussive manoeuvres. Tentative private explorations gave way to attentive imitation. The resulting improvisation resolved fortuitously on the impromptu sound of a distant train horn.

ChronoDemonicCycling, an improvisation with Newton Armstrong on sensor driven computer synthesis and Tim O’Dwyer on saxophone, immediately cranked the energy level. From the start the sound was intense and unrelenting. O’Dwyer’s extensive repertoire of sax sounds was often indistinguishable from the electronic sounds which were the product of Armstrong’s use of gestural controllers to configure the synthesis engine.

Alexander Waterman’s short and intriguing Grammophonology, based on processed gramophone record samples, set the mood for the final solo work, sige, by Tim O’Dwyer. For bass saxophone and pre-recorded sound, sige was challenging with the O’Dwyer style again unleashed with some restriction of movement imposed by the mounted sax. Nuanced techniques of key sounds and resonant aspirations through the instrument, occasionally lost amid the complex tape sounds, exemplified O’Dwyer’s skill and understanding of the saxophone family.

* * * *

A visually intriguing collection of percussion instruments (that could well have been an installation of late 20th century percussionist tools) was encountered in the Melbourne Museum between the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre and the Kalaya Meeting Place. The wide curved walkway quickly filled with the cognoscenti and the curious, who witnessed a lively and often humorous performance by percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson, as part of an ongoing series of Sunday recitals in the new museum.

Given the number of children in the audience, the opening work for amplified, stroked and massaged balloons spoke directly to the idea of music from simple things. Dear Judy was as much a theatrical performance upon the balloons as when Tomlinson resorted to silent gestures upon her own body. For every child there, the work legitimated the idea of environmental and sonic self-exploration.

Warren Burt’s Beat Generation in the California Coastal Ranges saw Tomlinson shift slightly towards a more sophisticated performance practice. Deceptively simple on the surface, the work’s recorded sine tones and vibraphone sound had, at certain times, an interesting cumulative effect, highlighting the challenging nature of the work. Listening for the interference or beat patterns that emerged between the notes played on the vibraphone and the shifting sine tones was certainly the attraction. This ‘third’ sonic behaviour encouraged attention to the sound and an anticipation of the onset of the beating characteristic.

Bone Alphabet raised the virtuoso level still further by introducing a greater range of instruments and a visually complex performance procedure. Had Brian Ferneyhough’s work been surreptitiously placed at this point? While certainly challenging, its complexity seemed subordinate to the spectacle of the performance. Listeners unfamiliar with Ferneyhough’s repertoire and style could easily absorb the spectacle as another dimension to the possibilities that overflowed from the array of instruments before them.

Finally, Anthony Pateras’ Mutant Theatre was clearly anticipated. Apart from being a ‘First Performance’, the children and many adults seemed eager to witness the outcome of the fall of colourful dominoes that would intermittently trigger mousetraps with balloons attached. As it happened, the fun part was over with a speed and subtlety probably not anticipated but the greater part of the composition held moments, in both the music and instrumentation, of equal fascination. Smashing light bulbs, sprinklings of marbles across instruments, a roaring gong and sounds from toys and cheap electronic instruments created a tour de force which closed the concert to acclaim.

AUTONOMIC, Auricle New Music Ensemble, Public Office, West Melbourne, February 23: Virtuosic Visions, Vanessa Tomlinson, percussion, Clocked Out Productions, Melbourne Museum, March 4

RealTime issue #42 April-May 2001 pg. 40

Leeanna Walsman & Nathan Page, La Dispute

photo Tracey Shramm

Leeanna Walsman & Nathan Page, La Dispute

Editor’s introduction

Just as the arguments prompted by Richard Wherrett’s National Performance Conference speech seemed to be thinning out, playwright Louis Nowra added another perspective to Wherrett’s “crisis” in his essay “The director’s cut” (Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 3).

While Wherrett sets out to evoke a malaise and suggest tough solutions, Nowra is more analytic. Like Wherrett he sees Australian “theatre as drifting without much of a purpose”, but he offers more than an absence of humanist vision and funding spread too thin as reasons for the condition. Nowra argues that a new generation of directors (who, like Wherrett’s targets, lack humility) do not engage with living playwrights, and that filmmaking draws other potential directors away from the stage (“the real reason for there being more women directors is not so much a deliberate policy, but the natural process of filling a vacuum left by young male directors”).

Yet again anti-humanist postmodernism—which has had nil effect on mainstream theatre in this country (save being railed at by David Williamson)—is the whipping boy. By tackling only the classics (the authors are dead and untroublesome), Nowra writes that “young directors are saying they are the authors of their productions.” Who are these young directors, what are the works they actually tackle, and, more to the point, if they are at fault, how many are there—enough to constitute a crisis? Hardly.

Of innovative directors, Barrie Kosky is the easiest target, directing theatre and opera classics since leaving behind his collaborative Gilgul Theatre Company venture. Who else then? Surely not Michael Kantor, a provocative director who has committed himself to a steady output of new Australian plays and music theatre works, nor Jenny Kemp who alternates directing her own works with classics (Marivaux for example for MTC), new works (Joanna Murray-Smith’s Nightfall) and collaborations with dancer Helen Herbertson. What about Benedict Andrews, Resident Director at the Sydney Theatre Company, the director Nowra uses as prime example of the problem? Nowra is curiously oblivious to Andrews’ association with playwright Beatrix Christian in the 2001 Sydney Theatre Company season on 2 projects—her new play, Old Masters, and a re-working of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (yes, a classic, but adapted by Andrews and Christian). It’s hard to think of key Australian directors who are not working with living playwrights.
Nowra blunders badly when he tries to portray young Indigenous directors as the good guys: “Interestingly, this is not a feature of emerging Aboriginal directors such as Wesley Enoch who, in shows such as 7 Stages of Grieving and The Sunshine Club, is determined to tell stories about his people by working with Australian writers.” In fact Enoch wrote both shows, the first with performer Deborah Mailman and the second on his own (the composer was John Rodgers). And what about his Black Medea for the STC and Grace for Kooemba Jdarra. Of course, he has directed plays by Nowra and Kevin Gilbert, but let’s not see Wesley Enoch as somehow different from his adventurous peers.

Once again, the problems facing Australian theatre are dealt with inadequately and misleadingly. Nowra admits admiration for Andrews’ directing, but bewails his lack of humility when producing a classic play and his alledged failure to work with living playwrights. Benedict Andrews replies. KG

******

Fidelity

I enjoyed Louis Nowra’s article “The Director’s Cut” because it steered the recent banter triggered by Richard Wherrett away from bitchier, subjective terrain into a discussion about ideas and values.

Louis also raised significant issues about the relationship between director and writer which I feel beg response. Given the article’s idealising of several established directors versus its anxiety about young directors, I feel compelled to offer an alternative point of view.

The theatre, it seems, is haunted by the dead. At the core of its practice is a fundamental tension between the present and the past, between the living and the dead, between the written and the read. This tension necessarily spills over into questions of authenticity, authority, and interpretation. The dead want to keep living, they keep coming back, to speak to us, but with whose voice?

The actor embodies this tension. Robert Menzies, a great Australian actor with a unique relationship to both classical European texts and new Australian writing, once remarked to me on the strangeness of the stage actors’ role. Where else in life could someone claim that at a certain time every night they could know exactly what they will be feeling at any given moment? For instance, that as Oedipus at approximately 10.25 each night for the run of the STC season last year, Robert would play a man driven to the limits of guilt and despair choosing to rip out his own eyes rather than see the light. And night after night, the actor will convince us, the audience, that we are witnessing this terrible and beautiful event for the first time. And indeed we are and we are not, at the same time. This is the doubling act of the theatre that Artaud wrote of, its shadowy presence.

Theatre is a kind of exorcism. Oedipus, like Hamlet, will not die. These characters keep coming back through new bodies, so new audiences can bear witness. Seneca’s re-telling of the primal myth was written around 500 years after Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy. Around 2000 years later, Ted Hughes translated Seneca’s text and created a new version that contained the bloody language knots of his poetic genius and our century. When Barrie Kosky directed Hughes’/Seneca’s Oedipus for STC last year he also created a new text. I saw the production several times because I was attracted to its intelligence, rigour and the relentless nature of its poetry. By confining the action, to a small scaffold, Kosky created the equivalent of a filmic close-up, an x-ray into the hallucinations of Oedipus, the puppet show of his unconscious. The power of this production was built upon a love of the playwright’s language and an awareness that as one of the core myths of Western civilisation the Oedipus myth, like the Sphinx’s riddle, cannot be forever solved. It remains a knot to be worked over by the actor. So, nightly confined on a crude stage for 2 hours, Robert Menzies would begin again, raise his ghosts and civilisation’s plagues. It is finally only the actor who brings theatre into play, who makes any communion possible between his/her body onstage and our bodies in the audience. To quote Ted Hughes, “It has never been my illusion that the theatre should belong to the writer. The theatre belongs to the actor…”

I am interested in the meeting point between a written text and the living body of the actor. I am also interested in the impossible conversation that occurs when working on a ‘classic’ text. I love the process of taking words and ciphers on a page from another culture and epoch, and translating them over time into the bodies of the actors, into something living and current. I like this exchange across centuries, this archaeology into the languages and thought processes of civilisation, this interrogation of what it means to be human. It seems to me that the theatre is precisely the place where these exchanges can still take place.

I am not interested in museum theatre or a received notion of approaching a given writer. Whether approaching a text that is 2000 years old or 2 days old, as director I strive to discover the text for the first time, to x-ray its insides and release its mysteries and demons. I try to explore (with and through the text) ideas about what it feels like to be alive, to ask questions about power, sexuality, death, love and other wonders. I search for very personal connections between my self and the work. Otherwise it is a dead thing.

So I was a little disturbed to read Louis Nowra’s recent statement that “many young directors want to tackle a classical text because it is easy to stamp their authority and ego on a canon piece by dismantling it and interpreting it anew.” This seems to me to be an alarmingly cynical view of the motivation behind the work of young artists and a shallow understanding of the reasons why a director might choose to engage with a classical text. Theatre is not an easy place. It demands intellectual rigour, emotional nakedness, and febrile imagination. As a director, I work on both contemporary texts and classical texts. I work with living writers and dead ones. I do not breathe some sigh of relief as Louis Nowra might imagine when working on a classical text as if I were suddenly free to dance on the playwright’s grave. Each project is demanding and all consuming and I enter it with questions and fantasies I want to explore with the community of people I work with and the audience who will watch our work.

There are reasons why classical texts keep coming back and directors and ensembles keep exploring them. When I think of plays I consider to be great classics, I love them because they are bigger than me. They have come through time like shards in an archaeological dig, full of secret lives, messages, and codes. This is why a director can return to Hamlet or King Lear several times during his/her life. The material is rich, dense and elusive enough to provide new challenges and glimpses over time. The renegade Italian director Romeo Castelluci speaks of the kind of awe an ancient text (in this case The Oresteia) inspires: “I wanted…a text before which I would have to bow, absorbing its mystery, and shaking from ‘contact’…”

I fear Louis Nowra is subscribing to a rather cheap, worn cliche of Director’s Theatre when he proposes that certain directors are concerned only with directorial authorship rather than the authority of the text. This notion is in danger of setting up a hierarchical schema that says Playwright sacrosanct, Director servant. I am not sure that this rule leads to the most exciting theatre. It seems to place imagined constructs of fidelity ahead of the desire to make engaging theatre. Hinting at a more open and braver idea of theatre-making, playwright Beatrix Christian said recently that “a play-script isn’t literature, it’s one limb of that deeply complex, mysterious and volatile organism called theatre.”

Translating any text to the stage is a process of interpretation and therefore a political act. When we represent ourselves onstage we address our assumptions about who we are and what we value. In rehearsal we work through the language and ideas of the playwright and transform words on a page into actions and emotions to be felt by the actors and the audience. Unlike an essay, novel, poem, or the frozen time of film, theatre is made only through living bodies in real time. The written language forms a skeleton of ideas and emotions which are brought to life (or made into the act of theatre) by the physical utterance of the actor, the spatial constructions of director and designers, and the reception of audience.

When I think of productions of ‘classics’ which have thrilled me, it has been clear that the director has worked with the material to release its life for a contemporary audience—the radical deconstructions of the Wooster Group towards O’Neill and Chekhov, Heiner Müller’s production of Brecht’s Der Aufhaltsame Aufsteig des Arturo Ui, Castelluci’s visceral retelling of Giulio Cesare, Peter Sellars’ contemporary political takes on Sophocles and Mozart, Stephen Daldry’s An Inspector Calls, Eimuntas Nekrosius’ recent Hamlet, or Kosky’s production of Mourning Becomes Electra. They each contain a tension between the written language and the theatrical language. They follow the text but reveal unexpected readings, hidden corners, or blow away received assumptions to reveal the writing afresh. This I consider to be faithful to the writer and the play. It is an imaginative engagement and trust which I would wish for from any writer (living or dead) who believed in the continued life of the theatre.

Louis singled my production of La Dispute by Pierre Cartlet de Marivaux as being indicative of “a young director establishing his authority over the writer.” While on the one hand calling the production “fascinating and riveting”, he also argues that it was a “perverse distortion of the original text” which would have left anyone who didn’t know Marivaux with a “wrong” impression of his work. While I find it lamentable that our theatre culture has not permitted us to have seen other comparable productions of Marivaux’s plays, I do not feel it is my responsibility as a contemporary theatre director to create a museum version of his work based on a finite, Platonic notion of how his work is supposed to be played. I think the Comedie Francais are probably already doing a good enough job of that.

I do believe however that my production was faithful to this particular (and peculiar) Marivaux play. I also cannot divorce myself from the history of my own times in making the play. The production was created with an acknowledgment of the horrors of the 20th century—the experiments of Nazi concentration camps, the orphanages of Ceaucescu’s Romania, and the state sponsored stealing of generations of Indigenous children. It shifted the question about who is more treacherous in love, male or female, into a contemporary anxiety about the nature or artificiality of sexuality, the processes of language and subjectivity, and our ability to accept or deny difference. I did not impose these things upon the play. They were written into the 19 short scenes by Marivaux in 1744. I believe that the supposed dispute about fidelity of the play’s title (which remains unresolved and ambivalent) was not Marivaux’s primary subject matter but a smoke screen, a gilded frame in his mirror box.

La Dispute is a problematic play for Louis to single out in a discussion about textual fidelity. It was a notorious failure with Parisian audiences at its 1744 premiere at the Comedie Francais. It played for a single night and was confined to the dustbin of history and academia until Patrice Chereau’s legendary 3 and a half hour production in 1973. The play has since found a modern audience 250 years since its failed premiere.

La Dispute is what Richard Wherrett might term a ‘minor classic’, but it comes as a perverse and fantastical document from the Enlightenment which has the ability to speak across and of history, to provoke questions about the history of Western subjectivity, and engage with Sydney audiences in 2000.

Louis makes another very upsetting statement in his article. He says, “In fact, theatre itself is not inspiring young directors.” He claims that most would prefer to direct film because it is an “exciting, sexy” medium, and implies that those working in theatre are simply filling a vacuum left by an exodus of (predominantly male??) directors to film.

Theatre and cinema are different mediums. One is certainly not sexier than the other. As a ‘young director’, I choose to work in the theatre. I am not killing time until a film shoot. I love working with actors and writers in the theatre. I am in love with its particular imaginative and technical demands. I like the time to play and question that theatre gives me, without the need for an extensive and expensive technical apparatus. I like the privacy of rehearsal and I like sitting in the audience watching live actors. I love the impermanence of theatre. It is live. It disappears. It can only be held in the memory.

PS This is a worry. I just did a spell check and my laptop did not recognise the word MARIVAUX. It suggested MIRAMAX.

RealTime issue #42 April-May 2001 pg. 23

I’m a sucker for (bad) puns at the best of times but given the recent history of the Perth International Arts festival (PIAF), they’re downright irresistible. Either that or Director Sean Doran shows an alarming prescience. ‘All washed up’ seems to capture the fairly catastrophic outcomes of last year’s PIAF. Themed ‘water’, it was a festival that began with a deluge that drowned out the opening night Philip Glass concert and ended with a massive financial dunking. Aptly enough, this year’s festival, carried the theme ‘earth’ and given the limitations of the budget, programming was indeed, much more ‘down to earth.’ The mind boggles at the possible outcomes of the ‘fire’ and ‘air’ festivals yet to come!

Despite the tight budget, there were some strikingly positive outcomes for local artists, companies and organisations. In the visual arts, while the budget for exhibitions remained more or less consistent with that of previous years, the appointment of a Visual Arts Manager, Sophie O’Brien, meant that this festival within a festival was infinitely more focused and substantial than previously. On the other hand, while this year’s theatre and dance program was a much more low key affair with far less emphasis on big ticket overseas acts than has historically been the case, it strongly featured local performing arts companies and projects. While most of them received zip financial contribution, the value and scale of the marketing and promotion offered through the festival paid huge dividends in terms of excellent box-office returns for the participating companies.

In terms of content, you’d be hard pressed to find a connecting theme. It was definitely a ‘something for everyone’, fiscally responsible, kind of affair. There was a bit of emphasis on works from South Africa (the Baxter Theatre Company, Ellis & Bheki) and there was a certain pleasant irony in that the headlining Australian theatre works were both strongly Aboriginal in focus (Marrugeku and Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre Company). Beyond which you could take in the really big one, the Merce Cunningham Dance Theatre, and smaller projects such as the charming and virtuosic Cirque Éloise from Canada, the slightly daggy (and derivative) but kind of interesting ‘popera’ Denis Cleveland from New York or the inevitable production from ‘ye olde merrie England’, A Servant to Two Masters, by the Young Vic and Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company. This year’s program was thankfully free of Irish drama.

Marrugeku’s Crying Baby was probably the highlight of my festival. This ongoing collaboration between members of Stalker Stilt Company, Perth-based Indigenous performers and the Oenpelli community in Arnhem Land remains the most artistically, conceptually, politically and socially ambitious work being made in Australia today. The issues are huge and directly impact upon the working process of the company (see RT#41) but the fragility, vulnerability, confusion and instability of that collaborative process is one of the most hopeful things I have witnessed in Australian theatre.

Ironically, Crying Baby was performed at The Quarry Amphitheatre, a favourite outdoor venue for those who prefer their theatre as a kind of benign backdrop to the pleasures of chilled white wine and a gourmet picnic hamper. It’s a beautiful site surrounded by bush, overlooking the lights of the city and Mark Howett’s lighting and Andrew Carter’s sparse set—suggestive of the weird sculptural forms of much of the flora in Arnhem Land—made for an extraordinary environment.

Crying Baby connects the story of an orphan boy neglected by his tribe and the retribution of Kunjikuime (a form of Rainbow Serpent). The performance extends this story visually, aurally and spatially, to encompass the experience of the children of the Stolen Generations, even drawing on that favourite trope of non-Indigenous Australia, the white child, lost in the bush. The story is told in ‘language’ and drawn in the sand by elder and storyman, Thompson Yulidjirri, and translated into English by composer and musician Matthew Fargher. It is elaborated through beautiful and poignant filmwork by Warwick Thornton (Katjet people, Central Australia) which juxtaposes images of a white child wandering aimlessly through grey green bush with archival footage of Aboriginal mission children. The live performers, often on stilts as Mimi spirits, appear and disappear, as do the extraordinarily compelling traditional dancers. Also interwoven is the post-contact story of Mr Watson, the first missionary in Arnhem Land, who removed the Kunwinjku people from their land Gapari (the Crying Baby site) to Goulburn Island.

For the most part, Crying Baby has a haunting, dream-like and evocative quality. It is extraordinarily moving and leaves you in no doubt that these people, stories, spirits, do inhabit and move across the land. The only difficulty I had with the work was a sense that, as Marrugeku, there are still (inevitably) moments of Stalker, which seem to pull the work back to a different place and time and create a kind of rupture. While the stilt-work is perfectly suited to representing the elongated Mimi spirits, the flying scenes, in which the sheer logistics of getting ‘crying baby’ hooked up and swinging around, seem clumsy and not worth the effort. However, this is quibbling. In the end, to quote director Rachael Swain, “this is an important piece of art communicating to a diverse audience in remote communities and urban festivals nationally and internationally.” It is also about reconciliation as more than a glib catchphrase, as a lived process inclusive of pain, listening, grief, moments of great beauty as well as loss and stories of country both pre and post-contact.

The experience of Crying Baby made other works dealing with the effects of colonisation, dislocation, loss and trauma rather more disappointing. Alice, directed by Sally Richardson for the Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre, was a really difficult show for me. I’d previously seen a showing of the work in development some 18 months earlier. As Alice Haines: One Night Stand, this much rawer version of her autobiography communicated directly and simply to the audience through straightforward storytelling, song and music. This festival version, however, with the addition of theatrical lighting and set (by the ubiquitous Mark Howett and Andrew Carter) looked like a bad 1970s pub act. Alice is known to many, as singer with the band Mixed Relations, and had this show focused more on her strengths as a singer it might have been a more substantial work. Alice’s stories of pain, loss and survival deserve to be heard but unless some serious critical analysis and dramaturgical rigour is brought to both the material and the process, it will not begin to achieve its potential.

Suip: The Fruit of the Vein by Baxter Theatre Company was extremely familiar to anyone who’s seen any theatre from South Africa over the past decade. Again, this is an important story of cultural shock, trauma and alcoholism. It is a community work in the sense that it was originally developed by young drama students at the University of Capetown keen to explore the legacy of previous generations apparently irreversibly damaged by the effects of colonisation and alcohol. They spent a month on the streets living with, interviewing and learning from their elders. The result is TIE (theatre in education) style theatre with a strong message and generally solid performances. With the exception of the outstanding onstage percussionist, Nkululeko Mzwakhe Hlatshwayo, and the young silent ‘boy’ beautifully performed by Nicol Sheraton, its in your face style drove me mad. As with Alice, however, audiences responded fairly rapturously.

It was great to catch up with 3 parts of a 4 part program, prag/port/perth, curated for the WA Fringe Festival by Berlin-based, Australian dance artist Paul Gazzola. Gazzola’s work has a strong orientation to live art (as opposed to dance per se) and this program, encompassing dance, video, installation and performance by artists from the Czech Republic, Portugal and Perth, reflected those interests. Unfortunately I missed his reprise of the Yoko Ono performance work Cut Piece. I did, however, manage to see Claudia, the video installation by Portugese artist Noe Sendas, a re-working of aspects of Fellini’s 8 1/2, as well as Venus with the Rubics Cube by Czech choreographer Kristyna Lhotakova and musician Ladislav Souk. A duet between double bass and dancer, this deceptively simple and idiosyncratic work dealing with anorexia and the ‘image of the perfect woman’ exploited a touching physical gawkiness. The final piece in the program was Calculating Hedonism: Performance stories from sober and temperate bodies, a collaborative work by Perth-based artists Felicity Bott (dancer), Bec Dean (singer/video artist), David Fussell (performer) and Paul Wakelam (architect, designer & LFX). In some ways, this work reminded me of New Yorker Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, particularly in its use of language to describe shifting psychological states, odd visual/physical juxtapositions and, of course, Foreman’s use of string to articulate the theatrical space. Similarly, Wakelam’s precise mapping of the performance area in coloured tape created an animate sense of space. While Calculating Hedonism, which dealt with the “calculating approach that contemporary society takes to its social relationships, their bodies and leisure time”, would have benefited from some judicious editing, it was great to see performers really playing with form. I was happy to be there.

Crying Baby, The Marrugeku Company, storyman Thompson Yulidjirri, director/writer Rachael Swain, choreographer Raymond Blanco, composer Matthew Fargher; collaborator/performers Dalisa Pigram, Sofia Gibson, Trevor Jamieson, Katia Molino, Simon Peart, Tanya Mead, Eddie Nailibidj, Rexie Barmaja Wood, Harry Thomson; The Quarry Amphitheatre, January 31-February 4; Alice, Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre, creator/performer Alice Haines, director Sally Richardson, Subiaco Theatre Company, Jan 31-Feb 17; Suip: The Fruit of the Vein, Baxter Theatre Company, writers Heinrich Reisenhofer & Oscar Petersen, director/choreographer Heinrich Reisenhofer, Octagon Theatre, UWA, Feb 7-11; Prag/Port/ Pert, 4 part program for the WA Fringe Festival, Rechabites Hall, Feb 7-14.

Canberra is a small town and I approached this play with a little trepidation—most of the cast and crew are close friends, and negative comments on a work can often be far more trouble than they’re worth. Wearing my flame-retardant underwear I made my way into the packed and somewhat stuffy Courtyard Studio at the Canberra Theatre Centre. Social Division, which presented this play, is a typical flag of convenience that badges local collectives in the absence of a properly funded professional theatre company in Canberra to foster such work.

Theatre and performance in Canberra have been in limbo since the demise of the mighty Splinters. Subsequently we’ve had not much more than an endless array of pretty ordinary plays, albeit very well produced and performed by an extremely professional theatrical community, interspersed with Bell Shakespeare’s overwrought extravaganzas and the occasional gem from expatriate installation/performance makers, Odd Productions.

A large part of the problem is the lack of writers. Canberra really only boasts 2 shining young talents in Jonathan Lees and Mary Rachel Brown, and their output is sporadic; of course it’s much harder for theatre writers to make a crust from their art than actors. So Canberra is lucky to count Christos Tsiolkas as an honorary local by virtue of 18 months spent here. This has resulted in an ongoing partnership with actor/director David Branson and the bond has already borne fruit in the form of the plays Viewing Blue Poles and Elektra AD.

It is a privilege to watch the development of a writer of genuine stature in this country and Dead Caucasians must be seen as a watershed in Tsiolkas’ career. Elektra was controversial here, and I found the technique of pummelling his message into your skull by yelling and swearing and pointing spotlights in the audience’s face tiresome. Branson as Director could share the blame, but I had the same trouble with the novel The Jesus Man—the descent of the protagonist into the abyss simply wore me out and I lost interest.

Dead Caucasians works because Tsiolkas now has sufficient wisdom to be compassionate towards all his characters. There are no good guys and bad guys, just a diverse and curiously interconnected group of ordinary people struggling to cope in the Australia of 2001. Some of them are driven to perform terrible acts of violence but shock is not (as is all too often the case) the obsession of the writer. The violence demonstrates clearly the inexorable and horrific consequences of the policies of John Howard’s government, at the same time as stirring the sense of the deep human bonds between us all. And it’s beautifully structured: after an initial shock, the tempo drops, and when the violence comes again later the device is perfectly timed.

Each of the cast was required to play several characters. The actors’ job was made easier by simple variations in costume—a jacket on or off, a skirt unzipped to show some leg—though a number of people I spoke to found this unclear. This actually led me to the conclusion that the author was deliberately inviting comparison between the characters each actor played. For example, Chrissie Shaw played a 70-year old Holocaust survivor, a 60 year-old bigot and a 40-year old white trash mother who keeps some bad company, and I found myself meditating on how narrow the divides really are.

Under the direction of Roland Manderson, the cast and crew were impeccable. Branson, Shaw and Danny Diesendorf stood out and were ably supported by Anna Voronoff and Rebecca Rutter. The costumes by Matthew Aberline, though untypically muted grey, were delectable. Pip Branson and Nik Craft performed a gorgeous, limpid score and I hope I will be forgiven if I describe it as Ry Cooder-meets-My Bloody Valentine.

This is a work of substance and deserves to be staged around the country. It is one of few recent plays which leaves me with a clear sense of it being good art, good craft, with a clear message. It demonstrates what can be achieved through a reasonably extended development time with an ensemble. I am left with a delicious sense of anticipation for future works, and have been bashing Branson’s ear to get Christos Tsiolkas together with Constantine Koukias in Hobart. Combined with Koukias’ grand visions we could be in for some real treats. Here’s to work with the guts for the long haul.

Dead Caucasians, writer Christos Tsiolkas, director Roland Manderson, The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, Jan 25-Feb 3

Margaret Trail is an adept performer of sounds. She can manipulate meanings, extracting sense from nonsense and vice-versa. Trail evokes the memory of sense. Sentences seem sensible, or at least they feel like they might have been once. Sounds are uttered, spluttered, stuttered. These too were once sensible sounds. They would have quietly sat between words minding their own business. Trail hovers above meaning, diving down into the abyss, rummaging amongst the sounds of sense.

K-ting! opens with a diatribe about the werewolf, magic words, signs, symptoms. An anachronistic story is offered against a dark background, the performer dressed in black. The setting for this performance might appear occult but it also looks like stand-up comedy—a single person speaking non-stop under a spotlight. It is not at all clear whether these words are funny or scary. If they seem funny, it’s not because of their content. It’s because of their playfulness, their surreal juxtapositions. And if they seem scary, it’s not because anyone is actually scared.

There are 3 quasi-acts to this show, parts of which have been shown before. Some consist of simply spoken narrative such as the werewolf section. Other parts embody those funny sounds that don’t make sense but that accompany sense-making. Here, Trail works with these sounds, taking away their everyday accompaniments to displace their normality. A laugh about an absent joke repeatedly punctuates a story.

Trail also uses technological means to either replay recorded sounds—such as a dog howling or glass shattering—or to play sounds to herself in the headphones which she then responds to. This latter mode gave the audience only half the story, allowing us to witness the oddness of a one-person dialogue. It also made palpable the fact that speech incorporates a mixture of references involving presence and absence. We hear a tale recounted of Trail meeting someone in a bar who describes himself as a fireman. What is a fireman? Someone who likes to smash things. Trail says she herself likes to smash things…sounds of smashing glass. She then calls herself supermodel Margaret. Someone else is fireman Sam; she can be supermodel Margaret.

What is it to describe yourself to someone in a manner beyond verification? Of course, we see Trail. We don’t see the conversation in the bar, we hear about it. It is repeated for us as stories are. Perhaps we continually make references in our speaking to that which is beyond verification. In the 1950s, the logical positivist philosophers claimed that if something could not be found to be either true or false, it did not make sense. After K-ting! one might be led to wonder how much sense is permeated by unsense (nonsense?). Speech is more complex, and sense more fluid than one might suppose.

After K-ting!, I emerged sense-dizzy, experiencing the most ordinary remarks as odd. Trail’s work isn’t a poetry of sound. It is a disorientation of sense. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with language, it’s just that it isn’t as normal as it seems. Madness lurks in the most innocuous of phrases.

K-ting! Extended play, writer/performer/ recorder Margaret Trail, lighting/technical production Dori Dragon, La Mama, Melbourne, Feb 28-March 11

I have always known Ros Warby to be a versatile and popular dancer. She is as able to sustain the fine detail of choreographic composition as she is to create complex beauty within the moment of improvisational practice, a modality that has captured her interest for some years now.

Solos merely underlines Warby’s ability to move in very different ways, for it consists of 3 pieces by quite divergent choreographers. Eve is Warby’s own work, Living with Surfaces is by Lucy Guerin and Fire is a recent Deborah Hay composition. The juxtaposition of these works allowed for a comparative reverie on the varieties of choreographic concern. The fact that one dancer performed all 3 works provided a constancy which unexpectedly heightened the differences between the works of each choreographer.

Eve was presented first, an appropriate choice since here dancer and choreographer are one. Ros’ entry into the space felt like an act of naming, a presentation of the corporeal and personal energy behind this project. This was enhanced by the fact that the piece is about woman, perhaps one, perhaps many. The set consisted of curved wooden surfaces upon which Margie Medlin cleverly and variously projected filmed images of Ros in movement. The images were always partial—a glimpse of hips shimmying, an arm, a torso—forming a dialogue with the live movement. This made the work feel less of a solo.

The dancer’s own attention was directed towards particular nuances of the body, tippy-toes, stuttered walks, indulgent spirals. Quite specific gestural moments were created, as if the body speaks but in another tongue. There is a quality in Ros Warby’s movement that is quite her own: an elfin quickness, the ability to change tempo in the blink of the eye, without the obvious preparation say of ballet’s pirouette. The intentionality of each action is manifest in the moment and not a second before. Naturally, Eve exhibited this quality more than the other 2 pieces, though Deborah Hay’s Fire did provide for moments of disjunctive and unexpected change.

In comparison with the fullness of subjectivity presented through Eve, I was quite shocked by the stark evacuation of the self in Lucy Guerin’s Living with Surfaces. A bold green wall was placed centre stage, the dancer emerging in pillar box red tulle and satin. From pointed fingers touching the wall, through the precise play of joints, and the placement of weight, it became clear that Guerin is interested in what a body can do. The body in movement leads this dance rather than some humanist conception of spirit or content. Guerin is not alone in this manner of composition, though she does offer it a very fine and precise articulation. Clearly this is what attracts Warby to the work, the absolute commitment to motion, and an informed detail in movement that is ultimately identifiable as Guerin’s own kinaesthetic. This is the point at which the human re-enters the frame, for Lucy Guerin contributes movement that emerges from her own particular and distinctive body.

Fire again instituted a complete change in what is taken to constitute choreography. Some people understand Deborah Hay’s work in improvisational terms but she rightly rejects this. Each moment in Fire is precisely determined in that the performer has to satisfy certain requirements. There is a choreographic script. However, there is no predetermination as to what shape will satisfy the choreographic instruction. This can only be found in each moment of performance. To this extent, Russell Dumas is right to suggest that all performance is improvisational in that movement has to be found in the moment. But improvisation, as a modality, adds another layer of variability that is not evident in Hay’s work. Rather, Warby has to follow a series of instructions, which she adheres to with total commitment eg “move across the stage dancing fire, interrupting to speak questions to the audience such as: who are you?”

A weird piece emerges, out of real time, yet tapping into something quite interior to the performer. An interiority that is quite distinct from the surfaces of Guerin’s work, and different again from the emotional and personal interiority of Eve. Although Warby has to work with her subjectivity in managing the dance of Fire, there is an impersonal tenor to it that takes over. What you see is a person expending their entire focus in the satisfaction of an eccentric inspiration.

Although it does represent a feast of difference, Solos is also a sign of Ros Warby’s own concerns, her sustained thinking and rethinking of what constitutes dance and performance, and how to work. Partly a homage to Guerin and Hay, perhaps it is also anticipating things to come. For that we can only wait. Meantime, we savour the moment.

Ros Warby, Solos: Eve, choreographer Ros Warby, composition Helen Mountford, projection design Margie Medlin, cinematography Ben Speth; Living with Surfaces, choreographer Lucy Guerin, costume Mila Faranov, music Alva Noto, Stilluppsteypa, Foehn, & Crank; Fire, choreographer Deborah Hay; North Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, February 14-18

In the current climate there are lots of feature films being made from Indigenous stories by non-Indigenous filmmakers. Beyond the Rabbit Proof Fence by Phil Noyce is a good example. Others are in the pipeline with ex-pat directors returning home from Hollywood. Meanwhile, Indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen has just started his first feature Beneath Clouds. Others like Rachel Perkins, Erica Glynn and Richard Frankland all have projects in development.

Yolngu Boy sits somewhere in between. A black story told by a white creative team supported by Indigenous associate producers. Much respect to the Yunupingu brothers in giving the filmmakers access to the communities and culture of Arnhem Land.

Yolngu Boy is a tale of instruction, almost a fable, which follows the story of 3 young lads who share the same totem: crocodile. The message is simple. If you follow your culture and stay strong then you’ll remain on track to becoming a man. If you stray off the path then you’ll be in trouble. At the beginning of the film we see 3 boys hunting together; they go through ceremony and we understand that they are bonded by more than friendship. The film jumps several years and we pick up the characters who are older now and heading in different directions. Miliki is into football and dreams of going to play AFL in the city. Botj arrives back from a Darwin remand centre where he’s spent time for petrol sniffing and other misdemeanours. Lorrpu is strong in his culture and thinks he can help Botj get back on track. The 3 band together to travel to Darwin. Despite their friendship there are strains as Botj stirs up trouble and tries to get his mates to come along with him. After much adventure (I loved the moment when they catch a manta ray and are dragged out to sea in a sacred canoe), they make it to Darwin and there the trouble starts again.

Yolngu Boy was written by Chris Anastassiades (who also wrote Wog Boy) and produced by Gordon Glenn. That the Yunupingu brothers were associate producers is instrumental in the evolution of this film. The director Stephen Johnson established his career making music videos with Yothu Yindi. Yolngu Boy is his first feature. The strength of the film lies in its characters and strong performances by John Sebastian Pilakui, Nathan Daniels and Sean Mununggur. It’s great to hear the sounds of Yothu Yindi, Nokturnl and other Indigenous bands and wonderful to see Indigenous characters and Top End country on the big screen.

Two films so dissimilar to each other as to demolish any definition of Asian cinema in terms of content or genre: a stylish romance set in 60s Hong Kong and a contemporary gay Thai true-life story. Talk about chalk and cheese, but fascinating nevertheless to witness how such diverse products can come to fruition, find an audience and create a market.

Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love picked up prizes at Cannes and has been a big hit with European critics. In parts it is reminiscent of Kieslowski, for better or worse, an appropriately moody love story set in the narrow confines—physically and culturally—of Hong Kong in 1962 where Mrs Chen (Maggie Cheung) and Mr Chow (Tony Leung) are neighbours who discover that they share more than just a common boundary. The realisation that their partners are having an affair forces the lonely duo together, a contradictory position in which they are attracted and repelled by the possibility of becoming like their unfaithful partners. It’s a delicate conundrum which neatly captures the double-edged nature of desire—trying to become what the loved one wants while simultaneously realising that, in doing so, one becomes what one is not.

This low-key discrete affair is played out against a network of mutual obligations and favours, debts and payback, credit and loss. There is a constant process of exchange as characters brush against each other—compliments and greetings, gifts that circulate as symbolic carriers of meaning—and other day-to-day contracts such as arrangements to meet, or part. And when it doesn’t always work, everybody always has an excuse or evasion to maintain appearances.

All this could be very ordinary, an everyday affair, but Wong Kar Wai (and Mark Li Ping-bing and Chris Doyle’s cinematography) imbues it with a suitably heightened perspective. The gorgeous interiors seem to absorb their inhabitants, blocking a clear view of events so that we witness everything through screens and mirrors, at the ends of corridors or off-screen through open doorways. We hardly see the adulterous couple at all, while their play-acting alter egos are constantly in rehearsal, replaying scenes with obsessive compulsion, wanting to know but never for certain. At other moments, the impassive faces of Cheung and Leung are offered up like matinee idols, a seductive blankness hinting at passionate depths, or perhaps nothing at all.

And if it seems as if this could go on forever, that’s because the narrative carefully avoids the regular rhythms of climax and release, crisis and resolution. Instead, the lovers simply continue to miss each other—literally and emotionally—until it all comes to an abrupt stop at Angkor Wat. The spell is broken and, after a lingering last look at the ruins, it is almost as if nothing ever happened.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet, Iron Ladies tells the real life story of Mon and Jung whose dream of playing volleyball is thwarted by homophobic team-mates who refuse to let them join the team. The duo must then enlist the help of gay friends, transsexuals, transvestites and a token straight to build a new team. Will the Iron Ladies overcome blatant discrimination and intimidation to become national volleyball champions? This combination of sport and identity politics, like Priscilla meets The Mighty Ducks, helped to make Iron Ladies the second-highest grossing Thai film of all time. The plot may be fairly ploddy and the message is hammered (spiked?) home but there are enough moments of subversive good humour to keep it alive, such as when the team overcomes a desperate form slump by going into a huddle to apply a bit more lippy (and you thought they were only talking tactics). Wait for the credits with this one to see how art (film) imitates life (television).

In the Mood for Love, writer-director Wong Kar Wai, distributor Dendy Films, opened Sydney March 29; Iron Ladies, director Yongyooth Thonkonthun, writers Visuthichai Bunyakarnjana, Jira Malikul & Yongyooh Thongkonthun, distributor Dendy Films, premiered 2001 Mardi Gras Film Festival, opened Sydney March 15, Melbourne March 22 & other states to follow

Once a year in Adelaide, we come together for the Zoom! ShortsFest, one of the central pieces in the South Australian Film Corporation’s creative development strategy. This series of awards brings together the SAFC, the Media Resource Centre and the SA Young Filmmakers’ Festival, a laudable achievement in itself. The crowning moment of the awards is the Filmmaker of the Future presentation, at which the makers of 2 short films are given a wad of cash, and anointed with this year’s hopes. It is a heady mixture of youthful ambition, small state desperation, and free booze in which to rejoice or drown your sorrows.

We’ve had 2 years of these awards now, brand name recognition is starting to grow and so it’s time to take stock. Basing creative development on an annual competition seems to be part of the post-Tropfest landscape in which young filmmakers are led to believe they can suddenly vault to greatness (or at least a first feature).

The awards system undeniably focuses the local film community’s attention and encourages audiences to watch and discuss local film. It is based on the assumption that an industry can best be encouraged from the top down by establishing a small number of stars, rather than from the bottom up by increasing the level of overall activity in short films. The MRC’s director, Vicki Sowry, made the point that the end of the SAFC’s New Players’ funding scheme would make it even more difficult for Future Filmmakers to make films in the future.

Currently, the top prize goes to the director of a short fiction film made during the year. There are several assumptions here: (1) that we need more fiction filmmakers than documentarists (who are only eligible for the second prize), (2) that directors are responsible for the achievements in the rather vaguely defined criterion of “excellence in visual storytelling,” even though one potential entrant was disqualified for having a Sydney cinematographer (a strange ruling for an event which craves national exposure), and (3) that the state’s development bucks can be wagered on this director on the basis of a single, isolated film.

This year’s awards went some way to laying these concerns to rest. One Day, Two Tracks by Shalom Almond and Tamsin Sharp was a worthy winner and seemed a good bet, as it also picked up awards from the MRC and Young Filmmakers. (Note to the SAFC Board: could we get the TAB to run a book on this event next year? If creative development is going to be run as a competition it seems un-Australian not to let us bet on it.)

The story of a perhaps incestuous moment, One Day, Two Tracks combined an interesting subject with strong performances and a solid professionalism in its visual style. The film was produced with the aid of an SAFC grant, and the directors clearly spent the money well, getting a lot of value for their cinematography and post-production dollar.

This gave me a sense that they were ready to win the award and spend the money fruitfully. One innovation this year has been the stipulation that 20% of the purse go to production-related expenses. The Corporation might consider increasing this percentage, given that the award is supposed to stimulate future films rather than function retrospectively as simply a best film award.

Second prize went to Rachel Harris for There’s a Hole in My Chest Where My Heart Used to Be. Harris has worked within a more artisanal mode of production to make a stop-motion animation employing dolls. We’re in the territory of Todd Haynes’ Superstar, or closer to home, some of the films of Maria Kozic. The central logic of this genre is that dolls are stereotypical representations of femininity to begin with, so they provide an appropriate form in which to comment on broadly social gender roles. This allows for postmodern self-consciousness combined with the didacticism of a Barbara Kruger. Harris’s film manages to rejuvenate its heavy social comment with a good deal of visual inventiveness, which earned it an MRC award for best design.

One of the problems that the judges undoubtedly faced was that the 27 entries represented wildly different conceptions of what short filmmaking is, and indicated a variety of backgrounds and ambitions concerning possible futures in filmmaking. Mike Theobald’s Deadline, which won the MRC’s editing award, is the opposite in every way to Harris’s film. Theobald has clearly made the film as a calling card for a career in commercial filmmaking. It is your standard slasher-chases-isolated-woman movie, designed to showcase professional skills rather than to produce interesting film. While we need all the good commercial filmmakers we can find, it seems a shame that Theobald understands commercial filmmaking as merely the replication of generic formulas rather than the reinvigoration of them.

If Theobald wants to become John Carpenter, others in Adelaide would prefer to be David Lynch. This brings us to another model of short filmmaking, which is the abstract, dissonant essay on the loneliness of Existential Man. Two examples are Jack Sheridan’s Solipsis and James Begley’s Buggin’, which won the MRC’s cinematography and sound awards respectively. Both films are based around lone protagonists who have isolated themselves in pared down rooms. In both cases, the spare mise-en-scène and lack of dialogue allow scope for the formal elements to come to the fore.

On the whole, I suspect that the strength of the films this year left people feeling more positive about the awards systems than they had hitherto been. However, those members of the film community who see themselves as clients of this system look forward to some discussion of it. Both years, the judges have commented on the anomalous position of documentary. This is an obvious issue that needs to be addressed. For example, I’d personally have given some encouragement to Amy Gebhardt for her SBS doco, Gepp’s Cross Drive-In, a vibrant celebration of community within a set of sub-cultures rapidly passing away before us.

I suspect that in the long run (if there is such a thing in any Australian film industry), these awards will be judged by the subsequent successes of their winners. Let’s hope that the results will justify the system quickly.

The Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) is a chimera, part supermarket, part artistic intellectual pursuit, part rebellious belligerence.

This year in Perth these powerful forces were much in evidence. Pride of place was given to cinema verité documentary-maker Ricky Leacock, documentary prankster Craig Baldwin and US filmmaker Fenton Bailey (The Eyes of Tammy Faye). Bailey sheepishly admitted, while sitting on a panel with the other 2, that he felt he survived in a “highly compromised way” by doing 2 types of work—those which he was passionate about, and those which paid the bills. The presence of commissioning editors from television broadcasters around the world also meant he was unwilling to identify which work was which. Leacock showed no such compunction and set about roundly abusing commissioning editors, listing the films and the broadcasters who had rejected them over the years. You can get away with that when you’re 80.

Leacock wasn’t the only person at the AIDC doing what he wanted to do in the way he wanted to do it. During a forum entitled “Self and Semi-Funded Projects”, younger filmmakers showed how they were able, through a combination of skill and sheer determination, to get their documentaries made and screened. Australian Janine Hosking, director of My Khmer Heart, is currently riding high on a sale to the US network HBO for her 95 minute documentary about Australian Geraldine Cox and her Cambodian orphanage. Hosking and her partner, Leonie Low, worked 4 jobs and called in favours from camera crews they knew from their time as current affairs producers to get the job done. Their crew accepted a deferred payment option, taking their fee once the film had been sold. Hosking is relieved now that they have been able to pay their friends but admits to some sleepless nights when things didn’t look so rosy. As an explanation as to why she didn’t seek funding from Australian funding bodies her reply is pragmatic, “We wanted to make a documentary, we didn’t want to spend our time filling out forms and waiting 3 months for the next funding round. The story would have disappeared by then.”

Annabelle Quince, writer/director of Watching the Detectives, admits that if she had been able to see the road ahead of her in 1993, when she had the initial idea for her documentary, she would never have proceeded. Quince, a producer on Radio National’s Late Night Live program, found that in applying for funding her track record in other media was not recognised. As the years passed, she saw the innovative idea she wanted to explore in 1993 become mainstream and fly-on-the-wall documentaries become the popular choice for funding. Quince admits that a certain bloodymindedness, and the promises made to women detectives she had met in the USA, helped push her to finish the project. A small handheld camera, a DAT recorder and a 4-week shoot in the USA in 1999 saw her project move towards fruition. It was finally completed after some post-production funding.

Documart, where filmmakers pitch their ideas to commissioning editors from television broadcasters, has something of the flavour of Christians being fed to the lions. The filmmakers take the part of the true believers, while commissioning editors give the thumbs up or down. Along the corridor was a master class on the possibilities of the internet, computer software and non-linear narrative. There was the chance to ponder the fate of The Real Mary Poppins‚ a documentary pitch (will it fly?) which saw interest from international broadcasters like the History Channel and A&E Biography while at the same time exploring whether broadcasters, exhibitors and distributors will even be necessary to documentary in the future.

The internet, DVD and DVD-ROM explode the idea of linear narrative and transfer much of the narrative control from the filmmaker to the audience. It is no surprise that this is something that captivates Leacock. For filmmakers whose ideas were rejected at the Documart, Leacock must stand as an inspiration. He is delighted with the possibilities the internet gives him to engage with an audience without kowtowing to broadcasters’ opinions: “I’m looking for an audience, not of millions, maybe only a couple of thousand people who can enter into dialogue with and about the work.”

Australian International Documentary Conference, director Richard Sowada, Sheraton Hotel, Perth, March 6-9.

In a scene from Solrun Hoass’ latest documentary Rushing to Sunshine a fisherman from South Korea discusses the media coverage of a recent ‘incident’ in which the South Korean navy sank a North Korean fishing trawler. He says: “There are no reporters who report the whole story. They all add a little bit and take out a little bit.” He is media savvy, which it seems the South Koreans need to be, if they are to avoid becoming legal ‘traitors.’

A professor has been less savvy than the fisherman; he is being prosecuted for editing a collection of children’s stories. The book was found to have 41 points in favour of the ‘communist’ North Korean lifestyle and only 14 against. The man who counted these points for and against is also interviewed. He denies that he condones the depiction of North Koreans with horns; only their leader, Kim Il Sung, must be shown with horns. At this point you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It is still dawn of the official ‘Sunshine’ policy of re-unification of Korea and it seems the birds have not yet acquired the right to sing.

In a Q&A discussion after the Australian premiere of her film, Hoass revealed that years ago someone had approached her and said her films were like fragments. While it was intended as an insult she rightly took it as a compliment. Rushing to Sunshine is also a fragmented film which, considering the fragmented nature of the country, is fitting. The first half uses a split screen. In the larger section we see recent footage of South Korea and hear what these people have to say. The smaller section features silent footage from Pyongyang in ‘communist’ North Korea. At times this split screen is profound, for instance when Hoass talks with the old men who have spent most of their lives in jail for their outspokenness about the division between the countries. In the left hand screen is a tracking shot along a railroad in North Korea. In the right, the men in South Korea cope with the modern technology of microphones as they tell their journey, their story. One image becomes a metaphor of the other and the tension of the Koreas is set up between the two.

Hoass is the first to admit Rushing to Sunshine is the most “wordy” of her documentaries. I missed the silences. It is almost as if the spaces are the cement holding the fragments of her films together; without them there is less time to dwell on a moment or a piece of information. The moments I enjoyed most were when we ‘watch’ the subjects. One of the old ‘traitors’ sits on the floor sipping his soup when the phone rings. He conducts a quick phone interview with an unknown journalist and matter-of-factly says his friend, not he, has the record for the longest time in jail. He then returns to his spot on the floor and his soup.

Rushing to Sunshine, Solrun Hoass, distributor Ronin Films, premiered at Popcorn Taxi, Cinema Nova, Melbourne, February 20. The film had its world premiere in Seoul, Korea, at Insa Art Space as part of the exhibition Three sunshine perspectives on North and South Korea.

You know where you send your mail from; you know where it arrives. But what you don’t know is where it goes to get to its point of arrival. Between the insertion of a letter into the void of the mailbox and the pressing of the weary envelope into the palm of its recipient, a black hole is constructed: a spatio-temporal dislocation which anchors the untold narrative of its journey in a swirl of unknowable sights and sounds. As the mail scurries across the globe, its sealed contents—covered by law—are as much protected from in-transit scrutiny as the mail is prevented from disclosing all it saw and heard on its travels.

The quaintly named ‘dead letter office’ implies that the life cycle of a letter can be halted and short-circuited by not arriving at its deigned destination. Centred on a ‘dead zone’ in-transit, Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away (2000) is possibly less about the stranding of a human (Chuck Noland, played by Tom Hanks) on an uncharted island and more about the insertion of a human directly into the mail/freight system and its inanimate direction of matter. Therein he experiences the actuality of the uncharted: a passage of time and space which all mail and freight suffers, endures, overcomes. Noland becomes freight; Noland is delivered; Noland arrives.

Noland’s reconstitution as freight is strongly forecast through a series of jump cuts shot and recorded from the point-of-view of a handled package. From the middle of America to the centre of Russia, a package is shuttled. We see what it sees, hear what it hears. Subjectivity is heightened as we are lost in its dark jungle of illegible dialogue, muted atmospheres, murky light, askew angles. Sudden incursions of consciousness blast that unmappable jungle as we momentarily glimpse our location—a bench top here, a truck there—only to be thrown back into the unknown as a hand grabs us or a roller door slams down. Recalling Paul Schraeder’s audiovisual reconstruction of Patty Hearst’s interiorised terror through the mind-deprogramming techniques of the Red Army in The Patty Hearst Story (1981), Cast Away transforms the auditorium into a desensitizing zone where editing, layering and mixing work directly on the audience. The materiality of this sensation—very much the product of director Zemeckis’ established relationship with sound designer Randy Thom—is a great example of how sound and image can be thoroughly aligned, combined and fused. A clear self-reflexivity drives the film (right down to Noland ‘time-charting’ the journey of a FedEx package mailed to himself in another country) which has not merely ‘allowed’ such audiovisual precision in the creation of what it would be like to ‘become’ an item of lost freight, but also determined that it directly affect the film’s narration.

The emphasis on subjective perception is handled in 2 distinct ‘movements’ which occur after the FedEx package allusion yet before the landing of Noland on the island. Firstly, the plane trip is a fascinating capture of the strange dimension that is air travel. While actually travelling great distances at incredible speed at impossible heights—all of which are far beyond the physical limitations of the human body—that same body is confronted with opposite forces and sensations, as one is rendered immobile, inert and grounded. Journeys to the toilet become major points of navigation; communication with flight staff a logistical manoeuvre; and the simple stretching of limbs a luxury. During this numbing stasis, the drone of the airplane engines and its vibrational spread throughout the body of the plane creates a humming dynamo of still energy, which itself induces a psycho-acoustic claustrophobia of inertia. The atmospheres in Cast Away portray this with great effect. Secondly, after the plane has crashed into the ocean, the series of blackouts which appear between the sporadic flashes of lightning force the narrative to be gulped down into a spatio-temporal void. Rather than ‘see’ what we could not possibly see at sea in the dead of a black stormy night, we instead get glimpses. These create a series of subjective points which tragically mark a line of dots on a map that no-one will find. Noland becomes a message in a bottle on a dead sea, not so much by floating into the unknown as by ‘becoming the undelivered.’

The lost island is literally and figuratively the zone of the uncharted. It is a place where we, through Noland as ‘reconstituted freight’, hear and see all that happens in the journey into the unknown which all mail and freight undertakes between point A and point B. Notably, Noland has to realign his audiovisual balance, and redress its pathetic lean on the optical in our culture. The most direct way to play on anyone’s nerves is to subject them to the sound of the unknown, be it by obscuring the source, the point of emission, the agent of action, the clarified content or even the means of production/reproduction of a sound. Noland hears ‘bumps in the night’ which prove to be strange fruit falling from the trees. No living being generated these events; just the life of the island, devoid of such directional presence. Eventually, Noland gets to read the island in many ways, from the seasonal changes in wind directions to the movement of fish underwater, to the many environmental sounds which define the terrain of the island. Gorgeous sonic detail and delicate spatial placement not only locate us within the aural dictates of Noland’s new world, but also create this acute feeling of having one’s audiovisual balance realigned.

When Alan Silvestri’s music appears, as Noland finally leaves the island on his makeshift raft, there is much to be considered in how and why it has been withheld from the soundtrack to that point. Firstly, the absence of music perfectly reflects the dehumanizing of Noland’s status as freight. The film has deliberately refrained from using music so as to mark this absence of humanist commentary on Noland’ plight, for he has entered another psychological dimension where there is little hope, scant aspiration and zero respite from the harsh reality of survival. It is apt that when Noland appears on the island some years later he is drained of ‘humanness’ and reconstituted as a walking pile of humus: part vegetable, part animal, part flotsam. A human, he no longer is; music, he no longer hears; sound, he has become. Secondly, the music—quite obviously yet with dramatically powerful effect—enters when hope and aspiration actually take hold within his psyche. As he passes the barrier of rocks which shield the island from the currents of the surrounding ocean, he is inserted back into the passage of freight along which the FedEx plane journeyed. Rooted on the island, he was a dead letter; caught in the flow of the sea, he is once again in circulation. The music cue’s entrance symbolizes all this in a material way as it matches an airborne helicopter-shot which removes us from his horizon to evidence the space beyond the site of his plight, and in doing so liberates us from the sound of sand, the reverb of rocks, and the timbre of timber which had acoustically built a sonorum for his entrapment.

‘Realism’ and ‘naturalism’ are highly suspect at the best of times, and while the sound design of Cast Away could very successfully be couched in those terms, there is a deeper narrational and psychological tone generated by Thom’s work. Possibly one of the most beautifully empty moments in the film, and easily on such a list for the cinema as a whole, is when Noland is waiting for his wife at the airport. Behind him, a set of monitors replay his return to reality, coded within the official return of his status back to human as an honoured FedEx employee at a special press conference. The occurrence of this only minutes earlier is now being televised nationally. Alone in a semi-soundproofed interior, he is still psychologically displaced. He is still fraught by being freight, caught in transit, ungrounded and as yet undelivered. Monitors play out of synch—showing him ‘live’ yet delayed, exuberant and relieved on TV but now tense and uncertain; large glass windows show planes in transit at the FedEx depot—yet their movement is muted by the double-glazed glass; the ambience of nothingness—air conditioners, fluorescents, carpet—hums uncomfortably, as its alien quality sonically scars his aural consciousness. There is no gradual rise of violins as we slowly track into Noland in anticipation of a clearly telecasted happy ending. Matching this unsettling existential moment, the film leaves us with just the distant ringing of nothing and the low hum of everything.

Fortunately for Noland, his new status as a parcel stamped ‘Return To Sender’ awakens in him an act which he must perform. By returning to the sender the one parcel he never opened, the one item whose law of protection he never broke, he connects back to humanity and to his own self-determined status as human. Mushy it might be, but the beauty and power lies in the material and phenomenal force with which Zemeckis audiovisually narrates the parcel’s story. Through such handling, the sound design inevitably comes to the fore, and the ‘mushy’ ending is a suitable narrative closure to a film that has already supplied a surfeit of existential aural density. As the credits roll—and long they are too—the refrain of music which hardly marked the film sails forth. But then a quite magical thing happens which confirms the considered modulation of humanism of Cast Away: the sound of waves gradually fades up and builds in mass, eventually overtaking the score. Not through mixing, but in a compositional dialogue which recalls the aquatic dialogue at the core of Michael Nyman’s seminal The Sinking of the Titanic (1977). Silvestri actively de-scores the orchestral theme by reducing its arrangement across series of repeated motifs which diminish in length and tempo. The music thus becomes the ocean—an ebb and flow of tidal call-and-response to itself; the ocean thus becomes air—the totality of atmosphere which carries sound.

Cast Away, director Robert Zemeckis, writer William Broyles Jnr, composer Alan Silvestri, sound designer Randy Thom, distributor 20th Century Fox, screening nationally.

Ever pondered the psychopathology of hair waxing? Or wondered why Mickey Mouse has never aged? What motivates the protestant sentiment of Madison Avenue’s Don’t call me baby? Martine Corompt has been exploring these and other questions for over 10 years as a practicing media artist. But her work doesn’t offer pat resolutions or satisfied conclusions. In the work of Corompt we constantly struggle with a tantalising ambivalence, an uneasy incertitude about whether things are coming or going, developing or breaking down. Exploiting her expertise in traditional forms of animation, design and digital media, Corompt utilises the full potential of intermedia arts practice to give expression to complex, yet subtle processes of becoming. The inscriptions of these processes mark out physiognomies of indeterminate trajectory, transverse hybrids that could be progressing towards higher states of being, or declining into abjection. These ambiguous processes are spatial as much as temporal concerns. In her most recent installation Wild Boy (Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, November 24-December 16, 2000) Corompt locates this becoming as an interstitial space or interzone in and of itself, for itself, rather than an intermediary condition on the way to or from something else. Is the Wild Boy evolving towards the social or devolving to the wilderness? We can’t be sure. However it is this incertitude, this disconsolate phylum, that underlies Corompt’s fascination with ephemerality and hybridity, those processes of becoming that underlie phenomena such as cuteness, that have and continue to preoccupy her as an artist.

How do you see Wild Boy in the context of your overall practice as a media artist?

Wild Boy was another way of incorporating influences of animation and carnival/theme parks into my work. I have always been interested in how animation in particular is used to appeal to our sense of sympathy and why we (as audiences) actually invite this to happen. I know that there are people out there reading this thinking “that’s crap, there’s no way I am ever emotionally moved by a cartoon.” Well, thankfully, those stone-hearted individuals are a minority and most of us actually at one time or another (in our adult life) find the spectacle of character animation irresistibly involving.

The tragic, mournful figure of the Wild Boy was also a way to try out something that wasn’t necessarily about “humour or playfulness” as my work is so often described, and instead to figure out a means of arousing pity from the audience, in the same way you would if you were at an animal shelter choosing which one to save from the gas. Having the character “sing” out to the audience seemed like the most direct and alluring way of doing it.

The work is very stylised, even minimalist in its design and installation. Given the tactility and very literal qualities of some of your earlier work (I’m thinking of Activity Station in particular), is this a direction you are interested in pursuing further?

The minimalism was necessary for Wild Boy as a way of emphasising this fictional sense of “loss” that is depicted in the song (ie the loss of his “earthy” unsophisticated past) and where the Modernist white cube gallery of the “present” could be compared to an observation lab or infirmary. Also, unlike Activity Station, where the purpose of the cartoony vinyl coverings was to disguise the technological aspect of the work (the computer and TV monitor), in Wild Boy it was necessary for the viewer to be aware and to contemplate the TV monitor as technological device, an apparatus that connects us with the character like some kind of life-support system. I’m not sure if this is a “direction” or if it just seemed appropriate for that particular piece. Petshop (1998) also utilised this reflexive and very literal use of the monitor as a form of confinement.

Your work of the mid-1990s is well known as an exploration of cultural representations of the evolutionary process of neoteny. You have explored this theme in a number of installations: Sorry! (1995), Activity Station (1997) and Cute Machine CD (1997). What is it about this phenomenon that interests you?

Neoteny is our infatuation with the young and our evolutionary progression towards becoming more infantile. It interests me because it explains a lot about human behaviour, character representation and even product design. It explains why couples call each other “baby”, why we are scared of hair, why cars, computers and white goods are becoming rounder, why Kylie Minogue is described as “coy and demure”, and keeps trying to be so, and why Drew Barrymore still lisps.

Since Cute Machine your work has not been so obviously concerned with the physiognomy of neoteny. How do you see collaborative works such as Trick or Treat (1997) in the context of Cute Machine or Two Face (1995)?

Trick or Treat was a “tricky” one because it was collaboration, and true collaborations are very difficult. Often they can just end up being one person’s vision, which is delegated to the other person to be realised in their particular medium. This is the usual model with film and theatre. In Trick or Treat, however, we tried to work together on the “vision” right from the start, which meant developing a theme that brought together Philip Samartzis’, Ian Haig’s and my own work.

So my contribution to Trick or Treat (the sculptural component) was about the anthropomorphic aspect of technology which is connected with neoteny, because through the process of personifying inanimate objects, we give them characteristics. In the case of personifying technology it’s usually about it being friendly or rather “user friendly” as a way of compensating for the menacing alter ego that we also think it has. The name of the show Trick or Treat itself implied this polaric Jeckyll and Hyde theme—is technology good or bad? Is it friendly or threatening? Is it meaningful or just spectacle?

