A man in a car. Alone. For a whole film. Even more alone than Robert Pattinson’s Eric Packer on his existential slippery slope in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis. Tom Hardy’s Ivan Locke is a businessman. One phone call undoes him. He drives and drives, he phones, he talks, as career, family and psyche unravel. Acclaimed for direction, concept, camera work, sound design and above all performances—it was filmed in 10 days with Hardy working to iPad cues hidden from view and improvising—this is one of the most highly regarded British films of recent times after Jonathan Glazer’s rivetting Under the Skin. 8 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
DVD: Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl
This four-part series is engrossing and enlightening and should be aired on commercial TV networks in prime time—it’s that important at a time when most Australians have little understanding of Middle Eastern cultures, or their manifestation in Australia. The series traces Lebanese settlement in southwest suburban Sydney from the 1970s to the present, interviewing families, police officers, community leaders, former drug addicts and criminals and sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz. Along with its precursor Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta (2012), Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl is another important step towards understanding Australian culture of the 21st century. There are more steps to take. 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
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The focus of the 8th OzAsia Festival is on China’s Shandong Province, famed birthplace of Confucius and home to around 100 million people. A meeting place of ancient and modern trade routes and the location of culturally significant sites for Taoists, Buddhists and Confucians, Shandong’s historical legacy and agriculture- and natural resource-derived affluence are obliquely reflected in this year’s marquee productions Red Sorghum and Dream of the Ghost Story, by the Shandong-based companies Qingdao Song and Dance Theatre and Shandong Acrobatic Troupe, respectively.
Both are conservative, visually lavish works, seemingly model companions for the chatter about soft diplomacy and measurable cross-cultural benefit that inevitably orbits the festival. To the contrary, Mayu Kanamori’s ascetic docudrama Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens strove for verisimilitude in its unsentimental summoning of early 20th century Japanese-Australian ghosts, and Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental’s flawed but enterprising glance at Ibsen’s oeuvre, Ibsen in One Take, provided food for thought.
Red Sorghum
Adapted from the 1987 Chinese language novel of the same name, the balletic Red Sorghum is a vast undertaking—around 50 dancers under the direction of Ge Wang and Rui Xu propel Mo Yan’s complex, generation-spanning family saga towards its bloody climax set during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). There are unpleasantly nationalistic overtones by the time this point is reached, Japanese ‘devils’ bayoneting their way across the stage without the leavening effect of the novel’s viewpoints from both sides of the conflict. But there is no doubting the vitality and precision of the preceding two hours. Especially impressive in this regard are the lusty, though strictly gender-segregated, distillery and harvest set pieces that take in the novel’s central metaphor—the versatile sorghum grass—and the masterfully sinuous love duets between lead dancers Meng Ning and Fubo Sun. Yuan Cheng’s recorded score is more of a mixed bag, most successful when least bombastic (I wasn’t surprised to learn it had been taken to Hollywood for mixing and production). A suona horn, a Chinese folk instrument with a distinctive high pitch, is a lovely addition to the otherwise predominately Western musical palette that, like the production more generally, ends up a somewhat over-rich concoction.
Dream of the Ghost Story
Shandong Acrobatic Troupe’s Dream of the Ghost Story is similarly predicated on spectacle but is also driven by it rather than by narrative—its use of a Qing Dynasty fable about demonic intervention in a love affair between a fox fairy (Zhang Xu) and a human scholar (Guo Qinglong) is nominal, a lightweight scaffold for the 55-year-old company’s well-honed legerdemain. Liu Kedong’s set design consists of a series of telescoping, parchment-like archways that hint at Dream of the Ghost Story’s folkloric origins but leave most of the vast Festival Centre stage open for the ensuing, virtually unstopping acrobatic displays: hoop and aerial work, plate spinning, juggling with hands and feet, Chinese yo-yoing, gymnastics, contortion and balancing. It’s heady stuff—there are no safety nets, and Guo Sida and Du Weis’ full-bodied, rock-accented soundtrack ups the show’s winningly deceptive uninhibitedness, most memorably during the second half’s descent into the spirit world when massed, incandescent skeletons judder, twitch and stomp à la Michael Jackson’s Thriller. A shamelessly entertaining fusion of ancient Chinese variety art and contemporary Western excess.
Arisa Yura, Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens
Elise Derwin, courtesy Darwin Festival
Arisa Yura, Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens
Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens
The supernatural is also present in Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens, a lean documentary performance work that quietly seeks to rehabilitate the memory of Japanese-Australian businessman and photographer Yasukichi Murakami who died in a Victorian internment camp in 1944. Murakami (Kuni Hashimoto) appears as a ghost to Mayu (Arisa Yura), playwright Mayu Kanamori’s analogue within the play. Their relationship begins with him softly rebuking her for taking photographs without, as Kanamori phrases it in her program notes, “taking notice, making an effort to hold space in reverence, trusting and responding in humility.”
The chronological rift between Murakami and Mayu only becomes clear when, by way of demonstration, Murakami sets up his box camera and photographs unseen members of his young family in Broome. Beautiful, high-resolution projections of Murakami’s actual photographs of fellow Japanese immigrants and pearling crews appear throughout the production but the play makes it plain that a shadow remains over his career—many images it is thought he is responsible for, some of which today reside in the National Archives and grace the covers of notable works of history, remain uncredited to him.
Director Malcolm Blaylock and visual designer Mic Gruchy imbue what is in essence a love letter to an unjustly overlooked life with the same reverence for space and attentiveness to detail Murakami demands of Mayu’s photographs. To say that Blaylock employs naturalistic performance, film, projection and a live score (composed and performed by Terumi Narushima, and which employs both traditional Japanese and esoteric instruments) makes the work sound cluttered but it is, rather, a dramaturgically crystalline—and ultimately moving—meditation on place, photography and the politics of recognition. (See also page 6.)
Ibsen in One Take
Henrik Ibsen’s problem plays have long exerted a significant influence on the course of modern theatre in China. Indeed, it took a conference on the playwright’s work in the 1920s for a Chinese word to be coined to distinguish spoken word drama from that which was, traditionally, sung. Ibsen in One Take, written by Oda Fiskum and directed by Wang Chong, feels like both an expression of and a reaction against the country’s longstanding fascination with A Doll’s House, The Master Builder and Hedda Gabler. There are close echoes of and occasionally exactly duplicated dialogue from each of these plays. The lugubrious plot centres on four iterations of the same man, called simply Him: as a child (Yang Boxiong), a young man, an adult (both Li Jialong) and an old man (Tan Zongyuan) who, nearing the end of his life, is confined to a hospital bed and reduced to pondering his past to assuage the boredom. Brief, intimate scenes flavoured with Ibsen’s familiar high-tension domesticity are arrived at through flashbacks.
The scenes are filmed by an onstage two-man camera crew whose vision appears on a large screen overhanging the space (the screen also displays English translations of the Chinese language dialogue). There are big problems, not the least of which is the conceit of filming the live actors ‘in a single take.’ Without a clear rationale, the footage feels extraneous; I felt no compulsion to watch the screen except for the surtitles. It is strange, too, that opportunities for enriching the production through the filming are often either mishandled or missed altogether. For example, a potentially delightful moment when a spray bottle is used to simulate rain falling on two actors is squandered because the water doesn’t show up on the screen. The camera usually lingers in close proximity to the actors’ faces, its gaze failing to either explicate or surprise, and the elusiveness of Fiskum’s script—a dour, slightly rudderless construction which strays too far from Ibsen’s psychological insights to prove affecting—remains largely unalleviated by its presence.
8th OzAsia Festival 2014: Qingdao Song and Dance Theatre, Red Sorghum, Festival Theatre, 3 Sept; Shandong Acrobatic Troupe, Dream of the Ghost Story, Festival Theatre, 5-6 Sept; Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens, performers Arisa Yura, Kuni Hashimoto, Yumi Umiumare, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 9-10 Sept; Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental, Ibsen in One Take, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 16-17 Sept
Nothing thrills quite like the recovery of lost art works, radical re-assessments, the outing of forgers or, better, discovering the impressive archive of a hitherto unknown artist. American nanny and private photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009) only ever sent a small selection of her photographs to gallerists or publishers in France and one to a family she worked for. One hundred thousand negatives of her images of street life, principally in Chicago, were discovered and some printed after her death, to great acclaim.
Not only was Maier an obsessive and very private photographer, she also exhibited eccentric characteristics, another plus for those taken with the curious lives and motivations of artists: “Residents of the Chicago suburb of Highland Park had gotten used to the nanny (taking photographs) along with her French accent, her penchant for wearing men’s coats and boots, and the look and gait that led children to call her ‘bird lady’” (David Zak, Smithsonian Magazine, Nov, 2011).
Maier’s black and white photographs are crisply precise (taken with a medium format Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera) and formally strong, yet blessed with a sense of street-life immediacy and moments of reflection—including images of herself, camera in hand. One gallerist, writes Zak, described her as “having the skill of an inborn melodist.”
Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) is presenting a selection from Maier’s huge body of work alongside images by a fascinating array of Australian photographers Patrick Pound, David Wadelton, Debra Phillips and visual artists who, like Maier, turn the camera on themselves—Cherine Fahd, Gabriella and Silvana Mangano, Clare Rae, Simone Slee and Kellie Wells.
Maier’s work has now been exhibited internationally and a book, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, has been edited by John Maloof, the real estate agent who ‘discovered’ her by purchasing 30,000 of her images for $400 at an auction, purely out of curiosity. Finding Vivian Maier, a feature-length documentary by Maloof and Charlie Siskel, has been programmed in a multitude of international film festivals and will screen in the Melbourne Festival as a companion piece to Crossing Paths with Vivian Maier before its cinema release.
2014 Melbourne International Arts Festival: Crossing Paths with Vivian Maier, curators Naomi Cass, Louise Neri, Karra Rees, CCP, Melbourne, 3-26 Oct; Finding Vivian Maier, directors John Maloof, Charlie Siskel, ACMI, Melbourne 16, 18, 23 Oct
Christopher Barnett, courtesy Antenna Documentary Film Festival
In Adelaide and Melbourne in the early 1980s the hard talking, hard living poet Christopher Barnett was a force to be reckoned with—socially, artistically, politically, not that he made these distinctions.
A charismatic public performer, this self-styled “Cultural Bolshevik”—a homage to his hero, Valdimir Mayakovsky (see p42)—and a key collaborator with Nicholas Tsoutas and Peggy Wallach in the All Out Ensemble, Barnett left Adelaide for Fitzroy and then in the mid 80s relocated to Nantes in France where he became notable for co-founding an experimental company, Le Dernier Spectateur, working with the disenfranchised.
The film’s maker Anne Tsoulis writes, “To understand what shaped the artist, we explore his formative years, raised in poverty in a dysfunctional Adelaide family to becoming the teenage poet and enfant terrible. We discover that, at an early age, his Communist ideals helped him to survive his own challenging circumstances.”
The 53-minute documentary includes footage of readings, reunions, a rare homecoming to suburban Adelaide after a 20-year absence and a visit by road in winter to visit Thomas Harlan, a radical documentary maker and translator of Barnett’s Blue Book.
These Heathen Dreams is screening in Sydney’s 2014 Antenna Documentary Film Festival. In The Conversation, 8 Aug 2014, you’ll find Wendy Haslem’s review of the film screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival and in the 29 Nov, 2013 edition you can read Anne Marsh’s appreciation of Barnett, “The greatest Australian poet you’ve never heard of,” on the occasion of the launch of a book of his poetry, titled when they came/ for you: elegies/ of resistance, published by Wakefield Press.
2014 Antenna Documentary Film Festival, These Heathen Dreams, Journey of a Cultural Bolshevik, director Anne Tsoulis, producer, Georgia Wallace-Crabbe, Chauvel Cinema Two, Sydney, 8 Oct, 8pm
Two productions in the 2014 Darwin Festival reviewed here involve distinctive collaborations between Australian and Asian artists, exploring fusions of traditional and contemporary cultural practices. With Asia as northern Australia’s nearest neighbour and being closer to Darwin than other Australian cities, this kind of exchange is becoming more common, with artists engaging in longer-term and ongoing projects. This creative fusion is reflected in the rich mix of ethnicities in the city’s population, as was evident in 100% Darwin.
100% Darwin
Held in the amphitheatre in Darwin’s tropical Botanic Gardens, 100% Darwin is a surprisingly moving, community-building experience. Germany’s Rimini Protokoll have created 100% cities since 2008 starting with Berlin, then 20 other cities around the world. They work with 100 locals with the aim of “performing the diversity” of each city. Casting director Bec Reid selects the first person; in Darwin it was baby Jordan. Each person then has 24 hours to find the next who must fit a specific criterion so that by the 100th person there is a huge cross-section of Darwin’s population represented—diverse ethnicities, ages, political views, sexualities, professions, interests. Ninety percent of the cast members have never been on stage before.
They come one by one onto the slowly revolving stage, each bringing their own special object (equally diverse, from teddy bears to microscopes, photos, tattoos, art and fishing rods). Each introduces themselves with a short snippet: “my vagina was made in Thailand,” and things they love or odd habits they have: “I always put my left shoe on first.” We get to know them and then the statistics begin. Through a series of questions the performance explores who is who, does what and believes what, with people moving to stand beside the “me” and “not me” signs that are held and sometimes dropped if no-one aligns themselves. The performers are supported and guided throughout by live music from local musicians David Spry and The Moral High Ground. It’s surprising and confronting as questions posed move from the easy: “who lives in Palmerston?” to: “who has tried and failed to save a life?” to: “who believes in the death penalty?” and “who has thought about taking their own life?”
This is reality theatre in which Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel’s direction ensures the two hours never drag by using different modes of posing and answering the questions that form the core of the piece—participants moving to yes/no areas of the stage, dancing, miming their hourly lives, showing coloured cards, asking questions of each other, asking questions of the audience, shining torches in the dark with birds-eye-view cameras showing results on screens at the sides of the stage. They reveal themselves to the audience and, like reality TV, it is totally absorbing.
Some of the revelations about what people felt shocked me. A large number agreed with the death penalty and would kill for their family and their country. Despite this, a feeling of connection between diverse people was generated and a liking for the very people whose opinions I would strongly oppose.
Book of Shadows: Chapter One
Book of Shadows is an NT/Indonesian collaboration incorporating live actors, traditional Balinese and contemporary shadow puppetry and new media. In a festival usually reserved for completed works it was refreshing to participate in a work-in-progress showing with a discussion and feedback session. It shows the vast amount of work that goes into making such a stylistically complex piece. This work is in its infancy. It has beautiful imagery and depth of combined visuals—kaleidoscopic colour film sequences, animations and elegant shadow puppetry —giving it the visual wow factor although the content still needs clarity and purpose.
Book of Shadows has a plethora of elements and is a deliberate mash-up of multiple Greek and Balinese traditional myths in what is an, as yet, unclear and over-complicated story. Beck Adams’ cave-like set with its scrunched and hanging layers of paper lit in ethereal blue was instantly alluring and provided multiple areas for action and projection. The combination of live and recorded sound moving from electronica to simple thumb piano was evocative, echoing the mix of contemporary and traditional visuals. With strong dramaturgical input this piece could be stunning.
Arisa Yura, Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens
Elise Derwin, courtesy Darwin Festival
Arisa Yura, Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens
Yasukichi Murakami —Through A Distant Lens
Through a Distant Lens is a delicate and beautifully simple evocation of the life of Yasukichi Murakami, photographer, inventor, entrepreneur and part of Darwin’s high society in the 1930s. The performance begins with the whole end wall of Brown’s Mart theatre covered in a projection of trees moving gently in the breeze and the musician at the side of the stage playing traditional Japanese instruments mixed with recorded sound—wind and birdsong.
Writer Mayu Kanamori, a contemporary Japanese-Australian photographer and performance maker, probes Murakami’s colourful past and searches for truths about his life and his photographs—the latter lost when he was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ in Victoria after the bombing of Darwin in 1942. Diverse story-telling techniques are used to unearth secrets and truths which are based on historical research: direct address, acted scenes, projected still images and interactive film of Murakami’s stern traditional mother played by Yumi Umiumare .The character of Murakami appears as a ghost with camera in hand to talk about life and art with young Mayu. They banter, philosophise, dance together, watch projected images of his family and friends and meditate on the nature of photography. The old sepia photographs of Murakami’s Japanese family tell both his personal story and that of many Japanese Australians of the time. We see the formal family weddings, the Japanese pearl divers’ graveyard in Broome, Captain Gregory the flamboyant pearl lugger owner and friend and business associate of Murakami, Tatura internment camp and Murakami’s own portraits of his children. Finally we see images of his funeral. This is a gently moving production with elements seamlessly combined and supported by a haunting soundtrack and live music. The opening night at Brown’s Mart was especially poignant as the two front rows were filled with Murakami’s descendants. (See also p5.)
The Lepidopters
photo Elise Derwin, courtesy Darwin Festival
The Lepidopters
Lepidopters, A Space Opera, Part Four
Punkasila, Indonesian mystic art music punk band, renowned Australian classical pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, singer-dancer Rachel Saraswati and local Darwin artists and musicians came together to create this behemoth tipped as a “sci-fi-meets-alien-moths-meets-Javanese-mysticism visual/video /musical/installation performance experience.”
An eclectic mix of Gamelan, post-punk, classical/jazz piano and projected illustrations, this space opera is an Australian/Indonesian collaboration that defies definition and challenges audiences—some leaving, some whooping. Silver-suited band Punkasila with big hair and geometric electric guitars (Gary Glitter comes to mind) take centre stage with Harvey on piano and Saraswati combining the traditional and post punk in both her vocals and movement. Divided into movements, this production is a roller coaster of confusion and entertainment, opening with Harvey’s looped jazz piano, followed by the Darwin Gamelan Orchestra and Choir, then a punk band, live piano and flute with traditional Indonesian backing, a guitar and synth duet and even local Indigenous performer June Mills performing a Larrakia welcome to country with acoustic guitar. The projected animations continued throughout all the musical sections with hand-drawn images telling the story of the alien moth invasion, its meaning not clear to all—but that was immaterial as the performers took the willing on a journey and left others to fend for themselves.
Darwin Festival, 100% Darwin, concept, direction, dramaturgy Rimini Protokoll, Darwin, The Amphitheatre, George’s Green, 9 Aug; Book of Shadows: Chapter One, Brown’s Mart Theatre, 10 Aug; Yasukichi Murakami—Through A Distant Lens, writer, creator Mayu Kanamori, dramaturg Jane Bodie, director Malcolm Blaylock, Brown’s Mart Theatre, 19, 20 Aug; Lepidopters, A Space Opera, Part Four, creator, musician Danius Kesminas, visuals Erwan ‘Iwank,’ Hersi Susanto, Terra Bajraghosa, Slave Pianos, The Lighthouse, Darwin, 7-24 August
Scott Miles, Nothing under the sun, courtesy the artist
Stepping into what seems to be a darkened corridor, I wait for my eyes to adjust…but they don’t. There’s just darkness; and in the distance, a small square of dim, glowing light. My hand touches the matt black paint on the wall to my left; the right wall, I think, runs straight ahead. So I feel my way with my hand, and a metre or so along I find a vertical slit; I look through. It reveals a room containing a large image in black and white, of luminous, snow-covered rocks or ice. I guess that if I follow this wall, I will find a break or a corner, will be able to turn left and left again, to access this room.
I keep going, very disoriented, but drawn forward by the touch of my hand on the wall, which sometimes changes texture as if there is a smooth steel edge of a panel, and then another panel. I’m not sure whether perhaps the wall is curving. I continue in this absolute black; surprised, fascinated, apprehensive. As I approach the end, the distant glow turns into a small light box on the wall, and then into a very small painting on reflective copper—an orange sun in a black landscape—and my hand finally reaches a large opening. A long, dim room extends back towards the entrance.
Before even beginning to ‘see’ Scott Miles’ Nothing under the sun, I’ve experienced a really strange sensory place, nearly lightless but for a vague, sun-like impression, far away. While negotiating the dark, I’ve been pursued by weird taps, pitches and clicks that remind me of bat or dolphin sonar; and pale, flange-ing drones like humming hard-drive fans. I’ve glimpsed, teasingly, light reflected off snow.
In the long ‘gallery’, when I reach it, I can see—just. On a video screen, what seems to be snow flurries towards the viewer, apparently caught in the camera’s own light. Further along, there’s a large, round painting—ice and rocks again—in subtle, monochrome bands, tinged faintly pink and greenish. For a moment, I think I’ve found the room behind the slit—I think I can see the slit. I feel along the wall for it, for assurance. But there is no aperture, and that other room remains hidden.
And then I realise the painting is not round at all; its rectangular shape becomes clear in the shadows beyond the circular beam of light that illuminates it. That’s how dark the room is.
Nothing under the sun draws on Scott Miles’ experiences in Greenland’s Upernavik artists’ retreat, during winter, when the sun did not broach the horizon for many weeks. It was so dark, he said, he took photos in order to see his surroundings (West Space artists’ talk, 28 August). The icy ground was treacherous, so getting around was difficult. Over time, he became acutely aware of sound and learned to move carefully so as not to slip or fall. In his paintings he wanted to experiment with “the removal of light,” and equally, “to bring the conditions of that experience into the exhibition environment”—in particular, to create a sense of duration.
Scott Miles, Nothing under the sun, courtesy the artist
The result is an unusual combination of painting—arguably the endangered polar bear of contemporary artforms—and light/sound installation. The gallery illumination is as faint as the starlight Miles became attuned to, consequently the paintings are eclipsed (but not obliterated) by the darkness and the AV-based (yet representational) form of the work as a whole. Their place here feels apt: as precise as photographs, they physically manifest time, contemplation and meticulous observation. Like the polar bear, they know where they are. Around them the soundscape, neither entirely abstract nor identifiable, shifts from speaker to hidden speaker. Combining found sounds and experiments with extreme frequencies, the audio is partly inspired by an Upernavik local’s recordings of radio waves emanating from the auroras: chirping, whistling siren-calls from Earth’s magnetosphere.
The Arctic, understandably, has become a regular muse for environmental laments, and a symbol of disintegration, loss and fragility in the work of many artists. Nothing under the sun is refreshing for not fetishising the melting icebergs and crumbling glaciers, nor asking us to contemplate the demise of the frozen north. Miles’ work lets the Arctic be just what it is: a place that whistles and rolls its hard-to-believe sounds around the ears; that challenges two-legged animals to see or stand up straight, at times; and that fascinates, disorients and unsettles in ways that will always resist the overlay of human meaning.
Scott Miles, Nothing under the sun; West Space, Melbourne, 1–30 Aug
You can read about Urszula Dawkins’ Arctic experience in The Arctic Circle international arts/science collaborative residency, Svalbard, Norway in RealTime 100.
Intérieur, Shizuoka Performing Arts Company/Les Ateliers Contemporains
photo Koichi Miura, courtesy Avignon Festival
Intérieur, Shizuoka Performing Arts Company/Les Ateliers Contemporains
With threatened social welfare cuts, artists and other workers across France went on strike this summer, including on the first day of the 2014 Avignon Festival. With banners across every venue, announcements of solidarity before every show and politicians banned from theatres, a very particular political message framed the audience experience.
Works offering overt political analysis such as Solitaritate from Romania and La imaginación del futuro from Chile brought this context into sharper view. The political framework felt equally strong in Intérieur, directed by French master Claude Régy, despite his presenting no overtly political message. Analysis and action, generational political engagement and the politics of western democracies were among the topics posed at the festival under the new artistic director Olivier Py.
Solitaritate
Solitaritate by Romanian writer-director Gianina Cărbinariu is a series of comic episodes which question the current guiding ideologies of Western democratic capitalism. Performers begin the show debating which audience rows they own—individuals claiming us as their territory. Falling walls are a repeated visual metaphor—from the theatrical fourth wall to a domestic argument which leads to a brick wall falling around a couple and their neoliberal ideals. This recurring motif unites the scenes that show all human experiences and intimacies reduced to commodities. In one scene we attend the funeral of “Eugenia Ionescu”—an homage to Romania’s greatest dramatist Eugene Ionesco. It’s a self-conscious attempt for this new generation of theatre-makers to bury the idols of their past and carve out theatrical space of their own. Cărbinariu places the blatant colonialism of marking out audience territory alongside a monologue from a nanny imported to work for a wealthy European family. A huge glittering Romanian flag—hung upside down—unexpectedly drops to engulf the nanny who struggles, trying to free herself from its oppressive weight.
Cărbinariu states that putting everyday lives in the theatre is a subversive act in Romania and no doubt this is what attracted the programmers. Unfortunately, the work seems somewhat contrived, its tone naive in an international festival where the context is starkly different. In a way the programming of this show for the festival mimics the very questions of consumerist ideologies posed by the company—and the power of their production is diluted as it becomes part of the marketplace it is questioning.
La imaginación del futuro
Further questions of political context are posed in relation to Chilean theatre company La Re-sentida’s La imaginación del futuro which replays the military coup and mysterious death of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. The brute force and energy of this young ensemble is undeniable; however, rather than the future implied in the title we are presented with a past reimagined with irreverence and humour. Allende is surrounded by political advisors at every turn trying to enact influence, minimise damage and create spin with the construction of his famous final address filmed and re-filmed. The backdrops, costumes and the speech are manipulated and reconstructed in a live video feed. In a triumphant moment for the advisors, huge banners of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende are unveiled during a dance routine to Latino-American hip-hop group Cypress Hill.
La Re-sentida poses the question of how Chile became a dictatorship after the death of Allende and how the construction of truth and mythology is continually remade. Although these are worthwhile questions, the ensemble’s response suggests cynicism rather than proposing any liberating action. As spectators we embrace the show’s surface and join in mocking the past. However, the present tense cynicism of the production diffuses the possibility of any political action as we realise our own impotence.
While La Re-sentida have power in their analysis, their discourse fails to move on from political rhetoric while drawing a new, less nostalgic view of Allende. La Re-sentida have bravado, enthusiasm and wit, but do not transform their questions into action that results in true political engagement for the spectator.
Intérieur
There is no explicit political analysis in the work of 89-year-old Claude Régy’s Intérieur. Régy first directed Maeterlinck’s 1895 play in France in 1985. So when Shizuoka Performing Arts company invited Régy to direct a play for them, it was this piece he wanted to revisit, in Japanese, with Japanese performers. Intérieur in Régy’s hands focuses on the symbolism of death and transcendence. We are confronted by the rules this director imposes upon us on the way into the theatre. An announcement requests total silence. Maeterlinck desired us to be aware of the laws we are subject to. The writing is pared back to essentials: minimal text which is simple and direct. We look with the townspeople at the silent family inside the house. A small boy is asleep centre stage. His immobile body comes to symbolise death as we hear about the death of his sister in the river.
Every movement and phrase in this work is excruciatingly slow. At this pace, interactions become inhuman and language unrecognisable: all removed from the everyday. Theorist Walter J Ong has stated, “sound only exists as it is going out of existence.” Régy’s theatrical investigation takes this to its extreme. We are acutely aware of each syllable and the silence that surrounds it. With slow motion, we are forced to reconsider what it is to be a spectator and become acutely aware of those around us too—the audience that coughs and wriggles. The stage is covered in noiseless white sand on which the performers almost seem to float. The only defined feature is the delineation between interior and exterior: the subject of the play, marked by low lighting, shifting almost imperceptibly between one colour and the next.
The impact of Intérieur resonates long after the experience—whether one is confronted, enamoured or enraged. In reimagining Maeterlinck’s text, this production awakens the audience to reconsider their position in the act of watching. We are offered no way in which to process this—we are given no referent for the real world. Without this, and by boldly manipulating time and space, Régy manages to break the nexus between consumption and culture for the duration of the play. Intérieur brings us to a new awareness and engagement with the world surrounding us through its theatrical action which resonates as a brave political act.
2014 Avignon Festival: Theatre National Radu Stanca Sibiu, Theatre National Bruxelles (Romania/Belgium), Solitaritate, 19-27 July; La Re-sentida (Chile) La imaginación del futuro, 17-25 July; Shizuoka Performing Arts Company/Les Ateliers Contemporains (Japan/France),, Avignon, France, 15-27 July; http://www.festival-avignon.com/en/
Going Nowhere is not a festival. That’s the first thing Arts House’s creative producer Angharad Wynne-Jones makes clear. She describes the three-day event as more of a “strategy or proposition,” and that proposition is one that gets more and more compelling the deeper you dig into it. Arts organisations have been getting down to the nuts and bolts of sustainability for some years now—theatres sport solar panels, venue bathrooms have reduced water use, programs have gone online—but Going Nowhere takes as its starting point a question. “What’s the trickiest thing that we would least like to do without?” asks Wynne-Jones.
The answer is travel. “For many artists their development is hinged on national and international partnerships, tours, institutional exchange and attending conferences, fairs, workshops and so on. The whole notion of getting on a plane is often critical to making a project happen,” says Wynne-Jones. “Making a collaboration work, being endorsed and surprised and delighted by being somewhere else.”
Going Nowhere challenges its participants to create international work without stepping on a plane. Of course there are modes of artistic production that better lend themselves to such a challenge, but Arts House has deliberately put it to the sort of cutting edge practitioners it regularly programs, often working in fields such as Live Art that crucially depend on the presence of their makers.
“People have been sending scripts and scores around the planet for centuries,” says Wynne-Jones. “It’s not a new thing. In fact, it’s only quite recently that we think of sending entire symphony orchestras from one end of the planet to the other. But it’s exciting that there’s a whole range of practice that has extended beyond the score or the text, and now how does that practice recalibrate itself through some of those old methodologies but still retain its investigative, experimental form?”
The core of the program might be the series of four commissioned works that see local artists collaborating with others in Cambridge, where Going Nowhere will also take place over the same weekend. Sarah Rodigari and UK artist Joshua Sofaer will confront head-on the fear of missing out posed by a situation in which performing artist and audience aren’t available to one another—in this case employing a surprising surrogate. Willoh S Weiland, Julian Crotti and Fritz Hauser are creating a highly theatrical Last Supper-scenario exploring the apocalyptic End Times thinking that accompanies much discourse around climate change, while a collaboration between Melbourne’s one step at a time like this and Bristol’s Helen Cole and Alex Bradley takes place in both Arts House and the audience’s own homes. Dan Koop, Andy Field and Nathan Street’s collaboration is both site-specific and transcendent of that notion, employing the ubiquitous transport loops that are available in almost every modern city—think train subways, monorails or free tram services—that tourists use to go nowhere but see everything.
“The brief that we’ve set is that we are wanting a live experience,” says Wynne-Jones. “We’re committed to that, even though all the digital possibilities exist and apparently make it seem like anything’s possible. There has to be a reason the audience needs to be there. The work can’t be completed without them. That’s potentially limiting, but that’s the discipline of it.”
Another appropriate restriction is that artists are not allowed to create waste. Purchases should be minimal and limited to recycled or recyclable material. “They have an extremely light touch in that way.”
Tanya Beer, Weather Report
courtesy the artist
Tanya Beer, Weather Report
Beyond the international commissions, Going Nowhere features a sizeable suite of events, including a Tipping Point forum, PechaKucha, and several other artworks. Olaf Meyer is creating a new textural projection to transform the face of the North Melbourne Town Hall; Tristam Meecham is bringing together a range of specialists who traverse an unexpectedly wide interpretation of sustainability—from frog experts to storytellers—to create an Everyday Imaginarium on the Town Hall’s balcony garden; and Tanja Beer’s People’s Weather Report is a 24-hour sound work and installation drawing on contributions from around the world.
While it’s one thing to ask artists to rethink their own practices in order to produce a work that can cross borders while they stay put, Going Nowhere’s sheer mass poses a broader dilemma. Specifically, it highlights questions of trust that go beyond the individual maker—“not just between the collaborating artists but between the producers and the presenters,” says Wynne-Jones. “Without their artists being there, we need to be really clear that we’re honouring what we imagine they want as much as what they’re demanding that they need. I also think it involves a level of trust from the audience. We’ve been enculturated, and with good reason, into wanting and enjoying the artist’s presence. Particularly in this kind of work. To say they won’t be there is challenging.”
Wynne-Jones admits that everyone behind Going Nowhere is “setting ourselves up with an impossible problem.” The weekend isn’t aimed at producing definitive answers that will only allow for 100% sustainable works to be created from here on. Wynne-Jones herself isn’t interested in only presenting works by artists working in that way throughout the rest of the calendar.
“To be honest, I think the only people that need to be flying around the world are artists. I think they’re the best transmitters of ideas and energy and connections. Once we’ve found some kind of biofuel for aeroplanes they should be filled with artists zipping around.”
But in the meantime, she does hope that Going Nowhere will expand beyond Melbourne and Cambridge in years to come. She makes it sound like a very attractive notion. “My fantasy structure for Going Nowhere in the future is that there could be any number of organisations around the world that over a particular period of time say ‘we’re Going Nowhere’ and there’s a repository of projects that have been designed in this way and the organisations can buy one or borrow one or create one or whatever. This is a rehearsal of that.
Going Nowhere, Arts House, Melbourne, 21-23 Nov. Full program at goingnowhere.net.au.
In an early interaction with a local, I ask what he is most looking forward to seeing at Launceston’s Junction Arts Festival in 2014. As we flick through the program guide together he remarks, “This isn’t really an arts festival. It’s more an events festival.” He’s instantly a little embarrassed at his apparent ignorance about what constitutes ‘art.’ What he had picked up on though is at the centre of the curatorial vision of the festival.
The artworks in the program this year were events. Each project possessed only a subtle artistic frame around an encounter between artist and audience. The works were not just for an audience but also made with and between them. That is the nature of art as event. It is a rupture in which people are necessary. It actively privileges the public, both their gaze and their presence. To borrow a line that I love to quote, but cannot remember where from: “It is not about something, it is something.”
Events took forms that ranged from script-reading to guided walk to dance battle to workshop to party-for-one. They were situated in a range of places—theatre, gallery, shop-front, warehouse, function room, park, car park, river and other public sites across town. The event-ness of these projects offered the potential to invite Launceston audiences to displace their typical status as subordinate to an artist and their artwork and instead take on their own agency and active interpretation within the established framework.
Nassim Soleimanpour, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
There was palpable excitement in the audience of largely conservative local theatre subscribers upon entering White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. We walked through the grand auditorium of The Princess Theatre and onto the stage. A meta-stage had been demarcated in white electrical tape, around which the audience sat in rows of chairs. Theatricality in terms of lighting and sound is renounced, and the set is simply a ladder, a table, and two glasses of water. A local actor enters carrying an envelope. He opens it and removes the script for the show. It is the first time he’s seen the text. He reads it to us.
The performance focuses on the presence of the audience, co-opting members into acting out scenes and noting biographical information on the Iranian writer and his life which we are both removed from and largely ignorant of. There is a joyous charm to be had in experiencing the actor attempting to fulfill what is stipulated in his script. Ultimately the work is a confrontation with the words he speaks: words via which the playwright has ‘travelled’ to Launceston, in order to conjure the performance through this intermediary. Everyone present is unified through the event of the script-reading. We have moved beyond a representational theatre experience and into the theatrical experience of an event. Because of this, a collective voice of the audience takes over the work in the concluding moments of the show. Despite what feels like a far-fetched provocation in the text, the majority in attendance band together to prevent the actor from drinking the glasses of water that have been said to be poisoned. Indeed, the actor too appears somewhat worried about the possible result.
Nick Power, Cypher
In Cypher we have another performance space demarcated in white tape. This is a break-dancing circle, known as a ‘cypher.’ In it the codes, conventions and gestures of ‘breaking’ and ‘battling’ are abstracted and appropriated by four break-dancers towards making a contemporary dance work that alternately has the performers competing with each other and dancing together. The cypher circle continually fluctuates and is literally deconstructed and reconstructed by the performers. The treatment of space mirrors the treatment of the break-dance practice and brings the audience in close, looks them in the eye, and encourages them to treat this cypher as the real deal.
The cypher eventually multiplies and the audience co-inhabits these spaces with the performers, before the performers hand them over entirely to the audience who dance within them. What the audience perform is shameless parody, a by-product of the representation and consumption of mediatised subcultures. As the light slowly fades, the show ends with a poignant moment of silence, a final repetition of synchronicity: we hear in the breath of the dancers the labour expended in their virtuosity. For a moment they are only human after all, and not that different from us.
Cypher is a thoroughly entertaining demonstration of the ‘breaking’ subculture. Sequences condense and repeat as rituals move towards the cathartic threshold of collapsing the work’s dance form and including the audience in an event that continues in the space post-show as enthusiastic children play at the break-dancing moves they have just seen.
Big One Little One, Confetti
After standing in a line for a little over 30 minutes I am instructed to knock on a door. It opens with screams of delight and two young women pull me into a tiny room. Silver streamers line the walls. I am offered a shot of vodka. I am spun around and instructed to strike a piñata. I am presented with a birthday cake and told to blow out its solitary candle. We dance. They strip a layer of clothing. Confetti is thrown. It’s over. I am ushered out. The concentrated joy of the minute-long work Confetti, by Australian collective Big One Little One (NSW-VIC) was the representation of a party rather than a genuine party-event. It was the formulaic machine of a party performed identically on repeat, with the audience as the anonymous trigger. The subject celebrated was the rather dehumanising act of partying itself—relentlessly and forever, and in a bittersweet way, always wanting something more.
Abigail Conway, Time Lab
UK artist Abigail Conway’s Time Lab performance exemplified one of the subtlest artistic frames at the festival. It takes the form of a workshop in which we individually make items of jewelry out of broken wristwatches. We are greeted in a shop-front by the artist and briefed on what is to happen. We are directed behind a curtain where a clinical workshop laboratory has been set up. There is an individual station for each of us, with all manner of utensils we will need for our arts and crafts session. The artist then leaves us entirely to our own devices, informally focused on making something of our time. The artist is there to provide assistance, but only really addresses us again to encourage us to finish when the hour-long workshop is nearly over. She then wants to document our pieces and have us answer personal and conceptual questions on the idea of time, for a publication that will provide a bigger picture of the travelling project.
The work privileged the workshop event over any sort of artistic conceit and was essentially handed over to us as genuine workshop participants. We became bricoleurs, for the artist and for ourselves, of transience itself. Timepieces of course are not time itself, but act as our representational measuring devices as we vainly attempt to control it. In Time Lab that representation is reconfigured into a personalised decoration—we each left with an individual pearl that somehow managed to personify the formlessness of transience.
When the Mountain Changed Its Clothing, Heiner Goebbels, Melbourne International Arts Festival
photo Wonge Bergmann for the Ruhrtriennale.
When the Mountain Changed Its Clothing, Heiner Goebbels, Melbourne International Arts Festival
If you’re wondering what choices to make for the 2014 Melbourne International Arts Festival, there are several major productions that might take you out of yourself, or deep inside, as the best art does: Heiner Goebbels’ When the Mountain Changed Its Clothing; Trisha Brown, From All Angles and Chunky Move’s Complexity of Belonging.
These should be seen alongside the festival’s expansive circus program, Dewey Dell’s Marzo (from the progeny of Italy’s Castellucci family) and Roslyn Oades’ Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday (see Caroline Wake’s interview with Oades), and there’s much else to experience.
Heiner Goebbels, When the Mountain Changed Its Clothing
Master theatre maker Heiner Goebbels has been a recurrent guest of Australia’s international arts festivals, always surprising us with large-scale works with strong musical foundations, exquisite design and a mind-bending theatrical sensibility. The visits commenced with Black on White, with Ensemble Modern (Adelaide, 1998), Max Black (Adelaide, 2000), Surrogate Cities (Queensland Music Festival, 2003), Stifters Dinge (Melbourne, 2010) and Eraritjaritjaka (Sydney 2013), the latter featuring a very brave string quartet, an actor reciting phrases from the work of Elias Canetti in a dissociative meditation, and, as ever, magical design. Goebbels’ design, collaboratively created, often has the stand-alone quality of an installation, not least in the performative but performer-less Stifters Dinge. We can expect nothing less than immersion in a strange world in the 2012 production When The Mountain Changed Its Clothing with its oscillation between a functional everyday and a vivid truth-telling fantasy world.
The title, drawing on a Slovenian folk song, refers to the changing of the seasons, which provides the work with both its structure and an analogy with the transitional Twilight Zone of adolescence, realised in performance by 40 girls between the ages of 11 and 20—Vocal Theatre Carmina Slovenica. These young people come from a region which has endured great social and political upheaval, reflected in Goebbels’ choice of music (indie pop, folk, propaganda and choral works), the games these young women play and diverse texts. Shirley Apthorp writes in the UK Financial Review (27 Sept, 2012), “Two teenage girls, their faces calm as a Vermeer portrait, disembowel stuffed toys with dispassionate precision as they recite Gertrude Stein’s views on the rich, the poor and the very poor. Then younger girls take the teddy-bear innards and make them float like clouds over a plastic lawn.”
As revelations about the appalling extent of child abuse escalate an increasing number of films and stage works attempt to provide insight into young lives (What Maisie Knew, Boyhood, We’re the Best) or give them the stage as in Belgium’s Ontroerend Goed’s Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen (Melbourne, Sydney, Aug 2009) and Teenage Riot (Melbourne Festival, 2013). Of course not a few Australian young people’s theatre groups have consistently worked this territory. Will When The Mountain Changed Its Clothing be an adult reverie about childhood or give its performers, so powerful in song, credence in their own right—or bring adolescent and adult together in revealing collaboration?
Trisha Brown Company, Set & Reset
photo John Waite
Trisha Brown Company, Set & Reset
Trisha Brown: From All Angles
This series of works, talks and films from the career of a major and highly innovative figure in 20th century American dance is a Melbourne Festival centrepiece. Acclaimed for her design sensibility, intelligence and wit, choreographer Trisha Brown was one of the artists from various practices who gathered and collaborated at the Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s, fomenting postmodern dance—anti-theatrical, non-narrative, improvisational and rooted in everyday movement. In the 70s Brown created works in which harnessed dancers walked along walls, that were performed on rooftops or operated according to game rules, mathematical sets or cellular imperatives—patterned creations that generated mobile spatial design from human movement and mostly danced without music, until 1983.
Since then, in theatre works of larger scale and design, Brown has deployed the music of Bach, Webern, Schubert, Robert Ashley and Laurie Anderson (the exhilarating Set & Reset of 1983 which you’ll see in the festival and can preview on YouTube), as well as jazz and opera. Brown’s choreography, although meticulously phrased and making unusual demands on the body (and her own in solos), continues to magically flow out of stillness or walking with an ease that defies the effort applied.
Trisha Brown: From All Angles is a once only opportunity to immerse yourself in the dance works and thinking of a great artist. In the two programs titled Pure Movement, nine works from 1978-1994, including Set & Reset, will be performed, accompanied by pre- and post show discussions. Another nine works, 1970-73, will appear in the Early Works program and nine films, including a 72-minute interview with Brown, will further extend our appreciation of the artist’s body of work. Brown retired from her company in 2011; these Melbourne Festival performances are part of the Trisha Brown Company’s farewell tour led by Associate Artistic Director Carolyn Lucas who has been with the company since 1984 and, as a dancer, originated key roles in Brown’s body of work.
Stephen Phillips and Lauren Langlois, Complexity of Belonging, Chunky Move
photo Sarah Walker
Stephen Phillips and Lauren Langlois, Complexity of Belonging, Chunky Move
Chunky Move, Complexity of Belonging
In the beginning, the internet was heralded as utopian, a promulgator of democracy and a simplifier of just about everything. Quickly appropriated by extant and emergent commercial interests—some of them, like Google, born of the internet itself—the global online networking system has yielded increased totalitarian control (in democracies and dictatorships alike) and an illusion of freedom (to have your privacy invaded and identity stolen). Life has become more complex. Chunky Move’s new work Complexity of Belonging tackles the issue head-on: “a theatrical exposé into the daily trials of surviving in a hyper-connected, hyper-sensitive, globalised society” (press release). The work focuses on nine figures (a mix of actors and dancers) and their sense of identity, in terms of nationality, gender, sexuality and history. Leading German playwright Falk Richter (writing here in English) and also the director of this production, has drawn on the lives of the performers, but they will not be playing themselves. Typically his writing borders on the surreal while being bluntly and sometimes satirically political.
But Complexity of Belonging is not a play. It is choreographed and co-created by Chunky Move’s artistic director, the Belgian Anouk van Dijk, in her fifth collaboration with Richter (the others are Nothing Hurts [1999], TRUST [2009, PROTECT ME [2010] and Rausch [2012]). Nor is it a dance work, or dance theatre. When Virginia Baxter and I saw the Richter-van Dijk Trust at the Schaubühne in Berlin in 2009 (a last minute invitation and following a rushed reading of half the inhouse English translation before entering the theatre) we were swept away by the theatre-dance synthesis, the work seamlessly slipping in and out of and merging dance and theatre. As Richter has said of the collaboration, “We were experimenting on a new art form,” in which words and movement have the same weight, where a naturalistic movement becomes dance, or words spring into telling physical shape.
In an interview for the Goethe Institut, van Dijk explains the partnership with Richter: “We share a strong interest in communicating energy, be it verbal or in movement. When we work together, Falk’s language and my choreographic eye meet as equals. We need one another to express what moves us.”
In an age in which many people’s experience of popular music comprises corporatised pre-packaged pap masquerading as televised talent quests, it’s easy to forget what a powerful agent of change music can be. An unexpected thread affirming the possibilities of musical expression bound a diverse range of documentaries at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF).
Jalanan
This debut feature from Canadian-born, Bali-based Daniel Ziv was the surprise hit of MIFF, deservedly taking out the People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary. Mixing casual interviews and observational footage, the film sparkles with the personality of its three subjects—Ho, Boni and Titi—as they eke out a living busking on Jakarta’s public buses. They don’t rely on regurgitated Neil Young songs however. These performers often pen their own tunes, rife with satire and loaded political comment. At one point, for example, we hear the dreadlocked Ho calling for Indonesia to hang officials who have corrupted the nation. Boni also sings of current events and life on the street, drawing on his experiences living under a road bridge for the last decade. Titi is one of the few female buskers working the capital, using her sweet voice to support herself as she tries to gain a high school certificate as a mature-age student.
Over the five years traced by the film, the lives of Ho, Boni and Titi undergo some radical and unexpected transformations. Despite the hardships they endure, the overriding tone of the film stresses empowerment through creative expression, a feeling reinforced by Titi’s presence at the MIFF screenings. A season of Jalanan at a Jakarta cinema has apparently made Titi something of a star in her homeland, and she played at several campaign rallies for the popularist new president-elect, Joko Widodo. An inspiring story about our rapidly transforming northern neighbour.
Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets
Expecting another standard issue rockumentary, I’d skipped over Florian Habicht’s film about British rock act Pulp when making my MIFF selections. But a ticket landed in my hand at the last minute through a stroke of luck for which I’m now grateful. Unlike most rock documentaries, Habicht’s film doesn’t take the viewer’s love of the band for granted. In fact, the film is only peripherally about the group. Its real interest is in the origins of Pulp’s music on the streets of Sheffield, and what their songs mean to those who live in the city. This very un-hagiographic approach is all the more surprising given the film was made in collaboration with Pulp’s frontman, Jarvis Cocker.
Habicht structures his film around Pulp’s final concert in their northern hometown at the end of a 2012 reunion tour. In the days leading up to the gig, he talks informally with Cocker and other band members, as well as many people on the streets of Sheffield. The diehard fans are here, as you’d expect. But so is a wonderfully eccentric newspaper hawker, a former colleague of Cocker’s in a local market, a wayward young couple living rough, and a range of elderly locals who would have been grey even in Pulp’s heyday of the mid-1990s.
The result is a cross-generational ode to the importance of popular music in British culture. It’s a measure of the film’s achievement that I came out a Pulp convert—not so much for what I saw of the band, but for the down-to-earth honesty they convey through their involvement in a down-to-earth project. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets is a timely reminder of just how intelligent and poignant pop music can be.
Jai Bhim Comrade
Jai Bhim Comrade
Part of MIFF’s India in Flux strand of contemporary documentaries from the subcontinent, Jai Bhim Comrade is an epic work from one of India’s master documentarians, Anand Patwardhan. Fourteen years in the making, it traces the struggles of India’s Dalit Caste (the so-called “untouchables”) in the wake of a massacre by police at a protest in 1997. It does so from a grassroots perspective, homing in on Dalit activism through performance and song.
The level of detail presented here through interviews, voiceover narration, observational footage and videoed performances is not easy to digest, especially for viewers not familiar with India’s complex history or intricate caste system. But Jai Bhim Comrade provides a fascinating insight into the country’s recent political upheavals from a point of view we never see on nightly news bulletins.
The film begins with the death of Dalit singer Vilas Ghogre, who hangs himself in the wake of the 1997 massacre. Over the next decade and a half we follow attempts to bring the police involved in the killings to justice, as well as the broader fight for empowerment of the Dalit caste. All of this takes place against a backdrop of rising Hindu nationalism, signified by the ascendance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Frighteningly, Patwardhan’s camera shows that due to a systematic campaign of disinformation by the BJP confusion reigns in the Dalit community about who was in government in 1997.
Jai Bhim Comrade concludes with the police commander who ordered the 1997 shootings finally sentenced to life imprisonment, 14 years after the event. He is released a week later, pending an appeal that is yet to be heard. Meanwhile, Dalit musicians of the radical Kabir Kala Manch group, who perform pro-democratic, anti-caste plays and songs in rural villages, are forced into hiding as they are accused of links with Maoist Naxalite rebels.
Jai Bhim Comrade is engrossing if challenging viewing for anyone wanting to better grasp the social dynamics at play in present day India and the country’s politicised street-level culture.
Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll
Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll
In the spirit of Golden Slumbers (Davy Chou, 2012), a documentary about Cambodia’s vanished cinema, John Pirozzi’s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten attempts to unearth the lost history of Cambodian popular music of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Although the film’s subtitle reads “rock and roll,” the nation’s pop of the era comprised a diverse array of crooners, Latin-Cuban dance bands, folk singers and surf guitar groups.
Pirozzi tries to cover a lot in two hours. As well as 25-odd years of music history, he sketches the political backdrop of the war in neighbouring Vietnam and the disastrous impact it had on Cambodia. A US-backed coup against the neutral government of Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 provoked a civil war that led to the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime taking control of the country in 1975. Khmer Rouge rule extinguished virtually all forms of culture and resulted in the death of around a third of the population, including many famous musicians.
With so much to cover, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten is more about breadth than depth, but the film snappily conveys the joy popular music brought to Cambodian society as it opened up and diversified during the relatively stable years of Sihanouk’s rule. Soberingly, the film also illustrates how culture provided little defence in the face of a regime as murderous as the Khmer Rouge.
If films like Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten and Jai Bhim Comrade show some of the limitations of music as a form of cultural resistance, they also affirm that whatever the vicissitudes of history, grassroots creative expressions can always be found pulsating beneath the surface of every society. Through the unexpected connections running through these very different documentaries at this year’s MIFF, audiences were reminded of just how much music can mean when it comes from the heart and speaks to the lives of everyday people.
Melbourne International Film Festival, various venues, 31 July-17Aug
Almost 25 years after the onslaught of post-colonialism in academic discourse—a well-intended yet passive-aggressive critique of preceding generations of colonisation and imperialism which shaped the concept of a ‘third world’—contemporary documentaries intent on capturing those terrains have rarely broken away from the leftist-humanist slant born of those ideologies.
While musicologists work similarly to televisual and documentary ethnographers and anthropologists, musicians and their audience rarely work this way. From Ska to Electro to Rai to Jungle to Reggaeton to Congotronics (to name obvious contenders), music has not once stopped performing as a living language, born of local conditions, shaped by transformative confluences and completely conscious of its shape-shifting identity. When industry and culture clash, it’s the stuff of people getting together and making noise despite the determining semantics of their chosen tools, instruments, processes and sounds. The resulting music dictates its own hybrid identity with its own voicing, no matter how incorrect, contradictory or unsuitable its appearance.
So what happens now when music-making and documentary practices intersect? Mostly, it’s the same old post-colonial lip service being voiced despite the styles employed. Openly problematising freshness comes from the efforts of the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, an experimental yet institutional filmmaking venture and program established in 2007 at Harvard University. Its varied results are linked by a willingness to explore cine-doco-televisual modes of encoding and inscription which forward an excess of documented data (visual and/or aural) while attempting to refrain from narrational, discursive and/or determining modes of address and commentary. It’s a utopian impulse for sure—one born of the power of poetics overcoming didacticism—yet the after-effect of this slant on documentary practice has enhanced and accentuated how sound (and by inference, music) shapes the end results.
Manakamana, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez
Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez’s Manakamana (2013) is possibly SEL’s most advanced example in this respect. The documentary is a suite of uninterrupted single-shots of one-way journeys in a cable-car strung high over hilly and terraced heights in Nepal, either to or from a Hindu temple at the uppermost stop of the ride. Each shot simply shows the car’s inhabitants (singles, duos and trios) sitting facing a fixed-tripod camera. Shot on Super-16mm but recorded in full and crisp digital audio, the inhabitants occupy most of the frame; we witness them observing everything we can’t fully see (beyond the layer of glass visible behind them), plus they often acknowledge the camera in a casual and nonplussed manner. It’s amazingly open in its procedure and its contents: the results are starkly experimental yet the means of production are thoroughly disclosed and evident. The surfeit of detail and the complexity of subtle inflections captured make for riveting viewing and auditing—the deliberately dumb automaton camera-work and the knowing tedium of its temporality seem to enforce rather than limit this.
Now, many critics have interpreted Manakamana in terms of ‘honesty,’ ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ due to the nature and conceit of its production. But I wonder if such knee-jerk support for ‘keeping-it-real’ documentary tropes misses the greater audiovisual complexity of the film. For many people, the absence of music and the removal of a narrational voice-over can create a ‘shock of the real’ while preventing them from realising how a documentary’s codes can determine their experience. In line with the SEL’s codes of practice, Manakamana is intent on exploring how an audience’s experience can be reconfigured by engaging with the documented material in a new and expanded way. And the locus of this activity is on the soundtrack.
Manakamana, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez
Firstly, the film crystallises the contradiction between visual and aural modes of inscription: its grainy patina collides with its hyperreal sonics. The closer you squint at its images projected large (in the 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival), the deeper you fall into the swimming grain of the film’s abstracting surface. But the closer you listen to the soundtrack, the more you perceive the complex networking of occurrences which comprise the real-time synchronous passage of time and space in each cable-car journey. Plus, one hears much activity equally beyond the camera frame and beyond the cable car. In an evocative gesture toward self-reflexivity, the cable car becomes a type of camera obscura, positioned to be embodied within the world while encoding its place within that world.
Secondly, inasmuch as the cable car is a camera obscura, it is also a recording booth. Its domain centres the spherical immersive experience of sound all around—especially in a suspended cable car high off the ground— and translates to us a similar ‘other-worldly’ experience of the depicted environment as one which floats the listener in sound’s totality. This is a supremely ‘non-screenic’ effect. The bulk of all cinematic effects is predicated on an illusory window-on-the-world, which in turn is derived from the sensation of situating an audience in a black void box to witness images which appear to come from a zone beyond/behind the screen. Conversely, Manakamana documents its sensory environment by situating the imaginary ear smack in the middle of the world it visually captures.
This ‘non-screenic’ effect is highlighted by the thunderous shuddering clackety-booms which intermittently occur when the suspension cable passes through the structural towers dotted along the cable car route. Rather than mute these moments or mix them down, the film fully captures the sensation of being jolted by these markers of the film’s cyclical journey. Sharp transients, whelps of bass and peaks in volume shake everything: the car, its inhabitants and the cinema itself, as the booms erupt the otherwise pastoral appearance of the film’s contemplative tone. But soon enough, one is accustomed to these jolts just as the on-screen passengers appear inured to their disruption, and the film synchronises to the inhabitants’ relaxed relation to their environment.
Manakamana, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez
But perhaps the most noticeable aspects of Manakamana’s soundtrack arise from the placing of music within this anthropological laboratory. From a trio of metal band members enthusiastically taking selfies, preening their hair while quoting/singing phrases of local folk songs from the radio, to what might be a father and son musical duo who say little but spend most of the time tuning their sarangi while playing a traditional song, the film powerfully captures the vibrancy of music as a lived language. The absence of preciousness with which these ‘characters’ breathe music while engaged in apparently oppositional activities proves how ‘second nature’ music can be, produced and experienced by musicians regardless of any contextualising or determining framework of its presentation. By the time we get to a cable car ride with five goats, one starts to even appreciate the animals’ responsive bleating as a meld of music, language and sound.
In a contemporary climate wherein everyone and everything is desperate to humanise, well, everyone and everything, Manakamana doesn’t simply provide momentary respite from this pathetically saturated realm of utopian well-wishing: it actively, materially and formally foregrounds how a commitment to an informed aesthetic practice can unleash a broader and more encompassing politics of representation. Watching the movie will only reinforce limp leanings towards the very humanism the film potentially combats. Listening to it subjects us to audiovisual incidents and environments that circumnavigate illusory humanism by instilling one with a breathtaking sense of our own insignificance.
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Manakamana was the winner of the Golden Leopard award, Filmmakers of the Present, Locarno Film Festival
Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, Manakamana, 2013, 118 mins, Melbourne International Film Festival, 7, 10 Aug
It was with heady anticipation that I arrived in Hobart for the third annual Stranger With My Face Horror Film Festival. Voted one of the “Top Five Coolest Women’s Film Festivals in the World” by readers of Movie Maker magazine, SWMF was started by Hobart-based filmmakers Briony Kidd and Rebecca Thomson as part of Women in Horror Month, the February-based initiative founded in 2010 by US writer/filmmaker Hannah Neurotica, which aims to highlight female directors working in a heavily male-dominated genre.
SWMF took root after Kidd’s short film, The Room at the Top of the Stairs, was shown in another women’s horror film festival, the LA-based Viscera Film Festival. “That’s all I wanted to do initially in 2012, just screen some of the Viscera shorts as a Women in Horror Month event in Hobart. But there were other films that I wanted to include as well, and then we wanted to have talks and a script comp, and it very quickly became its own thing. So we ran with it and called it Stranger With My Face (after the Lois Duncan YA novel) because the kind of horror I’m most interested in as the programmer of the festival concerns the ‘horror within’ rather than your more straightforward external threat.”
This year’s four-day program boasted five feature films, Australian and international shorts programs, children’s workshops, a symposium, exhibitions, play readings and the popular 48-Hour Tasploitation Challenge—a short film competition open to all. It opened officially with Ann Turner’s 1988 feature Celia.
Celia is a remarkable evocation of an Australian childhood whose terrors, enmities and fantasies transform, in response to 1950s political paranoia, into something jagged and dangerous. Child star Rebecca Smart’s unaffected yet compelling presence in the title role is supported by an accomplished cast and Geoffrey Simpson’s expansive cinematography. Chris Neal’s chiming score contributes strongly to the sense of an eerie childhood netherworld. The film’s detours into fantastic surrealism, gradually dovetailing with moments of real-world violence, led Kidd in her introduction to name Celia as a precursor to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994).
Opening a horror film festival with a ‘non-horror’ film, albeit one with horror elements, might be unconventional, but the decision to spotlight this lesser-known classic proved astute, for Celia introduced significant themes that resonated in the festival films to follow: unflinching identification with a female protagonist; retreat into a mythic woodland world in which (often violent) empowerment is found; and the conflicted identity suggested by SWMF’s title.
Running alongside the film program was the Mary Shelley Symposium, taking in traditional fairytales, Tasmanian Gothic, the children’s bogeyman in contemporary cinema and an illuminating history of women in horror. Common themes snaked their way through symposium and film program. Says Kidd, “The two are programmed side by side, but I wanted it to feel like they were riffing off each other in various ways. For example, Emily Bullock talked about Tasmanian Gothic and The Tale of Ruby Rose (1989) and we screened the short film Little Lamb, which is a new example of Tasmanian Gothic and the director’s mentor in making it was Roger Scholes, the director of Ruby Rose. I also realised there was a fairytale element to a lot of the films I was considering…so adopted that as an informal theme across the program.”
The Australian shorts program ranged from gorily irreverent to haunting and melancholic. Splatter gags were plentiful in Mia’Kate Russell’s queer werewolf farce Swallow (2013) and Caitlin Koller’s Maid of Horror (2013), which sees a bridesmaid usurping her friend’s big day in the bloodiest possible way. In contrast, Victoria Thaine’s The Kingdom of Doug (2013) was elegantly sparse, its subdued mood enhancing the cultish horror at its centre. Little Lamb (2014) gave us a convict-era Bluebeard with Tasmania’s dark rural landscape as grim backdrop.
International shorts were similarly eclectic. Grace Under Pressure (Jen Moss, UK, 2014) presented a cheeky spin on the wish-granting fable, while conversely, Hide and Seek (Kayoko Asakura, Japan, 2013) moved with beautiful clarity of composition from calm through to suspense, terror and ultimately horror. The standout was Substance (USA, 2014), Barbara Stepansky’s immersive, hallucinogenic account of two friends unwittingly bringing an alien powder to a winter music festival.
Evangeline, Karen Lam
The intense identification with a female protagonist—even beyond death—found radical expression in the festival’s ‘victim narratives’: feature films Evangeline (Karen Lam, 2013) and Kept (Maki Mizui, 2014). Partially inspired by a long series of unsolved murders of young women in British Columbia, Evangeline begins with its titular heroine (Kat de Lieva) escaping a restrictive upbringing for the excitement of college life. Lam develops this part of the narrative as though it’s a gentle coming-of-age film, allowing Evangeline to blossom as a character before, in a brutal turn of the tables, she is violently assaulted by young men she trusted and left for dead in the woods. The film now enters a subterranean world of heightened violence where fantasy and reality combine to hammer home the heroine’s suffering and rage.
Kept is, most disturbingly, based on its director’s personal experience of an abduction—faithfully reproduced, according to a Skype interview post-screening, in the film. Her attacker would subsequently go on to violently rape another young woman. Dealing with Mizui’s guilt at not reporting her attack sooner, Kept is the most difficult SWMF film to watch. Its bald detailing of sexual violence is unflinching, though the main character’s retreat into animist woodland fantasy offers some respite. It is hard not to be reminded, while watching Kept and Evangeline, how completely they upend conventional crime/horror narratives where an unformed female character is raped or murdered purely to drive the plot and further the character development of an often male protagonist and his antagonist. In Lam and Mizui’s scenarios, the viewer must remain with the victim; there is no escape from the suffering she endures, nor its consequences. The closest relative to these depictions might be the rape revenge movie, but Evangeline and Kept are deeply personal; far less formulaic.
Ground-breaking too, for different reasons, was SWMF’s closing film Chanthaly (2012), Laos’ first horror film and its first from a female director, Mattie Do. Made, astoundingly, for under $5000 and shot entirely in Do’s home, Chanthaly’s limitations work to its advantage, painting a claustrophobic picture of a young woman’s sheltered life in middle class Vientiane. The supernatural makes its presence felt ominously yet quietly. Do’s discussion afterwards with Indonesian-Australian filmmaker Katrina Irawati Graham covered the pressures and pitfalls of making a horror film in Laos, ranging from being arrested (due to Do’s recent emigration from the US) to having to justify to government officials the inclusion of scenes depicting hand-holding and a female lead wearing pyjamas.
This exploration of different perspectives and shaking up of familiar narratives is something that horror, a naturally transgressive genre, can pursue to great effect, but often does not. That SWMF showcases films outside of horror’s ‘safe zone’ makes it genuinely exciting. As Briony Kidd explains, “I’m looking for films that have something to say. There’s an assumption that genre is mainly escapism but, to me, there’s so much scope in horror to be provocative or extreme or personal or original, so why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?”
Stranger With My Face Horror Film Festival, University of Tasmania, Art School and Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 21-24 Aug
In the absence of Sydney Spring Dance (abandoned by Sydney Opera House after the 2013 season on the grounds of cost), Performance Space has done Australian dance proud in its SCORE season with works by Antony Hamilton, Natalie Abbott, Narelle Benjamin, Gail Priest and Jane McKernan, plus an installation by Belgian director Kris Verdonck. Collectively, the works demonstrated the ever-expanding conceptual and theatrical dimensions of what we understand to be contemporary dance.
Kris Verdonck
Kris Verdonck’s installation-performance video Gossip comprises a human-height screen running the length of a wall in one of Carriageworks’ Tracks. Standing in the otherwise empty, dark space we come face to face with a row of people, including the artist, oddly all of the same (digitally engineered) height though of a fascinating range of body types, physiognomies and fashions that are pretty close to our own. Perhaps they are, like us, a first night audience at the theatre or in a gallery. At first glance they appear to each stand alone, if shoulder to shoulder, some smiling, a few disinterested; but small turns of the head and discreet mouthings while staring directly at us suggest they are passing judgement in pairs and then, in trios and larger ripples along the line, gossip. It’s amusingly discomfiting and fun to witness emergent groupings and surprise when the whole gathering performs unanimously. It’s rather like the pleasure of watching Pina Bausch’s parading of her performers—each figure idiosyncratically attractive to our promiscuous gaze but the whole company enticing in itself.
At the New Media Dramaturgies conference opening on the same night, Verdonck spoke of his audience as “projecting onto his work.” Showing us video of his fascinatingly bizarre creations he described his aim as trying “to get actors to be as authentic as objects,” sometimes submitting them to the unpredictable—a Swan Lake passage in which the dancers are suspended such that they cannot properly execute their moves (“an elegant body-machine”). He imagines an equivalent “actor-machine.” While quite genteel next to Verdonck’s other sometimes violent works (focused, he says, on“one state of being, not an image”), Gossip though cleverly machined is open, subtle and certainly performed.
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maximum
photo Gregory Lorenzutti for Dancehouse
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maximum
Natalie Abbott, Maximum
Maximum, a work of labour-intensive minimalism, exploits the bodies of a dancer, Natalie Abbott, and a bodybuilder, Donny Henderson-Smith, whose cultural and personal aims in life might be very different but who share capacities for precision, strength and endurance. The pair is presented as a team (black singlets, silver shorts, the latest gym footware), jointly exercising to a strict routine that takes them from the unison pacing out of squares, circles and diagonals to a range of exercises, including lunges and, unusual for a gym workout, dance-like toe-pointing, swimming-like floorwork and barking while on all fours. The increasingly demanding exercises climax with a doomed attempt by Henderson-Smith to support Abbott as she stands, leaning far forward, on his thighs—it’s as much an effort for her as for him, her runners losing traction on his slippery shorts. Even before this series of collapses the strain on both performers has been evident, the bodybuilder less able than the dancer to sustain precise movement and rhythm.
Maximum is by turns calculatedly clinical (observe the routines, the sweat, the amplified breathlessness), fascinating (the contrasting body and skill types), funny (satirical at the expense of gym regimes), frustrating (repetition and failure) and—if you empathically ‘run with it’—rewarding. In RealTime Profiler June 30, Abbott told Gail Priest, “It’s about asking an audience to come up to that same level of intensity as the performers, asking [them] to persist with us and engage in a different way than in a more obviously spectacular dance show…” Maximum nonetheless has its share of striking theatricality: a stark white tarquette and a low-slung stylish lighting grid (the lights symmetrically arranged in the current fashion) comprise a perfect starkly illuminated cube suggestive of both gym and laboratory. Dan Arnott’s live sound likewise heightens our attentiveness, homing in on and treating the sounds of bodies at work.
While a logical extension of Abbott’s impressive Physical Fractals (RT114; identical-looking dancers working in unison and generating the sounds that Arnott treats), Maximum is not so obviously a dance work but it is the creation of a choreographic sensibility. It’s interesting to see that the dramaturg for Maximum is Matthew Day, an exponent of very idiosyncratically shaped works to which no obvious meaning can be attached however suggestive they are moment by moment in the dancer’s intensely vibrating body. Unlike Physical Fractals and the Day trilogy, Abbott’s Maximum makes visual poetry of something which we can recognise—exercise, its banalities, demands and, possibly, revelations.
Lauren Langlois, Benjamin Hancock, Alisdair Macindoe, Keep Everything, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Lauren Langlois, Benjamin Hancock, Alisdair Macindoe, Keep Everything, Chunky Move
Chunky Move: Antony Hamilton, Keep Everything
The title of Antony Hamilton’s Keep Everything apparently refers to the choreographer’s desire to use leftover ideas from previous projects in his new work, rather than waste them. That information is incidental but Hamilton does conjure a world in which humans comprise their contemporary condition, their simian ancestry and well-worn fantasies of cyborg selves. We do keep everything, although usually barely aware of it.
As science increasingly details the oscillation between genetic and social forces in our evolution as a species we learn how much of our ancient past is still embodied in us. We keep everything in our DNA and hang onto much of the inherited cultures over which we obsess. We also learned long ago to speculate, thanks to the development of language and the conceptual sharing it allowed. So it’s not surprising that Keep Everything is speculative or that one of the three performers delivers a talk, posing questions about our similarity to other species in terms of social structure, our use of codes, but also pointing to our distinctive preoccupation with meanings and feelings. Elsewhere the performers, computer-like, flawlessly churn out spoken number series or signal eloquently, with human fluidity—but later robotically fast in the exacting dance passage that completes the work. As well, we witness our prancing simian selves, the performers almost but not quite on all fours, and a bizarrely funny dog-man. ‘Everything’ includes not only our past and future but also our affinity with other species.
Steven Mithen in The Singing Neanderthals posits language as having evolved out of gestures, calls and dance. Humans, like some other species, are dancers but we have codified and conceptualised dance and now, more than ever, use it to express ideas of a complex order, well beyond ballet narrative and formalist abstraction. Witness not only Keep Everything but also in the past-present-future vein ADT’s Devolution and Be Your Self and Chunky Move’s Glow and Mortal Engine as well as Hamilton’s post-apocalyptic Black Projects 1 and 2 in which Carl Nilsson-Polias detected an anti-humanist vision (RealTime, Dance Massive, 2013). At the end of Black Projects 1 the two strange graffiti-ists disappear into their art and in part 2 human-like creatures build themselves yet another religion.
Not everything in Keep Everything is dance, which is hardly uncommon these days, but every bit of it is realised by the performers’ virtuosity in dance, movement, speech and song spectacularly framed in a light-sound-sculpture installation. For the opening minutes of the work we stare into a totally familiar landscape on which lie two piles of initially unidentifiable detritus. The enigmatic beauty of the scene is reinforced by waves of smoke and colour shadings that further complicate our vision. After this immersive opening, figures appear, one retrieved from the detritus, and the work’s initial mutability is then amplified over and over as the three humans themselves transform repeatedly in a world that grows more sonically dense (house music, sci-fi-ish massive synth glides and weirder) and barely categorisable, intense comic book colours prompt us to see anew. This is our world made otherworldly, textured simultaneously with popular culture and big questions. But for all the exhilaration engendered by its maker and his dancers and designers, Keep Everything is a closed circuit in which we do not evolve; we simply are—Hamilton expressing a kind of happy fatalism or offering a necessary antidote to the denialism that has sustained humanism’s belief in our species’ superiority and in progress at any cost.
For more about Performance Space’s SCORE see the reviews of Jon Rose’s Ghan Tracks on page 43, Gail Priest and Jane McKernan’s One thing follows another… on page 21 and Narelle Benjamin’s Hiding in Plain Sight above.
Performance Space, SCORE: Gossip, artist Kris Verdonck, 1-10 Aug; Maximum, choreographer, performer Natalie Abbott, performer, collaborator Donny Henderson-Smith, lighting Matthew Adey, sound Dan Arnott, dramaturg Matthew Day, 27-30 Aug; Chunky Move, Keep Everything, director, choreographer Antony Hamilton, performers Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois, Alisdair Macindoe, Mobile lighting Benjamin Cisterne, sound design Julian Hamilton, Kim Moyes, AV design: Robin Fox; Carriageworks, Sydney, 13-16 Aug
Hiding in Plain Sight asks for conceptual engagement. Narelle Benjamin draws upon Mircea Eliade who participates in a philosophical tradition that marches toward a holistic return to a self that is fragmented, alienated, empty and without home. Home is more than bricks and mortar; it is being at home with oneself. When this home becomes hearth for others, a re-balancing of the fundamental order of the heart occurs [ordo amoris]. But can we ever be home?
Two cross-legged figures sit facing each other on either side of a doorframe without door. The stage is divided, lasered in half by a white beam, symmetrically left and right, back, front, East, West, dark, light, appearance, reality—all depending upon where one sits in the saddle. The traverse staging sets up an immediate desire to change sides, but only in serving the logic of ‘getting the whole thing at once,’ a suggestion that this is not possible in the condition to which I’m constrained. Window frames without windows hang opposite each other further negating the space with emptiness and filling it with possibility. Doors and windows insist on being opened, closed or left ajar. Without door or window they become mysterious portholes to something else.
Dancers, Kristina Chan and Sara Black nuzzle their necks in a unified nape space, soft, exploratory. Emergent heads cock on a lateral plane in a metronomic beat: 1, 2, 3. This staccato motion posits an underscore of subtle and considered deliberation. We hear voices in a busy market place. Huey Benjamin’s score eclectically rolls out noises of impact: material, poking through a wall of static haze. These weighted sounds curl together then release like the dancers’ spines: tail to head, with the auditory ‘thwack’ of fans: 1, 2, 3. Musically we ratchet from trough to peak in a concertina arrangement cranked between earth and the ethereal.
The identity limit of a form is met vigorously in the dancers’ distal sweeping and wrapping up of limbs: foot pulled to buttock, head arcing to meet points that flip the whole body in transition. Synchronously, they reach with outer tips, taut, then softening, both yielding to the visceral patterns that underlie the beauty of the choreographer’s famed “Nellie’s knots.” This quality of effortless movement is extended through the versatility of the costumes: bodies covered but never lost. Together they deliver other patterns through dancing with fans: the art of not revealing. No longer birds of paradise, they spar, punching and blocking with even touch upon a thin line of separation. Apart, the dancers motor in their spatial halves in idiosyncratic ways. Black sharply accents through torso, arms, fingertips with a bolt of force that propels and slices through the silky contemplative movement that Chan often inhabits—arms behind, tentacles worm with proboscis hands anointing the space. There is an inner/outer dynamic. Sensorial motivations buoy, explode and haunt the choreographic form along its pathway—what lies beneath now in plain sight.
Floating like clouds, Sam James’ black and white floor projections are a cosmological meditation on scale: patterned surfaces magnified, universes miniaturized; a tree grows. The hypnotic motility of these visual symbols gathers all the elements of the dance and brings it almost home.
Performance Space, SCORE: Hiding in Plain Sight, choreographer Narelle Benjamin, performers: Kristina Chan, Sara Black, video Samuel James, music Huey Benjamin, lighting Karen Norris, costumes Justine Shih Pearson, fan designs Victoria Brown; Carriageworks, Sydney 22-30 Aug
Angela Goh, Lizzie Thomson, Jane McKernan, One thing follows another
photo Lucy Parakhina
Angela Goh, Lizzie Thomson, Jane McKernan, One thing follows another
It may not be a stretch to regard the performing arts today as gladiatorially pitted against the hyperreal X-Factor, The Voice and their like, contests which blur into one, hell-bent on delivering battle after battle of virtuosic talents while needlessly magnifying nondescript personalities.
One thing follows another offers a quieter alternative, taking its inspiration from the humble intermedia explorations of Fluxus, a movement which yielded works that eschewed bombastic expression, some of them sardonically catalogued by composer Gail Priest and choreographer Jane McKernan. Aided by fellow devisors Angela Goh and Lizzie Thomson, competition manifests below the surface, as the artists examine their own performance-making practices driven here by games of chance that trigger improvisation.
As the audience approach their seats in the arena, each member is given a brown paper bag containing spartan surprises: a Mintie and a handcrafted zine of reading matter which quotes seminal texts, instructions and provocations that speak to the conceptual forebears of the artists. We walk past the performers seated at a card table in the middle of the performance space as if in a miniature boxing ring, engrossed in a craft-making working bee, a mental warm up for the Big Game.
Lest we get too comfortable with the sporting metaphors, the group delivers Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto‚ aimed at reducing dance to its essential elements, thus muting our desire to read this endeavour as a deliberate exercise in gimmickry and interactivity. Regardless, it is impossible to ignore the three prominent video monitors above the performers, which are assigned the role of ominous timepieces, always reminding us of how much further we travel into the show’s allocated 56 minutes. Each of the 14 sections unfolds in minor increments of duration, making us aware of the finite nature of the offerings which alternate between movement, text and live sound-mixing, lulling us into an almost predictable rhythm of form and order.
But the music consciously refuses to intertwine with the action, creating Cagean disruption of notions of accompaniment and causality. Priest loops, distorts and mixes pre-recorded sounds and her own live utterances from a neat electronic sound table while the others carve up the space.
Halfway through, a muted game of handball is played alongside a sequence that could only be described as ‘mathematical notation charades‚’ involving two dancers flitting around and, with great commitment, taking instruction from simulated ticker-tape displaying mathematical symbols—fed manually as close-ups through a live video feed from a smartphone. The result is both whimsical and engrossing.
When the performers reunite around the table, a convivial game of Snap starts with little fanfare, characterised by aggressive table-slapping percussion—arousing the familiar sensation of palms flinching. Here the nostalgic audience is at one with the players.
Towards the end, the performers expand the number of proverbial plate spinnings simultaneously, including inviting volunteers to re-enact Tomas Schmit’s act of transferring water between glass bottles to the point of complete evaporation, conjuring the most overt reference to the Fluxus canon with regard to the measuring of a fluid time and ephemerality of action and matter.
Soon after, McKernan prepares and subsequently microwaves a packet mix cake, an olfactory awakening but then a backhanded treat when offered to the audience by way of a lottery. Having spent the better part of the 56 minutes inviting us to meditate and luxuriate in an expanded sense of time, it is a very apt coda to the evening. We are reminded that, beyond the theatre, where we may find ourselves in the land of the time-poor, you can speed things up in life, but nothing beats a real cake made from scratch and patiently baked in a real oven.
We are reminded that ‘time is a container,’ that we, the audience, determine those parameters within which we choose to engage with live performance. We conventionally ask of the live moment that it help suspend our sense of time as we encounter a plethora of purposefully prescribed sounds, images and emotions. In this endeavour, the opposite has been true, the show activating familiar anxieties that come from obsessively measuring time.
The assemblage of events in One thing follows another adds up to a disciplined ‘Flux-off,’ a refreshing mind-map of the movement’s spirit in celebrating the unassuming and the mundane, while inverting the brash aesthetic that has accompanied popular culture’s own obsession with the disposable.
Performance Space, SCORE: One thing follows another, co-creators Jane McKernan (choreographer), Gail Priest (composer), performer-devisors Angela Goh, Jane McKernan, Gail Priest, Lizzie Thomson, video consultant Samuel James, lighting design Clytie Smith, Carriageworks, Sydney, 20-23 Aug
Improvisation is an established performance methodology that emerged from the American Postmodern rupture in dance more than 50 years ago. One proponent, choreographer William Forsythe, has activated several generations of dancer-collaborators to produce what could be considered a ‘Forsythe lineage’ of dance artists experimenting with improvisational methodologies. One key artist is USA-born Michael Schumacher.
Schumacher has danced with and produced award-winning choreography for many major companies including the Frankfurt Ballet, Twyla Tharp Dance, Pretty Ugly Dance Company, Netherlands Dance Theatre III, Jirí Kylián and the Dutch National Ballet to name a few. I spoke by phone with the amiable and erudite Schumacher ahead of his visit to Perth to perform with cellist Alex Waterman as well as conduct masterclasses for the MoveMe Improvisation Festival in November.
William Forsythe
A brief overview of Forsythe’s work is important to contextualise Michael Schumacher’s current practice. Forsythe forged his choreographic aesthetic by deconstructing the ballet vocabulary while director of Ballet Frankfurt (1985-2004). He also generated multiple ways to visualise and archive dance ideas, including documenting his ‘improvisation technologies’ (available as a CD-ROM), devising methods for visualising the information in One Flat Thing Reproduced (2006) (http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu) and collaborating on the shared archival platform www.motionbank.org. As director of the Forsythe Company (2005-2015), he extended his exploration of improvisational methodologies by facilitating dancer-collaborators to self-compose within ensemble parameters and devised interactive installations to mobilise audience-participants.
Postmodern pioneers
While Schumacher belongs to Forsythe’s balletic lineage, he also shares several concerns of postmodern improvising pioneers such as Anna Halprin, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Lisa Nelson and Deborah Hay who first started working with a Western (as opposed to an African or Classical Indian) approach to improvisation in the USA around the middle of the 20th century. Schumacher is part of an interesting generation of dance artists because the boundaries between previously divergent dance lineages now bleed freely. Classical or codified forms have been deconstructed and radicalised, while improvising performers consolidate techniques, producing a richer and more complex array of ‘intra-disciplinary’ creative choices.
The Schumacher perspective
I asked Schumacher what he loved most about improvisation. He explained that primarily his fascination stems from the fact that improvisation resists codification and delights in the fact that everyone does it differently. In his practice he prefers not to create rules around improvising, for example, “if you’re not going deep enough it’s not authentic. I say ‘authentic to whom?’ In my experience, rules are not important.” He suggests that his open approach is a result of his practice of the Alexander Technique in which he, “releases tension patterns and with that comes the release of ideas about how things should be done.”
While at Ballet Frankfurt Schumacher worked extensively with tasks but he favours the non-delineated approach of “finding the score organically and then recognising it” as this method produces a different quality of attention he prefers. He says of composing in real time that, “it’s been extremely valuable to me to know how to not ramble on in aimless pursuit of new information. In five minutes you have enough material to build a 15-minute composition. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but it does take a certain amount of attention.” He explained that he arrived at this insight through ongoing practice. “When I first entered into it, it was more of an automatic, intuitive flow which relied heavily on my kinaesthetic experiences. Then, I found that the rest of my sensory body was not aware of what was going on around me. In performance, I was not totally present and I missed a lot of potential interactions. That’s what led me back to sensory perception and conscious presence.”
What Schumacher terms ‘conscious presence’ utilises the multidimensional facilities of the human instrument which he describes as “the ultimate technology on the planet.” Conscious presence accesses another level of consciousness through the senses. He says, “the sensation has a huge impact on the execution. It’s a sensory experience, not just a kinaesthetic experience.” He describes the methodology of conscious presence as to “experience without associating” while listening and observing.
Schumacher explains, “The way to describe the experience of listening on the cellular level has a lot to do with not naming, not analysing. It’s not rational at all. It’s simply sensing: listening with my skin, listening with my bones, listening with my organs, listening with my eyes…” Through the practice of conscious presence, Schumacher has developed an appreciation for observation as a creative act. He adds, “So much of the time that we work with improvisation or anything creative, we feel that we must produce something. We have to do something in order to be part of the creative process. I am realising it’s not true. We know through quantum theory and philosophy that observation changes whatever we’re observing. Observation is participation.”
Somatic practices became a major influence for Schumacher after completing his formal training at the Julliard School, when he discovered ‘release’ classes. He says that the Alexander Technique and T’ai Chi Chuan are “the biggest influences on my dance in terms of the technique. I think the funny thing about T’ai Chi is that it actually taught me how to do ballet…and then, when I went to work in Frankfurt, [my classical technique] really grew and developed in a way that I didn’t expect.” He says, “There is a valuable contribution to the experience of moving and to executing something that’s virtuosic when you are also listening to the effect that the movement has on you. This might be in terms of physiology, kinesiology, biology and physics: that you’re really experiencing something more than just creating an image.”
When asked about narrative in his work he says, “Every moment we’re telling ourselves the story of us. In my training as a dancer and in the earlier improvisational experience that I had, there wasn’t much acknowledgement of that. It was always just execution and a virtuosic approach to movement through improvisation. I am interested in broadening that space where it’s not only about the virtuosic, it’s also about the sensing body.”
Michael Schumacher is a compelling addition to a strong line-up at MoveMe Improvisation Festival, which also includes Ros Warby, Rosalind Crisp, Andrew Morrish, Peter Trotman, Jo Pollitt, Paea Leach, Jacob Lehrer and David Corbet.
STRUT National Choreographic Centre and collaborating organisations: MoveMe Improvisation Festival, Perth, 22-30 Nov; artists Michael Schumacher and Alex Waterman, Rosalind Crisp, Ros Warby, Andrew Morrish, Peter Trottman, Jo Pollitt, Paea Leach, Jacob Lehrer and, David Corbet, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey; selected works tour to Sydney’s Critical Path, Melbourne’s Dancehouse and Brisbane’s Judith Wright Centre, with Ausdance QLD.
Niharika Senapati, Tyrone Robinson, Imanuel Dado and Storm Helmore, Precipice
photo Traianos Pakioufakis
Niharika Senapati, Tyrone Robinson, Imanuel Dado and Storm Helmore, Precipice
An axle of light cleaves the silence like a strange attractor in the deep night of space. Bodies balance on this precipice of becoming, staring across infinitude while succumbing to the forces of attraction and repulsion.
Rachel Ogle’s cosmic dance, Precipice, glances gravely into being as an impressively contained universe of matter and motion, of sound and light. It is difficult to determine whether the four dancers are actually distinguishable from the dimensions which they inhabit. They are enigmatic carriers of ceaseless patterns which both bind and confound the senses. In those first moments of approaching, falling away and returning, velocity gathers pace until the dancers’ energy splinters sound and illumination with screams of presence. Then, with a snap, the cry of human loss is cut as the audience is plunged back into the dark and soundless abyss. The cosmos seems to fold human agency and desire into yet other bits of matter circulating into eternity. But, in this work, the dancing and the dancers do still matter.
In earth-bound terms, the dancers’ sporadic encounters often wheel into irregularity. One dancer’s twisting instability is juxtaposed with a horizontal folding of the three others, edged sharply in their carefully composed unison of turning. Vibrational momentum wraps angle and speed unto itself, incipient with form and variation, straining towards thought and communication. There is the cosmos in planes of abstraction, and there is the cosmos of human imagination and interconnection, which demands an emotional response. Both exist, signalling significance, even if the miniscule and the daunting whole do not logically hold.
Here is where I found the precipice in the work, in the sheer drop in which matter on the grand scale turns human, pivoting around vortices towards meaning. Ultimately, the work is a conversation between the human and the cosmos where wonderment and debility collide though not necessarily in negative terms. The dancers’ counterbalancing highlights the logic of human cause and effect, before spinning interdependence back into the limitless space of potentiality. Duos that merge into quartets—intimate ideas about family and community—only to eddy back into prehuman atmospheres. Precipice’s strength lies in its capacity to precipitate this odd convergence of incommensurable understandings.
The lighting (Ben Cisterne) and soundscapes (Luke Smiles) partner the dancers: together they assemble and dissemble form and traverse the space of unknowing to forge ideas, often indistinct but always compelling. Near the end of this abstract space odyssey, there is a stunning moment of disappearance, when the audience is plunged into darkness and hit by a blinding light in a single instant. The assault on sight is a little disturbing until focus returns on the stilled image of Niharika Senapati’s silhouette, black in a curved universe of light, hovering hesitantly on the edge of some unseen chasm. The light recedes, drifting slowly into the distance until only her after-image remains, a ghostly sliver wandering the cosmos. Curiously, at the same time the departure of these effervescent particles evokes the rightful place of an embodied human dancer within the overwhelming thought of cosmic infinitude. Precipice settles the universe within while turning endlessly beyond.
Precipice, choreography Rachel Ogle, performers: Storm Helmore, Tyrone Robinson, Niharika Senapati, Imanuel Dado, visual design Ben Cisterne, composer: Luke Smiles/motion laboratories, costumes Colleen Sutherland; Studio Underground, State Theatre, Perth, 21-24 Aug
The audience is ushered into an empty white gallery and, as with preparations for a kids’ game, we are assisted in putting sheets over our heads. Before long I stand among an assembly of ghosts in hues of pistachio, lilac, blush and fawn. The intention may be anonymity but I feel self consciously recognisable. The friend who has accompanied me is unaccustomed to the independent dance scene, though familiar with the protocols of theatre and the gallery. He chooses to pull his beanie over his bed(sheet) head and takes a series of photos on his iPhone—we are in a gallery after all.
All I can do is fidget, finding ways to wear my shroud: air underneath, shaping from outside, gather in, smooth over, endless methods in an attempt to get comfortable, in order to concentrate on the performance. Some audience members adjust themselves in a similar manner, while a few renegade spirits slouch against the walls. The majority follow the leader leaning into the alabaster ghost in the centre of the gallery.
There is something in the air of Not About Face as Luke George directs us to press harder, feel the vibrations between us and shake with him. Like a corporealist evangelist he passionately intones about bodily fluids, saliva and brain cells, bringing our attention to the aura that is so close “I could be you and you could be me.” I recognise the zeitgeist, a collective choreographic consciousness characterised by throwaway yet earnest detachment between the flesh performing and the bodies watching—through their Casper eyeholes. Still covered in their sheets his audience curls up on the floor ‘spooning’ each other. Unlike George and most of the audience, I don’t want intimacy, collective desire or to vibrate together. Tonight I don’t feel empathy. I feel coerced and I’m not in the mood for post-irony. Nearing the end, George discards his shroud and dances ecstatically in a skimpy lycra wrestling unitard. Like a charismatic preacher George’s dancing does tap into a collective consciousness of bodies and flesh. His moves are an interesting mix of brittleness and assurance. I enjoy the exuberance of the dance. This part of the experience does affect me and I am left in a state of agreeable bemusement.
Coming out from under our hot shrouds we enjoy the relief of the cool night air before shuffling into the Performance Studio for the second work of the evening, Cheerleader of Europe. The lights shine down on the audience. This is one of those theatrical settings where you feel implicated, in quite a different way from the earlier work. You can’t hide under your sheet, nor sit there in the dark, or relax and do nothing.
Daniel Kok, Cheerleader of Europe
courtesy Campbelltown Arts Centre
Daniel Kok, Cheerleader of Europe
The compact Daniel Kok, from Singapore, wearing the second lycra wrestling unitard of the evening, charms us with a tragic ‘true’ tale of army cadets and a fatal shooting, followed by a chirpy cheerleading routine. Hand coloured flags and “Song of Joy” set the scene for ruminations on the European Project. Once again there is dancing flesh and a proclamation, “My body is right here in front of you…the organs in between…with toes to live the dream…” Once again hints of the collective choreographic consciousness pervade the half-hearted if entertaining movement vocabulary. The manipulative, smooth, dictatorial tone serves as a complementary accumulation to the evangelical voice of the first work.
An awkward apolitical conversation with an audience member who lives here and is ‘European’ ensues. Banal questions such as “Do you feel Australian?” offer little in the way of enlightenment for this audience as to our position in the world. In between, Kok offers apologetically, “I don’t want to put you on the spot.” My European friend mutters, “Well you did,” and I laugh under the bright light. Other than a short, sketchy, informal introduction where he informs us of the previous context for this work, Daniel Kok hasn’t rethought the purpose of this performance, originally for a European audience, in its recasting for an audience in Greater Western Sydney, Australia.
I look for guidance as to how I should respond to these performances. A list in the Program Notes categorises “4 Levels of Engagement in a Performance” (Kok). I take on the advice, as it appears that I am a “meta-critical,” “critical spectator” “engaged in pluralist and agonistic audienceship!” Both works overtly deal with “the nature of the unseen and unspoken agreements/traditions between performer and audience” (George). While George remonstrates with the audience if they don’t do what he wants, Kok “wishes to marshal the community towards a sense of unity” where “everyone must be happy in the end.”
“Come on, do something. We are from Europe,” Kok cheers. “We are from Europe,” he urges us to chant. I can’t summon up the puff to make any sound but my friend sitting next to me, repeatedly utters in his gravelly Eastern European accent: “We are NOT from Europe, We are NOT from Europe. We are NOT from Europe.” Now, in the end, as confetti falls, Kok gets his wish. I am happy. But I am happy that we are NOT from Europe.
Luke George, Not About Face; Daniel Kok, Cheerleader of Europe; Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 1-2 Aug
Timothy Walsh, In, Gavin Webber, Threefold, photo Leigh Turner, Bottlebrush Studio
Threefold brings together three choreographers, each with a distinctly different aesthetic, for a triple bill of short, powerful, contrasting works. Bosco Shaw’s clever lighting design paradoxically enhances both the delineation of each work and the coherence of the trio of creations, reinforced by the same six mind-blowing dancers performing throughout.
The flow from Huang Yi’s minimalist Echo, focussed on pure gesture, light and shadow, to Gavin Webber’s twitchy acid trip In, to Raewyn Hill’s soul-clutching A dance for the forgotten, is the perfect order for presentation. The audience is prepped by wonderment in the first, raised to fever pitch in the second and have their hearts broken in the third.
A collaboration between Dancenorth and Tasdance, Threefold comprises a suite of two independently commissioned works—Gavin Webber for Dancenorth, Dancenorth’s artistic director Raewyn Hill for Tasdance—and one joint commission by Huang Yi from Taiwan, in his premiere work for an Australian audience.
Echo, Huang Yi
photo Leigh Turner, Bottlebrush Studio
Echo, Huang Yi
Huang Yi, Echo
Echo played out with unnerving precision to a soundtrack of low, incessant industrial rumble. Confined in intermittent squares or spots of bright light, with no discernible beat or phrases to work to, astonishingly the dancers seemed to synchronise every gesture to apparently random loud metallic clangs, clunks and booms.
The number of dancers seemed to change as they moved into the light pools with their shadows and were then absorbed back into the surrounding darkness. The lights switched off and on, merged, separated, as did the dancers, variously moving solo, in duo or ensemble; embracing, chasing, counterbalancing, dragging and re-placing each other. Gestures hinted one moment at capoeira, another at flamenco or ballet. This was dance quick, slow motion, sharp, fluid, combative or complicit, but always exquisitely precise. Spoiler alert: hidden technology was the key to perfect synchronicity in the absence of countable rhythm: rather than the dancers reacting to the sounds, the noises were activated externally by smartphone in response to the dancers’ movement.
Gavin Webber, In
Gavin Webber’s In ends with a dancer facing the audience to apologise: “Yeah, shit got out of hand, sorry,” a fitting conclusion to a chaotic journey (somewhere between a romp and a nightmare) through themes of conformism, bullying, manipulation, aggression, peer pressure, escapism and exhibitionism. Webber uses a recurring motif from his works as former artistic director at Dancenorth: clothing—worn, removed, exchanged, folded, piled, dumped from above to engulf and slapped on the floor in rhythm to Hendrix-like wailing guitars. Commencing with five dancers in business suits with one standout in casual exercise gear, there’s trouble from the start as she’s harrassed to change. But even as she conforms, the bar keeps changing as fast as the clothes do. These brittle, posturing and confused people indulge in a relentless, highly physical, sometimes almost violent game of sabotage while vying for their moment in the sun. “I’ve got something to say about current issues,” shouts one as he’s thrown around by another, “but it may not be pretty.” We never hear what it is as she weighs him down with layer upon layer of jackets.
The piece builds to a prolonged red-lit guitar trance party of frantic shaking bodies, and after the increasing sense of alienation reaches its pitch, the final apologetic statement is like being slapped out of it.
Raewyn Hill, Forgotten
Raewyn Hill’s A dance for the forgotten is the compressed essence of a 60-minute work made for the Tasmanian festival Ten Days on the Island in 2007. Like its place of conception, Port Arthur, the work contains layers of history and tragedy which, supported by the moving score (Eden Mulholland’s reworking of Pergolesi’s Marian Vespers), gives its themes a timelessness. The set conspires in suggestive simplicity. The space is atmospherically sidelit by vertical lighting set into tall wings, two at one side of the stage, one on the other. The dancers, clad in Alistair Trung designed costumes which defy period classification, surge from side to side through golden shafts of light on the otherwise black stage, the physical expression of the call and response in the gothic chant. They surge back, but someone is left behind. “Erynne!” they scream, reaching for the lost one, and sobbing breaths punctuate the music again and again.
A characteristic of Hill’s work is her ability to have multiple performers move as a single organism, from which dancers disassociate and reattach without losing a sense of connection. This is used to outstanding effect, evoking our common humanity and shared grief over unspeakable tragedy. A final series of lifts, a succession with each dancer moving the next, is interrupted with a plea to “Get down!” but a dancer’s hands fling back in slow motion, his chest recoiling, and it is over.
The physical and emotional diversity of Threefold must tax the dancers to the limit, but the energy never flagged in the commitment of Dancenorth’s Alice Hinde, Erynne Mulholland and Andrew Searle and Tasdance’s Sarah Fiddaman, Brianna Kell and Timothy Walsh.
TasDance/Dancenorth, Threefold, Dancenorth, Townsville 7-10 Aug and toured to Mackay, Cairns, Launceston and Hobart.
Daniel Belton’s career is a victory over the tyranny of distance. Based in the regional New Zealand town of Dunedin (closer to Antarctica than Hobart is), Belton has turned to producing dance films for international festivals. His most striking works however are difficult-to-tour multimedia dances such as Soundings (2000).
Satellites (2014) is a collaboration with the Royal New Zealand Ballet, enabling Belton to again work on a grand scale, placing multiple live bodies in front of and behind semi-translucent projections and sculptural objects.
The steely, silver and grey visual aesthetic of Satellites evokes planetary metaphors and Modernist visions of outer space. Jac Grenfell’s projected animations sketch Saturnalian arcs traced by small bodies mathematically circling around off-screen behemoths. The audience gazes from above or at a slight angle into these misty discs of interstellar dust, while dancers holding small mirrored rounds create a similar sense of backscatter across the space. The upper quadrant of the proscenium is often occupied by two vast, metalic discs, spinning gently.
The tableau is in this sense powerful and coherent, fusing 1950s dreams of spatial conquest and science fiction, with early Modernist and Futurist precedents from Europe. One could imagine Satellites as a grand early Soviet ballet. Indeed Belton and costume designer Donnine Harrison end the work with the entry of one then two ballerinas clothed in sleek, metallic dresses and tutus which are modelled on Oskar Schlemmer’s designs for the Bauhaus’ Triadic Ballet (1922).
Choreographically, the piece has an overall drag of left to right. Although figures do enter from the right (notably the closing ballerinas), these events act as a counterpoint to the way in which figures enter from the left, coalesce and gesture back from whence they have come, arms held out in forceful lines like Olympic heroes, often with the reflective discs featuring, before they seem to drop off to the right. This larger pulsion of movement echoes the circuits which the projected planetoids take, down the upper arm of curves rolling around left to right. It is as though cosmic tides wash the dancers away into utopian infinity.
As ballet-trained dancers, the performers of the Royal New Zealand Ballet emphasise the clear lines of Belton’s choreography, moving into statuesque combinations and holding the apogee of movements and poses rather than being swept into expressive flow (though this is undercut somewhat by the baggy pants worn by the male dancers). Broadly, the concept of scattering seems to act as a dominant organising principle as dancers break off into varied groupings from larger, unified associations, reassembling at irregular intervals into collectives of two or more.
This loose, open feeling in the choreography, together with elements of pedestrian or relaxed movement, is set against a sense of grandeur and a highly sculptural, material stage design with which the dancers must engage—suggesting Twyla Tharp meets Merce Cunningham (and perhaps a touch of Schlemmer’s contemporary, Leni Riefenstahl).
Scholars debate whether Cunningham’s sculptural complexity and precision made him Modernist (in the sense of Schlemmer) or Postmodernist like Tharp, but Tharp’s lighter touch and generally more gentle framing of the body seems closer to Belton’s approach. Belton’s scenographic framing by contrast presents something closer to Cunningham’s tendency to trawl through the history of Modernism for formal inspiration (such as in Cunningham’s Walkabout Time, featuring a set by Jasper Johns inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1923).
Satellite’s unstable positioning with respect to the divide between Modernism and Postmodernism is most evident in the collision of an otherwise utopian, almost spiritual visual palette, as opposed to Jan-Bas Bollen’s music, which owes more to Postmodern themes of communication breakdown. Bollen has previously created notated homages to composer Iannis Xenakis, but here his soundscape is sophisticated glitch-funk such as that popularised by labels like mille plateau and Bip-Hop in the 1990s. Key elements of Bollen’s acoustic palette include the digitally processed sounds of electricity sparking, or the effect of short-circuits upon amplification devices.
While the planets and the dancers move smoothly, the sound does not. Rhythmic pulses are interrupted by our futuristic technology, glitching and becoming embedded within interstellar noise. One can envisage an alternative version of Satellites in which the dance fragments along with the sound—planets careening off their orbits like so much chaotic space debris and the dense static force of Bollen’s sonic bed overwhelming our attempts to reclaim this material from Modernism’s confident utopianism.
Royal New Zealand Ballet, Satellites, part of the Allegro program, choreography, conceptual design Daniel Belton, stage design, sculpture Jim Murphy, costumes Donnine Harrison, animated projection Jac Grenfell, music Jan-Bas Bollen, Regent Theatre, Dunedin, NZ, 23 Aug
Miranda Wheen’s first work in this FORM triple bill, Safe Hands, is a short, cartoonish satirical take on demagoguery in which the initially suited dancer plays male-politician-as-celebrity—mutating from the crowd stirrer to a man-of-the-people mover (with excruciatingly protracted dancing and twitching to ironically selected rock and pop numbers) and, finally, the sportsman, pushing himself towards limits visibly beyond his reach but nonetheless wrapping (actually masking) himself victoriously in Australian icons (to “We don’t need another hero”).
It’s broadbrush commentary, but a reminder of how Tony Abbott (the suit, the blue tie; the hard hat, the safety vest; the army apparel; the bike, the water and any other challenge) has followed in the footsteps of John Howard (whose guises included the ‘RM Williams’ man on the land). The most striking image in this work has Wheen on all-fours convulsively dropping torso and abdomen floorward (to Janis Joplin’s “Cry Baby”), suggesting a masochistic dimension to the narcissistic power figure.
A more impressive work, Between Two and Zero, created in collaboration with co-performer Matt Cornell, is also an exercise in testing limits, this time in an initially delicate but soon assertively physical courtship. Informal party dancing is followed by cautious, almost courtly tracking of each other, her sudden, funny headfirst dash into him (desire as violence?) and a repeated series of tightly intimate face-to-face lifts which appear tortuously close to separating head from neck. This obsessive ritual is hauntingly realised in the dancers’ acuity of movement, physical strength and the dreamlike lighting transitions (Guy Harding) that increasingly close in the space around the pair. Wheen and Cornell reveal substantial choreographic potential, transforming an everyday universal into a very specific vision of the tangle that is coupling.
Sketch, Carl Sciberras (video still)
Carl Sciberras’ Sketch is an adventurous meeting of dance and digital artistry, bringing together a trio of dancers, composer Mitchell Mollison and visual artist Todd Fuller (both onstage), in which the latter alternately leads the dancers with his overhead-projected live sketches of body shapes into which they step, or accompanies them with richly coloured iPad finger swipes of increasing density, daring and complexity. The music is likewise responsive, crisply realised, nicely textured and more than a little evocative of the electronic music I grew up with in the 1960s—hard edged, metallic, static washes, shifting wavelengths and, finally in Sketch, great oceanic waves of sound.
There are several problems with Sketch. First, it is hugely overwrought: the not very interesting matching of sketched bodies and dancers and the much more fascinating digital brush-stroking of screen and the colouring-in of dancers are both far too long. Many good ideas are simply wasted. Second, the choreography, although adroitly and confidently realised, never breaks free of its formality, resulting in an unresolved dialectic between the dancing on the one hand and the freedom of expression of the sound and image collaborators on the other, especially the visual artist whose display of inventiveness appears limitless, eventually upstaging any attempt at dialogue or break-through synthesis. I treasured the few moments when the dancers appeared to take control of the imagery. Sketch is the potential from which a more succinctly powerful work might evolve.
FORM, Dance Bites 2014: Dance Makers’ Collective, Triple Bill: Safe Hands, choreographer, performer Miranda Wheen; Between Two & Zero, choreographers, performers Matt Cornell, Miranda Wheen; Sketch, choreographer Carl Sciberras, visual artist Todd Fuller, live composition Mitchell Mollison, performers Katina Olsen, Carl Sciberras, Rosslyn Wythes; Lennox Theatre, Riverside Parramatta, 11-13 Sept; http://form.org.au
The importance of the Keir Choreographic Award cannot be underestimated in the challenging climate in which independent choreographers work in this country. The prizes not only alert us to emerging talents and reward them with heightened visibility and cash (the Judge’s award, $30,000; the People’s Choice Award, $10,000) but perhaps the Award also signals where contemporary dance is headed. The latter, moreso than the winners, was the subject muttered about in the Carriageworks foyer after the awards announcement, as it was during Performance Space’s SCORE season (see pp19-23).
I can’t recall when I’ve heard, post-show, so much uncritical enthusiasm on the one hand and scorn on the other. There were eight semi-finalists: Sarah Aiken (VIC); James Batchelor (VIC); Tim Darbyshire (VIC); Matthew Day (VIC); Atlanta Eke (VIC); Shaun Gladwell (NSW); Jane McKernan (NSW); and Brooke Stamp (VIC); their works were performed at Melbourne’s Dancehouse. The works of the four finalists Aiken, Eke, Day and McKernan were on show at Sydney’s Carriageworks. (Perhaps the next showings should be telecast from one venue to the other.) What triggered debate was form. Award-winner Atlanta Eke’s Body of Work was even less a dance work than Monster Body, her much acclaimed segueing of dance, performance art and installation. Body of Work’s media dimension—the performer’s manipulated view of her ‘actual’ and virtual selves—suggested potential which the Award money might help realise.