Your 1999 collaboration with Phil Samartzis, Dodg’em, was, at first glance, something of a departure from your previous work. On closer inspection, though, it very much continues your interest in the manufacturing of neotenic iconography in everyday life.

Again, Dodg’em was a collaboration from the start, so in some ways it had to depart a little from my solo work. However, it was important that the cars themselves (the only tangible aspect of the installation) looked like big oversized toys, as I wanted people to feel a little awkward in them. But that was only a small part, it was also about making people feel out of place, like they had to re-learn or re-discover the world all over again and had no visual reference in which to do it.

You have given expression in your work to a number of ideas to do with interface and interactivity in the context of audience involvement. How important do you see this aspect of your practice relative to your interest in cuteness and neoteny?

Implicating the audience has always been important for me, as I guess it is for most artists. But whether this means being physically implicated (interactive) or just psychologically so, it doesn’t really matter, it depends on the particular needs of the work. Neoteny and “cuteness” are interesting ideas because they are purposefully about “winning over” their audience, about securing their affection. So while it is interesting to understand how this works, it is also interesting to know how to sabotage it, so that the experience isn’t what you always expect it to be.

I am working on the possibility of using live animals in another collaborative installation, housing them in custom-built luxury pet “penthouses.” I suspect that this will be troublesome for some people, but it will be no less ethical, physically distressing or humiliating (for the animals) than being in a commercial petshop. I would also like to make a film with an all-animal cast, maybe have them singing and dancing, but this will not be for a while.

The National Film and Sound Archive, snappily renamed ScreenSound, has upgraded its role from archivist to ‘exhibitionist.’ Heralding this new mode is their first major exhibition of Australia’s audiovisual history, Sights + Sounds of a Nation.

While debate rages fiercely about the historical perspective of the recently opened National Museum—too black-armband or not enough—it is clear that the Centenary of Federation marks not so much a coming-to-terms with representing our history but rather a time where it is, at last, “out of the vaults.” Curator Joanna Wilson describes the exhibition as a “window onto ScreenSound.” Ten years ago the main purpose of the archive was to ensure the collection’s longevity and access to it. The mélange of information contained within is diverse and impressive. Now the public can peer through that window and wonder at our multifaceted and vivid history even if we as a nation don’t know yet what to do with it.

However the exhibition appears reticent about providing hard factual content about the cultural history of Australia. While Australians appear to greet the majority of Federation activities with characteristic yawns or sectarian rage, perhaps it is a wise policy to refrain from commenting too much. Is the archive being simplistic or cleverly coy? The sight of Kylie Minogue dancing at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras may make some members of the community grind their teeth. However, there is no placard here proclaiming Kylie’s performance as a great historical moment in New Social Movement politics. It is tacitly understood to be so. This approach is quintessentially Australian—witness the Olympics closing ceremony. Package politics in a fun way and Australians rarely rail against it.

There’s also an understandable feelgood factor in nostalgic exhibits: Mr Squiggle, Muriel’s wedding dress. But is this enough? In the explanation to the Look Back and Laugh section, we are told: “Australians love to laugh. Humour has always been central to Australian popular culture.” Well, in what culture hasn’t it been? This statement belies the richness to be found within the collection, linked through video compilations and interactive digital screens; with more than 13 hours of clips, sound bites and interactives. Touch screen booths figure strongly in an attempt to entice young viewers towards our cultural history. While interactivity now seems compulsory on the museum circuit, here the technology and wonderment seem to overshadow what could be extrapolated. There is a message in the medium, but where is it? The chance to provide context—with regard to changing social mores and advertising standards within Australian history—is sorely missed, despite great contenst like ‘Ants Pants’ and knicker ads through the 70s and 90s.

This exhibition offers the first opportunity to experience 100 years of Australian film and sound recordings under the same roof. There’s much to engage with: censors’ notes for The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, TV’s first lesbian kiss on The Box, the bicentennial commentary on public radio. A number of items have not been widely accessible to the public before. Thomas Rome’s wax cylinders—Australia’s earliest remaining sound recordings—are on show in their entirety. Home movie footage showing the demolition of Sydney cinemas during the 1970s, and out-takes from Bruce Beresford’s early advertising career (featuring Barry Humphries as a nubile Dame Edna) attest to the merit of the Archive’s acquisition policies. There’s a certain poignancy in watching the devastation of historic cinemas, or hearing Rome’s late 19th century recordings, through the relatively new medium of digital technologies.

The exhibition is culturally short-changed by a lack of considered contextualisation and linking of historical information. However what’s on show in Sights + Sounds is interesting and vivid, and the archive must be congratulated for the preservation and depth of the collection on display,

Sights + Sounds of a Nation opened March 1 as a 5 year exhibition which will be added to in that period; South Gallery exhibition space, ScreenSound Australia, National Screen and Sound Archive, McCoy Circuit, Acton, Canberra; free admission; www.screensound.gov.au

‘Globalisation’: a term just ripe for a bit of Goerring/Godard inspired appropriation isn’t it? You know, ‘whenever I hear the word globalisation, I reach for my…’ But that’s just the point. What does one ‘reach for’ in the age of simultaneous presence, virtual subjectivity and networked environments? After all, the effort to reduce space between objects seems a little redundant if the “resistance to distance” in Paul Virilio’s words has “finally ceased” (Open Sky, Verso, London, 1997). For the contributors to Experimenta’s MESH 14, the reach and liminality of globalisation is anything but settled and, therefore, it is a term emphatically contested. Edited (and predominantly designed) by Lisa Gye, and for the first time peer reviewed, MESH 14 brings together a range of writers, artists and critics currently working in experimental film, net activism and new media art. In different ways, these authors refuse to accept the term ‘globalisation’ as a given, the irreversible and inevitable march of progress. Rather, it is a narrative always in formation; a story produced from competing technologies and conflicting economic and social exigencies. As Geert Lovink reminds us in Molly Hankwitz’s interview, it gets portrayed as “seductive and fatal, unavoidable.” How can one critique globalisation, he asks, “if it is presented to us as a meta-level historical process? It is like being against the Middle Ages.”

Part of the narrative of globalisation is, of course, informed by tensions between the global and the local; or between public performance and domestic practice. This point is comprehensively explored by Rowan Wilken’s “A Swatch in the Fabric of Time.” Wilken argues that in order to understand the patterns and rhythms of computer networks we need to acknowledge the impact of the ‘everyday’: “computer-mediated communication and the endless flow of global informational and media vectors is a priori anchored in the flows of the everyday—the global is filtered through the local.” Taking Swatch’s invention of “Internet Time” as his starting point, Wilken’s is a fascinating survey of the kinds of critical practice and theoretical acumen necessary for coordinating the spatio-temporal dimensions of “globalised communications.” As part of this approach, Wilken runs a nice line in genre hybridity and media recycling by including a “side bar” of ficto-theoretical whimsy that gestures toward an almost 19th century media form: the list. Wilken’s inventory is rather more Borges than Baudelaire in its remit including such disparate items as “Panasonic Digital answering system with perpetually stiff keypad” and “improvised tea/coffee coaster in the form of a miniature ceramic replica of the fishes and loaves mosaic from the Church of the Multiplication on the shores of the sea of Galilee (a gift).”

Another media form recycled from an earlier technology is the interview. Indeed, the relation between new and old media is a focal concern for the 2 interviewees. Geert Lovink wonders about the possibility for a “moratorium on the further development of computer hard and software.” This might focus attention on “other levels of deficit” within cultural and economic production. Hankwitz and Lovink speculate about the potential for a “more inclusive and multicultural” avant-garde. Lovink is less than sanguine about the current situation, arguing that we urgently need a new direction “away from the boys and toys culture.” Dean Kiley—as adjectively flamboyant and critically perceptive as usual—interviews “renowned new media artist” Jeffrey Shaw (an expanded version of an interview originally appearing in RT #41 p18). While discussing Place Urbanity (Shaw’s computer based interactive media installation for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Federation Square) they make some interesting points about the historical specificity of the relation between art and theory. DX Raiden also explores those entangled twin logics in his elegant piece—with gorgeous design and html by Sam Brown—entitled “Soft-Where Specifics of Site.” The authors critique a number of theoretical mappings of spatial politics within digital and concrete environments.

In keeping with MESH’s preoccupation with all things recombinant, Darren Tofts’ delightful piece on Ian Haig reads him as a “reanimator”: “low tech and outmoded are, in Haig’s hands, the signatures of funk, the beat of satire.” Particularly satirical—and certainly an analysis of the tension between new and old technology, differing channels of discourse and the technologised body—is Haig’s most recent work, The Excellsior 3000. With a name which to my mind sounds suspiciously like WeightGain 4000 (‘may cause irreversible damage to the kidneys and liver’), it is not altogether surprising to find this project has something to do with evacuation technology. Haig describes it as “the construction of 3 large scale futuristic toilet installations…resembling all purpose custom built media stations” showing “videos to aid the digestion and assist bowel movements.” As Tofts quips, “toilet technology is one of the great unsung watersheds in the history of the becoming machinic (certainly one that Donna Haraway seems to have missed).” My only complaint is that there are no electro farty noises on the site (what a pissy).

MESH 14 is an exciting and thought provoking read. It is also, importantly, beautifully designed: lovely clean lines; a pleasure to navigate and spatially uncluttered (please excuse antiquated bourgeois aesthetic of ‘taste’; Eminem has promised to drop round later to rectify the situation).

MESH, Experimenta’s media arts journal, issue 14: globalisation, editor Lisa Gye, commissioning editor Keely Macarow,
www.experimenta.org/

I User, exit this for that—
sorted compartmentalized, archived.
RE:organized—stacked, a body with
organs elsewhere.
The de:parted body rests, no longer active/ on Blur;
0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0…
Ka Space: encryption >book< of the dead in the DOUBLE-FUNNELS pathway, LEXIA to PER[(p)[L(ex)]]ia San Franciscan artist/writer Talan Memmott’s LEXIA to PER[(p)[L(ex)]]ia was awarded 1000 pounds sterling for 1st place in the 2nd trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Competition 2001. In many ways the work realises the promise of Lissitsky’s constructivist utopia in Manifesto Towards the Electro Book circa 1921. Produced in the heady days of the Russian communist revolution, the dream of electronic writing is now an everyday reality for people riding the wave of the information age. Memmott’s poetic ficto-critical work is a web-based synthesis of image and text, emblazoned upon a darkened stage/screen surface: words, typographical configurations, linguistic and mathematical formulas transform with geometric patterns, ideograms, and dynamic hypertext links. In this cyber-cultural space, the legacy of modern experiments in painting, literature, music and theatre come back to haunt the computer screen surface, which becomes an electric theatre of iconographic symbols and self-reflexive slogans of futurism. Inside this world, the act of writing transmutes into the act of composition, an assemblage of signs, fonts, graphic representations, pronunciations, in which there is a subjective interplay of meanings, thrown up through the slippage in and across a series of interactive screens. Foregrounded by Soviet montage aesthetics, the unfolding narrative of poetic juxtapositions between word and image is revealed over time by the subjective experience of each player and in a spatial relationship with the program. Shelley Jackson (of hypertext Patchwork Girl [Eastgate 1995] fame and) judge for the competition suggests that “Memmott borrows as much from the convention of html code as from the not much less difficult codes of Deleuzian theory, metamorphosing them into a jammed, fractured diction full of slashes, dots and brackets. There is purpose to this play, since the piece is about the code-mediated relationship between reader, the (electronic) text, and the author…What you-the-reader do IS the text.” Jackson’s feminist focus, in her own e-publication My Body (Alt-X 1997) and CD-ROM Patchwork Girl (see RT#34, p19), has been to self-consciously create for the reader/player a place to construct/re-construct the body and self. Memmott’s latest offering realises this on an abstract level—the narrative is the morphology of the electronic text. The self-reflexive activity of drawing attention to and designing an architecture from which the reader/player navigates and manipulates the text mirrors our earliest experiences of perception (in the apprehension of the visual world and upon our entry into language). Memmott describes coming to writing by way of the visual arts, drawing together his respective practices of design, painting, installation, video, performance and writing. Transcribed from a MOO interview he writes “…I think painting is one of the most richly narrative mediums…which probably sounds odd…the way painting offers narration as something that must be discovered and unfolded…” The fetishisation of word play and typography, with the arrangement of fonts and symbolic forms on the screen/canvass—in the pathways The Process of Attachment; Double-Funnels; Metastrophe; and Exe: Termination—are a condensation of Memmot’s previous concerns, explored in the online works LUX: Bronsino 1540, Sky Scratchez, and NEXT: [N]ex(I)t. Memmott is prolific and his contribution to e-writing substantial (www.memmott.org/talan/ tabRich.html). LEXIA to PER[(p)[L(ex)]]ia is a reminder of the blank page text experiments in Lawrence Stern’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the playfulness with text on the page in Joyce’s Ulysses and the investigation of non-linear structures in the writing of William Burroughs, not to mention Russian Constructivist propaganda. However, the distinguishing feature of net-specific hypermedia is the ability to interact in a 3D immersive environment with the material, re-visit and re-play episodic fragments, download segments/surfaces where the meaning making process is a collaboration between artist and visitor. Whether or not LEXIA to PER[(p)[L(ex)]]ia constitutes writing is what makes this compelling and ground breaking work. The inflated rhetoric of convergence often referred to as transmedia or intermedia (etc) has exceeded the borders drawn around the canons; a new kind of writing/production has emerged. The cross-fertilisation of genres, styles and modes in the digital domain has developed into a site specific one, where the opening up of digital space has made possible new creative forms. The absence of sound in this work reinforces the notion of visual dominance in our culture, the image/text/ (no)sound relationship might refer to the technological innovations present at the moment of authorship. Jackson states, “the first pleasure will probably be a visual one…Memmott’s most elegant arguments are made visually, through the logic of layout and the grammar of the link.” This is highlighted in the section Ka Space: encryption >book< of the dead where an Egyptian icon of Osiris has been named Ausere [phonetic], which according to Memmott is “a simple frivolous manipulation of the name you come up with, ‘A User.’ On top of this we have attempted constructing something akin to the ‘Body Without Organs’ of Deleuze and Guattari, misread through an attachment to the Egyptian funerary text…in reference to attachment to the internet apparatus and the distribution of ‘being’ across it—as data, as pixels, as energy…” It is no surprise that Memmott sees himself then as “something of a para-academic, or pirate-academic…Outside in…”

Talan Memmott, LEXIA to PER[(p)[L(ex)]]ia, http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk:80/newmedia/lexia/index.htm visit the trAce website at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk for competition runners-up.

I myself have a whole half-drawer stocked entirely with RealTime-bankrolled undies.

Perspex, red fluid, abstract shapes floating in space, spinning in time, light silently cast on the wall, refractions intersecting. The eye perceives a cloud of dust, the head of a snake, in strange deep space, eternally shifting, chasing its own tail. Red contours, like flames, the first stirrings of the universe. Silence. The gentle plucking of Japanese koto begins.

Madeleine Challender is a universal light worker. Light Forms, her latest exhibition of 2 thematically-charged installations and photographs appeared recently at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space. While CCAS’s Furneaux Street Gallery in Manuka regularly hosts up-and-coming artists like Challender, it was Galerie Gauche in Paris that housed her first exhibition with light, Thought Strings.

Paris, she explains, was the turning point for her art, where the decision was made to explore the medium of light. While on exchange at L’ecole Superieur des Beaux Arts from the Canberra School of Art, Challender worked under the tutelage of French installation artist Annette Messager. While in Paris, Challender exhibited her last paintings in Vancouver and turned to her new direction with passion.

Light is all around us. The parallels Challender draws as she observes light have led her to pose questions about nature, the universe and the mind, while exploring theories of interconnectedness through the processes of systems. The first of the 2 installations in the exhibition, Heart Gravity, was designed to be a dynamic system. “I was trying to make rather than represent a system. To take these fundamental elements and incorporate them to create an active working system,” she says.

Like the transition from the fundamental building blocks of Heart Gravity to the more complicated title piece of the show, Light Forms, systems can start simply and grow. Light Forms takes up half the small gallery space standing about 6 feet high and 6 feet wide.

System Element 1: The Space

Five curved perspex pieces are suspended from the ceiling. The plastic was about the size of A3 paper until the heat gun was taken to it. Each was moulded over an anatomically shaped heart. These are the fragments of space in Heart Gravity.

System Element 2: The Form

The red ink inside the perspex forms uniquely shaped pools, variations on one consistent liquid form. Red is a dominant colour in Challender’s work. It represents the heart that inhabits the space.

System Element 3: Movement and Time

The perspex shapes spin on mirror ball motors. Movement involves time. In Light Forms this movement is contained in boxes made of opaque perspex, textured glass and paper.

System Element 4: The Light

The light activates the red liquid and perspex shapes, and creates refracted images on the walls. In Light Forms, fibre optics are used to reconstruct the bending of light through the universe, and produce the effect of starlight flares through the hazed surfaces of the cubes into which they lead.

System Element 5: Dimension

At this point Heart Gravity’s simplicity, in which the perspex pieces are merely arranged at different heights, diverges from the 3-dimensional complexity of Light Forms.

Light Forms is a structure of sixteen 30cm cubes. A single box sits at the lowest height from which a clump of fibre optics springs and leads up to the ceiling. Two boxes at the second-lowest point sprout 2 clumps of fibre optics. And so it goes…doubling up to 8 clumps protruding from the top-most boxes. The idea of exponential growth.

A large mirror is placed under the work creating an illusion of depth, as though there is yet another dimension beneath the floor. The most active movement and refractions are only revealed by looking into the mirror.

System Element 6: Perception

People’s perceptions of the work are necessary to make the system complete. “It’s activating thought for people, stimulating them to form ideas and images in their minds,” says Challender. She believes that art must be accessible and open enough to allow interpretation: “I think that is a key element to life—everyone has their own individual experience.”

Light Forms was made possible through a grant from Arts ACT; Canberra Contemporary Art Space, February 16-25

The Visy Theatre at the Powerhouse in Brisbane is the best venue I’ve been to for small gig concert music. It’s small, 200 people max, it’s not cramped, the aircon works. You can park the car easily, meet some friends, have a drink, look at the river, catch some sounds, interval, have a drink, chat with friends, look at the river, go back in, listen up, home in 20 minutes. I’ve been twice this year. Early Feb it was The Necks, a jazz trio (piano, bass, drums) very much out of the Sydney tradition and, later, Topology played the first of their 4 concerts at the Powerhouse this year.

The Necks are tasteful, skilful, no surprises, recommended by the friend I went with. They come on stage fairly serious with a bit of contemplative silence. Not the full reverent ju-ju, but we get the gist. This is serious music, one piece an hour long. Take care; are you good enough to listen? The set starts pretty slow. The bass player plays a 3-note figure for a while, then a while longer. The pianist also plays a simple figure that has somehow escaped my mind. A bit like a bar from an old Keith Jarrett piece (circa Köln Concert). And this guy can really play that bar. The time goes by, the seasons change, Iceland grows larger. Suddenly the bass player plays another note. He doesn’t do that again for a while. The drummer meanwhile is playing some tasteful repetitions of his own.

You might have picked up that I thought The Necks a little on the dull side. Sort of. In some ways the concert was good. The playing was excellent. The sound was clear. And the last few minutes where they really rocked was some of the best jazz I’ve heard. Loud. Aggressive. Chunky piano slabs, hard rubber bass, cymbals of death. Improv is great for exuberance and surprise. For subtle and considered, I’d just as soon the composer considered the subtlety for longer than one hour on the trot improvisation.

A week later, Topology play the well and truly considered. They’re a quintet out of the classical tradition. Violin, viola, double bass, sax, keyboard, and some multi-instrumental bits and pieces. Topology present a down home face to the audience. There’s some gentle ribbing between them; the frontman is personable without the toothpaste. The set is well selected with consistent themes and enough variety. An oldie by Messiaen, a Glass piece, Gavin Bryars, Lois Vierk, premiered works by Greenbaum and Gibson, and Vivs Bum Dance by John Rodgers. Topology has played this before. Reminds me a bit of the band Oregon in parts, but there are lots of other reasonably overt reminders. Not self-conscious cornball though, just the world we listen in. Rodgers is in the audience and takes a bow when his piece is finished. I bet that doesn’t happen too often for Australian composers, multiple performances and a bit of good cheer.

The performance of the 6th movement of Messian’s Quatour pour la fin du temps is a gem, solid playing and a great arrangement. The Greenbaum and Gibson were also good. I hope they don’t disappear after a single performance. Bryars’ Last Days is another good piece, though the playing was a little loose at times. The encore piece, Bernard Hoey’s reworking of a rock anthem by Queen, was in the Kronos meets Jimi style—a bit of throwaway fun. Leave ‘em smiling. (Maybe it was more than that. It’s a worry reviewing something on first listening, and I would be more than happy to hear most of this concert again.)

Not surprisingly, some pieces worked for me more than others. I don’t much like Glass’s A brief history of time—the tape of Stephen Hawking speaking is a bit forced (same old same old with Reich’s Different Trains). The live guitar tone in Vierk’s piece for 5 electric guitars was via a jack in the back of the keyboard, and not a dedicated guitar amp. A bit thin. The other 4 guitars came via a pre-record. Tough to do 5 guitars with only a single guitarist. (Must buy Seth Josel’s version—and there’s an advantage of hearing new pieces. I wasn’t totally happy about the Vierk performance so I went looking for another and found the guitarist Seth Josel. New CDs=new composers, and off go the search strings again.)

There are 3 more concerts by Topology at the Powerhouse this year. I’ll be there.

Laid back and veiled. Maybe that’s what all this talk of ‘alt country’ and ‘post rock’ means. The obscure championing of Smog, Will Oldham, Papa M, Cat Power…all distinct artists in their own right, yet all sharing a sense of something else happening behind the sounds they approach, a feeling that insinuation and shadows and mood are far from done with in modern music.

Of course some of the acts that fall into these warped genres can be very explicit and aggressive, usually post rockers like Mogwai and Yo La Tango rather than the alt country types who sound as if they are holed up on some drug fucked, go-slow verandah. But there’s a bridge there, over troubled waters, between these worlds, I’m sure of it. Maybe the Dirty Three could tell us more about that.

Whatever the nametags and marketing stereotypes, these artists mark a new retreat from the commercial machine and so-called ‘indie rock’, the relentless retail of grunge/punk rebellion and the intensification of music into niche-marketed packages. They’ve gone into hiding, dived into atmospheres and mystery, looking for soul again.

The thought of a hi-tech, low-fi millennium blues pops into my head, a kinda ‘roots of rootlessness’ music, propagated through the convergence of a mushrooming internet underground, home studio technology and artists happy to blow off their own willful creativity. An aural community is taking shape around them: people who can accept things a little slower or stranger, who want to get to know music instead of receiving it dead ahead.

You might identify this feeling as exploratory, introspective, submerged: adjectives that express the emotional backlash of a new (and sometimes old) underground to what’s going on up there on the surface of pop life and a newly minted ‘alternative’ mainstream.

Tex Perkins’ Dark Horses CD fits well into this quiet, secretive talk of music from the margins. I’m certainly not expecting a Sydney Festival Bar Crowd to respond to the low-paced songs live. Just picture the place: girls in tight skirts drinking blue cocktails; boys with designer beers hunting for sex; the DJ flogging this season’s love drug, Cuban music, that no one really gives a fuck about.

So when Perkins and his group open up with She Speaks A Different Language it’s as if the whole bar has sloooooowed down. Fine as this ballad is, a more stated, medievally aggressive song like Splendid Lie tames the restless second song in for a while.

The Dark Horses themselves are a super-talented group: Charlie Owen on keyboards, guitar and some bright banjo picking that blazes away then dies; Joel Silbersher, a post-rock god in his own right, maybe an even bigger star in the cottage industries of cyberspace, playing a bass almost as tall as he is along with a splash of psychedelic guitar; Murray Paterson, red hair and firm acoustic work that details the songs with Spanish emotion; Jim White on drums, with those percussive rolls and holding back touches of not-hitting-just-yet drama; and finally Perkins himself on acoustic guitar as well.

Maybe it’s the Neil Diamond in Perkins that makes him hold onto the acoustic guitar and make the most of his swivel seat for the evening. But he seems walled in by the instrument, a superfluous strummer in a band already overweight with 3 exceptionally capable lead/rhythm players. You just want to see him move more, twist those extravagant hands into a lyric and back out into space.

As a band of multi-instrumentalists, the musicians continue to unbalance each other just when you have what you want from each of them. To see Charlie Owen strap on an electric guitar is a moment of rapturous yet short-lived kinetic excitement, while Joel Silbersher’s guitar work is so fine and shaded and trippy and…gone.

Strung together in a set, there’s also a feeling that the mood is way too blue, and that Perkins really should listen to the best bits of Hot August Night, or at least a little more James Brown and Captain Beefheart than he has lately. And yet a moody number like Ice in the Sun repeats and broadens so much of what has come before taking you to another place. It’s slow ecstasy, and it makes my complaints seem churlish, my gripes minor on a very fine night of music.

With demands to “bring me champagne”, Perkins camps it up, Frank Thring style, enjoying himself and amusing the crowd. I used to hate that about him in ages past, how he couldn’t commit to an emotion without mocking it; but now it seems more like a nervousness or shyness as he slides out from a song into the world again.

Tonight’s set would suit a smoky, intimate pub, maybe even a theatre better. Not a weekend meat market dazzled by the glitter of the disco ball. But to Perkins and the Dark Horses tribute, the audience here make an impassioned demand for an encore. By which time the singer and band have hit a note of raw, forward movement, coming out into us rather than making us draw into them. It’s a belated dynamic too often lacking in this moody, weary array of songs tonight.

Maybe all that is missing are 2 or 3 tunes which bring a bit of light and speed to Perkins’ songwriting palate. Or a few more of those instrumental touches, like Owen on banjo or Silbersher with his funky wah wah ripples from outer space. A few more bright notes to colour his backwoods/inner city morality tales and send us off into the night knocked out, rather than just pleased and half loaded.

Tex Perkins and the Dark Horses, Sydney Festival Bar, January 1. Dark Horses CD, Grudge Records/Universal Music. An edited version of this review appeared in Drum Media, Feb 20, 2001

A swallow is a bird, a harbinger of summer. “The sky is full of swallows, the sound of wings.” Swallow is also a term for an opening or cavity in a limestone formation.

Linda Marie Walker is an accomplished poet critic, novelist, a visual artist and a lecturer in interior design. Mike Ladd is a writer, sound artist and producer. They collaborated in making Lessons of the Swallows for radio.

Listening to Lessons of the Swallows is like looking at distant figures in a landscape, while hearing their voices next to your ear, and then realising that one of the figures is yourself.

The work was inspired by Walker’s sighting of swallows in Valencia, on holiday in Spain. Her impressions are like memories that last beyond the trip. The form is minimal, impressionistic, a “melancholy lightness.” It is about the impossibility of communicating an idea or who you are, and a lingering sense of incompleteness. At every moment you’re the product of thought and feeling and environment.

Swallows are symbols. The birds’ agility stands for human thought and mutable feeling, their social habits for desired human interaction. All speech is metaphor—it represents indirectly, unlike light entering the eye or sound entering the ear.

Lessons of the Swallows is adapted from Walker’s larger work The Last Child, written for theatre or radio production. The whole work includes a novella and visual imagery intended as a musical score. Ladd interspersed Walker’s script with her minidisc recordings made in Valencia, his recordings of the text being read, and musical and other fragments. Included are snippets of conversation between the artists about swallows and their mythology.

Ladd’s production has an ethereal, haunting intimacy. The restrained emotion in the readers’ voices, the close microphoning and measured delivery, emphasise rather than conceal the enormous affective power of the script. The avian swallow—here fleetingly, now gone—triggers the sense of loss and loneliness and the search for meaning.

There are street noises, distant voices, gulping sounds and the gasp of held breath, a nib scraping on paper, water flowing in a cave, and the swallows’ twittering song. Fragments of Jordi Savall’s viola da gamba thread through, either in the background or foreground. The shifting between male and female readers, and to other sounds, simulates the shifting of the mind between thinking and listening, between subjective and objective. The female voice carries the emotional weight, the male voice conveys facts.

The swallow’s mystery is a metaphor for the mysteries of life. The fables of the swallows are romantic expressions of human drama. Swallows are survivors. The geological swallow represents the descent into the abyss. To swallow and be swallowed.

This is a melancholy soliloquy. Walker and Ladd muse on the question: “what would you say to the last child?”, the impossibility of telling someone what they need to know. Their soundscape is evocative, powerful and intensely beautiful.

Lessons of the Swallows, Linda Marie Walker & Mike Ladd, The Listening Room, ABC Classic FM, February 19

Asimov says that the most exciting phrase to hear in science is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” Perhaps it is also the way with creativity where exploration, experimentation and mistakes evolve into new forms of expression. Funny things can happen in the spaces left by departures from convention. La Mama’s season of Explorations offers an umbrella for the presentation of works which are allowed such departures.

Synchronised Drowning was first presented at the 1999 Festival of Contemporary Arts in Canberra. This incarnation is a polished piece, tightly directed by Emma Newman with humour and whimsy in a space evocative of swimming pools, with change room cubicles, that peculiar light on pool water and starting blocks. The fears and delights of swimming are explored—fear of the water and the people in it, fear of going under, the pleasure of endorphins and the etiquette of the public pool. Instead of narrative, the work shifts through a series of people and their stories of interactions at the pool, children caught in a rip, sinking in a crowded motel pool. There is a touch of the all-Aussie Olympics, a race beautifully recreated with media commentary built into the dash for gold. Some of the physical work captures the liquidity of water in the human body—a breaking wave of arms and hands, a body floating. Elsewhere, the repeated use of counting and the human breath as a focus—holding breath or breathing to a rhythm—gives the work a meditative quality. Although the performers hint at intensity—“Water is so emotional”—this piece is generally slick and easy. Near the end, a long hug, people washing and getting wet, is less comfortable but hinted at the possibilities of departing further from convention.

Time and Tide (John Britton and Hilary Elliott) tells a Seachange story of Paul and Judy, leaving the familiar world of city work to pursue a dream. They move to an island to broadcast from a tin-shack radio station (Radio Atlantis) but never know if anyone is listening. Nobody phones. Their dream is gradually eroded by the rising tide, of isolation and (perhaps) the death of their child. There are ‘time warps’ in the plot where things may or may not have happened. Increasingly, Judy’s broadcasts are personal calls for contact and connection to the world. Paul maintains his desire to change the world, desperate to be noticed. Throughout this piece, dialogue routinely gives way to a form of movement as emotional expression. This physicalisation of subtext is intense, athletic and disciplined but not often surprising. It tends to happen between text, in lumps rather than blending with it. John Fenelon’s original live music, a significant part of the performance, is screened from the audience.

Clean As You Go is a wild, exciting piece which messes with everything. The audience are given protective gowns or gloves upon entry into a space dirtied with broken glass and soil. A sign invites us to sit anywhere or move around as the cleaning begins. Good humour is established between a slightly uncomfortable audience and performers who offer water, flowers to smell, newspaper to sit on. Performers turn lights—not ‘lighting’—on and off as required. Justin Leonard’s compelling and dreamlike text pieces are presented in darkness. The performance is interrupted by the traditional La Mama raffle, 20 minutes in. Clean As You Go is loosely scripted, partly improvised, allowing direct contact with the audience. These young performers had clear intentions and were never lost in this mess of their own making. Music/sound/noise, provided by Adam Simmons’ saxophone, works in with the improvisation. The musician is introduced into the space and has to speak about cleaning as well. His awkwardness in speaking again challenges convention: dancers don’t sing, actors can’t dance. His words turn easily back into sounds, a music that drives the performance towards a frenzied cleaning in which the audience are respectfully but forcefully swept out the door. The sounds of scrubbing, banging, swishing water and feverish saxophone continue from behind the closed door.

Why is there a sense in many of these (and other) works that exploration somehow veers towards themes of the personal and domestic, body-based or quirky? What might happen if such work attempted social or political themes? Perhaps a confusion stemming from (misunderstood) postmodern influences is that a departure from dominant or familiar forms, especially rationality and logic, leaves no politics in a broader sense, no way of speaking beyond the personal.

The ongoing significance of La Mama in Melbourne is that it offers a space, an infrastructure and finances which allow risk. This busy season of Explorations reflects audience interest in and support for such work.

It seems that barely a week goes by without an attack on Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In late February it was Premier Bob Carr’s turn. His complaints about the museum’s international standing and poor quality of its collection and exhibitions drew an instant, wounded response from its outspoken director Liz Ann Macgregor. She need have done no more than point Carr towards the MCA’s current exhibition The Film Art of Isaac Julien.

This display of film, video-installations, photographs and prints, with its suggestions for new narrative possibilities and ambiguous imagery, bestowed mental traces that uncannily haunted me for days, compelling me to revisit the (free) exhibition. Ghostly memories aren’t easily tracked down, so I had to go yet again. Each time the startling yet dreamlike, strong yet gentle, carnival of Julien’s film art told me something new.

Britain’s pre-eminent Black filmmaker, Julien’s prescient feature Young Soul Rebels (1991) and feature documentary Looking for Langston (1989) anticipated art movements. Young Soul Rebels surely positioned him as one of the provocative band of so-called ‘Young British Artists’, and yet he’s never been included in this group. Langston, with its retrieval of the Harlem poet’s homosexuality and stylistic treatment of history, heralds the homo pomo of New Queer Cinema at least 3 years before it was invented.

Julien is difficult to label perhaps because labelling is, in part, what his art explores. He burrs the boundaries between cinema, painting, video, photography and performance, and rejects stereotypes in a process of metamorphosis by which they re-emerge as icons. He moves confidently between past and present, inviting us to feel repair rather than loss; he achieves this most memorably by casting himself in Langston as the dead poet in his coffin.

This beautifully photographed documentary, which pushes to the limits the definition of the genre, is shown in full on a large screen at the start of the exhibition, setting the tone and touching the right auratic nerve with which to view Julien’s more recent video installation work. His film trilogy, The Attendant (1993), Trussed (1996) and Three (The Conservator’s Dream) (1996-1999), here transferred to DVD, all display extraordinary, powerful images drawn from a sincere engagement with post-colonial, gender, queer and other political and social discourses. The work is assuredly intellectual and, at the same time, provides easily recognizable images that hover between the outright provocative and, without a hint of false sentimentality, the aesthetically romantic.

Giving a lecture to launch the exhibition, Julien expressed admiration for the way in which the MCA had designed the space to display his work. And small wonder. Placed alongside his photos and prints, his videos glow on screens small and large, single and composite, without any sense of competing with each other. The open-endedness of his video installations, as they play on loops, provides a mood of repetition and compulsion that affects, entirely pleasurably, how we view the still images. They, in turn, allow us to see his moving images as a series of stills while the narratives move backwards and forwards from scene to scene, and between screens.

It is impossible to resist a sense of physical interaction with Julien’s work. Feelings of erotic pleasure and loss in Trussed, for example, are enhanced by its projection on 2 screens showing identical, but flipped, images that are set in a corner at right angles. This offers ambivalent resonances of a butterfly struggling to free itself from a Rorschach test. The stunning 3-screen DVD installation The Long Road to Matazatlan delivers frissons of recognition as the fragmented images of a story of unrequited love between 2 cowboys appear stuck in a bizarre salad of Andy Warhol, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, road movie and western.

Julien explained his interest in exploring the physical relationship between audiences and film by suggesting that he aimed to “bring back some of the early experience of making films. It’s more like early cinema, when spectators came and went at their own leisure, that open-endedness you don’t find when in a typical single-screen viewing situation. Repetition produces another way of viewing you wouldn’t otherwise get.”

Given its current troubles, it was a bold decision of the MCA to show Julien’s film art, since one of his recurring images is that of the museum as a repressive bastion of white authority. Can it be read as an indication of the MCA’s willingness to reflect upon its own role in helping us (re)define our relationship with screen culture? If so, things look good for the cinematheque which, many of us devoutly hope, the MCA will deliver in the not so distant future.

The Film Art of Isaac Julien, curator Amada Cruz, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until April 22; Out Takes, a presentation by Isaac Julien, Mardi Gras Film Festival 2001: A Queer Odyssey, Palace Academy Twin, February 15

Liquid Gold took place simultaneously in Brisbane/Australia, Sheffield/England, and live on the internet. By inviting the body to dance with incorporeal tools, transmute collective extended the landscape of interaction to new technologies of pleasure, emotion, and passion “within places of eccentricity and madness” (as introduced in prior works, Transit Lounge 1&2; see RT 32 p29). Lisa O’Neill, as adventurer and strong woman ‘Ling Change’, was filmed live on video as she travelled through the Brisbane Powerhouse (an industrial site converted into an arts complex). Avoiding a hierarchy between actual and virtual objects, or privileging computer over physical body, this performance examined questions of how ‘we’ conceptualise experience, examine self and others, generate and perceive beauty.

The word is cyberdelic: follow the yellow brick road to the yellow submarine, observe the antics on Gilligan’s Island through the Captain’s ‘looking glass’ (kaleidoscopic, says Alice). Editing the work from segmented perceptions (attention divided between 3 screens and the live performance), am ‘I’, as audience receptor/inheritor of a white pop art aesthetic—simultaneously being re-edited, rewritten as an intermezzo—in this country? O’Neill’s performative ‘look’ for Ling is pinched, hard-bitten, farouche. It comes to me that as an audience I am mirroring Ling’s predicament, irreconciled.

Ling is seen ‘in later life’ amid “strange new worlds where a number of chance encounters with objects from her past revive both nasty and particularly irrational ghosts.” Ling should know better, but old habits re-emerge as she is shadowed once again by spectres of material and fluid desire in the rotund shape of the Fiscalite who tries again and again to tempt her with ‘liquid gold’—bottled up in cans of Core. This Ubu-like nomenclature summons up both the seductions of material wealth and sinister connotations of the waste products of nuclear energy. Liquid Gold is ‘actually’ waste product honey contained within a brightly coloured can of ‘drink’ (coke/core), and it is said that solid ‘fools’ gold can be distilled from the lumpy bits at the bottom. Is Ling’s ‘straining’ for meaning a fool’s errand? Ling does indeed “fail again” (Beckett). But does she ‘fail again better’?

Ling’s emancipation is conceived through the self-realisation of others, in a dialectic between individual and collective. The rhizomic pattern of shattered glass between worlds refracts a collective “Impossibly Beautiful Strawberry Cloudlands” as an action of “the people, united.” This fulfills conditions for Guattari’s proposal for an “ecosophy”, an “ecology of the virtual”, having as its goal “not only preserving endangered species of cultural life, but also of engendering new conditions for creation and for the development of unheard-of, unimaginable formations of subjectivity.” Liquid Gold restores the most often suppressed aspect of avant-garde activity, namely self conscious ‘collective’ identity.

This was an important breakthrough work for transmute and for the future of collective new works.

Liquid Gold, transmute collective, instigator, artistic director & digital video production Keith Armstrong, choreographer & performer Lisa O’Neill, performer Leah Shelton, musician Guy Webster, interface designer Gavin Sade, director of photography David Granato, writer Hugh Watson, designer Deni Stoner, network specialist Gavin Winter, Media Directors Site Gallery, Sheffield, Kelli Dipple and Matt; Brisbane Powerhouse, Site Gallery (Sheffield England) & live online, liqdgold, March 9

Tony Leung Chiu Wai is one of the most sought after actors in Asia, having made by his estimate 60 films, among them John Woo’s classics Bullet In The Head and Hardboiled, Hou Hsiao Hsien’s City Of Sadness and Flowers Of Shanghai and Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo. In July he will begin shooting alongside Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi (of Crouching Tiger fame) in Zhang Yimou’s new film and foray into the Chinese swordplay genre. He is on his first ever visit to Sydney and Melbourne to promote his new film In The Mood For Love, in which he plays an understated role opposite Maggie Cheung as they discover that their mutual spouses are having an affair. At a public appearance in Sydney’s Chinatown he was mobbed by enthusiastic fans. He has arrived in Australia without entourage or interpreter, and has a gentle and unassuming manner.

Wong Kar Wai has said that the time in which In The Mood For Love is set holds a lot of memories for him. What memories does it hold for you?
I was born in Hong Kong in 1962 so I still have some memories of that time. The situation was the same for me (the shared apartment of In The Mood For Love). We needed to share everything with others, I mean the apartment and our privacy too. So I was shocked on the first day I went on the set. It was almost the same as when I was a kid. I think the relationship between people, between neighbours was very close at that time. People seem to be more isolated now.

Tell me about how you got into acting?
It was by coincidence. I wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing at the time…I was a salesman of home appliances and I couldn’t see my future even if I worked hard. Suddenly one day I saw something on TV, they were looking for new talents, so I got into the training class and I found that it was very interesting. Somehow I found a way to express myself in front of others without being shy. Mainly because of my background I’m very good at hiding my emotions and I keep everything inside. So after I get into training class I find a way to express myself, I can cry, I can scream, I can do everything. I enjoy the process and I love acting because it’s a kind of therapy for myself, a way in which I can express my own emotions. But I don’t do it for fame or money, so I don’t really care about it; fame means nothing to me.

You’re happy about winning best actor award at Cannes for your role in In the Mood For Love?
Yes. I was also nominated in 1997 for Happy Together…(I was at Cannes and) at the last moment they asked if I was still there so everybody thought I’d get the prize. There were only 2 left in the final, that is me and Sean Penn, but finally I lost it. I was quite upset at the time. We don’t do movies for any prize, but once you know that you have a chance you want it too. So I thought, it doesn’t really matter I’ll come back again. So I went 3 times in 4 years and the last time I got it, so I think maybe last year was lucky.

With In the Mood For Love, there are some publicity shots with Maggie Cheung which suggest it might have been a very different film. Were you surprised when you saw the final cut?
Of course, every time I was surprised, every time he (Wong Kar Wai) will surprise me. No-one knows what the story is about before the premiere, so every time when I see the movie I feel very frustrated. I was always looking for the missing parts: “Where is the love scene? Where is the scene I have with Maggie?”

You’ve worked with Wong Kar Wai through his directing career. What’s he like to work with?
He is very good at telling stories and he is very talented, very casual, very cool and always wears sunglasses. I don’t know what’s going on behind those sunglasses. He is the first director who can get rid of my Method acting because the way he makes movies without a script; everytime it’s like making an adventurous journey, you know we don’t know anything, what will happen next, so it’s quite challenging. It’s another way of making movies especially for an experienced actor who has a lot of knowledge about acting and some stereotyped expression. So working with him is something different.

What’s the hardest thing that he’s made you do?
I think the hardest thing is making Happy Together. At first when he approached me he asked me to play a gay role in the movie and I said, “I don’t think I can do that”, and ends up he gave me a fake script and flew me to Buenos Aires. After I settled there for one and a half months he said “I think (if) you play a gay guy it would be more interesting.” I said, “What?” But what can I do, everybody was there and everything was ready (pause) and I find out that I’m playing a gay guy. But I finally did it.

You’ve also worked with another of Hong Kong’s greatest directors, John Woo.
When I was working with him on Hardboiled I said, “We shouldn’t do this scene like this, I can’t cry in front of others in this scene.” And he said, “No, I think we should do it.” I said “Okay.” He’s very hard to compromise, he’s very stubborn, but he’s very nice.

Have you been offered any roles that might tempt you to Hollywood?
I have received a lot of offers in the past few years but I think the characters for Asians are very restricted as you can see—gangster or martial arts roles. Actually I never think of establishing my career in the States but I don’t mind if there’s the right character…If the project is interesting and the people are interesting, it doesn’t really matter where you shoot that movie.

You’ve never wanted to leave Hong Kong?
I love Hong Kong. I don’t have a reason to leave. No matter what happened to my place I won’t leave.

In the Mood for Love, director Wong Kar Wai, Dendy Cinemas, screening nationally; see page 14 for Simon Enticknap’s review.

As postmodern theory has asserted, performance is everywhere you look. But you have to know how to look. It helps if you’ve got a videocamera to note the finer details, or see things that real time viewing would never reveal. Fox has released slomo video shots of rugby league player John Hopoate violently goosing (or “date fingering” as coined by HG Nelson) the opposition in order to “immobilise them”, as one player put it. Viewers are aghast. Parents kick the TV power plug out of the socket or shield the eyes of the innocent. Grown men throw up over TV dinners. Team officials pretend shock. Players line up to come out—“he did it to me…it’s not uncommon…it’s just part of the game…” Well, well. No wonder men and women alike are turning away from league and taking up rugby union in droves. Doubtless the video footage will become a collectors’ item, aided by the media’s insistence on showing the footage over and over like the crash of the Hindenberg. Whatever, Hopoate has given new meaning to that old expression “bum sniffers” as applied to rugby league players ( The Dinkum Dictionary, 1991). What a creative nation.

In RealTime 42 cultural matters are only a little more refined as Linda Jaivin and Trevor Hay look into post-Cultural Revolution art and literature—the paintings of Sydney-based Guo Jian and the novels of Anchee Min, who lives in the USA. Exorcising the Cultural Revolution is not only therapeutic, but it can also be commercially satisfying—witness the trade in Cultural Revolution kitsch in China and Singapore, including DVDs of Madam Mao’s model operas and ballets which are central to the images and lives presented by Guo Jian and Anchee Min.

So that RealTime can become more and more a part of your life, take a look at our website between editions. You’ll find breaking stories and selected articles published ahead of the next print edition. We’ve also installed a good search engine, which not only allows you to find articles and artists appearing in RealTime, but also is great for web-surfing in general. Our website has been incredibly busy in recent weeks, prompted partly by interest in the response to the Richard Wherrett speech (See RT#41, page 23) and the Benedict Andrews reply (this edition, page 23) to Louis Nowra that we published online in March.

After 7 years of publishing RealTime we’ve finally decided to run a regular letters page (RTpost, page 10) and a news & commentary page (RTtalk, p11). These are modest responses to the vast amount of talk that goes on around the arts and the importance we place on dialogue with our readers.

March 5, 2001

Dear Editors
In response to Sarah Miller’s article “The Vision Thing” (RealTime 41, page 11) there are just 3 points I’d like to make in relation to her comments on the Australia Council.

My first point is about the Australia Council and “lobbying.” The Council is an arm of Government, being a statutory authority. A simple survey of funding issues at the Federal level over the past 5 years will show quite clearly that Government agencies lobbying Government is the least effective way to generate more funds. How does the Agricultural industry get more funding? Through the lobbying of the Farmers’ Federation. How did the scientists get more money? Through the lobbying of the business community. How has cessation of old growth logging come about in WA? Through lobbying by the green movement and its allies in Perth. And as for petrol prices, thanks go to the community at large!

None of this was achieved through lobbying efforts by a government agency. What the Council needs to do is to complement the lobbying efforts of others by reinforcing them through advocacy to government. Contrary to the implication of Sarah’s comments, we have not been sitting on our hands in this regard. Our role in achieving positive outcomes with the Ralph Legislation, the Moral Rights Legislation, and the Nugent Inquiry is well known to those who worked with us on these projects. But we don’t do it through the press or the other avenues that lobby groups will use.

Secondly, we have looked at how the increased funds were achieved for the major performing arts companies. This was not idle lobbying but an in-depth study of how that part of the sector was faring. The second and third tier companies, and the visual arts organisations, are now the centre of attention, and the Council’s planning process aims to fill out the picture in terms of the major issues for the field. Without such a picture there is nothing to present to government which is any more telling than the competing bids from the welfare, environmental, farming, and education sectors. Without “an expensive waste of time”, as Sarah puts it, we can’t even get to first base in marshalling our arguments.

Thirdly, Sarah accuses the Council of “hubris” in assuming responsibility for determining the future of arts practice. Please read the document, Sarah: it expressly says that this project is not about doing that, but is, instead, about enabling the Council to provide the type of support for the arts sector that the sector deems is most appropriate. You will notice, if you read on, that the leadership issue actually came up in one of the vision days and is not something that the Council itself put forward. I personally have big problems with the notion of a Government agency playing a leadership role—all sounds too totalitarian to me. But let’s see what the rest of the field thinks. After all, this is what the project is all about.

March 21, 2001

Dear Editors
In response to Dr Margaret Seares’ letter, I would like to note the following:

Firstly, I think that a closer reading of what I wrote would indicate that my response to the ‘minutes’ of the New Media Arts Vision Day were rather more ‘wary’ or ‘conditional’ than definitive. In my relatively brief, general remarks regarding the Australia Council, I was careful to note that “if there’s no money to back new ideas and initiatives…then all that vision and planning will become nothing more than an expensive waste of time.” For me and many of my peers, that is the unfortunate, everyday reality.

Secondly, I certainly don’t expect the Australia Council to be fully responsible for advocacy and lobbying. I made a distinction and suggested “a more effective role”, a “complementary” role if you like. Nor do I think the Australia Council has been sitting on its hands although, at times, it’s easy to get the impression that Council sees much of the arts community as the ‘opposition’ rather than as equal participants, perhaps a consequence of the funder/fundee relationship. I feel I must also note the enormous effort put in by students, individual artists, companies and organisations (NAVA in particular) across Australia to achieve more positive outcomes regarding the Ralph Legislation and Moral Rights Legislation and I’d be very sure that in terms of the Nugent Report, the MOF organisations lobbied extensively on their own behalf. I do see the Promoting the Value of the Arts (PVA) project and Vision Days as examples of ‘initiative’ and ‘leadership’, however I also reserve my right of comment.

In writing “The Vision Thing” I did, in fact, talk to a number of Vision Day participants, and I still feel it was important to note some of their concerns. I think I made it quite clear that a definitive response would be premature at this stage. Nevertheless, I strongly believe in the importance of discussion, debate, disagreement, dissent, scepticism, celebration, irony and even the odd bad joke. Only then can some of the interesting and important stuff emerge.

I appreciate Dr Seares’ participation in what I’m sure will be, and should be, ongoing issues for discussion and debate.

March 12, 2001

Thanks for the profiles of theatre and performance in Sydney in the last 2 issues of RealTime. It’s been a pleasure to read considered, informed and serious responses to work being done in a variety of companies and contexts. Can we please have regular, extended features on work being done in other States and Territories too?

I was fortunate to have the chance to work with Caitlin Newton-Broad and her team of young performers on their production of Pre-Paradise (RT#41). Fassbinder’s play, Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, was in part a response to the Living Theater’s controversial 1968 work, Paradise Now (which was “intended to inaugurate a non-violent anarchist revolution by freeing the individual”, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre) and Pre-Paradise Sorry Now was the original inspiration for the PACT piece.

As the research and development progressed, though, we found ourselves more drawn to Fassbinder’s play Blood on a Cat’s Neck (1971). The texts used in the final production included most of Blood on a Cat’s Neck, a piece written by Fassbinder himself as a young teenager (the “Vertex” piece which began the evening) and a short piece written by one of the performers, Michelle Outram. The title Pre-Paradise, however, was retained as Caitlin felt, rightly, that it was very evocative, especially for the young performers with whom she was working, many on the cusp of adulthood.

And you’re quite right in regard to the filmic feel to the production—not only is Caitlin influenced by Fassbinder’s films and visual aesthetics, but this early play contains a number of images, situations and characters which Fassbinder also included in later films.

We’re planning to work our way around the country with a series of overviews of theatre and performance in each state. Richard Murphet will report on a range of opinions from Melbourne in our next edition. Editors.

February 21, 2001

Dear Kirsten Krauth,
I greatly appreciate your review [of Cunnamulla, OnScreen, RealTime 41, page 14]—not only for its praise but for the story you tell.

If only I could reach out and touch more people the way I have to you—then I would be a happy man.

How come we’re not talking about….

…the Melbourne Herald Sun’s revelations that Cinemedia industry development manager Julie Marlow had misused her company credit card and that creative director Ross Gibson had funded a project involving his partner? This is the question that the new media community was belatedly asking itself: where was it during the assault on Cinemedia, the Victorian government’s film, screen culture and digital media body? As Premier Steve Bracks and Arts Minister Mary Delahunty took up the ‘scandal’ with indecent haste, there was more than a suspicion that it was a prelude to the dissolution of Cinemedia and the revivification of Film Victoria. This has been something long sought by the film industry lobby as it enviously watched the NSW sector speed ahead over the last 5 years. It accused Cinemedia of being inflexible and was hostile to former Premier Jeff Kennett’s preoccupation with investment in new media. The guilty were proven innocent—a small oversight on the credit card, the grant process had always been transparent—but damage had been done, to reputations and possibly to screen culture (already embattled across the nation) and new media. How will the funds be allocated between Film Victoria and what’s left of Cinemedia? As per the lobby push, the latter will be re-named Screen Culture Victoria. Presumably the very word Cinemedia had too many postmodern connotations of a multiplicity of forms and technlogies. So where will new media fit? At a moment in history when the digitalising of film technology and the emergence of new forms (with popular as well as artistic potentials) are already with us, it’s important not to see new media as a mere sideshow. It requires investment, production facilities and an infrastructure body where it can show its name. Federation Square’s Centre for the Moving Image, a major investment in screen culture and new media, will be looked after by Screen Culture Victoria, but what does that really mean for the development of new media outside of exhibiting it?

Kosky moves in on Vienna

Congratulations to Barrie Kosky. You might not have caught up with the news of March 6 that theatre and opera director Kosky has been appointed Co-Artistic Director (with Airan Berg) of the 300-seater Schauspielhaus Theatre, Vienna, with government funding of $2.5m Australian per year and a 3 year contract. In press reports he says has no intention of cutting ties with Australia with projects still to be realised here. It’s already rumoured that he’ll be taking some of his favorite performers to Vienna for particular shows.

Have you got it?

Throughout this country’s history much of the music heard in theatre, dance-hall, cinema and club was home-made and improvised. The Australia Ad Lib Project wants to find out if such music still thrives within the communities of multicultural Australia. ABC Radio is making a countrywide survey and archive of this wild, weird and vernacular music alternative. A wide selection will be broadcast on The Listening Room, on ABC Classic FM, on Radio National’s Radio Eye and on the web later this year. The archive will also become part of the National Library and The Australian Music Centre collections. Co-ordinator Jon Rose says, “We’re talking about the whole tapestry of non-mainstream music action. We’re calling for extreme or unusual club acts, street musicians with attitude, improvising pipe organists, computer hackers with smart ears, karaoke performers with glass shattering voices, disenfranchised toilet wall poets, building workers with high decibel whistles…Examples already documented include Leslie Clark, the man who can play hundreds of tunes by clicking his fingers at the correct pitches; the disturbing sounds of Toydeath; the spacey telephone wire recordings of Dr Alan Lamb; the legendary Chain Saw Orchestra of Fremantle and Ron West’s Majestic Theatre Organ improvisations for silent movies. Contact Jon Rose or Sherre DeLys, GPO Box 9994 in your capital city. Tel 02 93331308 or ozadlib@abc.net.au

A winner

Congratulations to playwright and RealTime writer Christine Evans whose new short play Mothergun was one of 3 winners at Perishable Theatre’s International Women Playwriting Festival—it means full production, $US500 and publication in a book of the 3 works.

Happy birthday Performing Lines

Congrats also to Performing Lines and to its General Manager Wendy Blacklock for 10 years of hard slog practically singlehandedly touring challenging acts around this difficult country. At the RealTime-Performance space Vision Thing forum, Wendy spoke with great optimism of the future of Australia’s innovative arts. Never before, she said, had she sensed such genuine interest from audiences here and internationally. It makes you think what might be done with more money to promote the vision, not to mention a team of helpers to expand on it. This year Performing Lines will tour over 10 productions to more than 15 cities including William Yang’s Blood Links to America, Europe and throughout Australia; Crying in Public Places’ Skin round Australia; Arena Theatre Company’s Eat Your Young to Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra; Ranters Theatre to the Porto Festival in Portugal and Nigel Jamieson and Paul Grabowsky’s The Theft of Sita to Sydney, New York and London. For more see Performing Line’s brand new website: www.performinglines.org.au

Dance results

We hadn’t caught sight of the Australia Council’s New Media Arts and Theatre funding results before going to print, but the dance results reveal, amongst other things, a commitment to cultural diversity with support for Wu Lin Dance Theatre’s (VIC) Journey of the Northern Tiger; Rakini Devi (WA), a 2 year fellowship which will enable her to work with key collaborators, Rosalind Crisp and Nigel Kellaway; and Hirano (VIC) for LADEN (Little Asia Dance Exchange Network) on a 5 week international tour of contemporary dance performance workshops and forums in partner cities including Melbourne, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo and Seoul. Also evident in the selection is a fair number of cross-artform and multimedia collaborations. The Gilgamesh Project (WA) involves performers and design artists from Australia and India, and musicians from Australia and Indonesia. Lisa O’Neill and Caroline Dunphy (QLD) are developing a movement/text performance piece (Rodin’s Kiss). In the Dark Productions (NSW) will work with 5 Australian performers to develop video material for a project involving UK director Wendy Houstoun. Susan Peacock (WA) will continue development of her dance theatre works Near Enemies and Crossing the Line. And it was good to see Sydney’s One Extra getting some real support for 2 projects involving Michael Whaites (see page 30).

NQ never had it so good

On January 23, Queensland Minister for the Arts Matt Foley made the much anticipated announcement that the joint accommodation submission for a purpose built facility to house both JUTE Theatre Ensemble and Kick Arts Collective had been successful. For a number of years both organisations have separately identified appropriate accommodation in the heart of Cairns CBD as their greatest need. Now, as a result of the $2.7million grant from the Millennium Fund, both can look forward to an exciting period of growth and development. The new facility will include a 200-seat theatre and rehearsal space as well as climate-controlled gallery and exhibition spaces, a digital media laboratory, meeting areas as well as much needed storage and handling areas. Both organisations are now required to prepare feasibility studies which among other things will determine the actual site for the Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA). This will involve consultation and discussion with the many other arts organisations located around Cairns.

the road to Singapore

And while we’re up north, NQ artists Rebecca Youdell and Russell Milledge (Bonemap) have scored the first combined Asialink visual and performing arts residency. It’s hosted by The Substation Centre for the Arts in Singapore from April to July this year. Another exciting component of the 4 month residency will be the presentation of New Image – New Ways an exhibition of Australian contemporary art in Singapore featuring many of the Cairns region’s finest artists. www.bonemap.com

Rare Murphet

Richard Murphet’s innovative Dolores in the Department Store was first produced in a brief season at the VCA last year. The college is remounting the work, April 6 – 11, so don’t miss it. Performance, design and production is by students from the School of Drama, direction by Leisa Shelton and Richard Murphet.

New venue hits stride

Imperial Slacks is establishing itself as a regular Sydney venue for out-there performance. A brief description of their “non-house style” for April: a lifesize fullscale yellow horse becomes a rocking toy; an allgirl boy band drags through the city with the top down baby; a bumper to bumper salon of paintings; watch as a 3D animated business man’s head explodes; panorama painting morphs through grid to graffiti cityscape; interact with a portaloo in a way that Duchamp could only hope for. 2/111 Campbell Street Surry Hills. 02-92811150 islacks@projectroom.com; www.projectroom.com/islacks

UTP gets doco-ed

Routledge has recently published Eugene van Erven’s book Community Theatre Global Perspectives which features a case study of Urban Theatre Project’s Trackwork conceived and produced by artists in Sydney’s western suburbs as well as 5 other projects around the world—Peta in the Philippines, Stut Theater in Utrecht, Teatro de la Realidad in LA, Aguamarina in Costa Rica and Kawuonda Women’s Theatre in Kenya. The book is not widely available at Australian bookshops but can be ordered from Amazon and there’s an accompanying video which is even harder to come by.

Arty genitals

Whereas there’ll be stacks of the new volume on genital origami, Puppetry of the Penis, a new book based on a cabaret show (now at the Melbourne Comedy Festival) in which Simon Morley and David Friend manipulate their genitals into various shapes, objects and landmarks. www.puppetryofthepenis.com

Performance Space at full force

There’s a buzz about a surge of new works at Performance Space over coming months at the very same time that it’s been announced it’s losing its home (see page 12). The April-May program kicks off off-site at Technology Park with Party Line’s steel fracture, a multilayered performance event which unravels the impact of steel on women’s bodies through history. Digital artist Justine Cooper works with steel artist Jam Dickson and the astonishing Party Line performers are directed by Gail Kelly. Text is by Shane Rowlands. Back at the Space, Version 1.0’s The second Last Supper promises “Australian identity, Australian corporate ethics and new Australian cuisine—the seriously playful politics of the personal, the global and the local.” Also in April, Frumpus star in Crazed. In May, Andrew Morrish and Tony Osborne do Relentlessly On. In Tess de Quincey’s Nerve 9 the dancer weaves between the work of 3 of Australia’s finest contemporary artists—provocative poet Amanda Stewart and digital artists Debra Petrovitch and Francesca da Rimini. De Quincey focuses on feminine space which she describes as “an environment where body and textuality coexist.”

Also in May at Performance Space, there’s El Inocente “an incredible and sad tale of innocence and heartlessness” by Nigel Kellaway’s The opera Project. Asked what he’s really on about, Nigel wrote back: “Our task has been to draw attention to the discrete components that make up the performative act, eschewing the illusion of ‘reality’ or (more accurately) ‘totality’ that has been a concern of much of western theatre since the Renaissance. Like the dramaturgy, the music collides many styles and genres as one would find in opera or feature film. It has its genesis in specific Handel operatic arias, but now original music by Richard Vella interacts, complements, ignores or collides with Handel’s music creating a complex musical web. We are simultaneously experiencing a Baroque opera based on Handel’s music and a more contemporary approach to music theatre making. In a certain sense, the music is similar to that found in a road movie. It is neither pastiche nor parody, but is multi-referential—placing the listener into strangely familiar contexts, enabling the work to have multiple layers for interpretation.” And it’ll be wild!

Martin Hibble festschrift

Now, there was a talker. Music broadcaster Martin Hibble was a passionate collector of stage and film music. He regularly raided his vast collection for rare repertoire for ABC Classic FM’s Sunday Bon Bons and other programs. Martin died suddenly late last year and friends and colleagues plan to celebrate the life of this influential and passionate music advocate with a memorial volume. Did you ever meet Martin Hibble? Even if you didn’t, do you have some reminiscence of a particular program he presented, lecture he gave or review he wrote? if so, editors of this memorial volume would be interested to hear from you. Contributions can be emailed to James McCarthy at mccarthy@active-media.com.au or John Baxter on genet@noos.fr

Talking of criticism

Criticism in dance is the focus of the latest Ausdance publication featuring papers by Sarah Miller, Hilary Crampton, Shaaron Boughen and Lee Christofis from a forum held to coincide with the Ausdance Awards in January. The discussion continues on the RealTime website with Keith Gallasch’s contribution to the forum, “Dancing with words: the future of dance reviewing.” Some forms of criticism can be disturbing with artists often feeling work is not adequately accounted for. While praising Company in Space’s previous work in her review in The Age, Hilary Crampton couldn’t connect with their new work, Incarnate. Company in Space’s Hellen Sky wrote to us that, “Basic responses that seemed to be missing, even in terms of a conventional review, were anything about what the show looked or felt like, what the dancers were doing, what the screens were doing, what the images were, what the score was, what the camera shots were, what were the real time effects of the computer vision mixing, what the animations were…the dancers were not just doing tortured gestures, nor were they unaware of the real audience, nor were they restricted by the live camera performer; rather he was moving with them and in fact, therefore very much a live performer, another dancer. To me this is also choreography, the work is not just about a critique of steps, rather the vocabularies of all the elements, visual, design, live, virtual, real space, projection space, sound etc…”

The loss of the Performance Space in Sydney is imminent. The organisation has to leave its famous home by the end of the year. At The Vision Thing, a RealTime-Performance Space forum (Monday March 26), Nigel Kellaway spoke eloquently about how he cannot separate his work and its evolution from this space he has worked in for so long. When he envisions a show, he sees it in the Performance Space. However, given the impossibly high rental, the move out of the building is inevitable. What we all hope is that the spirit of the place will travel with the organisation. And that governments, state and federal, remain committed to the organisation’s future as it continues its search for a new home.