Carli Mellow, Angela Goh, Leeke Griffin, Lizzie Thomson, Mass Movement, Jane McKernan
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Carli Mellow, Angela Goh, Leeke Griffin, Lizzie Thomson, Mass Movement, Jane McKernan
Matthew Day’s Rites (a take on Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring) was critically limited by its short duration and an awkward dramatic structure, but the work did spring from his body, as ever not looking like any dance we’ve seen, for which I’m grateful. Sarah Aiken’s Three Short Dances was Bauhaus-lite, more installation than dance, its large geometric shapes moving unrevealingly and the artist’s balancing of long poles on head, hands and shoulders aesthetically inexpressive. Jane McKernan’s Mass Movement was based on an improvisational structure which gave the work cogency, a great sense of nervy fluidity (suspenseful even as we waited for various patterns to resolve into a singularity of purpose) and featured actual dancing. McKernan won the audience vote (if foyer talk was anything to go by, Eke was also highly popular).
If there was a shortage of remarkable dancing in the final of the Keir Choreographic Award, there were ample signs of a young generation’s preoccupation with the body relative to its mediatised self, states of being, game structure and installation, none of them particularly new but certainly warranting renewed and regenerative investigation. Matthew Day (as evident in previous works) is the most idiosyncratic choreographer but his durational approach doesn’t mesh well with a competition requiring 20-minute creations (he came in around 10 minutes). Although conventional notions of dance haven’t figured highly in the finals, there are choreographic sensibilities at work, if not to everyone’s taste.
Expressions of disgruntlement centred on a perceived appropriation of dance by other art forms, not least the electronic arts, hence disappointment at the selection of video artist Shaun Gladwell as a semi-finalist (the award is open to non-dance artists who don’t necessarily even work with dancers) and irritation with Atlanta Eke’s limited movement palette and a po-mo overload of references that don’t add up to dance. Ironically, the movement to centre-stage of other practices in dance has been fostered by a generation of successful Australian choreographers who have fruitfully collaborated with photographic, video, sound, fashion, music and installation artists to yield aesthetically and intellectually ambitious works in which dance is primary but at the same time one part of an array of forces corralled by artists who describe themselves first as directors, then as choreographers.
There are dance artists and followers who feel that dance is being buried alive beneath other artforms—or displaced by notions of what constitutes art. Therefore, Natalie Abbott’s Maximum is not a dance work, it’s ‘just conceptual;’ Antony Hamilton’s Keep Everything is ‘over-blown,’ ‘tricksy dance theatre’ (although the dancers’ virtuosic skills are much admired, as if not choreographed), but Narelle Benjamin’s Hiding in Plain Sight is ‘the real thing’—entirely a dance work, one comfortably rooted in the lyrically fluent modern dance tradition of the last century, if blessed with the choreographer’s idiosyncratic demands on the body’s flexibility. Angst has also been expressed about recent works by Philip Adams and Luke George (page 26) which evoke ritual, the spiritual and the paranormal, their creations more akin to live art than dance. Is dance about to go missing?
Modernism’s challenge to ballet early in the 20th century and the Postmodern upheavals of the 1960s are still being felt in an artform which is at once born of highly disciplined, inherently conservative training, often from childhood, and a sometimes surprising openness to experiment. A desire for purity of expression has been central to these movements, expression freed of theatricality, narrative and psychologising—pure dance, of itself and nothing more. The Trisha Brown: From All Angles (see p15) program in the Melbourne International Arts Festival in October will track the evolution of this artist’s seminal aesthetic from un-dancerly performance art-like events to highly integrated, collaborative stage works—without Brown ever abandoning first principles.
Dance in the early 21st century is hugely diverse, complex and rampantly hybrid; it’s not surprising that there’s a desire to return to something essential (as in certain improvisational practices) or to at least further the abstraction and clarity of line in the dance of the second half of the 20th century with its entwined lineage of ballet, Modernism and Postmodernism.
Is a (mostly) generational battle looming over form and a perceived subordination of dance to other forms, or was it just a Sydney thing—in a state without a major dance school, with small university dance courses under threat and inordinately strong competition for arts funding? Given the unusually passionate, if not loudly expressed, opinions about the Keir Choreographic Awards (predictably there were complaints about the appropriateness of the judging panel, which included Mårten Spångberg, “the acclaimed ‘bad boy’ of [European] contemporary dance” [press release]), it would be healthy for the Sydney dance scene, and beyond, if these views were publicly discussed rather than rumoured. Was there dancing? Will there be dancing?
It is critical, from time to time, to ask what constitutes dance and how it renews and extends and even perhaps limits itself—as in the 90s with the incorporation of a greater range of body regimes and technologies. Interviewed in Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers (RealTime-Wakefield Press, 2014), choreographer Helen Herbertson says, “…there’s such an enormous scope for dance to be applied. I almost feel like it’s lost a kind of specificity of being about physicality… So I think we are slightly in danger of dance looking like it’s just a kind of tool to be used. I’m waiting for a kind of re-flowering of really specific, particular detailed language.”
Congratulations to Atlanta Eke and Jane McKernan and to Phillip Keir and his partners, Carriageworks and Dancehouse, for bravely supporting emergent choreography in whatever form it takes. Long may the Awards persist and, like many an art prize, controversially test our collective taste and judgment.
At Carriageworks on September 12, we celebrated 20 uninterrupted years of RealTime—its writers, editors, staff and clients, our Open City Inc Board of Management (publisher of RealTime) and especially our readers, supporters and the artists we treasure.
The evening commenced with the launch of Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers, jointly published by RealTime and Wakefield Press. Choreographer Sue Healey, one of the book’s subjects, spoke of its importance for her and Carin Mistry (Dance, Australia Council) launched it. The editorial duo, Erin Brannigan and Virginia Baxter, thanked contributors, reflected on their labours of love and mused over some of the big questions about Australian dance the book confronts.
The birthday celebrations proper commenced with speeches of reflection and congratulation from Open City Chair Tony MacGregor, sponsor Andrew Findlay, Managing Director, Vertical Telecoms (Vertel) and Andrew Donovan, Director, Emerging & Experimental, Australia Council. Managing Editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch reciprocated with a curated suite of 20 one-minute performances (one for each of our 20 years) gifted to RealTime by Nigel Kellaway, Julie-Anne Long, Edward Scheer, Felicity Clark, Amanda Stewart, Nalina Wait, post [Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose], Miranda Wheen, Caroline Wake. Katia Molino, Ruark Lewis, Clare Britton & Matt Prest, Gail Priest, David Williams, Jason Noble [Ensemble Offspring], Vicki Van Hout, Rosie Dennis, Sam James and Keith and Virginia themselves, to a sound score by Gail Priest.
Thanks to all who spoke, performed and attended and to the generous Carriageworks team. This was a wonderfully affectionate and truly communal celebration.
Virginia, Keith, Gail, Katerina & Felicity
Clockwise from top right – Tony MacGregor, Open City Chair; Virginia Baxter and Erin Brannigan; Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro, former OnScreen editors, photo Sandy Edwards; writer Edward Scheer, writer and former contributing editor Jacqueline Millner, photo Sandy Edwards; Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter
Clockwise from top rightMiranda Wheen, Nalina Wait, Mish Grigor & Natalie Rose, Vicki Van Hout, Jason Noble, Katia Molino
Sacha Cohen, The Three Minute Bacchae and other Extreme Acts, 2008, PACT
photo Heidrun Löhr 2007
Sacha Cohen, The Three Minute Bacchae and other Extreme Acts, 2008, PACT
For 50 years Sydney’s PACT has been a seedbed for artists of all kinds, most recently those engaging with contemporary performance and live art. In the late 60s and early 70s it was a vital hub for folk music, adventurous theatre (a multi-site production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt) and happenings. In following decades it focused on youth theatre.
Nowadays titled PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, the organisation “supports, produces and presents interdisciplinary and experimental performance work by emerging artists from diverse backgrounds…providing a space (its home theatre in Erskinville in Sydney’s inner West) for artists, where all aspects of experimental performance can converge in a vibrant and holistic community.”
Originally housed on the edge of the Sydney CBD, near Darling Harbour, PACT was founded by a group led by Robert Allnutt, Jack Mannix and Patrick Milligan in response to the Federal Government’s Vincent Committee Report that “highlighted the dire state of Australia’s performing arts, film and television industries.” This was at a time when the arts landscape was thinly populated, largely prior to the emergence of state and independent theatre and dance companies in the late 60s and into the 70s and of an incipient film industry. PACT (Producers, Authors, Composers and Talent, and later Producers, Artists, Curators, Technicians) aimed to develop a range of practitioners who would enrich Australian culture.
Alumni include a kaleidoscope of significant names in Australian arts and entertainment including Peter Weir, Graham Bond, Zoe Carides, Lara Thoms, Matt Prest, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose and Zoe Coombs Marr (post), Malcolm Whittaker, Alison Richardson, Augusta Supple, Sally Lewry, Ashley Dyer, Nick Atkins, Natalie Randall, Daniel Prypchan, Jane Grimley, Caroline Wake, Amity Yore and Ling Zhao. PACT has yielded directors, performers, writers, curators, choreographers, filmmakers, digital media artists, sound, lighting, set and costume designers, technicians, artistic directors, cultural producers and marketing managers.
As the cultural landscape transformed over 50 years, so too did PACT, focusing in recent decades on young and then specifically emerging artists—ranging from late teens well into their 20s, eager to learn, collaborate and engage directly with the public while on the cusp of their careers.
The PACT IS FIFTY birthday audience will be addressed by Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, and entertained by past and present PACT artists and artistic directors (who have included Caitlin Newton Broad, Anna Mesariti, Cat Jones, Julie Vulcan and now Katrina Douglas). There’ll also be screenings of rare archival footage and the launch of PACT’s 2015 program.
In RealTime 124 we’ll report on the celebrations and take a close look at PACT’s distinctive history and the breadth and depth of its sense of community. A visit to the Previous Events pages of PACT’s website offers a glimpse of a decade of engagement with young artists, arts organisations, festivals and communities. An extra 40 years adds up to a remarkable achievement.
PACT IS FIFTY, PACT, 107 Railway Parade, Erskineville, Sydney Saturday 18 Oct 6-9pm
Bonemap invites one audience member every 15 minutes to participate in Nerve Engine. Designed to ensure a very personal experience, this interdisciplinary and immersive one-on-one format has been perfected by this Cairns-based company (new media artist Russell Milledge and performer and co-creator Rebecca Youdell) over the past four years.
The installation is made up of two large round netted and transparent scrims hanging from roof to floor in a darkened room. The participant, with an iPhone attached to the back of their hand, stands inside one scrim while the other, four metres in front, is empty.
I’m immediately submerged in an environment of sound and image. Four double projectors fill the corners of the room with digital imagery, all of which is stitched together by software developed by Milledge. At the same time I’m engulfed by a 4.1 sound system. The work is coordinated by Milledge from a control desk behind me. Along with the programmed light and sound, an extra layer of sound is triggered by the iPhone—influenced by my movements.
As Nerve Engine begins, a spotlight illuminates a dancer, Youdell, in a brilliant red dress dragging a treasure chest. She too has an iPhone attached to her hand and I’m gently enticed into a duet of movement, finding myself imitating her arm movements. Then through a series of gestures she almost becomes my puppet as I guide her into the chest and she disappears.
The experience lasts for approximately 10 minutes and crescendos with loud, all-encompassing drumming while the performer reappears making frenzied movements in a red tutu.
The images projected on the participant’s scrim are elemental—water, air, smoke and flames. At times there is sensory overload—images are layered, the sound is engulfing and attention repeatedly drawn to the performer—theatrically lit and always garbed in red: the red of blood, the life force and nerve engine of the work.
With Youdell suspended in space like a lab specimen in the middle of the second scrim, the work concludes with a projection of the dancer in the stance of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, linking Nerve Engine to Bonemap’s ongoing exploration into the relationship between body and universe.
Most impressive is the way image, sound, light and action combine seamlessly, the result of clever use of technology alongside physical performance. As a participant I come away feeling privileged to have been part of a unique experience—a performance orchestrated just for me.
2014 Cairns Festival, Nerve Engine, director, scenographic design, media Russell Milledge, co-director, choreographer, performer Rebecca Youdell, sound design Steven Campbell, programmer Jason Holdsworth; Cairns Entertainment Centre, 26-30 Aug
Billy McPherson, Roslyn Oades, John Shrimpton, I’m Your Man rehearsals
photo Heidrun Löhr
Billy McPherson, Roslyn Oades, John Shrimpton, I’m Your Man rehearsals
There is a certain self-consciousness that comes over a writer when faced with interviewing an artist who conducts, edits and restages interviews for a living. I speak, of course, of Roslyn Oades, a Sydney-born, Melbourne-based artist who has spent more than a decade pioneering the form she calls “headphone verbatim.” [Actors are fed edited audio via headphones which they reproduce with precision. Eds.]
Though we have talked previously, about everything from the merits of supra- versus circum-aural headphones to the ethics of sharing other people’s stories in performance, when I get the brief for this article it occurs to me that we have never really discussed gender. What follows derives from a telephone conversation we had on the evening of September 4, four days before Oades went into rehearsal for her latest project, Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday, which will premiere at the Melbourne Festival on October 9.
Art, theatre, voice, installation
Oades identifies four paths or practices that have led her to this moment, starting with her formal training at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in the early 1990s. COFA had only recently merged with UNSW and Oades was among the first students who could take art classes at Paddington as well as humanities subjects at the main campus in Kensington. She speaks fondly and proudly of training in photomedia with Anne Zahalka and in theatre with John McCallum, among others. This would be more than enough for most students, but Oades also wanted to explore acting, leading to the second strand of her practice. While still at university, Oades won a guest role on A Country Practice, where she huffed and puffed her way through a teen pregnancy and labour.
Once she had graduated, Oades continued to work in television, doing small guest roles on shows such as Police Rescue (“Leah Purcell and I were rookie cops together”) before landing a larger role on Home and Away. From 1996 to 1998, she appeared in 25 episodes as Kylie Burton before being arrested at the altar and then dying of a drug overdose in prison. Such plotlines did not so much plant the seeds of doubt, as water them; Oades was still living in Bankstown, trying to reconcile its diversity with the very white world of Summer Bay, and wondering how she might go about making her own work. So she called the Bankstown Community Arts Officer, Tim Carroll, and asked him about what he did and how he got his job. Working with Carroll at the Bankstown Youth Development Service allowed Oades to start Westside (a publication for emerging writers from the western suburbs), investigate installation art (“we filled an empty bank with gravel”) and also introduced her to Alicia Talbot and Urban Theatre Projects, which would in turn lead to her first full-length theatrical production.
In the meantime, she had also started cultivating the fourth strand of her artistic practice—voice work. In 2000, her interest in voice took her to the United Kingdom, where she recorded every accent she could while also training and working with Mark Wing-Davey and his Non-Fiction Theatre company. She came home the following year to voice the character of Tracey McBean in the children’s program of the same name. More acting work followed, but when she appeared on All Saints for a second time, eight years after the first and playing yet another infanticidal mother (“I think I’ve killed six babies and a mother during my career”), she decided she’d had enough.
Headphone verbatim theatre
Oades’ first work, Fast Cars & Tractor Engines (2005), started life as the Bankstown Oral History Project. In 2000, she helped three young artists from the area perform some excerpts for the project’s launch. Two years later, she directed a 15-minute version for Urban Theatre Projects’ Short and Sharp season; three years after that, a full-length production premiered at the Bankstown RSL, to immediate and effusive praise (see David Williams in RT70). Since then Oades has made four more headphone verbatim works, including Stories of Love & Hate (2008; RT89) and I’m Your Man (2013; RealTime 117, Darwin Festival Feature).
While Oades calls these three plays her Acts of Courage trilogy, and Currency Press is about to publish them in a volume with that very title, I sometimes think they could just as easily be called the Australian Masculinities trilogy. It is fascinating to hear men from Bankstown, Cronulla and beyond trying to impress each other as well as their female interviewer while talking about love, violence and sacrifice. In I’m Your Man in particular one is often struck by the fact that Oades must have been the only woman in the room, moments before the big fight, trying to capture what she calls “adrenaline on tape.” Of course masculinity becomes all the more intriguing in performance when an actor like Katia Molino conjures it with a mere shift of the leg and tilt of the head. This “gap,” as Oades often calls it, between an actor and their character’s gender, race, ethnicity and age, is absolutely key to headphone verbatim if it is to be anything more than a “style.” For Oades, headphone verbatim is more than a theatrical “texture or technique;” it is a “dramatic device that enables us to think about who’s allowed to say what in Australia.”
The mention of masculinity brings us to gender more broadly and how it has shaped her career. Oades tells me how “at the start of every show, I have to be talked into making it; I feel as if I have an idea but I’m not sure if it’s any good.” Happily she has always been persuaded, but having sat in on artist pitching sessions since, she thinks that this is not a personal but rather a structural issue: male artists seem “better at stepping forward” whereas women often present themselves as “team players” and thus come across as less confident. On the contrary, when a woman is confident, and does pursue her artistic vision with the same focus as one of the many feted young men, she can be perceived as “difficult” or “demanding.” These insights have arrived in part thanks to Oades’ time as Malthouse Theatre’s Female Director in Residence in 2013. Like Anne-Louise Sarks (RT116), who was in residence at Malthouse in 2011, Oades is acutely aware of being in the “right place at the right time:” next door to Urban Theatre Projects when it moved to Bankstown; ready to take a production from the margins to the mainstream when Belvoir came knocking; and in Melbourne when Malthouse initiated its scheme. Indeed, it was there that she started work on her current project.
Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday, a Melbourne Festival Malthouse premiere headphone verbatim work drawing on responses from 18- and 80-year-olds, is not the first piece she has done outside the Acts of Courage trilogy—that was a Vitalstatistix commission, Cutaway: A Portrait (2012). It is, however, her first project without Katia Molino and Oades admits to feeling slightly lost without her. Perhaps this is why she thinks that this might also be her last headphone verbatim piece, at least for a while. She says she is interested in continuing audio work but without actors. One possibility involves the audience listening to recordings or re-enactments of conversations say, between a father in prison and the son who is allowed to speak with him for 12 minutes each week.
She’s also interested in creating an immersive piece, bringing her full circle back to those Bankstown installations all those years ago. When I ask Oades about what binds the many aspects of her practice, she says simply “storytelling,” to which I would add “listening”—a vital skill for every woman in a world of “mansplaining” (see Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain Things to Me” if you haven’t already (www.tomdispatch.com).
But do not confuse listening with passivity. Roslyn Oades says she loves nothing more than “disappearing in a room, when everyone else is speaking and I’m listening. I can look quite mousey and inconsequential, but really I have a microphone. I’m recording and that’s a very powerful thing.”
Melbourne Festival & Malthouse, Roslyn Oades, Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday, Malthouse, Melbourne, 9-26 Oct
When a performance purports to speak to a reality outside of itself, it’s fascinating how often we put absolute faith in that claim.
I’m not referring to the more profound ontological questions raised by philosophers and undergrad theatre alike, but the simple way in which we accept the honesty of an artist who apparently draws on experience, or presents something based on research, or includes found material, quotation or documentary. This is a good thing—think how much would be lost if we approached all art with paranoid suspicion—but it’s also just one of the many, many clauses in the unwritten contract we tend to agree upon in the creative sphere.
Red Stitch, Eurydice
US playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice maintains a very clear connection with a reality external to its fictional world. It retells the myth of Orpheus from the perspective of his wife, but in doing so also warps the story through an autobiographical lens. It’s a compelling proposition—merging a form of writing in which fabrication is almost unforgivable with a mythology that works on symbolic, allegorical and fantastic levels. When Eurydice arrives in the Underworld she finds her dead father there, but while her memory of him has been washed away by the river Styx, his own recollections have been imperfectly removed and he is able to reawaken their relationship.
Ruhl’s own father died of cancer in 1994 and the more effective elements of Eurydice deal with a similar loss. Nowhere in the play is explicit reference to the playwright’s own life made clear, but it is difficult not to read as honest her focus on retrieving something of one’s parent from the afterlife. This untenable quest is made possible by language, poetry, drama, imagination and, in the final telling, does not end well. Orpheus himself is mostly a supporting player in this retelling, and so it comes as no surprise that the reason Eurydice does not return with him to the waking world is here a result of her own actions. This is no soothing balm, of course, and to Ruhl’s credit she ensures that the tale remains a tragedy.
Red Stitch’s production brought out much of the work’s nuance and was commendably performed, with Ngaire Dawn Fair and Alex Menglet offering especially fine turns as Eurydice and her father, respectively. But the show’s strengths also highlighted its shortcomings, and were a reminder that this is a relatively early work in the playwright’s career. A trio of stones acts as Chorus in a manner not much beyond what you’d find in a high school exercise, and Hades’ earthly form as a “Nasty Interesting Man” suggests the way that rich and resonant mythology is made saccharine and twee here.
This is a recurrent characteristic of Ruhl’s writing: the invocation of grand themes such as love or death before a retreat into cliché or convention. It’s perhaps also why her works are so popular on mainstages around the world. They’re not particularly challenging, and seem construed not to elicit soul-shaking emotion from audiences but to simply meet the criteria desired by this play’s lord of the underworld—that of being “interesting…”
Lara Thoms, Liz Dunn, The Last Tuesday Society
photo Theresa Harrison
Lara Thoms, Liz Dunn, The Last Tuesday Society
The YouTube Comment Orchestra
By some coincidence, the first ever comment made on YouTube was just that: the word “interesting….” (followed by that infuriating four-dotted ellipsis). That’s if we’re to take as truth the delicious monologue that opens The Last Tuesday Society’s The YouTube Comment Orchestra. MC Richard Higgins walks us through the unexpectedly tortuous mystery of that first comment and its later disappearance, and the hilarious soliloquy is the perfect justification for a full 90 minutes dedicated to the truly bizarre phenomenon of online commentary.
What follows is a series of performances by a range of artists taking the notion of the online comment as a provocation. Last Tuesday co-creator Bron Batten herself enters into an online argument about a booty-shaking Nicki Minaj music video, interviews young people on the subject and finally presents an hilarious animal-suited dance routine. Post’s Mish Grigor delivers an art therapy experience that turns weirdly erotic and gently uncovers the role of power in the commenter’s relationship with her subject. Lara Thoms and Liz Dunn recreate notorious performance art videos and compare the responses of professional critics with those of confused or bemused online commenters.
These and other sequences don’t add up to any coherent thesis; the Society’s regular mission has always been to seek out polyphonic responses to a theme, rather than curating some kind of harmonic ensemble. There is a subversive overall effect to this otherwise light laughfest, however. Though we all know that a comments section is where good thoughts go to die, the comments themselves oddly emerge as the heroes of this work. For all the humour and odd-thinking these artists bring to the stage, many of the biggest laughs come from anonymous internet users mocking art in ways that are themselves wonderfully wry.
Michelle Ryan, Vincent Crowley, Intimacy, Torque Show
photo Rachel Roberts
Michelle Ryan, Vincent Crowley, Intimacy, Torque Show
Torque Show, Intimacy
Torque Show’s Intimacy is another work that draws much of its power from a real-world circumstance given creative treatment. Dancer Michelle Ryan was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 30, and this work makes viscerally apparent the effects of the condition on the dancer’s own body. In solos and duets with Vincent Crowley, the exertion and focus Ryan requires in order to simply cross the traverse playing space is both painful to watch and impossible not to grasp. As with so many contemporary works that feature a performer with some kind of disability, this work is not ‘about’ that disability but also not able to exist without it.
Ryan relates humorous or dark dreams she may or may not have had; Emma Bathgate belts out sensational jazz numbers; duo Lavender vs Rose provide occasional accompaniment. The work, again, doesn’t necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but Ryan’s engaging presence and, especially, a number of stirring moments of what appears to be genuine intimacy are more than enough to keep this experience alive in the mind for some time to come.
Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Eurydice, writer Sarah Ruhl, director Luke Kerridge, performers Ngaire Dawn Fair, Olga Makeeva, Dion Mills, Johnathan Peck, Alexandra Aldrich, Sam Duncan, Alex Menglet, 3 Sept-4 Oct; Last Tuesday Society, The YouTube Comment Orchestra, co-curators, performers Richard Higgins, Bron Batten, performers Zoey Dawson, Nicola Gunn, Mish Grigor, Grit Theatre, The List Operators, Telia Nevile, Lara Thoms, Malthouse 17-27 Sept; Torque Show, Intimacy, by Michelle Ryan, Lavender v Rose, director, choreographer Ingrid Weisfelt with Ross Ganf, performers Michelle Ryan, Vincent Crowley, Emma Bathgate, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 13-23 Aug
Casus, Finding the Silence, photo Sean Young, SYC Studios
The perilous follow-up to a smash hit is the subject of David Burton and Claire Christian’s new play Hedonism’s Second Album for La Boite Indie and the reality for Brisbane circus collective Casus (Emma Serjeant, Jesse Scott, Lachlan McAulay & Vincent Van Berkel). Finding the Silence is the latter’s follow-up to their internationally acclaimed Knee Deep and there was a palpable sense of anticipation at the Judith Wright Centre premiere.
Director and ensemble member Jesse Scott described the show as being about “that moment of inner silence before every trick…In that moment of solitude you are truly alive and aware, defying danger, fear, gravity.” Program notes can sometimes be abstruse or pretentious but in typical Casus understatement, these words sum up beautifully the experience of watching the show and its aesthetic of austere and vulnerable contemplation. Unlike the warm earth and honey tones of Knee Deep, Finding the Silence has clearly been infected by the white lights of hotel corridors, the low horizons of European winters and the craving for stillness in a ‘whirlwind’ of touring.
The work begins with a stripped-back stage, covered by a long rectangular training mat and a bank of lights to the right. Dan Carberry’s subtle score works underneath the action of the bodies, almost imperceptibly, resisting dramatic peaks and at key moments in the show almost falling away, like sound sometimes does when you close your eyes. You watch, engrossed as the flow of bodies passes before you, solo and duo mostly, with two or three climactic group routines that mark the half-way and then the endpoint of the show.
While founding Casus member Natano Fa’anana is sadly missed due to injury, newbie ensemble member Vincent Van Berkel maintains the intense, almost loving complicity that exists between each member of Casus. You feel like you are watching private moments as the tricks build from sequences on the mat to a bench and a gobsmacking aerial routine. There are blindfolds, cartwheels and spinning bodies. Yet somehow each extraordinary sequence, while it showcases a gently implacable strength from each of the performers, eschews the razzle-dazzle of ostentatious circus ‘stand and deliver’ tricks. The show felt to me like circus for circus-makers: complex, self-referential and tautly disciplined.
This is such a brave choice for that critical follow-up work. Casus has not sought to repeat a formula for success, to regurgitate Knee Deep in any discernible way. The sequences felt fresh and distinctive and this is the hallmark of true artistic risk-taking. While I suspect that Finding the Silence may not have the same popular appeal as Knee Deep it cements Casus’ place in Australian circus as a powerhouse of innovation, risk-taking and integrity.
Hedonism’s Second Album, La Boite Indie
Another new powerhouse on the local Brisbane scene is the playwriting team of David Burton and Claire Christian. Hedonism’s Second Album follows Sumo, Chimney, Michael and Gareth and their rapacious band manager Charlie as she pushes them to pump out their second album in the space of a week to placate their furious record company after a recording of the band trashing the studio appears on the internet.
The show belts along at rapid-fire pace. Band members harangue, comfort, confess to and manipulate one another. The unreconstructed Australian male drummer, Sumo, steals the show with all the best lines and a surprising tenderness for his closeted band-mate, Michael, who is unable to break away from a violent relationship. Yet the other men, ostensibly less damaged, seem to evade deeper investigation. I think this is because the plot is driven largely by band clichés, aka the lead songwriter wants to go solo, the drummer isn’t good enough and the girl breaks up the band (almost). What lifts the work into something arresting is both the superb directorial work of Margi Brown Ash and the quality of the writing. Ash makes the bodies on stage seem one beast, moving, snarling, bouncing, holding each other with fierce intensity. This is matched by a vernacular that sounds like flat naturalism but is rich with a kind of generational cadence—an attack that exploits the vernacular of band grunge and pushes it into a dark poetry of masculinity in crisis. Both Finding the Silence and Hedonism’s Second Album were full-blooded works that confirmed the talent of their creative teams and their promising futures.
Casus, Finding the Silence, performer-creators Emma Serjeant, Jesse Scott, Lachlan McAuley, Vincent Van Berkel, director Jesse Scott, sound design Dan Carberry, lighting Rob Scott, Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts, 15-23 Aug; La Boite Indie, Hedonism’s Second Album, writers David Burton, Claire Christian, director Margi Brown Ash, performers Patrick Dwyer, Gavin Edwards, Nicholas Gell, Thomas Hutchins, Ngoc Phan, designer Josh McIntosh, lighting Ben Hunt, La Boite, Brisbane, 13-30 Aug
Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, Mantle, My Darling Patricia
photo Heidrun Löhr
Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, Mantle, My Darling Patricia
“What am I for?” asks the voice that has been speaking since we were first planted into a sustained, unsparing darkness. This voice has transported us from suburban mayhem—a few too many sherries in the car before forgotten veggies bake to burning, a glimmer of someone sick and dying, eyebrows plucked to vanishing—to the edges of an ominous hole in the road and down into its abyss.
The voice that we hear while we do not see paints us into a stock Australian domesticity. The ‘she’ who speaks in both third and first person is at once inside and outside of her own scene-making. She sounds dry and a bit ocker, as if she is, in part, the voice of nostalgia or even gendered myth itself.
Since the early 1990s when Jenny Kemp first dressed the Australian stage in what has since been called an externalised dynamics of the female psyche, the national theatre has wrestled with the knottedness of female experiences and narratives, myths about them and the limits and possibilities of an increasingly experimental non-narrative stage. In Kemp’s works, it was writing for and at the edge of performance that seemed to land a form that was both implicitly national and explicitly ‘female,’ offering a transformative spatial rendering of those post-structural fractured subjectivities whose ghosts we now know a little too well.
In Mantle, My Darling Patricia reveal a debt to this lineage but also aim to cast their own poetics into the readily twinned spaces of psyche and theatre. We never learn the name of our narrator, but her figure arrives in the shape-shifting movement episodes that visualise the plight of a woman who has been plunged to the centre of the Earth (Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal). On the edge of visibility, her body writhes and twists, twitches gently, throbs and curves to varyingly thudding, sensuous and pulsating sound. In less effective scenes she is clambering against the scrim, acting out entrapment. In others, she seems seductively caught in the sort of ecstasy that might just come with freefalling grief.
If the figure’s movements shift undecidedly between the literal and the abstract, the speaking voice also jumps too neatly between a fictive elsewhere and the metaphor that renders it. Her story, we come to learn, is less about being enclosed in earth than it is about the kind of descent that occurs when the self is cut to its core by despair. As she appears and disappears, the stage invisibly moves around her—its objects also somewhat undecided, hovering ambiguously between symbol and substance. A large fluorescent ice beam appears out of nowhere, and then vanishes. A large black sphere casts a tall shadow of a hole, and then is gone. A cone enshrouds the woman’s body which by then is reaching tremulously towards a surface.
The components, individually, are interesting imaginings: text (Halcyon Macleod) is rhythmic; design (Clare Britton) is stark and vibrant. Both are often outdone by sound (Jack Prest) that radiates in and out of recognisability with moments of lonely jazz, a distorted car horn, a penetratingly dirty electric guitar. And yet, in moving us between the twin realms of this story—inside and out, fictive dream and fictive real—the artists contain us in a kind of pretense that, despite experiments in visual form, feels somewhat narratively closed. Jenny Kemp opened out the stage by playing with non-linear text and its relationship to an abstract and painterly mise-en-scéne. Twenty years later, Mantle doesn’t quite find a meta-theatrical language to sequel Kemp: the kind that could make those of us sitting in the dark alive to our own psychic imaginings, seeing and feeling the theatres in our minds.
My Darling Patricia, Mantle, co-creator, writer, narrator Halcyon Macleod, co-creator and images Clare Britton, lighting Matt Marshall, composition, sound design Jack Prest, performer, choreographer Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, dramaturg, script editor Janice Muller; Campbelltown Arts Centre, 11-13 Sept
You’re in a bungalow at the back of a garden in suburban Melbourne. The game runner, who met you at the door and explained the experience you were about to have, locks the door behind you and the room is dim. You have torches and an hour to work out how to get out.
Escape Rooms are a new form of interactive entertainment in which participants are locked inside a room and must complete a series of puzzles and challenges in order to escape. Inspired by the digital Escape the Room games designed in 2005 by Toshimitsu Takagi, such as Crimson Room, real life versions of the game began to appear around 2007 including Takao Kato’s room in Japan and Kazuya Iwata’s room in the USA.
Escape Room Melbourne, run by Dr Ali Cheetham and Dr Owen Spear, was the first to open in Australia and since then new rooms have opened in Sydney, Perth and a second in Melbourne. Cheetham and Spear first encountered Escape Rooms in Budapest, where the form is so popular that over a hundred rooms have opened. Spear recalls, “Some of the rooms had an interesting, old nostalgic feel; others would be a little bit creepy and run down. It felt to me like being a kid again, exploring a room, trying to find a hidden object.”
Each Escape Room tends to be unique, expressing itself through the aesthetic choices of the designer, the kinds of challenges and the depth of narrative. The active puzzle-solving and teamwork elements can lend themselves to less nuanced purposing of the experience, of course, and there are many versions that lean heavily on genre—there’s no shortage of zombies and safe crackers in these rooms, be assured. The experience can also be lyrical, suspenseful and magical.
Escape Room Melbourne, for two-four people in a 70-minute session in a medium size room, has a quality of haunted suburban mystery to it. There is a sense that something urgent once occurred in this room. A letter gives the room its fictional context, laying out just enough exposition to give a narrative explanation for your presence in the room. Each puzzle and challenge has antiquity: the furniture, the objects, the clues, all come from a Melbourne long past. It’s a little like discovering that your grandparents were Cold War spies.
In this way the environment is made to perform around you. The sense of significance gradually focuses the longer you play. As you work out how the puzzles have been constructed around you, a grid of narrative meaning is layered over your physical experience. At the end it’s possible to trace your own experience through the room by following the path of solved puzzles.
Spear describes the participant experience of their Escape Room, saying “most people start off a little uneasy, and then really get into it once they’re in. There’s huge variety in the way people interact with the room. No team seems the same, and they range from speaking very little, and acting quite seriously, to screaming and laughing.”
A crucial aspect of Escape Room is the feedback mechanism that helps players move through the tasks. This varies from live in-character performances to no feedback at all. In the case of Escape Room Melbourne it’s a simple voice over. The Game Runner who let you into the room is also monitoring your progress as you play. If you need a clue you can ask for one. If the runner sees that you are very off-track or running out of time they will sometimes offer advice. Spear says, “I think they interrupt it slightly, but it’s sort of a necessity, otherwise the puzzles would have to be made too easy. We’re thinking of having a note system set up in the next one, where hints are sitting round the room in envelopes.”
Players are able to listen to the prompts in an ‘out of game’ framework which keeps the mechanics of the game very apparent without impacting on the immersive nature of the experience and lends it a sense of security. Other escape rooms are much more immersive, designing all their interactions as ‘In Game,’ which heightens the potential for immersion but demands more commitment to performing over playing.
Escape Rooms are part of the growing trend towards immersive and participatory experiences that includes work as diverse as that of Blast Theory, Punchdrunk, Slingshot and Coney (see my articles in RT115, and RT117). As Frank Lantz, director of the NYU Games Center, told CNBC, “Games used to be a form of experience. The thing that got left out of that equation was human bodies and face-to-face interaction. I think we’re seeing a return to those qualities.”
Co-Curator of Melbourne’s eclectic Last Tuesday Society, Bron Batten, invited audiences into the dingily appropriate Collingwood Masonic Lodge in late August for her esoteric exploration of the art of hypnosis, Use Your Illusion. Supplied with voyeuristic pleasures, audience participation, cheese cubes and sliced kabana, spectators were drawn into a world of swinging pendulums and optical illusions; and equally, seduced by the mesmeric art of performance itself.
The venue’s somewhat clandestine side entry promises its own mysteries; entering the dimly-lit hall, three raised stages are apparent, the audience placed between them. We’re seated at large round tables dotted with tea-light candles and provisioned with the aforementioned snacks. A portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth II, muted to sepia over decades and too high for dusting, presides watchfully from the Lodge’s rear wall. On a side stage, Batten appears in a chicken suit, bathed in the light of a swirling, hypnotic spiral.
In a perhaps trance-inducing tone over spooky, meditative music, Batten gently, firmly and repeatedly issues her instructions: “You are going to enjoy the show immensely;” “Breathe deeply…let it all go;” “You will love me, you will love my show.” Her work done, the chicken exits. Next, there’s projected video of Batten on a couch, sobbing inconsolably, with a male (therapist’s?) voice crooning, “Take your time, Bron. We can wait till you’re ready.” But before we can become confused, it’s show time: pumping music, smoke and dancing laser-light draw us to the main stage where a now lamé-clad Batten reappears to introduce us to our ‘host’: professional hypnotist Charles Mercier.
Use Your Illusion, Charles Mercier
photo Bryony Jackson
Use Your Illusion, Charles Mercier
The ensuing lengthy (and very funny) demonstration of auto-suggestive techniques—which Mercier tells us are really just permission to release one’s inhibitions—uncovers rich territories of voyeurism and vulnerability, blurring the real and unreal. Mercier delivers his explanations like a serious professional while gesturing like a cheesy showman. After bringing 10 audience volunteers onstage alongside Batten, he hypnotises his subjects, inducing them to perform simple scenarios. They respond in varying degrees to requests to ‘walk down stairs,’ ‘be in a tropical resort,’ ‘walk the catwalk’ and so on. In watching, we, of course, are mesmerised too, enslaved to a fascination that’s tinged with the discomfort of our own laughter, as we watch people just like us doing slightly embarrassing things for our amusement.
It’s all rather silly—some of the volunteers themselves slip out of ‘trance’ to giggle as Mercier ups the ante with increasingly awkward requests. Gradually the ‘least receptive’ volunteers are culled, and those remaining ‘perform’ each new action in a state that may or may not be actual, but is riveting to watch because it is so free. Mercier uses his showman’s commentary to implant deeper ideas: at one point he describes these uninhibited behaviours in terms of the power and love that we all have in our bodies. I forget myself completely in the pleasure of watching a middle-aged ‘hypnotee’ dance for us, radiant and projecting joy like a woman in love. It’s magical, and a privilege to watch, regardless of what has unlocked her freedom.
Finally, only Batten is left on the stage. Mercier presents a final challenge, inducing her to perform a particularly physically uncomfortable task. Watching, the audience becomes complicit in a vulnerability that none of us moves to prevent, exposing the flipside of the ‘hypnosis’ created by the stage/audience divide.
The rest of Use Your Illusion leaps from the heartfelt to the wacky to the arcane to the self-helpy, without ever allowing the audience the safety of knowing what’s truth and what’s playful deception. There are self-critical confessions and positive affirmations, another chicken in a suit and a further scene of hypnosis that leaves far behind the showman’s piercing eyes and flashy tux.
Throughout the show, and around the long, central ‘demonstration,’ Bron Batten manages to juggle disparate scenes and styles, held together by our collective attention. Cohesion seems secondary to exploration: the ‘devised’ nature of the work is writ large, and ideas float free with all the plurality and contradiction of the things in life that are just a bit mysterious. One minute the feeling is ‘Be who you are!’ and the next, I know we’ve been duped. And in the next, I find myself reflecting on performing and watching: on who we are, who we think we are, how we ‘perform ourselves’ and who we might be if we really just relaxed.
And then I also think: what if that chicken at the start actually DID hypnotise us into loving the show? How would we know?
Bron Batten, Use Your Illusion, performers/devisers Bron Batten, Charles Purcell, Ben Liston, Beth Sometimes, composer Edward Gould; Collingwood Masonic Lodge, Melbourne, 21–24 Aug
Written and directed by prominent Japanese playwright Yoji Sakate, Honchos Meeting in Cowra sits within a post-WWII ‘small theatre’ tradition influenced by Chekhov and Ibsen as much as by Japanese Noh and Kyogen. The subject of this play is the Cowra breakout of August 1944 when 1,104 Japanese POWs escaped, 231 of whom were killed in the subsequent recapture, along with four Australians. The play’s focus is the redemption of identity and ‘face’ (or omote) by Japanese soldiers shamed by being captured. Hoping to be shot, the escapees possibly sought the means to die honourably by fighting or effectively committing suicide.
The play also looks to the contemporary context where the public in Japan remain misinformed of the effects of the recent Fukushima accident, unable to face the realities of that disaster.
The set represents a hut in the Cowra camp, replicating flimsy, fibro-thin walls (a pitched pine frame, joists exposed) with props such as tatami mats, toothbrushes, cups and forks and the bucket in which illicit sake is brewing. The details are significant, as we come to learn that this is actually a film set, part of an exercise where two contemporary, young Australian film students and their mentors from Australian and Japanese film schools are undertaking an ‘exercise’ to test their hypotheses as to why the POWS took the actions they did.
There are significant cross-cultural tensions, questions of honour and identity, the collective versus the individual, under investigation here. It is not just the POWs who suffer the effects of capture but also their relatives in Japan, who’d be subjected to extreme humiliation if it were known the men were captive. In many ways, this play is an attempt to understand, subvert and overwhelm that imperative. The final scene sees the young Australians urge the POWs to choose a different path from heading into suicide.
In this version of the story, the filmmakers being Australian smacks of Western imperialism, the superior, individualist, outsider view. The Tokyo original had these roles played by 15 young Japanese, which instead makes the questioning an inter-generational provocation. But within both conventions, the capacity to call ‘cut’ and have the final scene achieve a different outcome highlights the human capacity to create and remake different worlds.
Cowra no Honcho Kaigi/Honchos Meeting in Cowra
photo Michihiro Furumoto
Cowra no Honcho Kaigi/Honchos Meeting in Cowra
The strongest part of the play, however—in both imaginings—is surely when the POWs indulge the students’ wishful thinking but suddenly enact their own ‘cut’ and return to ‘what really happened.’ The men’s sense of shame cannot realistically be changed. So the play’s form is both linear and spiral, winding into the vortex, out into a world of different possibilities and then back in again.
The play passes from rather clunky didactic scenes, which serve to fill in historical detail, to disciplined comedic routines which borrow from their condensed, sharply-realised characterisations rooted in Kyogen (the lads in the barn, passing time), and then to intensely moving final scenes which combine both the refined stillness of Noh drama with the psychological depth of character and soul-searching we associate more with Western theatre, such as when the former group leader Murata, converses with the film producer, thinking she is his ghost. He is unsure who he has become, being incarcerated for so long. The part is beautifully played by Takahiro Onishi, his conscience stirred like turbulence deep within a lake.
Similarly, the ballot scene, where each POW is clearly expected to cast the vote to die rather than choose to live, is finely realised, each approaching the ballot box with an enormous sense of dignity and conscience. One man casts a vote to live. The one who seemed weakest in resolve but votes to die shows the full weight of a society unable to reveal what it feels resting on his shoulders. He is horrified. There is, perhaps, no one to blame. His fabric—the fabric of them all—has been frayed.
The set is lofty rather than claustrophobic, and the lighting its weakest element, too stark to be the dream it seems for re-thinking an historical event. Then again, its sharpness keeps the play from becoming an enactment of ‘forgiving the past, which I think it is not. The physicalisation of the Australian actors (building on a previous exchange between Sakate and NIDA in 2004) emulates the discipline of the Japanese actors but is odd in comparison: not that the Australian cast is weaker, rather their presence does not emerge out of a centuries old, deep-rooted practice where words and hieratic movement have evolved together. The slapstick in earlier scenes is particularly odd, not quite matching the sense of chiselled caricature of the POWs (although Matthew Crosby comes close in his various characterisations).
The intoning of both Japanese and English texts is almost identical from one performance to another, as in a musical score. Perhaps the characters are indeed dreaming each other. In Cowra—perhaps too in Japan—nothing in fact remains of these men apart from their headstones marked with false names. Members of the public—several from Cowra, whom I met both in the Canberra and Sydney showings—seemed deeply touched by a production that reveals hidden worlds in both sides of the experience.
Cowra no Honcho Kaigi/Honchos Meeting in Cowra, writer, director Yoji Sakatem, design Jiro Shima, lighting Isao Takebayashi, sound Takeshi Shima, costume Nobumo Miyamoto, choreography Mikuni Yanaihara; Cowra Civic Centre, Street Theatre, Canberra, NIDA Parade Theatres, Sydney, 1-10 Aug
Hamish Michael, Justine Clarke, Jacqueline Mackenzie, Toby Truslove, Chris Ryan, Children of the Sun, Sydney Theatre Company
photo Brett Boardman
Hamish Michael, Justine Clarke, Jacqueline Mackenzie, Toby Truslove, Chris Ryan, Children of the Sun, Sydney Theatre Company
In a short period, Sydney Chamber Opera has presented Mayakovsky (p42) and Sydney Theatre Company Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun (1905). A generation older than the poet Mayakovsky, Gorky was at various times harassed and gaoled (he wrote Children of the Sun in prison) for fomenting revolution with his plays. Both poet and playwright became key cultural figures in the Russian Revolution and both were dispirited by Stalinism. Mayakovsky suicided in 1929, Gorky died in 1935 of natural causes at the time Stalin’s Terror was escalating.
Gorky’s playwriting is commonly considered structurally ungainly but rich in social observation and deft characterisations. Belvoir’s 2011 production The Business (RT104, p 18), an updated adaptation by Jonathan Gavin of Gorky’s grimly comic Vassa Zheleznova (1911)—a favourite of Stalin who saw it many times, presumably enjoying the agonies of a bourgeois family in their act of self-destruction (and the enforced changes to the play in 1935 to suit his tastes)—retained the playwright’s essential virtues, not least his strong focus on women. Coming into his stage career in the wake of his friend Anton Chekhov was certainly not an advantage and he was lambasted by left and right for lacking subtlety or political solutions. Subsequently the blend of humour and high drama in his best plays has been recognised indeed as Chekhovian but with political intent and a voice all its own.
Andrew Upton’s adaptation (originally for the Royal National Theatre, London production 2013) and Kip Williams’ direction of Children of the Sun realise the comedy-drama dynamic right to the play’s bitter end, our emotions and allegiances tossed about and our sense of the inevitability of revolution—with a self-preoccupied intelligentsia indifferent to a superstitious and violent peasantry—confirmed. While adhering in good part to Gorky’s dialogue, texturing it lightly with contemporary touches and the odd four letter word (these alarmed the British but are deftly integrated), Upton has very cleverly re-shaped the play. A few minor characters are deleted or merged, providing a tighter sense of community and, more significantly, key exchanges (like the estate owner and chemical scientist Protasov’s admonition of the worker Yegor for beating his wife) are held off in order to more effectively delineate character and control plot momentum.
The largest change, and the most effective, comes in the play’s fourth act, partly making the climax sparer but also re-ordering it and adding a final image, quietly inherent in the original but here writ large—the physical and emotional collapse of Protasov, unable to comprehend the fact and extent of his losses, his property burned by rioters who think he has poisoned them to procure business for the local doctors (whom they execute) and of his wife, the spirited Yelena who yearns for an artist’s life and will leave him. The riot is offstage which means we don’t get to see her shoot a peasant (this scene had a frightened audience scrambling for the exits in the volatile climate of 1906) after trying her best to help the locals manage what is in fact a cholera outbreak. Gun in hand, she heads off with everyone else to do battle while Protasov lingers helplessly, curling into himself, the epitome of the landowning class-cum-intelligentsia blind to its failings. It’s a powerful ending, and certainly an improvement.
The production is mounted on a large revolve on which the house is segmented, so that when rotated we see large rooms and small private spaces but also the construction behind, adding an appropriate sense of fragility as well as an excellent depth of field for witnessing comings and goings and frequent wanted and unwanted encounters. As in Chekhov, entrances and exits in the production are very telling, and here often funny.
Humour is everywhere from the very beginning, with a buzzing, argumentative household, bossy servants, Protasov and Yelena uselessly insisting on quiet. Protasov’s admirer, the wealthy widow Melaniya, courts him disastrously—climaxing in a humiliating egg-throwing scene and a subsequent confession to Yelena. The pompous artist Vageen (who hilariously wields the act of portrait drawing like a weapon) courts Yelena who is in turn grateful for the friendship while he assumes she loves him. Yelena’s frustration deepens, but her dilemma is nowhere as deep as her sister’s. Lisa is a fragile Cassandra. Her gory visions of mob violence, inspired by newspapers and rumour, are more prophetic than paranoid. Everyone cares for her, if not really listening, including the bitterly cynical Boris, the estranged brother of Melaniya who realises to his astonishment that he is in love with her. Lisa’s own like-minded realisation comes too late with tragic consequences. This dark strand is tautly woven with the comic stand-offs, everyday crises (a maid resigns) and revelations (a marriage has run its course).
Kip Williams’ direction is precise, fluent and finely graded, his ensemble performing as one. Toby Truslove’s wonderfully realised Protasov is self-centred, easily distracted and unconsciously funny, his arrogance disguised by his apparent affability and the ease with which he avoids or moves on from clashes—a state of denial which will deal him a pathetic end. Justine Clarke judiciously delineates Yelena’s growing sense of herself, one of the family but moving beyond it. Helen Thomson’s Melaniya is hilariously naïve and subsequently sadly wise, another fine transformation. Jacqueline Mackenzie’s portrayal of Lisa is richly detailed—ailing, analytical but volatile, trapped and tragic, but then resolute. Chris Ryan, Valerie Bader, Hamish Michael, Yuri Govich, Jay Laga’aia and Contessa Treffone all bring subtleties and insights to their roles.
What is truly bracing about Children of the Sun, is that in an era of deracinated adaptations, Gorky’s breadth of vision has been sustained—with all the complexities of class, work, ideas, progress and ignorance and their stressful interplay. The play calls to mind our challenged intelligentsia (as neoliberalism sucks the air out of thought), women still fighting for equality and the widespread validation of ignorance—it’s not peasant ignorance about science that hinders us today, incredibly it’s wealthy, educated climate change denialists and parents refusing their children inoculation thereby putting others as risk. I left Children of the Sun in equal parts exhilarated—by the wit and wisdom of the play and its production—and depressed, mindful of the huge gap opening up between rich and poor in the West to which so many are blind.
Sydney Theatre Company, Children of the Sun, writer Maxim Gorky, adaptation Andrew Upton, director Kip Williams, designer David Fleischer, costumes Renee Mulder, lighting Damien Cooper, composer, sound design Max Lyandvert; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 12 Sept-25 Oct
The second Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) took place over a gloriously sunny weekend in the gold mining town of Bendigo. For those who have not visited Bendigo before (it was my first time), it is one of the best-preserved gold-rush towns in Australia with grandiose public buildings and sprawling parks. The Victorian public works somehow perfectly suited Australia’s most intense contemporary music festival.
It is not easy to ‘dip into’ BIFEM, as one is swept along a schedule of back-to-back concerts, panels, workshops and community events over three short days. The effect is ultimately challenging and stimulating, offering new perspectives on music to audiences, performers and composers alike.
Beyond the guest artists, the festival’s main attraction is its program of new and classic works of the 20th century curated by the festival’s Director David Chisholm. Geneva’s Vortex Ensemble brought an important theatrical inflection to the festival. Their first concert was a symbiotic dance of electronics and flesh as they performed naked in front of infra-red cameras in the Bendigo Art Gallery. The ensemble only performs new work, and usually that of ensemble members, so the next day we were treated to a concert of playful pieces by Swiss-based composers. In a valuable contribution to contemporary music theatre in Australia, Vortex staged Salvadorean composer Arturo Corrales’ piece Bug on Saturday night.
The festival was an opportunity to celebrate the dreamy lucidity of Melbourne’s Golden Fur, before they all rush off to California. Cellist Judith Hamann performed a solo recital combining installation art, lighting design and straight-up cello performance. Samuel Dunscombe teamed up with pianist Peter Dumsday to reboot the first ever piece for the Max program, Pluton. The pianist and composer James Rushford had several pieces performed in the festival, as well as performing a solo recital on the organ of the Sacred Heart Cathedral. Together, the group performed a surprisingly diverse and light-hearted program including works by David Chisholm, Anthony Pateras, Ivan Wyschnegradsky and others.
The festival’s house band, the Argonaut Ensemble, tried to inject some string culture and provided audiences with a rare opportunity to hear Grisey’s epic work Vortex Temporum under the baton of the award-winning conductor Maxime Pascal. Pascal’s energy was infectious, especially in Zipangu by the festival’s audience favourite, Claude Vivier.