We spent 10 years ourselves performing in the building and like many can sense performances past and read the walls and ceilings for signs of decades of great work. We will lament its passing, especially at a time when it’s enjoying a surge of activity, but will passionately support its next incarnation as we hope all RealTime readers will. We asked Performance Space Artistic Director, Fiona Winning to explain the situation. Virginia Baxter & Keith Gallasch

After decades of intensive experiment and critical debate at 199 Cleveland Street Redfern, Performance Space is moving on. In the best traditions of experimental work we have no destination yet, but the search for a new and better place continues. (Sixteen potential buildings/sites have been investigated in the last 3 years with a view to relocating.)

The Cleveland Street space has been home to a huge family of artists and an enormous variety of works that have attracted national and international attention and acclaim. Over the years the immense body of work produced here has been critical to the development of hybrid performance, dance and visual cultures in Sydney and Australia. The debate surrounding that work has been fundamental to understanding the evolving languages of performance and the limits of its potentials.

Now we approach another limit. The increased costs of commercial rent, of running and maintaining the 70 year old building as a venue, along with static or decreased funding over the years, has resulted in our need to move out of this building at the end of 2001. For the last five years, the proportion of our annual income spent on running the venue increased—and the percentage invested in the art decreased. Late last year, the Board agreed that it is impossible to continue this trend without serious artistic compromise or economic risk.

The irony is that this is happening in a period of increased demand on the space, when many established and emerging artists are developing good work, when our audiences are on the increase and when there is a terrible shortage of rehearsal and performance space in Sydney.

This is not to deny there have been significant shifts in the performance environment over recent years. There’s been an exciting increase in site-specific work being made by companies such as Gravity Feed, Urban Theatre Projects, The Party Line, Nerve Shell and freelance artists such as Julie-Anne Long. But while this means they don’t necessarily need our venue to present their work, these artists have often based their operations with us while working offsite.

This increased interest in the use of other spaces, does not diminish the need expressed by many companies and independent artists for a performance space with a critical environment and a profile to premiere their work. These include The opera Project, De Quincey & Co., austraLYSIS, William Yang, Nikki Heywood, Rosalind Crisp and the stella b. ensemble, Morgan Lewis, Andrew Morrish, Trash Vaudeville, Frumpus, and Version 1.0. Companies and independent artists based outside of Sydney also require a space to tour their work from interstate—aphids, Hubcap Productions, Rakini, PVI Collective, Shelley Lasica and Stacey Callaghan; not to mention international artists such as Russell Maliphant (UK) and Jyrki Karttunen (Finland) and others.

So with no shortage of interesting artists making good contemporary performance and time-based art and no shortage of new and emerging artists becoming involved, why has this happened now? The issue is that most of these small companies and independent artists have little or no funding to realise their work. Our role is increasingly to present, co-produce or produce more and more work—which, in addition to running the venue with fewer staff hours than we’ve had since 1995, has proved unsustainable.

Our situation reflects a deep crisis in resources for contemporary art practice in Australia and most particularly in New South Wales. It’s impossible to avoid the question: how can this happen in Sydney with its cultural and international pretensions? While our peers in Queensland are benefiting from state and local governments’ substantial and visionary investment in capital infrastructure —the Brisbane Powerhouse, The Empire (opening later this year and home to Elision, Rock’N’Roll Circus and the Institute of Modern Art) and the new Cairns Contemporary Arts Centre (2.7 million)—we in New South Wales are going backwards, closing doors, losing ground.

Most comparable arts organisations around the country are provided free or substantially subsidised space by their state or local governments, as well as separate program funding—including Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and Brisbane Powerhouse.

As audiences and artists, we urgently need to lobby the NSW Ministry for the Arts and the Government to provide appropriate conditions for contemporary performance practice in this state.

On paper, the Government would appear to be on the case. “We will pursue opportunities for rehearsal and performance space for smaller and medium sized groups.” (Encouraging the Arts in Local Communities: The Carr Government’s Cultural Development Policy 1999, p19)

But the reality of our political and cultural context is not promising. Firstly, there is no action resulting from several recommendations from the Ministry for the Arts Advisory Council to support Performance Space in resolving our accommodation crisis. Secondly, the Ministry’s recent major capital purchase was for a building in Leichhardt that currently leases its entire ground floor to major companies to house their flammable storage. While we have been invited to consider negotiating a space in that building, its location is unlikely to be suitable for a performance space within a 5 to 10-year time frame.

In the circumstances, it’s deflating to open the newspapers and read that Bell Shakespeare Company has been offered a home at Wharf 2/3 in the arts precinct at Walsh Bay—next to Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Dance Company, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Australian Theatre for Young People and Carnivale.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that these companies shouldn’t be provided this subsidised accommodation, but that Performance Space needs equivalent support. We are a vital part of the ecology of the arts in this state. We’ve played a key role over the last 2 decades in the development and presentation of new work. We are a well managed, dynamic organisation presenting 40 to 50 events per year to enthusiastic audiences. We work directly with 30 small companies and hundreds of local, national and international contemporary arts practitioners annually. We provide a fundamental contribution to the cultural life of Sydney and NSW and on December 31, we will be homeless.

It’s clear we won’t be able to secure a building that can operate as a venue by that time. We’re currently considering moving into an office and studio space in the short term while our campaign to secure an appropriate and affordable venue continues.

We will present a vital, focused program supporting the research and development of contemporary performative work, the professional development of artists and the presentation of new works in partnership with various venues and sites around Australia.

As the soon to be homeless home of contemporary performance in New South Wales, and the first of its kind in Australia, we seek your support in the process of securing a space. We need artists and audiences to stand up (as they often do at Performance Space) for contemporary practice. So please phone or e-mail us to register your name on our campaign list and keep an eye on our website for news.

Teenybopper films, Bring It On aside, got a well-deserved hiding from Phillip Brophy in RealTime 41, but TV for not-quite-adults has never been better. Look at it. The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, Daria, Love is a Four Letter Word, 24 Hrs versus the supposedly grown-up options of Temptation Island, Flat Chat, Millionaire Couples, Just Shoot Me!. OK, that’s a biased list (and there’s some crossover there) but perhaps it’s why those approaching their 30s claw onto their teens, revelling in scooters, streetwear at the office, I-wanna-be-a-filmmaker-writer-web-designer-dreams and moshing in Big Day Out sweatshops (or maybe it’s our inheritance from 50-something parents desperately hanging onto their 20s).

I weep when I think of a wasted youth watching The Brady Bunch every afternoon (I wrote that before realising it’s still on); The Wonder Years was a revelation! Now, look at Malcolm in the Middle: a teenage son undergoes S+M rituals at a military academy, a central character talks directly to camera and invites us into his skewed world, parents are so consumed by each other they forget about the kids, and revel in it. No moral to the story (really). No sitting in bed in demure nightgown and striped pyjamas communicating. Witty, shocking, out-there comedy on prime time Channel 9. A recent episode had an over-protected boy escape with Malcolm’s help into the night to play at Timezone, lose his wheelchair, get dragged along on cardboard, elevated into a shopping trolley, crash violently and eject, only to land on the concrete and scream “I can’t feel my legs!” The Simpsons has revolutionised the small screen (and my pop) world.

The ABC has been plugging away with teen drama for years. Heartbreak High was always miles ahead of Darren Starr’s receding-hairlined 90210, and now there’s Head Start, running smoothly after Top of the Pops—Ricky Martin is not made of cardboard!—and before the addictive chorus line of Popstars on Channel 7. Now there’s niche marketing. Top of the Pops proves that most acts in the Top 20 can’t sing or dance. Bring back Recovery! It seemed to hit on the right formula—Saturday morning, live performance (a rare outlet for Aussie bands to play on TV), deliberately chaotic delivery, a talented anti-host in Dylan—and then it disappeared to be replaced by repeats of Monkey and more Top 20; it’s almost like ABC programmers punish themselves for getting it right. But anyway, I’ve gone off track (you know, my generation’s poor attention span).

Head Start is, like Popstars, based on competition and market forces. Various youngsters are bankrolled to start a business. According to their mentor (who sits, like Charlie from Charlie’s Angels, behind a desk where he never seems to do anything) they are answerable to their sponsor (the bank) who has the power to suspend projects. They must learn to interact with their peers to succeed (hopefully Jonathan Shier watches this). The girls are picture perfect. The country boy wears an Akubra. The participants learn how to market their wares and bodies, bargain, make deals, and achieve the “potential of sponsorship and advertising on a global scale.” It’s the perfect show for the current political environment, teaching teens to be individuals while kowtowing at the altar of economic rationalism.

When it comes to drama, sometimes documentary can do it better than fiction. PS, I Love You, which screened recently on ABC, got into the head of 14 year old Mae, living away from home for a year in rural Victoria. It’s a revealing portrait of the intelligence, energy and conflicts of girls in their mid teens, with the added baggage of negotiating cross-cultural issues. As her Cambodian friend Pam says, “I’m sorta stuck between…not sure whether to follow my culture or whether to follow what I want to be and who I am.” The digital camera becomes the tool/weapon of daughter and mother (the director), as Mae and her friends are more comfortable talking to camera than their mothers: “If I tell her too much she’ll maybe hold it against me.” It’s a contradictory world with false allegiances and regular betrayals, where what holds families together/splits them apart is what remains unsaid. Fathers are noticeably absent and the film’s most memorable, uncomfortable scene comes when Mae’s father returns (she hasn’t seen him since he abandoned the family when she was 3) and he can’t even look at her, chatting up her younger brother and inviting him to sit beside him, taking on a stern authoritative role inappropriately, too soon (and too late). In a family counselling session, she asks him for a guarantee that he will send her a letter “in the next 2 years or something.” He won’t commit, even when she asks, “is there anything that you are sure about…that you can do?” Lisa Wang’s direction, interestingly, reveals the controlling hand of a protective mother. Her voiceovers often state what we can already gauge from the footage and seem intrusive, especially as we know she’s not (physically) present. In a scene where Mae lets her (considerable) guard down and talks about death, that indefinable fear that haunts us all, her mother’s prodding reveals that she no longer understands the complexity of what her daughter is trying to say. With panic in her voice, Mae says: “I don’t think people have enough time to do nothing in life.”

Love is a Four Letter Word is full of existential angst too and grows on you like fungus. Albee (Kate Beahan) and Angus (Peter Fenton) are today’s de Beauvoir and Sartre. If Jean-Paul was around, he’d own a pub and bash in pokies with his steel capped boots; and Simone would quit publishing because of its clash with her high ideals of being a Writer. And yes, they’ve come to an “arrangement” (they can have other lovers and be cool about it) which has always worked fine, as it always does, except that Angus’ dad’s wife is pregnant with his (yes, Angus’) baby and Albee doesn’t know. But would she care? It’s a rare expression that passes over her strangely masked face. Her sister Larissa (Leeanna Walsman) has all the spunk. LIAFLW has a cumulative impact. The concept/characters get more perverse, a new band in each episode—Preshrunk, Jackie Orszaczky, Machine Gun Fellatio—brings a varied mood (like in The Young Ones: who can forget Madness) and the writing and cinematography, after a ploddy start, spiral further into surrealism, camera swinging like a sinking ship. Angus gets most of the introspective focus, constructing alternate narratives, jump cuts thrashing him about. It’s interesting how Fenton plays against his own charisma in this role (and in Praise). As singer/musician (solo and in Crow), I’ve seen him devastate swirling crowds of panting girls but, on screen, he becomes almost sexless, a pawn in other characters’ games. It’s a good move. Paul Bannister (Paul Barry), the best-friend-third-wheel from hell says, “I did not lie. I told my own version of the truth which in a postmodern world is a valid statement of fact.” Hallelujah! Hopefully, the series’ off kilter dynamics, contrasting moods and playful style and pacing will get a second run.

24.00 Hrs, an initiative of Queensland’s Pacific Film and Television Commission, is currently screening as part of Eat Carpet. It’s an imaginative series of documentaries where inexperienced filmmakers head off with just a camera to meet a stranger, to capture 24 hours in their lives. Sly pairing makes the initially awkward relationship between filmmaker and subject as interesting as what’s filmed. Steven seems to want to escape the limitations of being behind the camera when he meets Colin, an Aboriginal rapper and artist in Cairns—cool NY hat shading his eyes—who says, “my name’s gone beyond Australia, I wish I could have gone with it.” Conflict between his white father and Aboriginal mother means he has poetic insight into an often painful inheritance. Rebecca introduces us to Hannabella (dwarfed by an art installation) reading Mexican poetry at Brisbane’s Metro Arts, an eccentric bowerbird in hat and beads and plaits who never stops moving or talking, but is trying for “less is more so I can really experience something.” Doug’s boss won’t let the camera behind the butchershop counter but “Nige” sneaks there anyway. Doug is a gorgeous, 20 year old “man’s man” who would have made it on Popstars. He sings Lean on Me to the customers buying snags, makes a mean Eggs Benedict, and pretty much seduces Nigel, constantly teasing the guy behind the camera who can’t answer back (“tables will turn when the editing takes place”, his girlfriend says revealingly). Bronwyn struggles at first with Yangdzom, a Buddhist nun who is also a legal secretary in a Brisbane high rise. She is intensely private, used to a life of (mainly) stillness, so Bronwyn ends up putting the camera down (to establish a relationship first) and, later, lingers lovingly on the details of ritual: putting on robes, praying and prostrating, building mandalas. Sam visits Mackay for the first time to check out Danyell who works at Red Rooster and (like Yangdzom) wants to be a mechanic. She’s uncomfortable in the limelight (“this is going to be the most boring 24 hours of your life”) until well oiled at a nightclub where she lets loose. As, apparently, does Sam who admits to the night being the best of his life, with “complete strangers.”

24.00 Hrs reveals a curious gender divide. The films made by women about women are intimate portraits, in close on faces, carefully framed, not afraid to question. Those by men about men hang back in wide shot, afraid of crossing that invisible line (we never get a good look at Colin’s face). It’s a bummer that 24.00 Hrs screens late on Saturday nights (and is not even listed in The Guide). It will be missed by almost everyone, relegated, like many aspects of youth culture, to the margins. Why not repeat it in prime time, SBS? And what about a second series where the roles are reversed, giving those filmed a chance to train their cameras on the filmmakers…it gives a whole new slant to Australian Story.

Malcolm in the Middle, Channel 9, Tuesdays, 7.30pm; Love is a Four Letter Word, ABC, Tuesdays, 9.30pm; The Big Picture documentary series, ABC, Thursdays, 9.30pm; 24.00 Hrs, Eat Carpet, Saturdays, 11pm; Head Start, ABC, Sundays, 6.10pm

What’s Cooking

writer/director Gurinder Chadha
co-writer Paul Mayeda Berges
distributor New Vision
national release May 17

It’s Thanksgiving in LA. An advert on a bus streaks by, a wholesome whitebread family proudly holding up a turkey. Hey hetero! Beach boys memories, la la land. Luckily, What’s Cooking is not just another Hollywood take full of overripe dialogue and sticky sentimentality. Gurinder Chadha is standing on the outside looking in (her first feature Bhaji on the Beach was a superbly realised intercultural experience) and, as is often the case with directors not from US directing US films (Ang Lee’s Ice Storm and Ride With The Devil for example) her perceptions open the gates to a new filmic world: the advertisement glides past to the bus’s interior, a mix of cultures and passions, loud, debating, pashing, stirring. It’s sometimes easy to forget that the US is a land of migrants.

Four families, 4 Thanksgiving dinners—Afro-American, Latin-American, Vietnamese, Jewish—where mums (as always) are the glue. It’s a challenging ensemble piece and the writing and acting are feisty: big and small names wrestling for solid, shared and sometimes sacred ground. The characters, like Jong Ling’s camerawork, are fluid. The men and boys shift allegiances, they don’t seem to connect—“without your father here…there’ll be leftovers for the first time”—smoothing things over or staying silent, camouflaged against the bright women, who live and breathe conflict and tenacity, silently simmering or bubbling over. A mother questions her son’s sense of family: “talking on computers…ain’t the same thing.”

Imaginative cross-cultural-cutting highlights the complexities of issues (people don’t agree within families, let alone communities) and keeps the pace as machine-gun-quick as conversation between middle aged Ruth and Herb Seelig (Lainie Kazan and Maury Chaykin), who have settled into that years-together rhythm that defies any real communication: she says, “your signal’s on”, he says, “I know.” Even though the indicator has been blinking for miles. Expectations. A word to tear any relationship apart, and undercutting all 4 stories are the next generation, American-raised, straddling 2 worlds of their parents’ ideals and their own. Almost intimate. Not quite touching. Carla (ER’s Julianna Margulies), after trying to cuddle up to her lover Rachel (Kyra Sedgwick) on 2 single beds shoved together in a girly bedroom, laments “all night I was in the crack.”

This is no idealised inter-racial world. LA is a shifting city where people’s attitudes can change. Or stay the same. Bigotry can be subtle or overt or overcome by humour, patience and self-deprecation. Jimmy (a wonderfully awkward performance by Will Yun Lee) lies to his mother Trinh (Joan Chen) about being in college and then spends Thanksgiving with his girlfriend who lives just round the corner. In a gentle poke at stereotypes, her father and brother can only relate to him by talking about Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee movies. His girlfriend’s mother Elizabeth (a crafty and vivacious Mercedes Ruehl) asks him, “where are you from?” On auto pilot he says, “I was born in Vietnam.” She smiles, but that’s not what she meant. Writer/director Chadha comments: “Most American films…with people from different communities are either buddy-buddy films, that kind of black cop-white cop thing, or films about conflict within 2 communities…It was very important to us that race was just a given, not problematised. That’s how most people live. I don’t think that most people of colour go around continually dealing with other people in terms of racial conflict.”

What’s Cooking is also a love story, a meditation on the relationship between family and food. Food as desire, perfection, control, dissent, belonging, cultural signifier. There are many ways to mash a potato. Chadha’s documentary background is evident in the food preparation and meal scenes, as the camera plunges in from above into the sweet steam while delicate meanings are sifted and spat out. A shiitake mushroom stuffing threatens a relationship. Little kids assimilate Kentucky Fried Chicken dreams. The turkey goes into the oven Vietnamese-style (one half a brilliant fiery chilli-red, the other white and lifeless), while a sullen teenager complains, “why do you wanna make turkey taste like everything else we eat?”

With Consuming Passions and SBS’s A Food Lover’s Guide, weekend newspapers chockablock with dining and consuming, and the success of films such as Like Water for Chocolate, Big Night and the recent Chocolat, Australians seem to be insatiable foodies, keen to explore unusual tastes and be inventive with new ingredients. When it comes to filmmaking too, the time is right to cook up our own vibrant cultural mix.

Walk The Talk

writer/director Shirley Barrett
distributor 20th Century Fox
national release March 15
preview screening & Q+A with Shirley Barrett and producer Jan Chapman, Popcorn Taxi, Valhalla, Sydney, March 5

It’s not very often we get to see an Australian director’s second film but Shirley Barrett has been touched by God, or David Geffen, the G in Dreamworks SKG (a hug with Spielberg of course). Five million, no questions asked. Enough has been said (Good Weekend, smh.com.au) about the film’s unusual history, a (relatively) low budget feature with Hollywood backing and local actors, but what’s curious is the synchronicity between the film’s content—positive thinking and ‘following your dream’—and its making.

Jan Chapman loves Barrett’s “take on the foibles of the Australian character” already revealed in the Cannes award winning Love Serenade. This was a film you either loved or hated and Walk The Talk is no different. Joey (Salvatore Coco) is an angel of success/destruction, spouting neurolinguistic platitudes/truths gleaned from evangelical churches, life affirming seminars and, I’d guess, Good Morning Australia with Bert. In his quest for a higher self he cruises restlessly through the Gold Coast streets getting a fix on “vulnerability” and using “his special gift.” It’s all about “reprocessing” he tells anyone who’ll listen including his girlfriend Bonita (Sacha Horler) in a wheelchair singing the gospel and revelling in irony: “I’m walking on sunshine WOH-HO and don’t it feel GOOD.” But Joey thinks she “chooses to be a paraplegic.” The old new age slap em in the face and blame em for their illness cos we all have the power to choose our own recovery with the powers of positive thinking.

Walk The Talk becomes frustrating because, like Joey, it doesn’t recognise its own boundaries. The opening is hilarious and pumps at such a furious pace (the feelgood footage of penguins slipping and dithering on the ice over the strains of The Impossible Dream is a perfect condensation of human stuggle and the cynical marketing of Optus ads) that the rest of the film seems to slide. And the characters loom so much larger than life from the beginning that, in the mounting hysteria, they have no solid surface to claw onto, despite some clever writing and good casting. In particular, Nikki Bennett deftly manoeuvres the immovable Nikki beyond bimbo status (cast after Barrett saw her performing Miss Otis Regrets on the Midday Show), her strange flat intonation and iceblock persona, combined with a “va va voom” body, perfectly capturing the ‘ideal woman’ completely out of sync with the “sunny disposition” and “affectionate nature” she is meant to have. The best thing about Joey is that his “instinct” is always completely off the mark.

From the beautiful hinterland of Tamborine Mountain, the highrises of the Gold Coast look like gravestones, a perfect setting for impossible dreams, and Mandy Walker’s cinematography (Barrett calls it “enhanced bleak”) evokes a harsh and faded world of “damaged goods”—lonely oldies and pokies, siliconed women and jaded singers. Tacksville. Barrett argues that the film is not a satire but it needs to be to succeed. Perhaps she just loves her characters too much. Perhaps she watches too much daytime TV. The film seems to have another darker plot lingering underneath its slippery surfaces, that Barrett knows is there but is too nervous to acknowledge. Apparently, the cabaret scenes were originally set in Twin Towns Services Club but after reading the script, management refused, and sent it back with suggested changes marked on yellow sticky notes. I’d love to know what they wrote…

Continuing the trend towards an appreciation of our screen heritage, BIG SCREEN 2001, a celebration of Australian Cinema (AFC & ScreenSound), is a selection of Australian films which will tour 20 regional centres including Northern Territory & Tassie this year. The program in each centre will be held over a weekend & will include a selection of Australian feature films (including Innocence, Better Than Sex, The Shiralee & Storm Boy), short films & documentaries; archival films shot in, or of specific relevance to the region; & Q&As with visiting filmmakers & actors. For tour dates visit www.screensound.gov.au/bigscreen2001/

With Indigenous filmmakers like Ivan Sen, Catriona McKenzie & Sally Riley making the most interesting short films in Australia at the moment, it’s appropriate that the AFC’s Indigenous Unit & SBS Independent have embarked on the next stage in the development & production of Indigenous Drama. Two 50-minute & five 10-minute films will be commissioned under new Drama Initiatives: the Fifty/Fifty Initiative is aimed at supporting Indigenous filmmakers with at least one screen credit to work in the longer 50-minute format & the Indigenous Drama Initiative 3 will support new & emerging filmmakers. Ivan Sen’s first feature Beneath Clouds is in pre-production with shooting to commence in western NSW. Ivan & producer Teresa-Jayne Hanlon have gathered together the crew behind Ivan’s successful short films Tears & Dust.

After intense lobbying from local industry & filmnet, the Victorian government has announced that Cinemedia will split in two, with Film Victoria to oversee new productions & Screen Culture Victoria to look after the Centre for the Moving Image (see page 10). In a culture of decreasing production & funding, the film & TV industry has been fiercely critical of Cinemedia’s direction, but let’s hope that policy makers continue to promote digital arts/artists as an important & evolving aspect of screen culture.

Popcorn Taxi in Sydney continues its impressive lineups & premieres of Australian films with a screening of The Goddess of 1967, the new feature by director Clara Law. The film stars Rose Byrne (Two Hands), Rikiya Kurokawa, Nicholas Hope (Bad Boy Bubby) & Elise McCredie (Strange Fits of Passion) & is beautifully captured by cinematographer Dione Beebe (Praise, Holy Smoke), Valhalla Cinema, April 18, 7.30pm.

WA’s Screen Industry Taskforce Report outlines recommendations designed to increase the state’s share of film & television production from 2 percent to 10 percent over the next 10 years. Potential initiatives from the report include the development of a ‘screen precinct’, providing studios, theatres, & commercial media & information technology premises, as well as the establishment of a Screen Training Academy through a partnership between TAFE & the secondary & tertiary education sectors.

The AFC has released an online database of film festivals, listing where Australian features & short films, documentaries & animations have been screened internationally, with detailed breakdowns of each festival’s screening programme & submission deadlines, aimed at helping Australian filmmakers target the best festivals for their current & future work. www.afc.gov.au/services/awards/festprofiles/intro.html
Online film journal Screening the Past is being edited by Adrian Martin & the March/June/September issues will explore the thorny issue of Auteurism. The current issue includes articles on Lois Weber, Hitchcock, Eastwood, Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, & Campion; & Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Michael Mann, Akerman, & Bigelow are lined up for future editions.
www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/

FTO & SBS Independent have joined forces to announce a funding opportunity for emerging documentary makers across NSW. They are looking for proposals for a third Australia By Numbers, a series of half-hour documentaries about the private worlds & secret places that lurk behind our postcodes. Deadline April 27. Download guidelines from www.fto.nsw.gov.au, contact Courtney, 02 9430 3816.

The AFC & ABC received 116 applications for Documentary Online, an initiative set up to encourage adventurous projects that exploit the possibilities of the internet for documentary. From the applications, 11 projects have been shortlisted for further development & 4 will ultimately be selected for web-streaming & hosting on ABC Online. The successful projects include Escape to Freedom (Sohail Dahdal/David Goldie explore the complex challenge Australia faces in responding to the plight of refugees); Fishbone (Gina Williams/Ivon Green on the adventures of Milli, the “Chat Queen of Bassendon” as she meets up with her internet chat friends of the past 6 & a half years, “The Fishboners”); Homeless (Trevor Graham/Rosa Hesp/Rob Wellington’s experiential website telling the stories of 6 individuals trapped in a state of homelessness in their booming global cities); & Restless (Heather Croall’s look into the lives of Ziggy & Rachel, 2 dancers with Down Syndrome & members of Restless Dance Company).

Queensland’s Pacific Film & Television Commission has announced an initiative for new/emerging writers, who are invited to submit short drama scripts (under 20 pages) for possible development. Financial assistance is available & successful applicants will work with a mentor who will help develop the script. Producers & directors will be attached at a later stage. Guidelines & application forms, Tessa Mitchell, 07 3224 5574, tmitchell@pftc.com.au. Closing May 14.

Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival (August 9-18, Reading Cinemas Haymarket) has announced a new national film competition as part of its 2001 program, SHORT SOUP, open to short films made by or about Asian-Australians. Winning films will be screened on Eat Carpet throughout the festival alongside the best new cinema from Asia. Other highlights of the festival include Australian premiere of ScreenSound’s brand new print of 70s classic The Man From Hong Kong. For competition details, visit www.sapff.com.au

In a bid to raise money for her local school (is this where education funding is heading?) filmmaker Pene Patrick is organising a short film fest, Fleeting Images, screening at Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, September 1. Films must be 16/35mm or DVD, less than 20 mins, preview cassette due June 30. Submission deadlines & guidelines, Susan Morgan-Elliss, 03 9848 3250, filmages@hotmail.com

Although the trigger for this performance, a broken back from a circus accident (and the pain that still lingers) is very real, the incident serves as symbolic for reflection on the formation of a life from early childhood; after all it was the accident that enforced the stillness that allows for the new perspective, a new life. Stacey Callaghan is a Brisbane-based artist. This account of her growing up is performed with a good humour, physical and verbal, that initially belies the seriousness of a struggle to find a self that was too good at hiding from life. This self resolved itself into 3 personae—a tomboy Scott Challenger; Jessie Kidd, a circus performer (the first name suitably androgynous, the surname indicative that she was still really a child); and the Unitard Bomber, an acerbic drag queen, about as far as Callaghan’s fantasy of sugar and spice and all things nice could go. The Boy therefore looms large in her, and she binds her breasts flat to her chest, and constantly fiddles with the bulge in her shorts. And there’s a toughness and insularity that goes with these personalities…and the fantasy of invulnerability. The only love she needs is that provided by an audience watching her on a trapeze, “I do it for love, not for the love of it, but for love…”

The splitting into 3 tough, essentially masculine personalities and the oblique reaching for love bespeak a dogged interiority, initially and hilariously portrayed in her first appearance, zipped up in a small bag. But it is also a selfishness that she needs to overcome and for that she needs us, her audience, in a different way, to address as confidantes, requiring several of us to help her (get her out of the bag, play games with her, help her urinate in a hospital bedpan) and, finally, in a couple of surprising reversals, offer one of us something special. At last the self has met the world, face to face, hands on.

Callaghan is utterly engaging as the tomboy (the best realised of the personae) and the abrasive circus performer (making out in a yoga class), but the Unitard Bomber is insufficiently bitchy, lacking the cleverness to be revelatory, and slows the show down dangerously. Physically, as in the scene where she plays both masseur and client, Callaghan is a dextrous clown. Gail Kelly directs with theatrical verve and inventiveness, working with lighting designer Clytie Smith to alternate a metaphysical circus of life and death with an intimate chat—the lighting is the set. The sound score is less effective, beginning portentously and powerfully, then (if rather literally) paralleling the action with clock ticks and heartbeats, and ending rather soppily with birds tweeting and guitar and synthesizer burblings—then again the New Age it conjures is perhaps part of Callaghan’s new world. Fair enough.

Callaghan’s winning personality, good audience responses in Brisbane (where the work was orginally commisioned by the Brisbane Powerhouse) and Sydney, and an evocative production suggest that with a bit of re-working (of the Unitard Bomber in particular) When I was a Boy warrants a longer life, to take audiences around the country on a fascinatingly bent path. And it’s great to see a physical theatre performer’s life realised on stage.

When I was a Boy, written & performed by Stacey Callaghan, dramaturg Shane Rowlands, director Gail Kelly; Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Performance Space, Feb 20 – March 2

unBecomings was one of the hits of the 2000 Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, dynamically designed and expertly and eccentrically performed by young, queer artists with guidance from experienced mentors. Sadly, the 2001 model has a still life set, some less than excellent performances and serves up some predictable queerness. But there are some high points.

Gay and lesbian duo Shelley O’Donnell and Karl Velasco kickstart the show with impressive showbizzy vigour and neat timing that the audience love, but there’s not much in the way of substance when it comes to trying to guess at the meaning of such a collaboration. Andrew Brennan, on the other hand, does great stand-up in Mom Knows (with the odd theatrical gesture deftly thrown in), delivered drolly (“under 16 rugby…is not an expressive medium”) and very much at his own absorbing pace. As a gay rites of passage narrative it’s pretty distinctive, not only country town, but working against a disability (not that he bothers to go into that) and a liberal mother with lesbian friends who baulks at her son’s coming out. One of the night’s best—let’s see more of Andrew Brennan. Verticularity (Rosie Dennis and company) comes on like a Pina Bausch show with its elegantly attired performers arriving ritually and gracefully with music to match (waltz’n’bass’drums) before engaging percussively with a row of typewriters and pointedly delivering some rather arch text. It’s a disciplined performance but it evokes soiree and recitation too much for my taste. Something’s missing.

Karen Therese is a charismatic performer first seen to great effect in Nikki Heywood’s The Darkroom III for PACT a few years ago. Recently she’s been training at the VCA in Melbourne. i’ll get you my pretty is strange, not queer strange, just odd. A savage tirade against Judy Garland (“she blamed her mother…she married 2 poofs…” etc, no irony in sight, very Karen Finley, the audience tense) is followed by storm FX and a dull bit of flirting with the audience using a video camera. She finds a female face she likes: “I want to be the father of your child…none of this turkey baster stuff.” She fantasises an ideal home, 2 mums, 2 dads (including sperm donor). She imagines she’s getting into bed “and she knows I’m there and I love it.” Who—Judy/lover? Judy’s shoes light up forestage. End. Is all forgiven. What happened? If I was a Kleinian psychoanalyst I could have a field day with this ragged pattern of rejection, ingestion, fetishising, various kinds of objectification, splitting etc. But I’m not and will have to settle with i’ll get you my pretty being rather opaquely about lesbian love-hate for a gay icon mixed up with more personal fantasies. Whatever, it was more mystifying than mysterious and, on opening night, Therese’s performance was unusually over the top and certainly short on her usual magnetism. Quite a trip nonetheless.

Last year Garth Bolwell was brutally splattered with cream, adding a sculptural dimension straight out of performance art, as he bewailed life and love. It worked. The wailing is with us again, but without tight direction it’s pathos all the way. The writing is too loose, the staging unfocused. Our coked-up confesser skates awkwardly on roller blades from inflatable doll to doll, lamenting a good lover turned bad, a too familiar tale, all abstraction, no specificity, no insight into his own appalling decay.

Topically dedicated to Tom & Nicole, The Devil has plenty of literary oomph in Brian Fuata’s sonorous delivery of his poetic text and in his and co-performer Hannah Furmage’s adroit physical game of heterosexual musical chairs, all fey affection and edgy antagonism (“I desire everything you are not”) underscored with gay male anxiety and a repudiation of aspects of gay life. This is played closely against resolutely noir-romantic black and white video images on a big screen of Fuata and Furmage in extreme closeup—embracing, dancing, kissing, smoking. Even though the work is sometimes dense to the point of opaque, the power of performers and video (finely shot by Marty Dacachen) make for memorably sensual imagery and an uneasy air of doubt about the certainty of sexual proclivities as the performers alternatively intone: “I was a queen once and all he loved me for was what I was.”

unBecomings, PACT Youth & Performance Space, producers Caitlin Newton-Broad & Fiona Winning, design Anthony Babici, lighting Richard Manner; Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival 2001; Performance Space, Feb 13-17

The gentle voice of Kevin Gilbert resonates through the room against the clack of computer keys. I’m writing about Gilbert’s play, the first by an Indigenous writer, The Cherry Pickers, 1968, not staged until 1994 (by Kooemba Jdarra). I’m listening to an ABC recording from Awaye on Radio National, an interview with the late artist. His recollections are interspersed with his richly rhetorical poetry. He moves easily from detailing childhood moments, to 14 and a half years in jail, to the emergence of Aboriginal protest, to a metaphysics of belonging, of love, of giving one’s lives for the generations to come. I’m recalling Wesley Enoch’s production of the play, trying to match the voice to the play, a riotous night out that embraces satire, protest, symbolism and a raucous female sexuality. It speaks high literature, it chats discursively. It is celebratory, but its tale is finally unbearably sad.

Much of the pleasure of The Cherry Pickers resides in the moment, camp fire conversations, a string of jokes and joshing, bursts of song, unanimity in the midst of stress. True to this spirit, you arrive to find the party’s already begun and you’re promptly implicated in it, addressed directly, the latecomers noted, friends identified. Next you feel a presence. Above the orange sand floor, above the performers, hang the roots and the base of a trunk of a massive tree. Against the easy atmosphere of the gathering the tree is an ominous presence, long before its sacred power is spoken of, and the imminence of its death revealed—you think the people are talking about a sick elder. The play eventually becomes more interior as the loose plotting tightens around the tree’s death, the death of the Godot-ish foreman who was going to galvanise the seasonal workers, and the devastating loss of work.

For all its humour, and sometimes through its humour, The Cherry Pickers is brutally honest about alcoholism, violence and the desperation that can lead to cultural and spritual dead ends. One of the most difficult scenes in the play is where a man tries to return to an idealised version of Aboriginal life, forcing his partner to go with him. The quest is a failure. So is the scene, despite the commitment of the players. The language is too abstract. But in the rash of climatic moments it makes sad sense as every option seems to close down on this humble bunch of people, who however worn down still acknowledge their spirituality and struggle to come to grips with the idea of protest. On the night I saw the show, the cast’s invitation to join their cries of protest was hard to accept after the depiction of a plight that we could neither presume nor pretend to fully comprehend or own. On other nights of the sell-out season it might have been different. On Awaye Enoch tells the story of a drunken Aboriginal man who leaps to his feet during the show to berate the cast, “How dare you represent our people in this way…you’re dogs and I hope you die…” After the man leaves, the inimitable Lilian Crombie says to the audience, “Welcome to the family.” It’s this honesty of response that Enoch is after: “it’s a form of racism not to tell the truth about our communities.”

The Cherry Pickers is a rough and raucous ride, rude and sexy, rich and melodramatic. Some of the time it’s like any other Western play, at other times it can be quite alien as time stands still. Enoch pushes its discursiveness even further with moments of improvisation and song. He wants white critics and audiences to recognise that Indigenous theatre “is evolving a different form…relaxing western theatre.” He takes it to the limits. He has the perfect cast, all of them adept at slipping from casual discourse into moments of intense engagement. Like many a classic, The Cherry Pickers has its flaws, and the production has its excesses, but its bravery is undeniable, the play’s support for women ahead of its time, and its literary and theatrical thrills and spills are funny, revealing and alarming.

Kevin Gilbert, The Cherry Pickers, directed by Wesley Enoch, designed by Stephanie Blake, lighting Mark Pennington, composer/musical director Wayne Freer; performers Wayne Blair, George Bostock, Luke Carroll, Elaine Crombie, Margaret Harvey, David Page, Tessa Rose, Pauline Whyman; Wharf 2 Blueprints, Sydney Theatre Company, opened Feb 17.

It’s been slim pickings in Sydney contemporary dance over the past year. The latest round of funding from the Australia Council redresses some of the imbalance for Sydney’s contemporary dance artists with project grants to Rosalind Crisp’s stella b. and the One Extra Company. During the drought, One Extra has provided the audience with some vital nourishment in the form of Stretching It Wider, a co-production with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and Twosome, a short and self-supporting season mounted in collaboration with the Centre for Performance Studies at Sydney University.

For want of a better hook, Brian Carbee and Dean Walsh decided on “isolation and intimacy” to corral the 3 works that make up Stretching It Wider. “They’re about standing in front of an audience which is isolating and intimate by its very nature”, says Carbee. First in Madame, they play with alternations of power. Carbee in pinnie, fishnets and heels is endlessly choreographically inventive in his attempts to control Walsh in drab—sinuous, sensual, cheeks sucked in, knees scissoring shut. In part 2, a welcome reprise of Glory Holy! seen at last year’s Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, Carbee raps on glory using the vocal style and physical mannerisms of a holy roller. Intermittently he turns his back on us and while getting off in a glory hole cubicle, takes calls from his Mom to confirm his memory for her bizarre life lessons. To a funky score by Drew Crawford, personae conjoin in the body of the dancer who’s eventually pulled through the glory hole by the invisible Walsh, this time his anonymous partner. In part 3, Stretching It Wider, they perform a duet with pennies taped to their eyes. Their blindness is real but they have no trouble finding each other. Lookalikes, their movements are seamlessly playful, invasive, rough-house, familiar and strange. Pennies removed, they mess with camp, running at and breaking fourth walls. Carbee and Walsh are skilful dance artists and accomplished writers. Both have created notable solo works but this is their first work together and like any great team, each brings out something new in the other’s performance. In his program note, Brian Carbee says “these pieces are just as much about working with Dean and Drew. They are also about having an opportunity to create, about making a living, such as it is, and about love.” This work was put together on a shoestring and at lightning speed. The intimacy between the dancers is infectious. While you’re watching, you’re already thinking about telling your friends.

In Rara Avis (part 1 of the Twosome program), Kay Armstrong in cocktail dress bluntly cut off at the knees, red runners and a bad Suzie Quatro wig makes her way along a wall. A strange bird. A little boy in the front row is in hysterics. We see the dancer’s face for the first time as she makes her way onto a stage strewn with beer cans and car parts. She’s not fussed but not that thrilled to be here either. She gives all her concentration to a meaningless display of beer can balances, squeezes the words “showsyertits” between her teeth, then hitches the sentence to a moving car. She spits out Coral Hull’s sad litany of suburban ugliness. Dancing detachedly to ‘Nutbush City Limits’ she tells us that 10 years ago she went with One Extra to Indonesia. By way of introduction, the Indonesians and the 2 Aboriginal members of One Extra danced some traditional stuff. The white dancer didn’t have anything to show. “We should have showed them this,” she says. Who doesn’t remember dancing to this?” and then she deadpans “Just because we remember something doesn’t make it good.”

This is a clever and odd performance which occasionally loiters in too literal zones. Contrasting staccato kicks, tight fisted tough girl poses with enigmatic movements such as a limp arm and wrist shaking at the ground or bending backwards to gaze at the ceiling, the disaffected dancer dwells on some of the grim banalities of Australian life. At one stage, she throws herself into a “meaningful” dance sequence then shakes it off like a spider web. Armstrong is an engaging performer who combines her choreography of physical tics with virtuosic vocal manoeuvres: dancing in the headlights to her boyfriend’s order to “get back in the car now!” she turns the “now” into a cats midnight growl. The little boy nearly falls off his chair.

Julie-Anne Long’s stage is empty. An ample woman in a pleated skirt and cardigan buttoned up and sensible shoes, she lies on the floor and, depending on your perspective, dances a horizontal dance or performs a series of elegantly restrained gestures to the music of Schubert. Holding a small TV receiver tuned to ER, her sad eyes blink to Mendelssohn. Distractedly, she lolls along a wall, retrieving toffees from her bosom and masticating them in time to Beethoven. In this work our attention is called to every aspect of the body on stage. Watching A Still Life is like looking at a painting that fascinates, each atom of the air between us and the object of our gaze is charged.

Each of these works is performed by dancers but trusts nothing to dance alone. Nevertheless they still inhabit the landscape of dance, that realm of inexplicable sensations, ephemeral spaces and elusive states of being. All are in some way about dancing. The place of virtuosic movement varies in the pieces. Carbee and Walsh move from virtuosic dance to everyday, non-dancerly movement, from plain to heightened speech, from improvisation to dramatic depiction. Brian Carbee describes the works as being about “having chairs that don’t match and movement that doesn’t quite fit and a groin pull.” Behind the shifting personae of Julie-Anne Long’s creation is “a former dancer whose work fell out of favour in a time of extreme physicality.” She creates an idiosyncratic choreography using her dancer’s grace to draw attention to the smallest or most indolent of movements. Kay Armstrong treads a line between forms using dancerly movement as well as extended vocalisations and a mixture of subtle and tacky theatrics. An extreme case scenario is suggested in the 3 works intersecting Armstrong and Long’s. In Girls, Girls, Girls Erin Brannigan and Lisa Ffrench play 2 dizzy showgirls. Here, dance is merely suggested in a flurry of lights and music offstage. What happens (and not nearly enough does) takes place in cute dialogues as the 2 cross the stage in tap shoes. Response to these works always splits the dance community, critics and audiences. Interestingly, over the 2 night season, the Twosome works evoked starkly different responses—hysterical laughter one night, contemplation the next.

Each of these works is dramatic, speaks to its audience emotionally and directly but not solely of bodies moving. This is the dance you have when the vocabulary at hand can’t quite account for the particular experience of dancing with someone on your wavelength. Or the sense of grim banality evoked by a place and time. Or wanting to dance about not wanting to dance. All are created by mature artists and deserve further development and more than the brief exposure offered by short seasons.

Now the heavens have opened, we look forward to Rosalind Crisp’s performances celebrating 5 years of developing work at Omeo Dance Studio. Though former Australia Council Fellowship winner Tess de Quincey has once again been left off the grants list, she will present new work at Performance Space in May. Meanwhile, One Extra’s forthcoming program features the choreography of Michael Whaites, a dancer educated at Adelaide’s CPA who went on to work with Leigh Warren, Twyla Tharp and, most recently, Pina Bausch. Michael returns to Australia to re-present Achtung Honey! and to create the site specific Oysterland with Kay Armstrong and Julie-Anne Long at the Seymour Centre in May/June.

Stretching It Wider, choreographed and performed by Brian Carbee and Dean Walsh, composer Drew Crawford; 2001 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, Seymour Centre, February 24; Twosome: Rara Avis text and choreography, performance by Kay Armstrong; A Still Life, performed and devised by Julie-Anne Long; Girls Girls Girls, created and performed by Erin Brannigan and Lisa Ffrench.

You really need to look twice at the works in Stills latest show. It takes a lingering look to make out within the glossy religious icons of Brenda L Croft’s cibachromes the blurry black and white portraits of Aboriginal people. At a distance, you could disappear into Christine Cornish’s gelatin silver photographs of “real and simulated spaces, random objects and images suggesting ephemeral cultural phenomena.” They look like drawings until you move in on them to see they are both.

Without knowing the history of Rebecca Shannahan’s images, my eyes had already begun to reconstitute plausible places from the improbable ones she had set up in her studio—combining disparate elements with words like “haunting” and “exotic” vying for attachment. Reading her notes on the Acclimatisation Project made the second viewing a whole new experience.

“The photographs depict plants set against landscapes. The plants’ histories of circulation and exchange make them useful metaphors for mobile, fluid cultures: the Andean potato was the direct cause of Irish migration to the United States; speculation on the Chinese tulip brought the Dutch economy to near collapse; opium from Turkish poppies grown in India gave the British their desired trade with China. The landscape backdrops refer to landscape photography’s ‘surveyor peg’ function in colonised countries—images which assert possession, acquisition, the right to belong. In this way, ‘foreign’ species and local views are joined within a single pictorial space.”

The grain in the images I thought I’d seen before. It’s a familiar of contemporary photographs. But perhaps no other photographer has gone to such lengths to achieve it. Each negative used in the series was sent to the country of origin of the plant it depicts. There, an assistant placed the negative near where they lived, to weather, or acclimatise, outside. When they felt their negative had stayed long enough, they sent it back to Australia to be printed. This process allowed each negative to experience a place as well as depict it and degraded the photographic emulsion which normally supplies a faithful representation of reality.”

Stills Gallery, Brenda L Croft, Christine Cornish, Rebecca Shannahan; March 14-April 14.

Exquisitely sung, engagingly acted, here is a comically realised Song Company performance of a rehearsal that feels both real and fantastical. It’s replete with interrupted songs, aesthetic differences, indifferences (one singer reads a magazine while the others perform, a mobile phone takes over), the letting down of hair (literally), awe (all at one on a huge lounge, singing while bathed in golden light pouring through a church window), a sudden rapturous will to dance (hands raised like paws, legs prancing in unison), a nervy edge of danger (some recurrent gun business), comic turns (a la Mr Bean, alongside company jokes at their own expense) and an interplay of the singers both as themselves and fictions. Subjecting the 15-16th century Belgian composer Josquin Desprez to various stresses inflicted by physical and spatial demands wrought by director Nigel Kellaway is perfectly legitimate. Most of them are secular compositions about lost love and other grievings, some are remarkably existential, almost heretical. The singers might not talk sensibly about the songs, but their immersion in and commitment to them is palpable, conveying the everydayness of rehearsal and the magic of their art.

Although movement tests the perfection of the singing it amplifies the dramatic in the songs without any literalising, though some occasional connection between song and action might have been nice…or did I miss something? It’s a pity that the spoken dialogue is too often unwieldy, rendering the singers (whose physical presence is expertly and confidently framed and projected) sound unnecessarily awkward and sometimes downright quaint. Some rescripting, a more focussed sense of purpose (some routines seem surplus) and other economies, could make Little George (an affectionate diminutive for Desprez) a popular addition to the Song Company repertoire. The final image, of the company all in bed, one with gun in hand, is a reminder that even in the most genteel of arts, risk is a virtue. Little George is a risk worth taking.

The Song Company, Little George, devised by Nigel Kellaway, Anatoly Frusin & the Artists of the Song Company, musical director Roland Peelman, director Nigel Kellaway, lighting Neil Simpson, Paddington Uniting Church, February 7-10

Congrats to ViCA graduate Tatiana Doroshenko whose interactive CD-ROM, SHOT (with Marcus Dineen as DOP & featuring Katrina Mathers in the title role), won First Prize at the Rencontres International Henri Langlois (RIHL) Film Festival in France; & Matthew Riley, who was invited to exhibit Memo at the prestigious Milia 2001 event in Cannes. An international jury selected 15 projects for the new talent pavilion & Matthew was the only Australian represented. The New Talent Competition is the world’s premiere competition for interactive entertainment & new media projects developed by students. www.matthewriley.net

Addicted to computer games? A new website Game Culture has been developed as a central information resource for researchers, game developers, gamers & others interested in the significance of computer games as a cultural phenomenon. The site hopes to explore & pull together the significant body of research & critical writing emerging in academia & the mainstream media & is encouraging submissions. www.game-culture.com or to join mailing list, send a blank email to game-culture-

CTHEORY Multimedia is a new site for electronic art projects & new media theory, published & hosted by the Cornell University Library’s Electronic Publishing Program. CTHEORY will feature collections of electronic art & theory organized around conceptual themes. The first issue “TECH FLESH: The Promise & Perils of the Human Genome Project” will examine the simultaneously ethical, social & ideological issues raised by the Project,

Australia’s digital artists continue to gain international recognition. hybrid life forms, curated by Josephine Grieve & Linda Wallace, profiles the work of 19 leading artists (including Justine Cooper, Michele Barker, Anita Kocsis, Brenda L Croft, David Rosetzky) & is currently exhibiting at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, until May 21. Works selected include digital photographs, installations, internet projects & computer animation. The curators commented, “we wanted to bring out some of the less publicised aspects of sunny Australia including the troubled reconciliation process, the identity crisis embodied in the Republican debate & the anti-intellectual climate…the exhibition aims to show some of the strategies different artists have adopted in response to such circumstances.”

How would you go about uploading your soul? From Manila comes Gimokud The Melting Soul, an online exhibition of collaborative artworks (which are the visualisation of an ancient Phillipines myth) where participants were invited to upload their souls & have them artistically interpreted. 52 digital works by 32 artists rendering the souls of 23 participants from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Estonia, France, Greece, Slovenia, UK & the US, were presented at the Asian Arts Fest 2001.

OK, here’s the ultimate gift for someone who spends so long at their computer they never see family or friends. A Lovbyte. A one off CD which features edited interviews with loved ones, a collage of memories and metaphors mixed with sound design & original music. Sound designers Solange Kershaw & Damian Castaldi have come up with the idea, a perfect marriage of art & ego. www.sodacake.com

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (1993) defines ‘arcane’ as something hidden, secret, mysterious, abstruse, and goes on to give examples, quoting B Mason: “Art was therefore something arcane: if not precisely forbidden then heavy with the possibility of discovery and guilt.”

Painting, the Arcane Technology, an exhibition by 12 prominent Australian artists, is based on the premise that painting is not only arcane but newly invigorated. Co-curators Natalie King and Bala Starr, in their extensive catalogue, acknowledge the resurgence of painting after the “1990s infatuation with installation art, object-making, photography and multimedia practices.” The variety and plasticity of paint as a medium is clear from this show. Painting can be representation, self-expression, commentary, decoration. It has materiality and objecthood, with conventions that can be upheld, contested, parodied or undermined. If you say ‘art’, the person-in-the-street hears ‘painting.’ Painters have a weighty tradition behind them. Some bear the burden uncomfortably, perhaps fearing viewers who judge by reference to a canon of great works.

Adam Cullen’s well known style—sloppy, sketchy, cartoon-like, line drawings and texts in paint—are partly a political message, and partly about paint itself, some dribbles going sideways. These works bluntly depict psychosocial dysfunction.

Hany Armanious, who has previously used installation and other forms, has painted small works on textured styrofoam panels. The paint is applied to the texture rather than giving rise to it, recalling heavy ‘classical’ impasto. The frames also are heavy, carved and classical, the overall effect redolent of the Academy. Figurative sketches only, of dreamy, fairytale themes, they mock academic painting. What is the aesthetic and monetary value of academic work?

Diena Georgetti’s small canvases depict simple, nearly figurative forms on plain grounds. Their titles are long and detailed, eg “this plan presents a graphic making—which must grasp the broad outlines of a false problem quickly.” The cryptic titles describe personal problems, separate from but complemented by the images. They suggest she is wrestling with the issue of mark-making as representation, but without clear figuration the works are neither evocative nor expressive. They’re like a muted form of Haiku, leaving the viewer wishing for more.

Nadine Christensen’s small, sparse paintings whimsically illustrate scientific research: subtle, careful, juxtaposing science with art itself.

Constanze Zikos’s work comprises three 10-part series of small-scale gouaches forming a sequence of scenes, as in a play. Each Icon depicts roughly outlined figures interacting but without detailing a plot. They’re like beautiful stained glass windows.

Brent Harris’ careful style blends graphic design, abstraction and surrealism. It would be hard to find a better medium than paint for such ideas. He makes fleshy, flat, graphic shapes that suggest juicy, carnal forms—human, animal and plant—in vivid tones, smoothly finished, both forbidding and jocular. Bloom No 1 comprises green leaves sprouting from a fleshy pink torso, suggesting something primeval.

Eve Sullivan’s arresting works are images of girls or women, some in seductive postures, rendered in expressive red tones. Their sensuousness is not straightforward, the works suggesting betrayal of the flesh rather than celebration. Our gaze is a guilty one. Sullivan’s use of form emphasises content.

Louise Hearman’s work is romantically expressionistic in its rendering, but surreal, apparently innocent settings contain a surprising object or idea, eg the upper half of a figure floating above a road. The expressive brushwork is in tension with the works’ naturalism. Hearman’s work speaks to us about art, art-making, art-history and its place in the world.

Anne Wallace’s colourful images depict instants from life, eg the female on view in mid-drama. In Curtain (1997) 2 women face a curtain, backs to the viewer, arms around each other’s waists. Drunk shows a table of glasses, bottles, a cocktail shaker etc, but painted to make the scene look blurry, as if our vision is distorted by alcohol. Wallace uses paint with clear purpose and solid technique. There is something unsettling in each image and also theatrical evoking, for example, the vulgarity and superficiality of TV-world human interaction. The somewhat naive rendering of Curtain supports the content. In Drunk the technique is modified—are our eyes deceiving us? A wry still life, ironically mocking our view of the genre. Wallace rejoices in her medium.

Gareth Sansom’s enigmatic shapes have an organic feel, like a doodle that evolves into a quirky, troubling form, perhaps springing from the subconscious. The oldest of the artists represented, Sansom’s practice matured in the late modernist era, and this work is imbued with long experience. It is about the gradual building of idea and texture, not in one series of images, but over many.

Matthys Gerber, also known for figuration and landscape, and for his extraordinary image of boxer Evander Holyfield, has included abstract work that stops short of resolving into the figurative. These are expressive and attractive, essentially feelgood works but with an underlying power and tension.

The catalogue essay acknowledges the influence of new media—cinema in the case of Wallace and Hearman, photography in the case of David Jolly. Jolly paints realistic, accessible images of banal, everyday subjects on the opposite side of sheets of glass. Reversed, they mask any painterliness, becoming illustration rather than still-life/landscape, parodying the photograph and the pomo world it depicts. The work is both about painting, as fugitive object, and the consumer world.

The powerful themes and florid tones of Hearman, Wallace, Jolly and Sullivan contrast with those of Georgetti, who has perhaps reached a reductive impasse. Zikos’ work evokes religious art; Christensen’s evokes science’s impotence. Gerber’s work has a joyous painterliness—he seems cognisant of his antecedents but unfazed. Harris’s work is naturally buoyant. Cullen’s is the most striking, with its strong, yet inconclusive messages exaggerated by manic rendering. Cullen uses just enough paint to establish an idea, the gestural line and dribbles tracing the processes of painting and artistic consideration. He uses the same technique in his portraiture—in last year’s Archibald Prize and in this year’s Doug Moran Prize—where the form carries a different weight. His sketch of a sitter is the barest representation, contradicting the genre’s traditions. Such a take on verisimilitude exposes our wish for representational accuracy and its inevitable failure.

Paint can’t be taken for granted as a medium. Wallace, Hearman and Sullivan use it primarily as a vehicle for powerful narratives, using familiar forms. Cullen and Jolly investigate society, its tensions and banality while also probing the material potential of paint. Armanious’s form and content diverge. Georgetti uses paint to dwell on form in a very personal way, while Christensen and Zikos address philosophical themes.

Here, art has stepped back from the possibilities of performance, conceptualism and installation to commodified, static 2D objects. These paintings are small to medium sized, framed, the bread and butter of the private gallery, the decor of suburban loungerooms and urban apartments. Each has potency in such locations. Perhaps now they’re the simulacra of art, even meta art—we see appropriation and parody, and the colliding of disparate languages. Painting adapts itself.

Instead of the appropriated object, the simulated environment of the installation, the performance, or the unretouched photo, which are kinds of lived realities, we return to the abstract image. All painting is an abstraction of sorts, an artist’s interpretation of a subject as a means of understanding and responding to it. Framing that image seems a natural and inevitable way of retaining it, encouraging viewers to look while preserving their anonymity and promoting a feeling of ownership of the (depicted) object. Paint in all its forms discloses the artist’s thoughts, feelings and abilities in a genuinely absorbing way.

Painting: an arcane technology, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, January 27-March 25

Small Black Box is an upcoming monthly experimental music and sound art performance space at Metro Arts, Brisbane, set up to foster a community of both artists and audience.

With access to all areas of the Metro Arts building, artists have a variety of spaces to propose performances or installations, from traditional theatre or studio settings to carriageways, stairwells and foyers. The opportunity for local and interstate artists to create experimental music performances and sound art installations is the inspiration for Small Black Box in which artists are freed to concentrate on their work and have it scheduled into a rapidly evolving year-long program to attract Brisbane audiences. The event aims to develop, refine and widen the tastes of the audience.

With support from ticket sales and volunteers, the budget is modest; an emphasis will be on abducting interstate artists for performances in a cultural exchange of ideas with local talent. Promotion is approached innovatively by replacing flyers and posters with emails and newsgroups (aus_noise-subscribe@yahoogroups.com), enhancing the word of mouth support that drives the awareness of new music performances in Brisbane.

Small Black Box as a performance space will be a pivotal location for new music in Brisbane. Associated with the events will be a regular stall of recorded works by artists.

First up is a dark ambient electroacoustic night featuring endoPHONIC in May. endoPHONIC is Greg Jenkins and Richard Wilding. Both are graduates of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music and have worked together on various film soundtracks and as part of the composers collective Trojan Theatre. For this performance they will be joined by classical cellist Jane Elliott.The rest of the year is building at an exciting pace with a melee of interstate and local talent.

Small Black Box, Metro Arts, 109 Edward St, Brisbane, commences May 27, $7, audience limit: 50

Along with the press releases handed out at the launch of their new program (Volvo presents Bell Shakespeare’s Roman Holiday 2001) at the Opera House in January, we get a free copy of the Volvo magazine.

The company is upfront about its corporate connections and its strategic direction: “The Bell Shakespeare Company is committed to being a commercially viable national organisation. Whilst we have the imprimatur of Government, we believe that as an enterprising and energetic company we need to be in charge of our destiny.”

Everyone from the company who speaks about the 2001 program is careful to pay homage to the sponsors sustaining this company now in its 11th year. In the otherwise laid back atmosphere you hear a faint crack in the ice in Marketing Manager Jill Berry’s drink when Associate Director Des James says his Actors at Work! team travel around the regions not in a Volvo Cross Country but a Tarago. The publicity shots of John Bell on his “Roman Holiday” projected onto a screen for the launch suddenly scream Vespa and not S60 sports.

Looking at the lineup, you can only marvel at the art of the Bell Sponsorship and Marketing team and at the range of players at the money end of town taking a crack at Shakespeare. Volvo gets top billing as Principal Sponsor, responsible for the expanded Education Program. “And It’s not only children who have benefited. Bell’s fresh, innovative approach…has received very positive feedback from customers and dealers who have attended the productions…some of whom have not experienced Shakespeare since their days at school,” says Managing Director Richard Snijders. Volvo see that “(Bell’s) mission, to change the perception of Shakespeare and bring it to the wider community reflects our own commitment to bring our newly designed and innovative motor vehicles to the Australian population.” (Coming soon to a garage near you?)

Another big player, the NSW Ministry for the Arts, with a 3-year allocation of funds and a supporting cast including Volvo and Fujitsu (“the possibilities are infinite”) picks up the tab for Bell’s expanded national touring program to major cities and towns in regional Australia.

Without BHP, Sydney Water, Edison Mission Energy and AGL, Bell could not turn on its Education Program Actors at Work! in which the team Jeremy Brennan, Patricia Cotter, John Turtwin and Nicole Winkler directed by Des James take scenes from Shakespeare’s plays to explore a set of curriculum-sensitive themes for Junior and Senior Secondary students. Director’s Cut for students at Years 8-12 expands the repertoire to contemporary Australian plays, movie scripts, poetry and songs in an examination of the Australian character. For Years 2-8 Chris Canute adapts and directs the award-winning children’s book My Girragundji by Meme McDonald and Boori Prior, a real life tale of country life and early manhood through the eyes of a young Aboriginal boy. The company also arranges special schools performances of the mainstage plays, workshops and master classes for students and teachers.

Spear carriers for Julius Caesar include Salomon Smith and Barney, Object Oriented Pty Ltd and Wesfarmers. Meanwhile Ericsson takes on Antony & Cleopatra and Australia Post delivers The Tempest (directed by Des James). A host of bit players tackles special events. And I wonder what exactly it means to John Bell to be personally sponsored by Orange who also host the website (www.bellshakespeare.com.au).

As you might expect with a monopoly board of moolah, a large part of the proceedings is taken up with talk of turnover, statistics, issues of scale and reach. Even the mileage covered by Australia’s only national company is calibrated (110,000kms). In the remaining time John Bell explains the major shift in the company’s artistic aims for 2001.

From its inception in 1990 until 1995 Bell Shakespeare accrued an ensemble of actors. In 1996 they changed direction with productions featuring a variety of innovative directors including Barrie Kosky, Jim Sharman and Lindy Davies. Though the strategy paid off in some truly memorable productions, what went missing, according to Bell, was the company culture. In 2001 he has decided to grow that side of the business with an ensemble of 13 including Robert Alexander, John Batchelor, Caroline Brazier, David Davies, Paul Eastway, Darren Gilshenan, Genevieve Hegney, Ashley Lyons, Robert Meldrum, Katrina Milosevic, Sean O’Shea, Oliviero Papi, Esther Van Doornum. Rowena Balos and Lindy Davies will regularly tutor in voice and Gavin Roberts (ex Legs on the Wall) in movement. In a season titled The Romans 2001, John Bell directs the ensemble in both Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra, 2 plays written 8 years apart but presented as “one continuing epic story…offering audiences the opportunity to follow the brutal and passionate history of the Roman Republic.” (Not quite the Roman Holiday of the breezy brochure).

The ensemble will be joined throughout the year by guest actors (including Michael Craig, Christopher Stollery and John Adam (Julius Caesar), William Zappa and Paula Arundell (Antony & Cleopatra) and director John O’Hare, for the off-Broadway hit adapted from Shakespeare by American playwright Joe Calarco, Shakespeare’s R & J. This production is set in a regimented boy’s school where the play has been banned because of the sexiness of some scenes. “Four teenage boys find a copy and decide to act it out and in the process, their adolescent hysteria transforms (the play) into something more profound.”

Bell Shakespeare is an Australian success story: a company which started small with a specific focus to create a contemporary Australian theatre by making classics meaningful to young performers and new audiences. The company is fuelled by John Bell’s vision shared with his artistic and management team. That is the strength of the company whose survival over 11 years has been heavily dependent on finding other than government sources of income. Though now one of the Australia Council’s major performing arts organisations and assisted in no small part by considerable sums from the public purse, it’s the corporate sector that stars in the company’s acknowledgements.

At the launch, it was good to hear the shift in John Bell’s voice as he spoke about the new ensemble and to see amongst both the company’s and the principal sponsors’ releases words like “innovation” rating more than passing mention. In recent years, Bell Shakespeare have attracted a new audience with some remarkably radical productions. It is to be hoped that the future business of Bell factors in more of the same.

Building: challenges, spaces, visions

Art isn’t always meant to be easy—some would say ever. Often appreciation comes with personal interrogation or contemplation over time. In current discussions of art and its reception where accessibility is sometimes confused with simple populism, it’s possible to lose sight of the pleasures of encountering difficult, unfamiliar or unexpected ideas through art. In this issue. Our RealTime writers articulate some of these pleasures. Christine Evans plots the luminous textual cadences of Sarah Kane and Mac Wellman’s “skimming the river of American speech”; listening to Radiohead, Mark Mordue likens to skating a pond in Winter; Philip Brophy relishes the hidden sonic depths of the teen flick; Rachael Swain describes the complexities of finding common ground with Indigenous artists in Crying Baby. Philipa Rothfield wrestles with the paradox of work, man and actor in Brian Lipson’s A Large Attendance in the Antechamber.

The significance of surfaces is also reflected in our coverage of some bold new buildings—Linda Marie Walker reads the subtle sense of the Aboriginal Cultures Gallery in Adelaide, Zane Trow tracks the audience trajectory at The Brisbane Powerhouse; a group of artists talk to Barbara Bolt about designing a collaborative public art work for another Brisbane innovation, the Centre of Contemporary Arts. International new media artist Jeffrey Shaw describes his VR installation destined for Cinemedia’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne’s Federation Square (opening November 2001.

RealTime 41 features interviews with artists Richard Giblett, Tos Mahoney, Brian Carbee and UK choreographer Russell Maliphant, famed for the way he uses light in dance. We continue our series The Arts? What Next, this time addressing issues of globalism and vision. Sarah Miller takes a wary look at the discussion notes from the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Vision Day and the WA Ministry for the Arts’ Building Community through the Arts. Ben Goldsmith reports on a conference on globalisation and cultural diversity staged on the edge of an extinct volcano.

As well as the interview with Jeffrey Shaw, OnScreen features Juanita Kwok’s account of the success of Columbia Tri-Stars’ Silk Screen program. Kwok talks to distributors and cinema owners about how the program worked and whether or not Silk Screen II is likely. OnScreen editor Kirsten Krauth tries to match the media fuss over Dennis O’Rourke’s Cunnamula with her rich experience of the film. Kirsten also quizzes Australian International Documentary Conference director Richard Sowada about significant directions he’s taking the conference in. Tina Kaufman investigates the fine tuning of the AFI Awards, wonders just how judging the if magazine awards worked, and why the results looked conservative. She comes up with some interesting findings.

Demolishing: the ABC

Protest seems to be having little effect on ABC Managing Director Jonathon Shier’s reshaping of the national public broadcaster. Before Xmas there was a flurry of email campaigns, including one initiated by RealTime. Responses from some politicians were almost instantaneous (the ready-to-go email missive), with Bob Brown first off the mark and a string of Liberals saying, yes, what a pity, but if the ABC wants to go in new (media) directions the money has to come from somewhere. Democrat Senators were responsive, but Labor was very quiet. However, Senator Rosemary West summed it up for the party declaring support for an independent, non-privatised, “adequately funded” ABC “so that it can meet its community service obligations and fully embrace the opportunities offered by the introduction of new technologies.”

The Australian Labor Party will set out our express financial commitment to the ABC prior to the next Federal election. While we acknowledge that some would like us to give an express commitment sooner, we simply do not know what condition the ABC will be at the time of the next election and therefore what level of funding will be appropriate.

No email from Senator Richard Alston, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, but a letter (3/1/01) in the post in response to our call for the government to cease Shier’s restructuring. His Broadcasting Liason Officer writes:
“Government provides an overall level of funding for the ABC, but has no role in deciding internal funding priorities. Accordingly, concerns relating to internal ABC decisions should be directed to the Managing Director of the ABC.”

Letters of protest continue to circulate on the net, at this stage presumably hoping to restrict the amount of damage Shier can inflict. It’s a tricky one, with a number of artists wondering what, outside of Radio National and specialist units like science, they’re defending—the wretched state of ABCTV and Classic FM? But, for the moment, there are real principles at stake that have to override our ambivalence.

Out of the building: the new head of NSW Arts

In NSW, Evan Williams, head of the NSW Ministry for the Arts has retired, to be replaced by Roger Wilkins, Director-General of the Cabinet Office. With a salary increase of a rumoured $10,000pa, Wilkins will double as Director-General of the Ministry for the Arts. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Kelly Burke (January 13) reports Premier Bob Carr as saying, “We believe in lean government.” Burke comments that “cost cutting benefits…are likely to be negated by the Government’s plan to appoint a deputy director-general to the Arts Ministry.” While the appointment was cautiously welcomed by the Opposition and the Australia Council Chair Margaret Seares (“It is interesting and probably positive to have the Cabinet Office so closely involved in the arts”), many an artist’s heart sank at the announcement, as once again bureaucracy/middle management takes the arts reins. While low key and cautious (many a NSW artist has looked enviously at developments in Victoria and Queensland in recent years), Williams, a former journalist and still a film-reviewer for The Australian, was nonetheless felt by many to be a part of the arts community. Our hopes for reform in policy and practice in NSW arts funding now rest probably not with Wilkins, but with the Deputy-Director General, hopefully someone responsive to the Ministry’s fine project staff and to the community of NSW artists. Apparently Wilkins will not be in the same building as his Ministry for the Arts (which was moved from its geographical proximity to the Premier’s Office in 2000). VB, KG

Zane Trow, Artistic Director of Brisbane’s Powerhouse, is positively electric. A steady current of unabashed enthusiasm about his first year at the new arts centre and the promise of the 12 month program he’s announced for 2001 flows down the phone line.

It’s a significant move for a contemporary arts centre to announce an annual calendar of events, tied as such venues are to artists and companies waiting on the outcomes of government arts funding cycles. Doubtless this plays a role in Trow’s scheduling too, but Powerhouse funding levels, box office income and co-production deals, along with an accessible, attractive venue with several performing spaces and a good bar, allow him a choice of artists and appropriate hirers that will add up to a distinctive program. As Trow says, “co-production is crucial. That’s the future. We operate this organisation far more like a festival than an arts venue. It’s a mixture of commissioning, sponsoring, co-production, investment.” In a short period the Powerhouse has proven itself attractive to audiences and artists and is a highly desirable venue for touring interstate artists. The 2001 calendar includes, from Melbourne, Crying in Public Places, Handspan Theatre, David Chesworth Ensemble and desoxy Theatre; from Sydney, Rosalind Crisp and stella b., The opera Project, Andrew Morrish and Taikoz; and from Brisbane, Vulcana Women’s Circus, Frank Productions, Elision new music ensemble and 2 appearances each by Topology and Rock’n’Roll Circus. There’s more in visual arts, new media, dance and community events—as you’ll see on the Powerhouse’s website: www.brisbane powerhouse.org. Almost a year after the centre’s opening, Trow’s enthusiasm is undimmed, he’s already achieving many of the goals he set himself, his staff and the building.

The 12 month plan

Creating a 12 month program is a struggle but it worked for us in our first year. We did a certain amount on the run and we were nervous about it—various marketing gurus said we should have a quarterly program but the 12 month one worked for us. People held on to it. More and more the website keeps people in touch with the program as it goes along. That seems to be working.

There’s no subscription scheme, but we’ve got some packages this year where you can buy a taste for the year of a range of projects, for example if you’re interested in contemporary music. I really think that relying on a subscriber base is a bit of a chain around your neck. Most national initiatives start from a premise of trying to convince subscribers to like contemporary performance. You know, how are we going to convince our subscribers to give something risky a try; rather than saying, here’s all this risky stuff that does have an audience, how are we going to expand that. It’s a different way of thinking. Last year in audience terms was extremely successful for us. More successful than anyone had predicted. That gives us a basis to build on the idea of diversity.

Audiences find a home

Part of what we’re doing is recognising that Brisbane does have an inner-city culture. It has an audience that’s probably between 18 and 45, that is interested in risk and probably has a range of entertainment options that is about risk but has not had that live performance option in Brisbane before, and in one place. That has served us very well. Our core audience is younger, comes to the Powerhouse more than once and has an interest in a whole range of aspects of contemporary performance culture. That’s been important with the Spark Bar up and running really well this year. In March we’re opening the Watt Cafe by the river so we’ll be able to offer regular visitors food and drink as part of their ticket package. We’re developing incentives, loyalty programs if you like, but we’re not locking it all down and trying to pre-sell a program 12 months out and then worrying that we haven’t got enough subscribers.

We do an initial push at the beginning of the year and then we sell show by show. We use the mailing list effectively, I think. People tell us what they like and don’t. We love the internet because we can talk to people directly. The website is very well used and we’re constantly developing new ways to use it. This year you’ll be able to go to the website and every couple of weeks get a regular update.

It’s crucial that people begin to come here for a whole variety of reasons and just hang out. The idea of the cafe and the atmosphere in the building is really informed by a small and medium scale European and UK art centre aesthetic—the bar and relaxed food atmosphere as much as the theatre or the bookshop. It’s those kind of models we’re drawing on to do the business plans for the Powerhouse. So far it’s working.

Given all the conversations that have gone on over the last 12 months about the Saatchi & Saatchi Report, it seems obvious that if you want to get people to enjoy art that is challenging and risky then it’s probably better to give people a relaxing and enjoyable environment and to break down the formality of the high art idea that you have to get dressed up to go. My experience tells me that when you’re able to do that, when you do create a happy and relaxed environment, the art is actually served well and audiences appreciate that and might, in fact, take a risk on something that they wouldn’t ordinarily.

A place for artists

That’s something that we really try to foster—a place where artists can come, over and above simply presenting work. In a professional sense, in terms of development, I’ve actually managed to achieve a level of residency program here that I’ve tried hard to do in the last few years in Australia and have never been able to pull off. We have artists in residence throughout the year, focussing on performance but not exclusively. We have people working in new media and installation and visual arts. That begins to foster the idea of a contemporary hub of ideas. The kind of atmosphere we’ve tried to set up in here is very different to the standard arts centre interval bar that nobody in their right mind would want to sit in talking till 3 in the morning. You’d go somewhere else. Whereas here we’re trying to foster an environment, for artists and audience, where you could come for the whole night, see a show or not and you can sit around and engage with an aspect of contemporary culture—which is the building itself.

Getting the work on

I’ve got development projects up to the end of 2003 and there’s a real demand to work here. We’re also being recognised as a place where you can bring an initial project idea that may be left of centre and get a critical, supportive response. That’s brought a range of projects which are attracting a level of support they might not have enjoyed in Brisbane. That’s part of the rationale of a place like this, to be able to respond to interesting ideas.

With the kind of independent and smaller company networks we work in, I think co-production is crucial. That’s the future. We operate this organisation far more like a festival than an arts venue. It’s a mixture of commissioning, sponsoring, co-production, investment. There’s a mixture of models about how a piece of art gets made. We try and retain a flexibility in the way we work and in our budget to be able to respond in different ways.

There are certain organisations nationally that we’re beginning to work regularly in partnership with so that you’ve got a mixed level of investment into a project that perhaps 5 years ago could have got away with maybe one funding source. We’re working with other arts funding agencies internationally to support overseas artists coming here. We’re looking at cross-producing work with some Queensland companies that are annually or triennially funded. They still need $10,000 or $15,000 extra to get what is in fact their annual program up. It’s so important for an arts centre like us to maintain the program funding we have and to be able to have the flexibility to choose where to invest it. I think that idea of a mixture of investment, sponsorship and co-production and commissioning is a model that could be used far more in Australia in an arts centre sense—The Powerhouse is a bit of a new model.

Robyn Backen, the building that speaks, public art installation, digital image courtesy of the artist

Of course it’s relevant

The issue is about a balance of investment between heritage culture and new work. In a forum we hosted with the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy in their response to the Australia Council’s Promoting the Value of the Arts campaign (www.gu.edu. au/centre/cmp/rtfs/ PVAworkshop.rtf) we reached a couple of conclusions. The first was that clearly there is a contemporary practice in Australia that actually does address, and has done so historically, a lot of the concerns expressed in that report. None of those organisations or initiatives, it seemed to us, were heritage culture. If you talk about 70% of Australians wanting the arts to be relevant to the way we live now, if you take that quote out of the Saatchi & Saatchi Report, well it’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?

If art is to be relevant to the way we live now, I doubt very much whether the Opera and the Ballet and the proscenium arch can deliver that in a consistent way—occasionally perhaps. Whereas it’s the contemporary practitioners of the nation who are involved in how we live now. Those things seem to us blatantly obvious. The question is how to convince the policy makers that it really is that simple.

It’s hard but I think we’re very lucky here at the Powerhouse because Brisbane happens to have at this time, regardless of diminishing project grants nationally and locally, a great energy.

Lifting the cloak of invisibility

In the 7 months we’ve been operating we’ve made just under a million bucks earned income, mostly in ticket sales with some stuff like hire and events. That gives us a good argument to go back to the Brisbane City Council and say that the “mad idea” they had to form this independent business is actually viable. It also proves that if you present this art, people will come and see it. For some of the more conservative strains of the arts industry in Brisbane this has come as a bit of a shock. The majority of the work we develop is hand in hand with local artists and organisations who have been “invisible” in Queensland for a long time—in terms of coverage in the media or in any genuine sense of local pride in what these artists might do. And we’ve certainly removed that cloak of invisibility and demonstrated that the work has an economic value.

We have an annual subsidy of $1.5 million and we do everything with that. It covers the overheads and we basically have to double it to stay alive. That puts us into the Major Organisations kind of bracket, but we’re a bit of an aberration because it’s rare that $1.5 million a year is spent on this kind of independent contemporary work. Just that small investment isn’t very much when you compare the arts subsidy in Australia with what one can spend on farming. It’s a pittance. But if there is energy and commitment and vision and there are artists who want to do good work in this contemporary culture, small amounts of money in our networks go an awfully long way. I think what we present is an argument that says yes, that’s true but if you take this culture seriously, if you were to invest in contemporary culture to the level that you would normally invest in straight theatre you will also see a significant return and you will see work that is recognised nationally and internationally. That’s part of our role, to say it is possible for Australian contemporary culture to get an audience and to make money. What it needs to achieve that is respect, trust and flexibility.

Beating bad press

The Courier Mail implied that the Powerhouse was turning into an elite centre for the gay and lesbian Mafia of Brisbane. There was a certain amount of local politics involved in all that but also the issue of invisibility. Once we pulled off the cloak what was presented to the more conservative end of town was a culture they hadn’t really looked at before. And it was clearly seen to be something that people wanted. For example, our Queer Film and Video Weekend was a 98% sell-out last year. If you are involved in arts and culture and your main involvement has been in a major organisation, whether you’re audience or arts worker, you haven’t really noticed all this contemporary culture before. You’ve got no reason to. In our collaboration with Brisbane Pride Festival, for instance, we’re not doing anything that hasn’t been done in Brisbane before, it’s just that we’re doing it with a new level of visibility. If you look at a program for any contemporary arts organisation, it’s full of bodies, photographs of bodies. Therefore the whole thing (according to the Courier) must be about sex and, not only that, deviant sex! One of the conservative critics thought it was appalling that we got so many young people in the space. Now there are some arts organisations who have spent 20 years desperately trying to get young people in. This critic was actually offended that the bar was full of nose rings and tattoos and she couldn’t believe it, so she thought, right, they must all be deviants. I don’t think she’d actually been in a bar full of young Australian people recently.

The article did come as a surprise. The program had been in the public domain for months before the article happened. But it has not affected attendances, ticket sales, project development at all. It’s basically an aberration and most of the people who have visited and the arts organisations in Queensland we’ve worked with thought the article was so bloody stupid that it was almost embarrassing. It certainly caused debate on our board which I think was a very healthy thing. The board is incredibly supportive of the directions we’re taking in programming and supported the idea that the venue should be gay and lesbian friendly. So it did raise some issues. Over Christmas there was another article in the Courier Mail. The headline read “On track despite the critics.” During that period there was the 25 year anniversary of the IMA and its director Michael Snelling in his speech said that the history of contemporary culture in Brisbane could be seen as a 25 year struggle with the Courier Mail.

We got an awful lot of calls of support. It’s interesting because if we follow through the strategies of audience development for contemporary culture that our betters and masters are currently so keen to have us do, my theatre foyer full of 18-25 year olds having a great time with art that hasn’t specifically been sold to them as Youth Arts—they’ve come because it’s an interesting product and they want to see it. On the other hand it’s a great threat to the status quo. I think there are some people in the arts here in Brisbane who think, it can’t possibly go on, we’ll have to pull that risky strategy back.’

New media vs hybrid arts

We’ve taken Cyber Cultures from the Casula Powerhouse in Sydney’s west and we’re supporting a number of residences. We have new media artist Keith Armstrong and performer Lisa O’Neill and in the visual arts there are some new media works as well. I’ve left it to the artists themselves to try and score the money from the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council. I think there is great potential here in Australia to develop a performance technology research and development arm of the culture. There’s a range of companies you can think of who have been working in that way for years. There has been a feeling that the New Media Arts Fund is in danger, in the long term, of becoming a digital arts fund rather than a multimedia and hybrid arts body. Perhaps it’s that, overall, the Australia Council is struggling with a Federal Government that wants to push it in particular directions. There’s been a lot of investment in rock ‘n’ roll recently and some good investments in international marketing and whatever but we still haven’t had a decent increase in basic grant funding for 20 years. One of the great jokes of the Saatchi & Saatchi Report is that the majority of work that could probably address its concerns about audience development is lucky to get $15,000 a year. Meanwhile, $15,000 wouldn’t even wipe the nose of the Australian Opera’s education program. What’s going on here?

The 2001 Program

There are a number of local artists and artistic directors who have a look at our venue and just laugh—‘never in our wildest dreams would we ever perform there.’ Others, like Michael Gow, Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company, see the theatre as a great opportunity. Hopefully our relationship with the QTC will be ongoing. The interesting thing about Richard II, in the 2001 program, is that it’s one of the few standard scripts throughout the year. I suppose if you’re going to have a scripted play you might as well have Shakespeare!

In the 2001 program there’s a strong emphasis on physical theatre and an expanded contemporary music focus which is important because the new music scene here in Brisbane is very strong. I hope our relationship with Elision and Topology and other groups will develop over a number of years. I really wanted to develop the music program to a point where it looked coherent and reflected the diversity of talent here. To the local groups we’re adding the David Chesworth Ensemble from Melbourne and Taikoz from Sydney.

Having established the strong physical theatre focus last year, we’ll continue that too. There’s Vulcana Women’s Circus, two shows from Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, Frank Productions, plus desoxy from Melbourne. We might see some long term development out of interstate visits—Taikoz and Frank Productions have been talking for years about trying to do something together. With the Powerhouse as a kind of broker those things can happen.

Brisbane Powerhouse, 119 Lamington St, New Farm. For 2001 Calendar of Events see www.brisbanepowerhouse.org.

…objects are not dumb but inexhaustible, capable of an infinite range of readings and re-readings.
K Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, Leicester Uni Press, London & New York 1997

Usually I don’t like visiting museums. I never know quite what to look at, I never seem to ‘see’ very much, and I’m acutely (and depressingly) aware that I’ve missed ‘seeing’ more than I’ve seen, and to top it off I become weary almost instantly. I have the same experience in department stores. All in all I feel defeated by museums (and department stores).

However, I finally (and with hesitation) visited the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery at the South Australian Museum which opened in early March 2000, along with an overall museum refurbishment. I’d anticipated being, once more, overcome by my own inability-to-absorb. It didn’t happen, I enjoyed being there. I felt like staying, wandering around, reading, listening, looking; I felt calm, instead of choked, and puzzled, curious…happy even. It was a strange response (for me). (I spent as much time watching the children as watching the displays—I’ll return to this.)

A couple of weeks after this initial visit a friend from Cardiff went to see the gallery. He was impressed; he said he didn’t feel “beaten over the head” by the politics of Aboriginal issues. He said he’d gained some understanding of a complex and elegant culture, and that even though the gallery was of a traditional museum design (in many respects), it had somehow subverted the common, and over-arching, intention of the museum—a heavy didacticism, a sort of grim inertness.

There are around 3000 objects on display, which is 10 per cent of the museum’s Aboriginal collection, as well as many archival photographs. At several locations, and in relation to particular Australian regions, there are video-screens with head-and-shoulder footage of Aboriginal people telling stories. They speak directly to ‘you.’ These screens are placed in such a way as to be discrete and at the same time clear and compelling. One simply comes across them. The voices do not interfere sound-wise with each other. The stories told are everyday, personal, and insightful (about relatives, cooking, singing, hunting, art, pain).

There is no directed way to view the gallery. One can follow the walls, or move through the curved passages, coming to ‘themes’ by chance (like ‘food and water’ or ‘aesthetics’), as well as ‘regions’ (like ‘South East’, ‘MacDonnell Ranges’, ‘Western Cape York’) and ‘technologies’ (like ‘spears’, ‘drugs’, ‘watercraft’, ‘string’). It’s tempting to move back and forward, criss-cross, or linger; things and ideas link up gradually; correspondences, relationships, and surprises slowly seep in. And by the time one sits down in front of the double screen in the second floor theatrette, where a series of anthropological films have been recut into shorts, and are shown with contemporary footage, and with relevant objects—illuminated in a sequenced way—in 2 cases (one between the screens)—one/I/you is a (potentially) slightly different person. Not because one has been given a lesson, or been overwhelmed by masses of artefacts and difficult (sad) matters, but because one has been touched quietly/softly and decisively by the beauty, innovation, richness and subtlety of objects, materials, rituals, and knowledges. The displays manage to give information both matter-of-factly and expressively, not tying down, or stitching, the exhibits into single or determined narratives.

Sometimes I wished for slightly brighter lighting, just to see in more detail what was there, to see the contours of small containers, or the exact marks on a fire-stick, or the colour of seed pods, and sometimes I wanted a little more text about particular exhibits—pieces of jewellery for instance. I was told by David Kerr, Head of Public Programs at the Museum, that there will be slight changes to the lighting over time, and more wall texts and labelling will be added.

As well as the individual video-screens and the theatrette, there are a number of larger monitors which run programs of archival film and video “providing contextual imagery for the objects on display. Significantly this is not explicitly the Museum voice of authority, but an independent witness, with the visitor making the connections between the film and the display” (David Kerr, Artlink, Vol. 20, No 3). And on both floors there is bench-seating along which are positioned touch-screen monitors on articulated arms. These contain multi-media data-bases of story-lines; they are simple to use, and the stories are well-organised and accessible. When I was there many family groups were gathered around, and discussion was animated, with children making associations between displays and stories.

The gallery also has an Indigenous Information Centre on the second floor, where Indigenous museum staff deal with inquiries about the collection, using CD-ROMs, databases, books and videos as well as providing Indigenous people with details from the museum’s genealogical archive. The Centre shows Aboriginal artists’ work—presently there are paintings by Ian Abdulla. Downstairs there’s a small dedicated exhibition space which can be used as an art gallery or for the temporary display of more pieces from the collection.

On entering the gallery one comes face-to-face with a layered display of black and white archival portraits, among which are two video screens with the animated faces of Aboriginal people. They look out at us, alive, nervous, waiting, and warm (we meet these people later as they talk to us from the video-screens inside). We are reminded from the start that we are in the presence of people, of a culture made, and being made, by people. A soundscape of voices, birds (and I’m not sure what else) plays above and around. It is unintrusive, and comes and goes in one’s consciousness. Upstairs there’s another soundscape, and at one point the laughter of children drew me to a display case where a silent video-screen shows children playing, as well as a number of toys.

So far I have several favourite displays: the string bags and nets, the shell jewellery, the medicines, the masks made from kerosene tins, and the exquisite carved glass spear heads (and the football segment in the theatrette).

Over the last decade there’s been an enormous amount of research and writing about ‘the museum’ and ‘museum-display’; about what ‘the museum’ was, is, and can be, and about its cultural-display role (and consequently, amongst other issues, about history, community, interpretation, ownership). This is due, in some measure, to recent theoretical and philosophical thinking regarding interdisciplinary and non-linear practices of meaning, working, creating and teaching. Especially important in displaying a culture (or in the display of history, science, art, and so on) is the seemingly ordinary concept of sense. How is sense made? What sense do we make, and why? How do we keep sense open, available?

The museum, the exhibition, is about seeing, reading, listening. The type of order the museum creates/imposes, the way in which its curators, researchers, archivists see, read, and listen, affects the memory of individuals, and of cultures themselves—the cultures which it displays and the cultures which come to visit, to view. The museum is a type of memory and dream; a space for memorising and dreaming. The care of memory and dream is the care of remembering, forgetting, and imagining, and it’s the care too of detail, possibility, and infinity. There are countless ways to make sense of every single thing; every single being brings themselves to bear upon the seen, heard, read event. The interaction, the potential for conversation, inner and outer, is where the moments of becoming ‘a slightly different person’ could be. “In dream space, many things might tumble through our minds: bits of songs, half-written shopping lists, things left unsaid. The shape or shadow of something, its texture or colour, the operation of space and the people moving through it can be triggers to an endless range of personal associations. Therefore, in accepting…[the] idea of the dream space, we have to accept more fully the imagination, emotions, senses and memories as vital components of the experience of museums.” (G Kavanagh, Dream Spaces, Memory and the Museum, Leicester Uni Press, London & New York, 2000)

Which brings me back to children. I watched the way children in the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery went about making sense. It was haphazard, unruly, restless. They stopped, wondered, pointed, or moved on, swiftly, careless; they saw one thing and returned to another. They used the touch-screens like video games, a bit brutal, expecting the equipment to work fast. They read here and there, not from start to finish. The gallery tolerated all of this. It seemed to give them a chance to play, or at least to remain in the mode of play. I thought, as a result, that in time, this gallery will make a big ‘difference.’

The Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery Project Team were: Philip Clarke (principal curator), Philip Jones (preliminary brief), David Kerr (content coordinator), Franchesca Cubillo, Chris Nobbs, Root Projects Australia (project management), Freeman Ryan Design in association with X Squared Design (exhibition design), CDP Media (multimedia consultant), Clinic Design (Speaking Land interactive), Bollman and Bietz (Contemporary Voice films).

Kid A, the fourth release from British group Radiohead, was one of the most awaited events of the musical calendar. Perhaps because no other ‘rock’ band of the present era had the newness of presence and the experimental vigour to qualify for what most critics, some a little less consciously than others, saw as a millennial statement, a chance to push the boat out into the 21st century.

Both REM and U2 were due to release recordings at the same time. There was no doubt these ‘grand old men of rock’ still knew how to set an influential pace: that each document would be received as a major statement, and that each would be looking to affirm their liveliness. But even these musical giants seemed to have accepted their more historic place after long careers and bowed their heads to a new pathfinder.

REM singer Michael Stipe was quick to tell the world a few years ago, “Radiohead are so good it scares me.” U2’s Bono was more recently quoted saying that the previous two Radiohead CDs—The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997)—“are among the best things ever recorded in pop music.”

The more experienced point men of contemporary music had a new champion walking beside them. Most critics and recent music polls agreed with them. And what did the new leader say when he arrived?

Recited in a manner—on a new song called Optimistic—that suggested maybe he/they can’t, that singer Thom Yorke and Radiohead are as lost as anyone.

Pre-publicity and hype around Kid A proposed something so experimental and aurally unexpected—strong new electronic influences, a drastically reduced use of Radiohead’s trademark guitar sound and Thom Yorke’s high, sweet-sad voice—something so musically strange we would have trouble even listening to it.

This was going to be a high art event. A record you struggled with. Half-baffled, half-admiring reviews are still perpetuating this lie. The truth is Kid A is beautiful. Complex textured music, yes, but driving and melodic, filled with luminous energy.

Most Radiohead fans will have long ago detected a utopian coolness at the heart of their sound. Everything from the band’s CD artwork through to Thom Yorke’s fluorescent lyrical ache—think of songs like Fake Plastic Trees and Paranoid Android, let alone their CD titles (Kid A betrays a fascination with biogenetic engineering)—have added to that surrounding mood of futurist uncertainty. This is tomorrow’s music from today’s romantics, struggling to maintain emotional efficacy in a world increasingly iced by electronic light: the internet, surveillance, reality TV, automated transactions, voyeurism, a denatured and alienated global communications ‘village’ where contact is byte-sized.

In no way, however, do Radiohead present themselves as rock ‘n’ roll primitivists (‘we really mean it man’), or Luddites opposed to a technological culture inside or outside of music. If anything, in today’s scene they are regarded as the last word in modern rock ‘n’ roll-up to the minute and beyond it.

If you wanted to place Radiohead into a ‘tradition’, you’d refer to acts like Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd, as well as the Bryan Eno-influenced exoticism of early Roxy Music (those brassy squalls and cool angles) and the Berlin digressions of David Bowie and U2 (the same pop alienation). Peers like the British avant-dance act Underground, and Britpop’s most intelligent act, Pulp (in songs like The Fear), are also a relating influence, estranged partners, along with electronic leaders like Aphex Twins and Autechre. And of course, mid-career Beatles at their creative, if shadowy, peak in the studio. Revolver, Dark Side of the Moon, Achtung Baby, The Man Machine… these are the musical moments that Kid A lodges itself beside.

In a like-minded way, Radiohead are straining at the boundaries of the pop-rock form and their own identity as a group within it, ranging over epic and neo-classical territory in a manner that is both aesthetically and technologically interesting. Despite the complexities, the coolness, there’s an undoubted exhilaration to this, the sheer thrill of new space.

Unlike the bloated ‘progressive rock’ movement of the early 70s (Yes, Genesis, ELP), which tried to instill rock music with classical seriousness—a movement Radiohead are said to have re-energised in Britain (though groups like Muse, Coldplay and The Doves are hardly acts to feel ashamed of)—Kid A shows discipline, tension, focus. Radiohead are also part of a re-intellectualisation of the British music scene—smart, sensitive Oxford boys who provide a relieving and awesome contrast to the road weary, lads-on-piss attitude of bands like Oasis and the cheapening magazine culture that followed them like bulldogs down retro-lane.

It’s possible to argue that Radiohead are a post-Empire blues band. No longer a vital economic entity, Britain depends on ‘culture’ for its post-colonial identity. It uses pop music, graphic design, fashion, and media aggression to reassert its prominence while its physical and social conditions emanate decay. The British, you see, are still set on world domination: they just operate their imperialist tendencies in a different matrix these days.

In songs like Kid A and The National Anthem you hear this put into an unsettling position. An indecipherable vocal croon distorting like something out of a 1920s microphone, a disembodied music hall lament from history; a splenetic rush of BBC, like orchestrations thundering and broken. ‘Great’ Britain in sickness more than health. I suspect Radiohead, with these allusions and their generally elusive atmosphere, are refusing to take on a more culturally chauvinistic role as yet another English musical export a la ‘Cool Britannia.’ They are also making music in anti-heroic mode, which includes forsaking cliched rock rebel poses: the bad boys, the decadents. No, Radiohead offer something more reflective, even traumatised.

If you’re the investigative type, you may have already discovered a booklet hidden beneath the back packaging of the CD. Once lifted and revealed you’ll find a lengthy poem inside, constructed, Burroughsian cut-up style, out of newspaper headlines and magazine phrases as well as song lyric fragments, culminating in the repeated phrase “the gap between you and me.” There are a few drawings and portraits of cartoon violence and organic isolation amid this typographical chatter. A native, dystopic soul is at work here: Thom Yorke’s lonely, ugly-funny, beautiful-sick sense of things, in a form that might be classified as ‘art brut’ or ‘outsider art’: the kind of disturbed creative expression usually associated with eccentrics and schizophrenics.

But in almost everything they do, Radiohead exhibit a profound sadness that goes way beyond the facile psychologising of Thom Yorke’s depressive inclinations and his past history as a mental hospital orderly. There’s something ‘social’ embedded in their sound, a broader grieving that picks up on the communication problems of the brave new world. They seem materially plugged into something, armed and disarming at once: exactly because their technical sophistication is dependent on the culture that troubles them. It’s a riddle.

Kid A accordingly resists anthems, providing instead a soundtrack—diving and resurfacing, often melodically pretty, inevitably sheeted with that touch of Radiohead ice, that surface over a deep pond feeling—that is hard to resist. I’d go so far as to liken listening to Kid A to the experience of skating over a pond in Winter: so pleasurable and cool, terribly alive to something childish and risky and temporary, easy on top, disturbing below.

Musically the recording could certainly be regarded as a retreat into childishness, a spasm of infantile panic. There’s a fixation with something funereal, explicitly conjured in the organ sound and heavenly harp of Motion Picture Soundtrack. And a need to transcend and back away from that darkness. That attitude infuses the entire recording with a regretful light. A womb-like yearning for lost warmth most easily heard in the lullaby mood of the title track and the bioscopic sound effects that colour the entire CD.

This ‘retreat’ sees the band backing away from easy musical hooks, erasing standard song structures, and therefore side stepping simple analyses. The band’s own identity almost fades away at times. They are literally lost in space. The decision to release no singles or promotional videos is part of this dissolution, while their ‘i-blips’ (brief images with soundtrack samples from the CD) on the internet accentuate, at most, a fleeting take on self promotion.

Perhaps Kid A’s affirmation of a struggle for humanity and spirit just off the edges of our individual consciousness—out there in a world of science, mass media and the internet—is one reason why I resort to the poetic rather than the analytical when I speak about it. That’s no bad place to be. From what I’ve read, critics are struggling to pin this one down, warning fans not to expect to like it, or even understand it. That’s so far out. I think they will manage more easily than expected and, if not, rumour has it the band have another recording of more straight ahead, conventional Radiohead tracks ready for 2001 release; for now they’ve put the experiment first, the career second.

At a time when pop music is more than ever an industry of empires, a world of units shifted and niche markets carved, Radiohead are happy, strangely happy, to be mysterious and elusive, a ghost in the machine. Or as Thom Yorke so eloquently put it in the wonderfully named song How To Disappear Completely, “I’m not here. This isn’t…”

And what is the next word that he says? Unhappiness? Happening? It’s hard to hear him. Like so much of this record, the message is unclear.

Maybe he says both. The song rolls on: “I’m not here. I’m not here. In a little while I’ll be gone. The moment’s already passed. Yeah it’s gone.”

On Kid A, it’s not what Radiohead say or declare that matters, but what they don’t know. This record is about loss, absence, a heavenly and hellish sense of space: mortality caught in a new technological web. Where so many people may have expected a major statement, they’ve thrown up an eerie question mark. And we are all the better for it.

The humidity is high, the temperature is way above Sydney’s mild Summer average and the air is utterly still in Tamarama (next door to Bondi Beach) where Marrugeku and Stalker director Rachael Swain and her husband, company technical director Joey Ruigrok Van Der Werven, live…from time to time. But, despite having just completed a week of hot stilt-walking practice at Stalker’s less-than air-conditioned Marrickville studio and having to coordinate an incredibly large and complex group of performers and staff (25 people from Broome, Perth, Oenpelli, the outstation Markalikbarn, Goulburn Island, Melbourne and Sydney), there’s a cool air of quiet confidence in the old shopfront house before the company fly out to Perth—for an all too short onsite rehearsal in the Quarry Ampitheatre. Joey breezes out to pick up a new back-up VCR for the show and Eddie Nailibidj, a key performer in Crying Baby sits in on the interview with Rachael, nodding agreement, answering the odd query, relaxed deep into his armchair but nevertheless exuding a restless energy that says dancer—traditional, break and stilt dancer.

After a rapturously received preview of Crying Baby at the 2000 Darwin Festival (see RT#40 p10), the Marrugeku Company, an ongoing collaboration between Sydney-based Stalker Theatre Company, urban Indigenous dancers and musicians from WA and the Oenpelli community in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, premiere their second work at the 2001 Perth Festival. Like their first work, Mimi, Crying Baby is destined to become an arts festival favorite. As we go to press there is hardly a ticket left for the Perth show and there are more offers from major festivals than the company can contemplate.

The rehearsal in Perth will allow the whole company to rework the show, accommodate various cuts and changes, make technical adjustments and add some cultural nuancing for urban audiences now that the show has left its Oenpelli home. Rachael calls the Darwin showing an avant-premiere and this phase the 5th stage of the show’s long gestation.

Stage 1 was the end of 1998. We had the whole company up there for a month. We went up with the question, is there a new show to make? We really wanted to approach it very openly to see if Mimi was just a one-off. But very quickly we moved into a whole lot of new territory together.

It took the work on Mimi for us to understand one another enough to be able to explore more complex issues. There’s always been a fascination with each other’s vocabularies. That’s been a backbone of the work. The community-based artists love the physical theatre work of Stalker. And we really enjoy their amazing mastery in traditional dance and music. The urban Indigenous artists in the company have vocabularies from a number of places. For example Dalisa Pigram from Broome has been trained in the traditional dance forms of her people. She also did a lot gymnastics from when she was quite young, so she’s learned the aerial work in the show very quickly. She also went to the Aboriginal Music Theatre Training School in Perth that Michael Leslie set up. I met her just after that and we taught her the stilts.

Mapping stories

In Kunwinjku culture, the Djang (the closest you can get to the meaning is what whitefellas call Dreaming) exists in the land and as stories that have moved across the land. But there are also Djang stories we would think of as historical and built out of post-contact history. And because Stalker works either with large scale outdoor touring works or more site specific works, this whole idea of a story in a landscape is something that is part of the process of our company. That’s a shared understanding or the ground that we stand on together, that we build from.

The text for the new work was in fact a map which took in the Djang of the area, including the history of the first white man in the area, a man called Mr Watson. Thompson Yulidjirri, who’s the elder for this work, the storyman, tells his own history in the area. And Marrugeku, over the 6 years we’d worked together, we have our history there.

It took us days to make this big map with all these stories on it and that became our text for the show. We used it spatially but also as a group of narratives as well as an understanding of how the Djang stories, the contemporary stories and the historical stories could weave together into a narrative. It started on a piece of A4 paper and then we got another one and another one and then we got a big piece of cardboard and then we stopped; then we got 3 pieces of cardboard and started again-it went on and on. In the show, as Thompson is narrating he draws out the map and in the film [projected in the performance] Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton has made a montage of the telling.

One day, in the process of doing the mapping, there was this little circle on the map and I said to Thompson, what’s that one there and he said oh, that’s Mr Watson. And I said, who’s this fella Mr Watson? And he told me the whole story of his father’s people along with other tribes being taken from their land and the setting up of a mission on Goulburn Island. Reverend James Watson was the first white man to come through this area. We then went and researched Watson in the National Archive and managed to find a copy of his diary.

With the company there for a month, we listened to lots of stories and went to quite a few places. At the end, I said to Thompson, last time we looked at the Mimi story; if we had a Djang story now, what would it be? And he got that furrow in his forehead and he said: the Orphan story.

The Orphan or Crying Boy Dreaming is from a place called Gapari, the country where Thompson’s father lived. It’s a story Thompson’s custodian of. It’s a place he goes and visits. We’ve been there with him a number of times. It’s a story of neglect. This little boy was neglected by two tribes and a form of the Rainbow Serpent became angry at the tribes for not looking after the boy and she turned them all into rock. That’s the short version. Because Thompson grew up on Goulburn Island and Eddie grew up there too, the Crying Baby Dreaming already had quite a strong resonance. One of the crafty things that Mr Watson did was to take these different tribes from a place thick with stories to a place where there was no Djang. There was no dreaming on Goulburn. The people said it was very arid and a stupid place to go and live. Not so much tucker.

When we started this project, Thompson said to us, we’ve gotta look at the whitefella story this time. We can’t just look at that blackfella story. The other side of that was, I said to him, well let’s also look at the contemporary story from your country. You can’t just sit back on your heels as traditional men and talk about your Djang. What’s going on there now? And that, of course, is incredibly difficult for me as a director and for him as an old man. It’s something he cares about enormously but also a very hard thing to tackle because there’s so little hope there. And it’s so complex. There’s so much violence, so much culture being lost every day. Old people are dying and losing stories. So many of the kids have big petrol sniffing problems. A large percentage of the parents are alcoholics. Kids are growing up in chaos. For Thompson, as an old man, a big part of his life is teaching stories to the young people. What he’s finding now is that the young people don’t want to listen.

So these were our starting points. The Orphan story, the question about white Australia and contemporary life in the community. Thompson talks about this story in relation to the Stolen Generations but also in relation to white Australia. The film also carries quite a lot of the narrative. I made a film about a lost white girl in the bush. Often when there’s a Watson scene, there’s this lost girl who’s telling a white version of the orphan story. In Australia there’s this thing about Aboriginal children being taken from the bush but also a paranoia about white children lost in the bush.

Representing the whitefella

It was interesting reading Watson’s diaries. He comes across as very gung-ho. He was a madman really. He tried to ride a bicycle from Darwin to Kunbarrllajnja (Oenpelli). He had so little water left that he started drinking the oil from his bicycle chain. I’ve juxtaposed this quite maniacal character with this disoriented figure suffering a kind of blindness. In the beginning there’s a whole lot that he doesn’t see that happens around him.

When it came to the part of the show where Watson meets the Aboriginal people and asks them to go to Goulburn Island with him, I handed that over to the guys from Oenpelli who were dancing in the show, to see how they wanted to play that scene. Harry Thomson had a lot of ideas about how it should be. And what was really interesting for me is that they made it very funny. Everybody in the community knows the story of that first missionary taking the people away from their country and how it was the beginning of a lot of change-it’s a very heavy thing. But they play it very slapstick. It’s going to be interesting to see how that translates from playing it in front of a community audience to playing it to an urban, festival audience. It’s quite strange and of course, Katia Molino is very good at it and it’s a bit Buster Keaton sometimes.

In the beginning the Dreaming, historical and contemporary elements are separate but towards the end of the show they start to break into each other. At the end there’s a scene where Watson has a fight with a devil-devil figure—Katia and Trevor Jamieson, one of the dancers from Western Australia, have a great aerial dance on bungy with pulleys. It’s a moment where Watson’s starting to see the spirit figures and also fearing that maybe he hasn’t really been doing the right thing—moving into a phase of doubt. In his diaries he actually appears to have stayed in his myopic, aggressive mode. But when I imagine him up there in Arnhem Land licking the oil from his bicycle chain and completely surrounded by such a foreign culture, what he’s written in this diary has to be a falsehood. Where’s the doubt?

Remembering the words

The music is a mixture of live and recorded. There’s the Marrugeku band that was in Mimi with the same lineup: Lorrae Coffin from Broome who plays bass and the composer Matthew Fargher who plays violin and keyboard. Bruce Nabegeyo is the main songman. For this show he’s singing quite a lot of songs in kunbarllang which is his mother’s language. He’s remembered these kunbarllang songs. It took him a while.

For the dancing, Eddie speaks a number of languages but some of the other guys didn’t know these songs so well so it took a while to remember how to dance to them. The dances come from Croaker Island. Eddie moved around a lot as a young man. He’s quite special because he’s been trained in a number of the dance forms. He has an incredible vocabulary to draw from. Sometimes he’s teaching the old men. When he started on the stilts, he was trying to learn what we do. Then one day he said, okay that’s it, I’m gonna do it my way. Suddenly his stilt walking got better. He could do a lot more, moving from the basis of his own traditional dance vocabulary rather than trying to copy our copying of them. Eddie does a scene in which he breakdances. It’s great to see him playing a role other than dancing painted up in his narga.

Reading the audience

When we did the pre-premiere it was programmed as part of the Darwin Festival. We had 2 shows just for the community and then 3 more when the Darwin community could come in. In fact, I think most people from the community came every night. They knew the show off by heart. It was important for us to have that Darwin audience but I do think a Darwin audience is educated to a slightly different way of reading things than, say, a Sydney or Perth audience. Some things I’m changing. I don’t believe in the Peter Brook universal theatrical language idea and because we make works spanning remote community audiences, urban Australian audiences and international audiences, we rework the shows for each place. Also I’ll learn from seeing it in Perth. It’s a groundbreaking time. I’ve had to make guesses about how things might be read. For example, in the physical vocabulary there are moves that can be read by a Kunwinjku audience, simple things, like a hand signal that means Rainbow Serpent. We need to think of a different way to communicate that.

We’re asking the audience to listen in a different way. And we’re looking at narrative in a different way. One of the things I’ve learned from Kunwinjku stories is that they have a simple structure but layers of meaning. And as we weave the Watson story and the contemporary story, I hope that the audience will accept our invitation to listen and think in a different way about what reality is. About what they see, about what’s going on, about how much impact the history of this country has had on the present, how much impact the spirit stories have on the here and now.

A lot of grounding for the collaboration is that our physical vocabulary for the stilts and the aerial work has always moved in between the realms of the spirit and the human. Stalker has done that since early works like Angels Ex Machina. It’s something we’ve been obsessed with as a company and I think it supports this idea of a connection between Dreaming, history, and the contemporary.

One of the areas that’s been most challenging with this work has been to look at the contemporary scene. So the prologue is set in Oenpelli with everyone in the company sitting round campfires. We’ve tried to really blur the difference between the audience and the performers. Everyone is sitting around together and there’s no starting-of-the show moment. It’s just a very slow fade into the performance. We’re limiting the audience number to 800 which for Stalker is quite small. We’ve played other shows for up to 1200. In the community we were playing to 500. Our Darwin limit was 300. Crying Baby is more intimate than Mimi and more complex.

Cultural negotiation

We go through more and more together, we grow closer and we trust each other more, especially people like Thompson who essentially writes the shows with me. He’s got to the stage now where he’s often standing on the outside almost directing. He’s standing out there shouting at these boys in Language if they get it wrong. I love that. I think the territory that we can go into together, there’s so much more understanding and we can go deeper, and that’s more satisfying.

But I think the issues that the company deals with and what the people in the company are living through certainly don’t get any easier. The “humbug” as they call it up there doesn’t get easier. The issues facing the urban Indigenous as well as the remote community-based members are really tough. There are mandatory sentences being handed out to members of the company. The alcoholism, families in Perth and Broome that are struggling with the number of kids being looked after, people having no money and trying to get food, the health issues…they certainly don’t get any easier.

When we were in the community there was a lot of trouble going on. Someone got murdered and there was a lot of payback. It was very heavy. And we were making scenes that looked at or referred to trouble and characters not so strong in their traditional culture. But the scenes I’m happiest with are the contemporary scenes even though we had been really worried about making that kind of work and showing it to the community. The issues are lived out on a daily basis. And so, in that way, I feel like the company is an example of trying to live through reconciliation.

Cultural liaison with the traditional owners in all the countries we go to is a really big part of what we do. There’s a lot of advance work that goes into it to contextualise the work in terms of site and the local culture. There’s always a welcome by traditional owners of whatever country we’re in. With Mimi, and we’re hoping with Crying Baby, someone from that country tells the stories in their language. In Manila, we told stories in Tagalog. In New Caledonia they were in French and Kanak. The Noongar mob in Perth are doing a welcome for us and hosting a barbecue when we get there. So those relationships need to be set up properly. When you’re bringing a Djang story, you’re bringing a living entity to a place and so there’s a certain amount of negotiation around that. When we took Mimi to Perth, it was the first time we’d performed the show and we didn’t set up those relationships and there were a lot of people who had bad dreams about Mimis at that time and it caused a bad feeling about the production in that place.

Stalker

We’ve just started a new work called Incognita. We’re working with writer Paul Carter and Koen Augustijnen from Les Ballet C de la B. He and I are co-directing, co-choreographing. After making Crying Baby, I had this absolute need to look at a whitefella story for this country. So the piece looks at what it means to live in a country with a buried past. It’s a kind of remote white outback Australian setting. One of the starting points was what it means to recreate life on the site of a massacre, a place where there’s been extreme violence in the past, what kind of characters would evolve out of that. It’s pretty heavy. The process of making Crying Baby has been heavy. And it seems that having worked with Marrugeku really propels us into another way of looking at content.

First thing I can say, I think its gamak [very good] that new story and old story go together. I will start with Crying Baby, this place, somewhere behind Coopers Creek. The story starts at Croaker Island, finishes up at Gapari. That little boy, he was crying, all the time crying, all the time crying for food. If you let that little boy crying all the time, little boy will make rainbow come, will kill you all. Like this mob, white man came and take children away, might be I can’t see them when they grow, they go away from mother and father, no one looking after them. I draw that story in that book. White man collect all them children. Take away, never come back. We have to look after them kid, or then that rainbow angry, coming to kill all.

The Marrugeku Company, Crying Baby, Perth Festival, Quarry Amphitheatre, February 1 – 4

In the 3rd of our series on future directions in the arts, Ben Goldsmith reports on an international conference on the impact of globalisation on the arts and the organisations taking shape in response to it. We’ll have more on those groups in the near future. On the local front, Sarah Miller casts a wary eye over 2 documents, a new, apparently enlightened arts policy out of Western Australia and a Discussion Draft from the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Vision Day.

For or against, or finding a third way to think about it, globalisation is on everyone’s lips. Andrew Ross, Artistic Director of WA’s Black Swan Theatre, comments in an interview (page 12): “I think the notion of the flagship company now has a lot more to do with what WA contributes to the rest of Australia than the way its repertoire correlates with other flagship companies—this is a by-product of globalisation—the necessity to produce distinctive, regional works. Each company has to chip out their own aesthetic and cultural position within that framework.”

Sophie Hansen’s report—in our last instalment of The Arts: What Next? (RT#40, p6)—on the British arts funding policy that ties all grants to community activity, was greeted with near disbelief by several RealTime readers: “You’re not suggesting it’s going to happen here?” So it was interesting to read in Sarah Miller’s report on the Western Australian Ministry for the Arts’ Building Community through the Arts: An eight year strategy that “It states, quite unabashedly, that the arts are good for us and that they do add value to a whole range of social justice areas.” Not at all the same thing as the British phenomenon, but a reminder how justification for arts spending has increasingly to rely on what’s value-added.
Editors

Less than 100 miles north of the Minoan centre of Knossos, the Greek island of Santorini is a most fitting place to debate the arts’ end of the world. The Cycladic island’s rich history, like that of neighbouring Crete, interleaves stories of natural disaster with invasions and great maritime wars, all of which have had dramatic and at times apocalyptic impacts on island cultures and ways of life.

Within the space of 2 centuries, Knossos was devastated by a series of cataclysmic events: fire, invasion, earthquake, volcanic eruption, tidal waves. In that same period about 3 and a half thousand years ago, earthquakes and volcanic eruption forced the abandonment of the thriving 2000 year old port of Akrotiri on the southern tip of Santorini. The town lay buried under metres of lava and ash for centuries, and has only recently given over some of its riches to eager archaeologists. Trained and expert minds today piece together fragments of Bronze Age life and hypothesise about the rituals and routines depicted in the intricate and extensive wall frescoes. Some of the more excitable even claim Akrotiri is the mythical lost city of Atlantis.

But these are not just stories of loss and desolation. They are also stories of cultural renewal. One of the most striking things about the Akrotiri excavations is that, to date, no human remains have been uncovered. This would suggest that the inhabitants had time to flee before the eruption to Knossos or other centres, dispersing stories of the events like clouds of volcanic ash around the eastern Mediterranean.

Most of the hardy souls who live on the volatile island inhabit Fira. There they enjoy cinemascopic views of what is said to be the largest caldera on earth and share their island with throngs of tourists cruising or island hopping or backpacking their way through Greece. Fira is the largest town on this island of lost cities, artists, volcanoes, goldsmiths, and grapes which grow stubbornly and stoutly in fertile volcanic soil on windswept slopes, into a sweet dessert wine for which the island’s 3 vineyards are justly famous. The town is also the home of the most stunningly sited conference centre in the world where afternoon speakers regularly lose their audience to the view from the windows of the sun setting into the sea.

In September 2000, 70 writers, artists, teachers, students, circus performers, curators, musicians and media folk gathered at this conference centre to discuss globalisation and cultural diversity. Representatives of non-government organisations from around the world shared common concerns about the homogenising impulses of globalisation, and the threats posed to global cultural diversity by the removal of barriers to international trade or the implementation of new intellectual property agreements. They urged restraint on trade negotiators who may seek to bargain away the capacity of their governments to make cultural policies which protect, promote and help build audiences for the work of artists and cultural workers. They sought to learn from and connect with other activist networks, and to represent cultural interests and values in a policy environment in which they seem to have less and less purchase on the ethics of government. And they formed a new international body, the International Network for Cultural Diversity (INCD; www.incd.net), to advise and coordinate the activities of non-government cultural organisations, and attempt to ensure that cultural considerations are given due weight in this current Millennium Round of World Trade Organisation negotiations on further international trade liberalisation.

In February 2000, discussion of a new and more comprehensive General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) began in earnest. While the exact agenda for these discussions has not been made public, the United States has signalled its intentions to seek broad agreements not only on audiovisual services—the issue which almost scuttled the last (Uruguay) round of negotiations in the early 1990s—but in a range of “cultural service sectors.” In acting as an information exchange and alerting service, the INCD will play an important role in ensuring that governments do not enter into any future agreements without taking close account of their impacts on cultural diversity both domestically and around the world.

A comprehensive round of negotiations on trade in services is intended and cultural workers and audiences are likely to be affected in a variety of ways if any international agreement is reached. A number of networks (like the INCD) have been established in recent months to link national cultural ministers, professional associations of artsworkers, academic cultural research centres, and arts support agencies like the Australia Council. These networks are testament to gathering interest in the value of sharing information and engaging in dialogue on issues not only for their own sake, but in order to meet the challenges posed to cultural diversity by emerging international free trade regimes, media convergence and the digital divide. The foundation meeting of the INCD was held in Santorini in September because the island was also hosting in that month the 3rd annual meeting of the International Network on Cultural Policy (www.pch.gc.ca/network_reseau/), an informal network of cultural ministers from around the world. That network was formed to allow dialogue to continue between governments on policy and diversity issues, following a major UNESCO intergovernmental conference on Cultural Policies for Development that was held in Stockholm in 1998. That conference provided the first opportunity for cultural ministers to meet in 20 years. At the initiative of the Canadian minister for culture, Sheila Copps, ministers met later that same year in Ottawa to form the INCP, which now meets in a different country every year.

Canadian agencies, organisations and government departments have played leading roles in both the INCD and INCP, as well as in the new International Federation of Arts Support Agencies which was launched at the recent World Summit on the Arts and Culture in Ottawa in December (www.culturenet.ca/cca/index.html). This network, whose secretariat will in the interim at least be hosted by the Australia Council, was formed to connect the many arts councils, foundations and public cultural agencies which have been founded around the world in recent years. In many cases these arts councils represent new partnerships between the public sector, the non-government sector and the private sector in the administration, promotion, production and preservation of cultural activities. Through the Federation, these councils will be able to use knowledge gained from international counterparts to shape domestic cultural policy.

Australian artists, agencies and organisations have a great deal in common with their Canadian counterparts but our organisations are only just beginning to play prominent roles in international debate on cultural diversity. This may be because the Australian political environment is less attuned than the Canadian to the challenges to cultural industries, diversity or expression posed by economic globalisation. Of necessity, Australian arts organisations tend to focus attention on the effects of domestic policy changes such as the introduction of the GST or the activities of the Australia Council. They are often poorly informed about the potential impacts of international trade agreements on the capacity of governments to make cultural policies which subsidise cultural production, instrumentalise commitments to cultural diversity, discriminate on cultural grounds in favour of domestic producers, and ensure a space for public appreciation of domestic cultural expression. As the trade negotiations roll on, Australian organisations would be well advised to participate as fully as possible in these international debates. Economic globalisation could have similarly dramatic effects on cultural life and activity as the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have in Santorini. The new international cultural networks including the INCD will play a role in determining whether those effects are productive or destructive, and in keeping a place for cultural values to offset the grosser inequities and most harmful effects of the rules-based trading order.

Since the advent of Creative Nation in 1994, there has been an almost tacit consensus that Australian governments, whether state or federal, should have in place some kind of policy framework from which to ‘deal with’ the arts. From an arts perspective it’s not hard to see why the ‘guarantee’ of a formal manifesto, allowing us to assess the value placed on the arts by government, might be vaguely comforting. From government’s point of view, particularly as the arts aren’t seen as having any ‘door-knock’ appeal, an arts policy offers a framework for justifying current expenditure.

A policy document may fulfil several functions but often it’s a form of marketing: a means of promoting the arts to the average taxpayer. Given the profound faith that governments and their variously affiliated bodies have in the efficacy and expertise of highly paid consultants, an arts policy is assumed to be beneficial in and of itself. It establishes a kind of imprimatur. It stands for good intentions. This is despite the fact that while such policies may lead to restructures of varying degrees, they rarely result in real benefits or improved working conditions for the 80% of artists and arts professionals working outside the major organisations. The Nugent Report, of course, focused on the financial woes of the major performing arts companies.

To develop an arts policy, you need a vision. Historically, vision has been understood as a form of imaginative insight, a prophetic apparition or sagacity in planning. These days, vision has less to do with imagination or prophecy and the judges are still out on sagacity. Nowadays, to get a vision you need a committee. To get a committee, you need various forms of expertise. You might draw on people who work in the arts sector and exploit their experience, expertise and ideas. Or you could choose people who are successful in other fields of endeavour (preferably commercial or sporting) and hope that their success rubs off. There should be a formula. There must be a solution. In recent years, ‘youth’ have been a popular inclusion, presumably because young people are distinguished from their elders by virtue of their wild and unfettered creativity, an absolute necessity when developing a vision by committee.

There are several arts policy documents currently in the making. The 2 I’ve been reading are notes from the Australia Council New Media Arts Fund’s Vision Day: Planning for the Future and the Western Australian Ministry for the Arts’ Building Community through the Arts: An eight year strategy. The former came to me in the form of photocopied notes whereas the latter is a 100 page highly produced document. At first glance they don’t have an enormous amount in common.

Cynicism aside, the state based document (mightily flawed as it is) is quite an achievement. This is the first time that the State of WA has articulated a framework and rationale for ongoing support of the arts. At one level, it is a profoundly optimistic document in that it displays no postmodern anxiety over the value and role of the arts in contemporary society. It states, quite unabashedly, that the arts are good for us and that they add value to a whole range of social justice areas. It also asserts (with substantiating figures and statistics) that the arts contribute both cultural and economic capital to the state of WA; that the arts are, in fact, good for business. In its celebration of the status quo, it is a rather conservative document, best understood in terms of ‘strategy’ rather than ‘vision’ per se. It seeks more to redress past and current neglect and to celebrate current initiatives than to provide a vision for the future, and in this lies both its strength and its weakness.

Building Community was developed to provide a case at Cabinet level for improved resourcing for the arts in WA. As such, it looks to quite pragmatic developments to achieve its ends. Its key concerns are described under 3 broad headings: “Engaging the Community”, “Building for Culture and the Arts” and “Resourcing Culture and the Arts.” These might be translated into, firstly, promoting the arts to the broader community in order to increase audiences; secondly, doing something about the poor conditions and inadequate facilities in most arts and cultural venues; and thirdly, money. There are other concerns but they tend to be either descriptive in function or motherhood statements from the statutory authorities that make up the Ministry of Culture & the Arts, including the Ministry Business Units, ArtsWA (funding agency), ScreenWest, the state gallery, state museum and the Library Board of WA.

In December 1999, after much behind-the-scenes lobbying by the Perth arts community, Mike Board took over the arts portfolio from the then Minister and Attorney General, Peter Foss. While Foss saw himself as an exceptionally high achiever for the arts, the general view was that his arrogance, inability to listen and unwillingness to lobby on behalf of the arts at Cabinet level was causing serious and ongoing damage to the sector. Mike Board quickly made it clear that he was ambitious to achieve change on behalf of the arts, to make his mark as it were, and put together a Ministerial Arts Advisory Council, a mix of eminent persons and “key industry stakeholders”, primarily from flagship organisations.

Building Community is the outcome of nearly 12 months work undertaken by the Council with some input from Perth’s arts advocacy group, Arts Voice. “In looking at the future facing the arts and cultural industry, the Council was concerned [as well they might have been] about the ability of existing structure and programs to sustain outcomes into the future. The age and state of cultural venues and facilities were identified as high priority issues.”

In financial terms, the objectives are to “broaden the base of support for arts agencies and cultural events; expand the scope and scale of private sector support for the culture and arts industry; and encourage a shift in perceptions about arts funding from arts spending to an investment in the arts” (my italics). The latter, presumably, is to allay potential anxiety about increased spending and to rationalise research and development as opposed to the interminable emphasis on marketing.

One of the key initiatives is the proposal to index funding to those “major subsidised arts organizations not covered by the Major Performing Arts Inquiry funding initiative”, most of which (including my own, PICA) have been functioning on static funding and diminishing resources for more than a decade. The question now, with a state election almost upon us, is whether the proposal to translate this strategy into real dollars and action will ever be realised. Mike Board is keen to realise substantial change. It appears, however, that the state coffers have all but run dry, meaning that whichever party wins government, massive cuts to recurrent spending or tax hikes are infinitely more likely than increased spending in the arts. Both major parties are fixated on the election winners: ‘family friendly’ and ‘law and order’ policies. Labor has not, in any case, been forthcoming in declaring their support for the arts. For Labor, the arts seem to carry the ‘taint’ of both Keating and strangely enough, Kennett, both understood as election no nos. Interesting times.