Elsewhere the French composer Clara Maïda brought her charged electroacoustic atmospheres to the Bendigo Bank Theatre, piano virtuoso Zubin Kanga played a recital to infants and performance workshops were given by international superstar-flautist Eric Lamb and the Perth-based new music virtuoso clarinettist Ashley Smith. For musicology nerds like myself, the presence of Stockhausen’s teaching assistant and wide-ranging musicologist Richard Toop was a thrill. An all-star cast was imported (and retrieved, having flown the Australian coop) for the performance of Stockhausen’s music theatre piece Sirius, namely Nicholas Isherwood, Tristram Williams, Tiffany Du Mouchelle, Richard Haynes, with sound projection by Myles Mumford. Detailed reviews of these concerts can be read on my contemporary music blog Partial Durations.
This year the organisers decided to expand the discursive aspect of the festival with a series of lectures and discussion panels. To begin with, I had misgivings about the old-fashioned themes for the panels. “Duration and Durability” grew out of the performance of Morton Feldman’s six-hour String Quartet no.2 last year. “Wired” was to be yet another exploration of the place of electronics in contemporary music. Both were enormous successes, with the panellists and audience (both were convened more as open discussions than panels) quickly finding the contemporary resonance of the given topics.
After dancing around some different philosophical and musical definitions of duration (including some musing on the “adagio decade” of the 1970s by Toop) it became clear that the panel wasn’t very interested in the experience of extreme duration works, but wanted to know how and why one would compose with duration as a key consideration. David Chisholm saw one-idea pieces as fundamentally didactic, as sensitising the listener to a particular technique. Brett Dean raised the issue that a long piece exploring one idea was less risky because one had longer to find something that worked for any given listener. So much for the why, but how? Thomas Reiner brought up competing notions of “outside-in” and “inside-out” compositional strategies and James Rushford countered that either can fail and that what mattered was the intended effect. I would like to know whether composers have extended parts of scores because the ensuing moment didn’t ‘work’ without a longer preparation, much as certain effects in theatre don’t work before an hour or so has passed. The discussion foregrounded duration effects throughout the festival, making me ask what was being explored, what the intended pay-off was and whether the effect was interesting within the context of the piece.
The “Wired” panel quickly recognised the standardisation of music programming languages and technology today. This has led to a more fluid divide between engineers and composers, even though Clara Maïda pointed out that there are still many pieces with new technology and old art (as we were reminded when we heard Pluton). The panel used notions of technique and technology fairly interchangeably, but it is evident that there is often a lag or plain divide between compositional strategy and available music technology. The contemporaneity of technology and technique became a useful frame for evaluating the electronic contributions to some of the later concerts. The final question for the panel, “What do you want in the future?” dashed any hope of a greater integration of the two, with such technology-fetishist answers as “flying speakers” and “morphing nanotech mallet heads” (though both of those would be cool). At 90 minutes the discussions were just beginning to get interesting and I can only hope that these sessions are given two hours next year.
Two wonderful events took the festival outside of the concert halls and into the community. A performance of Mauricio Kagel’s Eine Brise, a “transient action” for 111 bicycles saw a much smaller peloton circle the Tom Flood velodrome whistling, singing and ringing their bells to the cheers of a few dozen supporters. The colourful and ultimately hilarious sonorous sculptures produced during Dale Gorfinkel’s children’s workshop were opened as an installation on Saturday, allowing adults to navigate a maze of interconnected bellows, balloons and bells.
A duration experience in itself, the marathon of BIFEM induces moments of delirious rapture, but also shortens one’s temper enough to provoke important questions such as, “Is this piece really worth my time?” Thankfully David Chisholm’s curatorial nous rarely leaves one with a negative answer.
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Bendigo, 5-7 Sept
Early Warning System, Give us this Day—Five Sonic Adventures
photo Greg Harm
Early Warning System, Give us this Day—Five Sonic Adventures
Increased exposure to Indian, African and Asian music has made the last 100 years or so pretty good for Euro-Western percussion lovers. Enter Early Warning System with a beautifully programmed selection of recent works—by Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson, Kate Neal, Anthony Pateras and Michael Askill—that reflect the influence of that exposure on the Western classical tradition.
First up is the premiere of Erik Griswold’s Give us this day. The piece begins stately and processional (more Java than Bali) then moves through sections of quite different sonorities as is common with Griswold’s work. Not all percussive, at one stage Griswold’s much loved melodicas are introduced along with bowed cymbals to develop a beautiful tonespace of slowly overlapping chords. With the percussion the playing is sometimes soft and gentle, allowing the sound of touching skins with hand or beater to dominate the resonant boom of the drum, giving a percussion that is as much about touching and manipulating a surface as it is about dividing time into predictable chunks. Give us this day is very much a work that refines earlier concerns and demonstrates the continuing maturation of Griswold’s distinctive voice.
Vanessa Tomlinson continues exploring the theatre and physicality of sound production in her conceptual soundscape Static. The performers line up along the front of the stage each with a small table of bits and pieces and a bass drum at their feet. Electric static is soft in the air, the performers make soundless gestures—silent playing. Later these same gestures will be harder and faster, whipping sticks in the air, scraping shoe soles on the floor, scribbling with stones on steel bowls to bend and modulate pitch into speechless, gliding voice. Static is a fascinating work that draws attention to the link between gesture and the production of sound using commonplace actions.
Early Warning System, Give us this Day—Five Sonic Adventures
photo Greg Harm
Early Warning System, Give us this Day—Five Sonic Adventures
Similarly performative is Kate Neal’s What Hath II, a Kraftwerk-does-Beckett piece of music theatre that presents the performers as slaves to the rhythm—moving their heads in rapid and unnatural gesture to the beat of the music or flashing small projectors in an inscrutable machinic code. The body driven by an external mechanism—in this case the tempo—echoes the long history of representing people as dehumanised functional components (Metropolis, The Matrix). Watching the dehumanised performers is unsettling, even a little embarrassing. Why? Drumming is expressed through ballistic control and group synchrony of that control creates solidarity, a sense of group membership arising through shared motor action. And where there is a group there is a leader. People identify leadership with the person who most predicts the behaviour of the group, and in this case the leader is a metronome, a machine.
The performers rigidly moving their heads to the metronomic tempo have no other purpose than to comply with a machine. But there is no coercion, the performers are compliant in their own subjugation. Watching people willingly give up their autonomy like this is embarrassing, upsetting, disturbing. Both here and elsewhere.
Early Warning System: Give us this Day—Five Sonic Adventures, performers Vanessa Tomlinson, Michael Askill, Nozomi Omote, Rebecca-Lloyd Jones, Cameron Kennedy; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, 9 July
In an evocation of the life of Vladimir Mayakovsky, composer Michael Smetanin, librettist Alison Croggon and Sydney Chamber Opera splinter the great Russian poet’s psyche into multiple voices (sung and spoken), personae and video images in a multimedia fantasia that belies the simplicity of the poet’s heroic public recitations, if not the complexity of his verse—at once populist and startlingly modernist before Soviet Realism erased every conceivable kind of formalism and many artists’ lives.
The dramatic structure of Michael Smetanin and Alison Croggon’s Mayakovsky is above all, as a fellow audience member quipped, “bio-pic.” It tracks key events of the poet’s life—his fame, a love affair, despair (political and romantic) and suicide, interwoven with appearances by Lenin, Stalin and agitprop revolutionary workers who delineate the narrowing political compass of the Russian Revolution. The chronological narrative is however framed as interplay between present and future, opening with Rorschach Test-like video projections and a grimly realised version of the Phosphorescent Woman from Mayakovsky’s satirical comedy The Bathhouse, in which she’s an emissary from a glorious Communist state a millennium hence. A more immediate future subsequently manifests in the form of the poet’s cynical alter ego, the Author, walking from the audience into Mayakovsky’s presence a century ago. The hectoring Author torments Mayakovsky with the failure of the revolution, the compromising of his art and his sanctification by Stalin as the Poet of the People. Once the latter acclamation would have meant almost everything to a poet, who regarded the practice of his arts as self-sacrifice for the greater good. But as conformism becomes the order of the day, Mayakovsky’s inordinate idealism is collapsing.
Mayakovsky, Sydney Chamber Opera
photo Zan Wimberley
Mayakovsky, Sydney Chamber Opera
The externalisation of the poet’s inner anxieties via an accusatory alter ego is a familiar device, which provides the opera with a certain amount of tension but inclines the Mayakovsky character towards the mono-dimensional, until the weight of his failures overwhelms him—even then it’s a bloody tussle with the Author. Baritone Simon Lobelson is a vocally powerful Mayakovsky—obtuse, strident, grandiose, suffering—but his role as the people’s poet is undercut by having the poems intimately voiced-over by Alex Menglet. It’s interesting to hear the Russian (while straining to read subtitles, right angled to the stage!) but I wanted to see Mayakovsky addressing the masses, with or without microphone or megaphone, in full voice (English would have been fine) and standing tall on the illuminated platform that Lenin and Stalin otherwise occupy. We also hear the voice of the actual Mayakovsky from a 1914 recording (which in extended, treated form is also used to structurally underpin the opera; see the interview with the composer, RealTime Profiler, 2 July).
The splitting of the man—into poet, Author, a Russian reciter and Mayakovsky himself as voice—might heighten our sense of the man’s contradictions and the pain they, the state and lover Lilya Brik (Jessica O’Donoghue) cause him but the fragmentation doesn’t necessarily add up. His character becomes diffuse regardless of Croggon and Smetanin’s considered working of his poems and phrases and images from them into the vocal score.
Mayakovsky’s enduring love for Lilya Brik (initially realised in a ménage a trois with her husband Osip Brik) was as impossible to fulfil as his political idealism and just as destructive. This dimension of the poet’s life is simply told, amusingly with “The Cloud in Trousers” as a courting song and affectingly when Lilya explains to him once more, here in urgent, rising notes that his passion exhausts her. She withdraws from him, as does the state. The combination of incredible neediness on the one hand and aggressive expressiveness on the other is associated with artists, but the suicidal outcome (one of several attempts) is extreme. Both drives demand emotional reciprocity, from a lover and from an audience—where the lover is also audience and the people bestow love. To the end Mayakovsky suffered as much for his love (too vast for a lover) as for his Cultural Bolshevik idealism (too singular, too personal for the state). With its structural mechanics focused on the latter, the opera’s diffusiveness denies us a cogent vision of Mayakovsky, however much his life defies a single view.
Alison Croggon’s libretto is in fine sync with Michael Smetanin’s score; together they capture the urgency of Mayakovsky’s declamatory verse and highlight its ever-surprising imagery. The music for the small but powerful instrumental ensemble with electronics is bracing, from opening monumental brassy thunder to static-challenged fanfare, revolutionary workers’ choruses (almost out of Brecht) and the final cataclysmic roar of radio waves and a lone siren’s lament. There are rarer, scintillating passages of quiet, subtly textured beauty. Early electronic music is evoked and the diverse musical forms that coalesced in the 20s are finely woven through the score without resorting to pastiche. The vocal scoring however was neither as subtle, varied or embracing, feeling less like song than hyper-articulated speech or latter-day recitative, as in much 20th century opera, with the orchestra filling out the lyricism and passion.
Mayakovsky suffered from a superfluity of theatrical and thematic devices, the sheer volume of surtitle reading and Kat Henry’s ultra busy conventional direction (with young opera actors grappling with an awkward mix of naturalistic and stylised moves). Hanna Sandgren’s design (six metre-wide drops suggestive of columns that become Stalin’s wall against art) doubled as a screen for a plethora of visual effects. The sculpture above made little sense—perhaps a nod in the direction of early Modernism or even Constructivism (which might have inspired a more cogent design). The decision to show the surtitles and video on a wall to the hard left of the audience reduced the work’s intelligibility and the impact of the Phosphorescent Woman who, above all, should have been addressing us directly as well as the characters onstage.
With Mayakovsky, Sydney Chamber Opera continues its brave commitment to 20th and 21st century opera. If design and direction are not of the company’s usual high standard, the opera will doubtless benefit from its first outing. It cries out for re-thinking by its creators and a less encumbered production. Smetanin and Croggon’s de-centred Mayakovsky doesn’t have the charisma that could enthral masses of workers. He is denied the introspection that would convey a tragic sense of self presaging the poet’s downfall. Instead, we have pathos rather than tragedy. Yes, the words, music and multimedia dynamics of the opera spell out Mayakovsky’s unresolvable plight with varying degrees of intensity and insight, but no more than that.
I can vividly recall the All Out Ensemble’s Selling Ourselves for Dinner in Jim Sharman’s 1982 Adelaide Festival. Performed in a carpark and scripted by another Cultural Bolshevik, Chris Barnett, it realised Mayakovsky’s spirit with frightening, almost overwhelming vigour and clarity, portraying an artist consumed by his art, politics and love. We soared with Mayakovsky, and we fell with him.
Sydney Chamber Opera & Carriageworks, Mayakovsky, composer Michael Smetanin, librettist Alison Croggon, conductor Jack Symonds, director Kat Henry performers Simon Lobelson, Jessica O’Donoghue, Sarah Toth, Lotte Betts-Dean, Mitchell Riley, Brenton Spiteri, design Hanna Sandgren, lighting Guy Harding, AV design, Davros, Carriageworks, Sydney, 28 July-2 Aug
The Old Ghan, the train and the 3,000km of track on which it once ran, is almost mythical. It symbolises the Red Centre which Australia’s white colonists thought to harness and control. Its narrow-gauge tracks were first laid in 1878 and completed in 1929, the full track to Darwin only completed in 2004.
The train’s delivery of goods and passengers between Port August and Alice Springs (a seven day trip at best) fell foul of both the Wet and the Dry, the track regularly drowned in sand and/or water. In the late 1940s, there was a standard joke about when the train might arrive: this month, next month or December. Afghan cameleers not only distributed goods east and west of the track, but also stepped in when the train got bogged.
The train and its journey is a metaphor for white Australia’s long history of struggle to cross borders, join isolated towns and pretend Australians are ‘one people’ with a shared goal—to produce, to provide, to survive and to conquer. Jon Rose’s Ghan Tracks includes footage taken by Rose and Mark Patterson of the huffing, muscle-bound contemporary Pichi Richi Railway (the only part of the Afghan Express still operating) and the Old Ghan rusting in retirement, against archival footage of her heyday when she was a ‘slow silver ribbon’ with polished interior finishes and plush dining-cars.
Rose—an artist who has staged his work on, along or across boundaries such as fences dissecting the Strzelecki Desert, the USA-Mexico border and the Separation Fence in the Israeli Occupied Territories—excavates the romance, the struggles and the ironies of this mythology in a sound/performance/installation work involving seven musicians, a lighting artist, a sound technician and himself—a white-haired, hyper-charged piston engine driving the work through transitions by waving pieces of numbered, coloured paper at his orchestra.
Along with clarinet, tympanum, sousaphone, piccolo and corrugated iron, the ensemble also includes a rain machine harnessed by pedal-power and a canvas draped like pastry over a turning pin, which is wound like an oversized meat-mincer to create the sound of wind. Several times, Jennifer Torrence shovels gravel into a cement mixer, walks behind, turns the mixer, and then tips it out into the pit again. The steady dryness of this action, the brittle grind of the sound and the measure of Torrence’s footsteps is enthralling. This above all else serves as a synecdoche of the desert, of the hopes that people kept pinning on ‘good prospects’ and full crops (which all failed) north of the Goyder line, representing the gap between expansionist dreams and the moisture desperately longed for but which never returned. This dry truth is also echoed in the gap in tuning between the equal- and just-tempered vibraphones, to my eye matched also by the footage of coiffed women with slender fingers pointing to a dream outside the train window that we never get to see. Not quite visible or audible.
What I appreciate most is the delicacy in the use of film, a rhythmic/visual intervention appearing and disappearing in and out of score as do the instruments themselves. There are archival stills of Aboriginal children posed in stiff dresses beside sombre, starched white women, or taken on camel-rides by the Afghans. Another camel carries a pianola strapped to its back; where we might expect romantic keyboard tones, Rose overdubs the camel’s screaming song. A low POV shot, taken from the track itself as the Ghan passes over, is an apt symbol of obsession overrunning reason. Footage of the last run of the Old Ghan, pulling up its own tracks as it passes, like a spider eating its own young, is a sad homage to the folly of its past. As if we too could hoist up our limbs and say goodbye to dreams laid in sand.
Readings from old newspapers performed by Patrick Dickson and Lucy Bell capture the dashed hopes of the early settlers. The only strange element here is the full downlight on them, suggesting human superiority in the telling of this tale while the stage is otherwise discretely lit, spotting the curve of the sousaphone, the bell of the tympanum, the gleaming edge of the vibes.
Rose has been careful to document what the train meant to desert elders. A shot of the engine appearing like a caterpillar around the corner of a fat gravelly mountain is accompanied by a voiceover of Peter Paltharre Wallis telling the story of the black ‘devil dog’ eating up the ground. There follows a beautiful tract of Arrernte language, unmitigated and untranslated, holding its own.
Copious program notes unwind of Rose’s critical politics. Yet Ghan Tracks is a curiously conservative listening experience, its structure built on regular metre (appropriate, perhaps to the rhythmic forces of a train, but certainly not to the Old Ghan’s breakdowns!), albeit full of surprises and textures of which I value the reminder to take heed. The Ghan is less a radical take on the world around us than a reminder of the constancies of the battle between us and the environment, but yes, a cautionary tale (as Rose would have it) on how we may lay tracks into our future.
Ghan Tracks was commissioned by Ensemble Offspring in conjunction with Performance Space and with the support of ABC RN’s Creative Audio Unit.
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Performance Space: Jon Rose, Ensemble Offspring, Ghan Tracks, composer, multi-media, texts, conductor Jon Rose, musicians Claire Edwardes, Clayton Thomas, Eugene Ughetti, Jennifer Torrence, Lamorna Nightingale, Jason Noble, Damien Ricketson, Carolyn Johns, actors Lucy Bell, Patrick Dickson, sound Lachlan Vercoe, lighting, AV Aaron Clarke; Carriageworks, Sydney, 7-9 Aug
Tom Lane, Katherine O’Malley, Wake, Chamber Made Opera
photo Ros Kavanagh
Tom Lane, Katherine O’Malley, Wake, Chamber Made Opera
What looks like a coffin but sounds like a musical instrument? Rory Grubb’s original electric ceramophone, as seen in Chamber Made Opera’s Irish-Australian production Wake as part of Limerick City of Culture.
What first appears to be a rather macabre white coffin, funereally draped outside the back garden patio door of an exquisite Limerick family home, later reveals itself to be embedded with tuned ceramic pots and clever electronic components. The metaphoric significance of flowerpots embedded into a coffin is quite poignant, if you stop and think about it. But apparently that was all my own projection, as their functional raison d’être, invented by Grubb, who plays them, is genuinely acoustic.
That’s the thing about this open, subtle show—directed by Maeve Stone in association with an eclectic pantheon of collaborators—it offers space for the spectator to make his or her own associations, and is not at all pushy. It creeps up on you and suddenly you find yourself in its grip, all emotional, and wondering ‘how did that happen?’
When you set foot across the threshold of this dream home in South Circular Road, you are invited to take your shoes off and roam freely around the entire ground floor, to sink into the sofas, listen to the grand piano being played nonchalantly by Fionnuala Gygax, or hang out with the sombre Katherine O’Malley in her slo-mo sandwich making (you’ll be eating them later, as at any wake you have ever attended). Here, there are clever video projections, by the staircase, on the ceiling, in the media room, all by Australian Christie Stott. There, on the table in the drawing room is a pile of sympathy cards, all addressed to “The Ryan Family.”
We accompany the bereaved O’Malley on her thoughtful, pathos-imbued domestic preparations for a familiar ritual that is more than likely about to take place. It feels like being in a hyper-real movie at points. Even though as we wander around the beautiful home at our own volition, we wonder, is this it? Will anything happen? Grubb plays a bicycle wheel like a cello. Tom Lane dons his electric guitar.
In our own time, all 25 of us one by one take a seat around the large sandwich-making table and O’Malley, the woman of the house, executes a subtle choreography around and on top of it, sometimes catching it and shaking it. She locates a crumpled piece of paper with her personal, lowly uttered speech written out on it. Okay, she has to deliver this. Reluctantly, accompanied by a few bars from Lane on electric guitar, she articulates her fragmented few words about her mother, whom she had, she says, for 39 years of her life. The ceramophone kicks into action outside the window.
Then the bit we were all hoping would happen, to bring this poignant ritual to a close—we are offered sandwiches, whiskey and port.
Katherine O’Malley, Wake, Chamber Made Opera
photo Ros Kavanagh
Katherine O’Malley, Wake, Chamber Made Opera
The eternal topic of death can be approached in a number of different ways. While over at the Galway International Arts Festival, the play Ballyturk is wowing crowds with a high-octane, frantic, hyper-charged Enda Walsh attack on the subject, here in a leafy Limerick suburb, Chamber Made Opera is adopting a subtle, less is more strategy to deal with the same unavoidable fact of our mortality.
The Australian company, imported by Limerick City of Culture to collaborate with an array of talented Irish artists, manifests its mission statement of re-inventing our bellowing, big-lunged impressions of what opera can be, with quirky little instruments, the unsaid, heartfelt mutterings and careful installations and interventions in an actual family home. Catch this gorgeous experience if you can.
This review originally appeared in the online magazine Vulgo and is reproduced with permission.
Limerick City of Culture Commission: Chamber Made Opera, Wake, concept, director Maeve Stone [IRE], concept John Rodgers [AUS], performer, choreographer Katherine O’Malley, composer, sound design Tom Lane [IRE], video design Christie Stott [AUS], dramaturg Tamara Saulwick [AUS], musician, sound design Roy Grubb [IRE]; Limerick, Ireland, 15-20 July
The story of this early (1607) opera is based on the mythic journey of Orpheus to the Underworld to retrieve the love he lost to snakebite on their wedding day. Orpheus’ divine music persuades Pluto to allow Eurydice to return with him to the human world, but Orpheus’ weakness has him look back to make sure she is following. He thus breaks the barter, and she disappears forever. The story represents music’s capacity to celebrate and persuade, reflect love and despair, and to struggle with human fallibility—as musicians daily do with their instruments. At the end, Apollo pities Orpheus’ compassion for suffering and raises him to the heavens.
Monteverdi’s opera, with its delicate Baroque vocal ornamentation, coupled with a restless continuo and peppered with harmonic discords, holds together these worlds of contradiction between human effort and transcendence. Although I’m not sure these delicate tensions are successfully realised in this production—a joint effort between national and international designers, specialist period instrumentalists and singers and the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics along with School of Music alumni and current students—it certainly has its achievements.
Conductor and Head of the School of Music Peter Tregear wanted the production to be “generation defeating” by virtue of its digital elements. Certainly, Llewellyn Hall packed in the younger crowds. A digital set is also “cost-effective, infinitely recyclable and already receiving interest from other productions overseas.” Indeed, there were gorgeous moments in Andrew Quinn’s design: when the ‘forest’ of columns bows to Orpheus’ arrival (a reference to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII where trees “did bow themselves when he did sing”); in the depiction of the journey across the river Styx, the boat a stunning row of shingles, sea-water shimmering below; and in Hades’ dark-plinthed mausoleum, which called to mind the ‘grief museums’ designed by Daniel Libeskind.
Perhaps if the oscillograph—a projection for the audience tracking the musical score, manipulated by the digital operator—could become more responsive to the actual dynamics of the orchestra, it would be a less plodding device. Even so, I’m not sure that ‘seeing’ the shape-of-music-made-literal really works. It begs the question of what we see in theatre’s ‘empty space.’ It’s the role of director and performers to realise just how active, engaged and relational it already is.
Despite Liz Lea’s sprightly choreography, Orpheus and Eurydice’s wedding is strangely unjoyous, although some of its sombre tone must be attributable to Allessandro Chiodo’s rather stark lighting design. Other key dramatic interactions were lost: for example, Orpheus’s Act III aria to the Ferryman does not seem sung to the space between the two of them—which surely it is: Charon is mesmerised and charmed by Orpheus’ desperate need to have him sleep, as much as by the song’s melodic contours. A key dramatic interaction is lost.
The diction of young graduates, Lachlan McIntyre and Nicholas Beecher, were exceptional, as were the vocal, dramatic and emotional power of Krystle Innes as the messenger of Eurydice’s death and Paul McMahon as Apollo. As for other title roles, the visuals projector was so loud that many times singers could hardly be heard. What a strain for such fine performers.
Chiodo’s lighting design is at its best in the Underworld scenes, where figures seem to float and emerge from the darkness—occasionally reminding me of Brian Thomson’s design for Britten’s Death in Venice for the Australian Opera in the 1990s, but the bright spotlight on Eurydice just when she is lost to Orpheus forevermore is very strange. There is also some awkward plotting at sensitive moments in Act III when tenor Nicholas Mulroy as Orpheus struggled to move cross-stage into patches of light, disrupting the superb poignancy of his aria. In the final scene, Apollo’s digitised ‘exploding star’ seemed gauche against the delicacy of the music.
The Baroque style is generally less rich than the more familiar Bel Canto, partly due to the nature of baroque instruments—thinner gut for strings and harpsichord, smaller reeds and bores for winds. But L’Orfeo’s richness comes from the tensions layered between the continuum motion of orchestral instruments and the plaintive qualities of voice expanded into expressive bouts of melisma. One singer confided that her training in jazz helped her meet the music’s demands. Like the quality of light and shade created by wind through leaves, Monteverdi’s melismas catch more emotion and nuance than any literal interpretation.
The ANU School of Music with the School of Art and the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics: L’Orfeo, composer, Claudio Monteverdi, libretto Alessandro Striggio, translation Anne Ridler, musical director Peter Tregear, director Cate Clelland, digital set Andrew Quinn, lighting Allessandro Chiodo, costumes Nadine Geary-James, Deul Seo, choreographer Liz Lea; Llewellyn Hall, ANU School of Music, Canberra, 21-22 Aug
Though considered radically experimental when first produced, Philip Glass’s early operas have become standard repertoire because of their enduring musical strength and originality. Glass’s initial three—Einstein on the Beach (co-written with director Robert Wilson and choreographer Lucinda Childs, 1976), Akhnaten (1980) and Satyagraha (1983)—form what he called a portrait trilogy, paying homage to significant figures: Einstein the physicist, Mahatma Gandhi the civil rights champion and Akhnaten, the Egyptian pharaoh who revolutionised religious belief during his reign, all legendary figures who have god-like status.
But these operas are not conventional theatrical stories—Einstein on the Beach is not a story at all, but a choral, instrumental and dance performance with spoken texts addressing contemporary society.
It was with Einstein on the Beach that Glass and Wilson broke new ground, introducing a unique kind of formalism into the territory of conservative opera culture. Wilson had previously created theatre pieces of many hours’ or even days’ duration, dissolving the barrier between theatre and life. Einstein on the Beach is intended to run four–five hours without a break, during which the audience can come and go. But in its 2014 production, State Opera SA breaks it into four discrete acts, each of 50 minutes, with intervals, while still retaining the five “knee plays” linking the four acts. State Opera has reinvented Einstein on the Beach, retaining its essential character while enabling a high level of concentrated performance by the dancers and singers. Importantly, it changes the dynamic for the audience, so that instead of the opera appearing as one long immersion with which you interact as you wish, you now focus on the four parts. The result is breathtakingly intense.
State Opera does not use the original set design. Nor is the violinist, the wonderful Carolyn Lam, who also doubles on keyboard, dressed as Einstein but is instead seated with the other musicians centre-stage—except when she briefly engages in a dance passage while playing. Thus we hear but don’t see the figure of Einstein. State Opera’s design is spare, emphasising the dancers and the music while reducing visual cues to essentials. The central visual feature is a huge floating black triangular form that hovers above the performers.
The highlight of the trilogy is dancer Rebecca Jones’ performance in Einstein on the Beach, superbly delivering the Supermarket speech while en pointe. Her exquisite execution of classical ballet moves is in startling contrast to her rumination on mundane urban life—she’s a creative soul searching for meaning. The choreography throughout Einstein is superb, as the dancers move around the stage in close proximity to the musicians, as if feeding off the music. The five musicians form a central visual element, as does Timothy Sexton’s conducting, which links all the movement on stage to the complex musical structure with mathematical precision.
The State Opera Chorus is the driving force in all three operas. Producing a peerless sound, their controlled, tireless repetition of Glass’s musical figures creates hypnotic rhythms, building a chant that overwhelms all other thought, as if music represents the laws of physics governing the universe. As the musical patterns repeat and mutate, we are reminded of the repeating behaviours that characterise life on Earth and its evolution. In Einstein, the chorus repeats the solfege scale or a series of numerals as if they are mantras. The three operas are meditations and an education in the appreciation of mathematical complexity rendered as music. Throughout the trilogy, Sexton directs both musicians and chorus, managing entrances and multiple rhythms. The musicians are superb, brilliantly rendering Glass’s music. Vocal soloists Adam Goodburn (an excellent Ghandi), Cherie Boogaart and Deborah Caddy are outstanding, all having roles in both Akhnaten and Satyagraha in the same week.
State Opera’s most significant move in producing this trilogy is in inviting choreographer Leigh Warren to direct. Dance is a central element of Einstein, and Warren also recreates Akhnaten and Satyagraha through some wonderful choreography. In Akhnaten, the black-clad dancers swirl around the white-robed chorus and the soloists who are in contemporary western clothes. The dancers appear as a life force, their vitality and suppleness contrasting the measured, ritualised movement of the soloists.
Again in Satyagraha (the word refers to non-violent protest), the dancers envelop the singers in movement representing turbulent human and cosmic forces, or they become crowds or mimic forms such as lotus flowers opening. The most conventional of the operas, Satyagraha is exquisitely slow. There is a narrative element but the music, the singing (in Sanskrit) and the dance overwhelm it—unlike the other two operas, there is no outline in the program notes, implicitly inviting us to treat Satyagraha as a visual and musical experience to be appreciated rather than a story to be understood.
While thematically the operas represent science, politics and religion, the overarching framework becomes religion, or rather a raised level of spiritual consciousness. Refraining from any didactic or evaluative position, the operas are a celebration of three ideal, heroic figures. This trilogy is the core of Glass’s oeuvre, and through their musical linking, the three operas appear as a single work that is greater than the sum of the parts. Staging the three so successfully is a huge achievement.
State Opera of SA, Philip Glass Trilogy: Akhnaten, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, director, choreographer Leigh Warren, director, conductor, chorus master Tim Sexton, Leigh Warren Dancers, Adelaide College of the Arts Dance Ensemble, Members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Adelaide Art Orchestra, designer Mary Moore, lighting Geoff Cobham; Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 5, 7, 9 Aug
Matt Gingold, Filament Orkestra, 2014, What I See When I Look At Sound
photo Alessandro Bianchetti
Matt Gingold, Filament Orkestra, 2014, What I See When I Look At Sound
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove a group of mad military men are hunkered down in an underground bunker watching missiles fly around the world. As with much of the most paranoid science fiction, this setting was based on fact, in a command centre buried under the mountains of Colorado that is designed to withstand a nuclear hit.
In an exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Kynan Tan has created what looks like a contemporary version of this sort of bunker. We are immersed in darkness among screens animated by mute colours and thin lines. The biggest of these is a large, dual screen projection that flickers into a world map, upon which topographies and population statistics appear and disappear in a fantasy of total visibility.
Kynan Tan, What I See When I Look At Sound
photo Alessandro Bianchetti
Kynan Tan, What I See When I Look At Sound
Tan’s is a deep space aesthetic, one enabled by the era of information, while using this data to reimagine the earth. Contour profiles and cameras on aircraft reveal terrain that is both alien and familiar, flattening our experience of the Earth only to render it in four dimensions once more. The installation would look good in a biennale somewhere, as it makes more than a metaphor for the globalisation of information, making us feel as if we are both inside the world and out of it, immersed and abstracted from the planet all at once.
As if to completely reverse the immersive effects of this information bunker the other works in the exhibition rely on more analogue ideas. Cat Hope creates a temple of low frequency out of a dangerous looking pile of bass guitars and dirty amplifiers. The volume knobs and the placement of the guitars is just right to produce a well of bass, its density and texture shifting as we move about the room.
Cat Hope, What I See When I Look At Sound
photo Alessandro Bianchetti
Cat Hope, What I See When I Look At Sound
Hope creates a bunker of a different kind from Tan’s, but her piece also resonates strangely with the outside world, as it creates a highly tuned awareness of subsonic and low frequencies. After meditating on Hope’s strings, my ears and body were tuned to find bass wells everywhere, sites where low frequency sounds are trapped as they echo out of air conditioners and other ambient machines.
If Hope creates some kind of 1980s-style cyberpunk temple and ashram of bass, Lyndon Blue’s Altar harks back to a psychedelic era. He places an interactive Theremin in front of a trippy, warped projection so that putting your hand into the instrument’s field distorts old footage of airships exploding and crystals forming in a laboratory. Meanwhile the sound of tape wheezes back and forth, to create something akin to a bad trip watching the History Channel, when the bright colours go muddy at 3am.
The main PICA room is dedicated to two other installations. One by Lauren Brown features headphones that produce no sound, as if to deconstruct the whole exhibition. Brown alludes to sounds by writing a column of word-sounds under ultra-violet light, in a long poem to everyday listening.
The biggest single installation here is a dense and complex arrangement of light bulbs, electrical wires, radios and relays that runs as precisely as a toy train set. In Matthew Gingold’s Filament Orkestra bulbs switch on and off in different orders, triggered by sensors that are then hooked up to speakers that also hang from the ceiling.
With the passion of a technically gifted child, Gingold can play his instrument with an intuitive sense of how his abstract grid of light can be turned into a machine of beauty. His contraption is obsessive and strange, a steampunk factory designed to solve obscure riddles. Like a template for something greater than itself, Filament Orkestra looks like an experimental model that has yet to betray its true purpose.
Lyndon Blue, Altar, What I See When I Look At Sound
photo Alessandro Bianchetti
Lyndon Blue, Altar, What I See When I Look At Sound
There is a sense of occasion around this exhibition, that marks a coming of age for a couple of Perth artists, Lyndon Blue and Kynan Tan, who have long been lingering in local universities. Blue is a local polymath who plays everything from big band jazz to neo-folk and krautrock, while Tan has been creating impressive experimental sound pieces for some time.
This exhibition proves Blue and Tan can work with bigger installation spaces, while Hope used the occasion to announce she is folding her improvisational bass project Abe Sada to play more with the compositionally focused Bass Orchestra. A book launched at PICA, titled The End of Abe Sada (PICA Press, 2014), testifies to this shifting scene of low frequency improvisation.
While all of these artists work with completely different technologies, they are unified by an obsessive interest in their materials. From a set of older machines, such as bass guitars and light bulbs to Tan’s synchronised immersions and Blue’s hypnotic and hallucinatory device, the exhibition is like a poem to bunkers in space and time, illuminating a will to make caves out of wires.
In utopian fiction, there are always two characters. The first is the visionary who inspires others with his ideas about changing the world, while the second is the tinkerer, who will get madly enthusiastic about the details. Each of these installations shifts between the two points of view, as its artists realise some grand idea but only through an obsessive-compulsive attention to detail.
The wires of Gingold’s light bulb system extending to the PICA ceiling, the ridiculous collection of bass guitars and the old school optical distortions of Blue’s psychic projection all testify to the madness of artists at work. They come together because each of them displays a certain eccentricity, an interest in fiddling with things when others would have lost interest.
The evidence—making things work, and showing them off—is something that is often lost when art is taken into bigger galleries. Here the banality of the materials, the evidence of an artist’s madness, pulls this exhibition into a tactile realm. The mediation of sound and vision takes place as we listen to switches and watch the vibration of strings.
What I See When I Look At Sound, curator Leigh Robb, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, 12 July-31 Aug
Saltwater Country: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art from the coastline, from the islands, from the beach. Places of tidal movement, silt deposition, cyclonic storms and fishing. A shoreline where people meet for the first time—perhaps in the expansion of empire or on holidays at Christmas.
Saltwater Country is social, with workshops into the Gold Coast community and Erub Island in the Torres Strait. Workshops funded through a chance meeting of one of the curators, Virginia Rigney, with Hal Morris, the CEO of the Gold Coast Waterways Authority at a talk Rigney was giving about architecture. (This being the Gold Coast the talk was held on a cruise boat.) Rigney pointed out the value of highlighting Indigenous knowledge and culture to build community engagement and the Authority came on board with funding for public programs including a five day artist camp on Stradbroke Island run by Judy Watson.
Stingrays snooze half buried in the sandy shallows all along the coast, leaving flat-loafed depressions that Watson has cast in bronze then set to float just above the gallery floor. She has also cast the detritus of the shoreline: turtle heads, kelp roots, fishing floats, chest bones. Drifting and detritus are themes for other artists as well—not surprisingly given the role of the ocean as both a slow medium for exchange and the world’s largest dump. Laurie Nilsen creates barbed wire cages for urban rubbish that finds it way from shop to trolley to car to the drains then to the mouth of the Brisbane River. Barbed wire—from his younger days as a fencer out towards Roma. Wire grew barbs in the 1870s during the colonisation of the range lands in the USA. The barbs hurt the cattle just enough so they won’t lean on the fences and break them. Country museums almost always have a small display of different types; there’s a surprising variety. It’s a strange metaphor, wrapping discarded packaging with the tool for dividing land into parcels.
Erub Arts, GhostNet Weres 2014, installation,
photo Gold Coast City Gallery
Erub Arts, GhostNet Weres 2014, installation,
More drifting, more rubbish transformed. This time from way north. The Aru Islands are south from Papua. From here Willem Janszoon set off in the Duyfken in 1606 for the newly formed Dutch East India Company to become the first European to land in Australia, near Weipa. Nowadays maybe a fishing trawler heads out from Aru and a net gets tangled in a coral outcrop to be cut loose and drift away through the Arafura Sea. Six kilometres of plastic netting drifting along, a ghost net catching turtles for no-one then washing up on the beach at Erub Island in the Torres Strait. Erub Erwer Meta (Darnley Island Arts Centre) people take the net, free the turtles if they can, pull out the rubbish, pull apart the net, weave it into an oversized version of their traditional tool for scooping sardines in the shallows. For most people sardines come in a tin, from Portugal, Norway, Coles. For the people on Erub this is about who they are and have been, made into art and then traded to the mainland.
Also from the north is Alick Tipoti (see RealBlak, RT111) with a series of short videoed performances. Tipoti is best known for his linocuts but here we see his choreography and dance. The stage is dark and spare, the camera low, eye level for someone seated on the ground. Tipoti enters from the side, out of frame, out of darkness and into the light. He is dressed in what I take as traditional—long grass type skirt and leggings, arm bands, shell necklace and a mask that confronts the viewer with an unyielding, penetrating stare. Familiar items that can seem somewhat empty when viewed by someone with little personal cultural context in a museum but here they are transformative. It is a striking performance.
Saltwater Country next travels to the Australian Embassy in Washington and then to AAMU in Utrecht, a dedicated Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art set up by an ex-ambassador to Australia from the Netherlands. An exhibition traded across borders and across oceans to bring in the tourists and bring into being a binding chain of social relations.
And it is right that this exhibition starts at the Gold Coast, in a city that grew purely from the pleasures of the beach and at a venue originally called The Keith Hunt Community Entertainment and Arts Centre. Named after a-good-Labor-man who came up from Sydney in the 50s to run a snack bar on the Coast. Fish and Chips then local government. Years trying to get an arts centre off the ground. Became Mayor and the first civic leader in Australia to sign the petition calling for an Aboriginal Treaty. Front page news. 1981.
Saltwater Country, curators Virginia Rigney, Michael Aird, artists Vernon Ah Kee, Daniel Boyd, Michael Cook, Megan Cope, Erub Erwa Meta, Fiona Foley, Rosella Namok, Napolean Oui, Laurie Nilsen, Ryan Presley, Brian Robinson, Ken Thaiday, Alick Tipoti, Ian Waldron, Judy Watson, Gold Coast, City Gallery, 19 July-31 Aug
Cherine Fahd, Blown-Up, video still courtesy the artist
Strong political undercurrents rose to the surface in The Sceptical Image, an exhibition of 11 artists interested in unpicking the relationship between contemporary art and documentary practices. Offering new work by academic artists and researchers comprising the Art and the Document research cluster at Sydney College of the Arts, and presented in conjunction with The Image In Question conference, the exhibition sought to locate itself as a generative site for research.
The exhibition pursued a number of critically relevant threads and the politically charged nature of several of the artists’ practices was apparent such as Merilyn Fairskye’s MARCH on the annexation of the Crimea and Janelle Evans’ Eliza Fraser: The Blackening.
Spread across several spaces in the recently repurposed sculpture studios now home to the SCA Galleries, The Sceptical Image’s installation felt rabbit warren-ish in parts and was overshadowed by the vaulted architecture in others. The subtle potency of many of the works was not entirely lost however; Tanya Peterson’s Available Light conjured images of a bushfire smoke-obscured sun from an otherworldly sky. Taken at the start of Summer last year, these images captured nature in a state of imbalance. Peterson commented that on the same day she took them, Australia’s first ever request to activate the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters was made, allowing for satellite data and imagery of the bushfires to be received. Given that Peterson’s practice has been concerned with photography, light and the production of failure this coincidence seemed particularly apt.
On the opposite wall, Justin Trendall’s embroidered Helpless attempted to contravene images elevating industrial progress. Boldly disrupting the monumental modernist forms of factories, silos and skyscrapers using red thread, he undertook an act of resistance to their presence on the landscape and the interlinked economic system that drives them.
Drawing on industrial complexes of a different kind, Margaret Seymour’s Remote Sensing utilised an image of a National Security Agency surveillance compound made freely available by American artist Trevor Paglen. An iteration of her interactive Tracker robotic video works, Remote Sensing created an elusive experience for the viewer as it moved across the gallery floor, echoing the slippery and secretive way mass surveillance operates in today’s society.
Stefan Popescu’s engaging (un)identified contended with the speculative and the absurd as it highlighted the supposed concurrence of football and unidentified flying objects in Australia. His use of Tom Drury’s 1953 grainy UFO-capturing match footage (which has been called “the holy grail of Australian ufology”) served to destabilise not only the concept of truth in historical documentation but also notions of nation-building as they coalesce around male sports.
One of the most striking pieces was Blown-Up by Cherine Fahd. The twisted ‘selfie’ performance video challenged the viewer with the awkward political incorrectness of gazing at a person dancing in a fat suit. Blown-Up encapsulated the trajectory of humans looking at other humans—from Eadweard Muybridge’s early studies, politically contested images of prisoners and so-called degenerates, to reality TV and YouTube videos.
Kenzee Patterson, Bergie Seltzer, Firstdraft
Firstdraft: Bergie Seltzer
Across town at Firstdraft’s new space in Woolloomooloo, seven predominantly Sydney College of the Arts alumni presented the self-curated group exhibition, Bergie Seltzer. In contrast to the hodgepodge of works that can typify such endeavours, Bergie Seltzer was a well thought out, cohesive exhibition.
Borrowing from 20th century artistic tropes—pop, ready-made and text-based forms—and born from a shared appreciation of each other’s practices, the exhibition as a whole could be read as a conversation among artists, filled with witty one-liners and lines ripe to be read between.
While the title might have pointed towards the ‘thought bubble’ over the spoken word (bergie seltzer is the fizzing sound generated by trapped air being released from a melting iceberg), the exhibition elucidated matters of language and modes of communication through its inclusion of writing instruments, signage, advertising and broadcast content.
Due to their deft, interwoven arrangement in the space, many of the works entered a dialogue with one another. Playful tensions could be sensed however as the bright, colourful works vied for the viewer’s attention. Kenzee Patterson’s large wall text, Look, implored the viewer in deep Kleinean blue at the far end of the gallery behind Ben Terakes’ scatalogical Broken chair with poo and Frankensteined rocking horse after the late American artist Jason Rhoades. In front of this were two of the quieter, and possibly more nuanced, works in the show: Patterson’s Return to Form sculptures, a pair of sinuous ampersand forms teased out of a bar of galvanised steel reinforcement—a material prized for its rigidity and capacity to enable multi-storey construction.
Simpatico among the artists could be found in the adjacent room as Kevin Platt’s curly bracketed neon lips, Scripture/Cable Management, smiled benignly at Sean Rafferty’s suntanned plywood Fady Lingers (a word play on Lady Fingers and fruit and vegetable boxes) while in the opposite corner Will French’s bright yellow inflatable figure, an appropriated marketing character, rose with a kind of manic optimism and fell with a pathetic impotence.
In an exhibition that also celebrated materiality and process, French’s ink on paper TVSNOW took two years to complete. Produced while he was watching television, French painstakingly carved eucalyptus twigs into pixel shaped stamps and used their impressions to build a picture of screen static. Given that TV snow contains traces of cosmic radiation from the Big Bang more than 13 billion years ago, this work was a particularly poetic homage to the analogue signal as it fades from view in the digital age.
Echoing this, Emma White’s Waste of Potentia pondered the value of the individual gesture with a seemingly discarded pencil and eraser and a slight, pathos-filled sentence. “I was here” initially appeared to have been scrawled on the gallery wall by some anonymous vandal but, typical of White’s work, was an artistic facsimile laboriously rendered from polymer clay.
Both The Sceptical Image and Bergie Seltzer reinvigorate the at times facile discussions around artist-organised exhibitions and the sophisticated exchanges they have with one another about and through their work. As with icebergs there is always much more going on below the surface.
The Sceptical Image: Ryszard Dabek, John Di Stefano, Janelle Evans, Cherine Fahd, Merilyn Fairskye, Anne Ferran, Tanya Peterson, Stefan Popescu, Margaret Seymour, Yanai Toister and Justin Trendall, SCA Galleries, Sydney College of the Arts, Lilyfield, 2-30 Aug; Bergie Seltzer: Will French, Kevin Platt, Sean Rafferty, Kenzee Patterson, Kate Mitchell, Ben Terakes, Emma White, Firsdraft Gallery, Woolloomooloo, Sydney, 23 July-15 Aug
Titled somewhat tongue-in-cheek with a reference to A-listers and celebrity culture, The List, at the Campbelltown Arts Centre gallery, is a youth-focused group show that ever so lightly sends itself up while investigating suburban politics and culture.
Famously and shamelessly Westie, on the outer reaches of Sydney’s suburban fringes, there’s only one train stop further than Campbelltown, and the freeway soon gives way to the open road to the ACT. In the tradition of humour celebrating a certain impoverishment, Tom Polo’s hand-painted billboards kick off the show and can only properly be seen in the Minto paddocks if you happen to be sitting on the right side of the train. As if in a stumbling, hesitant voice the billboards are spaced at quite a distance from each other: single words and brief phrases spell out “All I Know” “Is That” “We” “Just Keep” “Doubting” “Ourselves.” For a group exhibition targeted at local youth, Polo captures the tension between self-perceived limitations and the ludic tone of self-deprecation.
George Tillianakis worked with a group of seven or so teens on a horror flick which is shown across two video screens in the gallery. On the left, shot in negative, life in the ‘burbs is summed up as a group zombie walk. In long, tacky wigs like witches’ locks, the troupe makes its way across the park towards a sign saying, “No Access to Hospital.” On the opposite screen, in colour, various scenarios play out against a brick wall, a metaphor for “up against the wall” and “hitting your head against a brick wall.” A teenager on the floor has a fit while another uselessly “shines a light on” him with a torch, hardly likely to attract political attention. A tall figure dons a sheet with two peep-holes in reference to the local legend of Fisher’s Ghost, then folds it into a burqa in a gesture of cross-cultural solidarity.
Given that curator Megan Monte aimed to engage local youth from within the popular cultural frameworks through which youth perceive themselves, Tillianakis, raised in nearby Blacktown, admirably succeeds. There’s nothing high art, but rather B-movie horror informing this take on disenfranchised political reality (the no hospital access a comment on recent Federal budget cuts or general lack of services?). Tillianakis’ tone is light, not afraid to play out dark subject matter through teen antics of ‘acting stupid.’
Robin Hungerford
photo Zan Wimberly
Robin Hungerford
Pilar Mata Dupont (see video interview, RealTime Profiler 4) placed the viewer on a sofa, under spotlights, to watch the horror show of contemporary political reality performed as a cheery musical with dance numbers and choruses: “We are the force that keeps us safe. You are missing documentation. I’m sorry you can’t get through. Please go to office for intrusive interview.” Robin Hungerford’s hand puppet scientist was as mad as Sesame Street, and in delirious conversation with a head in the sky straight out of The Wizard of Oz. As a comment on the dampening down of visionary thinkers, it soon became apparent that this scientist engaged in saving the world’s energy crisis needed to see a doctor and be locked away.
The dark political commentary eased somewhat in Uji Handoko Eko Saputro’s giant mural of a ghost, depicted as a long, heavy worm propped up Salvador Dali-style by naked footballers bearing crutches. In case you didn’t get the connection, a banner tells you the name of the local football team, “Campbelltown Rugby League Ghosts.” Additionally, a baseball cap on a plinth spells out the further association of Fisher’s Ghost with Campbelltown’s biggest art prize. (In the 1860s the ghost of a murdered local chap called Fisher apparently pointed out where to find his body.) However, a small figurine of Casper, the Friendly Ghost, also on a plinth, was needed, it seems, to boost the story with international comic book lingua franca, as if to say that even with the aid of football references local culture still needs help.
Zanny Begg,
photo Alex Wisser
Zanny Begg,
Zanny Begg moved beyond football and TV into what may be bleakly called local industry. In keeping with the times, and the proliferation of incarceration centres, her focus was on Indigenous youth filmed inside Reiby juvenile justice detention centre. Supplementary photographs showed boys alone, their backs turned, in their rooms, such that attention was on the identifiers on the walls: a patch saying ‘Koori Brothers 2014,’ another ‘Koori Family Boys,’ Adidas and heraldic blazonry adapted with Koori flag colours. The dominant video showed boys playing cards, riding bikes and walking around inside the enclosure, gang-like, in black handkerchief masks, like Jesse James. This was for legal reasons of anonymity but hinted at the outlaw activities that would have landed the boys in detention. With a deflated sense of the future the boys talked about life, dodging school and freedoms lost.
Michaela Gleave sealed viewers off from her installation. The audience had to look into the room through a glass panel, as if in the visiting room of a prison, in slightly unnerving resonance with the Zanny Begg work. Inside this plain and relatively empty room, again resonant with the rather empty cells of the Koori boys, was a pile of glitter and a vacuum cleaner, as if the fun had been cleaned up, held in abeyance for later. A series of what Deleuze would have called ‘order words’— or big abstract signifiers—was projected as if by random association, one after the other, on the back wall. These came from Gleave’s surveys of locals for the words which defined their lives. A selection read: Autonomy, Sacrifice, Commitment, Luck, Relationships, Economy, Realism, Conflict, Reliance, Respect, Persecution, Destruction, Togetherness, Happiness, Knowledge, Control. “Happiness” appeared more than once in this list sourced from a survey of locals. A further component invited viewers to don headphones and listen to a deep synth track while peering through the glass. This added an abject note to the installation, distancing and distracting the viewer from what mattered most.
Like Shaun Gladwell’s video installation, Gleave’s was a sobering work that referenced compromised opportunity and political reality. Recently back from Afghanistan and the practice of troop gifting to local people for political gain, Gladwell experimented with giving new skate decks to Campbelltown skate-boarders in exchange for appearing in his video. Less innocent than it seemed, skaters had to weigh up whether this was a fair exchange, and whether they were really being given something for nothing.
Campbelltown Arts Centre, The List, curator Megan Monte, artists Abdul Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Zanny Begg, Kate Blackmore, Marvyn Gaye Chetwynd, Shaun Gladwell, Michaela Gleave, Uji Eko Saputro (aka Hahan), Robin Hungerford, Pilar Mata Dupont, Daniel McKewan, Tom Polo, George Tillianakis; Campbelltown Arts Centre Gallery, 9 Aug-12 October
When RealTime talked with MAAP Director Kim Machan about the Land Sea Sky exhibition at the end of last year its 2014 international touring schedule looked ambitious—Shanghai, Seoul and Brisbane—particularly as the organisation had just been declined further triennial funding by Arts Queensland (see RT119). Despite this, Sydney has since been added to the list with a slightly smaller manifestation: 13 artists instead of the full complement of 20, exhibited across two floors of the National Art School Gallery.
Machan’s curatorial style grounds contemporary media-based works with the inclusion of a seminal historic work. For MAAP2004 in Singapore, themed Gravity, she used two works by Yves Klein—the magic of the collaged photograph Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) and the International Yves Klein blue series, presenting a hue similar to the blue channel of the RGB video signal—to re-assert continuity between visual arts history and the media art present (see our MAAP2004 festival feature). For Land Sea Sky she anchors the exhibition with Dutch artist Jan Dibbetts’ 1971 video series Horizon Sea I-III in which the meeting point of sea and sky is rotated in a number of orientations across split screens so that the landscape loses its figurative impact and becomes about line, angles and neat abstract geometries. Dibbets’ work thus reinforces both the land, sea and sky of the exhibition title as well as the sub-titular provocation to revisit “spatiality in video art.”