Notes from the New Media Arts Fund’s Vision Day are rather more art and artist focused despite, ironically enough, a recurrent sense that ‘artists’ as a group and ‘art’ as a practice may well have had their day. Participants included artists, curators, producers and artistic directors alongside Australia Council staff and Chair of the Fund, multimedia consultant John Rimmer.

This group was concerned with developing a shared vision for the future of new media arts. The questions seemed to focus on envisaging the year 2010. What will be hybrid in 10 years? What will be driving change? What will make change? It seems an impossible task. Who can forget Creative Nation’s misplaced belief in the CD-ROM as the driver of technological change? Perhaps what is most disturbing about this document, however, is the assumption of the leadership role to be taken by the Australia Council. Certainly, many of us have urged the organisation to take a more effective role when it comes to advocacy and lobbying government. It is, however, simply hubris for the Australia Council, whether at Council, staff or Fund level, to assume responsibility for determining the future of arts practice. What seems clear is that the day offered a wonderful opportunity for people to talk about current artform issues and ideas; there should be more of them, more often, with more participants. What is less clear is what policy or decision-making framework exists to translate all this talk into action and how much freedom practitioners really had to determine the day’s agenda.

It would be premature to comment definitively on the outcomes of the various artform Vision Days. Ultimately, they will no doubt lead to the development of the next set of funding priorities (see your forthcoming Australia Council handbook). Here too, it seems unlikely that new policy initiatives will be accompanied by any increase in funding, making the future look a lot like the movement of deckchairs on the Titanic. Past experience, and a healthy degree of cynicism, suggests that such visions simply mean more hoops for artists to jump through; well that’s my prophetic vision. It is to be hoped, however, that the Australia Council restrains its somewhat programmatic tendencies and retains the flexibility to respond to what artists and organisations are doing rather than just what the Australia Council thinks they should be doing.

In the long run, if there’s no money to back new ideas and initiatives it won’t matter a damn whether it’s a ‘strategy’ to resource and enable the imaginative insights of artists or a ‘vision’ created by an impeccably credentialed committee. Without money, all those meetings, all that talk, all that ‘vision’ and ‘planning’ will become nothing more than an expensive waste of time.

Discussion Drafts from the Australia Council’s Planning for the Future Vision Days are available for public comment (by April 10, 2001) at http://www.ozco.gov.au/issues/ppf [link defunct]

The Vision Thing Forum – An open discussion for artists on vision and funding is the next of the ongoing RealTime-Performance Space free forums. Performance Space, March 26, 6.30pm.

At the beginning of his 10th year as Artistic Director of Black Swan Theatre, Andrew Ross talks about the development of a different kind of theatrical aesthetic.

When Black Swan was set up, the central objective was to have a theatre company that engaged with the mainstream of cultural, political and social life of Western Australia, rather than just the theatre ‘industry’ of Australia. We were interested in giving a theatrical expression to WA’s cultural life, rather than the imitation of repertoire of other companies elsewhere.

It’s my sense that there was a deal of cultural resistance to the company at the outset. Do you think that has changed?

I think the resistance was political. A lot of that controversy over the Black Swan’s program was motivated by industrial issues concerning employment. Also, in the early 90s the view of what could constitute mainstream theatre was for the most part borrowed from elsewhere. For a time the 2 models co-existed, but it was inevitable that both could not survive.

I think the notion of the flagship company now has a lot more to do with what WA contributes to the rest of Australia, than the way its repertoire correlates with other flagship companies—this is a by-product of globalisation—the necessity to produce distinctive, regional works. Each company has to chip out their own aesthetic and cultural position within that framework.

When we set the company up 10 years ago we wanted to emphasise certain things that were important to us. The first was the development of WA plays: we’ve done a large number over the years and currently have 5 projects in various stages of development. Trevor Jameison and Scott Rankin (Box The Pony) are working on a play that deals in part with Trevor’s family’s (Pitjantjatjara) dispossession by the Maralinga nuclear tests, with the working title of Dust Will Fly, while Ningali Lawford and Ali Torres are developing a show reflecting on the lives of their mothers on Kimberly properties during the 60s and 70s. Black Swan has been commissioned by the Centenary of Federation Council to create a work on Sir John Forrest and his role in Federation. This is being researched and written by Phil Thomson and a production is aimed to be on stage around September or October 2001. Over the years we’ve shown a close interest in interpreting the literature of Randolph Stow and to follow up on our success with Midnite, Tourmaline, and The Merry Go Round In The Sea, we have begun work on the stage adaptation of To The Islands.

We have also felt it important to define that regional identity within the context of the Indian Ocean region. This aspect was slow to develop at first but has gained momentum in the last few years with touring productions from South Africa and, latterly, Indonesia with The Year Of Living Dangerously, where a group of artists from Surabaya in East Java participated in the 1999 Festival of Perth production.

We are working closely with the Taman Budaya (arts centre) in Surabaya, helping to develop international funding support for the formation of a new annual arts festival called Festival Cak Durasim. Actually, Surabaya shares some characteristics with Perth: relative isolation, a distinctive regional culture and propensity to view Jakarta in much the same light as we regard Sydney!

WA has a sister state relationship with the province of East Java which takes the cultural component of this relationship very seriously, beginning with the gift to the people of WA of an entire Gamelan orchestra. Over the years there have been a number of cultural exchanges and tours—Chrissie Parrott Dance Collective’s Satu Langit (One Sky) among others—but what I’m interested in building up is the long-term intimate relationship between the two artistic communities.

There were a couple of other developments in the region last year: a group of musicians toured Malaysia, holding workshops and performances that explored the acculturation of many traditional Malay songs into the music traditions of northern WA. This influence arose during the early days of the Broome pearling industry. Black Swan’s general manager Duncan Ord visited Shanghai and Singapore, while you visited Kuala Lumpur to further develop the possibility of touring and exchanges in the region. Regionalism has also influenced Black Swan’s interpretation of the ‘classic’ repertoire...

We have explored the classic repertoire within a regional context through earlier productions, such as Twelfth Night and Waiting For Godot. We haven’t moved on this area as much as we’d like to lately, though a cross-cultural, Indian Ocean region production of The Tempest is scheduled for 2002/3.

We have been involved in producing and touring foreign and Australian contemporary plays such as Closer, Art, Trainspotting, Popcorn, Dead Heart, Away and Cosi.

Finally, and very importantly, we have had the opportunity to help develop the talents of Indigenous performers and creators such as Jimmy Chi, Jack Davis, Sally Morgan and Trevor Jameison.

I believe we’ve remained true to our original artistic principles. Sometimes we’ve had to change the way we’ve gone about things while waiting for the resources to become available but we haven’t seen the necessity to reinvent ourselves in the process.

Dickon Oxenburgh has worked with Andrew Ross on several Black Swan productions, most notably adapting Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round In The Sea and Christopher J Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously.

Everybody in the contemporary performance and dance scenes (and not a few in theatre) in Sydney knows the familiar figure of videomaker Peter Oldham shooting from the shadows in the back row or upfront, snaking through the curliest of performer-audience configurations. Since the early 80s, Peter has recorded most of the significant performance works around a variety of venues, theatres, galleries and outdoor sites. With a small grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts, Open City (publishers of RealTime) is currently facilitating the establishment of The Oldham Archive with the Centre for Performance Studies at Sydney University. Not only does Peter Oldham know the territory and like the work, he knows how valuable a professionally produced video can be for artists and how much they can afford to pay for it. For a while now Peter has been noticeably off the case, a consequence of increased costs for equipment hire and artists’ shrinking access to adequate funds.

The Australia Council’s Audience and Market Development and Arts Development divisions have jointly funded Performing Lines to organise the provision of high quality promotional video material for independent performing artists and groups.

Performing Lines has established and will oversee a small video production facility, based in Sydney, but available to artists and companies nationally. This facility will co-ordinate the services of Peter Oldham.

The video production unit consists of a Sony DSR-250P 3 chip digital camera along with a Final Cut Pro Edit Suite operated on an Apple Macintosh G4-500 Dual Processor Computer. Peter will have the use of this equipment and, for a reasonable fee, offer his services to artists and companies to coincide with the first production and/or tour of their new works

Says Performing Lines’ Director Wendy Blacklock, “Most independent artists allocate small amounts of their budget towards the production of some print and video material. Some establish websites and produce CD-ROMs. However, too often, their efforts are undermined by the fact that they did not produce good enough material in the first instance—particularly videoed footage of their productions. With an increased emphasis on marketing Australian arts internationally and the need for an historical record of the innovative work being produced, this service will assist in redressing this imbalance.”

What this offers to the performance community is freedom from the costs of hiring camera and editing equipment. Because they only have to pay for labour, this represents a key reduction in costs and already, according to Peter, artists are making good use of the service. RT

The Year of the Dragon was a very good year for Asian film around the globe. A long essay in the New York Times of January 14 on “the sudden ubiquity of films from the Far East in art and commercial theatres, both here and in Europe” dubbed the phenomenon the “Asian Invasion.” Asian films took many of the European Film Festival awards in 1999 and dominated the US in 2000. Edward Yang’s A One and a Two was named Best Foreign Language Film of the Year by the New York Circle of Critics and awarded Best Film of the Year by the National Society of Film Critics. Contesting this choice was Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which scooped LA Film Critics Best Film of the Year, Time Magazine Best Film for 2000, The Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Feature Film and is in hot competition with Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love to do the same at the Academy Awards.

Australia, though geographically much closer to the countries collectively referred to as Asia than either Europe or the USA, only saw the beginnings of the Asian cinema boom in 2000. Only 3 Asian films were released by major motion picture distributors in Australia in 1999, a sad decline from a high of 13 films 10 years earlier (Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia).

It was in this climate of thriving global interest but much slower local market for Asian film that Columbia Tristar in Australia packaged 5 Asian films together, launching them as Silk Screen. Suzanne Stretton-Brown, National Marketing Manager, told me how it came about. “We were seeing an increase in Asian product that was coming via our production office established in Hong Kong to produce and acquire local Asian films and also Sony Classics. Through the 2 avenues we were all of a sudden faced with a slate of Asian titles and that was obviously a challenge in thinking what was the best way to distribute these films, to do each one justice and ensure each one realised its box office potential. It was then we came up with an idea how to manage that release and that was how Silk Screen evolved. It was for the purpose of creating some continuity in the area of our distribution and sales but it was also a wonderful marketing concept where under one banner we could promote 5 films.”

The package was launched with considerable fanfare with the release of the first film, Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home on July 6. Shower, an audience favourite at Sydney Film Festival, was released on August 24, Chen Kaige’s Emperor and the Assassin on October 5, followed by Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro on November 16 and the jewel in the crown, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on January 4.

The films were released simultaneously on 11 screens nationwide—3 in Victoria, 3 in NSW, 2 in WA and 1 each in the ACT, QLD and SA. “It was always our strategy to go with the more arthouse cinemas, the houses that perform well with this style of film and already have a very loyal audience.” In return for taking a package of films, the cinemas were offered “exclusivity”, guaranteed up until 25 January, when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the film which carried the greatest expectations, was released on more than 40 screens nationwide.

Was Silk Screen a success? “Definitely, absolutely. It’s done particularly well in all markets. Interestingly, some films did better than others in different markets. Queensland is traditionally a difficult market for foreign language films. The program up there has been very very successful, in particular The Emperor and the Assassin. Perth also has had tremendous success. Two cinemas—the Windsor and Luna—shared the market and have done exceptionally well, so across the country it has been consistent.”

Two cinemas I spoke with were united in their support. Andrew Pike of Ronin Films, distributor of many of the Asian films released at independent cinemas during the 80s and early 90s, said Silk Screen had been very good for Electric Shadows, the Canberra cinema he manages. “I think it’s been a very important thing that Asian films have started attracting mainstream attention and Silk Screen has been a great achievement in the circulation of these films.” According to National Exhibitions Manager Michael Eldred, Dendy Cinemas was originally offered the Silk Screen package on more screens but declined. “Columbia were very much encouraging us to take it in other locations and have more exposure but it was a new concept and committing yourself to a year’s worth of film was highly irregular. In hindsight, we could probably have used it in the other theatres. Some films were stronger than others. I think Columbia were aware of this and that was part and parcel of why they were delivered to us in a package.” Eldred said the package concept worked in favour of the films. “The customers loved being able to know what films were coming up in a few months time and what to look forward to.”

The most anticipated film was the last in the programme, Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee’s record establishes him as one of the most versatile directors anywhere, jumping genres from Sense and Sensibility to Ice Storm to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. What next, The Incredible Hulk? Well, yes, he has just been signed up. It is a mark of Lee’s standing that he could attract funding from Columbia Tristar to make his first Chinese language film since Eat Drink Man Woman. Three generations of Chinese actors—Cheng Pei Pei (the star of King Hu’s 1965 martial arts classic Come Drink With Me), Hong Kong star Chow Yun Fat, Malaysian born Michelle Yeoh and a new star from China, Zhang Ziyi—were united from across the Chinese- speaking world for this celebration of culture and tribute to China’s cinema history. Intertwining love stories along with the dynamism of the swordfighting scenes (choreographed by Yuen Woo Ping) has made the film a hit with audiences worldwide and a true crossover success. Michael Eldred commented: “It’s getting people who would never usually go to see a subtitled picture. I noticed the TV advertising doesn’t mention it being subtitled. So they’re coming, but they’re not disappointed because it’s delivering. It really is great from all angles.”

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has emerged as a phenomenon. It is the top grossing foreign language film in Australia, easily outperforming the Italian film Life is Beautiful. In its 3rd week of screening, it was earning over 4 times the screen average for the top 20 films (Urban Cinefile). Co-funded by Columbia-TriStar, hopefully its success will encourage greater investment in new talent and more risk taking in acquisition. The groundbreaking element to Silk Screen is the success of the series as a package not just in the selection of films. All of the directors but Zhang Yang are well-established, and Australian audiences have been familiar with Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige’s films since Ronin Films distributed a series of Fifth Generation Chinese films back in the 80s. While not disputing the quality of the Silk Screen films, there is far more to Asian film than “sweeping historical epics, blissful provincial fables and magnificent scenery and costumes.” The 3 films which best fit that description—Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Road Home and Emperor and the Assassin—were the films that performed best. Those about the newer realities of Asia—Shower, about the demise of community and tradition as it is bulldozed to make way for China’s new economics, and the one Japanese film, Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro—did not benefit from the branding of the package.

Silk Screen is not the only Asian cinema screening in Australia, though it had the financial muscle (and by consequence the ubiquity) to appear so. Actor Andy Lau’s 100th film, A Fighter’s Blues, was screening at Reading Cinemas, Market City in Sydney (before going to Canberra and Perth) at the same time it was number 1 at the box office in Hong Kong. Six films from Korea, currently considered the most exciting industry in Asia, have had short seasons at Reading Cinemas. (For regularly updated listings of Asian films screening across the country, check out www.heroic-cinema.com.)

Silk Screen’s success owed much to having Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as its trump card, but its overall impact may usher in a new era for Asian cinema in Australia. Early signs, such as Dendy Films’ slated release of In the Mood For Love in April and a retrospective of the films of the great screen actresses of 40s-60s Hong Kong cinema (planned for the second Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival in August) all point to the Year of the Snake as Australia’s year of Asian cinema. Suzanne Stretton-Brown hints that another Silk Screen may be in the offing: “That decision will be made in a few months. We would like to (do it…but) we won’t do Silk Screen this year unless we have the same level of product we had in 2000.” A second Silk Screen is likely to include Time and Tide, a new film by Tsui Hark (Chinese Ghost Story) produced by Columbia Tristar. As Michael Eldred said when I asked him if Dendy Cinemas would be willing to go with a second series—“Bring it on!”

The tourist brochure reckons all roads lead to Cunnamulla, a day’s drive from Brisbane, Sydney or Adelaide. It’s famous for a Slim Dusty song (Cunnamulla Feller), the Annual Lizard Races at Eulo and this documentary which, in true blue style, caused a media blitz and recriminations on A Current Affair, mainly from people who hadn’t seen the film. Local Councillor Jo Sheppard argued the townsfolk felt betrayed and angered by the portrayal: “It’s being presented as a documentary and the title is Cunnamulla. My concern is that people who watch it will presume it is an accurate reflection of life” (James Clark. “The man who betrayed a town like Cunnamulla”, Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 16 2000).

Ahhhhhh O’Rourke. You’ve done it again…and how little the debate has changed (in the mainstream media anyway) since the lessons of The Good Woman of Bangkok. The tenuous relationship between filmmaker and subject, the subtle blending of fiction and non-fiction, the prevailing sense that the documentary maker should be morally responsible, “a social worker with a camera” (John Power, “An Unreliable Memoir” in Chris Berry, Annette Hamilton & Laleen Jayamanne, eds, The Filmmaker and the Prostitute, Power Publications, Sydney, 1997) are ideas that O’Rourke has explored, embraced and headbutted throughout his career.

From 18 to 24 I was on the lam. I was nobody, I was nothing. I was shoplifting to eat…

A quote not from Cunnamulla but from O’Rourke. He goes on to say, “They were the best years of my life. The criminality was an expressed intention of antipathy to the establishment” (Ruth Hessey, “Bad Sex”, The Filmmaker and the Prostitute). Brought up in a working class family in a country town in rural Queensland, where he went to school with Aboriginal children and had “no exposure” to the arts, you hear his documented comments iterated throughout the film. Paul, the young Aboriginal man heading for jail, says he’s had “no culture or nothing”. Neredah says, “if you’re a good dog I’ll give you that”, and we wonder whether she’s speaking to the filmmaker or her blue heeler, both out of frame, patiently waiting for rich morsels and cold Christmas leftovers.

I can’t stop thinking about Neredah, wife of taxi driver Arthur. And Herb, scrap merchant: proudly displaying his bullet-ridden speed signs. And Marto, local DJ: “I don’t like the drugs but the drugs like me.” And Jack, a dark embodiment of the father in The Castle: sitting in front of his fan, relaying grim visions. And Paul, not really worried about going to jail, while we see his sister cry. And Irene, toothlessly singing “One Day at a Time” to Neredah, who says, “Jesus wants Irene for a sunbeam.” And a puppy, screaming, shot and dumped: I shield my eyes from the festering Animal Tip. And the spindly Aboriginal boy who carefully points to a dead lizard on the road with his toe: “someone ran over him…I felt bad cos I like lizards.”

I can’t stop being moved. I can’t stop asking why we can’t make heaps of good Australian drama/comedy with lives like these. Strong and striking and structured, with hyperlinks as seductive as Short Cuts or Magnolia. O’Rourke’s intense sense of these fragile networks means Cunnamulla is a knockout. It is stylistically rigorous—an extreme closeup of a character’s face means we imagine she is talking directly to us, filtered through the filmmaker. It is a shock when the camera does a slow sensuous pan to reveal a best friend, or boyfriend, or father—maybe, but not always, watching or listening. Palpably present. Out-of-the-frame becomes acute; we are sharing this making with others in the town. This style offers absolute intimacy, in complete harmony with the fierce loyalties of a drifting generation, lying on their beds in the sweltering heat, languorous limbs thrown over bike handlebars and each other.

Most of the ‘controversy’ surrounding the film centred on Cara and Kellie-Anne, teenage girls speaking unguardedly (or perhaps exaggerating for the camera) about their sex lives. Nothing they say will come as a shock to any girl who’s grown up in a small town (and probably not to most teenagers anyway) but what’s interesting and frightening is the hostile reaction to the film propagated by the argument (mainly put forward by Cara’s father) that O’Rourke made his daughter out to be a “slut” (a shot of graffiti—“Cara is a slut”—illustrates that this perception/lie existed in the town prior to the film). The media attention surrounding this notion of young women as ‘sluts’ illustrates not only a father’s obvious shame (and denial) but, more importantly, a collective irresponsibility and reluctance to confront the heart of the issue. These girls expose the hypocrisy inherent in community attitudes and the men’s and boys’ actions/beliefs; the old double standard that never seems to die. These girls are given a voice. They seem to relish it and no wonder.

In Cunnamulla the boys express their desires with “gissacrackatcha.” The difference between those who are “careful” and “not careful”? The careful ones try not to ejaculate inside. (A Current Affair didn’t bother examining why the safe sex message hasn’t reached rural Queensland). Eventually, the boys seem to wear them down. As Kellie-Anne says, “we’d rather be friends.” The girls play up for O’Rourke—freckled, apologetic, coy, delirious, giggly, upfront, naïve, wise, embarrassed, naughty—but what we see is their constant, unswerving desire to get out as their faces turn, in sync, to the louvered slats each time a car hurtles down the street.

The annual lizard race features on the Country Link brochure. “The most boring entertainment I’ve ever witnessed,” according to Neredah, who’s seen a lot; she observes for a living. Local contestants are rounded up and placed in a large circle. First to the line wins. No worries, this’ll be a quickie, but what happens? Overcome by collective inertia, they will not, cannot, move. A man stomps. Nothing. Is it lethargy, fear or an attempt to fit in that’s holding them back? Cara and Kellie-Anne know the answers but they’re in a bus heading to the big smoke…

The townsfolk of Cunnamulla should not feel betrayed. This careful and intricate portrait has enough shards of joy to make it one of the most elegant and absorbing Australian films in a long time.

Cunnamulla, writer/director Dennis O’Rourke, distributor Ronin Films; currently screening in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane with Perth, Adelaide, Hobart and regional cinemas to follow February-April. Dennis O’Rourke will be a guest at the Australian International Documentary Conference in March (see p15); Cunnamulla Visitor Information Centre, tel 07 4655 2481

For a long time before I saw this film I knew what I was going to see, even when I knew nothing about it. “I’m going to see the new Coen Brothers’ movie,” I said, and people understood what I meant, though they knew as little about it as I did. “What’s it called?” they said.

That’s what it’s like with the Coen Brothers. Everybody knows what it’s about before they know anything about it (unlike the typical Coen Brothers’ protagonist who should always expect the unexpected, remain frozen in a reaction pose of horror, bewilderment and fascination at whatever is coming down the track). The darkened humour, familiar faces (John Goodman, John Turturro), a knotty plot to unravel, the careful use of landscapes and background colour—the Brothers may move historically and geographically but, emotionally and stylistically, they stick to a well-worn groove.

This time we’re in Mississippi, enjoying a picaresque prodding at the prototypical parts of deep Southern sub-cultures—manacled chain gangs and gangsters with tommy guns, the Great Depression and old time radio, hobos and the Klan, hill-billies and Baptists; XXXX moonshine from a demi-john and pies left to cool on the window sill—these are a few of their favourite things. There’s a down-at-heel hero (George Clooney) battling dark forces to realise a simple dream, play-acting alongside his quirky sidekicks against a sepia-toned backdrop-all mustard yellows and washed out whites-and some rip-snorting musical interludes.

There’s also a Homeric underpinning which is kinda neat, a source of in-jokes for those who know their Homer—and no doubt there are many such allusions for the cognoscenti to collect—although the film has nothing instructive or informative to say with these comparisons. It’s like a reflex action, responding to hidden references as if that, in itself, is somehow sufficiently illuminating, the means to an effect. The Coens take the collective comic unconscious and hold it up to a dappled light, banking on a frisson of familiarity, the tiny pinpricks of pleasure which come from half-recognising a clue and making the connection. Their films trade in these moments of mutual recognition, sparks of shared sentiment like flashbulbs in a darkened stadium.

The musical accompaniment, one of the film’s strengths, also highlights its weakness as a cinematic experience. Instead of adding to the visual intensity of the film, the emotional pull of the songs seems to suck it dry, so that what we get is a series of musical fixes operating on a law of diminishing returns. The various set-pieces are unveiled with an almost anthropological fastidiousness but, ultimately, the only image which remains is that of a silver CD soundtrack spinning softly somewhere on a state-of-the art sound system.

It may look, feel and sound like a genuine Coen product but, in the end, O Brother doesn’t deliver as expected. Maybe that’s just as well; it goes to show that even when they’re being predictable, the Brothers can still throw in a surprise or two.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?, writers Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, director Joel Coen, distributor United International Pictures

I tend to fool around the edges. I think of myself as an observer…I don’t think of myself even as a filmmaker…All I can do is capture glimpses…incidentally it has almost nothing to do with verité (which means “the truth”) but to create this feeling of being there.
Richard Leacock*

The Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) is held every 2 years and democratically relocates around the country. The 1999 Adelaide jaunt was a successful amalgamation of screenings, conversations, deals and forums. This March the conference opens in Perth and, again, looks more tempting than most film festivals around the country with a relevant and engaging theme (The Edge of Reality), a market for filmmakers to pitch their wares (DocuMart), emphasis on evolving forms (self-funded filmmaking, reality TV, web-based storytelling, crossovers between fiction and docos) and a good-looking screening component (the REVelation film festival which will only focus on docos this year). Guests such as Ricky Leacock continue the interest in cinema verité and its implications for today’s generation (Albert Maysles spoke with Peter Sellars at the 1999 conference).

I spoke to Richard Sowada, festival director about his hopes for the conference. He chose The Edge of Reality as a theme because he’s “attracted (addicted?) to forms, styles, and filmmakers who…push the way documentary makes meaning…they hybridise the form, particularly with regard to the more political films…documentary is such a highly constructed form that it’s easy to forget that it’s all about dramatic principles and a high level of mediation.” This theme is reflected in sessions like The Art of the Narrative that will explore what doco makers can learn from writers in other areas including reality-based drama: “Reality TV is just one of those hybrids. You may like it…you may not…but the central point is the fluidity of the observational form…I am also interested in the notion of surveillance. In programming the event, this area was one which we always argued strongly about…that’s worthy of a session.”

The AIDC publicity places heavy-handed emphasis on the “new” with a current crop of filmmakers: refered to as “outlaws” and “revolutionaries.” This jargonish insistence on the current generation—Dan Gifford (Waco: The Rules of Engagement), Greta Snider (Hard Core Home Movie), Craig Baldwin (Spectres of the Spectrum) and Dennis O’Rourke—being like no other, detracts from what Sowada knows: that what’s most interesting is how filmmakers are working with forms that are evolving and re-moulding and incorporating the digital realm.

One of the failings of the Adelaide conference was limited exploration of the implications of digital technologies—for the creative process, distribution of work, opportunities for networking, self-funding—-and for documentary itself, with data storage, archiving and constantly evolving materials allowing a long life and access to new audiences. This year, a number of sessions examine these issues head on. Marcus Gillezeau hosts a masterclass, Storytelling for the Web and DVD: Space, Audience and Mediation. Sowada says, “As with other styles, we are particularly interested in the way these [web-based] works relate to the audience…the way the stories unfold and the way they explore the resources open to them. We will be running a craft session on how to use the technology for remote product acquisition (ie being in the middle of nowhere, shooting, editing and streaming) as well as a business-based session on distribution for the web…there’s a long way to go in what people consider to be web-based documentary and so I’m very keen to move this debate forward.” In addition, a series of sessions on self- and semi-funded works will explore how access to cheaper technologies—digital cameras and editing, internet for marketing and distribution—is changing filmmaking practice.

A popular component of the Adelaide conference was DocuMart, where filmmakers pitched their product to a panel of international media buyers. There was a huge turnout for these anxious, high risk, often very funny session where ideas were sold, swapped and dumped on. This year it’s on again: “…there’s no question that Australian filmmakers are compelled to make films for an international market. International market interest is the key in accessing funding. This doesn’t mean you cannot tell local stories but filmmakers have to start telling them in different ways…there is a tendency for many filmmakers to think the end point of the filmmaking process is ‘making the sale.’ Very few in the programming consultation process of the conference ever mentioned ‘audience.’ This was interesting to me and I think indicative of the powerful market forces at work…How does this encourage signature works? It doesn’t…which spells real trouble for the fostering of a unique ideas based industry…Filmmakers often feel they must tailor their work to these strands and streams and hence perhaps allow themselves to be distracted from the central issue…the story and how to tell it. There are some notable exceptions in Australia such as Tom Zubrycki and Dennis O’Rourke.”

The documentary screenings that are an important part of the conference will come under the banner of the REVelation film festival. Criteria for selection is that films “have to try something different…We are screening all manner of works from 3 minute micro-docs to 2 hour epics and ranging from the most low-fi to the incredibly lush…but ultimately they have to speak to an audience…Even if sometimes as an audience member you don’t quite get it…Over the past few years, the strongest REVelation performers have been documentaries and so we anticipate our selection meeting with a high level of public interest and success. For the filmmakers, this interaction is of major importance. Seeing how audiences respond to your work is a rare thing…usually with documentaries audiences are sitting in their lounge room and it’s the broadcaster telling you what they like and what they don’t. With a public film festival, you can actually look into their eyes. It is also particularly important in an environment like Perth (which is sometimes fairly underserviced in screen culture) that audiences have a chance to experience a fine selection of international works.”

A lucky dip into the screening schedule pulls out Cinema Verité: Defining the Moment, where conference guest Peter Wintonick traces the history of cinema verité (cinema direct, Cinema Eye, free cinema) while also considering its legacy in fiction/non-fiction crossovers like Blair Witch Project, Cops, Homicide Life on the Streets, and implications for a human rights organisation like Witness that trains activists to use digital cameras to capture and expose injustice; their advertising slogan: “you can’t say what you just saw never happened.” Blair Witch producers Gregg Hale and Robin Cowie play with this slogan in fiction, understanding the power of verité to simulate reality: “this [cinematic] language you inherit…it’s there.” They argue that the home video (of family events) is today’s “aesthetic of reality…often shaky, badly framed and sometimes out of focus.”

Spectres of the Spectrum (conference guest Craig Baldwin, experimental filmmaker from San Francisco, uses found footage in video collage) promises a history of speculative science in the shape of a pirate TV broadcast, where propaganda from the 50s is manipulated to examine the “culture of worship” of the latest gadget: “I call it a jujitsu move, to use the weight of this absurd, preposterous, blind belief in technology being the big fix and [I] turn it around and critique” (interview with Ed Halter, “Science in Action”, New York Press, www.nypress.com/fram.cfm?content_id =414, 13/01/01). Another interesting contender is Benjamin Smoke (Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen), a biopic about Atlanta band Smoke and lead singer Benjamin, his voice and lyrics a mix of Waits, Ginsberg and Ellroy, wavering between brain-mashed incoherence and exceptional insight into HIV, addiction, small town life and creativity, cross dressing, music and death. Fast forward frenetic domestic scenes intercut with slow sensuous songs echo Benjamin’s druglaced life; you need patience for this film’s raw power. His perspective truly embraces the edge of reality, an artist who “wasn’t trying to get to a place where people liked what I was doing.” One person who does count though is his hero Patti Smith and she gives him the ultimate dedication, in lyrics that outlive him: “Have you ever seen death singing…in the straw coloured light.”

Although the AIDC program is still to be finalised, the elements are adding up to a vibrant and challenging mix. Sowada seeks to encourage a culture of debate by merging interests and practitioners in areas often kept predictably separate: “it is crucial to really look hard at the craft…I think we have a strong critical foundation. Many of the attending academics will be chairing what are traditionally more market sessions in an attempt (I hope) to spin things a little differently. We have highly respected academics such as Michael Renov (documentary theorist, University of Southern California) and Joe Camacho (University of California; his focus is on Indigenous filmmaking in Southern USA and Micronesia) attending…We have attempted to embrace all industry sectors, providing them with platforms and allowing them to engage in discussion which I think affects all filmmakers.”

*Leacock quotation from an interview with Chris Buck, “Do Look Back: the story of Cinema Verité”, Popped, www.popped.com/articles98/cinemaverite/ veriteleacock.html, 12/01/01. [link expired]

Australian International Documentary Conference, Sheraton Hotel, Perth, March 6-9, www.aidc.com.au

Professor Jeffrey Shaw is an internationally renowned Australian new media artist, with The Legible City (1989-91) and its variants possibly his most famous work, and the big inflatable pink pig for Pink Floyd the one people mention least. He’s the Director of the Institute for Visual Media at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. In November 2000, he gave a (startlingly comprehensive but concise and accessible) lecture, “Future Cinema”, in the Digital Media Fund series at Melbourne’s Cinemedia.

I believe you’re developing a piece for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, to open in Federation Square in 2001?

It’s called Place-Urbanity: it’s a computer-based interactive media installation that will be part of the permanent collection at the centre. It evolves out of a series of earlier works, Place—a Users Manual (1995) and Place-Ruhr (1999), and is connected with my somewhat obsessive interest over the last few years in creating new kinds of interactive cinematic installations.

To give you some sense of the physical shape of the piece: there is a 9-metre diameter circular projection screen that is about 3 metres high, inside of which is a round platform about 2-and-a-half metres in diameter on which the operator stands. On this there’s a modified underwater video camera: it has no video functionality but you use its buttons to control the work’s navigation parameters. There’s also a projector on the platform projecting images out onto the circular screen: not the whole screen, only a proportion of it. Because the platform rotates, so does the projection ‘window’, and in that way the operator can explore the full 360-degree panoramic view. The functionality of the interface offers you control of the rotation of the image on the screen, and you can also move your point of view forwards and backwards within the virtually represented space.

In this work I’m creating a virtual landscape of Melbourne, populated by about 15 cylinders: these are video recordings made with a ring of cameras, so one achieves a complete panoramic video recording of each location. These panoramic cylinders inhabit a virtual landscape: they have an architectural presence there, and if you enter these cylinders you can view their respective 360-degree surround video scenes. It’s a strategy for making what you could call cinematic haikus at different locations in Melbourne, and putting them all together in a semi-fictional landscape. The visitor can then navigate through this narrative space and choose different places they want to visit.

From a content point of view, the piece intends to give a mirror to Melbourne, especially in terms of its remarkable ethnic diversity, so I’m choosing locations that are the centres for various immigrant communities. In each location you will find a comedian who belongs to that ethnic community telling a joke: jokes that reflect the idiosyncratic conditions of these various communities…these comedians are not standing upright in front of their respective panoramic locations, they are hanging upside down and seen from the waist down, telling their jokes directly to viewers.

And it’s not a simulacrum, it’s not like The Legible City, where there was a visual semiotic one-to-one mapping. Instead you’ve chosen delimited locations so it’s a bit more like de Certeau’s idea of walking through the city, producing your own grammar, connecting up points.

Yes, what I’m doing is building up a new ground-plan of Melbourne constituted by this set of ethnic community locations, each inhabited by its joke-telling protagonist. It follows from the Situationist notion of the psycho-geography of a city, and the fact that you can restructure or redefine an urban identity in relation to a set of psychological co-ordinates. As I’m putting the work together there is a new geographical form emerging, a kind of inverted Y shape with the respective locations distributing themselves along these axes, and the Yarra cutting through the middle. This new map will constitute the virtual environment where the video recorded panoramas are located, and on the interface camera there is also a LCD viewfinder where you can see a bird’s-eye view of this ground-plan in relation to your actual position.

And will you use text, text as architecture, as you have in the past? Michael Joyce and Judy Malloy have characterised you as a hypertext writer in 3 dimensions, though you also use text as sculpture or machinery or real-time mapping. Does Place Urbanity do this?

I’ll be using text here too. It offers me the opportunity to create another set of narratives that can run parallel to the gags spoken by the comedians. The interface device, the underwater camera, has a microphone that is sensitive to the viewer’s voice. It doesn’t take account of what the person says; it only wants to hear something spoken. And then it works like a switch: it releases prepared texts into the virtual world. These texts appear about 8 metres away from you, in the middle of the virtual space and always scrolling to the left. The appearance of these texts is relative to your movements through this urban landscape, to your trajectory there. If you start to move forwards, each letter will slide off further into the distance, creating a diagonal line of text. And if you’re turning the platform you’ll start to ‘sweep’ the text into curves, spreading or compacting the letters depending on the direction of the rotation.

While you are exploring the work you are laying down traces of text that ensue from and represent the paths you’ve taken ; as a result the text can become very scattered and chaotic. This becomes a kind of ‘concrete poem’ that’s splayed out inside the urban landscape. It’s quite personal for each visitor because it’s something they have brought into the space with their voice and movements. At the same time these texts are short-lived, impermanent; they have a lifespan of around 3 minutes and then they gradually fade away. Each person entering the installation inherits the temporary traces of where previous people have been, while adding their own. Human presence is signified by text, language occurs as the residue. Especially in relation to the increasingly distended cyberspace created by the internet, it strikes me that this is an apt contemporary representation of human presence, a presence embodied by just a density and complexity of text traces.

And the intrusion of text into the virtual landscape also breaks the simplistic ‘VR’ contract, where the user’s senses are meant to be tricked by consistent realism. It’s as if you’re trying to elicit a conversation between the individual user and ideas about interactivity—and about interface—dramatised by the work, so it’s reflexive, based on conventions.

You are touching here on something which is fundamental and important to me. I’m not at all interested in virtual reality per se. Rather, virtuality is used as a strategy to reconstitute something essential about the real. Rotating the projection window gradually reveals a panorama view that is assembled as a whole in your own mind, in memory, which is what happens when one is observing the real world. This is a level of realism that even goes beyond what conventional cinema can achieve.

In an interactive work like Place Urbanity the apparatus is spliced into the argument: the panoramic screen, the projector, the rotating viewing platform…these are blatant yet also fundamental to the point and storyline. In all my work the technological devices are present, visible, but at the same time they signal the thematic lines that extend from their operation. It sounds a little abstract but it’s important to me that the interface camera for Place Urbanity is an underwater camera because of the associative implications of such a device.

Like Cousteau in a bathyscope wandering round Brunswick…That’s something visitors to your works pick up on, I think: the interface familiarity, and then the defamiliarisation and retraining, learning how to work it.

Yes, in all the works there’s a variegated exploration of interface strategies. In Place Urbanity, the underwater camera interface is familiar but given a new identity in the context of the work: endowed with other functionality, figurative value and a metaphoric resonance.

Jeffrey Shaw lecture, “Future Cinema”, Cinemedia, Melbourne, November 20; Place Urbanity was funded by the Digital Media Fund’s Interactive Screen Arts Program. For more info, visit www.cinemedia.net/DMF/ [link expired]

Artificial Life was the theme of futureScreen00, curated by Leah Grycewicz and organised by dLux media arts, in collaboration with The Powerhouse Museum, Australian Centre for Photography and Artspace. A 3-day symposium and a series of exhibitions, Artificial Life: Hard/Soft/Wet explored, manifested, challenged and sometimes confused the discourse and scientific/technological/artistic practice of artificial life (a-life).

To begin at the beginning, which in this case is a very confused point, Chris Langton, professed ‘founder’ of artificial life, gave a “Millennium Retrospective” of a-life in which human evolution moves inexorably from microbial organisms towards virtuality and artificial life, propelled by technological development and cultural evolution. Inversions are common in this scenario; the map becomes the territory, the code (be it genetic or computational) is independent of the medium or host, natural life is superseded by the next hierarchical level of organization, which happens to be ‘artificial life.’ Despite the hair-raising simplifications Langton managed to pull out of some fairytale hat, his examples gave a good historical footing and his ‘retrospective’ a fairly clear map of the conceptual field, including complexity theory, emergence and evolution.

The next paper cut through some of the conceptual quagmire Langton’s ideas had generated, by outlining the relevance of a-life for artists. In “Metacreation: Artists Using Artificial Life”, Mitchell Whitelaw identified “meta-creation”—or the making of a creative process, rather than a work in itself—as one of the key characteristics of a-life art. Whitelaw surveyed a range of artistic approaches, discussing works using artificial evolution and genetic algorithms to “breed” images; interactive ecologies (such as Jon McCormack’s Eden, concurrently exhibited at Casula Powerhouse) and artworks generated by cellular automata, of which Ima Traveller by Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen (exhibited at Artspace as part of the event) is exemplary, both for its technique and for “re-engineering a-life science in both artistic and conceptual ways.” Ima Traveller, with its continuous zoom towards a landscape or object that is never reached, invokes the vertigo of perpetual specular journeying and speculation. As the “landing” is infinitely deferred, the beauty of the images and the seductive pull of the zoom develop uneasiness. Moving forward (think progress) becomes hyperbolic and fatal. Zooming quickly becomes falling; the inability to land becomes the impossibility of stopping.

This sense of being on some kind of juggernaut towards the immaterial was echoed in Jon McCormack’s presentation “(Re)Designing Nature.” Making the fundamental point that “nature is boundless while the artificial requires a container”, McCormack cautioned against replacing biological evolution with technological evolution, as this involves a redefinition of life in terms of the product of mechanisms rather than any particular materialisations. In that respect it is synthetic and reductionist. Crucially, McCormack discussed the anthropomorphism and supervenience integral to a-life rhetoric. While it’s common to project biological behaviors such as mating or eating or dying onto a-life creatures on the screen really, he stresses, we’re only looking at pixels, representations rather than organisms.

While a-life enthusiasts often like to present their creations as cute, lovable, evolving little entities, the uglier side of all this code rarely rates a mention. Michelle Barker’s beautiful and very powerful Praeturnatural, exhibited at ACP, opens up the monstrous as a dimension of scientific discourse, biotech and genetic engineering. Both this artwork and her symposium presentation “Digital Physicalities” revealed the kind of ‘distortions’ of supposedly rational systems (such as a-life and genetics) that develop under the weight of reductionism on the one hand, and market forces on the other. The preference for code over content, form over matter, creates a closed system that can hardly replicate the openness of life processes. These, Barker argued, have an essential relation to time, space and environment, factors that produce variation, difference, mutation and evolution. Similarly, the elimination of ‘defects’ in the human form is deeply influenced by consumer prejudices, a point well made in Praeternatural, when a semi-fictional survey asks a series of questions that elicit contradictory responses (in a test case, GMO foods were unacceptable, but the genetic manipulation of embryos didn’t raise an eyebrow).

Barker identified important beliefs that shape the discourses of a-life and genetics: that living organisms are kind of machines, that code is independent of and superior to the medium in which it is housed, and that genetic makeup and evolutionary imperatives supersede both the environment and individual responsibility. These were elaborated in Professor Lesley Johnson’s paper “The so called ‘Book of Life’ and what it means for humans and animals.” Johnson made a number of important connections between new evolutionary psychology and genetic research which, for instance, has allowed researchers to argue that core personality traits, IQ, sexual preference, race and ‘characteristics’ like homelessness, are genetically determined. As such, they are beyond questions of social justice or responsibility and may ultimately be manipulated through gene therapy. Equating living organisms with machines is part of a process of redefining life to suit certain interests, a dumbing down that loses sight of the different levels of organization of living systems and their incomparable complexity. “Molecular explanations for human organisation and culture,” she argues “turn the eyes of society away from political solutions…to seeing it inside the individual’s biology.”

Johnson began her paper with the observation that the unravelling of the Genome has been reported with references to “the code of codes”, the “book of life” and “reading the mind of God.” The religiosity of biotech and a-life was emphasised by Steve Kurtz, from Critical Art Ensemble (US). Kurtz’s interest in a-life and biotech has a lot to do with the ideological crises that both are provoking. Nature, he stressed, “is our primary legitimiser, a metanarrative of how we know what’s good and what we think we should do.” Its technological redesign has created a mass of contradictions that provide fertile ground for artists. For instance, transgenics transgresses the ‘like must be with like’ law that has dominated the notion of species intermingling, and allowed capitalism to deem separations based on class, race or gender, as ‘natural.’ A ‘double think’ is now necessary as capitalism sees wonderful opportunities to control food resources at the molecular level. Similar contradictions haunt notions of progress and technological development as the material abundance, increased leisure time and great convenience technology has promised fails to materialize. So, Kurtz asks, “what’s happening with the various pitch cycles? Well there’s only one rhetoric left and it’s Christian, and right now, it doesn’t have such a bad reputation.”

By far the most provocative moment in the symposium resulted from an entirely different order of emergence than the one being discussed. Tom Ray’s remote presentation “A Wildlife Reserve in Cyberspace” was divided into 2 distinct parts. The first was a eulogy for the absolute immateriality of cyberspace and virtual being; the second was, in contradiction, devoted to his project to develop an artificial “wilderness” in cyberspace. With great enthusiasm, Ray demonstrated how the different “species” would “breed”, how their DNA would couple and multiply, how evolution would work its way through this global artificial system. In response to heavy criticisms from the audience that he was too liberally borrowing metaphors from the biological sciences to represent his computer simulations, Ray answered that he was “interested in evolution, regardless of the medium, whether it’s digital or biological.” But although evolution might be the new progress or the mega-code, it is not, apparently, a speakable word in the state of Oklahoma, from where Ray was broadcasting. Mention of this fact immediately grounded Ray’s discourse of immateriality in a particular locale while, coincidentally, the interruption of his tele-cast by a hurricane warning, grounded it in time. This particular space-time turned out to be a hurricane prone, fundamentalist Christian, creationist preaching state in a part of the US that is probably uninsurable due to the effects of climate change. If Ray’s presentation showed how close evangelism—either Christian or techno—is to this area, it also reveals the extent to which religious fundamentalism and the reality of another non-linear system, global warming, is shaping the discourse in entirely unexpected, non-rational, non-linear, emergent, but scarcely artificial ways.

FutureScreen 00: Hard/Soft/Wet Artificial Life, Symposium, Powerhouse Musuem, Oct 27-29; Exhibition, Artspace, October 5-28; Exhibition, ustralian Centre for Photograph Oct 20-Nov 19, 2000.

In the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Open Space, artists are invited to test new works and new forms, and use the Space Theatre’s facilities as they wish. Following the successful 1998 season, the second Open Space involved 20 ensembles over 5 nights and promised much.

Dance predominated: Ingrid Voorendt’s Pinchu Macha and Me and My Shadow were strong, dancer Naida Chinner standing out. The Beltane company’s Spell of Harmony and Fire of Becoming were tight and energetic. Katrina Lazaroff’s Seeds of Groove Roots was a sparkling parody of the disco scene, with a tight 3-piece funk band backing 2 dancers, vocalist Liam Gerner showing much potential. Movement merged convincingly into theatre in The Waiting Room by dance company Pani. They portrayed the dislocation of the individual’s private space, with a man “climbing” over a woman who tries to maintain composure by ignoring his intrusion.

Two themes recurred through the season: troubled relationships and youth sub-culture. BudgieLung’s Je regret, a performance of music, movement and speech, depicted couples’ attraction and ensuing unhappy relationships. Different spoken languages were used to universalise the theme. The audience responded positively, though the work did not always maintain dramatic tension. In Fish Kiss’ satirical theatre work We’re all gonna get cancer anyway! the performers ponder the dangers of unprotected sex, intravenous drugs, mental illness and health generally in a disposable society—a strong text but staged in a simple soliloquy form that needs development.

Two theatre works stood out: Chimaera Productions’ Achenputtel was a charming adaptation of the Cinderella story, birds taking the role of the Fairy Godmother. Yashchin Ensemble’s Loco was a powerfully rendered take on the dysfunctionality of the incestuous family, where sexually-oriented neurosis and fear push the individual over the edge.

Michelle Luke, Caroline Farmer and Tommy Darwin’s The Mechanics of Subtle Persuasion, which appeared in the Moving Image Festival in August, has been revised and now includes music by Steve Matters. Two 30-somethings meet and become lovers, their taped voices revealing their private thoughts. The text remains strong, but the revisions have not improved its delivery. Previously, the actors entered at the commencement with video cameras strapped in front of their faces to relay continuous close-ups to a cinema screen. In this rendition, the actors enter part-way through, their faces on screen now dissociated from the voice-overs, reducing the immediacy of the text. The actors’ skates and skateboard, which symbolised slipperiness and uncertainty in the first version, are now gone and their movement is less focused. Design coherence is especially important when multiple media are used.

The highlight of the season, Reminders, was based around the recitation of a poem of that name by Geoff Goodfellow. Staged by Dancenet Contemporary Dance Collective, it begins with a video of the poet in his kitchen making breakfast. A male dancer with a large white sheet enters and in the foreground performs a slow, intense sequence before retiring to an armchair centre stage. Two dancers inside funnel-shaped tubes of white cloth then begin to move, suggesting a mind/body in sexual turmoil. A female dancer performs on stage while the video shows her emerging from the shower. The work culminates in the screening of Goodfellow reading his poem about a now absent lover. This is excellent theatre, with strong choreography by dancer Caroline Lawson, blending the various media effectively.

The major video work of the season was Unit E’s The Republik Opera, Andrew Petrusevics’ computer-based satirical video of the history of Australia since Federation. Petrusevics’ project continues to grow and develop. This time it was accompanied by actors hitting ping-pong balls into the audience with golf clubs, an element that seemed unrelated. The work would be stronger staged as short video in a booth of the kind increasingly appearing in art galleries.

Each evening ended with a musical performance, often augmented by projected imagery. Fiona Beverage’s Liz Dooley is a singer with potential; move over Sinead! A band called January’s lyrics are absorbing, even quoting Shakespeare.

This year’s Open Space was characterised by fewer ensembles attempting to blend disciplines but where they did, some good work resulted. Open Space provides an unparalleled opportunity for experimentation and the development of new forms. Some performers in the 1998 season, like Da Whyze Guize, have gone on to better things, and some of this season’s should too.

Theatre director Richard Wherrett’s autobiography has just been published, his direction of the Johnny O’Keefe musical, Shout, acclaimed, and he’s been given his own slot in the Radio National breakfast program. And he’s made a speech. Wherrett has witnessed what he thinks is a malaise in Australian theatre, “a terrible deception, a monumental con, a giant fraud”, that “from the moment we enter the yawning chasm (sic) of the auditorium we seem to enter a willing conspiracy that what will follow will be an event of great pith and moment, and seriously important to our lives. That it ought to be is beyond question. That it is is far from the case.”

Wherrett’s hit and miss assault on standards in theatre practice, writing and reporting at the National Performance Conference (January 19; edited version Sydney Morning Herald, full version smh.com.au, Jan 20) grabbed sizeable media attention, generated an odd collection of letters to the editor and sound responses from playwright Beatrix Christian and PACT Youth Theatre’s Lucy Evans in the Sydney Morning Herald’s open access commentary spot, Heckler. Doubtless, like provocations from Barrie Kosky, John Romeril, Katharine Brisbane, Robyn Nevin and others in recent years on a variety of platforms, Wherrett’s call for rigorous public debate will evaporate into the arts ether. A major reason for this is not necessarily artist or public indifference to the seriousness of some of the issues raised, but the absence of any sustained debate about them in the press, on radio and especially television. The infotainment era doesn’t encourage extended argument. These passing storms are quickly forgotten, usually until the next round of Rex Cramphorn or Philip Parsons Memorial lectures.

This is not to say that these surges of critical energy don’t share, at least on the surface, some common motivation, or solutions: Kosky has railed against the preoccupation with funding at the expense of vision; Brisbane and Jack Hibberd have proposed moratoriums (5 years I think) on funding in order to reinvigorate Australian arts; and Wherrett, while proposing we take to the streets to demand more arts funding, suggests we “ban all new Australian works from the stages for 5 years with the note ‘write better.’” He says funding is not the issue but how it is spent. Beatrix Christian retorts: “…Wherrett, like many Australian theatre practitioners, considers the act of playwriting as a thing apart. It’s not. Ultimately, playwrights become as provocative, ambitious and compelling—and as technically polished—as their theatrical culture allows them” (SMH, Jan 23). Asked by The Australian to detail his solutions, the banning of new plays was not mentioned, replaced it seems with a call for “separate funding for research and development wings” for companies (something that several flagship companies are already embarking on). “If the plays are finally not up to scratch, then they should not get done” (The Australian, Jan 19). Who’s to decide this—cultural commissars clutching 5 year plans in the guise of Wherrett-like gents of good taste?

Wherrett also proposes audience size as a significant criterion for funding: “I would propose any company or project reaching audiences of less than 60% per performance be carefully reconsidered” (The Australian). What then are we to make of this proposition from his address: “If you compared the Railway Street Theatre Company, Griffin, Sidetrack and Urban Theatre Projects in terms of actual dollar assistance in relation to the number of performances mounted, the size of the audience reached, and the resultant value for money in terms of subsidy per seat, you would find huge discrepancies.” Is that surprising? What is the cost of innovation? What is the cost of developing new kinds of theatre for regions and communities and for artists who work outside the mainstage, and for nurturing writers? Had the seminal Australian theatre of the 70s been assessed on audience numbers, where would we be now?

I have to say that I wearied quickly of people who enthused, “Good on Richard Wherrett. At last someone’s come out and said what had to be said.” “Which bits of what he said or do you really agree with all of it?” I’d ask. The particular impact of Wherrett’s wide-ranging tirade is, I think, because of its specificity. He names names and he names shows. This is not common to such speeches. There are things you can agree with, like the disgrace of Leo Schofield’s Olympic Festival, bereft of new Australian theatre works (and much else), the limits of much arts journalism (“How can two of our major arts journalists spend months of valuable column space obsessively speculating on the successor to the Australian Ballet”), his disapproval of certain productions, and the need for the arts community to unite on the demand for more funding. However, his call for “rigorous, selective and artistically assessed assistance” is as abstract as that which he condemns : “I feel there is at work, federally and statewise, principles of criteria for support that are dangerously idealistic, abstract, indefinable, and worst of all politically determined…” Wherrett’s calls for the return of heart over head in direction, for “thematic potency”, for the need to “entertain and uplift our audiences” and “the experience of shared communion,” evoke a cozy, cliched humanism, a dream of one theatre without the tiresome diversity that enrages him: “Should political correctness, which I assume is driving the STC’s selection of women directors, be banned?” Wherrett argues strongly for more funding, but the very absence of it allows him to deplore “spreading the jam too thin.” If empowered would he give out all the funds if they became available? I doubt it. His agenda is clear. Wherrett’s speech really adds up to little, a flurry of vagaries, dislikes (the things he would banish), abstractions about what he wants of theatre. There’s no vision here, just blind swipes. The end result is pathos, all that fury expended, signifying little. You know that when you ask yourself, “what exactly am I being rallied to do?”

All this, just when I’ve been enjoying going to the STC more often, sensing excitement, experiment, intelligence. And getting it, mostly in the Blueprints program, not always agreeing with the outcome, but unlike Wherrett not expecting every visit to the theatre to change my life forever. As I argued in RT#41 (“Plight of the New”, p26) there are many different kinds of experience to be had in the theatre, something confirmed by a group of innovative performances I’ve witnessed over the last 2 months in various venues. Not surprisingly, given the dated frame of reference Richard Wherrett springs on his audience, there’s little room for these kinds of work in his sorry vision.

Sydney Theatre Company, Fireface

The rare pleasure here is of seeing a recent German play, Paul Von Mayenburg’s. Fireface. Benedict Andrews’ intense production provides a voyeuristic widescreen theatrical experience, an irregular letter-slot view of family life, so confining that even the family has to stoop at one constricted end of the stage (designer, Justin Kurzel, lighting Mark Truebridge). A huge space behind, a pit inhabited by a multitude of fluffy toys lit with day-glo brilliance, is only ever the point of entrance and exit for the brother and sister who leap or crawl in and out of it, an evocation of the borderline child-adult place of these incestuous siblings where neurosis can and does become psychosis, passing from one to the other like a virus. This is serious pathos. There are no tragic insights, no room for sympathy, a little for empathy. We watch the spread of an appalling condition. It’s in their solo moments of raging pleasure that we recognise release and transcendence—the voice of the sister (Pia Miranda) pitches up and a tear winds down a cheek as she gives voice to the absolute pleasure that pyromaniacal conspiracy has unleashed in her. The brother (Matthew Whittet) is a crazed visionary (obsessed with his birth, the very moment of it), an irredeemable Hamlet (“you’re a mother, don’t try to be a woman”, he screams at his naked mother in the bathroom); his madness is simply inexplicable. His parents might be obtuse and ordinary, but there’s nothing to blame them for except their failure to recognise the monster in their midst, who’ll hammer them to death and await his own immolation, regretful that he ever needed his sister’s complicity.

Although a play from a new generation of German playwrights, this is theatre that seems to merge a Franz Xaver Kroetz family, a disoriented individual out of Botho Strauss, a Fassbinderish perversity and fatalism with an unpredictability common to all 3. True to all of these writers, the mise-en-scene is bizarrely cinematic. Matthew Whittet is physically and emotionally frightening as the brother, Pia Miranda provides just enough normalcy in counterpoint, Lynette Curran and Anthony Phelan play the parents with restraint (shorting Von Mayenburg’s satirical instinct) and dignity, and Socratis Otto is the sister’s boyfriend, the right mix of sensitive and obtuse, embraced by the parents. Not everything works: there’s a mix of playing styles most evident in vocal delivery; an excess of entrances and exits, especially by the parents, kills some of the cinematic drive; and the ending is muffed. Is Fireface the last instalment in a Benedict Andrews trilogy about identity and morality—the experiment with innocence in La Dispute, the invention of a life in Attempts on Her Life (including the imputed evil of the terrorist Anni) and the fundamental evil of the brother in Fireface (circling us back to La Dispute)? It’s been a fascinating inquiry, boldly conceived and directed, and without concession to the dogged demands for heart and sympathy called for so often these days, as if the recognition of otherness and the sheer struggle to understand identity stand for nothing. Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, opened Jan 6.

PACT Youth Theatre: Pre-Paradise

Just as impressive in its own way, if more innocently performed by its cast of 15-25 year-olds, is Caitlin Newton-Broad’s finely crafted production of the Fassbinder-derived and inspired Pre-Paradise with dramaturgy by Laura Ginters, I have distant memories of seeing/hearing about productions of Pre-Paradise Sorry Now in the 70s, but more familiar here was the sense, if not always the actuality, of characters and situations from Fassbinder’s prodigious film output, brief melodramas here played larger than life: the story of the woman socially maligned for marrying a migrant worker, a misogynist butcher in desperate need of affection (he talks economics to a doll), seriously disturbed upholders of the law, ruined soldiers and repressed homosexuals. Here they are fragments of characters in a turbulent milieu, self-possessed, barely aware of each other, perpetrating and battling the tyrannies of common sense (invoked by giggling children at beginning and end as a kind of geometric certainty) and unfathomable personal drives (“I like myself and won’t let anyone get in between”). Common sense rules, embodied in appalling cliches and double-bind killers: “You’re beautiful. Beauty doesn’t last.” At the centre of the social whirlpool is an innocent, an alien, Phoebe Zeitgeist, not unlike Handke’s highly abstracted Kaspar. Because she has no language, she is not seen (like the hero of Patrick Susskind’s Perfume who emits no smell) and is free to witness human society. She collects the sayings she hears perpetrated on others and innocently turns them on society. Shorn of their everydayness and the familiarity of family knots and the catch 22s of love, the commonsensical utterances kill—society falls down dead, murdered not by an alien, but by itself, by language. Fiona Green makes a very good Phoebe Zeitgeist, even if the mapping out of her journey is not always as clear as it could be. The cast vary enormously in talent but Newton-Broad and her collaborators (Regina Heilmann and Chris Ryan) somehow draw emotional, if not always physical, conviction from the least likely performers. Movement is boldly choreographed, only the absence of a coherent vocal strategy detracting from the force of the work, but Fassbinder’s overarching fable is always made rich by the moments of social observation and Brechtian wit, and not least by the terrible sadness at the core of these earthlings’ lives, the pathos that they know no other meaning. PACT Theatre, Nov 23- Dec 9

Urban Theatre Projects: Manufacturing Dissent

Fireface is a relentless hypernaturalistic portrayal of madness in a family scenario. It demands attention to experiences beyond our own. For all its dissociative and distancing elements it remains recognizably a play. Pre-Paradise is a fable packed with quasi-naturalistic micro-narratives, 60s/70s pre-revolutionary (pre-paradise)—the enemy is ourselves, not simply the state or the family, and can be found in our voices, embodied in us in language. The play itself is no longer revolutionary, that moment has passed, but its strangeness still acts on us and its moral is felt. The experience is not of seeing a museum piece, though at times Broad’s refusal to pervasively contemporise it made me feel at times that we were supposed to be admiring a classic. In an utterly different way, Urban Theatre Projects’ Manufacturing Dissent evokes and reproduces classic manifestos and performances from the 20th century history of the theatre of opposition while returning again and again, with grim contemporaneity, to the plight of the refugee. This is theatre as essay, a discursive, chatty talkshow of a performance at a very long desk (with microphones and texts a la the Wooster Group) where performers can drop in and out of various personae, address us directly, turn inward, histrionic, comic, pathetic. They read manifestos aloud, turn jury, enquiry, newsreaders, singers, slipping deftly in an out of roles that occasionally evoke characters who might return later (or not)—like the woman who, alone at a microphone, struggles across the evening to sing a song (is it Vietnamese?) full of pathos…and finally does. I don’t know what she’s singing, but it sounds nostalgic, full of yearning and, finally, release.

A friend, who knows about these things, tells me a few days later that nostalgia is a serious business. It was once recognised in 19th century Europe as a psychological condition that could kill—people died of nostalgia. It was common to soldiers and invariably it was tied to the loss of homeland.

For those in the know, Mayakovsky, Brecht, the Living Theatre, Boal, Community Theatre, Müller, all make their appearances one way or another in the course of the show, sometimes facilely (the sorry evocation of the Living Theatre), sometimes cheaply (a nonetheless hilarious litany of the buzz words of 80s community theatre), sometimes painfully (the revolutionary theatre company with their wooden guns who can’t spill blood when it comes to the crunch). The show’s multimedia dimension includes Philip Ruddock’s favorite—video footage of Australian wildlife and deserts sent out as a deterrent to would-be refugees. (Brenda L Croft, at a PICA-Perth Festival forum, apparently said she wished Indigenous people had had that tape 200 years ago.) And there are moments of provocation (familiar to some, a surprise to most): a woman performer asks, begs, demands someone from the audience spit on her (no takers this night, but some on others). Throughout, a man (Woody Chamron) in a wire cage with a potted palm (evoking Australia’s refugee detention centres), has been sitting with his back to us watching the Olympics on television. At the end he introduces himself and tells the story of his escape from Cambodia. He says we can leave at any time. But it’s hard; even though his story seems interminable (if finely delivered), it would be like spitting on him. What is interesting is that he is presented as real, he plays himself. And that he’s not an unhappy refugee. He’s home, though it’s no longer Cambodia. There’s hope. Well, there was once for refugees to this country.

Manufacturing Dissent sets itself a tough task, one which sometimes sets it teetering on the edge of impotence and cynicism when rattling superficially through the history of radical theatre; the performers don’t always seem at home with their material; and the show occasionally loses its shape and momentum (the potential of the team at the desk hasn’t been realised). But Manufacturing Dissent has stayed with me because of its insistent questioning about how to make performance as protest and how it manages to walk the fine line between accessibility and challenge, embracing an audience largely unaware of a (predominantly Western) tradition of resistance in the theatre. But it was the topicality of the refugee issue in Australia, the directness, humour and anger with which it was addressed that kept open the possibility of theatre as protest. Made by the UTP Performance Ensemble with John Baylis and Paul Dwyer. Director, John Baylis. Performance Space, Nov 30- Dec 10.

De Quincey Etc: Walking Species 1

Three women in raincoats walk the perimeters of the room, each at her own pace, in her own time, until we absorb their rhythms, glimpse images and texts on small video monitors in corners, a landscape projection on a wall (finally an electrical storm), absorb sounds—from the swish of coats, feet, Wade Marynowsky’s score. Rhythms change, the trio intersect, speed becomes collective, the bodies almost in competition to hold the space. The raincoats, worn reversed, are now right way about and open, the bodies naked, self-contained, the journey as insistent as ever, even if it goes nowhere but in and out of itself—or is it a space being claimed, and we, the audience, intruders. The facility of performance to evoke states of being (in contemplation, under physical duress, both here it seems) is nowhere more evident than in this kind of work. Although as yet lacking the definition and certainty of their director’s famed movement (De Quincey doesn’t appear in this show), the performers (Tina Harrison, Victoria Hunt, Marnie Georgiette Orr) move with such purpose and focus that their quest is convincing. Emerging from the second instalment of her Triple Alice project, De Quincey connects the performance in the end with the Irati Wanti campaign by Indigenous women to prevent their land being maintained as a radioactive dump (a legacy of the Maralinga bombs). Then other meanings flood back across our memory of the performance. Artspace Offsite Event, Imperial Slacks, Sydney, Jan 5-7.

Morphing from Brian Lipson to Francis Galton, A Large Attendance in the Antechamber

The Author is desirous to address the provocations of Mr Brian Lipson’s A Large Attendance in the Antechamber. The piece, written by same, is based upon the life of Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). The portrayal of Sir Francis fluctuates between the Actor’s representations of the Man, and the Man’s attempts to speak through the Actor. The latter project—the emergence of Sir Francis’s genuine voiceover and above that of his representative—is doomed to fail. After all, unless the Actor is clairvoyant, History can only speak through a veil of artifice.

Not only that, we, the Audience, have the benefit of hindsight with respect to Sir Francis’ dubious scientific theories. This is less the fault of the Man than that of his Time. It wasn’t until quite recently, last century, that scientific experiment became a matter of teamwork, and that the topics of experimentation were not simply reflections of individual interest. Thus, Galton’s demography of pretty girls in Great Britain or physiognomy of Semitic noses in London would not, in its day, have attracted any controversy on the basis of its racist and sexist tendencies. Mind you, I would not be surprised to see such theories welcomed today in some quarters.

We are thus presented with somewhat of a paradox. How are we to judge the Work, the Man and the Actor? From the present point of view or that of the past? Is it a question of authenticity, pure amusement or, to sup with today’s Devil, infotainment?

If we are to regard the project from the perspective of the past, the vicissitudes of Time and all its insights must disappear. Furthermore, under such conditions, it would be impossible to appreciate the Actor’s efforts, and include the reactions of the contemporary viewer.

If, on the other hand, we are tempted to judge the matter from the present, then the very heart of Galton’s integrity appears absurd. This is the man who conceived of eugenics. He scientifically investigated the making of tea, the attractiveness of women, the physical appearance of Jews, and went to Africa (twice) to participate in the annihilations of colonialism.

The Author raises these matters for your deliberation because they are raised within the performance itself. The work is not presented as a seamless historical window upon reality, and yet, neither is it completely alienated from its Victorian mise en scene. In Melbourne, In the Antechamber was performed in the Royal Society of Victoria’s lecture theatre. The halls of this building are lined with photographs of bearded men, presidents past of the Royal Society.

The Author understands that Galton himself was president of the Royal Society of England. A moment of Victoriana in the State of Victoria. Is this what Lyotard meant when he said that the postmodern was already contained within the modern? Are we to suppose that the present is already contained within the past; that the serpent’s egg is ready to hatch and bite its own tail?

I put to you two metaphors by which we might approach the matter. The first is a Victorian device—the diorama—in which a layered reality is presented to the viewer. The set of In the Antechamber is an impossibly small Victorian study, wood panelled and lined with books. It is placed inside the Royal Society’s lecture theatre, itself wood panelled and lined with books. The Audience views a world within a world, one real, one virtual, the effect of such layering being an infinite regress.

The second metaphor by which we might approach the matter is a contemporary device—the hologram-in which the viewer witnesses the collapse of Space and Time. Accordingly, In the Antechamber can be located beyond the categories of reality, both in its time, and in our time. Its performance is both authentic and apocryphal; the product of research and fancy. The Audience is witness to both the Actor and the Man; and the Author is both real and a proper name alongside a series of marks on a page.

Author’s Note: I have chosen to write from the present in the manner of the 19th century because A Large Attendance in the Antechamber itself plays between its own Victorian style and a postmodern treatment of the paradoxes of performance and authentic representation. My own vacillations between past and present are intended to mirror those offered by the performance itself.

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, An Encounter with Francis Galton, director/writer/performer Brian Lipson. Royal Society of Victoria, Melbourne, January 15-19; Sydney, January 15-20

UK dancer and choreographer Russell Maliphant is in Sydney in February to run a 2-day workshop and perform with his company at Performance Space. Russell began developing his own work in 1991 and now tours extensively creating work for companies such as Ricochet Dance Company in England and Batsheva Ensemble in Israel. He also teaches internationally, having developed a practice integrating various disciplines including the Rolfing Method of Structural Integration.

You have worked with numerous and varied companies and individual choreographers: Royal Ballet and Sadlers Wells, DV8 Dance Theatre, Michael Clark and Company. How did your obvious openness to different ways of working inform the formation of your own company in 1996?

I consider my experience working with those companies to have been my apprenticeship. However, I didn’t think about making pieces myself until I began to work on improvisation methods with Laurie Booth. During the first project of his which I worked on, he taught me possible methods to employ during an improvised performance. That was my first contact with ways of creating relationships to other performers in the space, and relationships to music, to light, to the stage as a blank canvas on which to paint. During that work and subsequent projects together, the issues we were dealing with were those of instantaneous composition, working with a motif, repetition, level and placement in space, energy, focus…

It was the work with Laurie that presented me with the tools and the personal challenge to create. It was not until I had begun to explore those tools that I had a context to make use of what I had experienced in companies like Sadlers Wells, Michael Clark and DV8. It was also at this time that I met Michael Hulls, who is the lighting designer I have been collaborating with since 1995.

Working with a broad range of companies has afforded me opportunities and exposed me to very contrasting and, at times, conflicting viewpoints of what is important in creating movement-based work. And this has made me reconsider my own viewpoint.

So there has been a clear demarcation in your career between being a dancer and being a creator of dance. Was this related to the company structures where you did your “apprenticeship”?

When I was working primarily as a dancer I felt that all the explorations I wanted to do, and had time for, were to do with things like quality, articulation, and exploring techniques that would benefit me as a performer. That’s what led me into exploring exercise/movement-related forms like Pilates, Tai Chi, acrobatics, Capoeira, and Yoga. I didn’t have a desire to explore my own creativity outside of that terrain.

How do you strike a balance between recognising the value of these various methodologies and deciding on what works for you?

I feel that my visually based aesthetic has grown from the qualities and dynamics I have seen and experienced over the years. The ‘shape’ vocabulary I choose tends to sit with aesthetic concerns I must have picked up from sculpture and painting as much as concerns I have learned through my dance experiences (such as the idea of ‘line’ from classical ballet). I think the methodologies are now used at the service of my aesthetic viewpoint.

Some people will be familiar with the film version of Critical Mass (directed by David Hinton) which was shown here last year. Is there a continuity across the program at Performance Space between this work and the other two pieces, Shift and Two you’ll be presenting?

Shift and Two are more lighting-driven pieces and the primary relationship (from my point of view) is between the performer and the light. They are both solos. Critical Mass is a duet, with less emphasis on the relationship of light to the choreography, because the primary driving force is the dynamic between the two performers.

The collaboration with lighting designer Michael Hulls and an exploration of the relationship between movement and light is clearly central to the work of your company. Why, in your opinion, does dance seem to offer so much in terms of the use of lighting within performance?

Light has the ability to sculpt the body and manipulate the space. It is a fluid medium of change, as is the body, and therefore offers a multitude of possibilities for representation. I am interested in how the body and light can shape space and construct environments of mood and contrast through which meanings may be engendered.

So perhaps they are all duets, with light providing the ‘partner’ in Shift and Two—another kind of outside, manipulative force?

Does your collaboration with Hulls begin from the very genesis of the work? The ‘duets’ with light are obviously more visual processes than the creation of a danced duet. How do you proceed?

Each process has, up to now, been different. On our first duet, Unspoken, we wanted to reverse a more regular approach where music is used from the beginning and light is put on at the end. We began with light; Michael designed and set-up a rig and we began to work with that over several weeks. The composer came in after about 3 or 4 weeks when we had already mapped out a lot of material.

This process has not always been possible, as it requires a theatre and can be expensive. We have been fortunate in building relationships with venues that have co-commissioned work, so have always had at least some time in a theatre during the creative process. We have also been fortunate in having had development periods unrelated to having to produce new work, which has often fuelled ideas for future creations, giving us something we want to work with before having any particular project in mind. Other times, it has not been possible to get space with light and I have begun by making work in the studio, bringing lights into the process in the third or fourth week (for a week or so) then continuing in the studio.

Shift happened very quickly—1 week working together, 3 days with lights. I had worked with some movement ideas for a while before, but I abandoned these once we saw what worked with the light. Two took 15 days in the studio to create, but we had already discovered the light-to-movement elements that we wanted to explore.

The compatibility of light and movement is something cinema has recognised for some time. Is there anything cinematic or photographic about the work?

Melbourne new media artist and dancer Cazerine Barry began producing performance and film in the late 1980s and founded the company Multi Dimensional Performance Enhancer in 1994. In 1997 she was awarded an Asialink residency at the National Institute of the Arts in Taiwan. In 1998 she directed HELP:the remix, a 3D projected aerial dance work and Separate at Earth, a performance with transparent screens where projected video images represented characters in a disintegrating family. She has recently completed an Australia Council New Media Arts Fund residency at Canberra’s Choreographic Centre culminating in Great Fakes, which she describes as “a condensed marathon simultaneously testing both sides of my brain.

“The objective was to examine the volumetric precepts of actual space and their relationship with 2D image projection. Monitoring the relationship between the design of the projection surface area with the ratio, scale and dimension of the projected image allowed me to create seemingly 3D spaces from a single video source…The outcome allows performers to move freely about illuminated sets which can transform their appearance. The sets are adjustable to combine a multitude of image-related shapes consisting of foreground, middle and background divisions. The resulting image-driven environments create magical, illusionary places that behave as metaphors of habitat for the dramatic intent of the work.”

The full production of Cazerine’s work Sprung can be seen at the L’Attitude dance event at the Brisbane Powerhouse in September 2001. Currently, Cazerine is researching the facilitation of digital media integration in performing arts internationally thanks to the Ewa Czajor Memorial Award 2000. RT

In HYPER_mobile, a recent TasDance highlight, artistic director Annie Greig presented the work of 4 important young choreographers, including 2 locally based artists, Michael O’Donoghue and Fiona Reilly, working with an augmented company of 7 dancers. Linking the 4 short works was the hypermobility of the dancers’ bodies, choreographed distinctively and with panache.

HYPER_mobile opens with Lucy Guerin’s Gift, initially commissioned for a Chunky Move presentation at a Melbourne dance club. The 5 dancers are clad, or decorated, in cellophane. The wrapping and unwrapping of this bright, shiny but ultimately ephemeral material, accompanied by energetic group and solo movement (to eclectic music), clearly speaks of “image”, the “packaging and commodification of the body” as the program puts it. There is also some intriguing use of gaffer tape as the male dancer is temporarily immobilised. Simple elements used to great effect and a sustained, unbridled energy level make Gift an infectious work.

Mad Sky, choreographed by Anna Smith in collaboration with the 7 dancers, explores “underlying tensions creating a whirlwind of electric energy before the point of downpour”—a black-costumed, dimly lit beginning where working in pairs, then groups, the dancers use running, floorwork and falling sideways onstage from the wings to capture the ambience of an imminent thunderstorm—a sudden end neatly evokes the unpredictability of the storm’s arrival.

In Michael O’Donoghue’s exotic and successful counterpoint, Fantasy Masquerade, 2 pairs of dancers (with the occasional nod to classical, Spanish and ballroom dance) convey many changes of mood and music as the subtexts and implications of a fancy dress ball are accurately explored. In Fiona Reilly’s Nursery Mimes, the dancers, dressed as toys and dolls, are made tiny by an oversized bed and props. An acrobatic performance with slapstick antics and the odd sad moment make for a satisfying evocation of childhood fantasy.

HYPER_mobile, TasDance, choreographers Lucy Guerin, Anna Smith, Michael O’Donoghue, Fiona Reilly, performers Tara Bollard, Joel Corpuz, Trisha Dunn, Lisa Griffiths, Leanne Mason, Kirstie McCracken, Ryan Mortimer; Earl Arts Centre, Launceston, November 9-11; Collegiate Performing Arts Centre, Hobart, November 16-18

An obvious thing about people is that over time they change. Babies not only grow bigger but they also develop; into children, then young adults, and then older ones. Hands grow: remember trying to put on your mother’s nail polish when you were 4, playing jacks as a 10 year old, or the calluses which grew on your fingertips when you first started playing guitar? What about the feel of silk, the touch of lover, a slap in the face? Hands do more things now than they did 100 years ago, do things differently in this country than in others less computerised. People do not wave their hands about quite so much here, or get them callused in quite the same way. Children use finely tuned motor skills for playing tiny computer games, instead of larger muscle groups for more expansive activities.

One impetus that Suzon Fuks and James Cunningham have had, as artistic directors of The Hands Project, is the idea that groups of performers and audiences alike tend to be rather homogenous and don’t properly reflect real human difference. The Hands Project offers a cast widely differing in age, background and capacity, a profusion of ideas, a tumble of images reflecting, above all, human diversity as expressed through the hands: from the fine needlecraft of an elderly woman embroidering to a baby’s tenacious grip; from the particular expertise of an able-bodied dancer to the manifold dexterity of a one armed/legged woman; from the clinical slap and scrutiny of a researcher to a lover’s lingering caress.

It’s likely that this profusion creates both richness and difficulty for the audience, who need to constantly change their focus and position in the space, simultaneously avoiding members of the cast and each other, and mobile slide projectors, while keeping track of a complex stream of images created by soundscape, lighting, slide and video projections and live performance, much of which might occur simultaneously in different rooms. The spaces between bodies (yours, 2 lovers on a bed, little boys chasing each other brandishing prosthetic arms like swords) and images (a moving car, looming silhouettes, a baby’s hand too large for comfort) start to narrow and fill with noise, until you realise that this is a microcosm, a day in the life of…, a street full of apartments with no facades, rooms with people sleeping, working, playing, in pain and in love, simply living, touching and holding onto things with a sliding scale of intensity and purpose and a variety of grips.

Some of the ideas work better than others. There are the ‘researchers’ with white lab coats, clipboards and severe demeanour, who create an unintentional but pervasive atmosphere of ominous disquiet throughout the piece. They might have been mad doctors wielding mind-altering drugs to helpless inmates, but they seem definitely in control, directing our attention one way or another as they silently observe and take notes. The best images are often quite simple: an Alice-in-Wonderland illusion is created when a dancer (Eddie Kay) enters onto a doll-sized raised platform through a small, half-concealed doorway behind it. This corner is constructed to create a false perspective against which another film image of a woman is projected. She seems to inhabit the space, walking in and out, as if 3-dimensional. Later in the work, a young boy begins a vividly eloquent sequence where he is palpably being tickled; we can feel and see his helpless giggling, mounting hysteria, and then the sudden crossing of some invisible line where helplessness turns into serious anger and retaliation.

The Hands Project, its Sydney showing a further incarnation of work first presented in October 1999 in Lismore, is indeed a ‘work in progress’, and it’s conceivable that it might stay this way for a while longer, as the material which Igneous is attempting to embrace seems potentially infinite. While the human body itself draws our attention to its own condition, our hands are often our most eloquent communicators and agents for change, without which we are still in many ways mute.

The Hands Project, Igneous, Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney, Jan 26-28.

Richard Giblett is a traveller, and as a practicing artist of 10 years he has moved through artforms as varied as landscape photography and ephemeral installation to detailed drawing and sculpture, his work largely informed by several years of nomadism, and exploration of predominantly Asian countries. Currently Giblett is preparing to transplant himself and his practice to Korea for an Asialink residency at Ssamzie Space in Seoul, the 4 month residency arising from the consolidation of elements in his work in 2 recent group exhibitions, Playtime at the Fremantle Arts Centre and Chiasm at PICA.

I had this impression that Asialink supported artists researching specific, traditional artforms…so I was surprised that you were chosen for the Korean residency.

The Korean residency really stood out at Ssamzie Space. Basically because it’s a new experimental art foundation in Seoul…a 7 storey building with about 3 gallery spaces. From what I’ve read it’s a fairly cutting-edge gallery situation, and they exhibit a lot of performance work, video, new media. It’s also located near a university, which forms a kind of cultural hub.

When you were studying at Curtin in the late 80s, the work you were producing was site-specific, documented installation…quite ephemeral. I still consider that your current practice is dealing with many of the same issues, of impermanency…only the materiality and scale is object-based.

I did a lot of work where I would gently intrude in an environment…that was probably a lot more popular back then, but it didn’t feel authentic because I didn’t live there. I’m working through those processes in a way, but using the urban landscape instead. If there’s to be an underlying theme to what I do, I suppose it’s all about the disintegration of things. So I did those initial works in the environment with natural materials which would eventually just disappear.

Giblett has spent the last few years redefining his position and practice within the urban landscape by developing work around the objects and imagery of the everyday. His most recent work has involved the life-sized replication in cardboard of a skip bin, an escalator and a set of security cameras, and the continuation of a series of intricately detailed drawings of urban and corporate environments including libraries, gaming arcades and views of the city from office windows.

In terms of material for my large drawings it’s difficult to find a space that really resonates, but I know it when I see it. So I’ll take a slide photograph, project the slide and work by turning the projector on and off, drawing from one corner, top to bottom. It’s quite a boring sort of exercise really…boring image of a boring space, but they’re environments that we all inhabit at some point. It was only after I’d finished the Tokyo Wars (an arcade game) drawing that I realised they were all representations of places where people sit in individual, enclosed areas. There is another drawing that I want to do which sort of deals with the same thing, but is a bit more gruesome in a way. In the new CTEC centre at the University of Western Australia, there’s a state of the art room where they basically dissect cadavers. I went down and took some photos. It’s just all of these tables with lights and high-tech computers everywhere…a really loaded space, just a place to look at the dead.

I was interested in the way that these works identified the physically isolating aspects of technology and over-designed environments, as opposed to the romantic discourse of unity and bringing people together that’s often used to promote them.

Isolation is definitely an issue I’m pursuing, and I think the idea is present in some of the other works…like the skip-bin and the escalator.

From working on a smaller scale, with vastly different materials, how did you come to commence this body of work with cardboard?

Basically I saw a skip bin one day down the end of an alleyway, full of cardboard boxes, and I had the idea to use it. There was something about the object, the thing, that I liked. So I just thought it would be great to transform the bin, and make the inside the outside. As I began working I realised it was a great material, you can do a lot with it, it’s free, very easy to cut and it’s quite strong and you can layer it like wood. The cardboard was obviously really important to that bin but for the other things I just wanted that uniform look. It becomes a model, only life-size, of the real thing. They’re works that are useless re-presentations of useful things…they just sit there.

The work is disabling in the context of the gallery because all the objects you have made sit so comfortably within it. Despite, or even due to, their imposing scale and the rigour of their making, punters will still leave their wine-glasses on them, try to mount them…or in the case of the security cameras, fail to even see them. I suppose…they expose the patterns of behaviour we develop to interface with changing technologies.

The idea of taking a banal object like an escalator, which for me is an integral part of your first experience of a new place, and re-making it expresses the experience of being both comforted and scared of it as well. The escalator somehow embodies modernity in a way…it’s basically just a set of stairs, which have been around for thousands of years, but it’s also something entirely different.

A large part of my new work is about replication and the idea of super-modernism…where everyone wants to look the same, and the same things are shipped all over the world in this global commodity exchange. You could land in the middle of any city and you wouldn’t know where you were…eventually you would recognize difference through language, but in a department store you could be anywhere. I was talking with someone who’s been to Seoul a few times and asked him what it was like, and he just said “Oh it’s a funny place, it’s a lot like anywhere else really.” I thought that was great. It’s just a big modern city…which is what I was after.

Richard Giblett’s residency is an Asialink project supported by the Australia Korea Foundation and the Australia Council.

(L to R) John Rodgers & Jeffrey Erbacher (Hydromys Chrysogaster), Jill Barker, Jay Younger (Curator) and Jeremy Hynes. (Adam Donovan is currently overseas)

Queensland’s new Centre of Contemporary Arts, due for completion in July 2001, is one of the winners in a state government initiative, Art Built-in which requires capital works projects worth over $250,000 to allocate 2% of the budget to public art. Curator Jay Younger and artists Jill Barker, Adam Donovan, Jeremy Hynes, and Hydromys Chrysogaster’s John Rodgers and Jeffrey Erbacher were selected by Arts Queensland to develop a collaborative, integrated artwork suitable for the Centre of Contemporary Arts. Barbara Bolt talks with Jay Younger (JY) and commissioned artists Jill Barker (JB) and John Rodgers (JR) about the progress of the project.

JY There is a long history of relating architecture to the body and that became useful to me to think about public art and how to integrate it with the building as a whole. I envisaged the building as the body and the public art as the prosthesis. I didn’t want to see public art as being static, permanent ‘plonk’ art that becomes irrelevant in a certain time frame. One of the major aims was to create an infrastructure that could actually show temporal work. Work will be programmed into the infrastructure for a certain lifespan and then other artists who show casework in the space can use that infrastructure.

JB Because we were able to work with the architects before the building was renovated, we actually looked at things that could be absolutely built into the building, for example videos and screens. And then the art, the content, becomes something that you plug in. If the art that we make for that infrastructure can be plugged into it, then so can any other work…art the tenants want to insert while our work is running, or afterwards, or a combination of both. It makes it very flexible.

While the project was designed as a collaborative one, the selected artists didn’t have a history of working together; in fact, they didn’t all know each other. What motivated the choice of participating artists and how did you imagine they would work together?

JY It became a question of looking at the various kinds of skills and trying to get differences in terms of disciplines, philosophy and ways of working. For example, one of the things that interested the Public Art Advisory Group (PAAG) was Jill’s minimalist aesthetic and her restrained approach to relating her work to the body. Some of the artists are quite excessive in the way they produce. When you draw together a number of people who wouldn’t necessarily produce an homogenous result, there are tensions and conflicts and agreements and strange kinds of things that go on between these different ideas and people and ways of working. You don’t have control; the result can never be something you would predict because of the way it takes you somewhere else.

JB The work is minimal, but I don’t know that I’d call myself a minimalist. I just think everyone else is maximalist. I guess my work is economical, finding the simplest way of doing things. I think I edit a lot before anything actually happens and in that way there is an economy.

How then did you as an “economical” artist negotiate working with artists who could be seen as excessive or maximalist?

JB I think part of it is generosity, going in there fairly open and talking about things and then seeing what happens and interests people. I try not to have very defined intentions. That’s part of the economy of working. It doesn’t help to have your intentions already formed at certain points.

JB I think that’s really important. At some point it is a matter of holding up everything as a possibility and at other points obviously some of those possibilities have to coalesce, become probabilities or definite. It is knowing when to do that, when to hold everything up in the air.

JY It becomes a really interesting situation though when it is about the polarities of where something is solid and where something is fluid. I guess in terms of collaborative process, people may be reticent to take control or be seen to be overbearing. While the artists all have collaborative experiences, the one formed here is unique. The artists decide what is acceptable and what is not. A particular approach is created between the participants and a specific process and language emerges.

JR We had an impossibly small introduction to each other’s work and that’s all in some cases that we knew. And then we spent 2 weeks around a table bringing stuff in, talking about it. And at the end, it did have a shape.

JB We actually came up with quite a number of proposals of various kinds so we didn’t fix on the final work at that point.

In the conceptual phase you can imagine anything, you can afford to be generous. What happens when it comes to decision time?

JB At that point we went to a meeting with the Public Art Advisory Group and the tenants.

JR We did come up with the notion of ghosting and that’s how it managed to hang itself together. ‘Intangibility’ or ‘ghosting’ seemed to cover the range of things people wanted to work with. My media, sound, is a perfect one for something that is very intangible. Because there were plug-ins, we wanted it to be something that was changing and ethereal and resonating.

JB It also seemed to connect with the nature of the building and its history, and the idea of bodies ghosting is like the final prosthetic, the final prosthesis of the body: the last thing that is left of the body could be thought to be a ghost. We weren’t really thinking of it in terms of ghost quite so literally, so we chose the word ‘ghosting.’

JY I guess it is about form mutating, something that might have been solid at one point has become intangible.

JB We were also linking it to the idea of contemporary art in the sense that what art is, is really hard to pin down. We then prioritised the ideas which seemed to have some kind of flow through the building, conscious of how they would operate for visitors entering the public spaces. The infrastructure for the works is like a haunting of the building.

JR You mean, what you would actually experience entering the space? The obvious thing is the video ghost, which involves a large sloping glass wall as you walk into the building. Behind this glass wall presumably there will be a restaurant. A video image reflects down onto this glass from the ceiling and you experience this as a reflection a further distance behind the glass…a ‘ghostingly’ real presence in the restaurant.

JB It can be programmed video material interacting with live performance with sound in 3 dimensions in the space.

Tos Mahoney has been doing his part for the last 20 years to sculpt, pursue, organise and otherwise conjure up new music for the public of Perth. Mahoney became involved with new music as a musician, playing impros on the flute with Jon Rose, Lindsey Vickery and others. His shift to administration began with the organisation of improvised music festivals in 1985 and 1986. “Or was that 84/85?”, Mahoney seems unclear. “It was a long time ago. I was doing some things before that. It was an incredibly energetic time…and then EVOS got created.

“EVOS was a new music organisation, a management structure. Specifically, EVOS was about putting on new music. It had concert series, residencies and commissioned work, radio work, things like that.”

What began in the mid 80s (Tos Mahoney trading as EVOS Music) quickly developed into a substantial incorporated body providing support and funding for new music practitioners as well as developing the local audience base. Then, in the mid 90s, EVOS sank; triennial funding, inaugural Australian Music Centre award and all. Down but not drowned, Mahoney did a name change. “One of the most sensible financial decisions I’ve ever made”, says Mahoney, “a few dollars, a new name and we had a brand new organisation.” A pause. “Well, sort of. It was definitely a new direction, different people.”

The new company was, and continues to be, Tura Events and Mahoney is on the board of management. The Mahoney/Tura combo began with the first Totally Huge New Music Festival, now heading into its 4th year. Tura has also successfully established Club Zho, the regular locus for the public performance of new music in Perth. With a monthly gig at the Monkey Bar, a Northbridge hotel, it has recently hosted performances by Ross Bolleter, Axis 21 (directed by Lindsay Vickery) and percussion ensemble Tetrafide as well as the electro-acoustic of David Wardell and the noise of Cat Hope. Eclectic.

Mahoney insists that Club Zho be open to new and untried work. “Otherwise, what’s the point. That’s what we’re here for, not just new music but new new music.” This policy has resulted in the occasional disappointment. “Yeah sure, with untried work, with new music, with impro in particular, you’re going to have a few duds.”

An example of success is Hannah Clemen whose sliding ambient soundscapes are given an industrial edge when she collaborates with Petro Vouris, a sculptor-turned-musician whose concrete music proclivities are balanced by a dry and incisive humour. Clemen’s current direction is towards further investigation of psychoacoustics and the human body’s physiological responses to sound. Both Clemen and Vouris have worked extensively at Lindsey Vickery’s Studio for Research in Performance Technology at the Western Australian Conservatorium of Music.

With the fourth Totally Huge New Music Festival arriving at the beginning of April, Mahoney is showing some signs of disenchantment with his administrative role, evasive when asked about his motivation to continue as the festival’s CEO, and in reply only quips, “…because I never really got a proper qualification…” (In 2000 he had to withdraw from a Master of Arts course due to the pressure of the festival.) “I don’t think I’d do any of it if I hadn’t been a new music practitioner. That gave me a lot of passion for the creation of it…the lack of opportunities for both audience and practitioners to experience new music was, and still is (despite Totally Huge) ridiculous.” After thoughtfully looking around the room he concludes, “Another year then.”

His diffidence about his position as CEO is not reflected in his supreme enthusiasm for the festival’s artistic content. Each year has built upon the success of the previous. Last year involved 97 local artists, 14 from interstate and 5 from overseas in 103 performance pieces. This year sees Ikue Mori return to Australia with her cinematic sampling, voice and electronic synthesis. Jon Rose will present a new mass violin and sampler work to be performed at Wogarno Station. Other overseas artists include Canadian multi-instrumentalist duo Derome Hetu and Mike Cooper from the UK. Interstate sound installation artists Philip Samartzis and Rik Rue are also performing/presenting.

“The most exciting part,” says Mahoney, “besides some specific events, is the festival’s eclecticism. The clashes and tensions that that creates are exciting—obviously things like (Jon Rose’s) Violin Factory because it involves so many people. It’s bringing a whole new audience, a whole new bunch of players to the festival, and new music itself…and then you extend that to the regional environmental event (at Wogarno Station). What do I say about Ikue Mori? When did you last experience her playing live, let alone be able to talk with her?”

Beyond the festival, Tura Events has funding for a concert series of chamber music featuring local and other Australian composers. In May, Tura and Magnetic Pig are co-producing Lindsey Vickery’s opera noir Rendezvous. Underway is the commissioning of radiophonic works for 2002.

“I find the art of programming quite exciting. The who and what goes next to each other is a creative process in itself. I’d always like to keep my finger in that a bit. But I’d like to gradually withdraw from the managerial, administrative side. I am a practitioner, although not so much in recent years. That’s something I’m going to return to.”

First up is a gig in January with his long time colleague and friend Ross Bolleter. The rest, he says, “…hasn’t been firmed up yet…”

Rosalind Page’s Macula lutea, dedicated to flautist Kathleen Gallagher, was inspired by the artwork and writings of Wassily Kandinsky. “Envisaged as an allegory of light, time and colour, the piece draws not only from the visual arts but also from concepts arising in the fields of astronomy, opthalmology and analytical trigonometry”. The work shared the prize at the 1999 Sydney Spring Music Festival for the Most Outstanding New Composition. In the scheme of things Rosalind Page’s reward came with the accolades of her peers. She added the award to her CV and moved on to the next composition. Another world premiere, another good Australian idea shelved for posterity.

However, along with an increasing number of composers and musicians, Rosalind Page is interested in presenting new music beyond the one-off premiere in second, third and more performances. As well as wanting to reach a wider audience, they are anxious to explore different arrangements, to include other instruments. She says, “A composition should be like the cosmos—in a constant state of evolution and flux.”

In Celestial Sites and Sounds, an evening of compositions with astronomical and cosmological connections, Sydney audiences have a chance to hear new work by Australian composers including a piece for amplified solo cello by Damien Ricketson. As well as revisiting Macula lutea, Rosalind Page contributes Extrema: A Galilean Sarabande—a hypothetical journey to Jupiter, accompanied by Kandinsky and Bach, composed for cellist Geoffrey Gartner. She also sets to music two poems by the Surrealist Apollinaire. Nathan Wilson’s new solo piano piece, Heartbroken Glass, will be performed by Clemens Leske and another composition winner of Most Outstanding Composition at the Sydney Spring Festival of 1998, Ian Shanahan, presents his work for alto flute Dimensiones Paradisi. The program also includes works by Peter Sculthorpe and Claude Debussy.

Weather permitting, the audience is invited to continue the astronomical adventure after the performance as Jupiter and Saturn put on their nightly show at Sydney Observatory, a short walk from Bangarra Dance Theatre. RT

Pungent kerosene lamps provide the only light source as we ascend the stairs of Hobart’s Old Net Loft, the locale for IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory’s work in progress, The Tesla Project.

The life of Nikola Tesla, son of a Serbian-Orthodox priest and an inventor-genius, provides the dramatic impetus for Constantine Koukias’ production. An ominous atmosphere is established with smoke, sand sifting through suspended white cones and a thunderstorm’s unrelenting menace: the terra familias of the Gods.

The world of Nikola Tesla’s light laboratory is evoked by Maria Kunda’s stage design. Members of the audience face each other across a narrow divide. This design device is a metaphor for the alternating current (AC) system developed by Tesla. The performers continually move to and fro along this narrow corridor transmitting the harmonic voltage of Koukias’ soundscore.

Two women sheltering beneath black umbrellas move down the long aisle. They are Tesla’s long-serving secretaries Miss and Miss (Debra Pridgeon and Sara Jones). Their highly stylised walking is emblematic of Tesla’s obsession with counting his footsteps until they were divisible by three.

IHOS Music Theatre performers rhythmically stamp their way along the central conduit. Their white shirts and black trousers embody the familiar dualism: the alternating domains of dark and light. Tesla’s AC system was in direct competition with Edison’s DC experimentation. The setting for Tesla’s secretaries and laboratory assistants is reminiscent of Kafka’s bureaucratic confinement and conformism: desks, typewriters, paper, frenetic activity and repeated sound motifs.

The largely unaccompanied singing of the IHOS chorus is as stylised as the walking of Miss and Miss. There is little room for the energetic variation of a spark, or the individual passing from voices to voice in an aural flow that enhances the suggested conductivity of Kunda’s design.

A group of children from the Helen O’Grady Children’s Drama Academy provides animated energy and transition. Representing New York broadsheet vendors they bounce basketballs, skip and cycle.

In a beautiful sequence introduced by cellist Brendon Conway, the concentration of Tesla’s team is interrupted by the illumination of electricity. Fifteen singers move through the central space each carrying a brilliant light globe. They intone electrice more and a larger globe (sculpted by Dianna Graf and Mark Cornelius), symbolising the world of light and creation, is held high. The shape resembles the Greek omphalos, a stone marking the central point of the earth. The chorus is immersed in a tiara of radiance. When the fluorescent bulbs are illuminated the laboratory team shows little exhilaration. Instead they offer a fascinated, yet contained homage.

Tesla’s AC system was used to light the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago. Dvorák’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor (From the New World) was premiered at Carnegie Hall in the same year. The haunting second movement from New World is a recurrent refrain throughout the Tesla Project and provides a concurring coda of loss and light.

Constantine Koukias’ work is infused with the basso profundo emphasis of the Orthodox tradition. His commitment to developing bass voices in the Music Theatre Laboratory is evident in the fine tonal qualities of Russell Bailey, Matthew Dewey and Craig Wood. This connection with earth’s solidity and timbre is established in the percussive scattering of birdseed. Tesla was fond of pigeons, which here are carried in cages by a procession of children.

In the final scene Tesla’s research notes are impounded. The assistants and secretaries slowly and reverently transfer books along the central space. Excerpts from Dvorák’s melody and continual percussion accentuate their gravitas as the weight of Tesla’s genius is deposited in a locker.

IHOS has produced a powerful tribute to a brilliant and eccentric inventor. Tesla held 700 patents including a dynamo, transformer, induction motor, radio and the Tesla coil. In 1908 a massive explosion devastated Tunguska, a remote area in the Siberian wilderness. Scientists attributed the devastation to a meteorite strike. It is now speculated that a death ray developed by Tesla was responsible.

Tesla has been commissioned by the West Australian Opera. Koukias will showcase sequences as work is developed. The second sequence offered Hobart audiences the opportunity to experience an intense work in progress. Like Tesla, IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory is working to realise a vision through the interaction of energy, light and complex theatricality.

The Tesla Project, IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, director Constantine Koukias, designer Maria Kunda, production director Werner Ihlenfeld, libretto development Marianne Fisher, music Constantine Koukias, lighting design Don Hopkins, sound operator & tape electronics Matthew Firth; Old Net Loft, Hobart, Nov 30-Dec 2.

The opportunity to be immersed in an aural environment created with the care and attention to detail that all art deserves is rare. Curator Garth Paine gave us such an opportunity at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art late last year with the second in the Sonic Residues series. The event involved concert performances and installation works by more than 60 composers and sound artists from across the globe. As Paine indicated in the program notes: “Electro-acoustic music is a viscous, fluid and engaging media; a form that promotes sound as an exhibitable object, as well as a totally immersive environment.”

Occupying almost all the available spaces at ACCA, including the rear garden, sound installations drew listeners into multi-dimensional aural worlds. Single point sound sources hung on walls; multiple point sources relocated sound from distant places, creating soundfields to be explored; interactive technology encouraged listeners to become participants, to contribute to or dynamically modify the soundfield; and confronting visual images of the human sound production mechanism provided stark contrast between the physical and the emotional constructions of the voice. These installations allowed listeners to contemplate sound at their own pace, to focus on the macro and the micro within each work and, with the aid of the program notes, to consider both the composer/artist’s intention and its realisation. It is precisely this unhurried consideration that is essential to enter the world of sonic art, since it is perhaps the least understood and least appreciated branch of composition, far behind film sound and virtually all forms of music for most listeners.

Indeed, it is the lack of understanding of sonic art that Sonic Residues sought to address. Paine presented a range of works by established, internationally recognised composers as well as emerging artists, all eager to present their work to new audiences and to hear them performed in a large space using state of the art audio technology. It was the performances that most captured my aural imagination. Seven evening concerts, each of approximately 90 minutes, were held in the large gallery space at ACCA. Such a space is inherently limited acoustically. Paine and assistant curator Ian Stevenson attempted to improve the acoustics with curtains and cushions and achieved a fair degree of success. But the heart of the concerts was the high fidelity, 8 loudspeaker, surround sound system supplied by key sponsor System Sound and arranged evenly around the listeners. Using a professional mixing console, it was possible to send any sound source to any or all of the 8 speakers, providing a unique opportunity for total 3-dimensional immersion in the soundfield. Thus the audience could experience the concert works in a tightly controlled environment approaching the quality of professional audio recording studios.

While many of the performed works were realised as stereo recordings, during their reproduction they were diffused by concertmaster Ian Stevenson throughout the acoustic space. Stevenson applied his knowledge and sensitivity for the works and the technology to pan the 2 channels of sound around the 8 speakers, perceptually creating discrete sources as part of an enveloping soundfield. The sense of motion of sounds around the space was at times breathtaking, adding a new dimension to the works. There were also several works created using discrete 8 channel recorders, which were reproduced from that format. Here, the true point source possibilities of the 8 speakers were explored, with the accuracy of spatial location and the depth of the aural envelopment as testimony to the quality of the composition and the fidelity of the reproducing technology.

Two forums completed the program, with the first an enlightening overview of the theoretical, technical and creative aspects of aural spatialisation by Ian Stevenson. Coming as it did in the middle of the concert series where Stevenson applied his considerable skills to diffuse the performed works, this proved an appropriate forum to consider and debate this aspect of performance realisation. The artistic diffusion of a stereo work into a multi-speaker environment is a little like having a colour wheel illuminating a Brett Whiteley. Every now and then we get true stereo as originally intended, while the rest of the time we hear sound sources all around. The results may be artistically skilful, interesting, even exciting, but are they a true representation of the composer/artist’s intentions?

The second forum brought together composers, artists and academics in a moderated debate concerning the current state of sonic art practice, listener perceptions and academic review. From the distinguished panel, including Philip Brophy, Ros Bandt and Jeff Pressing, emerged a sad reflection on the position of sound research and education. Within music schools nationwide, the first academic position lost is usually electro-acoustic music, and music is often the first department lost from a humanities faculty. Film sound is a small part of cinema studies, radio only a minor component of cultural studies and within multimedia and online technologies, audio often receives only cursory consideration. And where are acoustic principles in architecture and interior design? Consequently, there is little education available about sound and its artistic possibilities, which leads directly to a significant under-representation in galleries and in small attendances at events like Sonic Residues. It is ironic and, in light of the previous observations, disappointing that the concerts in this series that had the greatest number of listeners were those with visual elements, either as instrumental performers or video artists. For an aural person like me, these visual performances were often the least interesting, particularly the tired, cliché ridden video art pieces.

Overall, Sonic Residues presented electro-acoustic music and sound art in a manner that best represented the quality and diversity of works by national and international composer/artists. Garth Paine has used his extensive resources to bring together both established and emerging talent and added to it his own considerable ability as a composer and artist. The opportunity to experience sound art with high fidelity in a largely sympathetic acoustic space, to experience spatial location and aural envelopment with accuracy and depth and to be immersed in a soundfield that excites the aural imagination is a rare and enriching experience. Combined with exciting developments in the surround sound technology of DVD home theatre systems using DTS and Dolby Digital encoding, there is the emerging potential to deliver true spatial location and aural envelopment as part of these explorations in acoustic space. With support from funding bodies, this series may tour regional areas, attempting to fill the void of sound art in galleries, with the hope that in time, more people will experience these soundfields rather than simply read about them.

Sonic Residues: Electro-acoustic music and sound art. Installations, performances & talks curated by Garth Paine, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, November 18-December 3

Publications relevant to the sound arts are cropping up with increasing frequency, but not necessarily within earshot. A real gem from the past couple of years is the catalogue from Terry Fox’s exhibition at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken in 1998. Fox’s work is similar to Joseph Beuys or the earlier Vito Acconci, but much gentler. He has worked primarily in performance and installation, and his Children’s Tapes (1974) is one of the most outstanding videos from that period. He has become known over the years for his sly spiritual attention to sound which is detailed in this catalogue (book), Terry Fox: Works with Sound, in German and English from Kehrer Verlag in Heidelberg. Matthias Osterwold, now at The Institute for Music and Acoustics at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst and Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe) has written an excellent essay for the catalogue and descriptions of the works are very informative. The ATARAXIA compact disc is included, which has also been available independently.

Speaking of ZKM, as part of their “digital arts editions” they have published a wonderful CD-ROM called Small Fish: Chamber Music with Images for Computer and Player by Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masaki Fujihata and Wolfgang Münch (available from Hatje Cantz Verlag, www.hatjecantz.de). The child-like sensibility of Paul Klee, e. e. cummings or Satie come to mind when encountering this work, so too their subtlety and sophistication. In fact, it was a gift to my 8-year-old daughter (she loves it) before I became addicted to it, composing innumerable chamber pieces and soundtracks late into the night. Furukawa’s music and Fujihata’s graphics seem to encapsulate so many styles of the 20th century—a little constructivism here, 30s percussion music there—but never seem derivative, and the interaction is effortless and engaging, with new devices becoming obvious as time goes by, thanks to Münch’s programming. This past year it has been a real favourite among my media arts students at UTS.

The Wire magazine from London is often a good place to get information but, then again, they just discovered sound art a year ago. The way they announced it, you would think it hadn’t really existed before. This is odd because only a few years ago I attended a conference in Sunderland that had the explicit purpose of introducing England to sound and radio art. Perhaps that was too far north of London? Plagued by the conservatism of the BBC and bereft of the type of institutions here amenable to the sound arts, England has not been a hub of activity. Meanwhile, Australia has the most solid tradition of sound arts and theory in the Anglophone world and is into at least a third generation of artists and writers.

The Wire is mainly musical, but as they exhaust certain areas they move on to others. The move to include sound art was signaled when David Toop, a resident journalist with the mag, wrote an ill-informed article. This proved to be a dry-run for his catalogue essay for Sonic Boom, the sound art show at the Hayward Gallery in London, which he curated. This second essay shows a bit more thought but there’s still little familiarity with how the sound arts have developed in the past couple of decades, or the issues and opportunities artists confronted. The show is heavily weighted towards musicians, some with little or no prior exhibition experience, and not one Australian is included. (A similar thing happened a few years ago with the big German show Sonambiente, its coffee table catalogue in German from Prestel entitled Klangkunst.) While the show had some notable pieces, the consensus fell behind Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag, a video of a live electric guitar being dragged behind a pick-up truck on a dirt road in Texas—the meanings, like bits of the guitar itself, fly off in every direction, but stem primarily from the incident in which an African-American man was murdered a few years ago in the same manner. The catalogue (available from the gallery’s website, www.hayward-gallery.org.uk), apparently meant as a souvenir, is inadequate as a source of information, although the two audio CDs included almost merit a purchase.

Finally, the latest issue (no. 5, Fall 2000) of the Baltimore arts journal LINK includes a CD worth chasing down (www.baltolink.org). Curated by Steve Bradley, a media artist who runs the net radio art@radio, the CD contains some old stalwarts—Charles Amirkhanian, Susan Stone, Francis Dhomont—as well as a number of very interesting artists from the Baltimore area. Many of the pieces attend faithfully to the issue’s special theme of hysteria and none are more hysterical than David Snow and Peter Kougasian’s Freud in Konzert, an archival recording of Freud (speaking in English no less) when he was a stand-up comic playing the “small clubs and Wursthäuser along the Tyrolean ‘Schnitzel Belt’”, as the artists explain in their notes. The recording reveals that he is facing a tough house, their difficulty with his jokes arising no doubt from not having read his book on the topic, an unfazed Sigmund gesticulating his cigar like Groucho.

Among others, Christian Marclay will be part of Art/Music: rock, pop, & techno at Sydney’s MCA with performances at The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 21-June 24.

In a bid to encourage filmmakers working in regional areas, the FTO recently announced its Regional Filming Fund which will provide grants to productions in NSW—features, TV series, mini-series, documentaries—being made outside the Sydney metro area.

If you’re a filmmaker living in the Illawarra, the Short Sited 5 Film Festival is open for submissions. Films under 7 minutes can be entered in the open, doco, experimental or western categories. Deadline March 15. If you just like to watch, the shorts are screening at the Project Centre for Contemporary Art, Wollongong, March 23, 7.30pm. For more info check out the news section at Film Illawarra.

Siren Entertainment and Pinefilm Entertainment will begin sell-through DVD distribution in March with a catalogue (finally!) of foreign arthouse and Australian cinema titles from the last decade. The first round includes The Interview, Idiot Box, Lost Highway, The End of Violence and Secrets and Lies. Siren MD Nigel Rennard comments: “…this dual acquisition places us in the box seat for independent DVD distribution. This format is exciting for the film fan, and these films will all carry top of the line packaging and DVD features.”

SAFC has announced some new, welcome initiatives. The Producer Support Scheme will subsidise marketing and financing costs and provide professional development for producers who have made at least one feature film/broadcast drama/doco in the past 2 years. Up to $20,000 is available. Deadline March 9. The Documentary Incubator Scheme will help develop doco projects, offering a mentorship with an experienced practitioner for 3 months. Deadline February 16. The Script Incubator Scheme aims to encourage development of high quality feature scripts with a mentor available to help participants polish their first draft. This year they’re after comedy projects.

Columbia Tristar won two 2000 Multicultural Marketing Awards (Commercial Award for Big Business; Grand Award for most outstanding entry in all industries) for their Silk Screen programme of Asian Cinema (see page 13). Hosted by the Ethnic Affairs Commission, the awards recognise organisations that promote cultural diversity in Australia. Hopefully this will encourage Columbia to continue programming Asian films.

How’s your BAS coming along? If you haven’t already given it to the Performance Space for their upcoming project, and you are struggling, the AFC has published an 80 page manual on “The Film and Television Industry and the New Tax System”, covering GST, ABN and PAYG, producer investment contracts and exports. It also includes handy forms and a cashbook layout so you too can become an accountant. The manual is available free in hard copy or downloadable from the internet.

Wishing Popcorn Taxi could get to WA? Kitchen Sync is a new film night at the George St café, East Freo, screening local filmmakers’ work. Every 2nd Thursday will feature screenings, discussion, guest speakers from the industry and a chance to get some feedback on your films. Join their email list.

Teen movie energy is commonly signified yet grossly misrepresented in the cinema. Its signage is obvious—a grab-bag of whatever the art department thinks will make the film hip—yet its representation is vacuous and ingenuine. In most permutations of the genre, teen energy is thematically articulated: writ large and unimaginatively onto the screen as convincingly as a water-based tattoo transfer. ‘Youth’ is the deodorant of this cinematic corpus; teen movies accordingly stink of youth. They smell of adults remembering, redressing, inventing, and plainly, fucking with youth. Adult guilt in representing youth is typified by neurotic vacillation between cruel flippancy and maudlin yearning. Many teen movies walk a fine line between intentional expression and reactionary dismissal, squirming on their own psychiatric couch as they figure youth with wildly conflicting emotions and perspectives.

This is why teen movies are so derided: their apparent ‘celebration’ of youth is registered at the level of formal narrative construction as if designed with clear authorial guidance. The contextual reality of most teen movies is that highly problematized psychologies author their texts. Fucked-up parents are the ones making most of these movies. It would be rare for a teen movie to textually and thematically admit that it is so far removed from its subject that it cannot help but generate an invalid and suspect text. (This, for example, accounts for the last decade’s worth of ‘age-shift’ movies, where an adult suddenly inhabits a kid’s body and vice versa.) Self-loathing has been a major modulating current in 90s teen movies due to that decade’s own liveliness of pop cultural trends which, as they do each decade, mark the gaping distance between the veracity of true ephemera and the presumption with which filmmakers depict currencies and fads. Each new teen movie knows it’s dated, yet its maker wants to claim accuracy in depicting ‘what kids are really like these days’. (Larry Clark’s Kids is a sublime exception: he allows kids to be their own energy irrespective of their age and era.)

The main reason for teen energy’s overwhelmingly affected and underwhelmingly effective display in the movies is to do with the obvious fact that teens or youths are not the filmmakers. Picture teen energy—the embodiment of some such force within the psycho-sexual vessel of the body of youth—as a voice: a material manifestation of identity with precise characteristics. Picture teen movies—he dramaturgical diorama for the staging of that force—as mimicry, impersonation, caricature. Like a comedian doing Stallone or an actor doing a valley girl, their reference hinges on complete acceptance of their illegitimacy. Teen energy is most noticeable in social formations, group gatherings and public spaces. In place of a voice that can either be controlled, copied or codified, you have a din, all talking at once, each the centre of its own stage. Screaming, yelling, shouting, gaggling.

Consider that sonic image for a moment. Now amplify it a thousand fold. The noise you now hear is the sound of Bring It On. The dramaturgical diorama of Bring It On is one that commits to presenting this scenario, and with such intensity that there can be no room for smarminess, irony, hipness or satire. I’m sure many people equate cheerleaders with the image through which they have been branded by countless attacks on their subculture: from serial killers to comedians to punk bands to arthouse movies. I thought Bring It On was going to be some para-indie Sundance-hip (yechhh!) witty critique of an obvious bimbo-target like cheerleaders. But Bring It On is so aware of the cheap (and dated) idea of ‘critiquing pop culture’ that one scene brings up the infamous mother who hired someone to kill a cheerleader competing against her own daughter, then dismisses it instantaneously. If you can understand why a mother would be that obsessive, you wouldn’t make fun of such an event; you would accept its deviancy as normal. For Bring It On is literally about the absolute drive which pumps adrenaline through the youthful corpus. It embraces the competitiveness, rivalry, sexuality, sexiness, hysteria and exhaustion which vibrate the world of the cheerleader.

Bring It On is a sign of an appositely progressive cinema which cares zero for the jaded counter-cultural dialectic which erroneously equates critique with intelligence and awareness. Like Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion (the ultimate 90s ‘re-teen’ movie), Bring It On generates something that critical strategy can never manage: a wholly inward perception of self which simultaneously negates the external world while totalizing a sense of place within the world. Or, a presentation of dumbness which is so unproblematized that one feels stupid in having highlighted it in the first place. Unlike the dominant teen movie setting, Bring It On presents not just a bunch of rowdy kids in a mall, but a group of cheerleaders whose job it is to yell and scream and go crazy to whip up a crowd at a sports event. And, get this, their main aim is not just to be cheerleaders for any one sports event or season, but to compete with other cheerleaders in a national cheerleading tournament, where a mass of other people cheer them as they act out how they would cheerlead a sports event audience. The feedback loop of an audience cheering the routines of a cheerleading group is both ‘stupid’ yet also epicentral to designing the contained sonorific arena for Bring It On’s depiction of a teen energy space.

The sound of voice and music are vital ingredients in the creation and sustaining of this teen energy. The main approach to voice placement entails hyper-compaction. The whole soundtrack, especially when music is sounded, stylistically and technically employs the type of compression and ‘ducking’ which allows radio presenters’ voices to talk over dense music presence while never seeming to be on a separate volume plane. ‘Ducking’ is an automated process of compression which involves feeding a vocal track signal into a music track signal so that when no voice is present, the music is boosted to optimum level, and as soon as the voice comes in, the music instantly drops down and back up in every pause between the speaker’s words. When used to a high degree (as in AM talk-radio broadcasts) its psycho-acoustic side-effects induce a breathless claustrophobia wherein no gaps are allowed and the passage of time is rendered thick, imposing, congested. Narrative film sound design generally disallows this for 2 reasons: voice is typically rendered as being embedded within a location (or locatable) environment which includes occasional yet slight interference to the voice, rather than placing it in an aural void; and narrative crafting conservatively favours classical ‘peaking-and-troughing’ which stimulates drama through variance in dynamics, rather than pummeling the audience with a sonic onslaught.

Most scenes in Bring It On start with the explosive introduction of a music track as if you have jumped in a car and turning on the engine has simultaneously turned on the radio at full volume. The music then sits underneath the dialogue of the scene, but never low enough to feel separate from the socio-musical realm of the characters. Kids listen to music loud, so they must talk loudly over it. It is arguable that conventions of sound mixing for film are out of synch with people’s ability to hear ‘through’ the noise which surrounds us, so it is refreshing when a film acknowledges the currency of this through its mix. Bring It On recreates the aural energy of being in a space where volume is an issue which affects communication; the hyper-compaction of the vocal ducking facilitates this well.

Editing rhythms both support and enforce this aesthetic. The contemporary template of this type of hyper-compaction is found in Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing of the dynamic bind between voice-over narration and song-over score in Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Bring It On is like a screaming teen energy version of Goodfellas’ ‘solo voce’ opera; the former unleashes its energy in a flashing present, while the latter orchestrates its energy in a contemplative past. Both films rely on a clearly defined integration of aural levels and sonic rhythms between the cut and the mix. One operating in ignorance of the other would deliver an unbalanced combine, as in American Pie which clearly separates voice from music from score from film in a clinical and totally unerotic way. Bring It On drives on its energy like a fuel within the body of the text: the cheerleaders are always engaged in responding to music, through being energized by its erotic pulsation, choreographing body movements to it, and chanting slogans and call-signs over its amplified presence; song has a distinct use-value for the film’s characters and its placement is rendered compatible with their physicality.

The finale of the tournament and its confrontation between the East Compton team (as black as) and the Burbank team (as white as) takes place in the ground zero of American teen energy: Fort Lauderdale, Miami, site of many an atomic detonation in the movies (see Sean Cunningham’s Spring Break for the most frighteningly pornographic version). An interesting musicological schism culminates here in opposing the LA (Hollywood versioning) sound of energetic dance pop (exemplified by the Euro-House sample stabs reimported into the West Coast by the likes of CC & Factory’s Everybody Dance Now) against the multi-faceted fractalized cut-up of the current Miami mutation between old school Miami Bass (a regional take on East Coast Electro) and the UK sound of Jump-Up (a collision between Hip Hop, Drum & Bass and Electro). While the Burbank team originally went for pop, they learnt from East Compton the power of underground sound. In the climactic finale, both teams use similar tracks which provide a breathless and breath-taking soundtrack to the dynamic body scores of their routines, like watching a group version of an aerobics doubles tournament. Surprisingly, the underdog team (East Compton) wins, enabling a form of social justice to overcome dramatic resolution, another progressive element which other so-called non-mainstream films would not consider due to their intent to craft a ‘well-told resolved story.’ Again, it is refreshing that an American film foregrounds race when dealing with music, considering the tense history (and present) of criss-crossing racial appropriations of pop and folk forms which gives life to so much music.

Bring It On is dressed in the narrative regalia of competitive sport. Sports should allow people to kill each other. That way, the winners can be ultimately victorious and the losers can become martyrs, like tragic fools whose boats capsize in rich corporate yacht races. All competitive team sports enact militaristic stratagems, suggesting that deep down people like war, but they moan about it to feign worldly concern. Bring It On collapses dance, sport and spectacle in a way that the base death drive which compels someone to play or support sport is erased by the vitality with which the cheerleaders expel, eject and ejaculate themselves across the screen. Its stage is a healthy pornorium within which teen energy—compounding sexual, bodily and musical electricity—can both combust and regenerate to the sound of the crowd. Bring It On is healthy and, believe it or not, it’s not bad for you.

Bring It On, director Peyton Reed, writer Jessica Bendinger, distributor Roadshow, Australian release December 14, 2000.

Like many other analog media forms, photography has spent the past decade being digitised. The photochemical sensitivities of film and paper have been gradually edged out by the recording, manipulation and reproduction of images as arrays of numerical values: pixel-grids.

Editor Mike Leggett introduces Photofile’s August 2000 edition, “Tekhne,” with the declaration that “the pixel, the byte, the inkjet and the photographic are seamlessly integrated into contemporary practice.” That integration, and that practice, are the subjects of this edition. Leggett has assembled a mixture of essays, artists’ statements, images and reviews that give some sense of the range of contemporary digital photomedia in Australia.

Leggett’s introductory statement, “The Speed of Light,” sets the digital transformation of photography within a continuum of technical change; the image-making process is inseparable from a technological “evolution” spanning the glass lens and the computer monitor. “Tekhne,” Leggett reminds us, is the Greek root for “technology”, but originally meant “art.”

This etymological union doesn’t negate the tensions and torsions involved in photography’s latest evolutionary step, as Leggett hints. Les Walkling gives an artist’s perspective on the downside of digitisation in “The Desensitisation of Photography.” Walkling is refreshingly up-front, quoting a friend’s frustrated exclamation: “Digital imaging sucks.” It replaces the “honesty” and “inevitableness” of the photosensitive surface, and its corresponding capacity to “remember” its process, with a shifty, duplicitous array of data. The digital image doesn’t accumulate traces, Walkling argues, “its memory is one of loss”: transformations are absolute, erasing previous values—worse, successive transformations degrade the image data. “Digital imaging archives its own destructive tendencies.” Not only that, but the absorption of imaging into the computer workstation robs the artist of those kinaesthetic and sensory subtleties of the darkroom, replacing them with pre-fab tools and a low-resolution display.

While Walkling’s protests sound a bit like media-nostalgic griping (“if you don’t like the screen, use the darkroom!”) they are motivated by an artist’s desire for a better, more supple medium. Walkling points out that digital imaging needn’t be so bad; the now-defunct imaging software Live Picture solves many of these degenerative problems, and returns a more photographic sensitivity to the digital domain. In “Thinking Imaging Software”, Leggett takes up the story of Live Picture and its ubiquitous competitor, Adobe Photoshop, detailing the commercial and technical machinations below the consumer-surface, and giving an interesting case study in the way digital media practice is profoundly shaped by the discourses and processes of the software industry. Leggett once again argues that transformations in tools and processes have long been integral to the creative practice of photography, and suggests that artists’ involvement in imaging software might be reclaimed through a distributed, inclusive, open-source approach; doing a “Linux” on Photoshop.

These protests and speculations are a little slight; happily here they are mixed in with the work of some fine photomedia artists. The colour reproductions are excellent, and easily worth the cover price in themselves. The stills from Patricia Piccinini’s The Breathing Room are gorgeously grotesque—folds of intricately textured amorphous flesh, with blank glistening orifices. Murray McKeich’s images are just as fleshy; decaying chimeras with that characteristically metallic sheen. These two prominent locals are joined by Austrian artist Dieter Huber, who also uses the digital surface to invoke reshaped and fantastic bodies. Huber’s Klones are mutant plant forms: seed pods in loops, a cactus growing in an impossible torus. Also included are an enticing set of stills from video work by Perth collective Retarded Eye, images by Indigenous artists Rea and Brook Andrew, and a diverse gallery of local work from artists including Marty St James, mr snow, Lui Xiao Xian , Rebecca Cummins and Carolyn Brunet.

The texts around these images are generally less satisfying than the images themselves. Darren Tofts’ essay “Terrible Beauty” discusses the work of Murray McKeich alongside other notable exponents of dark, mutant viscerality: Hans Bellmer, Frederick Sommer, Francis Bacon and Pierre Molinier. These comparisons are all well made, but they leave no room for a discussion of what the contemporary significance of McKeich’s work might be; certainly, as Tofts says, it involves a “poetic, defamiliarised meditation on the culture of the cyborg”—but I’m sure there’s more to it. Ricky Cox attempts a survey of net-based photomedia—an enormous field-and the result is inevitably much broader than it is deep. Edwina Bartleme’s discussion of the work of Rea and Brook Andrew, “Multiple Realities: Digital Imaging & Contemporary Queer Art”, walks us through postcolonial identity-engineering in prose which lacks the wit and energy of the images.

There’s more focus to the 5 reviews that round out the volume—Teri Hoskin on Bill Seaman, Kathy Cleland on John Tonkin, Paul Thomas on Retarded Eye, Daniel Palmer on Suzanne Treister, and Anna Munster on Linda Dement. Meanwhile the artists’ writings drop some oblique and elegant hints about the potential rewards and agendas involved. Lui Xiao Xian offers a neat way of imagining his doctored Victorian-era stereographs, as 3D-images stretched through time—the “fourth dimension”—to create cultural and historical identity-parallax-errors. Marty St James’ text fragments reveal his digitally-smeared figures as virtual “performance/sculpture”—“art as a reformed feeling of existence/(captured and engineered between worlds).” Despite the reservations of artists like Walkling, digital imaging technologies have fostered an active creative culture; not photographic, but perhaps as Leggett suggests, “post-photographic.”

Photofile, “Tekhne”, edited by Mike Leggett, Australian Centre for Photography, August 2000, www.acp.au.com

empyrean, Melinda Rackham’s online multi-user VRML world “that questions the nature of virtual space” has won the Sound-Space Award (for interactive sound works in the 3D space of the internet) at the Stuttgart Filmwinter (www.filmwinter.de) in Germany. Incorporating sound design by Mitchell Whitelaw with additional scripting and modelling by Horst Kiechle, empyrean can be viewed at www.subtle.net/empyrean. The jury commented, “Rackham’s visual style, use of sound, and her deep existential inquiry into the colonisation of cyberspace made her the Sound-Space jury’s unanimous choice.”

Submissions are open for CD-ROM and web-based work to be highlighted at MILIA, the interactive media market at Cannes from February 10-14. The AFC will showcase Australian work that has been completed in the last 12 months & distribute flyers on upcoming projects. Contact Rachel Sinclair, 02 9321 6436, r.sinclair@afc.gov.au/.

Cyber Cultures: Sustained Release, the Casula Powerhouse’s touring digital arts exhibition, will be launched at Mercury Cinema in Adelaide on March 2. First of the 4 modules is Animation Playground, followed by Post Human Bodies at Ngapartji Multimedia Centre. New Life begins in May and Infectious Agents in October. Contact Adele Hann, 08 8410 0979. Check out the RealTime website for reviews and an interview with curator Kathy Cleland in our Working the Screen feature.