Positioned next to this work is a more contemporaneous version by Korean artist Kimsooja. For Bottari—Alfa Beach (2001) Kimsooja has filmed a stretch of sea and sky on the Nigerian coast, the place from which slaves were dispatched to the colonies. By splitting the screen horizontally and inverting the image in two ways—placing upturned sky on the bottom, and upside down sea on the top—the artist intends to negate the romantic ideal of a seascape. While the work certainly manifests an aura of gloom, this an instance where the artwork requires the roomsheet notes provided to convey its deeper import.
Derek Kreckler’s Littoral (2014)
photo Peter Morgan
Derek Kreckler’s Littoral (2014)
Also accompanying the Dibbets series is Australian artist Derek Kreckler’s Littoral (2014). Kreckler offers a low-tech approach to expanded video that is playful and effective. Projecting onto a wall-sized screen made from vertical strips, he presents three black and white sequences of wavescapes, each sequence increasing in closeness. Behind the strip-screen is an oscillating fan and the resultant billowing lends a remarkably satisfying three-dimensionality to the image, waves surging out towards the viewer. Kreckler undercuts the implied power and grandeur of the images with his gently comic use of a domestic fan. This, in addition to the strip-curtain allusion and the black and white of the image give Littoral a sense of nostalgia—the seascape often integral to Australian childhood perhaps.
Adding a little land to the watery second level of the exhibition is an understated piece by Shilpa Gupta. The artist asked 100 Indian adults to draw a map of India from memory.100 Hand drawn maps of India (2007-08) is simply what it is and something more. The highly variable outlines are down-projected onto a plinth resulting in a quietly powerful comment on ideas of identity, border and nationalism.
Zhu Jia, It’s Beyond my Control, 2014
photo Peter Morgan
Zhu Jia, It’s Beyond my Control, 2014
There is a nice resonance between Gupta’s piece and pioneering Chinese artist Zhu Jia’s It’s Beyond my Control (2014). His is also small and intimate, projected onto a small alcove at the top of the gallery’s impressive semi-circular staircase. Jia’s work most directly addresses the manipulation of spatiality in the video medium. It consists of a hand holding a pencil which is outlining the edges of the corner into/onto which it is projected, the joins between walls and floor. Here the virtual attempts to actualise and define, to demarcate the real world. While not quite flawless in execution—the projection is stretched to fit the corner (as the title implies, as part of a touring exhibition it is beyond Jia’s control)—it is still a very neat conceptual conceit.
Positioned near the gallery entrance—which unfortunately washes the vision with excess light—Barbara Campbell’s interactive close, close (2014) also deals figuratively with the Land Sea Sky thematic explored by second floor works. The viewer controls a horizontal image strip which moves up and down the screen according to your proximity. From the furthest distance you are offered a view of the sky and as you walk towards the screen the image moves downward displaying the tops of sails, a grassy sand dune and a strip of beach populated by birds. At the closest point you ‘enter’ the water, the sound implying submersion. Within the short video loop (filmed by Gary Warner who also contributed the sound) there is a strong dynamic that works effectively with the interactivity. When I played with the work at first there were birds on the shore but as I moved the image to the sky the flocks were on the move. As I brought the image back to the beach it was empty and I felt the loss. The very deftly managed visual and sonic interactivity (by John Tonkin) is perfectly integrated into the overall concept of the shifting territories of migratory shorebirds.
In Lauren Brincat’s This Time Tomorrow, Tempelhof (2011) we leave the sea behind to concentrate purely on land and sky—a strip of grey runway leading into a hazy distance. The perfect symmetrical perspective is reinforced by the mounting of the screen on a triangular frame. A figure walks into shot and down the centre of the runway to gradually become a black dot in the landscape. Near the end of the cycle, if you peer hard enough you see two distant figures emerging though we are denied the closure of their arrival. The work’s precise geometry and sense of shifting scale is mesmerising.
Other works on the ground floor offer more oblique though no less intriguing interpretations of the exhibition’s theme, concentrating more perhaps on the idea of spatiality of video and the frame as a landscape—such as Wang Peng’s Feel North Korea (2005) which uses the split screen with one part often blacked out to echo the political situation in this country. His second piece, Beyond (2014), is perhaps the most oblique, featuring three screens depicting subtley moving images of a pair shoes and a head of hair, both in extreme close-up. A shot of a distant aeroplane and vapour trail separates them, the connection to be read in the negative space between the screens. Wang Gonxin’s The Other Rule in Ping Pong (2014) splits the action of a bouncing ball across three screens one of which is embedded in a plinth in the space, implying a spatial and sculptural relation between the surfaces. Both Chinese/Australian artist Paul Bai’s Untitled (Wind charm) (2013) and Italian artist Giovanni Ozzola’s Garage—sometimes you can see much more (2009) use subtle manipulation of video footage to question perception of the image, the depicted space and the architecture of the gallery itself.
Kim Machan’s curatorial combination of figurative and conceptual makes Land Sea Sky a satisfyingly cohesive exhibition, a compelling showcase of Australian and Asian artists—something MAAP has consistently offered for over 15 years. May it continue to do so.
Above Adelaide’s Fontanelle Gallery is a banner saying, “Occupied and Enjoyed.” The gallery is being occupied by a group of artists staging Bound and Unbound: Sovereign Acts—decolonising methodologies of the lived and spoken. As we arrive at the exhibition, attendants in lab coats ask us to sign a register—we are now under surveillance.
Bound and Unbound is a group exhibition of videos, texts, a ceiling-high stack of books, a field of red sand representing desert country, family photos and a representation of a traditional bush camp. But the key elements are the performances and the key issue is the exhibition’s agenda.
Performers Ali Gumillya Baker, Simone Ulalka Tur, Faye Rosas Blanche and Natalie Harkin are lecturers at Flinders University’s Yunggorendi First Nations Centre for Higher Education and Research, which provides support for Indigenous students at the university, engages in Indigenous research and education and is involved in communities of practice.
Bound and Unbound curator Baker also has her studio at Fontanelle. In the exhibition press release, she writes, “This experimental work aims to explore complex ideas of being both bound and free; what we are bound to historically and, as sovereign people, what we choose to (un)bind ourselves to and from, both now and into the future. The core themes include: interrogations of State colonial archives; notions of ethical practice and responsibility; enacting memory and storytelling; and sovereign identity and (re)representation.”
The performances are powerful and eloquent: Baker announces the exhibition’s aims; Yunggorendi Director Simone Ulalka Tur sings, accompanied by her niece Katie Inawantji Morrison on violin, and reads her mother’s poetry. Poet Natalie Harkin pastes up a text on the wall that reads, “Attention record keepers of the State we have you under surveillance!” referring to the surveillance of Indigenous people during South Australia’s colonial history and the retention of records of Indigenous communities held in the State Archives. Baker tells me that she needed written permission to access her family’s records, having had to sign a confidentiality agreement, and that Indigenous South Australians still feel under surveillance as if outside the community. Her video Archive Fever Paradox, of a performance by Harkin, also addresses the issue of the Archives, and her video of Tur and Blanche’s My Pen is My Weapon announces the group’s philosophy.
The family photographs recall and honour ancestors. The books in the stack are anthropological texts concerning the habits and nature of Indigenous people and their history. Baker declares these books racist; the artists’ intention is to address what has been written about Indigenous people in order to reclaim their history, change the way in which Indigenous people are understood and to re-present themselves. She cites Judith Butler’s concept of subjection and the process of becoming a subject of power as indicative of the colonial past and notes that Indigenous people are still defined racially. Their artwork is about how representations of Indigenous people still shape the lives of these people and our perceptions of them.
This is activist, community art. When viewers at the exhibition register on entry, they will subconsciously identify as Indigenous or otherwise and implicitly are asked whether they are in solidarity. The group demands decolonisation, reclaims Indigenous sovereignty and seeks mutual respect, inclusion and understanding. Indigenous people in SA lived under the Aborigines Act and this exhibition represents a symbolic emergence from it — to become unbound.
Baker and Tur tell me they are undertaking an educative process that is intended to complement their roles as lecturers at Yunggorendi. They teach Indigenous culture to non-indigenous university students and the artistic material they have developed will be used in their teaching. Using Fontanelle for the exhibition allows them to step outside their university roles and to develop their art in a space that supports experimental and interdisciplinary artwork. They use the space to promote dialogue between cultures and across art forms—theatre, installation, video, poetry—and they are interested in how experimental art might be used, citing as influences Richard Bell and the proppaNOW collective. It is a transforming experience for the artists themselves—they are undertaking PhDs and will use this experience in thinking through their research.
Bound and Unbound is described as Act 1 in a project that is planned to continue into 2015 with the production of further videos and possibly street art in key locations. It forms part of a broader project including the Tall Ships performance (recorded on video by Baker) at the opening of the Historia group exhibition, Adelaide Town Hall, earlier this year, which reconsidered Adelaide’s history.
Bound and Unbound: Sovereign Acts—decolonising methodologies of the lived and spoken, Ali Gumillya Baker (curator), Simone Ulalka Tur, Faye Rosas Blanch, Natalie Harkin, Fontanelle Gallery, Adelaide, 24 Aug-21 Sept
Proximity Festival, Australia’s celebration of one-on-one performance, finds big dreams, plans and talents being brought to bear on the most intimate artistic performance experience.
Proximity Festival 2014 has a new home at the Fremantle Arts Centre for its three programs running from 22 October to 2 November. Producer Sarah Rowbottam has been sharing the helm with co-founders James Berlyn and Kelli McCluskey since the festival’s inception, and is enthusiastic about the many “firsts” added to the one-on-one performance festival’s composition each year.
2012 welcomed the first Proximity Festival, with daily bumping in and out of an eclectic collection of shows at The Blue Room Theatre in the middle of the frenzy of Fringe World, where it won the Spirit of Fringe Award. 2013 found Proximity Festival occupying an entire venue, enjoying more established settings in the studios, gallery spaces and random nooks and crannies of PICA and introducing the public Symposium and artists’ Lab programs. This year, moving away from Northbridge to the Fremantle Arts Centre, the Symposium program has changed to include all festival artists in the keynote, an intensive weekend Masterclass for the general public has been introduced, a national curatorium has been assembled and artist Julie Vulcan has been invited in as provocateur, bringing new ideas and experience to the core curatorial team.
The 12 micro-performances range widely not only in their use of space, but in the scope of their coverage of artistic practice and topics. Rowbottam is enthusiastic about the power of the “subtle but strong messages” possible in the un-themed collection. In Let’s Make Love, Jen Jamieson scientifically examines the bonding hormone oxytocin with you, but minus the romance, while in The Queue, Toyi-Toyi Theatre will test your ‘Australianness.’ Air from different eras generates atmosphere in Emily Parsons-Lord’s Different Kinds of Air, A Plant’s Diary; voices lead the way in Dance with Me by Sylvia Rimat; and Ian Sinclair’s Learner may cause stress as you teach him how to drive. Vulcan says, “some of the simplest ideas are the most beautiful” and some of the most basic ideas are also the most evocative. “Not all performances in a program will affect you in the same way. Even if only two out of four capture your attention, the other two are a bonus, which would be the case in any hour-long performance”, just as most staged theatre, consisting of spaced climactic points, will not be uniformly compelling.
Three programs of four shows apiece accommodating a total audience of 12 each night work against the aims of most arts festivals. Stepping away from the notion of bigger being better, Rowbottam cites fellow festival founder James Berlyn’s belief: “There are equally big pay-offs for audience and performers in small-scale, intimate and one-on-one works”—a philosophy that sees Proximity Festival create a space for the audience and artist to grow and create something new with each and every performance.
Before the festival, the artists are put through a two-week developmental program, Proximity Lab, overseen by the festival’s provocateurs, a process that Rowbottam says is “important in breaking preconceptions.” The Lab and Masterclass also bring together artists with an interest in the form. Vulcan is enthusiastic about the “richness of gathering artists together, an inspiring aspect” that develops one-on-one practice. And the festival is educating audiences about this artform; she is confident that “growth will come through word of mouth.”
Rowbottam is also keen on making artists self-sufficient beyond discovering the essentials of their art, with a pragmatic workshop on how to market themselves and create opportunities in the commercial reality of the contemporary art world. Alongside developing a sense of the global market for one-on-one works, Rowbottam wants artists to “keep to the spirit of the performance, while considering everything that can go wrong,” to consider personal and artistic boundaries both for artist and audience in the potentially confrontational nature of one-on-one presentation. Vulcan says that artists “can forget about the needs of the audience and assume the audience wants to be there and creating with them.” As provocateur she encourages the artists to think in terms of an exchange of gifts via performance, to consider what is being given and on what levels.
With a national curatorium, guest provocateur, a more diverse opening night, its Lab and Masterclass, Proximity Festival is finding every way to grow, save for raw audience numbers. But each night is sold out. More inquisitive audiences seek the experience of participation. The opening night Party for 1 promises to be lots of fun, with lateral thinking shaping the planning process. Rowbottam reminisces about rejected plans for 2013’s initial opening night, which included sitting down at the bar for a quiet drink with all 12 audience members, but this year’s plan looks more interesting, offering a celebration of one-off performances, music and “hidden surprises,” along with the cake. Even the keynote speech at the Symposium is evolving, with the 12 performers each delivering intense insights into their work with one-minute manifestos.
Proximity Festival 2014 promises great things, not only in itself, but in the development of artists, audiences and tourable works in the years ahead.
See RealTime Profiler 6 for Ben Brooker’s interview with Cat Jones, a 2014 Proximity Festival artist.
Proximity Festival 2014, advisor, provocateur James Berlyn, co-curator, producer Sarah Rowbottam, co-curator Kelli McCluskey, provocateur Julie Vulcan, artists James Berlyn, Caroline Garcia, Jen Jamieson, Cat Jones, Loren Kronemyer, Tanya Lee, Emily Parsons-Lord, Sylvia Rimat, Hallie Shellam, Ian Sinclair, Alina Tang, Toyi-Toyi Theatre; Fremantle Arts Centre, 22 Oct-2 Nov; www.proximityfestival.com
Making art is more than a job and it’s more than a life-style choice—for many, it’s an all-encompassing way of being. This can make living with an artist a difficult feat, unless both are of like constitution. So it’s not surprising that in the art world there are many couples who share both their lives and their art.
RealTime is run by such a couple, Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter, who, before their foray into publishing, also produced a large number of contemporary performances as Open City, often drawing on personal experiences and their relationship or, as Apartners, working as consultants for other artists.
Of course it’s not all smooth sailing—one’s partner is often one’s harshest critic, but perhaps this is a key to the conceptual rigor often illustrated in the creative manifestations of couples. To get to the bottom of this, over the next two Profilers, we are asking a number of art couples about their collaborative practices. We thank them for their generosity and their honesty. Gail Priest, Online Producer
PS. The natural extension of this is the art family, and if you haven’t already, the RealTime team strongly suggests you read The Family Fang by American novelist Kevin Wilson about two siblings struggling to accommodate their performance artist parents’ radical interventions. Nicole Kidman’s production company has produced the film of the book, directed by Jason Bateman.
We are currently working on an ongoing series of performance installations investigating our relationship as both partners and collaborative artists. This has come about really as a response to interest that emerged from interviews and discussions about our roles as Co-Artistic Directors of Art Month Sydney 2013, and the works we produced after that time. We were pushed throughout that period to talk about the benefits and challenges of working together as romantic partners, and so it’s been a natural progression that those conversations and reflections have become the focus of our current work.
The experience of producing our first collaborative work in late 2010/early 2011 made us aware of the different skill sets we each have and how they can and do complement each other so well. We also found the scale of work we could produce together was much greater than either of us had attempted or contemplated in our individual practices at that stage.
Beyond that initial realisation, of course we also discovered the tension and difficulties of working as collaborative artists with different schedules, priorities and approaches to making. We find ways to negotiate that, sometimes we can work through it and produce something incredible, other times, for whatever reason, we can’t or don’t want to, and there’s a silence. This process has inspired our recent series of works.
Alexandra Clapham, Penelope Benton: 1) Great Expectations, Day for Night, Performance Space; 2) Self-Portrait in a Room, SafARI 2014
courtesy the artists
Alexandra Clapham, Penelope Benton: 1) Great Expectations, Day for Night, Performance Space; 2) Self-Portrait in a Room, SafARI 2014
Great Expectations for Performance Space’s Day for Night at Carriageworks earlier this year was presented as a tableau vivant in sittings varying 90-150 minutes. This piece encapsulated both our working relationship and romantic partnership, a rhythm one could say was synonymous with many couples. The days, the nights, the stillness, the nothing, the expectations, the boredom, the waiting, the brewing, the growth of ideas, the clashes, the tension, the conflict, the noise, the intensity, the passion, the moments, the magic.
At Wellington St Projects for SafARI this year, we built two sets within one room in an adaptation of Floor 7½ in Charlie Kaufman’s film Being John Malkovich—the half floor which has a portal to Malkovich’s mind. Each set contained a hyperreal version of ourselves presented as living self-portraits, this time in sittings of 180-240 minutes. Again the tableau is used as an allegory to examine our public and private selves, both as individuals and as partners.
Our new work currently being developed, experiments with these living portraits in video format. http://penelopealexandra.com/
Related article
Enduringly queer
Fiona McGregor: Day for Night, Performance Space
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p26
Clocked Out Duo in the studio
courtesy the artists
Clocked Out Duo in the studio
Clocked Out (Erik Griswold & Vanessa Tomlinson)
When “partner art” is good, it’s really good. But when it’s bad, it’s really bad! To be able to take a new idea, the excitement and creative energy, and share it with someone you love is a beautiful thing. That enthusiasm can spill into your everyday life and become infectious. Meetings happen at any time, inspiration arises while hiking, watching TV, gardening or waiting for the kids’ cricket game to finish. And on the good days, when this does happen, you have your collaborator right next to you and the idea progresses to actuality in an instant. The energy of two people can lift something out of the imagination effortlessly. But if you pick the moment badly, the same idea can also get squashed and left behind. If there is any negativity, conflict or stress, there is no escape. It doesn’t stay in the office, but follows you home 24/7.
Two advantages of working with a creative partner over a long span of time (about 20 years now!): the depth of possibilities that come from experience; and trust. We know that at the end of the day, our partner will come through. On the other, hand there is the challenge of how to keep things fresh. For us it’s been essential to have a balance of solo, duo and collaborative projects which have consistently helped to reinvigorate our artistic practice.
Clocked Out Duo with The Australian Voices.
courtesy the artists
Clocked Out Duo with The Australian Voices.
Our project The Wide Alley, based in Sichuan Province in China, evolved with us both experiencing a new culture together. It integrates the very survival of the situation, the amazement of newness, the adventure of discovery and the extraordinary music to be found there. We began this in 1999, at the beginning of Clocked Out, and in a way this adventure into another world shows us working at our best. We really need each other here, to communicate, push and understand just how difficult an artistic process really can be. We are heading back there soon to make Water Pushes Sand for the Australian Art Orchestra, to see now familiar things and to experience the new—with kids in tow. We are building new experiences, supporting each other and trying to make sure that support includes critiquing, asking questions. Hopefully by now we know how and when to push each other, when to step up and cover the other’s insecurities, when to allow the other to shine. We wouldn’t have it any other way. http://www.clockedout.org
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Dounreay, 2014, Gallery Wendi Norris
photo Johnna Arnold
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Dounreay, 2014, Gallery Wendi Norris
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
Right now we are working towards our solo exhibition at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. The exhibition is titled Architects of Destruction. The body of work consists of Lego, cross-stitching and whiteboards. The works all depict fantastic scenarios that inevitably lead to destruction. They are based on historic catastrophic events or allude to future scenarios that may lead down a similar path. The works meditate upon the saying ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’
There are many levels to the execution of a body of work like this. Initially one of us would have been struck with the idea. This would then have been conveyed to the other, and probably not met with the same enthusiasm, so the idea was probably shelved in a sense by writing or drawing it into our shared diary. Although an initial concept may not be considered so great, we record the idea anyway. Over time, ideas percolate or other opportunities arise, an old idea is revisited and given a different spin. We have found that our minds work very differently, so using this method seems most effective. We often forget who came up with the initial concept, or an idea has morphed so much from incarnation to execution that it really becomes a true collaboration.
We have found that working collaboratively can mean having to verbalise everything we consider. Sometimes this can stifle the subconscious or naive level of art making. We did try reading an identical library once so that we did not have to speak to each other and eventually have our minds synched. This did not work! Our reading habits and speed, did not match. Perhaps subconsciousness is lost when a work is conveyed from two entities.
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Downstairs Dining Room – Octopus, 2014, part of Habitat, Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur
courtesy the artists
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Downstairs Dining Room – Octopus, 2014, part of Habitat, Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur
Executing work and seeing it to its end seems to be more effective when collaborating. When so much time, labour and effort goes into the creation of a work, it will not suddenly be dropped because you have lost interest. There is a level of mutual respect that somehow is great for completion. We both have different skills that complement each other. We don’t have scheduled meetings but find that being stuck in a car together for a long time forces us to talk about work.
Rosalind Crisp, Andrew Morrish, Hansueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…
photos Patrick Berger, courtesy the artists
Rosalind Crisp, Andrew Morrish, Hansueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…
Andrew Morrish & Rosalind Crisp
I am a Partner Art Phobic. I am terrified of seeing ‘too much information’ disguised as intimacy. Ready to gag on presentation of the ‘reality of our relationship.’ I had been traumatised at an early age by one of a couple reading, in a performance, a description of her pleasure in cupping the balls of her partner, when I had had dinner with them the night before.
When Rosalind Crisp (dancer and choreographer) and I (Andrew Morrish, improviser and teacher) began our personal relationship in 1999, we were both established artists with our own practices. The romance of the moment did not sway us into thinking we would make work together. From my perspective this decision was driven by my prejudices and my feminist beliefs. From Rosalind’s perspective it came from the fact she was already too busy to include me.
Our first appearance together on stage was for two minutes in a piece by Emma Saunders at Omeo Dance Studio in which she invited 30 people to dance to the same two minute song in 2001. Nikki Heywood said we “had legs,” but I was not convinced.
Our separate practices meant we were both busy with our own work, but we were also partners so it was clear that we began to influence and support each other. I was able to help with keeping the Omeo Dance mailing list up to date, even made a letterhead for Rosalind’s company. Rosalind’s Sydney and international network became available to me as I began to expand my teaching practice away from Melbourne.
In a relationship, for me, the fundamental verb is ‘support’ and we both began to offer this to each other while we continued to develop as individual artists. We saw each other’s work a lot and of course became experts in it, and confidantes. These are very precious commodities. I always felt that it was important for Rosalind to be able to come home after a day in the studio and be able to complain to me about her collaborators and that this would not be possible, or be more difficult, if I was one of them.
When we shifted our base of practice to Europe in 2003, our support roles for each other became even more important in our new isolation. I was often involved in the production side of Rosalind’s presentations. I was not particularly skilled in that area, but I was cheap, available and understood her intention. It was also clear that at certain times, in certain French theatres, other production staff were confused by my role as Artistic Conseil/Husband.
On one occasion, when producing danse (4) in Paris, one of the dancers hurt her knee and was unable to perform. The structure of the piece could be rearranged to accommodate this, but the “4” in danse (4) refers to the number of dancers, so I became the fourth dancer. My role before that had been to organise the seating for the audience and to iron the costumes for the dancers.
I had already been a performer in duck talk (2005—a collaboration between Rosalind, David Corbet and The Fondue Set) and was later to become a performer in No one will tell us…(2010) In all this, and still today, it is clear to me that in these pieces I was working in Rosalind’s work. I maintain my own solo practice and this I consider to be my work. We have no work that is ‘our’ work. I support her work in anyway I can, through encouragement, criticism, technical and artistic participation, filling gaps when required. And she in turn does the same for me.
Oh how they danced!
Virginia Baxter: Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
RealTime issue #112 Dec-Jan 2012 p2-3
Testing the tightrope
Keith Gallasch on Andrew Morrish and improvisation
RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007 web
Rosalind Crisp is one of the 12 Australia choreographers featured in Bodies of Thought, published by RealTime and Wakefield Press (2014). Supporting material is available at realtimedance
Sally Rees, Matt Warren, Burnie residency
courtesy the artists
Sally Rees, Matt Warren, Burnie residency
Sally Rees & Matt Warren
Having a partner who is a practicing artist and collaborator can be an exercise in dealing with objectivity and subjectivity simultaneously. Critiquing the other’s work from the mindset of a partner begs care as to how your response may be interpreted, bearing in mind the intimate knowledge of the creator’s thoughts and biases as well as one’s own. However, one must also be mindful to remain an objective, critical onlooker.
Perhaps most importantly for the collaborative process, in addition, to the genuine enjoyment in working together, we have a deep respect for each other’s practice. It is the differences in approach, process and conceptualisation, not the similarities, that are the most important elements, colliding to produce something that neither one of us could achieve alone.
It is vital to both of us to keep objectivity at the forefront and maintain a professional attitude when we collaborate, perhaps as a result of having seen collaborations between other couples break down as the needs of the relationship become greater than the project. Often at the end of a collaborative day we may give each other a peck on the cheek and jokingly declare the act “purely professional.”
Having a child has made collaboration difficult as we’re rarely available at the same time—one is always parenting—but a recent opportunity changed that. A residency in Burnie (our birthplace and a once notoriously polluted city), where family generously took over child-care, meant that we were able to work side-by-side—our first one-to-one collaboration for some time. Suddenly two artists turn and face each other, reintroduced, after following each other’s practices in parallel. What a wonderful thing to do.
We acquainted one another with sites of personal history, allowing ourselves to indulge in memory to discover both shared experience and singularities and then seeing it all reflected in the eyes of our son. It was an inspirational and emotional experience.
Sally Rees, Matt Warren, The Snowman
courtesy the artists
Sally Rees, Matt Warren, The Snowman
The creation of The Snowman evolved from shared memories of the local titanium processing plant that evoked mythic images of white men emerging and a stand of white trees by the roadside. An interview with an ex-employee gave further fodder to this idea and we used his voice to soundtrack an animation of a white figure moving through a landscape we created from weeds at the factory site. An invented, memorial cryptozoology.
The Ronalds: 1) Shannon Ronald with an example of one of a 3D Photo-Sculpture; 2) Patrick on location at the Barmedman Mineral Pool for the In Common project
courtesy the artists
The Ronalds: 1) Shannon Ronald with an example of one of a 3D Photo-Sculpture; 2) Patrick on location at the Barmedman Mineral Pool for the In Common project
The Ronalds (Shannon & Patrick)
Patrick and I have been collaborating exclusively on projects for very close to 10 years now. We started out working as Ronald+McDonell and since getting married in 2010 we have officially become The Ronalds, even though this is not quite as amusing as our old title.
We both trained as photographers, but over the years have morphed into installation artists who work in many forms, including photo-sculpture and interactive gamification. This progression into three dimensions and the virtual world is due solely to working as a partnership, pushing and testing both our diverse skills sets and interests.
Together we challenge each other to come up with more ambitious projects and to take on commissions that we might not be brave enough to attempt as solo artists. Our work is made stronger by our differing skills and opinions, as we both need to be convinced that our decisions are the best ones for our project, and it is during our constant discussions and problem solving that our best ideas are formed.
I have always explained our working relationship as me being the editor—Patrick comes up with the most fantastically ambitious projects, and I find ways to produce the same outcome in a more achievable way without compromising the original vision.
For our current project, In Common—Public Places of the Murrumbidgee/ Riverina, we have been commissioned to create work for the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery’s 40th anniversary next year. For this work we are creating hundreds of 3D photo-sculptures, small replicas of buildings throughout the region and turning the gallery into an immersive interactive environment that aims to reconstruct a region ranging 60,000 square kilometres from the Snowy Mountains to the vast plains of the Long Paddock. Our work roles in this project are defined naturally: we never need to decide who will do what, we just know. For this project Patrick has taken photographs of objects throughout the Riverina and will construct physical large-scale components and assemble any electronic parts for the final exhibition. I have created the online platform for the community input and will reconstruct Patrick’s photographs into 3D paper models and design the interactivity.
Over the years we have honed our individual skills and strengths to make working together on our projects a seamless process, and I can safely say that working as part of The Ronalds is the only reason that I am still making art. (Shannon Ronald) www.incommon.com.au, www.theronalds.com.au
Our current project, Augmented Terrain, is an immersive audiovisual installation that re-imagines the relationship between nature and culture. We present highly detailed aerial views of Australian landscapes and waterways that we dynamically manipulate in ways that reveal their underlying fragility. Through collaboration with Slovenian artist Marco Peljhan, co-founder of C-Astral, we are using their fixed wing drone system to photograph these zones in crisis. Our vision is to configure the land as active and to imagine it being able to speak and make comment about human impacts upon it. This Creative Australia funded research project culminated in a two-week residency at the Io Myers Studio, University of NSW in partnership with Performance Space where we exhibited the first iteration of the work, documented here. The full-scale installation will be shown in 2015/16
Starrs & Cmielski 1 & 2) AugmentedTerrain 3) Drone launch, Augmented Terrain in development
courtesy the artists
Starrs & Cmielski 1 & 2) AugmentedTerrain 3) Drone launch, Augmented Terrain in development
A comment from Lionel Bawden, artist and friend.
“It is funny observing an artist couple, with the intimacy of friendship, as it is easy to take aspects of the collaborative relationship’s success for granted. I would say with Starrs and Cmielewski, it’s the things that make the relationship a success that similarly bond the collaboration. Their differences create strengths and they have a deep admiration for and acceptance of one another’s thinking. They can argue with the best of them, with very passionate, distinct voices, so conflict resolution really means they discuss decisions in detail. Leon and Josephine are very playful in their thinking, so they take risks together, taking the audience in interesting directions.
It is like going to their place for dinner—they usually prepare different parts of the meal separately whilst conjuring the banquet together, often using recipes they have been perfecting for a long time, which one may have originally introduced to the other. They confer and consult constantly and one will defend their decision to cook something another five minutes or throw in a little more of something, to a supportive “Okay, good, I was just checking.” There is always a new piece of technology brought in to spice up the dish, like a space age barbeque on the balcony. Their dinners are amazing and over time their collaboration has become simultaneously more inventive and more relaxed.”
Multidisciplinary artist Cat Jones is in Adelaide this month as an ANAT Synapse artist-in-residence at the University of South Australia’s Sansom Institute for Health Research. She is attached to the Body in Mind research group who investigate the role of the brain and mind in chronic pain. Here she will be continuing one of her current investigations which looks at the idea of body illusions and their application in treating chronic pain.
Vocationally and geographically, Jones is hard to pin down: her CV spans over 20 years and an impressively diverse range of live art presentations, research engagements and curatorial and advisory roles. Either side of her time in Adelaide will take in a residency in Perth (with the University of Western Australia’s School of Medicine and Pharmacology) and a performance in Fremantle (at October’s Proximity Festival for one-on-one intimate performance). Next year Jones will travel to the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles where she will explore the creation of “bespoke and conceptual scents” for potential use in a performance context.
Jones’ current work is situated at the crossroads between art and science, and performance. I was fortunate enough to be one of only 15 people to experience her Somatic Drifts v1.0 at this year’s national artist hothouse Adhocracy [see RT122]. I was not alone in finding the sensory, one-on-one work which investigates interspecies empathy, to be a memorably affecting experience. Jones is still receiving feedback from audience members: “I’ve seen about five of the participants and each one has wanted to talk about the work again or say something about their experience and their memory of it. So I’ve had positive feedback in that way which is more ‘I really love that work’ or ‘thinking about it I can still feel it in my body.’ Someone I saw recently said they wanted to do it every week. They wanted to book into that experience.”
Cat Jones, Somatic Drifts v1.0; illustration by Cat Jones, remixed under Creative Commons Licence 4. Original images accessed via Wellcome Trust & Stephen Hale Vegetable Staticks, Google Books
courtesy the artist
Cat Jones, Somatic Drifts v1.0; illustration by Cat Jones, remixed under Creative Commons Licence 4. Original images accessed via Wellcome Trust & Stephen Hale Vegetable Staticks, Google Books
So is Somatic Drifts art or therapy? “I’m working on Somatic Drifts as an art experience and it’s informing my further research into neuroscience which in turn is feeding back into the work, but I’m not intending Somatic Drifts to be a therapeutic experience. It might lead to the making of experiences that clinicians could use in a therapeutic context.” Jones tells me that in contrast to performance works such as Somatic Drifts, therapy situations tend to be clinical and non-aesthetic: “They might look at touch and vision but they might not necessarily include sound in that environment or things like that so my question to the clinicians I’ve been talking with is ‘can an artistic approach into these situations enhance and move it forward even further?’”
One-on-one performances have a reputation for being confronting in their intimacy and the fact that participants often go in without an exact knowledge of what will happen or what they may be asked to do or discuss. Jones acknowledges this but emphasises the need for participants in her work to feel, at least initially, relaxed and receptive: “I begin with an element of creating a space for deep humour and they lead to great pleasure. However, they are also kind of uncomfortable situations, not necessarily confronting but certainly challenging. In Empathic Limb Clinic [the precursor to Somatic Drifts see RT121 and RT118], participants come into a very enclosed space with one other person and it’s a challenge to know that the performer is going to touch you. It’s uncomfortable for some people and I observe that process through performing—the fear in some people’s eyes—and being able to subtly manipulate that to the point where they barely notice the transition from us not touching to touching. The subversion of expectations as well is a key part of those things and that’s always part of the humour that has usually been my starting point for creating a work—humorous, offbeat, sometimes a little dark.”
At this year’s Proximity Festival Jones will be presenting Anatomy’s Confection, a new work about the anatomy of the clitoris as well as the censorial history of the clitoris’ representation in anatomy textbooks and medical curricula. Participants will create sculptural assemblages during the ten-minute performance. “It’s a topic that is rarely spoken about,” says Jones, “and I guess the language around the clitoris is rarely allowed so I wanted to create an experience that makes that open and also gives the participants a physical experience of that. Making something is a tactile way of taking the idea we are working with into someone’s own body. By making something you also create a sense of ownership over that and with that comes care and responsibility. So it’s going to be fun!”
courtesy David Rosetzky and Sutton Gallery Melbourne
David Rosetzky, Gaps, ACMI
Watching David Rosetzky’s new video work, Gaps, is not a passive occupation. One spends the whole time questioning: how much is this ‘performance’ and how much is it ‘real’? On a wall-sized screen, four dancers/performers and their words and gestures permutate and loop within two sparse rehearsal spaces; one white and daylit, the other lined by dark curtains. The viewer is drawn in close, ‘people-watching’ at intimate range, yet distanced by the seductive formality of every element in the frame.
Gaps is ‘people’ writ large: the camera, shooting in high definition, manufactures closeness, even in the wide shots, revealing the creases of lips, the knit of a t-shirt, strands of hair, fingernails. Performers share personal thoughts related to identity: about how they think the world sees them; or how they avoid conflict; or on living through a revolution. Over 35 minutes, then looping seamlessly back to the start, the same texts—based on interviews with the performers—are spoken by different bodies, disabling any hope of pinpointing who first said what.
Discussing Gaps, David Rosetzky says that the process of separating the text from its origin functions in a number of ways: “It allows it to be used in quite an experimental way rather than being tied to any particular truth…The transposition of a text from one subject to another, or being shared amongst a group of performers, is used in part to provoke questioning and potentially destabilise assumptions that the audience may have about any particular set of characteristics of the on-screen subjects.” Also destabilised is the logical opposition of spontaneous vs artificial, highlighting the blurs between how we speak and how we ‘perform’ ourselves.
Stephanie Lake’s choreography for Gaps gives physical form to what hangs in the air between the four performers. Fingers tremble or limbs fold, like unspoken sentences or manifestations of inner conflict. Rosetzky describes Lake’s approach as “beautiful, precise and intuitive…able to bring a range of different emotive tonalities, speeds and textures.” Rosetzky chose David Franzke as sound designer/composer for Gaps, for his “sense of connection with the performers…emphasising the various tonal shifts within the work.”
David Rosetzky, Gaps, ACMI
courtesy David Rosetzky and Sutton Gallery Melbourne
David Rosetzky, Gaps, ACMI
Gaps is technically accomplished—both slickly produced and intensely human; distancing yet intimate; cool but seductive. Its formal precision is unsettling, the performers smoothly ‘screened off’ from the viewer. And yet they are so near: presences that almost breathe, but without the work ever approaching the uncanny or immersive. Video lends itself to these qualities, says Rosetzky, in ways that live dance performance may not: “I think the moving image as a medium provides exciting opportunities to position the perspective of the viewer in quite dynamic ways. One can create a great sense of intimacy and connection to the performance through the use of different camera shots and movement. The shift between proximity and distance is something that I find very interesting to work with. The ability to create different speeds, rhythms and intensities is also something that appeals to me about working with the moving image.”
David Rosetzky, Gaps, ACMI
courtesy David Rosetzky and Sutton Gallery Melbourne
David Rosetzky, Gaps, ACMI
Removing the possibility of matching words to specific bodies also allows the questioning of “authentic subjectivity;” the opportunity to present “the idea of the self and identity as shifting and relative” and the creation of “a more fractured and unstable subject that is perhaps more difficult to identify.” says Rosetzky (ACMI program notes). In an interview he elaborates: “In Gaps I was interested in exploring identity as something that could be played out and explored by the cast in relation to each other and the camera. Rather than establishing characters as such, I wanted to present a range of subject positions that were never completely formed or held on to, but rather, operating more like possibilities—in flux and shifting between the different performers.”
The careful casting of two dancers (Lee Serle and Jessie Oshodi) alongside two actors (Rani Pramesti and Dimitri Baveas), has allowed Rosetzky to further shift and juxtapose personae and to explore sameness and difference in their representations on the screen, as they perform both alone and together. He says, “The work required that the actors had a facility for movement and similarly the dancers had to have experience in working with text. Other than this, I was keen for them to be clearly distinct from one another—both in terms of their appearance and also their particular qualities of performance…I am very interested in our desire to connect with one another and the way we attempt to negotiate the space between our selves and others.”
Hobart-based artist Matt Warren is a man of many guises. His website reveals 14 different “band names” (past and present) for his various musical projects and collaborations which range in style from shoegaze rock, doom metal, beats and dub to improv and field recording. His most recent album, III – real and imagined scenarios, is released under the pseudonym for his solo drone project, mumble(speak).
III – real and imagined scenarios offers 11 haunting meditations that are rich and multi-layered while maintaining a sense of ever expanding space; the depthless chasm of the unconscious perhaps. There is a timelessness to these pieces with little sense of urgent progression, yet they never succumb to stasis. The palette of sounds across the album melds recognisable midi and acoustic instruments with field recording and otherworldly sounds from unidentifiable sources. This is the first time Warren has used instrumental and sample contributions from other artists—Laura Altman, Carolyn Gannell, Felix Ratcliff, Mark Spybey and Sara Pensalfini—which he has interwoven subtly and effectively, particularly on the track “Loud as Ghosts.” “Entropic Flush” and “Departure” feature arpeggiated guitar which lends the album a folktronic flavour. Spoken text occasionally appears, sometimes as texture, sometimes as fragments of narrative and is generally well pitched and evocative with the exception of “silence” uttered at the end of “Entropic Flush,” which feels overstated. But as a whole, real and imagined scenarios presents a wonderfully dark and complex sonic world, offering equal parts pleasure and perturbation.
Gothic landscapes
The sonic other/underworld described by III – real and imagined scenarios could be seen to be indicative of Tasmania’s particular brand of gothic. I asked Warren (via email) to what extent he feels his work is influenced by the place where he resides.
“The gothic sense to Tasmania is not something I always notice; I mean living here you may just take much of it for granted and it’s probably harder to be objective about it than it would be for a ‘mainlander.’ But there would have to be something unconscious [here]. There is a dark beauty definitely, some pretty harsh landscapes, some bleak history. Much of my work deals with transcendental states, creating aural and visual environments that sit liminally between faith and rationality. The hauntological element is quite personal in a way, insomuch as it deals with my own history, but it’s a shared history, cultural mainly and likely generational. I utilise those elements, sound, music, images and so on in an abstracted way that allows others to get an empathetic sense of it without it being blatant [or] overtly personal. It becomes a kind of dreamscape. Perhaps Tasmania contributes to that.”
The Lull, light and sound installation detail (2010)
photo Matt Warren
The Lull, light and sound installation detail (2010)
Dream mediums
Warren began his artistic life as a painter and moved into sound and music. He describes his interest in sound as a medium: “I think I enjoy how it abstractly hits you, emotionally, cerebrally; how it can alter or enhance your mood and how it exists in the world—how it’s great in a gallery or a performance space, but does not need that framework to reach someone. I’m [passionate about] music in particular and sound in general.”
Warren also works frequently with video (most recently on the installation The Snowman with Sally Rees—see Partnering Art) and I asked him how he sees sound and moving image relating in his practice. “I think the projects define their own mediums. The relation between video and sound is often quite cinematic, insomuch as, regardless of how abstract the video is, the sound should have some kind of logic [in relation] to the image. In my formative years of art making, I often felt the sound kind of ‘finished off’ the video, but I don’t feel that way as much today and just as often I consider video will work just as well silent. Interestingly, I’ve been thinking that I would like to create sound works that could be accompanied by still images, photographs in a space or in a book. But often sound can be so immersive that it can create visual imaginings in the listener. Performance is another element insomuch as the nature of a physical being in the room brings with it a whole other presence and interactivity with the sound.”
Gathering dust and silence
In the last few years Matt Warren has also turned his ear and eye to curation. His motivation he admits is “as simple as wanting to see or experience something I haven’t yet seen.” In 2012 he undertook an emerging curatorial mentorship at Contemporary Art Tasmania (formerly CAST) resulting in the exhibition In A Silent Way that involved eight sound artists with all the sound works playing in the gallery simultaneously. Warren says he was thinking “about the issues of group media shows, how works can co-exist and still have their own space. I was also thinking about how noisy the world is and, as a kind of antidote to that, invited artists to make or contribute works designed to be played quietly, co-existing, quietly merging with each other and with the sound of the outside world.”
Last year Warren curated Ghost Hunters at the Plimsoll Galleries which at the time had been defunded and was not being used. He says, “I thought about [the] artists as kind of paranormal investigators, basically using sound and video of the empty, silent space to create works, trying to reveal something about the space, the residue of all that had come before.” The curatorial premise built on a methodology that Warren employed in his own work for his PhD that involved recording empty buildings, the duration dependent on the age of the building, then boosting the recordings by 200% to hear the sonic residue of the past.
Isolation and objectivity
While Warren has undertaken a number of travel fellowships over the years, including an Anne & Gordon Samstag Fellowship to do a Masters degree in Vancouver in 1999, he has never felt the need to leave Tasmania permanently to develop his practice. “I feel the local sound and contemporary art scenes are quite lively and have a sense of rigour. They are often nicely intermingled and probably due to the size [of the scene] are quite supportive of each other. And as far as I can tell, it’s always been that way. Obviously Tasmania has had a greater national and international art/music focus of late, but there has been a small but vibrant scene here for a long time. In the scheme of things, perhaps staying here has affected my career trajectory. Of course lots of show offers or exhibitions would always be nice, however I’m happy to follow my own path. I once wanted to move to a bigger city to live and work, but [now] I feel that cons would probably outweigh the pros. I don’t feel isolated here and there’s a nice degree of objectivity about the rest of the art/sound world that can come with just being a little removed from it.”
With an idiosyncratic take on puppetry melded with animation and shadow play, Perth-based Tim Watts has enjoyed considerable success in Australia and beyond with The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer (2009) and It’s Dark Outside (2012 – see RT109 and RT113). Now he’s joined forces with fellow artists and long-term collaborators to create The Last Great Hunt, a group aiming at mutual creative support and touring. I spoke by phone with Watts when he took a break from sharing in the shaping of a new work, Falling Through Clouds, focused on the power of the imagination and the plight of severely diminished wildlife species.
After the relatively small scale of Alvin Sputnik and It’s Dark Outside is The Last Great Hunt a chance for you to work on a larger scale and with more collaborators?
The Last Great Hunt involves a collection of seven individuals whom I’ve worked with before, some of them many times. It’s really just a formalisation of an ensemble that was already kind of there and we thought, let’s join forces and really help each other to take all of our practices to the next step, as opposed to seeking companies to auspice us or arrange our tours for us. Falling Through Clouds is a bigger scale show, which is exciting. We work within our means often and this show has allowed us to work with slightly bigger means.
You mean in terms of the number of people on stage or the number of puppets or the extent of the animation?
I really try retain the sense of how creatively you have to problem-solve when you have only one person. We had to keep that in mind making It’s Dark Outside: although we had three pairs of hands we wanted to make a show that felt like five or 10 people are performing, the sense that there are more things happening than just three people [could possibly handle] on stage.
Tim Watts, It’s Dark Outside, Perth Theatre Company
photo Richard Jefferson
Tim Watts, It’s Dark Outside, Perth Theatre Company
What about the off-stage working of your projections and the shadow play in It’s Dark Outside?
With all of my shows the tech is operated by the performers and they do all of the shadow work and everything else. I do all the animation. We don’t have any stage managers or mechs and we bring all our lighting with us—we’ve designed our own system that’s both very tourable and heavily integrated into the show while we’re devising. At the moment we’re devising in the theatre where we’ll be performing in in five weeks, which is a privilege. We’re rehearsing in a complete blackout. Usually all the best stuff happens when we switch off the fluoros and use our own lights to create the scenes.
This portability and control must give the performers a good feeling of integrated possession of the work?
Yes, all the elements become equally important and integrated into the show. Sometimes you don’t realise how simple the puppetry or the acting needs to be in the actual scene when you have very precise lighting or the music is creating a particular mood. Then you only need to contribute a fraction in order to create a really simple yet sophisticated image or communicate a particular narrative. You can use lighting or animation in an inventive way to make a much more complete image. Even though we’re all performers at heart, we start considering all the other elements for communicating a particular story point or moment.
Do you begin with story or an image?
It’s really a mix. There’s not really one way that we devise. In terms of the ones where I’m leading the devising process we have a lot of showings. At the end of each week we invite an audience of usually not more than five to seven people to show some scenes. Even if we’re having lots of ideas we’re forced to make bite-sized chunks. Usually if you try to focus too much on story at that stage you don’t get anywhere in terms of making a scene because it becomes very difficult logistically to tell everything that you want when you have a short amount of time.
We film just about everything when we devise because we don’t really have a director sitting on the outside. All the performers are also the directors and creators. Every so often someone will sit out on scenes but we tend to film everything so we can look back over it at night and share it with the other collaborators, like the musicians.
The puppetry traditions you’re working with are fairly eclectic but nicely integrated. What’s your background in puppetry?
I was devising theatre shows and I started dabbling in puppetry because I’d seen it in other shows. We experimented and I started really enjoying it. I organised a puppetry workshop with Spare Parts Puppet Theatre in Fremantle—a really fantastic course for about a month, just learning the basics really. I did a couple of workshops around the world but none was as really influential as those few weeks with Spare Parts. The rest of it has really been basically learning on the job: you make a puppet and play with it in front of a mirror, in front of a camera and see how [it works out]. Almost every show we’ve done has had a different type of puppetry. There hasn’t been any formal training as such, just experimenting and whatever works works.
In Alvin, for example, you’ve focused very much on the hand.
That’s right. No training as such involved in that: just a matter of picking up a glove and a ball and mucking around in front of a mirror. That puppet actually came out of that same Spare Parts puppet workshop. We didn’t learn about a specific form of puppetry and that kind of epitomises my opinion of puppetry—I really love it but I’m not a purist. There are rules that we adhere to at times but I guess we’re less precious about them.
In It’s Dark Outside I liked the surprising changes in scale. Sometimes things are very large, other times quite small and, of course, the coup was having a human puppet at the centre. There seems to be something going on thematically in your works about the imagination, delusion and creativity if realised in very different ways in each. Puppetry lends itself to those kinds of themes, doesn’t it?
I guess ultimately it comes down to what I find interesting, what I feel. It’s all about the audience’s imaginative engagement and playing and manipulating and experimenting with it, whatever the form, through the imagination. Puppetry and animation are really fantastic at it. The audience has to actively pretend something dead is alive. The old man puppet in It’s Dark Outside, for instance, is nice but I don’t think it’s quite as successful as Alvin or the Dog in It’s Dark Outside. It’s much simpler to pretend that a little old man puppet is a little old man as opposed to a styrofoam ball on top of a hand. To some degree, the more work the audience has to do in terms of pretending that something is something else, the more potential it has of really sucking them into another world and feeling a bit more magical as an experience. I guess I’m continually fascinated by the human imagination and [our capacity for] delusion and how that affects our perception of the world. That keeps on cropping up in these different works.
Tim Watts, Adriane Daff, Chris Isaacs, Falling Through Clouds (development), The Great Last Hunt
photo Jamie Breen
Tim Watts, Adriane Daff, Chris Isaacs, Falling Through Clouds (development), The Great Last Hunt
On the one hand there’s delusion and on the other there’s creativity. Is it about reaching a kind of balance? In Falling Through Clouds you have a scientist who’s in love with flight but who can’t fly like a bird can.
Yes. I think there has to be an access point for an audience too. Stories that get a bit too weird or are all in someone’s mind are harder to engage with. There has to be a balance so an audience has a way in. We’re continually finding the balance with how much we don’t have to tell an audience, how open we can leave it without it becoming unsatisfying or too esoteric.
You’re not going for spectacle?
Well, I love a bit of spectacle but I want it to be rooted in some sort of universal truth or connection for an audience so that moment of spectacle is resonating from something more personal for them—so the spectacle is not purely surface but rather a grand expression of something that resonates.
Why the focus on a crane in particular in Falling Through Clouds? Looking at your work-in-progress video I wondered if there was an origami influence.
Actually, the initial inspiration for the show was flying and how much of an impossible dream it is. Then we heard a story about a conservation program to save whooping cranes on the brink of extinction. There were about 10 left in the world and there was a radical program to restore their numbers. It involved a very strange thing where they made the females lay loads and loads of eggs and then removed them from their chicks because they only take care of one at a time and it wasn’t going to be fast enough. This resulted in a very bizarre childhood for these new cranes: the scientists had to wear really spooky outfits with bird crane puppets on the end of their arms to show these new chicks how to eat, drink, mate and eventually fly. There were a lot of very interesting images in there about false motherhood, bizarre childhood and human intervention. That story has its own interesting trajectory which we’ve sort of taken inspiration from to tell one of our own. Our story is actually now pitched in a bit of a soft sci-fi area, in the future where there are no birds left at all and we’re bringing back a species.
Where did this original conservation program take place?
I believe it’s been running for 50 or 60 years. It’s in the US [and is run by IFC—the International Crane Foundation www.savingcranes.org. ICF has a 225-acre world headquarters near Baraboo, Wisconsin, “with a captive flock of approximately 100 cranes, including the only complete collection of all 15 species assembled.” Eds].
Adriane Daff, Tim Watts, Chris Isaacs, Falling Through Clouds (development), The Great Last Hunt
photo Jamie Breen
Adriane Daff, Tim Watts, Chris Isaacs, Falling Through Clouds (development), The Great Last Hunt
So will we see scientists teaching cranes to eat and drink?
Funny you should ask because these are the scenes we’ve been working on today. It’s hard to say what exactly will end up in the show. The thing that arrested us most about the story of these cranes in the US was that $100,000 put into the life of each bird and at the end of it all, when they let them out into the wild, they teach them to fly, but it’s currently unsustainable because the mother birds just get up and walk away [from the eggs]. It’s not a population that’s sustainable outside the laboratory—they’ve been unable to teach them how to be parents. As soon as they’re born they’re popped inside a cage with a stuffed swan with the head of a dead crane. And that’s their mother. And scientists in all-white outfits with their faces hidden and puppets on the end of their arms creating a bizarre childhood and a very peculiar relationship to their parents, which is ultimately false. Those are the elements of the story we find particularly interesting.
What’s the dynamic with the scientist then and her dream of flying?
At the core of it all there’s Mary the scientist and her imagination is very important to her. Every night she dreams of flying. Her goal is to restore birds to the world but beyond that there’s a subconscious goal to want to fly.
I suppose she’d like to take off with them.
Exactly. What we found when we were exploring flying as a life ambition was that it often represents something else like escape or freedom or that you’re in some sort of prison. We feel that for Mary it’s almost a bit of a mental prison. We’ve discovered an archetype of personality that comes from a child not having a very good relationship with the parents as in situations of controlled crying. The child learns that they’re not going to get their needs met by the primary caregiver so to some degree they shut themselves off from the world and become very solitary. As an adult this manifests as a hermit type character or someone who doesn’t engage very well with the world. Maybe they’re quite functional as an individual but they’re bad at sustaining relationships.I guess we’re using that archetype as a possible basis for Mary. Her dreams of flying are the one place she has to let down her walls and to feel free and soar above it all.
Who are you working with this time as principal collaborators?
Arielle Gray and Chris Isaacs whom I worked with on both Alvin and It’s Dark Outside and Adriane Daff, who I’ve worked with many times before. They’re co-devisors, performers, co-directors—all of it. It’s a very equal rehearsal process. I’m the initiating artist and the one who has to lead things a little bit from time to time but in terms of the show itself, it’s about all four of us coming together to make something. And then besides that we also have Ash Gibson Greig, the composer who’s making us a beautiful score.
Is Falling Through Clouds designed to suit young and adult audiences simultaneously as in your previous work?
We’re unsure at the moment. Right now we’re saying 15+. I think it might be a bit more adult than Alvin and probably similar to It’s Dark Outside with some adult themes and some dark subject matter.
PICA & The Last Great Hunt, Falling Through Clouds, PICA, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 22 Sept–11 Oct
Julie Vulcan talks about recent and upcoming live art performances at Performatoria, Canada, Venice International Performance Week and Punctum’s Seedpod Amplified project, as well as her artistic trajectory from visual to performing artist.
The launch of the Australia Council for the Arts’ Five-Year Strategic Plan in the northern foyer of the Sydney Opera House on a damp, grey 18 August was a baleful affair, overly catered and awash with anxious speculation about the shape and extent of the future of arts funding.
Little was revealed except in the broadest of terms, reducing strategic planning goals to four and grant funding to a mere five categories—a signal, it was quickly feared, for red tape cutting, big savings and the elimination of subtle responses to a complex art ecosystem. “For the Arts” had been pumped up on the Council’s logo and the Strategic Plan was headlined “A Culturally Ambitious Nation” (in the tradition of Creative Nation and the short-lived Creative Australia, if this time more explicitly aspirational).
A later, much happier gathering—one of a number held around the country for artists, groups and organisations—at the Australia Council offices in Sydney on 9 September, finally revealed a radically simplified, less prescriptive grant funding structure than in the past, some of it a work-in-progress open to comment. It included many significant innovations and a great deal of reassurance and hope for artists.
At the launch, Attorney General and Arts Minister George Brandis stressed the Coalition Government’s commitment to the Australia Council. In the context of aggressive cuts to ABC, SBS and Screen Australia budgets this was reassuring if hardly comforting in terms of the country’s overall cultural ecology.
Historically, Australia Council restructurings have been perceived as regressive: steadily diminishing artists’ contribution to policy-making, whittling away at peer assessment, responding poorly to new developments in the arts and reducing the size of grants at the same time as unwise multi-million dollar Arts Minister initiatives took centre-stage. Yet, the good the Australia Council was simultaneously doing could never be underestimated. The prospect, however, of another re-structure has been daunting. Where would it sit in terms of the Coalition Government’s attitude to the National Cultural Policy championed by Labor Arts Minister Simon Crean and the boldly increased funding of the Australia Council by Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s government as part of Creative Australia?
The 9 September meeting at the Australia Council offices was lucidly hosted by CEO Tony Grybowski and the details of the new funding model confidently explained by Executive Director of Arts Funding Frank Panucci. The mood of the meeting appeared uniformly positive, indeed congratulatory (save for one well-known gallery director doggedly disgruntled with democratic peer assessment). Australia Council staff I spoke with felt proud of and fully engaged with the new plan.
Strategic Goals
The first goal of the strategy, Art without Borders—“enabling artists to discover and develop across borders”—is about international development with Sophie Travers (Australia Council-IETM Project Officer) continuing to foster European-Australian art partnerships. The mention of further appointments to be made with regard to North and South Asia and North America excited interest. The overall focus of Art without Borders is on expansion and reciprocity with a role for Foreign Affairs and some $11m invested in touring.
The second goal is Great Artists: “Australia is known for its great art and artists,” with emphases on capacity, adventure (“foster[ing] experimentation and risk-taking in all art forms”), excellence and diversity. In fact, “experimentation and risk-taking” were frequently invoked at both gatherings—alongside excellence, with one speaker from the audience reminding us that experimentation and excellence are not always complementary when the former outstrips the latter’s status quo expectations. However the Australia Council does have a good record of supporting risk-taking through its modestly funded Inter-Arts Office (now Emerging and Experimental) and some of the former artform Boards.
The third goal, Enrich Daily Life for All, is about “abundance” (ample art for wide access), “infusion” (art as part of daily life) and inclusion (the public makes art). This goal includes the aim of reaching new generations with an expanded Artists in Residence program with artist and student collaborations, and “leverage”—“increas[ing] public and private investment in the arts.” Realising such a large-scale vision will not come cheap
Goal Four is “Australians cherish Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and culture.” It comprises “Enrichment: embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and cultures into Australian arts; Brilliance: boost investment in artistic excellence; Belonging: increase Australians’ experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait art; Journey: support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people to practise and experience their culture.” While “embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and cultures into Australian arts” is unfortunately worded, “increase Australians’ experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait art” is a significant aim.
Peer Assessment
The ongoing importance of Peer Assessment was emphasised, as was its centrality in the Australia Council Act of 2013. Grybowksi reported that there are now 500 peers registered to assess applications. He said that the number and diversity of peers is a vast improvement on the previous 80-90. He made it clear that assessments by panels of peers would be artform specific, despite a growing fear that it would not be, not least in the context of the contested assessment procedures of some State Governments.
Later in the meeting Panucci explained that artists, groups or organisations would select “which peer panel you want to assess your application.” In each case, a panel of eight peers, without a chair person and in the presence of non-voting Australia Council staff members, will make the assessments. The peer panels available are: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts, Community Arts and Cultural Development, Dance, Emerging and Experimental Arts, Literature, Multi-art form, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts.” If artists are uncertain about their category they can consult with staff or allow staff to make the decision. It was also mentioned that the panels (selected by a committee led by Robyn Archer, Deputy Chair of Council) would have degrees of continuity, if unspecified. This reflects a key concern to artists, that one-off assessment panels potentially lack historical knowledge and policy understanding.
A speaker from the floor raised the matter of expert assessment of ‘disability arts’ applications. Grybowski said that appropriate advice would be provided and that— in moderated trials of the assessment panel model—artists with disabilities were not disadvantaged.
The Australia Council Budget for Grants
The budget allocation (aside from that for other of the Council’s programs), said Grybowski, would be for five grant categories designed to increase flexibility of funding new kinds of work while sustaining traditional practices. Overall there would be $9m more in the arts budget than two years ago despite overall cuts of $28 million over the next four years. The new grants model would provide more continuity (for example development and production can be applied for at the same time and over a number of years as desired). Organisations currently in receipt of triennial funding would be funded until the end of 2016 (allowing many to have their current three-year term extended to four), applying in 2015 for further six-year funding.
Grant Programs
Frank Panucci then detailed the implementation of the new grants scheme: in summary
• Development Grants for Individuals and Groups | $5,000 to $25,000
• Arts Projects for Individuals and Groups | $10,000 to $50,000
• Arts Projects for Organisations | $10,000 to $150,000
• Six-Year Funding for Organisations
• Fellowships $100,000
Development Grants
Development Grants can be applied for by individuals or groups at any of four times across the year (March, June, September, December) for $5,000-$25,000, for projects ranging from six weeks to (staggered over) two years. The criteria for these grants include “potential, viability and career impact” with regard to “professional skills development, showcase opportunities, forum/workshop attendance, residencies, mentorships, arts market attendance and exploration.” Grant results will be known approximately 12 weeks after the application closing date. Development Grants are a more flexible form of Artstart Grants, both financially and timewise.
Arts Projects Grants
Arts Projects Grants for Individuals and Groups for amounts $10,000-$50,000 have the same timetable. Grants are for “the creation of new work, creative development, touring, festivals, productions, exhibitions, publishing, recording and market development activity.” Projects can be funded for up to three years.
Arts Projects for Organisations offers grants of $10,000-$150,000, again four times a year, for “creation of new work, creative development, touring, festivals, productions, exhibitions, publishing, recording and market development activity.”
Concerning Arts Projects grants assessment, Frank Panucci said that applicants would be required to prioritise one goal (eg Creation, Audience, Access, Regional, International etc) against which their application would be judged. Presumably the aim here is to significantly reduce the need for applicants to attempt to cover all bases. Panucci said, “You tell us what you want to do…the artist is central.” Doubtless for many projects, interconnected goals are fundamental, so two or possibly three related goals might make more sense. Panucci said Council is open to discussion about this.
Six-Year Funding for Organisations
Organisations can apply for Six-Year Funding by submitting a brief expression of interest by 1 March, 2015 and, if short-listed, make an application with a Strategic Plan (instead of the former overly labour-intensive Business Plan) by 3 September. Results will be announced in November. Applicants can also apply for Arts Projects Grants, up to six across their six-year grant period. Unsuccessful applicants for six-year funding can apply for Arts Projects for Organisations grants.
The Council’s website says, “We are currently developing the assessment criteria for six-year funding. These will be published before the grant round opens in January.” As listed on the Council’s website they will at least include artistic merit, organisational capacity and “contribution to strategic goals of the Australia Council.” Tony Grybowski made particular mention of the importance of “realistic programs.”
The big picture
Grybowski spoke with enthusiasm about how the new six-year funding model would allow for a much stronger overview of the Australian arts ecosystem. Mention of “an enhanced research program” and the production of an annual State of the Arts Report also boosted confidence that Council might tell us more than can be found in annual reports and audience numbers surveys. A frank State of the Art Report citing media and specialist commentary as well as informatively extolling the successes of Australian artists would be very welcome. Also mentioned were several functioning artform Strategy Panels, with more to come, each led by chairperson “eminences,” who will provide overview and guidance.
Challenges
Tony Grybowksi emphasised that the new 5-Year Strategic Plan had evolved from the enormous amount of work and consultation in recent years as cultural policy was established and the Council’s role was thoroughly interrogated. Council responded to critiques that its grant application processes were complicated, prescriptive and insufficiently responsive to new forms and practices and a greater range of artists—those who felt left out of the Council’s notion of what constitutes art.
One speaker from the floor suggested that given this new openness there would likely be a flood of grant applications and greater overall competitiveness in an already challenging climate. Grybowski said that the current average grant application success rate is 20%, adding “our model is driven by excellence not by demand…over which Council has no control.”
Where will the increased demand come from? Doubtless from the annual flow of graduating student artists from the tertiary education sector and the burgeoning commercial theatre and media schools and, more broadly, from ‘creative industries’ artists at the intersection of art and commerce who, I recall, were significant complainants about the Council funding structure in online surveys.
The Five-Year Strategic Plan for a Culturally Ambitious Nation is a grand work-in-progress with a great clarity of purpose: artists will be able to apply for the funding they need, when they need it and in what stages and without having to fit into standard artform categories. Substantial organisations will have ‘certainty’ with six-year funding (as a recipient of triennial funding RealTime’s staff and board know only too well the horror of being barely half-way into the triennium and suddenly having to invent the next).
Above all, the Australia Council promises to “embrace its role as the national advocate for the arts.” Under the leadership of Chair Rupert Myer, Deputy Chair Robyn Archer and CEO Tony Grybowski that undertaking seems glowingly evident: the confidence of the declaration quite unlike anything heard from the Australia Council for many a year.
As a teenager I decided to “be a film director like Jane Campion,” so I went to study film at VCA. Truthfully, I had an inkling, even at that age, that it wasn't going to be a straightforward career path, but does anyone truly understand what they're getting into when they sign up for a creative pursuit? So here I am, years later. I'm a screenwriter and a film director, but I'm also a script editor and screenwriting teacher, playwright, social media consultant, festival programmer/director [Stranger with My Face Horror Film Festival] and a freelance arts writer currently based in Hobart. I have a personal interest in genre and the stories I want to bring to the screen tend towards horror, thriller, black comedy. But I spend as much time writing about or supporting other people's artistic endeavours as I do developing my own and maybe that's a good thing. For the moment. I'm still nothing at all like Jane Campion, but then that would probably be embarrassing for both us.
http://www.brionykidd.com
Exposé
I've dabbled in various forms of arts writing over the years, but I've spent the most time cranking out film and theatre reviews. This has sometimes been awkward. One example: a six-month stint as the film reviewer for The Jakarta Post. It was fine actually; I mean, the newspaper is written in English and all and they let me write what I wanted. But it occurred to me after a while that I was giving almost everything two stars. I realised, in other words, that most big budget, wide release films were crap. Which is fair enough, but a film review column should be entertaining, not depressing. The solution? Well, in that case I moved on and left if for the next person to figure out (which was just as well, because I was on the verge of adding an extra star to everything just to make myself seem like less of a bitch).
Another example: for a few years I was reviewing just about everything happening in Hobart theatre, amateur and professional alike. Non-professional theatre is probably as deserving of being written about as anything else, but there's a slightly different way you've got to approach it. In short, I had to work out my own ‘rules’ as a reviewer, and I'm not going to tell you what they are (to be honest, I didn't always stick to them either). My point is, that's the part of critical writing that doesn't get talked about much. There's “Yes, I like that” or “No, I didn't like it,” but there are a million other thoughts whirling around your head, and it's learning which ones are important and which ones aren't that's really the trick. I tell you what, it's a lot easier when you have an editor (thanks, RealTime). Many quite reputable outfits these days don't bother with such luxuries, and we're all intellectually poorer (and more confused) for it.
I’ve worked for RealTime for 15 years, my role morphing with the needs of the organisation and the changing media landscape. I started out as the advertising sales girl and I am now Associate Editor, Online Producer and for the duration have been the magazine layout artist.
Alongside this my art practice has also shifted—originally starting as an actor (not a very good one), to making my own contemporary performance, to sound designer for dance and performance which led me to find my true calling as a sound artist. It’s hard to imagine my artistic journey without RealTime or my RealTime trajectory without my artistic explorations.
Most recently I’ve been curating things: Rapture/Rupture for MCA’s ArtBar and my ongoing gig series Pretty Gritty at 107 Projects; mounting a Fluxus inspired dance music performance with Jane McKernan, One thing follows another at Performance Space; as well as putting out the occasional album—The Common Koel (Flaming Pines) and blue | green (vinyl on Metal Bitch). I’ve also written so many non-fiction words that I have found myself ready to turn my hand to some creative writing, and my first sound-based speculative fiction is included in Sight Lines, the 2014 UTS Anthology. www.gailpriest.net
Exposé
Recently RealTime celebrated its 20th Birthday and for the party I gathered some statistics discovering that I’d written 184 articles (as of this online edition). Employing some rough calculations that adds up to 138,250 words. Many of these words did not come easily but they have all been incredibly rewarding.
I started to write about sound and experimental music in the early 2000s, just as I was beginning to explore making it. It was terrifying because I was by no means an expert but, in the RealTime phenomenological style, I acted as a curious observer, writing my way through and into this new cultural landscape. Looking back at old articles I’d like to suggest that this opened up a potentially opaque area of practice to some other curious folk—we all went on the field trip together. The result is, that with others’ writings as well (Jonathan Marshall, Greg Hooper, Caleb Kelly and Chris Reid to name a few) RealTime offers an impressive archive of this exciting period of experimental music in Australia and its development into the current phase in which the worlds of “new music” and “experimental music” are now intermingling.
Writing about sound makes me listen to it with utter dedication—it gives me permission to stop multitasking and meditate on the sound alone. And sometimes in this situation it almost feels as if there’s a connection in my brain that directly translates sound information into words. I find this exhilarating—like hallucinating. Alas I can never read my scrawled notes, lines written over the top of each other in the dark, but what I can remember of this experience makes it onto the page and hopefully gives an indication of the experience. I will admit that I am rarely deeply critical—the way I started writing meant I felt no right to rush to judgement—but that by my being true to the experience, the reader is invited to make their own assessment.
Under the tutelage of editors and amazing wordsmiths Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter I feel like my writing over the years has truly improved and that my process is far more under my control. Originally I only had one way to say something—whatever blurted out first—and I had no ability to rework it. But with their gentle but rigorous encouragement I’ve come to love the crafting of the perfect sentence, even if that means rewriting it 10 times. And I can even (sometimes) cope with the need to then cut that sentence if requested, because I trust that there will be the potential to write more good sentences in the future—as long as there’s a RealTime anyway.
David Brophy, Presence in the absence of presence (detail), from the series Euphoric Recall, 2013. Tarpaulin, brick. Exhibition view HATCHED, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2014. David Brophy studied at Creative Arts, Central Institute of Technolog
photo Alessandro Bianchetti
David Brophy, Presence in the absence of presence (detail), from the series Euphoric Recall, 2013. Tarpaulin, brick. Exhibition view HATCHED, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2014. David Brophy studied at Creative Arts, Central Institute of Technolog
It’s a fascinatingly trepidacious time for teachers and students of arts education and training. The resurrection of the culture wars, the ‘deregulation’ of university fees, consequent ‘increased competition’ and fear of the evolution of a two-tiered rich-and-poor university system sit side-by-side with exciting new degrees, programs, local and international partnerships and new buildings. It’s optimism against the odds as the tertiary sector makes its presence felt and integrates itself with the wider world.
UNSW’s College of Fine Arts has been retitled UNSW Art & Design. The Dean, Ross Harley tells us about new teachers, equipment, studios, labs and galleries that will occupy new buildings, playing an instrumental role in the making of Art & Design’s local and international partnerships and reputation.
In regional coverage, Scott Howie empathises with refugees, casting himself adrift on Wollundry Lagoon in the centre of Wagga Wagga; Urszula Dawkins talks with Bridget Crone, director of the impressive Cinemas Project staged across regional Victoria; and we highlight Selena de Carvalho’s The Evolutionary StraitJacket = Climate Change Karaoke, a featured work in the 2014 Junction Festival in Launceston.
Zoe Kirkwood, 1) Let Them Eat Cake (detail); 2) The Neo-Baroque Spectacle, installation view.
photos Che Chorley. Zoe Kirkwood, a graduate of the University of SA, is the winner of this year’s Dr Harold Schenberg Art Prize presented at HATCHED National Graduate Show, 2014, PICA, Perth.
Zoe Kirkwood, 1) Let Them Eat Cake (detail); 2) The Neo-Baroque Spectacle, installation view.
Conducting an informal survey of arts education and training for this edition of RealTime has been revealing. It’s striking how university arts faculties and schools are having to establish a public presence in an increasingly competitive market. They’ve been doing this modestly for a long time with open days and hosts of public performances, but the pressure is on as the Abbott Government ‘deregulates’ the tertiary education market.
The second noticeable development is integration, first within degrees—two majors are more frequent, for example directing and design—and across discrete disciplines—double degrees for example media arts and science, dance and law. Secondly, schools are increasingly aligning and partnering themselves with the cultural and creative industries. Jane Montgomery Griffiths (p12) tells us that Monash’s Centre for Theatre & Performance will sponsor Malthouse in a relationship which will benefit their students in attachments with the company. Monash is also holding workshops for the theatre industry featuring prominent overseas artists. Adelaide College of the Arts (p16) enjoys a strong relationship with the State Theatre Company of South Australia and the VCA with a multitude of organisations (p14).
The same kind of integration can be seen in the ‘re-birthing’ of UNSW’s College of Fine Arts as UNSW Art & Design (p6), with local and international partnerships, a significant number of students taking up double degrees, new buildings and facilities. Integration builds public presence.
New and re-visioned degrees are also proliferating, for example VCA’s timely Master of Dramaturgy and SymbioticA’s Master of Biological Art at the University of Western Australia (p22).
If seen as integral to the ‘industry,’ teaching staff play an important role in developing the profiles of tertiary education institutions, not only attracting students but negotiating various partnerships and funded research opportunities.
Unfortunately, for the most part university websites, the key providers of information, are still difficult to negotiate, let alone discover who the teachers are and precisely what courses they teach. Sometimes the information can be found if you’re dogged, but it’s often of varying quality and degree of detail and with little sense of a school’s collective vision—which is most frequently abstractly stated. Similarly, information about graduates varies greatly. Prospective students need to know the who and why of the world they about to enter.
Michael McIntyre, Everything / Becoming A Monster, 2013, Highly Commended, HATCHED Graduate Exhibition, PICA. Image courtesy and copyright the artist.
photo Peter Morgan. Michael McIntyre is a graduate Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) (Honours), National Art School, NSW
Michael McIntyre, Everything / Becoming A Monster, 2013, Highly Commended, HATCHED Graduate Exhibition, PICA. Image courtesy and copyright the artist.
Few teachers we communicated with complained about the straitened circumstances of their schools, save for the odd, anxious ‘off the record’ comment about struggling to maintain studio hours and tolerable class sizes and fears of more budget cuts. Surprisingly, given the huge cuts applied to Screen Australia by the Abbott government—what has it got against Australian film?—teachers in film schools were relatively upbeat, extolling to Tina Kaufman (p24) alternative screen career opportunities in the creative industries. While these will provide jobs, they’re not likely to be what many young filmmakers envision for themselves. But the film schools will certainly continue to teach the art of filmmaking with conviction.
Matthew Lorenzon, writing about music education, is concerned about the diminution of opportunities for young musicians to receive the specialist training they warrant, instead they’re expected to become cultural ambassadors for music in whatever roles required (p10). In these circumstances, just getting a job becomes an end in itself.
‘Employability’ is a term favoured by politicians and certain education providers. At its best it means students are prepared to immediately and effectively engage their skills in creative work, at worst it suggests accepting second best—in film because of an utterly unwarranted funding cut. Of course not every screen student or trainee actor will make the grade they seek, but diminished opportunities will undoubtedly limit the realisation of talent.
At the very moment that bridges are being built between the arts and science (and much else) the humanities are clearly, if in varying degrees institution to institution, being devalued in the tertiary education sector, with cuts to TAFE budgets and the whittling down of humanities departments. The blurring and evaporating of the line between the arts and sciences represents a critical moment for our culture, which needs to be regarded cohesively, as a totality in which invention will come from unforeseen collaborations and mergings.
The Dawkins’ reforms of the Labor Government in the late 80s absorbed visual arts, drama, dance and music schools into the academy, giving these forms added legitimacy (as well as hoping for financial savings) but made them subject to university dictates and budgeting with often sorry results. Ironically, however, being part of a university has allowed for the development of multi- and interdisciplinary degrees, pedagogy and research that reflects the state of the arts outside the university. But this great project will come to little if art is regarded as mere presence rather than integral to life.
“Fish are born expecting water, humans are born expecting culture.”
When Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist wrote this, he was doubtless thinking of ‘culture’ in the broadest sense, but it applies no less to art as culture: the films and theatre we share, the music we hum, the irrepressible desire to dance, the new live art we make together with which to understand the world.
As essentials to our lives and to our culture, arts education and training within the universities and TAFE need vigorous support against the pervasive neoliberalism that puts a price on everything, converts artists’ visions into business plans and fails to see art as signs of life. We need to defend art in the same way we fight to preserve the diversity of the Earth’s biosphere—because we are part of it and our emotional and physical well-being and survival depend on it.
As for student survival, even though the expected hike in HECS interest rates appears to have been dropped, the Abbott Government proceeds with its fanciful plan to deregulate university fees in order to lower them (and raise TAFE fees?) on the grounds that it will make the sector more competitive. The plan met with this retort from the Sydney Morning Herald’s economics writer Ross Gittins: “To take a relatively small number of government-owned and still highly regulated agencies with a monopoly over credential-granting, allow them to set their own fees and then imagine an adequately competitive ‘market’ would emerge isn’t economics, its magical thinking” (SMH, 4 Aug, 2014).
The wealth of vision, courses, programs and adaptive strategies detailed in the following pages offers more hope than trepidation. RT
Segue, 2014, installation view, Neil Brandhorst, a PhD student at UNSW: Art & Design
Sydney’s College of Fine Arts, a campus of the University of New South Wales, will take on a new name and new life on September 30 as UNSW Art & Design under the directorship of its Dean, the artist and writer Professor Ross Harley who has been shaping the rebirth of the campus over recent years. Not only will its new buildings be completed but there’ll also be a dedicated public space, its construction, Harley says, “facilitated by Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore.
Given the venerable age of the art school, Harley quips, “we’re the newest and the oldest art and design school in Australia.” He’s adamant, “We’re up there with the best and we’re thinking not just nationally but internationally—that’s where we think the next 10 or 20 years for the institution will take us. We want to be best in the world.”
International thinking
I ask what form this international thinking might take. “It’s about a trans-disciplinary approach to the big social, cultural, aesthetic and political problems of our day. Only artists and designers really have a sense of tackling that in the creative spirit we know art is all about. Art and design are at the core of the 21st century. They feed into so many other areas which need the benefit of an aesthetics approach.” Consequently international connections have been made with the likes of ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, and with Jeffrey Shaw, Dean of the School of Creative Media at Hong Kong City University. “We’re also working with the GLAM sector—galleries, libraries, archives and museums. We’ve appointed around 20 new academic staff in the last 12 months or so, attracting people we think are really world-class leaders.” Harley offers as an example Sarah Kenderdine, “who is partnering with many museums around the world from the Smithsonian to the V&A to major institutions in Hong Kong and China.
“She works in the area of digital cultural heritage. Sarah’s work is very high tech but it’s also embedded in the most ancient of cultures. For example she’s been working on a project with researchers, social scientists and archaeologists in the Dunhuang Caves in the north of China—the Mogao Grottoes, a series of over 200 caves which are of significant cultural heritage for Buddhism but also for China. The more the caves are visited, the more damage is done to incredible paintings and statuary. Sarah and a team of experts have scanned the caves in incredibly high resolution data that goes beyond the ability of the naked eye to see. Then she’s constructed augmented reality exhibitions where you can explore the caves away from the actual site. The demos of the work she’s been doing are mind-blowing.” Kenderdine, who has set up a laboratory on the campus— iGLAM, for Innovation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums—is also with Museums Victoria.
Local partnerings
Harley adds, “We’re also putting in place significant partnerships with major cultural organisations in Sydney—MCA, Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks, Artspace, Powerhouse and the State Library—formal ongoing relationships where staff from our respective organisations have the ability to work across institutions. We also have particular projects we’re working on, for example we’ll partner Carriageworks on their 24 Frames dance film project. The artists in that program will be able to work with our academics and students and with our facilities. Similarly with Artspace, we’re looking at a program where visiting artists and scholars will reside at the Artspace studios and they’ll have a visiting fellowship with us, teach in our courses and have access to our facilities. I think that it’s in all of our interests to work more collaboratively in the sector.”
The 4-year integrated degree
I ask if the re-naming and the new buildings come with changes to degrees and courses. “We’ve now pretty much totally overhauled all of our degrees. We have four areas where we offer degrees: Fine Art, Media Arts, Design and Curatorial/Art History/Art Theory. In all of those areas we now have a four-year integrated Honours degree where students get training in a research-intensive university but also have work-integrated learning or internships and work experience structured into their third and fourth years. As well in the studio degrees—Design, Fine Art and Media Arts—students share a common first year for half of their courses and then they all come together again in the fourth year.”
As part of a more expansive view of the education of the artist or designer, the school will offer the opportunity for double degrees. “For example, you could be studying Fine Art in which you do one stream or major in Painting and the other one might be in Animation or Visual Effects that comes from another degree. Or you could do Graphic Design and a Media Arts stream and so on. Allowing students to really choose what they want to do has been a big change. And students are voting with their feet.” Harley sees the majority of students undertaking a four-year integrated program, the benefit residing in “students having enough time to really get their practice honed, to work in the industry and to develop research skills.”
Ross Harley
photo Richard Glover
Ross Harley
Combination opportunities
Even more expansive and opening up opportunities for innovation is “the offer of more dual award or combined degrees, for example Media Arts and Computer Science & Engineering, or Design and Commerce. You can take the BFA and also do the standard BA and major in Politics or Languages or whatever. We were surprised when we looked at the numbers this year: half our commencing students are doing dual award degrees. That’s what they want to do.”
Postgrad: getting to the essence
As for postgraduate studies and research, Art & Design UNSW “offers a postgraduate coursework degree and a two-year postgraduate Masters Degree. If you’ve done an appropriate Honours degree then you get credits for the first year of the Masters and you would complete the degree in one year. Then we have HDR (Higher Degree Research) students who do PhDs and MFAs. [In the US] they’re saying the MFA is the terminal degree, you don’t need a PhD. I think we’ve gone the opposite way, saying actually it’s the PhD that’s required because we know that in this multi- trans- or inter-disciplinary world you need to have research training and qualifications. So we’re doing a lot in the PhD space, particularly in what we call Research-led Practice rather than Practice-based Research. It might seem semantic, and probably is in some regards, but we think your practice can be led by your research. A lot of our students are making work that gets exhibited in all the ways you might expect, or not when it’s more innovative. They also write a thesis that informs that project. These degrees allow candidates to perform their research in a traditional and a non-traditional way so the work that you produce is not just an example of your theory but embodies the very essence of the new knowledge that you’re producing.”
Labs, studios, galleries
When it comes to discussing facilities and resources, Harley’s excitement is palpable: “That’s really the best story of all. We’ve got lots of new studios, laboratories and workshops as well as galleries. UNSW Galleries comprise three new gallery spaces over two floors taking up about 1,000 square metres of museum-grade exhibition space. We intend them to provide a platform for engagement with our research and what characterises the work we do.
“We’ve got a number of new laboratories: the IGLAM Lab, the Creative Robotics Lab, directed by Mari Velonaki, and the 3D Visualisation Aesthetics Lab, directed by John McGee “working on the visualisation of the body from an artist’s perspective. An aesthetic approach to the understanding of the body can be helpful for both patient and medical and health professionals.”
Motion capture session in Black Box, Art & Design UNSW
photo Britta Campion
Motion capture session in Black Box, Art & Design UNSW
Minds and hands
Among the new facilities, are “sound recording studios and brand new state of the art analogue film processing studios—so we have darkrooms and a wet lab. Some people say, ‘Really? Do students need to learn how to do black and white photography and how to do photograms?’ And I say, ‘Yes, I think they do.’ A new course Debra Phillips has put up is called From Photogram to Instagram. Students get to think more deeply about what an image is and how it’s produced, how light works and its relationship to science and chemistry. When you’re in a wet lab it’s all chemistry.” For Harley this corresponds admirably to the UNSW motto Scientia Manu et Mente, “Knowledge through Mind and Hands.” “For us,” he says, “thinking is a form of doing or making and making is a form of thinking. So we’ve got a lot of new maker labs including a new facility with 3D Rapid prototyping machines and soldering bays for working with Arduino, Fidgets and Raspberry Pie devices where you can bring programming and electronics together into a physical 3D maker world. That’s another really big part of the present and the future”.
What’s in a name?
Finally, I ask Harley about the re-naming of the school, which has stirred a modicum of public debate. “’Design’ has never been in the name and while I think the old name was very appropriate in 1989-90 when the art school came into the university, I think things have changed and this is the time for us to say very clearly we’re not a college [in the American sense as sub-university]; we’re part of the university and art and design is what we do. And it’s all kinds of art—media art, experimental art, anti-art, performance art, video art, art history, art theory, art thinking—and all kinds of design: media design, graphic design, environmental design, whatever. Art and Design go together hand in glove. It’s also a combination that has real resonance out in the world.”
UNSW Art & Design indeed resonates with the world: locally and globally, maintaining traditional skills, which now include the likes of photo-processing, side by side and integrated with new ideas, forms and techniques. Ross Harley exudes utter confidence in his ambitions for a wonderfully regenerated school, the oldest and the newest.
UNSW Art & Design [formerly CoFA, College of Fine Arts], Paddington, NSW
The dust has now settled from the tectonic shifts at the ANU School of Music. For those who did not feel the earthquake from its epicentre in Canberra, the shock arrived on 2 May, 2012, when all positions in the department were declared vacant in an epically mismanaged ‘spill and fill.’ The then-Head of Music Adrian Walter disappeared on leave, before popping up on a Hong Kong news site as the newly-appointed Director of the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.
A sham of a consultation process ensued, during which the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) quarrelled idly with the new Pro-Vice-Chancellors, whose wages just happened to equal the projected savings from cuts to the School. The community didn’t come up with the money to stem the job losses and the local orchestra saw the whole shebang as a great opportunity. The only real and clear-headed organisation came from the students, who put on some of the finest protests and concerts that Llewellyn Hall had ever seen to defend an education that they believed to be first-rate. Enter Peter Tregear, a spirited academic and senior administrator (who I’m sure prefers the former title) with all the right credentials, first and foremost of which was his foreignness to the whole situation.
Tregear took the helm in November, 2012, once all the spilling and most of the filling was over. He has proceeded, despite the holes left by a valuable faculty corralled in more prosperous times, to shape the school into its own thing, with its own distinct merits. It is reaching out into the community through educational programs, bringing the community in through a fine micro-brewery setting up shop on the ground floor, expanding its early music area, even reaching up by squeezing into the sixth floor of the building. It has become, as is only appropriate for the music department of our national University, a centre for the study of Indigenous Australian musics.
But my place here is not to evaluate the changes to the School. I am, after all, still a PhD student there, Tregear is my principal supervisor and I intend that he continue to read my thesis drafts. Instead, I’m going to review some of Tregear’s ample public commentary on music education in general, in particular the Platform Paper “Enlightenment or Entitlement?: Rethinking Tertiary Music Education,” published in February by Currency House.
The limits of music advocacy
While Tregear’s definition of the “crisis” in music education is sound and his solution of an “ethical” music education worthwhile in its own right, music advocacy has a limited effect upon the structural problems raised by music departments within corporatised universities. Alongside Tregear’s survivalist rhetoric of the ethical responsibilities of music students to their communities, we need to consider the ethical imperative of music educators to provide an education in music.
The essential parts of the essay are really the first and last chapters. Here Tregear defines the “crisis” in music education and his own solution: a new ethics of personal responsibility. The crisis is twofold: firstly, under the “logic of late-capitalism,” university departments are placed in a state of artificial crisis that leads to perpetual competition for funds (consider the PVCs’ salaries and the music budget), a competition that music education can only lose given the expense of studio teaching. Secondly, internal competition distracts from the “real” problem: that of convincing the broader society of music education’s worth.
Musicians as good citizens
Tregear’s solution is to make students “good citizens” as well as good musicians. They will be exposed to a broader humanities education and coached in critical perspectives so that they can question their role within society and defend their musical values. This socially aware cohort will then go out into the world, trumpeting the value of music far and wide and, the idea goes, fostering a new culture of philanthropy. Bravo to Tregear for advocating cultural leadership, or the spirited and open defence of whatever one takes to be “good music.” Contemporary art music has taken the lead in this regard by finding new and innovative modes of presentation and engaging in brave, didactic programming. I am thinking in particular of Speak Percussion’s new music spectacles, the good vibes of MONA FOMA, Ensemble Offspring’s intimate concerts and the historical surveys of Kupka’s Piano.
Not only is the first part of Tregear’s vision (the fostering of a critical culture within music) worthwhile in its own right, it is achievable with the absolute minimum of fuss and may be said to already exist in some places. Students only need access and some impetus to enrol in existing courses in philosophy, social theory, politics, literature and cultural studies. Musician and academic Michael Hooper points out in his response to Tregear’s essay (published in Platform Paper 39) that his own institution, the University of New South Wales, offers a variety of double degrees with music, as did Adelaide University during my undergraduate degree. Students naturally carry their knowledge across disciplines, but a greater synchronicity between the philosophical and theoretical frameworks taught in other disciplines and those in musicology classes wouldn’t hurt either. But could Tregear’s model solve the crisis? Of this I am extremely doubtful because the feedback loop between the public and our corporatised universities is broken.
The broken loop: the public & the universities
If students are taught that they ought to serve their communities, it is evident that not all university executives share this conviction outside their barest obligations as “service providers.” This was succinctly demonstrated in the case of the ANU School of Music restructure, where there was no initial lack of public support for the School as it stood (short of raising a $60m trust to bankroll it). All that mattered to the university executive was providing education to as many customers as possible at the least possible expense. There is no shortage of music students; they are just an expensive lot. As this will never change, no amount of propaganda will increase support for music education within the institution until the fundamental ideology of the executive changes. Small battles are won and the fault at the middle of Tregear’s essay, where he discourses widely and optimistically on a range of issues central to the ANU situation, is its dialectical playing-down of his advocacy of one-to-one studio teaching. Against the initial wishes of an executive who once justified the cuts to me by saying “some of my friends learn instruments on YouTube,” ANU now offers more studio teaching than any other Australian university.
Philanthropy disengaged
As to philanthropy, it is evident that the corporatised university does not effectively engage it to the common good. Two examples: Canberra’s CityNews.com.au (11 June, 2011) reported the story of arts patron Barbara Blackman and her attempt to spend a “spare million dollars” on an arts-music studio at the ANU. After presenting a pilot sum of $10,000 “and the suggestion of a substantial donation to follow,” she received “a receipt, but [the University] never followed up on her requests for a meeting with the then-vice chancellor, while indicating that she could have no say in the use of any sum she gave.” Not surprisingly, Blackman “signed the biggest full stop you’ve ever seen.”
The second example concerns the more recent $50m gift from Graham Tuckwell, himself a state school alumnus, to fund scholarships intended for “those who were bright, engaged and ‘ready to work hard’, and who may not have had advantaged upbringings” (5 Feb, 2013, canberratimes.com.au). Tuckwell’s gift is to be applauded and emulated. How can one not brim with noble feeling at the intention to help “kids from different states, different cities, different country towns” go to university, taking into account “grades, natural ability, background and drive”? (5 Feb, 2013, news.com.au) The problem is in the implementation. Though the preamble to the award’s selection criteria recognises that “everyone is dealt a different hand in life,” background does not form part of the actual selection criteria. Though public schools are represented in some other states, the Victorian recipients come exclusively from the state’s wealthiest schools (30 July, 2014, tuckwell.anu.edu.au) and 16 of the 24 awards across Australia went to such schools. In his blog, Andrew Norton (22 July, 2014, andrewnorton.net.au) further argues that analysis of the socio-economic data of the successful schools suggests a massive over-representation of the top socio-economic quartile. Within a corporatised university, even philanthropy must be turned away from community service towards growing the prestige of the university’s brand.
Ethical obligations to students
Given the degraded lines of communication from the community to the university, perhaps we should return to the question of just what teachers’ ethical obligations to students are. Hooper agrees with Tregear that Schools of Music have an ethical duty to “not predetermine” students’ careers. By this he means that Schools of Music should provide a rounded education that will stand students in good stead in the broad range of work in which many will inevitably find themselves. Nobody would deny, of course, that this is second to the duty of providing students preparation for a career in music performance, seeing that is principally why they are attending university. Tregear and Hooper are right, students should determine their own career paths. But “not predetermining” a career path is a simple matter of allowing or requiring students to take subjects in other disciplines and should not detract from the business of core music education.
What sort of music education
Which brings us to the question of what sort of music education should be provided. On this issue I could not agree more with Michael Hooper, and indeed I made the same argument in the Arts Education article last year (RT116, p10). That is, that Australian Music Schools need to specialise and students should be encouraged to travel to receive the specialist music training they desire, be it in early music, contemporary music, orchestral playing, popular music and so on. But this requires a cultural awareness that is not often found in Australian school leavers.
The true value of Tregear’s enlightened cohort could be in fostering cultural literacy so that students are capable of determining which rigorous course of study they want to pursue. When they do, high quality and specialised Schools of Music should be there for them.
Peter Tregear, “Enlightenment or Entitlement?: Rethinking tertiary music education,” Platform Papers: Quarterly Essays on the Performing Arts 38, Currency House, 2014
Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Sappho…in 9 Fragments, Malthouse
photo Jeff Busby
Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Sappho…in 9 Fragments, Malthouse
Jane Montgomery Griffiths is a widely experienced, practising actor, a performer of her own work (Sappho…in 9 fragments) and director of plays who writes on acting and is currently editing a volume on space and time in Greek drama. She’s also Head of Section at Monash University’s Centre for Theatre and Performance (CTP), with ambitions to create an enduring bridge between the academy and the theatre world.
I see that the Centre for Theatre and Performance is relatively independent within the university structure.
Yes, we are our own autonomous centre now—no longer part of a school.
That’s almost pre-Dawkins. Presumably with quite a measure of independence?
We have a lot. Obviously we report to the faculty but it is nice to be able to steer the curriculum the way we feel it should be going in the current cultural climate. Since going autonomous, we’ve had a lot of changes over the last 18 months, given university restructuring, but I think we’ve come out the other side; it’s an exciting time for CTP now.
What makes it special, do you think?
We had an independent Bachelor of Performing Arts degree, which was very successful and we had a lot of people applying for it, but because of university restructuring that was disestablished last year. What we have instead is a very vibrant suite of units nestled under the university BA. We have a Theatre Major, which is theoretical with a lot of practical application. We’re also developing a very cutting-edge Performance Minor, which will be investigating—with a lot of industry focus and industry connection—ways of making theatre in the current cultural climate.
The most exciting initiative is that we’re just about to sign a partnership as the major sponsor of Malthouse Theatre. That’s going to make a big difference because it means that our Performance Minor students have access to internships at Malthouse [in] a cultural conversation between Malthouse as a theatre that likes to see itself as an engine for change and us as a department that wants to really explore what the parameters of performance are, not just in the Australian context but globally. This will come into effect from 2015 and it’s really going to bolster the potential for us to engage in the community in a way that perhaps doesn’t often happen in a university context.
And as Head of Department I’m a professional practitioner as well as doing my research and teaching; I’m still out there doing shows. We have a huge number of industry engagements. In our Theatre Major units we have pretty much the best of the best independent theatre-makers coming in to teach. We’re trying to look at both the theory of performance but also the industry practicalities in a way that’s intellectually and theoretically rigorous and also practically very engaged. That’s a big change because we didn’t have the opportunity to do this before.
And how much weight will the Performance Minor actually have in the BA? How much can a student commit to that stream?
Every unit is six points and a traditional major is 48 points and our Performance Minor is 24 points. Everybody will commence the Theatre Major and then those who discover that they really have a passion for the Performance as Research—investigations through practice—can also take the Performance Minor. In effect they have the same suite of educational outcomes as they did in the old Bachelor of Performing Arts but the difference is that they’re now coming in to the Performance Minor really knowing what they want to do and where they want to go. It’s very much honed and targeted as very specific education and training for students who really want to take that next step and go into professional practice.
Do they audition to move to Performance Minor?
No, it’s not an audition. Anybody who has completed the first year of the Theatre Major is welcome to apply for the Performance Minor. I think auditioning has historically put too much weighting on the ability to act. I want to validate people who want to be dramaturgs, stage managers, directors and lighting designers. I trust the students well enough to know that they will only do the Minor if they really want to pursue this and if they’re really passionate.
Centre for Theatre and Performance, student
photo David Sheehy
Centre for Theatre and Performance, student
And what about the forms of performance engaged in within your courses?
I think it’s really important that we validate all forms of theatre. We give the students a theoretical and also a practical understanding of everything from very traditional forms of theatre right through to the most avant-garde. For instance, our most popular unit is still on Shakespeare in Performance and I love that. But I also love it, because of the range of teaching staff we have. Students don’t just learn how to speak in iambic pentameter and read John Barton, they also learn how to deconstruct a text. I actually think historically one of the biggest failings that we’ve had is that we’ve put so much weighting on avant-garde experimental performance forgetting that students actually need to learn the nuts and bolts before they can become experimental. So we’re offering units that will give them a real grounding so they know what they’re experimenting from. They know that people were there before them. If they are re-inventing the wheel, at least they’ll know they’re doing it.
What are the possibilities as students are completing the course—do they have Honours and Post-Graduate options?
Our Honours is popular and the university has the largest post-graduate department in the country. What’s attractive for early and especially mid-career practitioners coming back to academia is that we have Practice Research PhDs and Masters. With Practice Research degrees there has been a rather prejudicial view that it’s taking the soft option. You know, instead of writing a 100,000-word thesis, you make a work and you write an exegesis. Honest to God, I think if you’re applying practice research rigorously, it’s so much harder to do that than to write a thesis.
What’s terrific is when the post-grads and the undergrads interact as they did last year when [autobiographical, queer performer] Tim Miller came over from the US to do a residency with us. That was fantastic because a range of experiences and academic backgrounds came together to create a collaborative piece. That’s what we’re aiming for—to create a real cohort from first year undergraduates right the way up to final year PhD students.
One of my briefs, as well, is to bring in practitioners to give free workshops to early and emerging career artists. So we’ve brought over Robin Arthur from Forced Entertainment. He’s giving a week of free workshops to about 15 or so of the independent theatre-makers from outside the university. CTP and the Monash Academy are sponsoring it. And it’s part of our brief to say, in a way, universities need to be the new patrons of the arts. If we have the funding to help emerging artists and companies develop, then we need to do that.
What topics are postgraduates tackling?
A huge variety! A BodyWeather artist investigating the phenomenology of the body in site-specific performance. A Sri Lankan director re-interpreting ancient forms of Sri Lankan tragedy for a contemporary Sri Lankan-Melbournian audience. A director looking at film/stage adaptation and a well-known artist working on how you can portray ‘Strine’ and Australian patriotism through musical theatre. It’s a very broad church that we have.
And who are some of your staff members and sessional teachers?
On the staff we have Dr Stuart Grant who is a phenomenologist and also the lead singer in a punk/noise band [The Primitive Calculators]—Andrew Bolt got wind of this earlier this year and Bolted him. There’s Felix Nobis who’s a professional actor and award-winning poet who also wrote the very well received play Boy out of the Country, which was on at 45 Downstairs last year. Fiona Gregory is a Shakespeare and Ibsen scholar. And in terms of sessionals, last year teaching directing we had Adena Jacobs, Nadia Tass, Pamela Rabe and Daniel Schlusser. This coming semester we have Emma Valente [The Rabble], Nicola Gunn, Matt Bebbington and Angus Cerini.
How are you going with the overlapping careers?
It’s a bit bonkers to be honest. It depends what you’re doing. When I’m writing a play that’s okay, but for instance, doing something like performing in The Rabble’s Frankenstein, I just adore The Rabble and love working with them, but it doesn’t ‘arf take it out of you physically! Doing a full day at Monash and then going off to be a naked monster with 29 bosoms at night was a bit tricky.
I’m a jobbing actress who happens to be an academic too but I do genuinely think that with the vision to try to make CTP into a place of engagement, not just for our students but also with the independent theatre community—also the mainstream stages such as Malthouse—then we’re not just surviving but we’re going to thrive and be a really innovative and exciting centre.
Centre for Theatre and Performance, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Melbourne
VCA Company 2014 (1st, 2nd & 3rd Year Production Students), UN/clean, directed by Noel Jordan, part of ENUF is Enough*
photo Giulio Tami
VCA Company 2014 (1st, 2nd & 3rd Year Production Students), UN/clean, directed by Noel Jordan, part of ENUF is Enough*
The Victorian College of the Arts has a long history of influential teaching in theatre yielding many professional actors, directors and other theatre artists, including the animateur, a highly motivated creator able to work across discipline boundaries and bring diverse practitioners together to generate all kinds of work, including new forms. Although the specific diploma course that nurtured this role will no longer exist at the end of this year, the principle strongly persists in VCA’s new degree offerings.
When I ask Robert Walton, Head of Undergraduate Studies in Theatre, what is distinctive about the school’s three-year undergraduate program, he pinpoints with clarity “a kinaesthetic approach to acting through the actor’s body drawing on various techniques,” “a focus on what is already strong in the VCA” and “looking to Melbourne as the inspiration for our course with its vital and exciting theatre community—acting, writing, devising and initiating projects and seeing them right through to production.”
The actor as originator
Walton says, “We’re looking at an expanded vision of acting. We don’t make a distinction between interpretative and generative acting; instead we aim to create a well-rounded artist who is an actor and can contribute to the most exciting work in theatre, film and emerging media possible. From the beginning we develop each individual as an author and originator of work as well as an interpreter.”
Walton describes a key part of this process. “We work in adaptation a lot; some of our graduates are famous for it. The first part of the students’ second year first semester is dedicated to Chekhov, to learning an approach which ends in a presentation of a Chekhov play. Here students continue a deep approach to text, exploring how fantastic this language is and learning traditional naturalism. In the second part of the semester we ask the students to demonstrate their understanding in a variety of ways, one of which is adapting the work into a mediated performance piece—they might make a short film to delve into the characters in the text—an adaptation with the Master of Writing students in which they write and also perform. Then they make a small ensemble response—creating a new piece based on their experience of Chekhov.” So, says Walton, the division between interpretative acting and devising is replaced by a spectrum.
Ensemble strength
This approach, Walton emphasizes, underlines the school’s commitment to ensemble practice, “which is the context in which students learn and we choose those we think will be good ensemble members for entry into the course. We establish a strong group, give it power and ways to look after itself with agency—that’s where students learn, even more than from the amazing teachers we have. It shapes how they see each other and allow each other to get better and better and become brilliant actors.”
FR!SK
In third year, says Walton, “we respond to the ensemble in terms of what they need most.” He describes a new component of the course as a response to Melbourne in the form of a festival of new work titled FR!SK. “In the first week of third year the students take part in an intensive pitch development project where leaders of local major institutions talk about what they’re looking for in new work and offer students advice. This year we had Emily Sexton, director of Next Wave, Sarah Neal, executive producer at Malthouse, Daniel Clark, Creative Producer Theatreworks and Angharad Wynne Jones, Creative Producer Arts House and two regional artistic directors. The students then have a week to prepare a pitch for a work to the same people; eight works are selected, developed (while other course work goes on: performances in contemporary plays, film scenes and screen tests) and then FR!SK is performed at the end of September. After third year is completed FR!SK is then taken on a regional tour funded by Arts Victoria. The works range from solos and group works to multimedia pieces—whatever is most urgent to the students. In this way they graduate with works to show in festivals.”
Walton adds that third years also work on 12 new plays in conjunction with the Master of Writing for Performance degree course which is led by playwright Raimondo Cortese. This provides “further opportunities for integration, with those you might work with in the future. We are creating a generation across disciplines with a shared vocabulary and their own distinctive, creative personalities.”
Mastering directing and dramaturgy
A buoyant Alyson Campbell, Head of Graduate Studies, tells me “this is the first time I’ve been able to say publicly that we’re changing our graduate offerings completely. The long running Postgraduate Diploma in Performance Creation for directors and animateurs is ending this year and we’re introducing two new Masters courses—a two-year course work Masters in Directing for Performance and a Masters in Dramaturgy.” She says of the latter that it is unique in Australia: “I was attracted to the VCA because of the possibility of introducing this course so I’m really thrilled.”
Like Walton, Campbell is determined to maintain the VCA’s tradition of interdisciplinarity. New Masters of Design for Performance and Dance will offer great collaborative opportunities within the school. She says the new Masters in Directing for Performance will offer “a very expanded notion of directing, from classical texts to performance creation from various starting points, nurturing the autonomous, free thinking, self-driven creative artist distinctive to the VCA.”
I ask why “performance” instead of “theatre.” Campbell replies, “It’s deliberately so; performance is a broad ambit and we already have Raimondo Cortese running the Masters in Writing for Performance, not just playwriting.” This common nomenclature resonates with the variety of forms delineated by Robert Walton above. “The two-year course in directing will allow people to get a lot of intensive training and research skills and, in their first year, they can also choose electives to help them select individual pathways. A very self-directed second year follows, leading to an independent project that might be a solo piece or directing undergrads in a text-based work as part of FR!SK.”
Discussing the inspiration for arguing for the Masters in Dramaturgy degree, Campbell tells me that she taught “Dramaturgy and Live Performance” at Melbourne University with Peter Eckersall (now at City University New York and co-chief investigator for an international research project titled New Media Dramaturgy). and then taught it at Queen’s University Belfast. When she came to Australia to do her PhD she felt that Melbourne was a “great epicentre of dramaturgical thinking.” As part of Paul Monaghan’s Pedagogy Working Group the idea of “a dramaturgical consciousness” turned to a discussion of the possibility of a “pedagogy of dramaturgy.”
The prospect of Masters directors, choreographers, designers and writers coming together and working with undergraduate performers evokes for Campbell “an ecology of overlapping skills, mutual support and an egalitarian spirit” in which something may well be learned about the teaching of dramaturgy. Campbell feels “this is an exciting time in which we are doing something very important.”
Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, vca.unimelb.edu.au
*ENUF is Enough, two major new works based on the stories of Victorians living with HIV and AIDS, in collaboration with Living Positive Victoria’s ENUF campaign and coinciding with the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne
David Geddes, Caetlyn Collins, The Threepenny Opera, 2013, director Cameron Goodall, Adelaide College of the Arts (ACarts)
photo Sofia Calado
David Geddes, Caetlyn Collins, The Threepenny Opera, 2013, director Cameron Goodall, Adelaide College of the Arts (ACarts)
After 30 years of acting, directing, teaching (including NIDA, VCA, UWS, The Actor’s Centre and conducting his own acting courses), Steve Matthews has taken on the position of Principal Lecturer, Performing Arts, at TAFE SA’s Adelaide College of the Arts. He’s been a mere six months in this position but had long admired the college: “It’s a $60m purpose-built performing and visual arts centre. ‘Wow,’ I thought, this is the country’s best kept secret.” It’s as well-equipped as NIDA and the VCA, he says, and offers students advantages less available in larger cities.