Fuselage, an interface between digital arts and design in the form of a new magazine, website and regular exhibitions, was recently launched in Sydney at the Rubyayre Gallery, Surry Hills. They are looking to promote the work of emerging artists. Unusual and challenging work will be featured.

trAce (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/ [expired]) has just changed its name to trAce online writing centre and its new-look site is easy to get around and full of great info. The annual trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Competition was won this year by Talan Memmott for Lexia to Perplexia (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/lexia/ index.htm/ [expired]). Memmott is an artist/writer from San Francisco who has been active in the web-based hypertext scene, serving as Creative Director/Editor for BeeHive Hypertext Hypermedia Literary Journal (beehive.temporalimage.com/index.html). He comes to writing via visual arts, having worked in video, installation art, painting, and performance art. You can chat with Talan at the trAce website, February 4 @ 9pm GMT.

Poets and Writers Magazine (www.pw.org/mag/index.htm) has a special section devoted to “Literature and Cyberspace” this issue with articles by Rob Wittig, Nick Montfort, William Gillespie, Stephanie Strickland, Justin Martin, and Eastgate’s editorial team Diane Greco and Charlie Bennett. Two articles are available online: Martin’s “Preserving the Word” and Wittig’s “Observations from Here”.

In New York, to step out onto the street is to be immersed in a delirious river of speech. It seems (to this visitor, used to Australian reserve) that everything is on the surface. New York playwright Mac Wellman delights in this and draws the excess and rhythms of the American everyday into his work. He writes, “I believe, along with Beckett and Handke and Witkiewics, that the depth is on the surface. The inside is on the outside” (“Poisonous Tomatoes: A statement on Logic and the Theater”, The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays by Mac Wellman, John Hopkins University Press, 1994). Meanwhile half a world away in Australia, Keith Gallasch (“The Plight of the New”, RT#40, p26) expresses a hunger for theatrical experiences that offer “different surfaces, new rhythms, that induce reverie and contemplation…”; that trade a moribund theatre’s obsession with depth, character, plot, for an attention to the play of surfaces.

In New York, where hyperreality (in Umberto Eco’s sense) is the dominant mode, the experience of cultural surface without depth or centre is mediated by sheer speed: you’re moving too fast to sink.

There’s a similar energy, an incantatory quality to American speech, on the street and sometimes, hallelujah, even in the theatre, that strikes you with a physical force. The manifesto, the shout chorus, the sermon (Martin Luther King Day has just passed as I write) are embedded in the rhythms of the language, which is palpably shaped by the strong African-American presence in the culture. There is a vocal tradition here, black and white, that connects to an embodied musicality: Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, some of Williams and O’Neill, are animated by these cadences: African-American dramatist Suzan-Lori Parkes exhorts writers to dance around the room as they write; and to encounter her extraordinary The America Play is to hear the body in the words. Aishah Rahman talks of a “jazz writing” and in her play, Only in America, bird-woman Cassandra stammers a kind of rhythm-based gibberish for the entire first half of the play. A history of struggle writhes in this speech and unlike in Australia, where the cracks in the White-out of our history have only begun to open into public discourse (think of the stuttering, paper-shuffling and anguish around that one simple word, “sorry”) in the US the wound of a deeply divided and racist history is not so much pasted over into an uneasy silence as danced, sung, spat out. It continues to animate and energize a profoundly polyphonic language. Or so it seems, here on the surface of things.

And that’s just on the street: what’s going down in the theatre? In search of exciting non-naturalistic work, in one weekend in December I saw 2 off-off Broadway productions: Mac Wellman’s Cat’s-Paw at the Soho Rep, and the US premiere of British dramatist Sarah Kane’s Crave at the Axis Theatre. The production of Cat’s-Paw was exuberant, accomplished and performed with a kind of dark glee appropriate to Wellman; however, Crave fell terribly flat. The disappointment was more acute because I had eagerly anticipated the full production, having first encountered this play in a reading directed by Chris Mead on the rooftop of an East Sydney pub. Then, I was moved by the rhythms and repetitions of Kane’s writing and the way that states of obsession, desire and frozen memory are played out through these rhythms as much as by the content of the language.

Kane’s play revolves around 2 men and 2 women: the men, A and B, are respectively in (occasional) dialogue/connection with the women, an older M and younger C. The mode of speech alternates between reverie and dialogue, which is written as a rhythmic interplay on certain speech motifs rather than conventional dramatic interaction. There are suggested pathways of exchange but relationships are hinted at rather than developed: dialogue functions as collision, which spins the solitary balls back into their own orbits. A longing for love so strong that it consumes its own object; a moth-to-flame relationship to troubled memories of abuse (“she can’t remember and she can’t forget”) and repeated attempts to connect and to distance from a possible affair constitute the landscape of this play.

The New York production of Crave begins strongly: the Axis set is spare; no props, but a dappled light plays over a grey space, with minimalist sound/music creating a similar aural effect. Hung from the low ceiling are 4 video monitors that play continually through the performance. The actors move little, delivering their lines more to us than to each other. However, from the moment the video monitors begin the text begins its long struggle against the production, finally to sink without trace beneath an effortful recreation of psychological depth. The production works hard to create coherent subtext from Kane’s luminous fragments and neither the text nor the production survive the attempt. This is evident not in the staging, which remains austere, but in the visible thought-chains of the actors, struggling against the cadences of the text to create a subtextual inner journey for each character. Just in case their efforts are not enough, the video footage fills in the gaps by linking the text to an external ‘real.’ The 4 video monitors play continuous footage of the actors in real spaces: a bedroom, a café, drinking, smoking, enacting lonely angst. Where place-names surface briefly in the text (“Florin’s” and “Rudi’s”) these are seized upon by the video and screened in all their NYC veracity. Differently edited, the footage could work—another level of displacement—however it’s put to work in anchoring the real in a way which adds to the nett effect of failed and overwritten naturalism.

The attempt to drag ‘depth’ to the surface, thereby dulling the shimmer of Kane’s language and the pathos it enacts through its missed connections, was at its most marked in the older male character’s monologue on love. The actor turned this obsessional litany into a coherent monologue from a young man, perplexed in love, recalling the ups and downs of a relationship with a difficult young woman (poor dead Sarah Kane, perhaps). The contrast with Mead’s directed reading in Sydney could not be starker. There the same monologue was performed with a pleading stammer and lack of tonal variation: an astute choice—against the stumbling voice the yearning in the words floats light as cobwebs, only nominally tied to the possibility of a ‘real’ other. To imbue the narrator of this speech, as the Axis production attempts, with potency and hope of love is to fatally wound the writing. Kane’s cadences, drowned out here, are those of a fragile spell against loneliness: the mumble of prayer that expects no answer, the child rocking itself to sleep only after the longed-for parent fails to come.

Deflated but not defeated, it was time to head downtown a few blocks for Mac Wellman’s Cat’s-paw. On the way I wondered: is it true there’s no irony in America? Is it the gaps and silences in Kane’s writing that make it hard to stage in the US? The wonderful Cat’s-Paw—admittedly a play employing very different strategies of language—restored my belief in a certain vein of American irony that works not through understatement, but by excess. Wellman’s writing employs the hyper-real in the sense of fashioning a mode of dialogue scarily close to the surface. His work skims the river of American speech and draws on it as found object, with its elisions, loops, interruptions, excesses, brutal lack of listening, animal cunning, rather than crafting the dialogue of that familiar form of naturalistic theatre where motive, plot and yes, psychological depth of the shallow sort, prevail. By contrast, Sarah Kane’s work (4:48 Psychosis was briefly reviewed in RT#40 by Aleks Sierz, p4) comes from, and extends, a tragic strand within British writing which conjures a severe beauty from the condensed lyricism of its language: Edward Bond, Martin Crimp, Howard Barker predate and share elements of this line of writing. Subjectivity in Kane’s Crave is fractured from within rather than from without: with Wellman, the hectic collision of dialogic surfaces infuses the writing with a kind of demonic glee.

The Soho Rep production of Cat’s-Paw is directed and performed with energy, wit and a real relish for the hyperbolic curves of Wellman’s language. Kyle Chepulis’ set creates a simple and vertiginous space—a long black and white floor elevated above a drop of several feet at either side and the front, and raked upwards as it recedes—creating a false perspective: upstage seems very far away. This platform is the setting for 4 movements, played out like a game of chess: the first 3 take place high above the city, at the observation towers of the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center and inside the Statue of Liberty. The first movement pairs mother-daughter couple Hildegard and Jane Bub. They speculate on how long it would take to hit the ground if you jumped. There are dark references to Bermuda (or is it Key West?): “I don’t want to talk about Bermuda!” hinting at torrid affairs, at triangular disappearances or even the fashion disaster shorts of the same name. The second duet is between friends Jane Bub and Jo Rudge; again they speculate about suicidal drop-time from the platform, and struggle over the revelation and interpretation of dark pasts. In the third scene Jo Rudge and her adolescent daughter Lindsay break into the Statue of Liberty.

In one of the funniest and sharpest passages, Jo speaks to her daughter in familiar liberal-left platitudes about depth, human connection (not surprisingly, given Wellman’s iconoclasm, it’s also the territory of the heart-warming well made play) and yet we are refused the familiar pay-off of psychological revelation: Lindsay demolishes her mother’s beliefs with a machine-like relish and a kind of Ayn Rand commitment to personal supremacy. Lindsay praises the beauty and severe survivalism of the cockroach, falling in love with a “roach motel” (cockroach trap) and souveniring it. Jo attempts to explains the “cat’s-paw” of the title, an intricate game played with string wound around the player’s hands, but Lindsay isn’t interested.

The final movement brings the 4 women together outside the Federal Courtroom, where Jo and Lindsay have been arrested for stealing the roach motel and, in their escape, breaking the Statue of Liberty’s arm. In a wonderfully sharp digression which muses on the mutating nature of narration, Hildegard Bub attempts to tell Lindsay a story, beginning with “once upon a time” and Lindsay refuses such a premise as illogical and disturbing: Lindsay is only interested in the “continuous present.” Hildegard is reduced to the ‘real’, within which mode she enchants Lindsay with a contemporary news item involving a woman engineer who unsticks a ball of grease and sludge that blocks the sewage system of an entire town.

The content of the dialogue is oblique, almost baroque in its excess: its vision of a radically conservative youth demolishing the platitudes of baby-boomer liberalism is funny and acutely pertinent to the current US political landscape. The patterns and shapes of Wellman’s language-games recreate a sense of struggle, familiar to many mother-daughter dyads where connection is maintained only through keeping the string of the cat’s-paw tight: as with water in a full cup, always threatening to spill and saturate, it’s the surface tension that holds everything together.

Cat’s-Paw, writer Mac Wellman, director Daniel Aukin, performers Nancy Franklin, Alicia Goranson, Ann Talman, Laurie Williams, Soho Rep, 46 Walker St, opened December 15; Crave, writer Sarah Kane, director Randy Sharp, performers Brian Barnhart, Kristin Dispaltro, David Guion, Deborah Harry, Axis Company, 1 Sheridan Square, NY, closed December 23

While Stretching It Wider is the name of the whole show, there are 2 other pieces, Glory Holy! and Madame. In this program Glory Holy! is reworked. It’s still the same piece in structure and text from a year ago, but the gestural element has changed. I thought I’d try to find a new place, go somewhere else, play with new rhythms. The text itself was pretty much ingrained, and I didn’t have to study it, but I’m finding new things coming out. I want to become reacquainted with it, let it tell me a few things instead of me determining it all the time.

Glory Holy! shifted very quickly through extremes of characterisation. For instance, that pervasive mother character who called at inappropriate times.

Yes, that phone call from ‘mom’ was from another piece, In Search of Mike. I thought it would be fun to see how mother would go in Glory Holy!. There was a montage of characters: a truck driver leaning out of a window; a person in a box at a fairground; a dog in a kennel. The preacher was pretty much the central character though, on his soapbox.

On the surface it’s about death, consumerism, sin, sex, all the big things. On a deeper level it’s about intimacy and isolation. It’s what that set is about, that booth/confessional/box office thing, where the central interactions occur through a little hole. There’s an element in that box which is like a womb, the greatest place of intimacy really. And that’s why the mother visited, to support that sense of female, even though it’s in a very male environment.

What about the food images, mother’s little aphorisms that constantly filtered through?

My mother’s conversation was all clichés. But they were far from meaningless. She had her own unique set, and as I got older I discovered they were unusual, completely particular to her. There’s a surface conversation that makes a kind of trivial sense, but there is a deeper level you can get to. And just that lack of being able to communicate speaks volumes. It makes you ache a little bit.

I remember sex and food and religion, and the selling of all of that, and how it all merged. Was that really what it was about?

A lot of elements of popular culture, like consumerism and sex, are advertised, and the preacher is the consummate advertiser. He sells God; he sells morality; he’s a moderator of thought. He’s right up there on his pulpit, preaching his faulty gospel. It’s all so corrupt. And yet, those extremes are part of a mix; extremes dictate each other, help to define each other. So it was a mix, too, with the sexual thing. The booth was a place of false intimacy, but also quite intensely intimate.

Madame had its genesis—and this is by no means what it is—when I worked with Jean Genet’s The Maids. I’m not really dealing with any of the issues of that play. I just wanted to take that character out for a walk, basically, to see what else she can do. I think the whole program is about intimacy and isolation, about 2 people trying to make a connection. In Madame, you might wonder whether making a connection is a game, because it’s really about not making it. The characters, they both get off on that. A lot of people do that: being thwarted, people thrive on it.

Stretching it Wider is about walking into that rehearsal room and not knowing what we’re going to do, me and Dean Walsh and the composer [Drew Crawford]; just let’s go somewhere. We’re looking at how bodies connect, and what that connection yields, and ways in which bodies act, react and over-react. It’s tending towards the over-reaction, but that’s Dean and me.

And again, it’s turning out to be lots of fun. The whole thing of stretching it wider has sexual connotations, for Mardi Gras, but it’s also looking at art practice, stretching that a bit wider, too. We’re working with blindness, taping over our eyes so we actually have to feel and connect, seeing how adventurous we can be in that realm. And you do feel a real dependence there; and you feel anxious when you lose that contact. But that was one of the precepts, to challenge ourselves, make it risky and make it work.

The 2 coins we tape over our eyes suggest a death image. It’s physically very striking, with black tape around our heads, very bondage. But more than anything I like it to be about Dean and I having fun. If it’s not fun, not pleasurable, then especially at my age, I don’t want to do all that big stuff. I’m 10 years older than Dean. Let him do all the wild stuff. Dean’s also in Madame. I’m Madame, though, and that’s a big change, getting Dean out of drag. But it really is a Mardi Gras program.

Glory Holy! is very Mardi Gras. I hadn’t actually seen that hidden, secret men’s business on stage. In the gay community it’s still an area that people don’t talk about, don’t own. It’s very much a place of non-communication; people don’t talk. And because it’s a place where people don’t talk, they don’t talk about it, either. This piece does have a gay sensibility, but then Dean and I are very queer in our own beings, so the sensibility is there. But I would like to see Mardi Gras just do work by gay artists, and not necessarily gay themes. I think that might be an important direction for the festival to go.

Stretching It Wider, Brian Carbee and Dean Walsh, produced by One Extra Company, Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Downstairs at the Seymour Centre, February 28 – March 2

Among the galleries active in Sydney, 2 in particular exhibit distinctly hybrid tendencies. Grey Matter Contemporary Art Projects and the Asia-Australia Arts Centre at Gallery 4A, however, are very different galleries. The first is housed in the modest Glebe residence of its tenant, Ian Gerahty, while the second occupies a large, well-equipped heritage building in the heart of Chinatown. Grey Matter is free for exhibitors although Gerahty stresses that it is not merely a ‘rental space.’ Gallery 4A is also not rental based. Its director Melissa Chiu, alongside a board of artists acting in advisory roles, considers proposals annually. A percentage of those artists accepted pay a fee to utilise the premises.

What tentatively unites these galleries is their focus on international content. Gerahty, an ex-Londoner, benefits from his contacts in the UK and is firmly committed to the cross-cultural exchange of ideas. Chiu is similarly inclined towards the presentation of a strong overseas (in this case East Asian) component. Both Grey Matter and Gallery 4A also show the work of local practitioners, helping them to develop their careers and experiment with concepts.

What separates the galleries is their mode of operation. Gerahty is essentially a one-man band who generates the shows he exhibits. With relatively few resources and limited physical space, he is dedicated to the critical exploration of the art process, and encouraging interaction and debate in the local terrain. The Asia-Australia Arts Centre receives funding from the Sydney City Council as well as corporations. Significance is assured with its specific targeting and promotion of contemporary Asian art, especially timely as it places Australian culture firmly within an Asian rather than exclusively European context.

The entrance to Grey Matter is located in a back alley in Glebe. Its success, aside from the gallery’s extensive mailing list, depends largely on word of mouth. Physically the gallery consists of a narrow corridor leading to a modestly proportioned room. This is connected to a small, enclosed balcony overlooking the street. The entire space is painted a uniform and pristine white. Psychologically this locates the gallery just outside its obvious domestic origins although it is this aspect that makes Grey Matter unique. Gerahty points out that in London and in Europe such duality is not unusual, and during the 80s Sydney boasted numerous temporary exhibitions in disused commercial and industrial spaces. At the same time, Art Hotline hosted an ongoing series of surreptitious shows in a variety of unexpected locations. Grey Matter appears to be rekindling the ‘do-it-yourself’ in the face of real estate constrictions, escalated prices and lack of other suitable gallery spaces.

Gerahty hopes visitors are not merely taken by the novelty of the gallery’s domestic spaces. The emphasis is on exhibitions as concrete and ‘serious’ as any seen in alternate spaces, commercial or otherwise. Gerahty is convinced of the necessary role played by all types of galleries in the prevailing artistic micro-climate. It would be difficult to regard Grey Matter as ‘alternative’; the easy dependence on such terminology is restrictive to the open and democratic presentation and reception of contemporary art. Also rejected (well, perhaps not entirely) are ready-made notions of ‘site-specificity’ although particular projects staged at Grey Matter like The Palace of Exaggeration and Everything are unlikely to be simulated in commercial galleries in Sydney. In this exhibition, every available space—bathroom, toilet, clothesline, kitchen bench—was utilised by exhibitors. The result was closer to an environment than a simple ‘exhibition’.

The Asia-Australia Arts Centre represents quite another position. The gallery is contained in a large brick and timber building owned by the city council, with the ‘project space’ at street level providing room for artists to explore their ideas in a visible context. With its large windows it also provides 4A’s public face. Upstairs the main gallery is subdivided by means of a series of large mobile partitions. These supply multi-purpose solutions to hanging requirements and potentially serve both wall and object-based work. To one side of these partitions is a list of gallery sponsors including James Fairfax and Chinta Ria, the pan-Asian restaurant located at Darling Harbour. On the same wall, potential sponsors are guaranteed (in return for financial support) a portrait of themselves by established Sydney artist Lindy Lee. Such a model of patronage is obviously a long way from the ‘as-it-goes’ (though by no means less ‘professional’) approach of Gerahty. Overall, the Asia-Australia Centre has an institutional quality that places its aspirations somewhere between the artist-run gallery and the museum, especially in its current format which is a long way from the gallery’s initial office-less incarnation. While this first space was cramped, it promoted an immediate and social relationship with the gallery and its director(s). The centre’s increasing success as a quasi-corporate entity has made its role vaguely ambiguous. While its vitality continues, this ambiguity results occasionally in displays of an amorphous and rather conventional ‘multiculturalism.’ At their best, the centre’s exhibitions reveal aspects of contemporary experience that are illuminating and culturally specific.

Gerahty’s homespun approach is conditioned partially by his own artistic practice. The internal knowledge this provides, combined with empathy for the position of artists, helps sustain exhibitions that are open-ended and close to the generative core of contemporary art. Sometimes this open-endedness affects the coherence of exhibitions but, rather than being detrimental, a willingness to take curatorial risks ensures Grey Matter’s on-going discursiveness and relevance. Currently exhibiting is a group of ‘young British artists’, a term currently harnessed for varying ends. The show appears at times a little too self-consciously reliant on deadpan chic but when viewed as a whole it offers a rare glimpse of contemporary cross-continental art practice.

The Asia-Australia Arts Centre is presently showing The Mandala Project. The title, intentionally or not, suggests universalist western theories of eastern spirituality. Surprising, however, is the exhibition’s embrace of collaboration and temporality. Here, the image of the Mandala coalesces over time and is celebrated with a gallery closing rather than the usual opening.

The divergent nature of these exhibitions indicates the range of Sydney’s contemporary galleries. While Melissa Chiu argues for widening models of popular and commercial patronage for artists, Gerahty at Grey Matter forcefully demonstrates the artist’s responsibility in fostering independent creative opportunities.

Grey Matter Contemporary Art, 1st floor, 35D Ross St, Glebe: The seat with the closest view, artists Adam Chodzko, Anne-Marie Copestake, Steve Dowson, Volker Eichelmann, Gareth Jones, Hilary Lloyd, Victoria Morton, Eva Rothschild, Gary Webb, Toby Ziegler, January 13-February 4; Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Gallery 4A , 181-187 Hay St, Sydney: The Mandala Project, January 16-February 3

The cygnets on the ornamental lake at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne were somewhat bemused. When not being enlisted by their long necked parents to drum up a little business from people throwing bread at the water’s edge, they poked about the curious floating objects which have temporarily invaded their space. These objects, which sang and chirruped exquisitely as the cygnets cavorted around them, were part of Garth Paine’s installation Reeds, for the Melbourne International Festival.

Reeds was a site-specific installation consisting of a series of reed pod sculptures (artfully designed by Christopher Langton) which transmitted and broadcast computer-generated music. The music was produced in response to data gathered by the pods on the basis of variations in the weather, light, wind speed and direction and solar activity. In this sense, the music was conducted by the natural environment with the aid of interpretive and generative software programs hooked up to the reed pods. The data collected by the pods was transmitted to a land-based computer which analysed and fed it into a sound synthesis software program designed to generate music in real time, producing 8 channels of digital audio. These channels were then broadcast back to the reed pods where Sennheiser EK300 stereo receivers, installed in 6 of the pods, received the broadcast signal. These signals were then separated into 2 mono components, fed into 2 adjacent pods and broadcast using amplifiers attached to the reed stems.

The reed pods were designed to blend almost seamlessly with the surrounding environment. Similarly, the music generated by the pods subtly mimicked the kinds of sounds you would expect to hear in this environment. You needed to constantly remind yourself that what you were seeing and hearing was, in fact, artificially constructed. The Botanic Gardens, an artificially constructed “experience” of the natural, are an apt setting for the work, highlighting an important theme of Paine’s work. Reeds allowed the viewer to negotiate a number of tenuous oppositions, such as the distinctions between the natural and the real, the artificial and the virtual.

Reeds, positioned as neither for nature nor against technology, enabled the viewer to experience the symbiosis between the two. The processes enacted by the reed pods were akin to the photosynthetic responses triggered in the surrounding plant-life when they are exposed to the same stimulus. At a time when popular representations of technology tend toward hysterical denunciation and generate fears about its dehumanising properties, Reeds reminds us that the nature/technology dichotomy is itself entirely artificial as is the concept of nature.

The question of where the sound performance of the installation takes place also highlights this blurring of boundaries between the artificial and the real. As Paine points out in the Reeds catalogue, sound literally penetrates the body. In this sense, the presence of the human audience is as necessary a condition for the performance as all of the technologies that drive the installation. We can’t separate the human from the technological—technology is, in fact, a necessary condition of humanity.

Reeds continues Paine’s explorations of the responsive, activated space that began with such works as Ghost in the Machine, Footfall and Map 1. Like these, Reeds is thoughtful, eloquent, evocative and ingeniously executed. The only disappointing aspect of the installation is that it could not remain in the Botanic Gardens permanently. I’m quite sure the swans wouldn’t mind.

Reeds, Interactive Sound Installation by Garth Paine, Melbourne International Festival, Ornamental Lake, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, October 14-November 12. www.activatedspace.com.au/installations (expired)

“Test the power of your loins!” was the call for men to donate their semen for Sperm Race—one of the most publicised events of Next Sex: Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness, this year’s Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. The festival sought to engage electronic arts, gender studies and queer theory to highlight the mechanisms of discrimination based on sexual preference, gender or heredity. Analysing men’s semen for mobility and hence reproductive success, while giving women the opportunity to participate by placing bets on whose sperm they thought would be the fastest swimmer, seemed to reinforce rather than challenge these issues, but I tried to keep an open mind…

While the banks of the Danube resonated with To Rocco Rot from the outdoor sound stage, the very brown Bruknerhaus Concert Hall was hung with Dieter Huber’s huge vinyl prints of irritating, unerotic, morphed double vaginas and multiple penises. Wander upstairs and you’d find a pink faux fluffy viewing lounge for Natacha Merritt’s (US) web-published soft porn digital images of herself. Demonstrating the festival’s prevailing lack of critical engagement, Merritt was sure her work was really “art” as she also had a print publishing deal.

In a simulation of sleaze you could follow some gaffer taped arrows down back corridors to find Shu-Lea Cheang’s (US) The IKU Experience. The Blade Runneresque Experience has a variety of straight and queer couplings, a loose narrative of sci-fi viral cybersexual encounters, dialogue of the moaning kind, a sprinkling of sexy cinematography and 3D graphics—but I’m not sure how it ends.

The most rewarding installation was Sergio Messina’s Brave New Porn which showcases amateur (rather than industry) porn images from similar-interest-groups on the net. Perhaps you are looking for a hiccupping lover, a play pony to ride, another clog worshipper, or you just want to swap pictures with some friends that delight in “plush sex”—the arranging and photographing of cuddly toys in erotic poses. Messina illustrates with both humour and respect the variety of human desire as these otherwise marginalised consenting adults get together online.

On the gallery level clear plastic tents housed a selection of bio-art projects that manipulate nature by processes like changing the spots on butterflies by cell modification or inserting synthetic DNA into living cells. Australians Oran Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary (Israel) were showing their ongoing project Tissue Culture and Art(ificial) Wombs, now being carried out at Harvard Medical School in Boston—growing skin, muscle and bone tissue culture on degradable polymer worry dolls in the artificial womb environment of a NASA developed bioreactor. The project questions our loss of innocence in the age of technological reproduction, but is not clear on the ethical issues surrounding the seam between tissue culture and the creation of an autonomous living entity.

The Next Sex symposium covered tired material such as disembodied cyber sex, contraception, and transgender operative procedures. Sandy Stone, a pioneer in the field of virtual sexuality, had nothing new to say either as she did the same performance I saw at Digital Aesthetics in Sydney in 1996. The controversy of the festival was neo-Darwinist Randy Thornhill’s theories on rape as a natural evolutionary adaptation for survival, generating outrage from both men and women in the audience. However, there was no official platform for response.

Thankfully downstairs the independently curated electrolobby—a net event of streaming and sushi provided a haven from sex. Works included Sissy Fight, Eric Zimmerman’s (US) engaging multi-user bitchy playground game of teasing and scratching and ganging-up strategies and Icontown from Bernd Holzhausen—a network community project based on the concept of the pixel as building material. Also featured was Leonardo, with Annick Bureaud, the artistic and scientific network that has existed for more than 30 years and has been slapped with a lawsuit by a French financial firm claiming violation of its trademark rights and etoy (Switzerland) who won their legal battle against retailer E-toys in a similar name dispute, by mobilising a global army of net users to electronically engage and defeat the corporate giant.

The parallel Cyberarts 2000 exhibit in the Ars Electronic Centre and the OK.Centrum venues hosted a variety of interactive and sound works. Borderland from Laurant Hart/Julien Alma is a variation of the Streetfighter genre, a game console with a choice of about 40 disparate and amusing opponents, such as a woman with a sink plunger, a man covered in cardboard boxes, a set of twins, gasmask guy, the backpacker who swings the backpack as her weapon. You also get to choose the backgrounds, from postindustrial urban wasteland to desert terrains. The control buttons are a semi-dismantled standard computer keyboard leaving enough keys to move your player, adding to the sense of hacked genres.

On the large scale was Rafeal Lozano-Hemmer’s (Mexico/Canada) Vectorial Elevation, a stunning execution of public art with international participation facilitated by an internet site. Over a 2 week period you could design via the web a light sculpture to be made by 18 searchlights on top of buildings around Mexico City’s main square, which could be seen for a 10 mile radius. Global participants were sent back webcam documentation of their implemented design, creating a tangible sense of technologically mediated remote intervention into public spaces.

Each evening a different performance event was featured—the most enjoyable was Scribble with Golan Levin’s (US) Audio Visual Environment Suite software projected onto a massive screen in the concert hall where the mesmerising graphical interface generated soundscapes. Ars Electronica also ran a late night social club with themes of sex work, peep shows and beauty contests. These were supposed to be provocative, but hardly seemed to raise an eyebrow amongst the audience. The highlight was the wo-man gender morph night with two very differently paced acts—New Yorker Dred-Drag King Extrordinaire’s sweaty hip hop and rap sets, and Sydney’s norrie mAy-welby performing intelligent cabaret to the crowd’s delight.

The Free Speech Camp squatted outside the social club in the Ars Quarter. This motley assortment of caravans and a corrugated iron cantina provided the only mention during the festival of the current Austrian political situation where organisations such as Public Netbase in Vienna and Radio FRO may lose their funding and ability to provide independent commentary against Austria’s right wing government.

Being at Ars felt a little like playing shuffleboard on the Titanic, as eugenics and bioengineering were discussed without any reference to political contexts or social realities. Turning the ship around is unlikely as Ars Electronica is following the genetic theme again next year. Nearly everyone I spoke to expressed their dissatisfaction with this as well as the jurying process for the Prix and the lack of responsiveness to contemporary debates. In its larger context as an arts festival Ars Electronica is sponsored by global computing and telecommunications corporate entities that are perhaps unwilling to engage with these ethical issues.

Microsoft, one of Next Sex’s main sponsors, may be excited by the possibility of a “genetic upgrade of mankind”, however the rest of us may like to stay with our current bio-operating system as the hidden upgrade costs may be too high.

Ars Electronica 2000 and Cyberarts 2000, Ars Electronic Centre, Bruknerhaus Concert Hall, OK.Centrum, Linz, Austria, September 2-7, www.aec.at/festival2000

During that strange, sunny quiet of the Sydney Olympics, the train journey out to Casula had a tinge of the surreal. It was Spring, the natural time for New Life, the third “capsule” in the Cybercultures: Sustained Release program at the Powerhouse. Rolling through the balmy outer suburbs, you could feel the new life photosynthesising—an ongoing renewal of ancient, carbon-based forms. Inside the wonderfully cavernous gallery, the idea gets a twist; this life is new like a new car, a new TV. It’s crawling around inside ‘new media’, conjured by artists and turned loose inside the computer.

Technosphere III, by British collaborators Jane Prophet, Gordon Selley and Mark Hurry, is one of the ‘classics’ of this decade-old microgenre. The plot is simple: you create an artificial creature from a set of off-the-shelf parts (head, body, mouth, eyes, wheels or legs) and then release it into the wilds of the Technosphere, a vast artificial savanna where thousands of others roam. Life for a technocreature consists of the bare essentials: foraging, eating and procreating. Death is as close as the pointy jaws of the nearest ‘carnivore.’ In its original online incarnation, circa 1996, the Technosphere remained invisible; the system sent out regular emails detailing the artificial life of your cartoon creation. In this newer off-line version, we can follow the creature in real time, watch it shuttling around the plains meeting, eating and having sex with passers-by. This is life in 3D, with hardware acceleration; sharp-edged and fast-paced. Like a game of Quake.

Jon McCormack’s Eden is a more restrained and complex artificial ecosystem. McCormack seems to be moving away from the lush 3D aesthetic of works such as Turbulence; Eden’s visual surface is simple to the point of being diagrammatic. Flickering discs move through a flat matrix of cells, foraging on lichen-like patches of ‘food’; every now and then one of them ‘sings’ an abstract refrain. Like many such works, Eden gets interesting in the longer term, as these artificial organisms adapt to each other and their environment. Equipped with virtual hearing, their behaviour becomes linked to sound—organisms sing to attract a mate, or (altruistically) announce the presence of food. While this sounds like an experiment in cyberbiology, it’s also a manifestation of McCormack’s reflective nature philosophy—in particular a concern about the human need to experience ‘nature’, and the gradual erosion of living environments in favour of their simulations. In this sense the work’s title is highly ambiguous—this little world is complex and engaging, pleasant to see and hear, and like that fabled garden, it’s whole, contained and ordered. On the other hand it’s the merest tracing of the complexity and vitality of a real ecosystem, and it won’t grow us food or generate oxygen; it’s a kind of uninhabitable Eden.

Anita Kocsis’ Neonverte is an electronic garden in a quite different form. Clusters of flickering LEDs line the walls of a darkened space, leading towards a video-projected image. An abstract, low-fi soundtrack meshes with the stuttering 3D wireframes of the video. Layers of meshed trees and flowers scroll by, a bird is frozen on a branch; the virtual space is discontinuous, dissolving into flashing pixel–grids and chunky texture-maps. There is a kind of poetry of digital degradation at work here which sits well with the idea of the garden; Kocsis has generated an electronic mulch which folds familiar nature imagery in with the blank, abject surfaces of wireframe 3D. The technical means are simple enough—no Artifical Life programming here, or complex interactivity—but the result is remarkably poignant.

In Neonverte pixels seem to decay and sprout; so too in Kat Mew’s Muto, an interactive which plays out the fusion of biological matter and digital code. Like Neonverte, Muto does without the A-life processes of Technosphere and Eden; and this seems to leave more space for aesthetic invention. Muto runs in a circular domain, like the view down a microscope. Jittery animation loops slide through 5 elemental domains; cellular blobs fuse, clumps of code shed pixellated numerals; Steve Law’s soundtrack is all funky bleeps. While this cyber-bio mix-up is a familiar story, what marks Muto out is attention to detail: Mew’s animation in particular is intricate and energetic. Its presentation at the Powerhouse matched that level of detail, with video projected onto a weather balloon, wrapping perfectly around to push Muto’s disc-world into a gently swaying, glowing sphere.

If biodiversity is important, perhaps cyberbiodiversity is too. New Life presented an enjoyable balance of approaches, and a mixture of technical and aesthetic concerns. While this stuff is hardly “new life”, it offers imaginings, proposals, for how life and technology might come together—and in that sense diversity is crucial.

New Life. Cybercultures: Sustained Release, curator Kathy Cleland; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Casula, September 30-November 12

Writers and new media authors appear to be well served by 2 organisations with ambitions to foster all aspects of electronic literature—the trAce writing community based in Nottingham and the more recent Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). Recently the ELO announced 2 new $US10,000 prizes for Electronic Fiction and Poetry in the first annual Electronic Literature Awards.

While notionally housed in Chicago, the ELO (yes, they’ve heard all the jokes) has an ambitious international mission to “promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature.” Scott Rettberg is Executive Director of the ELO (www.eliterature.org) and co–author of the hypertext fiction The Unknown (www.unknownhypertext.com/), which won the first trAce international hypertext writing prize.

trAce and ELO

trAce (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/ – expired) is already well known in Australia, with Sydney writer Bernard Cohen a former writer in residence, a visit to the Adelaide Festival by trAce director Sue Thomas, and Alan Sondheim (a former trAce writer–in–residence) currently at the Australian National University. In what ways does the ELO replicate the activities of an organisation like trAce, and how does it differ?

Both trAce and ELO are focused on the expansion of the literary use of electronic media and both have an international focus. Both have very valuable web resources which are hubs for our community and for showcasing electronic literature, and both organisations are attempting to sponsor international electronic literature prizes.

One obvious difference between the two is that trAce has both an international focus and a local base in Nottingham and ELO has an international focus and more of a national base in the US. We’re as active in New York, San Francisco and Seattle as we are in Chicago, and during these early stages of our activity, we’re intensely focused on raising awareness of electronic literature in major US population centres. We’re holding a variety of readings and other events, and we’re facilitating more ongoing discussion of both the economic and artistic issues involved in electronic literature. We’re acting both on the web and in person. As wired as we are, there’s still no better way to draw people into the field than live interaction. Many of our programs are focused on facilitating that person–to–person interaction. We’re focused on making this a bigger tent, and neophytes are welcome.

The other principle difference between trAce and ELO is that we’re as interested in helping to develop new distribution models and markets for electronic literature as we are in fostering its artistic growth. So though we’re most interested in forms of literature like hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry and interactive drama—forms designed specifically for the electronic media, that use the computer to do things which can’t be done in print—we’re also focusing attention on what’s going on in electronic publishing. It’s a tremendously exciting time in that arena. As a writer, I’d ultimately like to see publishing models that enable electronic writers to support themselves through their work.

Funding and independence

Most cultural support in Australia is state funded in some manner. How is ELO funded and how you ensure your independence?

The state of public funding for the Arts in the US is quite dismal. Recently the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities have both been whittled to shadows of what they once were. I consider this a national disgrace, but regardless, to develop the kind of programs that we’re trying to pull off, we clearly couldn’t rely on public funding from the federal government here. Instead, we’re reaching out to corporations, foundations, and individuals. Many internet and technology companies in the US have done quite well in the internet boom (even after the NASDAQ crash), and we’re asking them to help fulfill the cultural responsibility that our government will not. It’s a tough pitch of course, but many of these companies were founded and are led by people who do have something of a visionary impulse, who do want to better the world through technology. Though pure greed is quite rampant in the dot com universe, individuals and companies within the internet sector have not entirely lost sight of the idea that the internet is a global village, one which should have art and culture as well as a marketplace. Even more important to our fundraising strategy is giving from individuals. More than half of our seed money came from individual gifts, and I’m hopeful that our operating budget will also reflect that kind of grass–roots support.

As the founder of the organisation, I decided early on that the ELO will remain independent of the prerogatives of any single corporate entity or government institution. Our funding comes from a variety of sources. Additionally, we have three clearly separated boards—a board of directors, of internet industry advisors and of literary advisors. When they are funded, our prizes will be judged by the international board of literary advisors, who are not beholden in their judgment to either the board of directors or to our corporate sponsors. All this has made funding the organisation more difficult than it may have otherwise been, but that integrity is worth the hassles it entails.

The prizes

The ELO has announced a series of major electronic literature prizes for 2001. Could you describe what genres of electronic literature will be eligible?

At this stage the prizes are for Fiction and Poetry but we hope to eventually include Drama, Creative Non–Fiction and Children’s Literature. The main criteria for judging the competition will be the innovative use of electronic techniques and the literary quality of the work. The fiction competition will be judged by Larry McCaffery, author of Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, and After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology. Heather McHugh, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of Hinge & Sign and The Father of the Predicaments, will judge the poetry competition.

We’re trying to focus the prizes on extending and enhancing the literary tradition, endowing them with both the monetary weight and the prestige of something like a Booker Prize or a National Book Award. We hope to raise the bar for electronic literature. We want the best writers and artists in our culture(s) working in the realm of electronic literature, and one of the best ways to do that is to sponsor a series of prizes that will in effect give the winners more time to work on new projects.

By putting together an international board of literary advisors including not only renowned experts on electronic literature, such as Sue Thomas, Michael Joyce, and Takayuki Tatsumi, but also print writers such as TC Boyle and George Plimpton, and leading critics and publishers from both the print and electronic side of things, we’re seeking a different level of engagement from the culture as a whole. The prizes should do a great deal to validate the field, and bring more people into the tent of electronic literature.

What is electronic literature?

An interesting issue being discussed in the electronic literature and hypertext communities is just what constitutes electronic literature. For example does the ELO want, or see any need, to distinguish between print based poetry, the same poetry presented electronically (for instance via a web page), or poetry that can only be presented electronically?

These distinctions are tough to make, but our focus is on aiding and publicising the development of literary works which utilise the electronic media to accomplish things that could not be done in print. I’m a big book reader, and treasure the print form, but there are already organisations working to support literature in print. Electronic literature is the babe in the woods—it’s what needs our help right now. Furthermore, it’s the way that literature is going to reach a generation of readers who are more accustomed to surfing the web than they are to picking up a book. So most of my hopes and fears for literature in general are tied up in the idea that without some particularly literary innovation in the electronic media, the internet will move ahead without a literature native to it. Such a failure would be an horrendous missed opportunity. We don’t want to see what happened to television happen to the web.

The meaning of Stephen King’s e-book

Electronic literature seems to be entering the dot com universe with the success of things like Stephen King’s recent offering. Do you see this as something good for the future of electronic literature?

Yes, I do. Even though King’s e–book was essentially just a print novella made available for download, it served as proof–of–concept for the whole field of electronic publishing. The people, in effect, have spoken, and their overwhelming message to publishers was “we will and do read off our screens.” For years, we suffered the likes of Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, London, Faber & Faber, 1996) jawing on about how the electronic media is the end of literature. Then King comes along, and suddenly the nature of the discourse changes—electronic publishing just may be the future of the book, rather than its end.

The other tremendously important aspect of the King e–book is that it is actually necessitating that publishers re–examine their own publishing models and royalty structures. If we’re able to remove the costs of printing, binding, shipping, warehousing and pulping the artifact, we’re able to produce literature at a lower cost to publishers. As in King’s case, a higher percentage of the profits should go to the writers, and a great deal of savings should be passed on to the readers. Even after constructing this more equitable model and passing on the savings, publishers will be able to reap higher profits as well. In my view, even pure print publishers will benefit. With the simultaneous evolution of print–on–demand technology, more books should be available in print and electronic format, as well as the literature that is created and designed for the electronic media.

The future

In 5 years time what would you like the ELO to have achieved? What would be different?

Wow, that’s a tough one. Firstly, I hope that ELO is still around. Even accomplishing that is not going to be easy. Secondly, I hope that as many people spend as much time reading the web as they spend now playing DOOM. Thirdly, I hope that the international community of which you and I are a part will have expanded and will include many of the most talented writers and artists of our generation. Lastly, I hope that there is a sustainable market for the work that they produce.

Right now, when I mention electronic literature, people say, “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Five years from now, I’d like people to be able to introduce themselves as electronic authors, and to have that mean that they keep bread on the table by making great art happen on the internet.

We’re hoping to line up an International Day of Readings next year for ELO, and would love Australia to be represented in that. As far as The Unknown, we’re waiting by the phone. We’ve encountered many Australians on our travels, and you folks celebrate in the style to which we are accustomed. Line us up some readings, Adrian. We’d love to come out there next year to tour the continent.

This is an edited version of an email interview with Scott Rettberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Literature Organisation, Chicago, USA.

Debra Petrovich’s new CD-ROM Uncle Bill is an engrossing, multilayered work that explores, with thematic and formal inventiveness, questions dealing with childhood memories, sexual abuse, social class and space. Petrovich’s distinctive, foreboding soundtrack presages its Gothic narrative of sexual violence, industrial chaos and repression. Set in Wollongong in the 1960s with the ‘satanic mills’ of BHP’s steelworks, Uncle Bill’s opening macroscopic aerial focus of Petrovich’s childhood neighbourhood and its subsequent microscopic zoom into the intimidating spaces of a home, set the right frame of dramatic action for the user to navigate the work.

Uncle Bill displays a subtle use of still, moving and scrolling illuminated text images accompanied by pulsating images of a child threatened by drunken men sporting air rifles. Bored teenagers and leather-clad bikies milling around milk bars on their bicycles and motorbikes sometimes give Uncle Bill a Kenneth Anger look. Footage of crashed cars and roadside victims evoke a JG Ballard undercurrent. As we navigate the rooms and corridors of the home, the industrial sounds of Wollongong are a perfect aural metaphor for the traumas of a child in the care of sadistic, loveless people.

Uncle Bill’s powerfully raw images and sounds form a stark, resonant work with aesthetic, cultural and formal roots in various feminist video and new media traditions exemplified by artists Lynne Hershman, Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson, Dara Birnbaum, Sadie Benning and Carole Schneeman. The violent treatment of a child is acutely rendered by the recurring motifs of her playing in a tub of water and the frequent abrasive sounds of a barking dog (off-space). Both motifs underline Uncle Bill’s chilling mise-en-scene of child sexual abuse.

In a tour-de-force section of the work, a collage of structured scrolling text attests to Petrovich’s strong visual and sound instincts as an artist/narrator. Her graphic multimedia skills and unswerving motivation to create form out of chaos is ideally suited to the expressionist treatment of this subject matter. The CD-ROM genre suits Petrovich’s atmospheric collage style of techno-creativity. As we follow our own navigational instincts, we can immediately experience the overpowering sense of “no escape” from the violent domestic and industrial cacophony that surrounds Petrovich’s child protagonist.

The ugliness of the suburban-industrial landscape of the CD-ROM provides an apt metaphor for domestic violence. However, Uncle Bill is not a thesis—it does not set out to prove a point—but instead it reveals a tragic assemblage of ideas, gestures and atmospheres that vividly telegraph to us the traumatic horrors of child sexual abuse.

Ideally because of the expressionist stylistics used in Uncle Bill, it would be better exhibited as an installation (as it was at Artspace, Sydney in August). It is a large, bold and atmospheric work notable for its omnidirectional thematic and formal concerns around an issue central to our individual and social psychic lives.

Despite initial scepticism in certain quarters, CD-ROM is thriving in this country and overseas. Uncle Bill is an innovative, experimental contribution to the expanding definition of the genre.

Uncle Bill, written and directed by Debra Petrovich; interface designer Wade Marynowsky; producer Julianne Pierce, CD-ROM 2000.

Writers and ideas engaging in and with the relationship between writing and the internet came together recently at the incubation conference, organised by the trAce: online writing community at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

A text not only approaches the singularity of its writer(s) but also a community comprising each and every reader. If the reading audience inhabits the space between words, one hopes a comfortable space will be made by the text for its visitors (the writing of ambience). Considered as such, the text itself is structural, paradigmatic—a necessary and arbitrary formality whose contrivance abridges physical and ideological distances. This contraction apparent in language is a one whose design draws people together in the social space between signs.

The thread I know specifically as incubation and then generally as conference—itself a type of text—also functioned as a structural formality with its own set of social spaces. By providing opportunities for meeting or gathering—the rapture of the moment as a celebration—incubation was a success. Many delegates commented that incubation possessed a vibrancy not normally felt at conferences.

The gift to be found in conversation is perhaps to make possible in writing the passage and the place, the transient and the preserved, the singular and communal, the foreign and familiar, comfort and vulnerability without contradiction. Conversation that keeps the lines of communication open and plural, speaks of what it means for writing (language) to be interactive.

Linda Marie Walker and Michael Tawa consider the reciprocating contexts of language and structure as an endless modification and questioning of reality’s perceived formal dimensions—or the validity of a finished product—by way of an email correspondence. Conversation approaches an inclusive space in which each participant’s contribution is welcomed—“… so, to live is to live with strangeness, to approach without knowing, to touch without possessing” (Linda Carroli, speak, http://ensemble.va.com.au/speak/ featured in Salon, an exhibition of internet writing curated by Mark Amerika, http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation as part of the incubation program).

How to find ways of being with others is the question approached infinitely through the practice of communication and writing. This motif recurs variously in the hypertexts of the writers featured in Salon.

incubation asked: “What is the value of the conference as a mode of communicating in the field of electronic media?” For me, its value lies with the understanding that television, telephone, mail, book, video, voice, conversation, music, song, sculpture, internet, conference and letter are all possible means of facilitating communication. There is room enough in the world for all mediums and means when one recognises that each moment of expression complements, enhances and accompanies the others.

It follows that if one considers how one writes; one will have also considered how one writes for the internet. Writing and the internet exist as social practices within a world of reciprocating contexts. Here I found the theme of writing and the internet sadly limited in scope in contrast to the experience of verve: the other writing, coordinated by Teri Hoskin for the 2000 Adelaide Festival of Arts, in which writing and writing technologies were considered expansively.

Something of the other writing was suggested in Dr Jill Seal’s discussion of the Perdita Project—a growing online compilation of manuscripts by women that not only recovers their historical contribution through writing, but also includes often overlooked writing practices such as diaries, account books, vitalogies and devotional writings.

Voice and text messaging already articulate private and transient writing practices whose relevance and joy exist purely for participants. Panelist Mike Allison suggested that we are the last generation for whom the printed word carries implicit authority, and so perhaps the revolutionary practices he feels are so lacking on the internet are already taking place in the privacy of chatrooms, through mobile phone message banks and via email.

The internet’s wider ecology of communication technologies and communicating possibilities were addressed by panelist Robin Hamman who spoke of television and mobile telephones as tools with the potential to broaden individuals’ access to information and chatrooms over the internet. The chatroom—itself a transgressive writing practice—is a series of private and public overlapping texts made by a community of individuals. Independent of the formal channels of professional literary institutions, the chatroom, or MOO environment, reminds us that writing perceived at the level of its universal practice can be a truly liberating experience.

incubation: trAce International Conference on Writing and the Internet, director Sue Thomas, web design Simon Mills, administrative assistant Jill Pollicott, web editor Helen Whitebread, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK, July 10-12.

In the 1980s the place to be and be seen was SIGGRAPH. Its first Art Show was in 1981 in Dallas and it became the essential focus for the art and technology community. By 1990 ISEA was the young kid on the block, unfettered by convention and keen to take risks. But by the late 90s it had burned out. So now, at the dawn of a new decade, century and millennium there’s Consciousness Reframed (www.caiia-star.net/production/conref-99/index.html – expired). Over its first 3 invocations (1997, 98 and 2000) Consciousness Reframed has established itself as one of the more significant international meeting places for the misfits who often slip between the cracks of conventional discipline boundaries.

The conference convenor is Roy Ascott, Founder and Director of the CAiiA-STAR postgraduate program that has attracted some of the top international talent in the arts field (www.caiia-star.net/people/RA.html). In his own plenary talks and presentation Ascott was anxious to reinforce his concept of the transdisciplinary nature of the art, science, technology and consciousness convergence. He also quoted another regular contributor, Australian Stephen Jones: “The term technoetic is the key. It refers to our use of technology in cultural production, and it also refers to the noetic, or how we understand the world and our processes of being in it. This suggests the exploration of how technology is changing our perception of the world.”

Ascott proposes “Edge Life: technoetic structures and moist media” where “between the dry world of virtuality and the wet world of biology lies a new moist domain, a new interspace of potentiality and promise. Moist media will constitute the substrate of the art of the new century, a transformative art concerned with the construction of fluid reality. This will mean the spread of intelligence to every part of the built environment coupled with recognition of the intelligence that lies within every part of the living planet.” Shades of de Chardin and Gaia as he continues: “This burgeoning awareness is technoetic: techne and gnosis combined into a new knowledge of the world, a connective mind that is spawning new realities and new definitions of life and human identity. This mind will in turn seek new forms of embodiment and articulation.”

In his own talk Stephen Jones (www.culture.com.au/brain_proj/ – expired) describes cyberspace as a system that orders information objects according to their importance to each other or via their perceived value to an observer. This geometric space is very different from the perspectival space that orders objects according to their geographical location. As such cyberspace has more of a relationship with medieval organisation, (I was reminded of Eco’s library in The Name of the Rose) than with the Renaissance systems that displaced them and have dominated our thinking since. The mind has a similar structure where myriad connections are rhizomatically made and remade allowing consciousness to emerge. He concluded that the real and the virtual are of the same nature. Fact and fiction converge. We face a continuous spectrum of experience differentiated only by the tools we use to observe this continuum.

Many of the artists speaking at Consciousness Reframed describe virtual artworks. Donna Cox (www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/cox/), the pioneer of ‘renaissance teams’ where artist and scientist work together to reveal knowledge via computational tools, has recently joined the CAiiA-STAR PhD program. Her virtual theatre is the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum in New York and she talks about the global virtual team who created their spectacular digital tour of our local Milky Way Galaxy. She compares this to her personal research which looks at the way that different civilisations have merged scientific knowledge and artistic practice in order to understand the nature of the universe and consciousness.

From the other end of the budget, Sydney-based Melinda Rackham (http://empyrean.cofa.unsw.edu.au – expired/, www.subtle.net/) demonstrates her “Empyrean—soft skinned space.” She says, “however I am the centre, I hold the axial position 0 0 0 in this space—that of the empyre builder.” Her presentation playfully mixes her own poetic insights with quotes from the VRML manual to create a fluid frame of double meaning. “My words become flesh—my statements create mythology.” Empyrean achieves a sensitivity that is unusual in the often clunky VRML world and will consolidate Rackham’s reputation for work in the network domain.

Greg Garvey describes a split brain user interface that he developed during a residency at the Banff Centre in 1999. Using a headmounted display with both stereo vision and sound, he presents the user with the emotionally charged testimony from the 1991 Supreme Court Nomination Hearings where nominee Clarence Thomas faced Anita Hill who accused him of sexual harassment. The spectator simultaneously sees and hears the two protagonists—one via the left eye/ear, the other via the right. Like most of Garvey’s work the simplicity of the concept belies the complexity of the ideas and emotions he juggles. It’s a profound and challenging piece that sadly, since C-SPAN won’t release their video rights, cannot be exhibited.

Michael Quantrill is a researcher and artist-in-residence at the Creativity and Cognition Research Studios at the University of Loughborough. He describes a system he has been developing with the centre director, Ernest Edmonds—one of the pioneers of the computational arts in the UK. It’s based on an earlier work called SoftBoard which uses a large scale whiteboard interface that allows artists to communicate with a computer process by drawing standing as if at an easel and which allows greater flexibility of movement than a mouse or graphics tablet. Their more recent work extends this to more general movement detection where “the computer can become an extension of the individual, part of us, but not always under our direct conscious control.”

The theme of human computer symbiosis continues with Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer (www.mic.atr.co.jp/~christa/ – expired) who describe their new PICO-SCAN system created for the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. The spectator faces an array of flat panel plasma screens each with an attached hand held scanner. When the scanner is picked up, artificial-life creatures come out of hibernation and the spectator can modify their behaviour and feed them by scanning in parts of their bodies. When the creatures acquire enough energy they can mate and produce offspring that inherit various characteristics from their parents, as well as minor mutations. The artists describe the work as an open system since it involves the external agency of the spectator and suggests that the creature-creature interactions coupled with the creature-spectator interactions create a complex adaptive system that links the real and the virtual.

During the 90s the Brazilian/US artist Eduardo Kac (www.ekac.org) established an impressive reputation and he has created several key works in the emergent genres of telecommunications, teleprescence and interaction. Now another member of the CAiiA program, he describes his most recent work in Transgenic Art—works that involve genetic engineering.

Genesis takes a sentence from the Bible: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The genesis gene was created by first converting the sentence into the dots and dashes of Morse code. Kac describes his decisions: “This sentence was chosen for its implications regarding the dubious notion of (divinely sanctioned) humanity’s supremacy over nature. Morse code was chosen because, as first employed in radiotelegraphy, it represents the dawn of the information age—the genesis of global communications.” (In the same month that Kac described this work at Consciousness Reframed Morse code was officially retired from the telecommunication spectrum.) The next step converted this Morse code into a DNA sequence where: dashes were represented by the letter T (thymine); dots were represented by the letter C (cytosine); word spaces were replaced by the letter A (adenine); and letter spaces were substituted by the letter G (guanine). This DNA sequence was then synthesised and inserted into the genome of a strain of E-coli. This living bacterium was exhibited and grew, reproduced and mutated. After exhibition the mutated DNA sequence was decoded to produce the modified sentence: “let aan have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that ioves ua eon the earth.”

The relatively remote location of the conference, at Caerleon in South Wales, helps make the event small and intimate with plenty of opportunity for networking and socialising. Next year Ascott intends to focus on the non-ordinary, non-local and non-linear with an emphasis on parapsychology.

Consciousness Reframed 2000, The Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts—CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport, UK, August 23-26.

Australian filmmakers and interactive media artists interested in challenging traditional forms of documentary can now apply for up to $100,000 to produce an online project. The Australian Film Commission recently established an initiative with the ABC to encourage documentary projects that “explore the online environment in innovative, challenging and original ways.” Up to 4 successful works will be selected for production and housed on ABC ONLINE.

The initiative provides a vital space for Australian cultural content at a time when the Internet is primarily a site for commercial transactions, says the manager of co-production at ABC New Media. With the online documentary genre still in its infancy, Domenic Friguglietti says it’s an opportune time to dedicate web space for the development and inclusion of Australian rather than North American cultural material.

Peter Kaufmann, project manager at the AFC, hopes this initiative will encourage filmmakers to redefine the boundaries of conventional documentary. The fund also provides a unique scope for documentaries to be instantly available to an international audience. Audiences can also have the opportunity to respond and engage in an intimate and idiosyncratic way with the content of the online works, making their own contributions. Kaufmann says the AFC definitely isn’t looking to provide conventional documentaries with an alternative delivery and marketing system via the online environment, but is interested in new and radical approaches that explore what is possible within the documentary genre.

Recent Australian examples of the form include a chronicle of the life and work of artist Russell Drysdale compiled by the ABC and the National Gallery of Australia (www.abc.net.au/arts.drysdale – link expired), a work by Carolena Helderman on personal stories of HIV (www.hivaids.webcentral.com.au – link expired) and Fools Paradise, a history of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival documented by Peter Milne and produced by the ABC and the Performing Arts Museum (www.abc.net.au/arts/fools). See also Sharkfeed by John Grech and Matthew Leonard (www.abc.net.au/sharkfeed/index.htm – link expired), an exploration of the social and cultural after-effects of Sydney’s 1960 Graeme Thorne kidnapping. (See Dean Kiley’s response to the work in Working the Screen, page 3, and the authors’ account on page 26 of OnScreen both in RealTime 38, August-September, 2000).

Kaufmann says these should not necessarily be seen as indicative of the kind of projects the AFC will produce, but rather as examples of the possibilities of the form. Filmmakers and new media artists often ask what type of online documentaries the AFC might fund, but besides limiting the content to material based on fact, Kaufmann prefers not to offer prescriptions and hopes people will design and assemble their own unique aesthetic.

Twelve months into your Artistic Directorship of the Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide, where are you at?

I don’t know whether it was just naivete on my part or because I was so focused on the work but I didn’t really think about the history of the company when I took the job. In every interview that I’ve given, up until very recently, the situation with the previous director, has been brought up. But for me, an organisation advertised a job, I applied for it, I was the successful candidate. I’ve always wanted to have a cohesive unit of dancers and a creative team to work with on an ongoing basis. Now I find myself in this situation, I’m really doing what I’ve always wanted to do. However there has been a change in the culture here. I’ve come into a company that’s had a particular mode of operation and a particular way of presenting itself within the artistic and greater community. That’s probably been the biggest challenge—to come in and shift the culture within this company. I feel my ideas have been embraced by the Board and the management although with every new idea I come up with they don’t say, “Great! let’s do it tomorrow!” They are governing the company responsibly by asking me to bring them more information and to talk it through and I really appreciate that.

We want to push towards film and multi-media as part of our agenda. We plan to work in alternative spaces, not only virtually and digitally but also in real alternative spaces. We want to continue curating seasons of work by local, independent choreographers and support the local dance community. I want to try and open up rehearsals from time to time so that local dance practitioners and members of the public can walk into rehearsals and talk to the dancers and gain some insight into our rehearsal process. I want more sense of community ownership of the company. We want to throw open the doors and offer our studios for next to nothing to local choreographers who are underfunded. We have rehearsal studios that sit here vacant from 6pm every night and on the weekends and as far as I’m concerned they are not our property completely. They are the property of the community. Once a month I want to have showings in the Balcony Theatre and from that process works will emerge for a more formalised season that may occur once every 6 months. I’ve always felt that flagship companies should be more than just the director and the dancers and the touring of proscenium arch works. We certainly do have a charter of responsibilities and that is why we are funded to the level that we are—to maintain performance levels in particular spaces of representation. But we should also try to be dynamic and far-reaching in our relationships. I mean it’s nothing radical. It’s nothing new at all. But it hasn’t happened. When I first applied for the job I envisaged ADT, these studios, as being a real nerve centre for dance in Adelaide, a hive of activity and not always from or about myself and my dancers.

Could you talk about your interest in multimedia? Why film/video? Why dance? Why the mix?

When I create I like to manipulate a very open palette. I’m interested in projecting a contrasting semiotic layer, something that’s going to skew the image of the live dancing bodies, some other text which will create a new image and a new experience and allow a different reading of the performance. I’m interested in finding fresh aesthetics and meanings and experiences through incongruous juxtapositions of texts. If ever I employ any technology within a live performance it is there, as the platitude goes, to serve the idea of the work. Because this generation of artists is pioneering the use of new media in performance, much weight and time can be taken up by the technology at the expense of the ideas and the conceptual terrain of the work. I wonder if the artist should know what the technology can do but at the same time be separated from it when it comes to making the work, should let go of the need to have a “hands on” approach. I have. I’ve actually shied away from multimedia works because I think what you can do with technology in performance is still actually quite crude and basic. Unless the audience is armed with knowledge of what is technically occurring, they don’t have the same impression of the work as the creators of the work do. I am interested in working with film and video technology but that’s not new technology. If we’re talking new technology, we’re talking developments on the web and also digital broadcasting.

What I’m interested in and what I’m planning at the moment is doing a multi-platform work. It’s one project but its delivery is on a number of different media platforms. Its working title is Mind Game. It will have an online delivery, a digital broadcast, a separate film that’s a composite of the film within those works and perhaps a CD-ROM. although I wonder about the future of CD-ROM. It hasn’t really taken off. This work is about the mind and paranormal phenomena. It started off as an interest in Jung but from there I’ve developed an interest in telekinesis and mind reading and these strange pockets of mental phenomena that can’t be absorbed by science.

I have an interest in dance and in certain aspects of culture or civilisation so I want to bring the human body into dialogue with these. Using video and film in performance allows me to do this. I think it would be difficult to stage this dialogue with just bodies in space although I fetishise pure movement to a degree as a choreographer and uphold it as a totally valid point of view.

It’s a really strange connection between my subconscious desires and my body trying to fulfil those, which drives me into dance and hence choreography. And I don’t understand that connection and I don’t even know if biologists understand that connection. A fundamental desire of mine is to see bodies manipulate themselves through space at great velocity and in an ambiguous orientation. I remember reading an interview with Edouard Locke from the Belgian dance company La La La Human Steps about 12 years ago. He was saying when a dancer is spinning horizontally in space, like in a full twisting butterfly, it connects us to our dream state because floating in space is like dreaming. I really identify with that statement. I receive a great deal of psychic satisfaction from watching dancers perform those kind of phrases and those kind of movements. So I choreograph in this way for very individual, personal reasons. It’s not that I think because it’s spectacular and high risk that people are going to be drawn to it. It’s not about that at all. It’s a personal pursuit.