He and his staff emphasise not just the facilities, but also the industry readiness of its graduates, “The College has first class facilities reflecting industry standards. There are two very good theatres plus studio theatres and dance studios. We work on the production house model similar to NIDA and WAAPA. There are four 10-week terms, the first 5-6 weeks of which are studio-based, plus lectures and tutorials and then we move into production mode. We do up to 14 theatre and dance productions a year; tech, design and stage management students all work on these. It’s very practical, hands-on, three-year intensive training.”
Other advantages centre on the College’s home being a festival city, ideal for placement of students as interns in the performing arts. There’s a very high demand for technical staff and opportunities for emerging actors and dancers, given a close relationship between the college and the State Theatre and other companies. Adelaide is also a very liveable city and far less expensive for students than Sydney and Melbourne. Matthews is determined “to put this well kept secret on the map.” Certainly the industry is aware of the College but it warrants more attention, national and international, insists Matthews, eager to also attract overseas students.
Acting
Terence Crawford, Head of Acting and an actor himself (most recently in the STCSA’s The Seagull) and also director, playwright and author of two books on acting, is passionate about teaching. He expresses wariness about the ways acting schools often seek to make students creatively autonomous: “After years of running courses here and overseas and hearing and believing the rhetoric that we should teach students to make work. I’ve really tried to take responsibility for it. Schools err by saying we’ll get some theatre-makers in and they’ll lead you through a process to make your own work: student-devised work is often in fact expert-devised work, and at the other end of the scale it’s done for cost efficiency—‘Here’s the keys to the theatre, go and make it.’
“We asked, what might we thread through the course so that in third year students are fully ready to make their own work. We have 3D, the Third Year Devised Exercise, with students working without directors and devising short pieces, but for two years they know that’s going to be the culmination of their course and on the way they’ve learnt a lot about writing. I learnt a lot about acting through being a playwright and have brought into courses a kind of reversal of the classic American writing model where writers have to get up and act their own scripts to know what it’s like to be an actor. I get actors to write. History tells us that quite a few of the great writers were actors. It’s a way to attack a study of dramaturgy and if nothing else, they learn how bloody hard it is to write a couple of pages of dialogue. And in second year, there’s a director-led devised project. The students have been prepared and their ideas pitched by the time they get to third year. The outcomes are remarkable.”
The practicing professional artists the students work with in their second year “include the young constantly working Adelaide playwrights Emily Steel and Nicki Bloom; Paulo Castro, a Portuguese-Australian director with an international reputation; Jo Stone the other half of Stone-Castro who has performed with les ballets C de la B; and Chris Drummond, the Artistic Director of Brink and a regular contributor to the course who has his own particular dramaturgical approach.”
Crawford states with conviction, “we teach to empower and liberate rather than tick boxes. I also think there’s a particular value in being taught by someone who has published as much as I have [including Dimensions of Acting, An Australian Approach, Currency Press, 2012]: you know what you’ll be getting.”
Another strength, he says, is that the College “is so closely linked with the industry with a closer relationship with the State Company than any school could hope for. They often rehearse in our building, I perform with them and their Artistic Director Geordie Brookman has directed here. We’re a sibling institution offering great opportunities for work for our best graduates. Of course, we aim for our students to have national careers, but it’s best to stay in Adelaide for a couple of years and get some runs on the board. Graduate Kate Cheel has played Irina in The Three Sisters, Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Thea in Hedda Gabler, all for STCSA.” Other graduates performed in STCSA’s Vere which toured to Sydney Theatre Company as a co-production.
Crawford says, “TAFE’s god is industry while a university’s god is the very notion of the academy. That means we can justify the hours of studio work that we deliver because they are the hours called for by the industry. It’s about employability.”
Dance
Lecturer in Dance, dancer and choreographer Peter Sheedy, whose extensive career includes performing with ADT, Dance North, Human Veins and Taipei Crossover, likewise points to the College’s courses “being born out of Vocational and Educational Training [VET, government certificated]. A lot of hours are dedicated to the actual training of the dancer; we’re still embedded in studio practice with a healthy number of hours even though now the course is a Bachelor of Creative Arts Dance degree offered by Flinders University, run in conjunction with TAFE SA.
“All our teachers have a minimum seven years in the industry and choreographers come in to work with our students on productions. We function like a production house, all the subjects are tied to that. We diversify from pure or abstract dance forms through to theatre-based work where you’ll be handed a script towards building your own physical theatre forms. Students perform at the Fringe Festival in their final year and there are secondments with companies in direct correlation with the industry. It’s a lot of work.”
After the first year’s relatively informal Foundation Performance course, there are five major seasons in second and third year shown publicly as well as students developing their own work. Guest choreographers include Daniel Jaber, the new artistic director of Leigh Warren and Dancers, Jo Stone, Larissa MacGowan (ex-ADT).” Contemporary dance is taught by Sheedy and Lisa Heaven, classical by Sally Collard-Gentle (Sheedy comments, “we are a contemporary course but ballet is included for discipline and technique”) and sessional teachers include Rebecca Jones (Leigh Warren and Dancers) and Kylie Nadine Williams (ADT). The many successful graduates include “Chris Aubrey in Sydney Dance Company, Tom Greenfield and Jessie Oshodi, who have worked with Dance North and Oshodi’s now working with Shaun Parker & Company which another graduate, Lewis Rankin, joined for a European and Middle Eastern tour.
Technical production
Jeanne Hurrell, an experienced theatre technician, writer for the national entertainment technology magazine CX and Lecturer in Sound and Technical Management at SA College of the Arts, lists its extensive range of Diplomas in Live Production, Theatre and Events, Set and Scenery Construction, Costume for Performance, Advanced Diploma in Stage Management and Advanced Diploma in Design. “Students design and manufacture sets, props and costumes, install and operate complex staging, lighting and sound and stage manage eight fully-resourced public productions for our Acting and Dance students each year…guest directors and choreographers expose our students to the high standards expected in the profession.”
Hurrell writes that a typical successful technical production graduate is Lachlan Turner, who is working with Australian Dance Theatre on Multiverse (see review p38). “The production relies on high-end 3D technology. As a student, Lachlan had spent six weeks seconded to ADT’s Production Manager, Paul Cowley—a graduate of the technical course at AC Arts’ predecessor, the Centre for Performing Arts. Paul takes AC Arts technical students for work placements because he knows that our training gives students experience with the latest technologies and teaches them how to adapt and develop technology to support artistic efforts. Lachlan was part of the small technical production team that accompanied ADT’s recent European tour.
“Graduates are taken up by the Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide Convention Centre, Adelaide Festival, Fringe Festival and the technical production companies servicing South Australian major events and festivals. Many students start work with these organisations while still studying.”
Sometimes referred to as “TAFE SA’s jewel in the crown,” Adelaide College of the Arts is “a well kept secret” no longer, with the institution eager to promote its successes and offer the kinds of intensive courses that engender students who are not simply industry ready, but confidently creative.
Twelve Ascensions, 2013, featuring Dance students from Creative Industries Faculty, QUT
photo Fiona Cullen
Twelve Ascensions, 2013, featuring Dance students from Creative Industries Faculty, QUT
In June-July, RealTime approached tertiary teachers of performance, acting, dance, technical production and design diploma and degree courses across Australia. Our thanks go to those who participated. To those who we missed, who were on leave between semesters, we hope to catch up with you in due course. As for the proliferating commercial drama school sector we’ll address this in a forthcoming edition of RealTime.
The survey revealed signs of change, some adaptive as budgets tighten, but most made with a sense of grasping the present and looking to the future. Schools are re-writing degree courses; creating new degrees; increasingly engaging directly with professional theatre and dance companies; increasing training time spent on designing, directing and acting for screen and film; and running with expanded notions of performance that have evolved over recent decades—just look at the variable use of ‘performance’ and ‘theatre’ in faculty, degree and course titles. The more performance opens out, the more possibilities for new forms of creativity and unanticipated careers.
There is also growing competitiveness, sometimes expressed bluntly on these pages, for and against training without rigorous academic demands; issues relating to class sizes and hours; commercial versus artistic imperatives; and just what is meant by training for autonomy.
Potential students browsing these offerings will be attracted to the prospect of commitment to developing a single expertise while others will see in more open-ended courses a host of often unexpected career opportunities. The range of courses and locations, not all of them in big cities, offer an incredible diversity of experiences. All emphasise teamwork, inventiveness, creative collaboration and relationships that extend into careers. You’ll see the same focus in our articles on Monash University, VCA and the Adelaide College of Arts on previous pages.
Ken Boucher, Director, National Theatre Drama School
Located?in St Kilda, Melbourne the school offers a three-year full-time Advanced Diploma in Acting, which is nationally accredited and VET registered. Ken Boucher, a widely experienced theatre director, writes, “The course aims to prepare industry-ready graduates with skills in live and recorded performance or as performance-makers and producers.” Staff are all active in the industry and “the School’s alumni includes well-known names such as Kat Stewart, Brett Tucker, Richard Cawthorne, Lawrence Mooney and Rick Davies.”
Boucher is adamant that “at a time when higher education providers are increasingly deserting undergraduate actor-training and/or massively increasing class sizes in the courses that do remain, we place strict limits on our intake (16 in the first year) in order that each student is given maximum support, encouragement and assistance….In their final year students have the opportunity to present their screen work through a professionally produced and nationally circulated showreel and their live performance skills via devised performance and a showcase presentation to industry.” Sessional teachers come from the industry and “provide great contacts for students.”
Associate Professor Kim Durban, Arts Academy Federation University, Ballarat
Durban, a VCA graduate who has directed for major companies, emphasises the care the Arts Academy has for its students and the praise it receives from graduates: “We work as a team, we aim to inspire and we succeed. I am passionate about ensuring we have great guest artists, strong contact hours and screen acting as part of the program.”
Students engage directly in cultural events in Ballarat and graduates have “created companies such as [the all-male comedy troupe] Aunty Donna who this year have been invited to present at Gilded Balloon in Edinburgh.” The Academy’s Professional Practice course, writes Durban, “is firmly based on survival skills. Acting graduates know that they will be responsible for creating their own success beyond the Industry Showcase.”
Dr Erin Brannigan, Lecturer, Dance Studies, UNSW
The distinctiveness of Dance Studies at UNSW, writes Erin Brannigan, co-editor of Bodies of Thought, 12 Australian Choreographers (RealTime-Wakefield Press, 2014) and Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) comes in the form of “three broad areas of study, Thinking, Writing and Making, linked by the key terms of corporeality and movement.” The breadth and depth of the approach makes the course ideal for producing “dance artists, writers, researchers, educators and arts workers ready to enter the performing arts industry and secondary and tertiary educational institutions.”
While Thinking covers “the history, theory and analysis of dance in diverse cultural contexts, locating dance within a larger ecology of related national and international practices” and interdisciplinarity in current practice and thinking. Writing encourages students “to develop a writing practice alongside their creative or theoretical interest in dance, and to explore the various relationships between writing and dancing.” Making involves movement practices and techniques and acknowledges the role of studio-based learning.”
Dance Studies at UNSW, writes Brannigan, “has strong ties with local industry through teaching staff and professional residencies, and is aligned with the existing ecology of dance practice in NSW with a focus on self-authored movement research, offering clear pathways to higher research in Creative Practice and Dance Theory.”
Rosalba Clemente, Head of Acting, Drama Centre, Flinders University
Actor (most recently in the State Theatre Company of SA’s The Seagull), director and former STCSA Artistic Director, Clemente singles out “learning driven by a strong core pool of arts practitioners and theorists and supplemented by excellent outside practitioners in both classes and production blocks; engaged industry partnerships with student participation including industry workshops; and student exposure to more than one methodology [with the] opportunity to apply diverse processes over at least nine diverse productions in live performance and film over four years as well as class work.”
Creative Development of new work is experienced with outside writers and directors (at present Philip Kavanagh and Nescha Jelk). Clemente rates highly the opportunity to work in “a strong artistic community—artistically, politically and socially aware—with an emphasis on how to work, not just what to make. The aim is “actively encouraging the protean artist: an actor/director/writer/maker/cultural leader/producer [with the] penetrative discipline of the thoroughbred artist. The Centre has yielded diverse talents such as Tim Maddock, Xavier Samuel, Sara West, Sam Haren, Amber McMahon, Alirio Zavarce, Cath McKinnon, Geordie Brookman, Catherine Fitzgerald, Caleb Lewis, Melissa Reeves and Benedict Andrews.”
Clare Grant, Lecturer in Performance, Theatre and Performance Studies UNSW, School of the Arts and Media
In tune with contemporary theatre, performance and live art practices, lecturer and performer (most recently in My Darling Patricia’s The Piper), Clare Grant writes that Theatre and Performance Studies (TPS) offers “a mix of theoretical and practical experiences in the study and making of theatre, encompassing a culturally broad definition of performance.” The integrated courses span cultural theory, Australian drama and theatre, acting and performing theory, solo and group making and writing processes, multimedia practices, the classic repertoire and a range of 20th century European performance practices.”
Grant singles out “the unique-in-Australia opportunity to experiment with contemporary theory and practice with the support of the Creative Practice Lab in the Io Myers Studio and the capacity to develop fundamental performance skills.” Graduates enter careers as diverse as performance making, marketing, arts administration, teaching, academia and event management.”
As well, TPS offers study at Honours and Postgraduate levels in theoretical and practical areas of study with a number of recent graduates winning prizes for research and performance writing while staff members are working on major national and international research projects. TPS has an impressive list of graduates working in a variety of roles including RealTime writer, former Online Producer and academic Caroline Wake; writer, reviewer Bryoni Trezise, Lecturer in the UNSW School of the Arts and Media; Frances Barrett of Brown Council; Jessica Bellamy, Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award, 2011; Emily O’Connor of Hissy Fit; from post, Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombs Marr (the latter also Philip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights, 2011); Anthea Williams, Literary Manager Belvoir St; performer Janie Gibson, MA Manchester University; Teik Kim Pok, performer, RealTime reviewer, Outreach Co-ordinator Playwriting Australia; Grant Moxom, residency Blast Theory, 2012; and Bernice Ong, freelance artist, technician, curator, Singapore.
NIDA students perform Stephen Sewell’s Kandahar Gate, 2014. Stage design by NIDA Design students Charles Davis (set), Emma Vine (costume)
photo Lisa Williams
NIDA students perform Stephen Sewell’s Kandahar Gate, 2014. Stage design by NIDA Design students Charles Davis (set), Emma Vine (costume)
Michael Scott-Mitchell, Head of Design for Performance, Director of Undergraduate Studies, NIDA
A leading Australian theatre and opera designer (including the State Opera of South Australia’s Ring Cycle, 2004) and himself a NIDA graduate, Mitchell is thoughtful: “The essence comes down to the simple fact that a conservatoire based training is to be cherished in an institution where you get such a high level and detail of training with a pretty remarkable staff-student ratio. I take eight students handpicked from 60-70 around the country each year. This is done deliberately to ensure they have the best possible training but also that there’s a place for them in the industry when they leave the building. I see each candidate for an hour. In some ways I’m casting because they have to live in an intense pressure cooker for three years while doing undergraduate training and 15 months for the MFA. I want to know how this person thinks. How does their imagination relate to their perception of the world and can I help them? It’s intimate training and I have to think about not only the eight individuals but how they’ll work together and deal with the pressures of being in a studio—it’s beneficial but there are times when things fracture.”
As for arriving with drafting and artistic skills, Scott-Mitchell says, “I’m not obsessed with them walking into the audition with a fabulous model—which they have to do for their application. We’re good at training in the basic communication skills in drawing, documentation, freehand drawing and model-making. I can’t make someone a fabulous designer. I can find people with the right kind of ingredients in terms of their talent and then give them the tools to express themselves well. They do need to have clocked that they are going into something where they’ll rely on people around them to create an artwork, a very different experience from working alone.
“In the new Bachelor of Fine Arts [BFA], the first year is broadly skills development and design exercises of increasing complexity in the studio and they also get to work on two productions building and crewing, so they see how they fit in the process. They’re attached to the designer of the production essentially as assistants.
“The second year is almost entirely a studio year. I wanted them to have a longer theoretical exploration and, importantly, it’s the year they start working with the student directors. For example, they used to develop an opera project first, which seemed slightly insane [LAUGHS] so I moved that to the end of the year and they start instead on smaller works. Egil [Kiptse, Head of Directing] and I have spent the last six years trying to craft that relationship building process, starting with small exercises and taking the students to a festival—during the day we do quick exercises, then we see a show, meet the next day and discuss it. The second years also crew the third year designers who are making films.
“In third year almost everything has a practical outcome: a short film, a major exhibition at the end of the year, designing the directors’ graduation productions, so that relationship building comes to fruition. They also create six JJJ video clips each year. There’s been an increase in screen design to six to eight months across three years.”
Scott-Mitchell is particularly pleased with the introduction of lighting design into the BFA [Design for Performance] for the first time. “In first year lighting design students will do their course with the set and costume designers who will also have lighting training, which also has never been done before. In second year their training is ramped up but they’ll keep intersecting with the projects other designers are doing.”
Forming enduring bonds between directors and designers is important, says Scott-Mitchell: “Design students work with both second and third year directors, doubling their opportunities to form long-term partnerships from six or seven to 12 or 14.”
Associate Professor Helena Grehan, School of Arts, Murdoch University
Dr Helena Grehan, writer and editor (co-editor with Peter Eckersall of ‘We’re people who do shows,’ Back to Back Theatre: Performance, Politics, Visibility, Performance Research Books, 2013, RT121, p38) describes the Major in Theatre and Drama in Murdoch’s BA as designed to provide students with a broad range of skills and experiences in the area of theatre, drama and performance studies. Students are trained in acting, directing, design and script development and they have the opportunity to work as part of a large team in their third year on a major graduating production. Each student is exposed to all areas of production so that they have skills in the running of a show as well as in being part of an ensemble.”
Guest professionals include performance writer and novelist Josephine Wilson who is coordinating the Performance and Creative Arts unit, “working with students on both the theoretical and analytical skills needed to read and respond to creative work as well as in devising. Zoe Atkinson, an internationally recognised set and costume designer who designed fellow WA artist Matthew Lutton’s production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman for Opera NZ in 2013, will work with second and third year students in the Design unit.” Grehan adds, “in recent years students have had the opportunity to tour to Singapore and/or Malaysia with a troupe from our Childrens’ Theatre unit and this has given them valuable opportunities for cultural and artistic exchange and team building skills.” As well, students majoring in theatre also participate in the five or so student theatre companies on campus, operating at graduate and undergraduate level.
Grehan writes, “There is strong sense of belonging and pride amongst the students in Theatre and Drama Studies and they are very supportive of one another.” Graduates have gained places as actors, composers, designers and crew members in theatre companies in Australia and Malaysia, in Drama Departments in Malaysia and Singapore as well as in the primary and secondary education sector in Australia.”
Dr Julie-Anne Long, Lecturer in Dance & Performance Studies, Macquarie University
Lecturer, dancer, choreographer and a key figure in the NSW dance scene, Julie-Anne Long rates the absence of auditions for the dance course at Macquarie University as distinctive. However, although no dance experience is required, “many students have extensive dance training in ballet, tap, jazz and contemporary. Others may be hip-hop dancers or have experience in cultural dance forms. Plus there are those who have an interest in dance alongside another art form, say music or film.”
The diversity of dance origins is reflected, says Long, in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies (MCCS), the largest department within the Faculty of Arts, “offering unique cross-inter-multi-disciplinary opportunities for students.” This presents opportunities for students to combine dance practices and creative processes with screen and digital media production skills. Long also singles out double majors or double degrees, partnering say Education or Law or Commerce with Dance as being attractive to students. “We encourage students to ask what dance can offer other fields and how they can apply embodied principles, choreographic skills and collaborative practices to other world applications. Dance is therefore addressed in everyday, cultural and social contexts and students are encouraged to generate their own directions and creative possibilities alongside workshops in contemporary dance techniques, choreographic performance, music and theatre, as well as experience with intermedia production.”
Tim Maddock, Program Convenor, Performance and Theatre School of Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong
A graduate of Flinders University, Adelaide, Maddock was a founding member of the Red Shed Theatre Company, directed for Brink Productions and subsequently for Malthouse, Griffin and Sydney Theatre Company. He states with conviction, “We develop students’ whole cultural and aesthetic awareness—only university courses can deliver this. Rather than being a skills or entertainment based course we’re constantly contextualising everything we do in terms of historical and contemporary practice.”
The Bachelor of Performance and Bachelor of Creative Arts [BCA] Theatre degree students share an identical foundation year developing “voice, acting, movement and singing skills intensively, two hours each a week. They do stagecraft which introduces them to the basic languages of the theatre, playing with the components and experimenting…and getting them out of some bad practices they might have picked up.”
The BCA Theatre degree equips students with skills in a broad range of performance areas involving performance skills, stagecraft, stage management, technical production, dramaturgy, history and theory and other possible areas of study including art history, creative writing, design theory, media arts, graphic design or technical theatre. The Bachelor of Performance, which requires audition, is “an intensive, specialist course that develops students as self-reliant, highly-skilled performing artists through a strong, practice-based program…with an emphasis on collaboration and ensemble practice”(website).
Bachelor of Performance students engage in four major productions across their course “and switched-on students drive their own productions in the break.” Current works include Tim Crouch’s Nothing to See Here involving visual arts and other students, and an installation based work. Several Honours students develop work each year in which other students are cast. The overall output, says Maddock, is prodigious; a technical production student itemised on YouTube 44 productions she had been involved in across her course.
Students study dramaturgy with Dr Margaret Hamilton (Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners & Theatre Aesthetics in Australia; Rodopi 2011), contemporary Australian Theatre, contemporary theatre practices (Robert Wilson et al) and Theatre History.
Maddock says that Wollongong is a lovely campus and that students appreciate being in a strong cultural cohort, educate each other and establish long-lasting relationships as evidenced by the emergence of successful performance ensembles Team MESS and Appelspiel and writer-director Mark Rogers’ home-based Marrickville Woodcourt Art Theatre. “We make units of people who will go out and create; we’re not an industry sausage machine.” Adding to the cultural intensity at UOW is a strong contingent of postgraduate researchers including Nikki Heywood, Deborah Pollard (RT120, p40) and Nigel Kellaway.
Sophie Don, Sophia Stratton, Mnemonic, QUT
photo Fiona Cullen
Sophie Don, Sophia Stratton, Mnemonic, QUT
Sandra Gattenhof, Head of Drama, School of Media, Entertainment, Creative Arts, Drama, Creative Industries, QUT
Associate Professor Sandra Gattenhof, a specialist in drama/arts in schools and communities, postdramatic theatre and contemporary performance for children and young people, cites “a benchmarking survey in 2009 with other Australian universities that offer similar degrees; at that time and still, we are the largest drama department and the only one within a university that offers acting, tech production and the generalist degree in drama. Others offer one or two but not all three.”
The BFA Acting degree requires interview and audition, Technical an interview and Drama the appropriate tertiary entrance score. Drama students, who receive a strong theoretical and academic grounding can do a one year postgrad course to allow them to become drama teachers in schools.
In terms of annual student course numbers, Gattenhoff says there are 16 in Acting, 25 in Technical and around 85 in Drama. She points out that Acting and Technical students do not work to the university semester schedule once in second and third year because they are constantly in production daily and many evenings. “We mimic life-like experiences but have six-week rehearsal periods, a luxury for guest directors, but vital for student training.”
Gattenhoff is thrilled that the faculty is moving into a new building “which will provide purpose built facilities for the first time—rehearsal rooms and workshop spaces on Kelvin Grove Road opposite La Boite Theatre and highly visible to the public.” She believes, “we are the only drama faculty that has had any kind of new building in the last 10 years. All the surfaces are digital skinned and all rooms are sound-separated. It’s a 21st century facility.”
A new and distinctive feature appears in the re-written acting course for third year students: “There are units on entrepreneurship—how to create your own business and how to market yourself so that you’re not just at the mercy of agents. This is in response to what we see our post-degree students doing.”
As well, Gattenhoff emphasizes an increasing shift to actor training for film and screen work, learning how to audition for screen tests, making showreels and preparing “auditions for iPhone that can be sent to Hollywood within 30 minutes if we get a call about seeing someone’s work. It’s the future.”
As for the BFA Drama students, “most of them go into independent theatre. All of the third year is about making, producing and marketing your own work and developing your collateral with two dedicated units on entrepreneurship and business skills.”
Here’s exciting news for experienced art practitioners, scientists, or humanities scholars who wish to engage with creative bioresearch. SymbioticA, a world-renowned Artistic Research Laboratory embedded within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at The University of Western Australia, is offering a Master of Biological Arts degree.
Academic coordinator and Assistant Professor Ionat Zurr writes, “The Master of Biological Arts (aka the Alternative MBA) is offered to those who are interested in what is happening with (and to) life today. Students have access to recent technology and expertise in the field of science (particularly the life sciences) and are required to explore them, hands on, in a cultural and artistic context. We encourage critical thinking, ethical provocations, controversial future scenarios, and questioning of current practices and politics, all through a rigorous and informed engagement with the fields of art and the sciences.”
In the first of the two years of the course, students with arts backgrounds will take relevant science units, while students from the sciences will take units in fine arts and/or performance, literature etc. The focus in the second year is “the student’s own creative research with access to scientific laboratories and mentorship from the arts and the sciences,” in the context of SymbioticA’s other activities involving “core and visiting researchers from around the world.”
Previous student projects include the deploying of “living neural tissues as agents for digital corruption and misinformation”; conducting experimental portraiture in the making of death masks for laboratory disease model mice; drawing imaginary landscapes using sleep science techniques with living, sleeping bodies; exploring “interspecies relations and feminist critique by caring and living with slime molds”; and converting “an atomic force microscope into a musical instrument that plays by touching living cells.”
The accompanying image is from the work of Tarsh Bates who completed a Master of Science (Biological Arts) in 2012 and is currently a candidate for a PhD (Biological Arts) at SymbioticA where “her research is concerned with gentleness, the aesthetics of interspecies relationships and the human as a multispecies ecology. She is particularly enamoured with Candida Albicans, the single-celled opportunistic fungal pathogen commonly known as thrush.” RT
Brenton Alexander Smith, The Bicycle Man, 2013, SCA Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours); one of a series of photographs and stand-alone sculptures (see page 22)
photo Hyun Lee
Brenton Alexander Smith, The Bicycle Man, 2013, SCA Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours); one of a series of photographs and stand-alone sculptures (see page 22)
Unlike contemporary technological devices that tend to distance users from the impacts of their public interactions—distracted pedestrians lost in their iPhones or bike-riders reclaiming the footpaths are among the everyday hazards of city life—Brenton Alexander Smith’s prosthetic “bicycle suit” attachments made from old bike parts are designed to “hinder the wearer, forcing them to slow down and consider their movements.”
On the cover of this edition, we reproduce an image from Smith’s series emanating from this idea. Titled The Bicycle Man (2011-2013) the series comprises photographs and a set of stand-alone sculptures.
He writes, “This work parodies the idea of the cyborg and reflects society’s apparent desire to merge with technology. It serves as an antidote to the post-humanist belief that technology can allow one to transcend the limitations of the body.”
Smith is currently completing his BVA Honours year at Sydney College of the Arts. In December he will be heading to Iceland as the Skammdagi Artist in Residence at Listhús in Olafsfjordur “in the darkest part of winter.” RT
Brenton Alexander Smith, The Bicycle Man, Extension Obstruction, 2013, photo courtesy the artist
HOME, director writer Apirana Ipo Te Maipi, producer Jesse Phomsouvah, Griffith Film School. HOME won the Most Outstanding Script Award and Best Overall Film at the Griffith Private Craft Awards, 2013.
The local film industry was one of the big losers in this year’s federal budget, with government funding agency Screen Australia set to lose $38 million over the next four years. Screen Australia has since announced that most of the cuts will be made to documentary funding and ancillary programs, that its marketing department and state and industry programs section are to be replaced by a smaller business and audience department, that staff will be cut from 112 to 100 and support for screen resource organisations such as Sydney’s Metro Screen, Melbourne’s Open Channel and Adelaide’s Media Resource Centre will be phased out over the next 18 months.
CEO Graeme Mason argues that the changes will focus Screen Australia on development and funding of what he describes as “risk-taking projects that identify and build talent; intrinsically Australian stories that resonate with local audiences; and high-end ambitious projects that reflect Australia to the world.”
In June, Mason described the screen industry as contributing “$6.1 billion to the economy. It employs 41,000 people. When we come to town the spillover benefits and spillover effects are monumental—although this again is often forgotten by our detractors. Films and television programs are made with an eye to the commercial gains. It is, however, incredibly difficult to finance high-end television or a feature film and then see it through to completion on time and within budget, often in multiple locations, with a total cast and crew reaching up to 2,000 on big productions.”
“Producers,” he said, “have to be incredibly agile business people, managing a project from the chrysalis of an idea to a major-scale production, and the advertising and distribution to a wider audience over many years. To put this into perspective, on average it takes three-plus years and eight drafts to develop a project, and that’s before shooting begins. It is then another 12 to 18 months before the project hits a screen of any description.”
Globalisation & its benefits
So, given the severe budget cuts to an industry in which it is already very hard to make a film, are things looking gloomy for anyone whose tertiary education is aimed at a career in film? Surprisingly, no. There’s still a degree of optimism about the interesting and different career paths opening up for graduates. And what is contributing to this optimism? Primarily, it’s the increasing globalization of the industry, the many ways in which the role of the screen producer is widening and changing, and the ever-increasing opportunities offered by the explosion of digital production.
As Tom O’Regan, Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Queensland, and Anna Potter write in Media International Australia (No 149, Nov 2013), “Australian producers were once almost exclusively Australian companies accessing Australian funding schemes and courting international partners. They produced programs to imported and locally developed formats and created original feature and television drama production. Now they are just as likely to be transnational production companies utilising the global formats of parent companies and creating original Australian content, including for subsequent use as formats in other markets.”
This increasing affiliation of “independent Australian production companies with their global counterparts” is either through overseas companies establishing local operations, or the purchase of local production companies by international organisations. “These arrangements offer considerable advantages,” they add, “including access to global distribution and financing networks, specialised production knowledge and superior market intelligence.” And, of course, employment. With Australian film distribution, production, post-production and visual effects companies also being globalised, the expertise of local personnel should certainly lead to work in other areas of the new parent companies’ activities.
Speaking the languages
Universities and film schools are keeping up with this globalisation. They not only take international students, but as Lisa French, Deputy Dean, Media, School of Media & Communication at RMIT, explains, have overseas campuses as well. RMIT has campuses in Vietnam, Hong Kong and Barcelona, and students can undertake overseas internships or work on various projects with international partners. However she still sees as a problem the fact that Australian students don’t speak many languages. “RMIT does provide language courses, and in some courses it’s a requirement,” she says, adding, “it’s really important that this emphasis on language is increasing, as is the growing interest in Asia.”
Multi-skilling
Filmmaker and critic Peter Galvin, who has been teaching at the Sydney Film School since it opened in 2004, says the school attracts a number of international students who may have already worked in their local industries. “They come here to sharpen their skills and acquire a diploma; some then stay on, while others return. They come to our school for the same reason as our local students do—because they can make films here. Very few film schools or courses allow their students to make as many films as we do. Most of our students would work on about 15 film projects in a year, working on each other’s films—we encourage collaborations and partnerships. They may be working on two or three films at once, in different roles. They get a chance to diversify, to understand the different roles that go into making a film, and discover where their own interest lies. That’s not only a big output, it’s terrific experience.”
Alternative directions, new niches
While graduates with creative arts degrees in film and media might not have clear pathways to established careers, there are increasingly interesting and different directions in which they can find fulfilling occupations. Associate Professor, Media Arts and Production at UTS, Gillian Leahy says, “we’ve got graduates who are making music, directing drama, setting up sound companies. And they go to all sorts of places—working with film festivals, in classification, making digital displays for a museum, working in different areas of research.” She’s very pleased that while many of their graduates, “don’t end up anywhere near where they they thought they would, they still feel happy and fulfilled at the unusual direction they’ve taken. But then,” she adds, “there are those who really know where they want to go—and get there.”
As Stuart Cunningham Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications at QUT and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, says, people who do creative work find all sorts of niches in advertising, marketing, creative services. Digital is ubiquitous, he says, “and there is a need for digital producers in mining, in health services, in training areas. Many graduates find stable employment working in creative roles for organisations outside the creative sector, or for firms that provide creative services such as design or media/communications to other businesses.”
And Lisa French explains: “we’re trying to produce graduates who are mobile, able to adapt, not afraid of moving into new technology. They’re more flexible, more creative, and can move into all sorts of industries. By the time they finish they have work they can show, but it’s not necessarily traditional work—it’s their potential, and if they are innovative and adventurous they’ll have lots of options.”
The new screen producers
The actual role of a screen producer is also changing; Stuart Cunningham believes that it now spreads across film, television, advertising, corporate video, and the burgeoning digital media sector. “In recent years, fundamental changes to distribution and consumption practices and technologies have brought about changes in both screen production practice and in the role of existing screen producers, while new and recent producers are learning and practicing their craft in a field that has already been transformed by digitisation and media convergence.” And he emphasises that it’s important to give filmmakers some business skills so they can establish start-up companies, or form partnerships. “These skills are much more necessary in this diversified world; government money is never going to be enough, so small business survival is important.
Producers are now being trained who can work in a wide range of entertainment areas, such as managing the entertainment on a cruise ship or creating digital content for a supermarket chain.” As Gillian Leahy says, “If you can produce a film, you can produce anything. If you master the details of producing, of budgets and schedules and time constraints, of getting your film finished and into the market, anything else would be easy!”
No glitz, no glamour
Producer Liz Watts, whose company Porchlight Films has produced Animal Kingdom, Lore and currently has The Rover in release, takes interns from UNSW, AFTRS, UTS and Metro Screen, and says she’s impressed not only with their enthusiasm and aptitude, but with their realistic attitude. “I do think they understand what a hard industry it is; they have no illusions about glitz or glamour.” She’s impressed with the way AFTRS and Metro Screen are establishing short courses that tap into skills gaps in the industry, in areas like SFX. “That provides more flexibility, and combines with more early interaction with the industry through internships that can only be positive.”
The group & time to think & create
One skill that is well worth acquiring is that of editing. Gillian Leahy says, “when you teach students to edit, the how and why, there are all sorts of jobs they can do. They can start editing promos, then move into making or producing promos for film, for television, for distribution and marketing. Their editing skill gets them started, and they can move into other areas from there. We give them a good grip of visual language, a sense of what works. And one of the great benefits seems to be that sense of a group effort, of working with others during their course, and then working with other graduates afterwards. We’re not just training them for the industry. We’re giving them time to think, to create—all the things that universities are supposed to allow them.”
New degree of optimism
AFTRS, Australia’s national screen arts and broadcast school, is certainly optimistic, with a new three-year Bachelor of Arts in Screen starting next year, designed to prepare Australia’s next generation of creative practitioners to be the leaders in their respective fields. The school, which has a process of adapting its courses to keep up with the needs of a changing industry, is looking to equip graduates for work in a platform agnostic world. But the course also recognises the importance of both narrative and tradition with its two core subjects, Story & Writing and The History of Film that will run for the full three years alongside elective specialist subjects. AFTRS CEO, Sandra Levy says the BA is all about critical thinking and creative engagement, and has been designed to ‘future-proof’ graduates for a changing and dynamic world post tertiary studies.
Documentary options
With the commissioning of and funding for documentaries already difficult, has the decision by Screen Australia to cut some of its documentary support made it a bleaker future for graduates specializing in documentary? Associate Professor (and documentary maker) Pat Laughren, from Brisbane’s Griffith Film School, says, “documentary makers, more than any others, are multi-tasking and flexible, and while it’s true that not much traditional documentary is being commissioned, there is an enormous amount of factual programming being made. And there is still corporate and industrial production, too; it may be shorter, and it may be streamed, but it will never go away. So those with documentary as their real ambition will still be able to find interesting and related work, even as the means of production and distribution change and evolve. And that’s just as well, because there are always a few students who really get the documentary bug!”
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1982
courtesy the Profile Foundation
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1982
What is the role of monumental architecture in urban terrains traversed by hordes who pay little attention to their surroundings? How does a glitzy outré edifice impress a general populace glued to their smart phones scrolling through selfies and welded to earbuds playing television idol finalists’ hits? This is the problem faced by entrepreneurial city councils the world over. To succeed, architects and councils must collectively pierce the insular audiovisual womb within which more and more people walk the streets and take public transport.
Buildings thus now perform like outlandish clowns, hysterically trying to attract the attention of those in their immediate vicinity. Buildings are no longer forms or objects – let alone sculptures or installations. They are forced performers: mimes for hire; fancy-dress party goers; strip-o-grams. Within the logic of global millennial urban renewal, buildings are there not to be renovated, but to be tizzed-up, frizzed and permed. And the most effective means for this type of drag is public projection. It can be rudimentary still dissolves à la PowerPoint, or smarty-pants projection mapping. It doesn’t matter; the result is the same. That old building is deemed to suddenly ‘come to life.’
Lit-up public buildings are new millennial equivalents of fireworks displays. But rather than the cosmos exploding in an open-air planetarium, illuminated architecture celebrates the earthly realm and its civilised patrons by portraying the city in idealised aesthetic terms. In the urban dark, the outside world shines just like the evening parade at Disneyland. It’s all family-friendly and lower-common-denominator stuff—which begs the question whether it’s worth analysing or critiquing. But the preponderance of council-funded tourist-touted festival-lauded events of public projections now constitutes a dominant form of audiovisual spectacle. Instead of the raw energy gunpowder detonations of old fireworks displays, any night-time event of large scale is now accompanied by ‘public address’ broadcast of musical accompaniment.
Things didn’t start out that way. Early public projections such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s anti-Reagan statements of the mid-80s were thankfully silent. Like elliptical luminous graffiti, their critique was metaphorically amplified by scaling-up succinct, direct imagery (a politician’s hand, a missile head, chains, a homeless youth, a grieving mother, etc) onto public architecture. Despite their gargantuan presence, they did not blare their message; their still silence invited contemplation. That was a long time ago, when city centres were struggling to stall bankruptcy and deal with crime rates. In the soft culture overload of the present, those core social problems have returned with a vengeance. The city is now regarded as a giant canvas of distraction to celebrate its ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ or whatever Disney/Pixar/DreamWorks effigy you choose. Consequently, musical accompaniment of the rankest order is required to actualise the public space of the projection, to transform it into a transfigured shopping mall plateau.
Krzysztof Wodiczko, AT&T Long Lines Building, New York, 1984
courtesy the Profile Foundation
Krzysztof Wodiczko, AT&T Long Lines Building, New York, 1984
All this would be fine if it was acknowledged that the commissioning of public projections since the late 20th century performs this workman-like task of tizzying up a CBD void. But that would be a bare, blunt admission. Hence art comes to the rescue: that wonderful transformer of the banal into the aesthetic. For no public projection is not regarded as ‘art’. Indeed, public projections are championed as technologically advanced contemporary art. Massive render farms. Mega-pixels. Humongous solid-state drives. Enough lumens to decimate a small planet. It’s the ‘wet reality’ of what New Media Art proponents dreamt of throughout the 90s. Well, those dreams came true.
The Lighting The Sails commission for illuminating the Sydney Opera House with synchronised multiple projections has always been a major event of the annual Vivid Festival. Starting with Brian Eno’s projected version of his software-randomised still cross-dissolves titled 77 Million Paintings in 2009, Vivid embraced the idea of granting an artist access to the mega-canvas of the Opera House ‘sails’ at night. Great in theory, but ugly in reality. The visual quality and appearance of Eno’s ‘vivid’ artwork is like a hyper-RGB tweaking of splotches of Ken Done and swathes of Pro Hart. Uncannily, Eno’s gaudy palette and texturing synchronised perfectly with Australia’s populist idea of ‘visual artistry’: they evoke 77 years of bad white ‘modern’ landscape art.
Since 2010, the Vivid public projections became Lighting The Sails. These large scale commissions have been granted internationally: 2011 to Superbien from France; 2012 to Urbanscreen from Germany; 2013 to Spinifex from Australia; and 2014 to 59 Productions from England. Each one progressively foregrounded musical accompaniment by effectively ‘scoring’ the image sequences to a mix of shallow studio-produced teledoco-style background mood noodling. It’s the kind of ‘imaginative soundtracking’ that high school kids source when they post their first YouTube video editing exercise. The 59 Productions upped the ante with a more astute track selection (Explosions In The Sky, Ratatat and Battles), but the visuals swamp the edgy art-prog-rock of those tracks with decorative fluff and smarmy pop graphics. 59 Productions’ commission has been the most blatant in its self-serving remythologisation of the Opera House’s design, going as far as incorporating historical sound bites of parliamentary missives against carrying through with Jørn Utzon’s original design. Everyone now champions the design of the Opera House—but mostly as a pat on the back to show how far we as an anti-intellectual nation have progressed.
Looking at and listening to 59 Productions’ Lighting The Sails, I perceive no progression—especially as it climaxes with Vivaldi and Joey Talbot. If anything, its audiovision confirms how the Opera House can become a forced performer, illuminated and animated into an audiovisual effigy of all the ersatz values of hi-tech public art. It’s presented as an ‘art event’—but of the kind that first and foremost pleases the marketing departments of large arts institutions, consoled in knowing that plebeians will be transfixed by vulgar momentary distraction. The public will lower their smart phones, pull out their earbuds, and realise how magnificent the Opera House is. Considered this way, public illuminations of such scale are like gargantuan portraits of court officials. The Sun King Louis XIV would have found Lighting The Sails dazzling.
The Australian film industry mostly services the advertising industry, with occasional deliveries for television drama. Similarly, large scale public art commissions form but a tiny tiara on a hulking pro-AV industry which mostly services the advertising industry, with occasional deliveries for franchised theatre and corporate events. One can read the cartography of these interlocking industries to discern any overlapping zones between their client servicing and ‘artistic production.’ There isn’t any. That’s what is illuminated by Lighting The Sails.
What happens when you take three of Australia’s most innovative and dynamic artists—media artist Lynette Wallworth, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek and theatre director Michael Kantor—and provide them with $670,000 in funding to produce arts-based films in multidisciplinary teams? The results were on show over three Sunday nights in June when ABC1 screened these three bold projects fostered by the Hive Lab, an initiative of the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival.
With additional funding from ABC Arts and Entertainment, the Australia Council, Screen Australia and the South Australian Film Corporation, these ambitious films were developed in a workshop environment with the aim of “break(ing) down the silos between film and the rest of the arts,” said Katrina Sedgwick (then director of the Adelaide Film Festival and now of ABC Arts and Entertainment) in 2011. The films premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2013 and have since enjoyed success in other venues. For example, Obarzanek’s I Want to Dance Better at Parties was recently awarded the Dendy Award for Best Live Action Short at the 2014 Sydney Film Festival and Wallworth’s Tender received the $25,000 David and Joan Williams Documentary Fellowship Award at the 2014 Australian International Documentary Conference.
Lynette Wallworth, Tender
Wallworth’s Tender was produced by Kath Shelper, whose previous work includes the award-winning Samson & Delilah (2009, director Warwick Thornton). This touching 73-minute documentary follows the quest of a small but determined community group in Port Kembla (NSW) who aim to set up their own low-cost funeral service. Led by their manager (and Wallworth’s lifelong friend, Jenny Briscoe-Hough), the residents attempt to bypass the commercial drivers of the funeral industry, to make their own coffins and to access their own burial ground. As their plans gain traction, the community centre’s caretaker Neil is diagnosed with terminal cancer and it becomes clear that his funeral will be the group’s first responsibility. This unforeseen twist (Neil received his diagnosis two weeks before filming began and then passed away before the film’s 10-week shoot was over) adds a sense of urgency to the group’s project.
From the outset, this observational ‘fly on the wall’ work gives the audience intimate access to the group’s frank discussions concerning the nature of death and dying. Both the static and handheld cinematography by Simon Morris keeps the viewer close to the participants as they go about their daily business, also capturing expressions of emotion as they grieve for their much-loved friend and colleague. One particularly affecting sequence sees Wallworth utilise still photography to capture images of Neil’s body being prepared for his funeral. Tender is ultimately an insightful and uplifting film, which questions the protocols associated with the act of dying. (See realtime tv interview with Lynette Wallworth.)
Elizabeth Nabben, Steve Rogers, I Want to Dance Better at Parties
photo Ian Routledge
Elizabeth Nabben, Steve Rogers, I Want to Dance Better at Parties
Gideon Obarzanek, I Want to Dance Better at Parties
Gideon Obarzanek’s I Want to Dance Better at Parties is a hybrid project based on the 2004 Chunky Move dance production of the same name. Co-written and directed by Matthew Bate (creator of Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, 2011) and produced by his colleague Rebecca Summerton at Adelaide-based Closer Productions, this 28-minute docudrama tells the story of middle-aged Phillip Rose, a single parent recovering from the untimely death of his wife. Seeking to improve his dance style (and by consequence, his social life) Rose takes up weekly dance classes with an enthusiastic young instructor, Melissa (Elizabeth Nabben). In an otherwise deserted dance studio he learns a variety of sensual Latin dances and the two become friends, ultimately performing together in an amateur dance competition. This climatic competition scene recalls that of Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992), but is in fact filmed using a real-world backdrop, with competitive dancers and members of the public.
The film is narrated by Rose himself in documentary style, but the story is also dramatically recreated with a sympathetic and somewhat dance-challenged Steve Rogers in the central role. Rose himself occasionally appears in the background of these recreated scenes, as if he’s watching and reliving his lonely experiences from a more comfortable place. A handheld camera follows over Rose’s shoulder or offers his point of view as he dances, fostering strong audience identification. I Want to Dance Better at Parties successfully weaves documentary and drama, film and dance, to create a moving portrayal of a man reclaiming lost meaning in his life.
Michael Kantor, The Boy Castaways
The Boy Castaways is perhaps the most ambitious of the three films. Directed by former Malthouse Theatre director Michael Cantor, this feature length rock musical (touted as a reimagining of Peter Pan) stars Mark Leonard Winter as insomniac office worker Michael, a man drawn into a surreal parallel world that exists in a mysterious theatre. Here he joins a bizarre mix of characters who seem midway through the staging of an elaborate spectacle (Tim Rogers as the cryptic Peter, Marco Chiappi as the demanding George and Paul Capsis as gentle Nico). Michael finds himself drawn to enigmatic theatre manager Sarina (Megan Washington) but he cannot be sure that she returns his affections. As the narrative moves between musical numbers on and off stage, the audience is positioned alongside Michael, wondering what is real and what is artifice.
The bold colour and high contrast lighting of Cantor’s theatrical visuals is a delight for the eye but the camera often frames subjects in distancing wide shots, making it hard to engage with characters on an emotional level. The uttering of cryptic and isolated lines of dialogue turns the film’s first half into something reminiscent of a Mad Hatter’s tea party, with Michael seemingly perplexed as to his place in the performance. The film’s dark ending, which sees death as a means of rebirth, returns the protagonist to the outside world, leaving the viewer with questions concerning the nature of his journey.
It is perhaps coincidental that the three Hive projects explore common themes of death, escape and grieving. Although diverse in their content and methods of realisation, each presents a unique viewing experience, delivering boutique film festival content to public television.
HIVE Production Fund Films: Tender, writer, director Lynette Wallworth, producer Kath Shelper, cinematographer Simon Morris, editor Karryn de Cinque, sound designer Liam Egan, music Nick Cave & Warren Ellis; I Want to Dance Better at Parties, directors, writers Matthew Bate, Gideon Obarzanek, producer: Rebecca Summerton, editor: Bryan Mason, cinematographer Bryan Mason, composer: Benjamin Speed; The Boy Castaways, director Michael Kantor, writers Michael Kantor, Raimondo Cortese, producers: Jo Dyer, Stephen Armstrong, executive Producer: Robert Connolly; ABC1, June
Underlying the collected essays of Darren Tofts’ alephbet is the audacious, anti-historical idea that the internet can be thought about through films and works of literature that preceded its invention. To play out this provocation, Tofts chooses writers whose stories are game-like, such as Italo Calvino, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes and above all Jorge Luis Borges.
Alephbet is presumably named after the Borges story “The Aleph,” about a point in space through which it is possible to see all other points. Borges is a character in his own story, and is introduced to the Aleph by a rival writer, Carlos Argentino, who is trying to emulate the effects of the Aleph in a long poem. Borges himself shies away from the Aleph, feeling more intimidated than inspired. He tries to distance himself from Argentino, whose aspirations he finds insufferable.
Of the two characters, Tofts resembles not Borges but Argentino, as the essays in alephbet are about the internet, that great portal of simultaneity in our own time. In so doing Tofts confronts the paradox of the Aleph, that aspires to contain everything in space including itself, and yet appears to lie outside everything too. To describe the internet is to describe an everything that is also a something, a thing that is also nothing, an immense multiplicity that seems to hold in its grasp the world itself.
So it is that Tofts resorts to a literary archaeology in which Borges stars prominently, because his writing describes textual mazes that stand in for the frantic contemporary experience of searching and linking, connecting and disconnecting. The analogy is a compelling one, not least because the historical Borges, as well as the character of Borges in “The Aleph,” stand perpetually outside the internet and its ecstasies, maintaining a sensible distance.
Tofts’ turn to Borges and other literature of the mid-20th century would seem a sensible move, in order to put some distance between the present and the past, to begin to cognitively map the virtual age. In literature lie cognitive precedents for both the disorientation of the labyrinth and its mastery, for navigating the infinite rather than being paralysed by it.
The stories of Borges come in alephbet to look like a roadmap for navigating the early 21st century, anticipating the hypertextual ecstasy of the internet user. In the indefinite narratives of Borges’ stories lie guides to the ways that conventional narratives can be circumvented by new links, new information.
The essays in alephbet use Borges as a bit player in Tofts’ much greater ambition, to create writing that is adequate to the everyday experience of the internet. They do not put a distance between ourselves and this most permeating of media, but create an hysterical present by which the possibilities promised by the internet might come into being.
For Tofts’ version of the internet is also bound to its most utopian moment, the late 1990s, as his theories revolve around terms like avatar, cyberculture, hypertext, media art and virtual worlds. In “Virtual curb crawling, lurkers and terrorists who just want to talk,” online sex is the key to understanding digital culture of this moment in our recent history, when the prophesies of cyberpunk seemed to be coming true. A wave of art projects took up the challenge of being adequate to the new virtuality. Internet Explorer, Bjork’s Post (1995), VNS Matrix and Stelarc are conjoined by Tofts’ ecstatic investigation of the way that bodies took on new meaning as they connected digitally.
“Virtual curb crawling” is symptomatic of a second paradox that haunts Tofts’ essays. This is the problem of doing a media history of the present while also describing this present, critiquing Internet Explorer while having it open on your desktop. The problem is unavoidable when it seems, as it does for Tofts, that the future has already arrived, that it came into being some time ago, as history became mired in the simultaneity of cyberspace.
The essay “Epigrams, Particle Theory and Hypertext” reports on the visual epigrams that punctuate the writing of Borges, Calvino, and Deleuze and Guattari. These little designs create miniature analogies for the circularity of their ideas, for the traps they lay for the reader. Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979) begins only to begin again, never completing a story but creating a succession of first chapters. Calvino’s novel is about the impossibility of writing, as the novel remains trapped by its own infinite possibility, its labyrinth of potential.
Cinema, too, furnishes Tofts with metaphors for the virtual revolution. Essays on the retro-futurism of Alphaville (1965) and the Deleuzian time-image in The Matrix (1999) work to unravel some of the paradoxes of an age steeped in technology. The hero of Alphaville photographs everything with a flash camera, momentarily blinding this imaginary future for posterity. The Matrix slows down time, as the action sequences of super-powered avatars are choreographed to suit human perception.
Borges is often cited as the forerunner of everything from magic realism to postcolonial literature, if not postmodernism itself, but for Tofts such multiplicities have already collapsed into the digital now. To read Tofts is to breathe as if we are drowning in binary code, and it is in this ecstatic, hyperbolic universe that Tofts creates arguments about writing.
Most compelling are his descriptions of the avatar that cannot theorise its own existence except through writing, through representation. In taking the place of the self, the avatar rewrites the possibility of thinking about thinking. It writes itself as a writer. And we are all avatars of ourselves insofar as we spend increasing amounts of time online.
Alephbet may be a tricky read for those unfamiliar with the proliferation of references that Darren Tofts strings along in quick succession, but the kind of hypertextual model of writing that he proposes comes to seem sensible in a digital era that has us all immersed in its own multiplicities, even if in spite of ourselves.