Because they’ve had an incredibly steep learning curve with regard to movement, they are hypersensitive to the complexity of constructing a move. They have a heightened sense of how to regulate their own bodies to approach a move. They have developed this awareness from having to pick up a diverse range of skills in a relatively short amount of time. It’s something they don’t get too much relief from. We have a training program that’s very constant and consistent. Not only do the dancers do release classes and ballet classes but they also do advanced yoga, and 3 training sessions per week in gymnastics, breakdance, martial arts and Capoeira manoeuvres. From these movement disciplines we have developed a vocabulary that is specific to this company over the past 12 months. There’s a misconception about my process. What the audience sees on stage is really difficult, risky work which looks really punishing on the body. There’s an assumption in the dance community that I just take dancers and force them to do these difficult movements that are way above their level of ability. That’s not the case at all. We have probably the most well thought out, well planned, training regime of any company in Australia.

That’s because I’m attracted to individuals. I get attracted to certain individuals that I meet and come across.

I feel incredibly supported in what I want to do with this company. It’s not something you can do overnight but it’s happening.

I love dance works that use bodies to depict the landscape of the mind. Lucy Guerin’s The Ends of Things swoops upon a moment in the life of a man (Trevor Patrick). This man is alone yet not alone—4 dancers populate his internal and external reality. At first they are outside. Maybe they are his thoughts, perhaps memories, metaphors, non-literal others. Then they move into his room, peopling his negative space, manipulating him, calling his agency into question. Later a party is thrown and they become people, you know, the ones who always seem to be having fun. Trevor is both visible and invisible. Hugely funny movements occur because of his flickering visibility.

There is humour despite the pathos. The man is pathetic but in the sense that he displays no self-confidence or sense of mastery over his everyday life. Yet neither is he oppressed by this fact. Patrick has a knack of moving with great simplicity. He does not need to look cool. And this creates quite a contrast with everyone else. Perhaps their skill should suggest a neutral kinaesthetic but this is just not possible. Ros Warby, Brett Daffy and Stephanie Lake are far too good, their movements too elegantly executed.

At one level, The Ends of Things deals with the abstract. The 4 dancers are aspects of the man’s internal life. Like in an Edward Albee or Harold Pinter play, we do not know exactly what these figures stand for. Perhaps they are real; perhaps they are memories, or aspects of the mind. The Ends of Things explores its themes in several ways. It is sad and beautiful. Guerin’s is a thoughtful work beyond the intricacies of her usual choreographic style. Sadly the inspiration for the work came from Jad McAdam who died suddenly this year.

Chunky Move’s latest mix, Combination #3, shown at this year’s Melbourne Festival, consists of 3 works by Phillip Adams, Gideon Obarzanek and Kim Itoh. Adams’ egg-centric, Ei Fallen, hails from Humpty Dumpty. Its fluorescent lights, square dance patch and minimalist bench make the stage look like a battery farm on acid. The costumes are bizarre, padded, white egg shapes. Later, they are replaced and fake arms flap around dancing torsos. The dancers twist and turn in a courtly dance that reminds me of the ball scene from Roman Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers. That’s because there is a formal element in Ei Fallen. Formal with a twist. Ei Fallen concerns death but it didn’t make me sad. Perhaps I’m hard-boiled.

Obarzanek’s Crumpled is distinguished by the intervention of its curtain. The red drapes rise and fall independently of the action, which continues regardless. Perhaps you think this is a Brechtian device but it isn’t because there is no particular message to be conveyed. There is a lot of physical interchange, precision, athletic strength and grace but no discernible meaning over and above the movement. Obarzanek describes this piece as “purely structural and formal.” On occasion, individuals escape the curtain’s divide. At one time, two men are in front, perhaps espousing a male gaze. They do a little comedy sketch—suburban boys trying to dance. At one point, fire breaks out. The curtain is an escape, a pathway to safety. The way in which the curtain breaks the viewer’s access is a bit like TV ad breaks; a slash right across the middle of the action.

The last piece in Combination #3 was Itoh’s Butterfly and Me. I found it difficult to view this justly after the first two works. Its style of movement was quite different, beginning with many rolls on the floor. There was also a section where people spoke, travelling pathways etched in light. One part had Luke George address the audience, incorporating elements of the here and now in his text. Although Obarzanek wrote in the program notes of an “imaginary world” shared by all three choreographers, I had a feeling that Itoh’s world was quite different—both from the other two and from mine. I think I would need to see more of that world in order to enter fully into it.

The Ends of Things (for Jad McAdam), Lucy Guerin Company, choreographer Lucy Guerin, sound (original concept) Jad McAdam, composition Franc Tetaz, design Dorotka Sapinska. Combination #3, Chunky Move, Ei Fallen, choreographer Phillip Adams, set and lighting design Gideon Obarzanek, costume and set design Dorotka Sapinska; Crumpled, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, composer Hugh Covill, costume David Anderson; Butterfly and Me, choreographer Kim Itoh, costume David Anderson, lighting Margie Medlin; National Theatre, Melbourne International Festival of Arts, Melbourne, October 19-28.

Orbital was an ambitious exhibition of time-based media installations, simultaneously held in Melbourne and London. It featured 5 new media artworks by Australian artists Nicola Loader, Megan Jones, Nigel Helyer, Margie Medlin, Brook Andrew and Raymond Peer.

The first thing that struck me as I walked into the CCP gallery space (Gallery 1) was Nigel Helyer’s Ariel, a luminous lime-green and lemon interactive sound sculpture installation described in the catalogue as “a sensor based ecosystem of mutant jellyfish-like radio objects which respond to the physical presence of a human interface.” In the catalogue Helyer reflects on his work as “a sonic-mapping of voices lost in the ether, of song long settled in the dust.” Fugitive sounds, with all of their associated resonance, vibrated and echoed in this labyrinthine soundscape.

Voices speaking to each other were affecting in different ways in Nicola Loder’s monitor-based digital video installation. A wall of monitors simultaneously screened 5 sets of strangers interacting with each other in a neutral photographic studio space. This mise-en-scene of blank white background focused further attention on the people and their conversations. Each monitor had its own set of earphones which enabled a semi-voyeuristic listening-in to encounters which were variously polemical, topical, intimate, sometimes even indifferent. Positioned as an acousmetre, I had memories of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in its invitation to multiple intrusiveness.

Megan Jones’ Sites of Interception, on the other hand, was clearly a work whose purpose was both educational and political. This multimedia installation invites viewers to look at satellite imagery of the Murray Darling Basin in the Sunraysia region of Victoria, to explore Quicktime VR 360-degree panoramic environments of the region. Megan’s CD-ROM was created in consultation with the Salinity Management Consortium as a SunRISE 21 Artist in Industry project and explores the sustainability of the Sunraysia region in the 21st century. The pathways through these topographical images, however, often transcended their informational function. There was at times a poetic feeling of place in the images of vastness and proximity, in the comparisons of the parched and the lush landscapes.

In the second gallery space there were 2 installations, one on each side of the room, a space enveloped in images, flickering constantly. On one side Margie Medlin’s monitor-based digital media installation, Estate, focused on the nexus between dance, film and digital media. A kinetic dancer traverses a montage of digital images of Australian and Asian cities. A dance of the figural, in the unlikely milieu of an ever-expanding urban vista.

On the other side was BIYT/me/I (BODILY INSTINCT YEARNING TECHNOLOGY/multiplying emptiness/Identity), a digital video projection-based installation directed by Brook Andrew and choreographed by Raymond Peer. The intention of this installation was to give Wiradjuri (Aboriginal) and Assyrian perspectives of an Australian landscape. A multiple madness of images is navigated through 3 Australian identities. These figures are an Aboriginal surveyor re-mapping a city landscape, an Assyrian business man locked in a twilight zone of a train station trying to scale the capitalist terrain, and a displaced German woman living out of a trolley filled with both European and Australian objects. These narratives intersect and parallel one another, creating a complex cityscape tableau.

Orbital’s accomplishments were highlighted in the different conceptions and visions of Australia represented: from the sonic echoes of the past to the hesitant meetings of strangers; from the vast and sparsely inhabited landscape to the bustling city streets and metropolises. The invitation of this exhibition was to reflect on the many ways that we have, and continue to, imagine ourselves in the many places that we live.

Orbital: visions of a future Australian landscape, curator Keely Macarow, Experimenta Media Arts, an associated event of the Australia Council’s HeadsUp Australia 100 festival, London, Lux Gallery, London, July 2-9; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, July 6-29.

According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, mythology is the means by which society expresses the mysteries of existence. These enigmas are not apparent to the naked eye. Rather, they lie beneath the surface of the stories we tell ourselves, locked in deadly embrace. If Levi-Strauss is right, then Chunky Move’s Hydra is a work of mythic proportions. The name and its surrounding publicity suggest a mythical inspiration for the work, but it is also possible to interpret Hydra in the narrower sense suggested by Levi-Strauss—as standing for the irreducible conflicts that underlie human existence.

Hydra opens with twining figures who seethe through the shallows. These sexual creatures seem not of this world. Their wetsuit flesh suggests that they hail from the depths, whether of mind or matter we do not know. Their natural habitat is below, underneath the surface. Contrast these beings with what appear to be humans whose dress is urbane and whose movement tells a different tale. These mortals lurch through space, throwing themselves from situation to situation. They are not in control. They expend energy but life speaks through them, they do not speak it. Almost somnambulist, their lexicon of movement reminds me of B-grade zombie films.

The set of Hydra connects and separates the two levels of reality represented by each type of being. It consists of a shallow pool of water, covered by a removable wooden floor. As the work progresses we see land become water become land again, through a series of deformations and reformations. When the land level is lifted, the structure looks like the inside of Moby Dick—a large wooden ribcage.

The water creatures are pitted against the humans. There is no love lost between them. Yet, the humans must interact with the water. They fall into it, fall out of it, they lie across its boundaries. Although none of the beings in this landscape exhibit anything as explicit as consciousness, each will destroy the other if occasion allows. Some wonderful duets and trios occur betwixt and between these creatures.

Whatever Hydra is about, and not knowing is a strength of the piece, it is clear that it represents conflict. For Levi-Strauss, the inability to resolve the fundamental contradictions of human existence is the lifeblood of myth. Myth covers over that inability, somehow pretending a resolution; through what we might call narrative closure. At the end of Hydra, the wooden floor is reassembled. An uneasy peace reigns but not all is resolved.

The last section of Hydra involves a live performance by Michael Kieran Harvey on piano and Miwako Abe on violin. Repeated waves of musical consciousness lap the action, lulling us into stillness. The otherworldly temporality of the music breaks any sense that the end of the work is an earthly one. Rather, there is an ineluctable movement towards a truce, one which leaves everyone drained. The sense is meditative.

What then are we left with? Hydra can be seen as a battle between oppositional forces, perhaps where man=culture and woman=nature (not again). But it is richer than that. Firstly, the mortals’ movements are complex; they are definitely skilful yet they manifest a human fallibility. Choreographer Gideon Obarzanek leaves the world of displayed virtuosity for something else here. Secondly, there are several fine kinaesthetic interchanges, duets and trios, which need not be reduced to a single storyline. I like the abstraction that washes over Hydra. It’s thoughtful. If it is about the conflicts of myth, these dwell way beneath consciousness. It is not for us to plumb the depths of each and every mystery.

Hydra, Chunky Move, choreography Gideon Obarzanek in collaboration with dancers Fiona Cameron, Luke Smiles, Kathryn Dunn, Sarah-Jayne Howard, Michelle Heaven, David Tyndall, Stephanie Lake; musical composition James Gordon-Anderson, Darrin Verhagen; design Bluebottle, National Theatre, Melbourne, August 2-12.

Although Kate Denborough’s Birthday involves 2 members of the crew’s immediate family, it has a solo ring to it. This is because the feelings of the piece centre around Denborough’s existential self-questioning. Birthdays can do that to you, sometimes creating solitude in the midst of celebration.

The set is small. A little bit of a house comes crashing down. A party is held. The audience are the party, that is, apart from Kate who does everything. She even plays her own party games amidst a choreography of excitement. Funny how sad it all seems. The bigger the gesticulation, the emptier the gesture. Finally, a headpiece is revealed, a sort of silver galaxy with orbiting blue lights. When the headgear is fitted, the piece changes from witty, funky, and sad to surreal. This is the largest danced section of the piece—a mixture of beautifully shaped legs and turns and tottering unknowingness, turned inside out. The walls of this small universe provide anchorage but not direction.

It takes Dad (Michael Denborough) to bring his daughter out of her existential nausea with cake and champagne. Unfortunately, he fades away, his mortality getting the better of him, leaving our hero alone again. The wall momentarily functions as an artificial partner, absorbing the betrayal of loss. But how good can a wall be? Luckily, youth saves the day and dashes across the stage to grab a mouthful of cake. We leave Kate seated by the young musician (Christopher Bolton), having her cake and eating it too. A thoughtful piece that comes from a deep emotional place. Three cheers.

Birthday, choreography Kate Denborough, direction John Bolton, performers Kate Denborough, Michael Denborough, Christopher Bolton, design Ben Cobham, Kristin Green, sound Franc Tetaz; CUB. Malthouse, September 14-16.

“I like smashing things,” Margaret Trail confessed in K-ting!. It was a fortnight of ‘smashing’ in Melbourne, from Chunky Move’s exploding set floor in their Hydra (shades of John Carpenter’s The Thing) to Yumi Umiumare’s evocation of the Hanshin earthquake in her Mixed Metaphor piece INORI-in-visible. Artaud’s exclamation that “The sky has gone mad!” was repetitively rendered on stage.

The Mixed Metaphor artists were obsessed with language, or languages—their layering, mutual incompatibility and paradoxical similarity. Dancehouse was filled with projected text, surtitles, interrupted whispers, mangled soundtracks, bodies both literally and metaphorically inscribed in a way affective and yet impossible to fully know. Metaphors of likeness and unlikeness, these are works inhabiting a realm between holistic unity and irreducible multiplicity.

A new space is opened up in the creation of a performance which is like a performance (rather than ‘like nature’); metaphors about metaphors. Susie Fraser for example, offered us the doubled spectacle of watching a mother watching her experience of motherhood, represented by diary entries, medical reports, home video and more. Her confession however left much unsaid. Similarly dancer/choreographer Jodie Farrugia projected a mysterious book above the dancers, containing poses that they appeared preordained to echo. A partial revelation of the inaccessibility of destiny as semi-unconscious accord.

Full revelation was perpetually offered yet denied the audience. Various texts bound these performances together whilst allowing one to glimpse through them towards something else—aporia perhaps. The performances were vertiginous in their very materiality, creating the possibility of a metaphoric conflation and conflagration of the word.

In this respect, Trail’s K-ting! was the most absorbing, and frighteningly funny, work. Scored to a complex deconstruction and montage of pieces torn from some unknowable and apparently absurd conversation or conversations (“Are you really a fireman?” she remarked), the text was constantly interrupted by the sound of smashing crockery and other materials. Each misplaced phoneme shattered the veneer of normality, raising the almost literally hysterical possibility of social opprobrium and embarrassment (“What is…what is it…it is…this really quite unpleasant thing we do?”).

Trail stood largely at ease in the centre of this vortex of mistakes, Freudian slips and alliterated nonsense, pondering and imperfectly miming under the spotlight. She acted as a performer performing someone not performing—not really, not in any overt way. The subject-hood of the scored ‘characters’ she interacted with was provisionally and variously defined by the name they answered to—“I’m super-model Margaret”, “I’m fireman Jeff”. Trail dramatised how all conversation and recognition occurs under the threat of potentially sublime linguistic breakage or meltdown (“k-ting!”).

Lest one seek refuge in the idea of a pre-linguistic body, Trail exemplified the tendency of the performers to dramatise the body as a parallel, coded presence. Her physical performance consisted of a series of abstract yet implicitly communicative gestures: arms raised, hands spread wide and shaken in frustration, or fingers curled delicately as they described the space that bathed and sustained the subject. Though these actions ‘touched’ the recorded vocalisations, they never followed the same logic or pathway—meta-performance perhaps. The poses recurred and frayed, like old phrases becoming increasingly meaningless or overloaded through use. The body struggling against becoming a cliche. Of what? Of itself.

Compared to Trail’s thoughtful, at times ecstatic, implicitly sexual linguistic farce, Yumi Umiumare’s performance was immediately disturbing. Should one laugh? Is it okay to laugh at someone else’s horror? Can an Anglophone laugh when berated in Japanese without appearing insensitive or culturally smug? Aural hieroglyphs from the perspective of the Anglophone, words transformed—transfixed—rendered as ‘pure’ sound or affect by cultural and geographic distance.

Umiumare entertained her audience, but she did not let them off lightly. She was, however, more reluctant than Trail to revel in smashing. The sticks she wielded acted as ambiguous talismans of the quake zone, memory and experience.

The core of the performance was Umiumare ‘re-enacting’, trying to phone her relatives in Hanshin. “Hello?…Hello?…Hello?” Echoing calls degenerating into violent, hysterical shouts, and even a psychic space outside of this. An implosion of space, time and emotion. The venue becomes an abstract, mnemonic theatre in which Umiumare imagines an event she herself was denied. The walls’ “shake” she mimed for us, breaking through language for a moment. Umiumare’s adoption of an almost childlike, tragically playful performance mode suffused the space with an overwhelming sense of presence and absence, of felt pain and the impossibility of its recapture. One moved from Trail’s almost orgiastic celebration of smashing, to Umiumare’s ambivalent attempt to recapture it.

Mixed Metaphor, Separate at Earth, video installation Cazerine Barry; Stories From The Interior…Shedding, writing/direction/performance Susie Fraser, video Lisa Philip-Harbutt, dramaturgy Sue Formby. In Outside, direction/choreography/performance Jodie Farrugia, performer/collaborators Dylan Hodda, Rowan Marchingo, video Dermot Egan. K-ting!, writing/direction/performance/sound Margaret Trail. Operation in the Middle of Things, creation/performance Tim Davey. INORI-in-visible, creation/performance Yumi Umiumare, set Anthony Pelchen, sound Tatsuyoshi Kawabata. Lighting (all works) Nik Pajanti. Dancehouse, Melbourne, July 27-August 6.

Michael Pearce is a well established stage and costume designer for dance and recently won a Green Room Award (his second) for the set and costumes in James Kudelka’s Book of Alleged Dances (Australian Ballet). His latest solo exhibition, Flow, was inspired by an Asialink residency in Hanoi.

A series of drawings were hung on gallery walls, some overflowing onto the floor. They were shaped like Chinese wall hangings but their content was different. Most of the drawings were of body parts; feet, head, face, wrist, arms. Their vivid colours reminded me of the impressionists’ deconstruction of white light into the spectrum but in this case, the subject was a body in movement. Even in stillness, the impressionists’ concern was with the animation that makes a body alive. My favourite piece was a pair of feet, lapping the floor from the wall. In this interpretation, you could feel the history of practice that has formed this particular pair of feet, the uneven weight distribution, the irregularities of its toes.

Pearce used a ghosting technique to suggest a trace, a not-quite presence related to the very palpable flesh of his work. Even the parchment began to look like skin to me. I was reminded a little of this year’s Sydney Biennale exhibitor, Adriana Varejao, but where her flesh is thrust in your face, Michael’s very gently emerges somewhere between you and the work.

Flow, drawing installation by Michael Pearce, The Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, August 17 – September 3.

Triple Bill opened the Brisbane Powerhouse’s inaugural l’attitude 27°5, an annual event of contemporary independent performance intended to showcase risk-taking fusions of dance, music, and installation art alongside forums, workshops and masterclasses. Curated by Zane Trow and Gail Hewton, the intention is to support independent artists and small companies by providing a platform to make new work, assistance to build networks including residencies with visiting overseas artists, and the connections to get their work shown beyond Brisbane. l’attitude 27°5 offers 3 weeks focusing on Australian dance and installation artists beginning with 3 new works by Brisbane choreographers.

Shaaron Boughen’s Bleeding-A-Part is a moody exploration of love, desire, manipulation and obsession, sensuously danced by Fiona Malone with Tim Davey. Three scrim screens providing layering and texture initially veil the duo. She approaches, he rejects…they move to the next screen, each time she adds clothing items—layers—of separation. Susan Hawkins’ deftly crafted soundscape of cello, piano, and spoken text gives body and substance to the whole. More layers—tips for young women from the Vogue beauty book, a manual on preparing rabbit carcasses, love scenes from Cole Porter, the laboratory dissection of a rat, erotic secrets of an imaginary lover—words juxtaposed against movement driven by the feminine point of view. Always the female wooing, the male resisting, rigid, passive. By contrast, his narrative is left unpenetrated. A prop for her to propel herself relentlessly against—towards—hurling her desire at him, recoiling from his touch.

The highlight: a haunting screen projection, dancing with the narcissistic ghost image of herself as her lover, a her-him, before the image dissolves into ‘he’ and therefore turns away from her once more. Artfully realised, Bleeding-A-Part seems resigned in its mild meditation on the ambiguity of a hunger for desire with no messy, juicy bits.

Fugu San. Space made tangible. Sliced. Shifted. Sculpted. Fugu San is not alone but in pas-de-deux with her environment. The first sound from the darkness is a rhythmic knocking beat. A shaft of light slowly reveals the pounding of crimson pink pointe shoes like pistons into the floor. Above, Lisa O’Neill, austere in black, and seemingly still. For 6 minutes the pointe shoe generator rumbles under black skirt, an engine building up a charge, whilst oblivious, the arms, torso, head explore the space they occupy. Behind her, Emma Pursey cuts a dramatic presence as the gothic mistress before a glass cabinet of sound, mixing live from her potions on vinyl.

O’Neill is a vital performer, more than just the pay-off of her disciplined training—Suzuki on top of an orthodox dance background. Absorbed in kinetic ritual we are absorbed in her absorption. She manipulates space and time with mesmerising nuances.

Disappearing down a hazy passage of yellow light. Emerging from another, icy blue. Symmetry informs the work, an architectural geometry in design of body movement and staging that is used to underscore mood. And the hint of a Japanese aesthetic? (The title, I am informed, is a nickname meaning ‘blowfish’ but does not bear directly on the work.)

It’s not just a matter of body control and focus. Highlighting this, the third movement, a variation with grand pliés in first, momentarily loses that unmeasurable quality despite unwavering focus and control. A subtle shift, and I feel the movements are suddenly no longer satisfying her but made for us. Why…to extend the work, fill a quota?

Another exit: hip-rib-shift-elbow-leg heel-flick-land-look-pause….Eyes in her feet, in all her body parts. Querying, questioning, quirky feet. Despite the brief lapse, O’Neill’s Fugu San is powerful, playful. With no agenda, it demands no explanation. One could charge O’Neill with conservative formalism, or banal decorativism, but Fugu San transcends that by the shamanic power of the performer. With a noble reticence to disclose her secret narrative, Fugu San does not invite us, she simply embarks on her mysterious journey, and I want to follow.

The set of Monster loosely suggests a Hammer horror, its gothic doorway, its drapes splattered in lipstick pink blood. A scream in the dark. Now he takes it back. “What, did you think I’d serve you up a monster just like that?…Fuck off!” Monster is a highly personal work for dance and text by Brian Lucas, supported by Brett Collery’s eloquent soundscape, claiming to explore the iconography of Frankenstein’s monster, the politics of the monstrous and the monster within, but weighted towards the relationship break-down that drives it, sparking the inquiry into monsters but never really descending into the deep. These are the monsters of bad faith. There are 10 ways to hit out at the lover who deserted you—stapling his trouser legs, hiding 6 pork chops around the apartment, outing the beloved to his father.

As if writer, performer and choreographer all knew each other, Lucas presents a hybrid performance piece where movement and text arise out of the same impulse; a self critiquing narrative that turns over and over, folding in upon itself whilst winding its way forward through love story, childhood reverie, the father’s story, the lover’s revenge. “One! Two! Three! Four!…such a Control Freak!” Lucas parodies his choreographer, himself. Dad-monster shuffles and swears—“Pigs Arse yer Cunt!”—his fingers wobbling.

The demanding range of performance skills is delivered with assurance, seamlessly moving between dance and dialogue, between multiple strands of narrative: creator/creature, father/son, lover/beloved, choreographer/performer. But skirting the truly monstrous, monsters of domestic pettiness prevail, pivoting on loss of self esteem. For me, only his monstrous father evoked the kind of revulsion and pity that challenged.

Is this self expression made art or an effort to make artistic capital out of a surplus of self? Is this monster a power-freak manipulating us into condoning and approving of his monstrosity? Surely perpetual irony cancels itself out. By setting up and pulling down, Lucas wants to have his cake and eat it too: brave, raw exposé and self-absorbed relationship therapy. Whilst compellingly performed, I feel Lucas relies on a sophisticated complicity from his audience, implicating us in his revenge tactic no. 5: to “analyse his relationship breakdown in a performance piece.” How monstrously decadent!

Triple Bill, Bleeding-A-Part, director/designer Shaaron Boughen, writer Michael Richards, dancers Tim Davey, Fiona Malone; Fugu San, created and performed by Lisa O’Neill; Monster, created and performed by Brian Lucas; l’attitude 27°5, curators Zane Trow, Gail Hewton: Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, September 5-17

According to the program for the 4 free performances given by Oscillate Youth Dance Collective, Hobart is Australia’s only capital city whose university does not offer tuition in the discipline of dance. While there are private teachers and classes, for many dance students Year 12 is where the formal training and experimentation stop.

The consequent lack of resources and opportunities—and of avenues to perform and present “dance as an accessible conceptual medium”—are motives behind the formation of Oscillate (Kyra and Rachel Pybus, Jasmin Rattray, Jessica Rumbold, Tullia Chung-Tilley, Edwina Morris). The group acknowledges the inspiration and support provided by dance teacher Lesley Graham.

The dancers share a background in dance/contemporary movement/choreography studies (Years 11 & 12) at Rosny College and have recent experience in the Hobart Fringe Festival, plus individual work with dance companies Tasdance and Par Avion. Scarabs was danced and choreographed by all Oscillate members and devised in partnership with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery that has, over the past few years, presented a number of innovative dance works with related exhibitions.

The 30-minute performance features ingenious costuming (inspired by the Museum’s extensive beetle collection), a unique, custom-mixed soundtrack that is more an eclectic mix of sounds and rhythms than music (“stomachy sounds” as one dancer put it at the post-performance forum) and a simple and effective lighting design. The piece worked well as a site-specific dance installation, responding to its intimate gallery space.

The work is deceptively simple, with barefoot performers in costumes suggesting the iridescent winged surface of the scarab beetle. Each dancer enters with her back to the audience. As she turns, she is revealed to be ‘gagged’ by a beetle-shaped mouthpiece, its sexual and violent overtones inescapable, even if perhaps not part of the ensemble’s intentions. The scarab beetle theme and the group’s fascination with the museum’s displays give this essentially abstract dancework a strong coherency.

Initially, subtle movements are made in synch; then the choreography expands with each dancer performing her own variations, while still reacting to and with the rest of the troupe. The collaborative choreography is, just occasionally, derivative, but overall the gestures and sequences are attention-getting—good, athletic contemporary dance. The beetle theme is well maintained, giving the performance an other-worldliness wisely free of movement mimicry.

The standard of dance is high; it is evident that some Oscillate dancers have experience in gymnastics and aerobics. A highlight is one dancer who has virtually mastered the knack of barefoot pointe dancing.

The printed program is a useful extra detail to a very professional work, the catalogue essay expanding on the dancers’ concerns and inspirations. With its genesis in a ‘brainstorming’ creative process and the product of 4 months’ collaborative work, Scarabs is a worthwhile project successfully brought to fruition and clearly much enjoyed by a responsive, standing-room-only audience.

Scarabs, performance installation by emerging choreographers, Oscillate Youth Dance Collective, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, July 20 – 23

The Ends of Things, your new work for the Melbourne Festival has an intriguing title. Where did it come from?

Originally from a composer I worked with, Jad McAdam. It was his idea and it grew out of a sound idea really, to do with creating a score from sounds of finality. Like the end of a record or the tone after someone has hung up on you on the telephone, or when a film reel comes to an end and you hear a clacking noise. There are a lot of different sounds of things running out and ending and television going off the air. So rather than in a huge cataclysmic, catastrophic way it was more like that empty hollow sense of endings.

That was difficult because I did a development period on the piece earlier in the year and I thought that I would use all these gestures of finality and I’d set up these situations that had this emotional tone of endings. But it became extremely difficult. I realised that to create a sense of endings without anything going before it was almost impossible for me. Also I found it very, very draining and found myself not really being able to get into the process that much during the development period which was in January. So I let myself wander a bit with it and get off the track a little bit and just try out a few things, but that ended fairly inconclusively. Since then I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve developed more of an overall structure, which will have more of a beginning, middle and end. And within that structure these little final moments will present themselves. So they’ll set the emotional tone of the piece; but there will be a greater end as well, almost like the end of a narrative.

Yes, well it does. And that was one of the other things that was worrying me about it, actually. I didn’t really want to make a piece that was completely dark. But having thought about it, I’ve sort of made Trevor Patrick the central character. He has this very dry, interesting sense of humour and he’s sort of like a character. It’s almost like his life. The dancers represent more the workings of his mind or his past or his fears—they are more like his psychological state. So I think it will probably end up being fairly bleak in the final scene but there will be quite a bit of humour before that, slightly black humour, but it won’t all be dirge-y and doom ridden.

Yes, I think that will be in there, definitely, especially in the first scene where we set him up in his little environment. Yes, but I won’t give too much away.

Is there a narrative thread that runs through this at all or is it predominantly an abstract work?

No, it is actually quite narrative, much more narrative than works I’ve done previously. So I feel like I’m trying to have both worlds in this work. I do have this narrative character who is isolated pretty much for the first two sections of the work. We pick him up at a certain time in his life where he’s become quite withdrawn from the world and he’s obviously a fairly sensitive character who can’t really deal with the pace of things outside of his own room. He’s at a point where his isolation and cutting off from people is just starting to cause his world to disintegrate and he is losing connection with reality. Hence things running out. The Ends of Things ultimately relates to the end of control or reason, so he’s losing it a bit. It is a bit bleak in that way.

It also sounds interesting that you are actually tackling that way of making work.

I think I’ve always felt when I’ve made works that I was entering a psychological state or getting into a particular zone of psychology. But I haven’t actually defined a character before as specifically as I am this time. Well, I suppose that when I did Robbery Waitress on Bail, I wanted that mood of the suburban teenager and that sort of frustration and hopelessness. But it was more through just an emotional tone. This time I’m being a little more specific with myself about who this person is. So I suppose it’s more like a writer would research their character. And I don’t know what’s going to happen because I haven’t worked this way before and it will be interesting to see if that’s helpful or hindering when it comes to this next rehearsal period and creating the movement.

Yes, I want it to transfer to the audience, to be quite simple and straightforward, which is something I haven’t really done before. I mean I think I was quite happy for people to enter a more dramatic realm but I wasn’t too fussed if they got exactly what was going on. In fact, it wasn’t necessary for me at all. This time I’m really interested in them knowing what the situation is. I still haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to get people to realise that the other dancers are what’s going on inside his head. Because, I don’t know, maybe you need these really obvious voiceovers or signs coming down or someone coming out and making an announcement. I hope not.

Is this new interest something that’s been prompted by making work in Australia?

It’s partly to do with making work here in Australia because when I made work in New York my main audience were other choreographers and dancers or other people from the art world who really easily accept abstraction and don’t feel threatened by it at all. If they don’t understand it they’re quite happy to make an attempt to engage with it anyway. And that was great except that you do start to work within a bubble in a way that’s not really connected to anybody else. It’s art for artists in a way.

There has been a lot of talk about making what we do accessible to a wider audience.

Yes, but I think a lot of that has to do with wanting to sell more tickets and create more income, which is not my main interest. I find it quite challenging for myself to actually be clearer about what I mean and not be afraid for people to know what it is. So that you are a bit more exposed, you are a bit more revealed if you actually say it straight out. I think a lot of artists are afraid of that. I think I have been.

The Ends of Things, choreographer Lucy Guerin, composer Franc Tetaz, dancers Ros Warby, Trevor Patrick, Brett Daffy, Stephanie Lake; design Dorotka Sapinska, dramaturg Tom Wright; Lucy Guerin Company, Melbourne International Festival, National Theatre, October 20-28.

English playwright Martin Crimp’s late 80’s satire on Thatcherite conservatism, Play With Repeats, has been reprised in a quietly effective production at the ADT’s Balcony Theatre. In a one-off production, director Chris Drummond guided his strong ensemble through the bleak netherworld of the central character Anthony Steadman (played with naïve fanaticism by Geoff Revell). Steadman inhabits a limbo of desolate urban spaces like some latter day Candide, energised by a kind of intuitive optimism that “everything is possible.”

Steadman is an amiable, unambitious low-tech worker in a hi-fi factory whose blind faith belies the deep cynicism and depressive fear of most of the characters that he comes into contact with: embittered fellow travellers at the bar—Kate (Jacqueline Cook) and Nick (Justin Moore), and Steadman’s harried boss Franky (effectively doubled by Cook). This white-collar subsistence world is stripped of meaning by economic rationalism, where cynicism is the strongest bulwark against despair. Steadman tries to further understand his world by employing the services of Lamine, a shabby, irascible clairvoyant (played with shuffling pomposity by Phil Spruce). But Steadman’s utopian alternative to the post-industrial wasteland he inhabits is revealed to be a nostalgic neo-Victorian conservatism connoted by visions of grand houses and sweeping gardens. His real nature is finally revealed when he tramples the only real possibility for human warmth and companionship held out by Barbara (interpreted with fragile sincerity by Cathy Adamek).

With some great jazz by music director Julian Ferraretto, and effective, functional stage design by Gaelle Mellis, Play with Repeats still has metaphoric resonance today, giving us pause to reflect on what we have lost or gained through the past 10 years of fundamental economic change. Who has benefited from that change and at what cost to community values?

Community and attendant notions of connection and alienation are explored in 2 other recent arts events in Adelaide. Piercing the Skin and Body Art have peeled back epidermis Australis with striking results.

The human body as post-structural icon scarified by the twin forces of identity and power is a popular theme in contemporary arts and culture. “The body is both a playground and a battlefield; the site where the greatest tenderness occurs and the most brutal inequality is acted out,” says Vanessa Baird of the New Internationalist-inspired Piercing The Skin, a performance collage of impressive quality and diversity performed last month by Junction Theatre and Leigh Warren Dancers.

The companies jointly commissioned 5 distinctly different writers (Rodney Hall, Stephen House, Eva Johnson, Verity Laughton and Paul Rees) to interpret Baird’s sentiment. The result was a series of vignettes, each exploring broad connections of time and space, language and subcultures in an eclectic interplay of styles. Eva Johnson’s The Body Born Indigenous 1 & 2 took the form of a piquant ode to identity and sense of place, while Paul Rees chose a monologue for Spare Parts (1&2), a mordant apologia for body-part farming (the ultimate rationalization of the individual?). Verity Laughton created a vivid poetic dialogue for Fox, a forensic whodunit spanning 1000 years. Stephen House’s expressionistic Walk In the Dirt and Rodney Hall’s The Self, a satiric examination of gender and difference, rounded out the conceptual kaleidoscope.

Rather than appearing a stylistic hotpotch, I thought Piercing the Skin achieved a real sense of playful connection—a spirit of co-operation that has spilt over into future joint projects mooted for the 2 companies.

Skin piercing took on a decidedly more permanent connotation in Body Art, an ethnographic survey of body decoration at the Museum of South Australia. Representations of traditional cultural insignia from Pacific nations such as Samoan tatua and Maori ta moto are juxtaposed with voyeuristic images of urban tattooing, piercing and scarification. While I appreciate the death of curatorial narrative, I found the thematic progress of the exhibition rather too open ended, relying on sensation (S&M, fetishism) rather than substantial analysis. Camp irony abounds in some of the contrasts, such as the comparison between tribal men wearing restrictive belts and Kylie Minogue sporting her version. In all, Body Art goes a long way in opening up debate surrounding the psycho-sexual pleasures in adornment and cultural initiation but I was troubled by its celebration of a particular stream of underground counterculture by making superficial comparisons with traditional images and material. I also wondered why cosmetic surgery was included, but not surgical scarring?

Ironically, in a small town like Adelaide, neither Piercing The Skin nor Body Art seemed to know of the other’s existence! Better communication spells more lateral audience crossover, which is always handy when you’re doing good contemporary theatre.

Play With Repeats, writer Martin Crimp, director Chris Drummond, lighting Mark Pennington, music Julian Ferraretto, design consultant Gaelle Mellis, Balcony Theatre.

Piercing The Skin, Junction Theatre Company and Leigh Warren Dancers, directed by Geoff Crowhurst and Leigh Warren; designers Kerru Reied and Dean Hills, music David Hirschfelder and Collage; The Space

Body Art, National Museum and the South Australian Museum, Museum of South Australia, July 15–September 30.

Stompin Youth’s latest performance embodies the energy of dancers in the process of becoming primed for life. Artistic director Jerril Rechter has situated Primed in the Inveresk Railyards Tool Annex—a large and echoing workshop constructed from galvanised iron. Daylight chinks through gashes in the walls.

Primed is a site-specific performance that requires the audience to move to 4 locations. This would be a manoeuvre of (t)error for any director lacking Rechter’s certainty. Stompin Youth effectively exploit the integrity of each space to perform a dynamically diverse, yet unified sequence of dance.

Site 1—Arcade. The beginning of Darrin Verhagen’s sound score evokes a Tibetan prayer bowl resonating pure sound from its rim. Two skateboarders mirror this effect by circling a huddle of dancers lying on the floor. Four women enter, each with a flashing strobe attached to their belt. Chelsea Billet demonstrates stylised movements which build to a frenetic pitch as the dancers respond to her theme. They grip, release and fall, alternating a kickbox movement with a Zen bow-pull action of the arms. A strobe is dropped and lies displaced, winking at a red ball clamped in mechanical arms that hover menacingly. The dancers acknowledge this threatening presence with alternating gestures of homage, longing and uncertainty. Sixteen dancers maintain the focus and patterns of connection as Jan Hector and David Murray’s lighting spills across dance to unrelenting dynamic and pulsing sound.

Site 2—Bedroom. Long strands of multi-coloured milk-crates dangle from the roof. Once released, the crates become seats for the audience. The area is in darkness and a slowed video sequence by Marcus Khan (from the original video Destination) establishes the elements of flirting, love and lust. Khans’ languid images highlight an evocative interplay of limbs and bodies while handmaidens unroll red and blue quilt covers onto randomly slanted beds. The actions of 4 entwined couples counterpoint dancers who sit or move alone. In a world saturated with commodity images of sex, this uncompromising sequence evokes the permutations of sexuality and corporeal codes. Stompin Youth dance the space of desire with authority and maturity.

Site 3—Scanner. A corner of the workshop is dramatically steeped with white light. Sun seeps through the corrugated walls. Five male dancers revel in their strength and potency, testing their physical limits in vigorous duo and trio combinations. The work of Adam Wheeler and Cheyne Mitchell (in his first performance with the company) is robust and skilful. These dancers self-launch from the walls with ballistic force. The operatic voice emerging from Verhagen’s score, and the tracking light grid accentuate the power of this performance. A feature of this site is the dancers’ use of the corrugated walls and framework to enhance the percussive and choreographic effects. The dancers demonstrate a subtle combination of physicality and vulnerability. They realise something other than strength is needed to survive the whispering static of their own uncertainties.

Site 4—House. This site is the most enigmatic and challenging for a school audience. An empty carriage gradually reveals faces looking out onto dark ground. The train arrives, dancers emerge then re-enter the carriage. Each compartment reveals an upstairs and downstairs level. Hector and Murray’s stunning lighting emphasises split panels that reflect and accentuate different body parts—hips, hands, heads and shoulders. When the lower level passengers exit there is an intriguing optical effect of surreal disembodiment.

Stompin Youth is a young company experienced in choreographic collaboration and working in multi-medial environments. Primed is a sophisticated production that successfully meets the demands of the workshop annex and the transitions across 4 sites. Launceston is fortunate to have a company that so effectively showcases the vitality and excitement of dance in a non-conventional theatre space.

Primed, Stompin Youth Dance Company in association with the Tasmanian Department of Education, artistic director/choreographer Jerril Rechter, choreographers/performers Cassie Anderson, Emma Anglesay, Sheona Anglesey, Claire Barker, Chelsea Billett, Rachelle Blakely, Mark Brazendale, Jo Briginshaw, Sally Anne Charles, Lilly Deeth, Elizabeth Elsby, Eve Flaherty, Sarah Hankey, Lauree Harris, Kylie Jackson, Tanya Lohrey, Kate MacGregor, Kathryn McKenzie, Cheyne Mitchell, Amalia Patourakis, Chris Philpot, Sandy Rapson, Ingrid Reynolds, Cory Spears, Lyndsay Spencer, Natasha Tabart, Nicola Watson, Adam Wheeler and Linda Voumard; composer Darrin Verhagen, designer Simon Terril, dramaturg Vanessa Pigrum, lighting Jen Hector & David Murray, video/documentary Marcus Khan; Inveresk Railyards Tool Annex, Launceston, August 31-September 2.

I’m part of a large organising committee including people like Annemarie Jonson, and John Tonkin. I’m helping out with the exhibition components. I’ve recently finished by PhD which looks at artists using Artificial Life because essentially that’s the theme of this futureScreen.

The right man at the right time in the right place. How is the theme realised?

It’s been taken on in a broad way. Alife is a quite coherent little scientific discipline with its own conferences and papers and journals and there is quite a lot of art that draws directly on the techniques of that scientific culture. On the other hand, the idea of artificial life is much broader than that and embraces all kinds of re-engineerings of life including biotechnology and medical technologies; it also filters into artificial intelligence and robotics. All those things are broader than Alife as a discipline but all of them are involved in futureScreen 00.

The core event is a forum that spans technoscience, creative practice and cultural thought. So in the last one, which was about avatars, we had technologists who were building software to make avatars and people who were building virtual worlds from the technology, IT and commercial industry point of view. We also had lots of artists who were doing the same sort of thing. Similarly with Alife, we’ve got people who are researchers in the field. We’ve done incredibly well and got Christopher Langton, the guy who basically founded Artificial Life. He’s coming to give a keynote, which is fantastic.

During the early 80s. Alife defines itself by distinguishing itself from Artificial Intelligence. It came about through a hunch that AI was basically going about things the wrong way by trying to start with intelligence as the object that needed simulating. The basic intuition of Alife is why don’t we start with something simpler and see if we can work out how living systems work. The key approach of Alife is to think that the intelligence will pop up out of the life once the life is put together in the right way.

Over the years we’ve seen life being generated and mutated on computer screens.

It’s an obsession but it’s also quite a well-established tradition in the electronic arts. This is quite a strong thread, which almost parallels the science. I think of it as a generative urge and an urge for automatism, if that’s the right word, for the automatic, for the thing that does its own thing. I guess you can trace it back to kinetic art and systems art in the 60s if not well before that. To me that’s what’s fascinating about this. Artists are taken with it because they’re interested in exactly those aims. So they take up these techniques from the scientific field and start tinkering with them…

On the other hand there are things I have problems with about it—things like organicist ideas about the wholeness of the work or the work being some sort of perfect functioning unit or ideas about the “living” work. That’s the whole modernist tradition which all of this stuff is really involved with, I think. But when it works well it sidesteps that.

All kinds of ways. We’ve got some beautiful robotic work. An American artist called Kenneth Rinaldo for many years has been building robotic systems. He calls them a “confluence” between technological and biological systems. They’re robotic arms but the structural material is grapevines with delicate little wire and pulley articulations. The work’s called Autopoiesis and consists of 14 of these arms; we’ve got 8 of them, each about 3 metres long. They hang from the ceiling, sense each other’s location and sort of flock around. They also sense the location of people walking around in the room and they twist and turn and sing to each other, using telephone tones.

It’s huge. It’s come fresh from the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki who commissioned it. It’s a piece of straight Alife in the sense that it’s using all of the basic techniques from Artificial Life to do with putting lots of simple units together and watching them interact in order to make something more complex, something emergent happen.

With Ken’s work and a lot of the other work it’s a kind of involvement of the environment, the work is sensing itself and sensing changes within itself. It’s really the setting in place of a system that is richly interconnected both with itself and with its environment. So it’s reacting and that is, I suppose, where the impression of life-likeness or autonomy comes from, from the complexity and the patterned nature of those responses.

Autopoiesis is at the Australian Centre for Photography. Also at the ACP is Michele Barker’s new work Praeternatural which is a very luscious, interactive CD-ROM-based work about the engineering of a being, a build-your-baby scenario. There’s also an Australian group called Tissue Culture who make tiny artworks out of bits of living tissue—tiny postage stamp sized bits of scaffolding with actual living stuff growing on it. That should be interesting to see.

Then opening during October at Artspace are 4 other works. Two of my favourite Alife artists, Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen, are relatively unknown in the electronic arts world because they come out of the contemporary European gallery scene. We have 2 works of theirs. One is called IMA Traveller, which is a computer-driven video projection piece, very very simple. It looks like you’re diving into a field of multi-coloured clouds and the clouds advance towards you and keep differentiating and you keep diving in and in and in. It’s a kind of zoom that never stops. But it’s made by a little cellular structure. They call it “pixel consciousness”—each of these pixels looks around at its neighbours and then splits into a bunch of other pixels. So it’s like a microbial mat of pixels.

Nothing apart from itself. It looks around in the picture plane. Each pixel looks at its neighbours. The work borrows an idea from Artificial Life called cellular automata, a kind of computational system involving cells which do things based on what their neighbours are doing. The classic is a work called The Game of Life by John Conway. This one is really great because it has cells but the cells actually split. Conventionally, they stay as static units, but these sort of split and push each other out. So it’s a much more dynamic structure. It gives a beautiful result. As a sensual thing, it’s gorgeous. I’m really excited about seeing that on a big projection screen. The other work of theirs, called Breed, uses similar cellular splitting process but in 3 dimensions. The artists are sending out some intricate little polyester resin computer manufactured forms. Their work is interesting because while it’s very beautiful, it involves a kind of blankness, a total removal of artistic volition from a process of morphogenesis.

Yes. It’s like the artists are asking how can we remove our aesthetic decision-making and just make varieties of stuff. One of the most complex works in the show is Life Space by a pair of European artists based in Japan, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. It’s an artificial ecosystem where the creatures live in a thicket of vegetation and you can interact with them on a video screen. Interestingly, the way that you generate more creatures is by typing text into the system. You can send it an e-mail, which it will interpret —this is the genetic code for a new organism and based on the characters in your e-mail it will generate some new creature. Then other people can log into the site and see what the creatures are doing. You can encourage them to get together and have babies or stop your favourite creature from being eaten by the others. Stuff like that. It’s a play garden.

No. All the interaction level is quite fluent, quite intuitive. Also in the exhibition there’s a listening station for a site I’m curating called Autonomous Audio, which is a collection of audio pieces by artists using Artificial Life and other complex generative systems. Everything from conventional Artificial Life techniques of cellular automata and simulated genetics through to more open-ended physical feedback systems and other complex forms. That’s at Artspace and we’re streaming audio on line as well as mpeg downloads. It includes some interesting Australian computer music—academia-based computer musicians in the art music mode—and then some people who are more experimental media hackers but often using similar processes and coming up with stuff that in some cases sounds quite similar to old school computer music. There’s a piece by Oren Ambarchi and Martin Ng who are local improv. merchants—a beautiful piece using feedback systems running through turntables.

Then there’s the forum event—another all star lineup. There’s Langton, as well as Tom Ray, another Alife pioneer who will be doing a remote presentation, and Cynthia Brezeal, who builds “sociable robots” with Rodney Brooks at MIT. We also have Steve Kurtz from the American group Critical Art Ensemble, who makes a strong political critique of biotechnology. There are some interesting AI people. There’s Claude Samut, who was involved in the Robo Soccer Tournament with the winning team of Sony AIBO dogs; Sony’s little artificial pets. There’s also some good local people like Stephen Jones and Jon McCormack, an artist who has been working in this area longer than most people. Oh, and also, we have Don Colgan from the Australian Museum who’s involved in the Thylacene project, hoping to clone or revive the Thylacene from preserved genetic material. That’ll be fascinating.

dLux media arts, futureScreen00, Symposium, Powerhouse Museum, October 27 – 29, Exhibitions: Artspace, October 5-29, ACP (Australian Centre for Photography), October 20 – November 20, (www.dlux.org.au/fs00).

Acts of Language production, in the place of the page project Construction Phase 3

An Australian novelist reports on his UK residency to Incubation, an international conference on writing and the internet organised and hosted by trAce International Online Writing Community at Nottingham Trent University.

In this presentation I attempted to improvise a hypertext-like performance through a number of (also improvisatory) strategies. These were: 1. sitting among the audience facing forward and without making eye contact; 2. shifting restlessly from seat to seat (8 had been placed in an arc for an earlier panel) at the front of the auditorium; 3. reading to individual audience members and showing the place in the written text by following with my forefinger; 4. sitting on the knees of an audience member; 5. reading to individual audience members; 6. giving copies of my novels to audience members; 7. climbing over chairs stacked precariously at the rear of the auditorium; 8. crawling on hands and knees under the legs of rows of audience members, then springing into the air and shouting “Asparagus”; 9. teaching Israeli folkdancing (specifically, Havu Lanu Yayin Yayin—this involved the entire audience, and necessitated an interlude of about 4 minutes, after which I continued the talk somewhat out of breath); 10. wandering up and down the auditorium’s centre or side aisles; 11. striding along the centre aisle patting audience members on the shoulders in time with the words; 12. informing a baby how my own 2 year old had insisted I go straight to Teletubbies websites and how I’d often have to switch back and forth between my work-in-progress and these children’s sites if I wanted to get work done. These actions are indicated in parentheses where they occurred in the talk, as best as I can remember.

I was interviewed for the trAce Writer-in-Residency via videoconference (1). I sat in a room at the University of NSW and Sue Thomas and 2 other interviewers occupied a similar space at Nottingham Trent, although because of the camera framing, I could only see 2 of them at any time. During this interview, Thomas was quick to incorporate a definition of the word “flesh” widely circulating in this conference. Flesh is no longer a burden for our immortal souls to bear for a mere lifetime, but a guise which we may wear or discard at our discretion, alternating it with the virtual as a phase or layer or link in internet era identity.

I was flesh writer-in-residence at trAce from June to December 1999 (2). I shipped my meat to the UK by aeroplane, taking up space, eating aeroplane food from plastic aeroplane trays, leaving the plastic covers to become an international waste disposal problem, to become landfill in Singapore, Dubai and London where the plane touched down, sucked in fuel, emitted fumes and unloaded consumed and unconsumable international air traveller waste.

My friend McKenzie Wark (3), the writer and (I hope he’ll excuse me for saying this) polemicist for the postmodern, borrows the term “vector” to describe flows of information, especially in relation to the operation of international media. The term implies both direction and mass (4). Anyone taking an international flight can observe the contents of their aerodynamic cylinder, 300 or 400 brain-boxes loaded with prejudices and ambitions with regard to the proper modes for conducting trade, government, travel and conversation, preconceptions and hopes for aesthetics, relationships and money schemes, as the flight arcs over irrelevant places (10), totally aimed at destination.

(8) There has been a lot of reference at this conference to the rhizome as a model for internet story-telling. I don’t know if this theory holds water, but I’d like to suggest as an alternative, the sponge (3). The sponge is a collective of semi-autonomous cells, each of which has its own function yet contributes to the whole. It is possible to separate the cells by sieving. When brought near each other, they are then able to reconstitute the total organism.

I drove up the M1 from London to Nottingham, and I was in residence—or perhaps I should trace it back a little earlier—from the moment I saw the massive cement cooling towers of Nottingham’s coal-power generators (7). Does a narrative place begin with the sighting of its iconic representation, even if one has not yet discovered that the landmark is iconic?

The flesh residency could be mapped along the length of this room: (11) June, July, August, September, October, November, and December. But to do that, I would need to remodel it in the Caesarean manner: I came, I saw, I overcame a number of minor technical difficulties and showed various people and groups in the East Midlands ways in which they might find certain aspects of internet culture and/or content interesting, useful, engaging, engulfing whereas others preferred other modes of research or creative production.

Dear Sir:
Having had your name and e-mail address from the Internet, we avail ourselves of the opportunity to write to you and to see if we can extablid (sic) your name and E-mail address from the Internet, we avail ourselves of the opportunity to write to you and to see if we can extablish (sic) business relations with you. We are Haimen Sihai Plant Extracts Co., Ltd., Jiangsu, China, specialising in astraglus extracts. We shall be glad to send you quotation and samples on receipt of your specific inquiry.

We await for your early reply with keen interest.
With best regards,
Yours faithfully,
Shirley ffield Sanford.

I was a relative newby, had built only 1 small and simple website, but had a longstanding interest in non-linear narrative, recognised by reviews such as this one of my first novel Tourism: “The back cover blurb calls it a novel, but you might as well call it a gazebo or a stirrup pump” (6).

If you’d asked me in June I would have said (5): I find the internet, in its unrestricted, ungated, chaotic, non-hierarchised, improper, uncatalogued, misspelt, garbage-filled, shit-strewn, amateurly built, poorly argued, jargon-ridden, linguistically overloaded, fanatical, self-important, trivial, pornographic, commercial, hit-driven, disorganised, memory-swallowing, time-stealing, left-branching, paranoid, unfocused, meandering, self-promoting, meta-generic, error-message-prone, window-popping, security-promising, satisfaction-guaranteeing, new-age-philosophising, loss-making, anything-goes, direction-finding, repetitious, unreliable, unbelievable, incredible, sex-life-saving, breast-expanding, money-throwing, pharmaceutical-flogging, comparison-shopping, bad-poetry-propounding, more-is-more-aestheticising, history-revising, spin-doctoring, repetitious, unreliable, neurotically generous and sometimes beautiful incarnations to be a useful resource for the understanding of otherwise difficult-to-imitate institutional languages, and their appropriation in my writing for various media.

I spent a good proportion of my residency travelling around the East Midlands (10)—the counties of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, and the tiny breakaway enclave of Rutland—introducing internet possibilities to writing and other groups such as journalism students, recovering mental health patients, arts workers and librarians.

(9) One difference between online residency and flesh residency was that participants in the former were almost entirely self-selecting. They chose to participate in discussions on the webboard and for the most part chose to contribute to Christy Sheffield Sanford’s My Millennium (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sanford/my_millennium/presents.html – expired) or Alan Sondheim’s loveandwar (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim – expired) or to my Speedfactory (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/cohen/speedfactory/speedfactory.htm> projects – expired) (10).

On that TV program-of-record, Sky News, it was reported the other night that although internet connection in Britain has doubled in the last Very Short Time (this story shows up on free-to-air every 6 weeks, every 3 weeks on Sky), some 15 million Britons have no intention of ever going on line and do not regard the internet as either relevant or necessary (5). I worked with many of these people.

While this produced some mutually frustrating interchanges, it also opened up surprising possibilities. One of the projects to which I had been most looking forward was the chance to work with retired and redundant coalminers. The East Midlands was a primordial site for the Industrial Era, the first resistance to it (by Luddites), and the major site of its end, hurried by the anti-union rabidity of the Thatcher government (3).

I was informed that a group of ex-miners wanted to write their history and stories online. Half way through the first session, a journalist rang to inquire how it was that an Australian novelist came to write a book about coalmining in Derbyshire (3). I was surprised by this project to say the least, but at this stage cannot entirely rule it out. The miners had been told I was conducting research for a book, and that it would be very useful for me if some would show up to assist with this (5). This meant that the most helpful miners, and some members of a writers’ group composed largely of ex-miners’ wives, chose to come along, but that none had any interest in the internet. So, in the manner of farce, I’d gone along to make their lives better and they’d shown up to improve mine.

We did manage to find material, 19th century coalmining poetry, coalmining and mining history discussion lists (3). More importantly, people brought out their archives, writing labours of love and 60 year-old catalogues of mining machinery. (Some of this is now online at www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/cohen/front.htm – expired.)

Meantime in that refuge of calm, the internet, various people were teaching me more advanced skills. I’d been trying to make a MOO-based chatterbot say witty remarks, though it had come out more like Peter Handke’s theatre piece Insulting the Audience (3). Later, trAce member Pauline Masurel and I constructed duelling sestina bots (12). (They’re currently in the “trace” room at LinguaMOO www.lingua.utdallas.edu – [expired] and are named balagan and clamjamphrie.)

Christy generously suggested ways of improving my page-building skills, suggestions I abused to the degree that I became notorious for having built one of the ugliest pages in trAce (according to the Arts Council of England’s Dispatches newsletter). Alan invited me to contribute to loveandwar. Instead (using a very simple Markov Chaining program), I remixed an Act from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with extracts from The CIA World Factbook to produce what may be the ultimate in paranoid and bureaucratic Italian Romance (10).

In November, with Terri-ann White’s assistance, I ran a superfast version of the collaborative e-mail writing exercise Speedfactory, a project devised in its long form by Wark and John Kinsella (5). In its original form, 1 partner e-mailed 300 words to a second, who had 48 hours to e-mail back. These exchanges seemed to sustain about 15 or 20 “rounds”. In the trAce version, participants fired 50 words at each other 20 minutes apart. (The Kinsella/Wark/White/Cohen version will be published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press, hopefully within the next year.)

It’s 7 months since the end of the residency, but I’m still involved with trAce (3), working with poet Mahendra Solanki, journalist Kaylois Henry and UK-based New Perspectives Theatre Company on another of Thomas’s wild and hopefully achievable ideas, the HOME project, which, like me, is investigating various forms of dislocation.

Incubation, international conference on writing and the internet, trAce International Online Writing Community, Nottingham Trent University, UK, July 10-12.

Tertiary institutions everywhere are setting up new media departments, their computer labs bulging with students eager to skill up for the 21st century in which it seems everyone wants to be a web designer.
Courtney Love, recently writing about music pirating, posted to a list serv:

I have a 14-year-old niece. She used to want to be a rock star. Before that she wanted to be an actress. As of 6 months ago, what do you think she wants to be when she grows up? What’s the glamorous, emancipating career of choice? Of course, she wants to be a web designer. It’s such a glamorous business!

Glamorous? Well certainly ubiquitous, the landscape is littered with URLs. Bus and taxi backs point to insurance websites, graffiti points to net.art sites, Telstra has back buttons on their billboards, the accepted interface norm dumbs down another notch. The web is the area where students know they can get work right now, in spite of some employers’ proud boasts of huge burn-out rates; if you look remotely like a plug’n’play pixel monkey, you’re in (for the moment anyway). We wonder about a time when every business has a website, there’s a glut of people out there with web skills who can’t get work and nobody knows how to bang a nail into a piece of wood, or use a welder.

According to Kathy Cleland, new media curator and lecturer:
There is a huge student demand for courses at tertiary institutions which have anything to do with multimedia and this is increasing exponentially. An introductory multimedia course I taught at the beginning of 1999 had 30 students; the same course this year had 95 students. There is also a tendency in full fee paying institutions to over-enrol students to maximise profits which leads to very large tutorial sizes and consequently to staff burnout with huge marking loads. I have been teaching at an institution (half university owned and half corporate) that has 4 semesters per year so there is also very little time for research and skills upgrading.

The difficulties in teaching digital media arise from the breadth and scope of the area. Due to its hybrid nature and links with cultural studies, communication theory, visual design, visual arts, computer science, film studies etc, new media projects typically require a vast skillset and cover a range of considerations which are not necessarily able to be delivered within the one faculty (as lines are currently drawn) or indeed by the one student. This is why it is particularly exciting for us that the School of Design, University of Western Sydney, Nepean is potentially merging with the Communications and Media School. Students currently can choose to undertake subjects across school lines, but it is difficult to “synthesise” school approaches. As new media becomes less new and more consolidated in its own right, we will see some of the moving targets come into focus enough to better track them.

The pedagogical dilemma is the fact that the ‘mission statement’ doesn’t yet exist. There is no agreed canon. It’s too early to be able to draw on a history of interactive media, as we have for film and TV. But then again, that’s often the attraction. It’s new and uncharted, with a plethora of opportunities for innovation.

There is a strong trend towards online education, which makes life easier, or at least more efficient for both students and teachers. List servs can be an extremely useful teaching apparatus, enabling the whole group to communicate their ideas to each other, and also for lecturers to give feedback easily. Online education is going to be a huge growth area and will ultimately challenge the traditional university structure. The fees charged for these courses are much lower than current student fees and you can do a course with the university of your choice anywhere in the world. There are also a lot of corporations looking at education as a vast, extremely lucrative untapped market—so education is not going to remain the exclusive property of universities for much longer. A friend who recently moved to Canada to take up a university teaching position wrote describing a rather dystopian vision of future online education:

Moving to Canada was a mistake because the university I came to is trying really hard to be like a corporate online course farm…I have to be managed and work in a cubicle.

Here it is often visual artists who are teaching digital media in design schools. Practitioners have a wide practical skillset acquired through an exploratory approach to self learning as well as from working in different roles on varied projects, and are experienced in collaborative working models. In our own practice, the aim is to teach people to integrate their creativity more deeply into the computer environment as well as to teach within a cultural context. We encourage practical teamwork as well as learning the toolset, which is an easier task in design than fine art. The fine art world, for all its postmodern rhetoric, is generally trapped in the modernist paradigm of artist as lone lone hero. Consider the promotion of young British artists (or YBAs as they are known) by the advertising firm/art collectors/government consultants, Saatchi and Saatchi, in London. These artists are like popstars, the more famous and controversial the more likely they are to sell their work. And now there are billboards at Heathrow airport of Tracey Emin selling Bombay Sapphire Gin. First artists become products to be promoted and, when famous enough, they can be used to sell other products.

New media artists tend to be critical of the current fine art institutions. We like to employ a hacker mentality in our approach not only to technology but systems in general, whether they be social systems or ‘the media’ themselves. Our interest in the area of new technologies is fuelled by a mixture of scepticism (who is excluded from technotopia and why would anyone want to live there anyway?) as well as enthusiasm for the playful possibilities of digital media. Our own work which includes the User Unfriendly Interface, Paranoid Interface and the Bio-Tek Kitchen game patch deconstructs current interface and game paradigms, subverting them to reveal that our experiences are being increasingly mediated by new technologies and that there are dangers hardwired into this trend.

At UWS we introduce students to different online and gaming cultures, cyberfeminism, hacktivism, and ‘Tactical Media’, which is the rather slippery term used to describe the practices of a loose alliance of international media theorists, artists, designers and activists. We also expose people to the enormous amount of interesting and playful work which is being made around the globe. Often what excites the students excites us and, as play and pleasure have always been an integral part of our work, we encourage people to do the same and sometimes get great results—work which can inspire and entertain us all.

Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski are artists and lecturers in new media at the School of Design, University of Western Sydney, Nepean. Their latest work Dream Kitchen is an interactive stop motion animation CD-ROM. See Working the Screen

Thanks to Robyn Stacey and Sarah Waterson (School of Design, UWS Nepean) and Brad Miller (College of Fine Arts, UNSW), for their valuable input into this article.

Find