Darren Tofts, alephbet, essays on ghost writing, nutshells & infinite space, Litteraria Pragensia Books, Prague, 2013
Bianca Hester, Sonic Solar Objects, The Cinemas Project
photo Sam Nightingale
Bianca Hester, Sonic Solar Objects, The Cinemas Project
An old-time country cinema, still standing despite floods, fires and hard times; immersive films that question representation itself, drawing viewers into mysterious depths; the literal ‘moving images’ of historical figures across Port Phillip Bay; spinning hoops that raise sonic spectres of sites now lost…All are part of The Cinemas Project, curated by Bridget Crone, which paired five artists with former cinema sites to make new, site-specific works in Mildura, Warrnambool, Geelong, Bendigo and Gippsland.
Crone conceived The Cinemas Project while travelling with photographer Sam Nightingale, who was documenting lost or now-hidden Victorian cinemas and drive-ins. Finding these early spaces of cinema, Crone says, meant talking a lot with locals; their recollections fuelling her rationale for what became the project’s sub-title: “Exploring the Spectral Spaces of Cinema.”
“What struck us both about these conversations was the vividness of people’s memories but equally, at times, the inexactness of memory, and its imaginative license. It seemed that this approximated somewhat the activities that had taken place in these old buildings…the cinemas were used as community centres for debutante balls, for community meetings and other ‘live’ events, as well as being places where you could imagine another world—so they were of this world as well as part of another.”
Crone is keenly aware that regional centres often see touring exhibitions, but have less frequent access to work created in, with or for their own communities. She deliberately commissioned contemporary interdisciplinary artists for the project, because “they work so flexibly between terrains of live, tangible form and mediation—the projection of images—and the intersections of these modalities.
“The activity that has taken place in the cinema buildings also neatly evokes this slipperiness between images and material forms—or, in other words, live bodies and projected images.”
The artists commissioned were Brook Andrew (Bendigo), Lily Hibberd (Yarram, Latrobe Valley – see In Profile), Mikala Dwyer (Mildura), Bianca Hester (Warrnambool) and Tom Nicholson (Sorrento to Geelong). Bianca Hester’s performance/film—titled sonic objects, solar objects: variously—included large, spinning, wailing metal hoops, spun on the ground at sites of now-lost cinemas. “The hoops reacted very specifically to the material of the ground upon which they were spun—concrete, wood, asphalt,” says Crone. “They therefore give a very particular reading of a place.”
By contrast, Lily Hibberd, working with Gippsland’s Yarram community (RT Profiler 4, 2 July), created an exhibition including recovered cinema artefacts, a play and film performed by community members, drawing out memories, unearthing lost relics and exploring themes of displacement and resilience.
Tom Nicholson, Indefinite substitution The Cinemas Project
photo Sam Nightingale
Tom Nicholson, Indefinite substitution The Cinemas Project
Tom Nicholson’s Indefinite substitution—in which unfired wet clay busts of prominent colonial figures William Buckley and John Batman were carried (and ferried) from Sorrento to Geelong over four days—referenced film’s analogue nature and extrapolated the ‘moving image’ to its most physical form. Also relying on community input, Indefinite substitution’s busts were carried, substituted and exchanged by local volunteers whose hand-marks on the clay gradually altered the busts, which also left their mark on the handlers.
Bridget Crone gave each artist thematic ‘free rein,’ but sees definite cross-connections in the works. If community engagement links Hibberd’s and Nicholson’s works, Brook Andrew’s and Mikala Dwyer’s contributions share a fundamental concern with the question of image-making, Crone says. She mentions the “materiality” and “magic” of Dwyer’s work, which includes both haunting, locally shot film images and mysterious clear-plastic sculptures. “Both material and magic have a direct relationship to the image if we think about early image technologies developing from forms of magic and spiritualism,” she says, “making things appear and disappear.” Spectral threads connect Dwyer’s Underfall to Brook Andrew’s large-scale video installation, De Anima, which simultaneously explores the concept of the soul and the politics of representation. Both works, says Crone, evoke “a strong sense of the immersive, sensory, experiential nature of cinema; therefore focusing on the affective nature of the medium.”
She also points to the ways the five artists have drawn attention to specific materials or environments—extant or lost—of the cinema sites themselves.
“There are many tangents and commonalities…One interesting thing I have noted is that the cyclic movement of film—the film reel—is evoked in Bianca Hester’s spinning hoops and also in Mikala’s three-channel video installation, Underfall, with one screen devoted to a swinging pendulum that forms part of the mechanism of the town clock. This is just an odd aside, but shows that there are so many different connections to be seen through the works—which is amazing considering they have been produced so independently of each other.”
The Cinemas Project: Exploring the Spectral Spaces of Cinema, curator Bridget Crone; commissioned by NETS Victoria, April-August, www.thecinemasproject.com.au
On Wednesday 9 July, Tony Abbott appeared on the Today show where he addressed questions about the reports of mothers on Christmas Island attempting suicide in the belief that their children would then have better success at achieving asylum in Australia. Abbott’s response was that his Government wouldn’t “capitulate to moral blackmail.”
So as Australian citizens, what are our options? What do we do when our government won’t answer questions of deep concern? When our government doesn’t serve our needs, our natural cravings to see ourselves operating with humanity and compassion?
Scott Howie, a Riverina based artist and cultural leader, felt this despair as he watched the media coverage. What followed was a very public series of posts on social media which saw his compulsion to act develop, just three days later, into a durational performative action on the Wollundry Lagoon, in the centre of the civic precinct of Wagga Wagga.
Scott Howie, Boat/Person
photo Vic McEwan
Scott Howie, Boat/Person
Regional Australia, especially areas like the Riverina, which has a deeply conservative white history, isn’t witness to much protest let alone public durational performance. So to watch this event unfold in the public realm felt exciting. Scott’s initial, dismayed post quickly led to the idea that in quiet, respectful protest, he would sit in solidarity with refugees by launching himself in an inflatable boat into the middle of the lagoon where he would “sit and weep for some time.”
He assembled a group of Observers who would be on the banks, protecting his belongings, looking out for his safety, addressing any concerns with police, rangers or media and answering any questions from the community. The proposed action was both an act of rebellion and an act of love, of personal expression and protest. Scott’s direction to the Observers was to not become antagonistic or be drawn into conflict with any opponents who might be encountered.
As Scott launched himself into the Lagoon, just after 9:30am on Saturday 12 July, drizzly rain got heavier, the adverse conditions only adding to the weight of the artist’s actions—the fog, the rain, the boat drifting into the middle of the lagoon, blown around its edges, the lone figure trying to keep it from crashing into rocks, from getting snagged on lagoon debris.
He sat, restricted in movement in the precarious dingy for a period of ‘settling in.’ As the rain fell harder, he attempted to move about carefully in his raft, using his meagre possessions to create some comfort, some shelter from wind and rain. He placed plastic over his body and used an old tarp to umbrella the boat, to stop it taking in the rain. We felt empathy for Scott in his plight out on the water, a small figure in a big landscape, his actions engaging and mesmerising from afar.
Scott Howie, Boat/Person
photo Vic McEwan
Scott Howie, Boat/Person
Onboard were a few supplies: a tiny suitcase, some food, a thermos and personal mementos. Also on board was another passenger, Scott’s puppet, a regular collaborator in works over recent years referred to affectionately as “Old Man.” Sometimes they were in conversation, sometimes they wept, sometimes they just sat slumped.
Scott’s action lasted until 3:30pm when cold conditions proved too much for him and the effects of exposure to the elements were deepening. As he made his way to the shore, he was helped out by supporters, some of whom had sat on the bank all day. With cramped legs that made walking difficult at first, he was helped up onto the rocks until the circulation started flowing again and he stood drenched and shivering.
Some watchers engaged with the action, some asked questions. One man held up an imaginary rifle and pretended to shoot the boat before explaining to those within earshot that he didn’t like refugees because they once broke the window of his shop. Many engaged in lengthy conversations.
In the Riverina on this day, people were brought together by a durational performance to witness one man’s personal expression of empathy as the rain fell and the boat slowly filled and the man sat huddled in the fog and wept.
Boat/Person, artist Scott Howie, Wagga Wagga, 12 July
Selena de Carvalho, The Evolutionary StraitJacket = Climate Change Karaoke
One of the centrepieces of Launceston’s 2014 Junction Festival is Selena De Carvalho’s The Evolutionary StraitJacket = Climate Change Karaoke in which the audience enters “a surreal fantasy environment that holds an array of extinct animal costumes. You are invited to…embody an animal and channel the disappearing wild, while belting out karaoke pop songs that are surprisingly rich with tales of evolution.”
The Evolutionary StraitJacket looks like it will be a wild ride, a curiously fun way to contemplate the grim reality of “the inability [of species] to adapt to changing environments, thus facing possible extinction.” Hence the show’s title.
We emailed De Carvalho, asking, “What’s the relationship between the seriousness of your subject and the apparent fun of dressing up and singing karaoke?” She replied: “The Evolutionary StraitJacket hopes to raise questions as opposed to providing answers. By encouraging participation and employing humour as an entry point, the project hopes to encourage the contemplation of a more sustainable future by ‘re-wilding’ through a ridiculous, poetic, neo-ritual as opposed to getting hung up on the apocalyptic tragedy of it all.”
De Carvalho is an up and coming innovator who has enjoyed residencies in Beijing and Tarraleah (Australia) and been mentored by Anna Tregloan in design for live performance and by Raef Sawford in new media. The recipient of the 2013 Arts Tasmania Dombrovskis award, she took up an internship with Melbourne’s Magnificent Revolution, a pop-up pedal-powered cinema collective. Last year she designed Shadow Dreams for Terrapin Puppet Theatre (in partnership with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Tasmanian Palawa Community) in the Ten Days on the Island Festival. RT
2014 Junction Festival, Selena De Carvalho, The Evolutionary StraitJacket = Climate Change Karaoke, Launceston, 4-8 Sept
When I ask CEO and Creative Director Rosemary Miller to describe the way she visualises the Salamanca Arts Centre (SAC), she refers to work done some years ago by Neil Cameron. After interviewing a wide range of people involved with SAC, Cameron created a delightful physical map from thread and pins, painting a complex portrait of this place. At its centre is SAC—a generating point—surrounded by a wildly branching network of connections. Miller enjoys this image as she sees SAC as a starting point or ‘engine room,’ supporting artists to begin, create and present new work that shows locally and reaches beyond the bounds of Hobart, Tasmania or even Australia.
Like the labyrinthine buildings that make up SAC, diving into the organisation occupying these spaces is a little disorientating to the uninitiated. The Centre has many faces. It is an organisation that incubates and presents new artistic work, an initiator of major arts projects, a dance school, an umbrella platform for marketing, a landlord, an administrative body, a theatre, a weekly bands venue, a shopping arcade and importantly, a custodian for an organic bundle of heritage buildings that cling to a cliffside in the heart of Salamanca Place.
Evolution
Coming up to its 40th birthday, the Centre was initially established as The Community and Arts Centre Foundation, at a time when locals were in need of “a home for the arts” and Salamanca Place was a shadow of its current bustling self. The first chairperson was winemaker Claudio Alcorso, a key supporter of the arts in Tasmania throughout his life, setting up the collection of antiquities and contemporary art that has since become MONA. Alcorso was also Chair of the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board at the time, so from the beginning there was a connection between the Centre and the State’s broader cultural agenda.
Shape
The Centre is made up of a number of sandstone warehouses that spill directly onto Salamanca Place, but also connect laneways and courtyards that define the area. At the top of the cliff sits an historic cottage used for artist accommodation. Behind a continuous stone façade is a maze of spaces that house the Salamanca Arts Centre staff; a number of arts organisations such as Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Tasmanian Theatre Company and the Festival of Voices; artists’ studios; a range of gallery spaces; and a hive of small retail tenancies. While the physical infrastructure is complex, the organisational structure is quite simple. A board of nine governs the activities of the Centre and these are then driven by a small administrative team lead by Miller. The series of tenancies are just as important as the program. Each organisation or retailer is approved on the basis of demonstrable involvement with contemporary arts practice, bringing a curatorial approach to the Centre as a whole.
Neil Cameron, Conceptual map of Salamanca Arts Centre (not to scale)
Vision & projects
Leading SAC for almost 15 years, Rosemary Miller has a background in multi-arts bodies and festivals, with past roles at Arts Victoria and as Director of the Adelaide Fringe. As a result, she naturally fosters contexts that encourage artforms and organisations to mix and manages her team as one might a festival, retaining a core to run annual projects and maintain infrastructure, expanding as required for larger productions. Artforms that intersect within SAC include writing, theatre, dance, puppetry, film, sound, music, visual arts and craft.
The Centre runs an annual program that includes a curated visual arts show, curated installations within Kelly’s Garden and exhibitions within four galleries; but it is the longer term projects and structures that are at the heart of SAC’s current vision. Three interconnected and ongoing projects currently define its vision. First is Mobile States, which was set up in 2004, but seeded prior to this so that Miller could bring Sydney-based The opera Project’s The Berlioz—Our Vampires Ourselves on from its Brisbane Powerhouse season in 2001. Mobile States, managed by Performing Lines, subsequently emerged as a nationally funded touring consortium that includes PICA (Perth), Performance Space (Sydney) and Arts House (Melbourne). Its mission is to extend the season, audience and impact of original shows, by touring between these venues. SAC’s priority with this program has generally been to present challenging, hybrid performances, integrating learning and professional development opportunities for local artists wherever possible. This year’s program brings Chunky Move’s Keep Everything.
The second key program is HyPe, produced by Kelly Drummond Hawthorne, which incubates new, hybrid work in Tasmania. Recurring annually, this program draws in performance practitioners Deborah Pollard, Martyn Coutts and Aphids’ Willoh S Weiland as mentors and provocateurs for intensive arts laboratories. The program keys in with local festivals like Junction in Launceston, which will this year incorporate a pitching event for artists to develop funded projects for next year’s festival. Rather than present each idea that emerges from this program, SAC aims to support artists to find funding and forge relevant relationships. There are seven HyPe projects currently in development.
The third project, SITUATE, now in its second iteration, keys in with Tasmania’s bubbling festival landscape. Interestingly, this project navigates changes to the state’s arts ecology, brought on by the introduction of MONA FOMA, which is now seen as the leader in Tasmania’s festival scene. While Salamanca Arts Centre played a fundamental role in the first MOFO festival, it has refocused its energy back to its central purpose—to incubate risky, hybrid projects that push the bounds of artforms. SITUATE brings together emerging hybrid practitioners (sometimes rolling out of HyPe) with experienced events professionals to develop pitches for experimental public projects suited to local, national and international festivals. SITUATE currently has memoranda of understanding with six festivals and a number of projects in development. Miller is really excited by the projects underway: Giidanyba (Sky Beings) by Tyrone Sheather which will premier at Dark MOFO in 2015 and Plastic Histories by Cigdem Aydemir, currently showing at Vryfestival in South Africa. Critically, SAC doesn’t believe in pushing projects to fit particular annual timelines, but instead considers ways to give ideas the time needed to develop.
As MONA is on everyone’s lips when they think of Hobart and Tasmania these days, I ask Miller how she sees this diagrammatically. She gestures inward. She sees it as a place that people are drawn towards, a destination. Salamanca Arts Centre is also a destination, and a hub (as we speak on Saturday afternoon, we hear choirs in rehearsal for the Festival of Voices) but philosophically, as described by Cameron’s imagery, it is a place that thinks outwardly. Here, the focus is on developing artist careers and sending them outwards, with improved skills, a sense of autonomy, a desire to introduce risk into their practice and excellent connections.
Salamanca Arts Centre, Salamanca Place, Hobart, Tasmania
Thomas Greenfield, Leonard Mickelo, Patyegarang, Bangarra
photo by Jess Bialek
Thomas Greenfield, Leonard Mickelo, Patyegarang, Bangarra
Patyegarang is Bangarra Dance Theatre’s newest work, inspired by the relationship between the young local Aboriginal girl who shared her language, local Eora (Sydney) lore and knowledge systems with first fleeter botanist and astronomer William Dawes, unwittingly leaving a legacy for her people in centuries to come, through meticulous notes taken by Dawes.
Bangarra’s reckoning of Patyegarang is presented like a contemporary song cycle in short episodic vignettes. The performers don ochre and move in procession into the narrative, as we would coming/entering the dance ground in a more ‘traditional’ or community cultural context. The core narrative is presented in the manner of a dreaming, where time is expressed as abstract information or data, and although the sequence of events occurs in chronological order, the actual period is not as crucial as the events depicted.
From the beginning the movement differs slightly from the usual Yolngu inspired locomotive stepping. The women’s torsos still bend low toward the ground, heads slightly bowed, but the footwork brushes forward, away from the supporting leg, as opposed to the brush up flicking motion of sand toward the supporting shin/ankle. The men stamp in a simpler singular motion, or shunt, being propelled forward from the back foot, which is sickled with hip and knee slightly rotated outward, instead of an alternating Yolngu drop stomping motion. These subtle nuances may be lost on mainstream audiences, but are crucial, an indication of the different land and relationship to it, as is the local language featured in David Page’s score which is peppered with place names that have been appropriated since settlement.
I am pleasantly surprised by the intricacy of this contemporary vocabulary, which has definitely evolved over the past two decades with Stephen Page at the helm. His use of compositional space is most elaborate, busy, mirroring his use of the individual moving body.
Jacob Nash’s set is the yellow brown of sandstone, both cliffside, which appears to hold bodies in bas relief, and shore mound. This is broken up periodically by blood red banner/sculptures which fly in and loom large like ominous chandeliers. The shape of these objects is reminiscent of the NSW Aboriginal possum skin patterns burned into hides, which also remind me of visual artist Brook Andrew’s geometrically adorned caravans, Travelling Colony (RT107).
Patyegarang, Bangarra
photo by Jess Bialek
Patyegarang, Bangarra
The young dancers are beautiful technicians. Every now and again I catch a glimpse of the embodied performer: most notable was Tara Gower, the true fisherwoman, whose eyes look right down the barrel of her imaginary spear to catch her prey, among a cast performing a convincing dance about fishing, while simultaneously becoming the fish themselves in clever costumes which double as fishing baskets, created by longstanding Bangarra costume designer Jennifer Irwin.
Luke Currie Richardson impressed me with his lightning speed when shifting/transferring weight, now and then integrating a subtle quick flick of the head to emphasise the footwork when emulating the perennial hunters, in flight or fight mode.
It is the body in readiness and the eyes that focus with such intensity, penetrating the construct of the contemporary fourth wall between stage and audience, connecting with sincerity, believing and embodying, which I know from my training in cultural community dance, and am blown away by when I recognise its employment in the contemporary Indigenous form—although I was disappointed its presence was not as consistent in Patyegarang as in previous works .
I appreciated the textural shift as two bodies were scrubbed of paint, changing the dynamic, pedestrian in juxtaposition with the highly stylised vocabulary, the analogy perhaps referring to Patyegarang’s declaration that if she scrubbed she would never be white, or that we are the same underneath the colouring. Maybe it was a little too didactic to paint the bodies at all, along with the blood red cross symbolising death (from plague or massacre), or the holding of hands in assimilation. But some audience members found the metaphors mysterious and elusive.
Nick Schlieper’s lighting was epic, a constant wash of differing intensities, bathing the whole stage at all times. I couldn’t help but think that my empathy for Patyegarang and Dawes’ ill-fated relationship could have been intensified by creating a more intimate setting with pockets of light that only they inhabited.
This is a beautifully picturesque ballet, which serves a great purpose, to introduce Indigenous contemporary dance to a general public new to Bangarra while reintroducing an historical event which deserves acknowledgement. The work is a catalyst to pique curiosity, and if that curiosity is acted upon, if people are prompted to investigate further, then this show is well worth their seeing.
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Bangarra Dance Theatre, Patyegarang, choreography Stephen Page, music David Page, set design Jacob Nash, costumes Jennifer Irwin, lighting Nick Schlieper, dramaturgy Alana Valentine; Sydney Opera House, 13 June-12 July
During Reconciliation Week 2014 in Sydney two dance works by Indigenous creators offered insights into the challenges to their cultures—for Djuki Mala, the suicides of young men; for MAU, the diminished status of Maori women—each produced with the companies’ distinctive magic.
MAU, Stones in Her Mouth
Samoan choreographer Lemi Ponifasio, the director of MAU, the New Zealand-based dance company, and his collaborators, make haunting large-scale works inspired and nourished by the cultures of the South Pacific.
As in previous MAU works, Stones in Her Mouth conjoins traditional culture, dance and contemporary performance, heightening the melding with stage and sound design in which immersion and illusion are fundamental, such that, without narrative, we lose ourselves in a dream world that we acknowledge as sublimely other but also familiarly Western in its disorienting stagecraft.
Ponifasio carefully prepares his audience to enter the world of Maori women. We listen in protracted darkness to a growing, dark rumbling above which sonic pings evoke sub-marine depths (or “The fabric of creation/ The unfathomable space/ The internal void/ The conscious light/ The unravelling path…” in the show’s text). In the foreground a narrow strip the width of the stage floor glows with fluorescent intensity, blinding us to what lies in the void behind until the performers enter—their serene gliding (a MAU signature) made more magical by our not being able to perceive the dancers’ lower bodies. In a complementary image at the very end of Stones In Her Mouth, the floor shines like a black pool into which the women slowly wade, appearing to sink, as if spirits returning to their realm.
More than spirits, these women are like Maori goddesses: elegantly erect, imperiously inexpressive, whether as powerful individuals or groups moving in intersecting circles or, in rows facing us, deploying sticks or poi, the balls on strings that here suggest anti-gravitational, supernatural force born of ritual and shamanic power. That power is given voice and individual passion in the solo singing and reciting, alternating affectingly between anger and lament. Unfortunately there are no surtitles (which would perhaps diminish the stage magic) but the texts in the printed program can be read subsequently (or at festival.co.nz/stones-in-her-mouth/). The following program note explains the motivation for the work and the nature of its texts:
“Stones In Her Mouth was conceived as a leadership project of young women travelling and working in the community: in marae, schools and rural areas of New Zealand and in the world. …the women’s challenge is voiced through the M?ori language, genealogy, body, spirituality, ceremony, family and nature. They communicate their adaptiveness, resiliency, beauty and rage against the apparatus of power, oppression and even Western-style feminism. Stones In Her Mouth is based on writings of moteatea, the strong M?ori tradition of women as poets and composers. In Stones In Her Mouth, the chants, songs, oratory and calls are written and composed by the performers themselves.”
Movement is restricted to a set of recurrent motifs including vibrating hands and fingers, the aforementioned gliding and patterning, hands covering faces, single arms shooting upward and heads bent so far back that the dancers momentarily appear alarmingly headless.
One scene breaks the aura of ritual and its eerie but integrated cosmos: a lone woman in white, her hair loose, has been branded with a painted red cross, suggestive of the destructiveness of Christianity for Indigenous cultures; the same paint runs down her thigh, as if she has been raped. In the final scene, do the women return to an eternal spirit world or do they, as emblematic of beleaguered cultures, disappear forever into the void?
In his theatre of images, Ponifasio eschews narrative for suggestiveness. He and his superb lighting (Helen Todd) and sound designers (not specified) and the MAU performers sculpt a quasi-spiritual dream space, hinting at meanings, occasionally made specific (more so if you’ve read the text), and leave us awed to reflect on the fate of an Indigenous culture so close to Australia and paralleling the plight of our own.
MAU continues its relationship with Carriageworks, part of a three-year project, with two works from the company’s international repertoire (Stones in Her Mouth and, in 2013, Birds with Sky Mirrors, RT114, RT115), with the promise of an already much anticipated new work for Carriageworks in 2015.
Baykali Ganambarr, Wakara Gondarra, Djuki Mala
photo Mick Richards
Baykali Ganambarr, Wakara Gondarra, Djuki Mala
Djuki Mala
A full house of devoted Sydney fans exuberantly greeted Djuki Mala [formerly the Chooky Dancers] for the Elcho Island group’s touring autobiographical show in which they interpolate their dancing with projected interviews with the performers and the eloquent wife of their late founder Big Frank Dulmanawuy—“we are living his dream.”
A brief opening speech from company director Josh Bond introduced a sombre note, reminding us that Australia has the second highest rate of youth suicide in the world, with Indigenous young men dying at double the rate of their white peers. Each member of the group had been affected by the suicide of a relative. Lack of awareness, under-resourced support organisations and the absence of a sense of mutual responsibility, said Bond, contributed to the deaths. While the performance did not dwell on this crisis it underlined the motivation for the creation of Djuki Mala—to create careers for young men living in a remote small town with one shop, now engaged with their culture and with art from further afield to give their lives and others’ meaning. Filmed aerial views revealed the greater extent of the performers’ lives—the sheer scale of country, the beautiful landscapes on which they learn their Dreaming and to hunt.
Djuki Mala’s dances are hugely varied, ranging from their signature “Zorba’s Dance,” the umbrella twirling “Singing in the Rain” and a very funny, acutely observant Bollywood number (gold turbans, sunglasses, flashing teeth and their eight-man many-armed Goddess Kali) to a formal dance with spears, a long, low-stepping, stalking dance with moments of the hunter’s absolute stillness, and an exquisitely elegant and seemingly melancholy solo performed slowly and almost on the spot, subtly merging rowing and martial arts moves from a very low centre of gravity.
This Djuki Mala production—more informal than 2010’s intensely dramatic Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin) (RT99)—boldy persists with the group’s project, to give meaning to young lives, building awareness of the cultural complexities of Indigenous life in itself and within non-indigenous Australia. Djuki Mala are charismatic parodists of Western and other popular cultures, increasingly skilled dancers and deadly serious about their craft and the issues they confront.
Carriageworks, Concertgebouw Brugge and Tjibaou Cultural Centre: Lemi Ponifasio/MAU, Stones in Her Mouth, Carriageworks, 28-31 May; Djuki Mala, Seymour Centre, Sydney, 28-31 May
Lauren Langlois, Benjamin Hancock, Alisdair Macindoe, Keep Everything, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Lauren Langlois, Benjamin Hancock, Alisdair Macindoe, Keep Everything, Chunky Move
Over the years Antony Hamilton has been all too aware of what has accumulated on his cutting room floor. And he is not afraid. His new work with Chunky Move, Keep Everything, is a foray into this realm of choreographic scraps, and reveals what lies beyond the edge of our well-crafted stories. I spoke with him about his motivation.
Your decision to work with previously discarded fragments of choreography, was there a personal charge to this at all? Was it salvaging? Or scavenging?
Kind of both, really. But the work transitioned a lot from its gestation to its final form. And what I really became aware of was a fascination with collecting things, and a larger meta-narrative of history and documentation: the way we follow a single, written truth about who we are, all defined by the past. But that’s not reality—history is a cultural construct, built out of fragments of ideas. We’re told there is a logic to it all. But we create logic with meaningless material from the past. So I felt compelled to step outside of all this and assess the human trait of categorically going through moments and events and ‘making sense’ of it all.
Hence the impulse to linear narrative, which you try to resist. How do you feel about traditional forms of narrative and archetype, the great monolithic meanings? Is there any nostalgia there?
Not nostalgia. I do have a reverence for the situation they’ve created though, which is expressed in the ritual of going to performance. People seat themselves in the theatre as part of an audience, awaiting performers. We surround ourselves with that comfort and familiar context, but the moment the lights go down, there is uncertainty.
So what consideration do you give your audience in Keep Everything, in terms of possible discomfort and the risk of chaos?
Well, for one thing, my work is conventional in its set-up, with the division between audience and performer, so the comfort this gives is pretty hard to break.And that gives me a great deal of freedom. I try not to filter much for my audience, but give them a direct portal into my thinking. The challenge is in framing the material. I want to present things with a wash of clarity, not just show a mess of what’s in my head.
As for chaos, I use it illustratively to show how it can become part of the norm, the cultural fabric of a situation, a world or a space. I weave it in so it creates dynamics and texture in the work, and somehow it all hangs together. Somehow meaningless things can become meaningful.
You address the myth of progress in this work through the notion of evolution, charting the human story from apes to robots and back again.
In my pieces there is quite a lot of the evolutionary tale, covering a large time scale. But this isn’t something I plan—the work just keeps falling back into it…So yes, it becomes a capitulation to linear narrative, but a playful and poetic one in the way it loops back around to the simian condition. All civilisation is forgotten and we’re back to the beginning again. And it’s fun, not serious.
In the work one of your performers delivers a brief, documentary-style account of the human story through time. What is your intention there?
That happens only very briefly at the beginning, and it is intentionally lightweight, quite jokey. Really it points to the ridiculousness of the gravity of words in the time we live in. I’m very interested in that moment when humans become self-reflexive, and that becomes their folly. They gain language and critical thought, develop opinion and everything falls apart, because they have too much information and too much self-importance. That moment shows how we’re living in a myth—the social and cultural constructs we create are a mythology, but we can’t see them when we’re immersed in them. It’s quite silly, but it’s also quite beautiful, because it gives us meaning.
How about the reference to robots, technology and futuristic possibilities?
Again, I probably didn’t consciously choose that. I know it does read that way when you watch it. But what I’ve learned in making performance is that when you focus on the larger picture unfolding hopefully you can let your consciousness escape those overbearing ideas. The functional side helps with that; you don’t over-bake it because you’ve got a job to do…Keep Everything tends to jump away from logic and moves into a space that is dream-like over a longer period of time. It lets the audience see these bodies as physical entities rather than humans they’ve been watching throughout the piece.
Lauren Langlois, Benjamin Hancock, Alisdair Macindoe, Keep Everything, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Lauren Langlois, Benjamin Hancock, Alisdair Macindoe, Keep Everything, Chunky Move
At the other end of the spectrum, in charting the so-called evolution of the human species, did the notion of human animality influence you much? In terms of choreography?
It’s tricky to talk about choreographic choices to illustrate things, they do, but I’m not driven by that. The choreography is instinctive and there’s no great attempt from me to make it illustrative. Rather than animality influencing it, my own direct experience as a dancer was informative. Daily assessment of your moving body as a dancer will just point you in that direction. To have and constantly observe that daily experience of your body, drawing your attention to it constantly really draws your attention away from humanism, because when you focus on the blood and bones, you’re both more and less than that.
How about the darker aspects of the work? If we reject the myth of progress, are we in danger of trading it in for the story of collective dehumanisation or self-annihilation? Did you find that kind of vision of doom feeding into your work at all? It is, after all, in the air.
No, not really. The piece is coloured by a darkness, but the visual world is open, uncluttered, sparse. There is a bit of rubble on stage but it is quite a free world in a way.
Those images of destruction can actually be quite liberating too. Annihilation can be cathartic, a release. This kind of stuff has been documented in war-time scenarios: when whole societies collapsed there was a sense of weight being lifted off their shoulders—as though ‘we can start again’ and all the old attachment to what was important is gone.
Can you talk about your choice to work in multiple mediums?
I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ll do anything I can do to get away from a compartmentalised view of performance elements. I want to destabilise that and draw the functions together in a meaningful way. In the end it all serves the work.
In Keep Everything, I aim to strip away the sense of the body as human and reveal it more as a component in something, perhaps an agent of another purpose rather than that of its own ego. After studying dance for a long time, I came to realise I wasn’t actually choosing to do it; I’m a servant to the work. I’m removed from this. So I became interested in revealing the body as agent of other activities. The performers build sculptures on stage. They’re part of a greater activity.
We live in an age of multifarious stimuli, multiple overlapping and unstable contexts and cultures. More than any other point in history our minds are exposed to incongruous and jarring information. Many are burdened by this. If we ‘keep everything’ in the net of our perception, is this somehow a burden?
Possibly. But really we are hardwired to filter. These days, filtering is everything and Facebook is God. To be honest, I never meet people who are responding to a thousand different things they’re exposed to. Instead, we tend to do what we’re told and follow one truth. If anything, the burden these days might be the idea of missing out, the feeling that we really ought to be doing it all.
Chunky Move, Keep Everything, director, choreographer Antony Hamilton, national tour concluding,13-16 Aug,? Sydney; 20-24 Aug, Melbourne
In A Delicate Situation, Lina Limosani attempts a considered and rigorously composed drama using dance and visual imagery. She commenced the work on an Asialink residency at Rimbun Dahna, near Kuala Lumpur in 2008. At this time Limosani became intrigued with Malaysian mythology, in particular the demonic Pontianaks, the vampire ghosts of women who die during childbirth. She turns the image of these figures into a personification of death and we witness a middle-aged woman in a changing relationship with the demon.
Performers Carol Wellman Kelly and Suhaili Micheline Ahmad Kamil are well cast as the Woman and Death respectively and intriguingly different as dancers who work sensitively and skilfully together. The visual elements are beautifully chosen and realised. We move from death, a realm of darkness, white material and struggling body, to a 1940s British home in Malaysia. Each visual field is sparse but bold with the influence of puppetry-based visual theatre evident. The bodies move in relation to the visual elements. This is just one of the satisfying aspects of the show: the rigorous composing of the dancing between all the elements—dancer and dress, dancer and dancer, dancer and objects, furniture and floor.
Each ‘scene’ is so strong and evocative that the work, even though organised as narrative, is experienced more as a set of intense images, metaphors and physical explorations. A body struggles into a suspended white dress. One dancer completes the picture proposed by the other, an ignored Malaysian servant intuiting a British woman’s desires. A dancer rearranges busts (three dimensional death masks) on a sideboard and the other dancer’s head is caught up in this activity. One dancer inhabits a room in which the furniture moves, eventually leaving the space on a carpet runner. The ghost or death figure keeps transforming, becoming at one stage a large white sheet with long, spindly arms and hands drawing in the older woman.
What was arresting and strangely moving was the shifting power dynamic expressed between the two figures in the drama: from British colonial matron blind to her Malaysian servant’s presence to tormented woman struggling to complete domestic tasks for her dead husband present as white bust (death mask) to woman tenderly held by death. The interplay of the colonial story and the drama of a woman’s relationship with death illuminated both narratives with death as foreigner, as servant, torturer and nurse—a colonial story as one of the unrecognised dependence of coloniser on colonised and then a story of the terrorising of a coloniser by the colonised and of the colonised’s great kindness to the coloniser.
The exacting choreography was intelligent and finely honed, clearly emerging from a well worked-through interplay between investigation of situation, ideas and the physical skill of the performers and choreographer. Because of the potency of the double play of narrative and imagery the piece lost a little momentum towards the end when the story of the relationship with death was privileged over the colonial narrative, but this is a very minor quibble. This was dance theatre of great originality, thought, depth of feeling and relevance.
Adelaide Festival Centre: A Delicate Situation, director, choreographer Lina Limosani, dramaturg Andrew Brackman, set, costume design Eve Lambert, sound design Hardesh Singh, lighting Neil Jensen, Space Theatre, Adelaide, 22-24 May
James Batchelor’s Island is as remote an experience as its name suggests. Not only is it a work that reveals spatial relations and manipulates our perceptions, but it also presents a world of singular and slick, futuristic discomfort.
In this space there are no seats. One black wall is adorned with a few streaks of silver that zigzag up and away. Over erratic rasps we hear echoing trills and beeps. Between two rows of transparent screens is a dancer, with runners and shorts, anorak, powdered hair and eyebrows all in desolate white. Her movements run circuits based on tight pivots, precise and robotic, and yet with an unhurried, human calm as she moves over two rows of neon-lit hoops on the floor.
Island speaks of isolation, but illusion as well. The screens behind this figure (Bicky Lee) set up a hall-of-mirrors effect, so that looming behind the dancer is a succession of her ghost-like reflections, ever-diminishing, hovering over the hoops; and there in the muddle we also see ourselves, staring back. We are watching a world fragmented, ever-detaching. But we’re also free to roam around it. At a step, the spectres vanish and Lee is revealed as a tangible body. A few steps more and she slips again into other, subtle distortions.
The soundscape (by Morgan Hickenbotham) rises aggressively now. Lee is joined by Batchelor and Amber McCartney, in the same aseptic adventure wear. A rhythmic, high-pitched whirr grows louder and faster, asserting itself with a swerve and swing through the standing bodies, from ankles to hips, to shoulders and down again. A shrill and circular nightmare, the textures of sound and movement merge unnervingly. The effect is potent, but the shocking volume of sound makes me wonder, why the severity?
Batchelor cites among his influences the works of famous pessimists like Aldous Huxley and John Gray, who have promulgated anti-humanist views about the fickleness of the human mind. The installation of mobile screens (by architect Ella Leoncio) does make a point about this. Their mirror effects at times shatter all sense of unity; and since they are moved to new layouts between each section of Island, their changeability is the most interesting feature. Island ‘reads’ like an ironic and self-reflexive study of illusion: a demonstration of Gray’s notion—borrowed from Taoism—that illusion is inescapable, and the best we can do with our susceptible senses is be aware that they feed on such tricks.
Amber McCartney, Island
photo Gregory Lorenzutti for Dancehouse
Amber McCartney, Island
What becomes of ‘humanness’ in the midst of all this? Another irony in this work is that, for all our freedom to roam and get close, the dancers remain untouchable and inscrutable. Something human is lurking there, but beneath layers of effects and a wall of harsh sound the dancers gaze at us without expression, with post-human faces we recognise and yet don’t.
In the final section, each dancer draws from their pocket a small potato. A small consolation, perhaps? Each shuttles theirs through the air, staring as it rebounds between bodies and screens, navigating the re-ordered space. If not consolation, then amusement? Or anachronism? This island is full of surprises. It conjures its world with enough force to make the mundane strange again.
Island, concept, choreographer James Batchelor, performers Amber McCartney, Bicky Lee, James Batchelor, architect Ella Leoncio, sound artist Morgan Hickenbotham; Dancehouse, Melbourne, 11-15 June
It has taken only about a century, a mere blink of the cosmic eye, for physicists to condense the principles that regulate the behaviour of all forces and forms of matter in the universe into a series of fundamental laws and theories. The pursuit of a master equation, a ‘theory of everything’ that would unite all of these hypotheses, is among the major scientific projects of the current era.
The best candidate we presently have for such a unifying theory—one that may be verified within the next few years by particle acceleration and detection experiments at the CERN laboratory—is String Theory, a theoretical framework that replaces ultramicroscopic point particles with one-dimensional strings. The American theoretical physicist Brian Greene has described these strings as “dancing filaments of energy.”
It is, no doubt, this kinematic quality [kinematics: the motion of points, bodies and systems without consideration of the causes. Eds] which attracted ADT’s Garry Stewart to the idea of exploring theoretical physics through contemporary dance. While a Thinker in Residence at Deakin University’s Motion.Lab in 2012–2013, Stewart began to develop Multiverse, a work exploring the microscopic interactions of matter and energy via the macroscopic intermingling of live bodies and 3D stereoscopy. For the completed work, which features ADT dancers Kimball Wong, Samantha Hines and Matte Roffe, audience members don 3D glasses just as they might at a new action or family movie. They are also met by a warning, displayed in large, friendly letters prior to the start of the show: “Please look away if the 3D starts to make you feel sick.”
It comes as something of a relief that Multiverse does not induce nausea in this writer and, furthermore, does little to remind him of the biliously excessive uses to which 3D technology is so often put in contemporary cinema. CG animation is, however, as central to Multiverse as it is to a Michael Bay blockbuster. We see a computer-generated image—a sort of orange-coloured galaxy in cross-section that appears to loom out of the darkness into the very centre of the space—before we see a human body. When one does emerge, the choreography, mirroring the violent agitation of subatomic particles, is convulsive, the motion of arms and legs seeming to be propelled from external rather than internal energies. A second dancer appears (it is often difficult to tell them apart) and the pair shudders around beneath the 3D object as it continues to expand and revolve. The effect is bettered by a later sequence in which Hines and Roffe seem to wrench apart a dense matrix of red points of light, the dancers suddenly godlike in their easy manipulation of what may be a star field or a cloud of electrons.
The graphic design (Kim Vincs, Daniel Skovli, Simeon Taylor, Kieren Wallace, Bobby Lin, John McCormick and Peter Divers) impatiently cycles through multiple geometric shapes and topographies, constantly playing with both our perception of depth and our sense of where the work is situating us at any given moment—embedded within the nanoscopic universe or projected into the garish mise-en-scènes of alien cityscapes and spaceports. It is not always clear which of these planes Stewart is attempting to invoke.
In a post-show Q & A, Stewart said that Multiverse’s visual language is an invented one, a reflection of his desire to eschew the typical aesthetics of TV science programs. The result is, however, not so much original as an original hybrid. Brendan Woithe’s electronic soundscape, for example, clearly channels Vangelis’ Blade Runner score and there are moments when the graphics veer uncomfortably close to IMAX documentary-style blandness or, worse, the visual banality of computer screensavers. In this schema, the dancers are occasionally swamped, their demanding floor work unable to hold our attention over the show’s most persuasive optical artifices. But they are assisted by Catherine Ziersch’s light-reflecting costumes and the use of registered video which partially integrates the dancers’ bodies with the graphics. I would like to have seen how this contest between our privileging of the live and the mediatised might have played out had Stewart elected to raise the dancers up off the floor, a decision that may have presented enhanced opportunities for the ‘interaction’ of Wong, Hines and Roffe with the 3D images.
As it is, though, Multiverse is a surprisingly fluid and cohesive experiment in extending Stewart’s familiarly technologised contemporary dance vocabulary. It never feels like a work in progress even if, as was made clear by Stewart’s Q & A responses, the company feels the 3D stereoscopy is still in need of a good deal of refinement. It may be, in fact, that this imperfectness is a virtue, conceptually consistent with our still-developing understandings of the quantum universe and the strange, vibrant choreographies of matter and energy that fill it.
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Multiverse, Australian Dance Theatre, director, choreographer Garry Stewart, lighting designer Damien Cooper, video designer Matthew Gingold, Space Theatre, Adelaide, 9-12 July
Something kind of awful, but also a little bit funny, happens to one of the performers at the end of the performance of Philippe Quesne’s Next Day. This production is the latest in a series of works for young performers made in collaboration between Flemish company CAMPO and international theatre-makers; previous works have been with Gob Squad and Tim Etchells, for example.
In Next Day, the performers, all aged between 8 and 11, have been engaged in a series of fantastically constructed activities that are always on the verge of spilling over into chaos: fending off an alien attack, building a city out of oversized foam blocks, assembling an orchestra from a disparate range of instruments and musicianship. In the curtain call, they excitedly race onto the stage several times, wild and rambunctious, careening and bounding around the foam blocks.
And then, the inevitable happens. One of them bounces off one of the blocks a little bit sideways, misjudges the landing, and curls up on the stage clutching his ankle. He looks plaintively at us, not putting on a brave face to make us feel better, but clearly surprised and hurt and wondering why this happened to him in front of all these people who are supposed to be looking after him. In the audience, mostly adults, is a sense of confusion. Do we keep applauding? Should one of us help him? Has our responsibility shifted from offering aesthetic appreciation of a performance of childhood to what feels like a real need to assist? And yet, the seats we’re in are designed to suggest that our role is to stay where we are, so that’s what we do, even if we’re no longer quite sure what to do with our hands. Another child tries to help lift the injured boy but is waved angrily away, until eventually, after a few moments that feel like an eternity, an adult supervisor from the production comes to the stage and helps the fallen boy off stage. Relieved that it’s someone else’s responsibility after all, we resume our applause, and leave the theatre to go about our business.
This moment from near the end of this 20th iteration of the biennial LIFT is an unintentional but succinct demonstration of this year’s tagline: “Where the city meets the stage.” After an hour of brilliantly vivid visual theatre, those excruciating few moments served as a reminder that the world of action on the stage, and the world that starts where we are sitting and extends out through the foyer to the streets, are infinitely far apart and yet made of the same material: the living, breathing, tangible stuff of imagination animates both spheres. With its ambitious international program, the month-long festival reminds us again and again that the world of artifice and dreaming and the world of politics and agency are inter-nestled, folded layer upon layer, so that what is off-stage is always partly on-stage, and vice versa.
Opus No 7, Moscow School of Dramatic Art Theatre—Dmitry Krymov Laboratory
photo Natalia Cheban
Opus No 7, Moscow School of Dramatic Art Theatre—Dmitry Krymov Laboratory
Dmitry Krymov Lab, Opus No 7
This interweaving is thematised in Dmitry Krymov Lab’s Opus No 7, an opulent and dextrous work combining song, puppetry and physical theatre in a slowly accumulating spectacle. The work unfolds in two independent but complementary halves. The first finds a ragtag group of apparently placeless or displaced persons sifting through fragments of memory: half-remembered stories about people with Semitic names, piles of children’s clothes and shoes, photographs projected onto blank silhouettes, and scraps of paper that engulf the audience in a wind-driven maelstrom.
The second half tells a more particular story, that of Dmitry Shostakovich negotiating his relationship as an artist with an ever more brutal Soviet state. This story is depicted in a swirl of images that oscillate between whimsy and horror, and, though occasionally madcap, there’s a surprising spaciousness to the tempo of the work, with long lulls punctuated by frenetic outbursts that match the rhythms of the composer’s Jewish folksong-inflected music. It’s a vivid depiction of the way in which the making of art is always embedded within its political context, and how even an apparently apolitical aesthetic practice such as formalist music is informed by these contexts: even in the sequence of musical notes, state power and resistance are co-present. What’s more, this idea is manifest not only in the work’s thematic content, but also the circumstances of its presentation here. It is shown at LIFT, the program declares, as “An Official UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014 Event”: a harmless enough schema, no doubt, but the juxtaposition of this work’s Stalinist imagery and the ongoing repercussions of nationalism under Putin’s Russia, felt in Ukraine and beyond, give this blandly deferential phrase an ominous undertone.
Belarus Free Theatre, Red Forest
A contemporary version of the contest between authoritarianism and artistic expression is exemplified by Belarus Free Theatre, famously exiled from their native country. At LIFT they present Red Forest, an ambitious project that began with the company undertaking research throughout the world in sites of political, economic and ecological oppression. The ‘real stories’ of the people they met have been adapted into a fabric of wordless choreography, accompanied by narrative voice-over and live music. It’s an exciting and commendable initiative to see this company take the ways of working it has developed in response to its own political climate and apply them to new contexts and situations. But the results here are mixed, often reproducing stereotypical images such as women as perpetual victims of violence and indigenous peoples as wise truthsayers. Their work is strongest when the theatrical elements are not illustrative of a larger metaphor but have their own internal force, as in the ensemble’s powerful use of song, but more often than not the distinctiveness of the various stories and contexts is lost as they are collapsed into the same melodramatic dilemma in which victims are interchangeable.
Turfed
courtesy LIFT
Turfed
LIFT-Street Child World Cup, Turfed
This is in contrast with some of the other works that draw on ‘real stories’ in the festival, where the particularity and individuality of the experiences being drawn upon are more lucidly illustrated. Working at a more modest scale than Belarus Free Theatre is a project called Turfed, specially commissioned by LIFT in partnership with the Street Child World Cup, a parallel tournament that calls attention to the rights of street children by bringing together from around the world a number of those who have experienced living on the streets. Now in its second iteration, it also features an artistic program in which an ensemble of children who have known life on the streets worked with director Renato Rocha over 10 months to make Turfed. Where Red Forest paints with broad strokes, Turfed creates a lyrical and affecting collage of visual images and abstracted fragments of narrative, seizing on poetic detail (the rhythm of rolling suitcases, the memory of a missing friend, the exuberant intensity of scoring a goal). In keeping with the festival theme, as a meeting of city and stage the work is also striking for the way in which it acknowledges, and uses to its advantage, the fact that an international festival like LIFT is no less imbricated than international sport within the swirling forces of globalisation.
El año en que nací/The year I was born, Lola Arias
photo David Alarcón
El año en que nací/The year I was born, Lola Arias
Lola Arias, The year I was born
Similarly, it is the complexity of detail that comes vividly to life in Lola Arias’ The year I was born. It takes a very similar approach to Arias’ previous work My life after (2009), in which people who were born during the Argentinian dictatorship told the story of that time through their own experiences, finding creative ways to theatrically reconstruct events from their autobiographies. In this latest work, the stories come from Chile’s dark years under Pinochet, but in the meeting of life and art, the humanity and ingenuity of the theatrical endeavours in this present moment hold their own in the face of atrocities of the past. Smartly composed, full of contradictions and playfully inventive, it foregrounds the circumstances of its own making. Like the festival as a whole, it reminds us that theatre is not just a place where we can reflect on our real lives, but also where we might actively compose them.
LIFT, 2014: Philippe Quesne and CAMPO (France/Belgium), Next Day, Unicorn Theatre, London, 26-28 June; Moscow School of Dramatic Art Theatre—Dmitry Krymov Laboratory (Russia), Opus No 7, Barbican Theatre, London, 4-14 June; Belarus Free Theatre (Belarus), Red Forest, Young Vic, London, 12 June-5 July; Turfed, director Renato Rocha (Brazil), co-director Keziah Serreau, Hackney Downs Studios, London, 9-21 June; Lola Arias, El año en que nací/The year I was born (Argentina and Chile), Southbank Centre, London, 24-26 June
Under the artistic direction of Sam Routledge, Terrapin Puppet Theatre has continued its focus on puppetry that embraces new technology. The Tasmanian-based company’s new production Big Baby, devised by Routledge and playwright Van Badham, is predominantly a non-verbal work, brought to life by puppeteer/performers Bryony Geeves, Maeve Mhairi MacGregor, Kane Peterson, animation and video (see the review).
I spoke with Routledge, who has had an extensive career in puppetry, including as a member of performance group My Darling Patricia and in related works such as I Think I Can, the miniature model train interactive installation featured at recent Australian arts festivals (RT120, p15 & 35).
Whose idea was Big Baby?
I worked with Van on Hard Rubbish (2013) at the Malthouse, which was a Men of Steel show and she was the dramaturg on it. I found she had a great sensibility for puppetry and working non-verbally. I went to her with the idea, saying, “Let’s do a show about a big baby,” and we developed everything together from there. Apart from the spoken text, of course, which was entirely Van. [The production features three poetic monologues]
I’ve always made work that tells stories non-verbally. I feel like puppetry does that really well. For this process Van and I talked over email and then we had a week workshop, just the two of us. Once you know what the story’s going to be and therefore what the puppet needs to do, then [you] have the puppet built. Then everything comes from what that puppet can do.
How was the puppet made?
We commissioned Katrina Gaskell, who’s a very experienced Melbourne puppet-maker. We had it made with a moving mouth, but the way the production developed it didn’t end up speaking. You plan for everything and then some things don’t eventuate, but at least you have the option. When we remount the production maybe the puppet will vocalise.
The show has physical performance elements, such as a clowning influence. Is that something you like to incorporate?
I want to work with performers who are comfortable working physically. The puppet will always move in a heightened way so the performers are also moving in a stylised or heightened way; then we’re going to see them as part of the same world. Part of the puppet being made to live comes from the performers imbuing it with life, looking at it in a way that it’s alive, and often clowns and physical performers have the ability to do that.
It seems to be a trend that the puppeteer is becoming more and more visible in contemporary puppetry?
Ideally, it’s great if the puppeteer has a role in the narrative, apart from just bringing the puppets to life. I see no purpose in entirely hiding the puppeteers because they’re definitely there. Actually not hiding the puppeteers can make the audience experience more authentic. They see that there’s no trickery at work—this puppet is being brought to life in front of their eyes and someone is doing it.
The element of trickery is perhaps to be found in the animation and filmic elements of the show. Do you often use video or is Big Baby a departure for you?
Terrapin’s really focused on puppetry and new technologies, so in Big Baby we use a live feed from an HDMI video microscope. And we also use Leap Motion, which is a digital puppetry device. It’s like a motion-sensing device in the way Kinect is for the Xbox, but just using your hands. So the baby that you see in the show on screen is being manipulated live by Bryony. The microscope made a lot of sense because [the story is] about things that are usually very small being big and seeing the beauty in things that are small, and tiny especially. Also, I’m continually interested in the miniature. In the theatre if you can [show the] miniature it opens our understanding of things that we might normally gloss over or forget.
How do you work out what kind of show is suitable to pitch to different audiences?
An audience of children is different from an audience of children and adults [as in the case of Big Baby, which is designed to be seen in theatres rather than schools]. [The poet] Ted Hughes—because he did some work for children and some work for adults—talks about when adults go to the theatre they seek an anaesthetic. They want something that’s entertaining that will not unsettle them…That barrier does not go up when they go to see children’s theatre. They say, “This work is not for me. This work is for children.” Therefore you can speak to adults through theatre for children.
I do always, when I’m making work for children, have the adults in mind, and I have no problem if an adult has to explain something to a child in the theatre. The child and the adult together in the theatre [make for] a really interesting dynamic. I hope it opens up a conversation about what [the story] means and why it happened.
There’s an interesting problem in puppet theatre of whether to have work for children that’s too complex or work for adults that’s too simple.
I’m interested in [Terrapin productions] being sophisticated, original work for children that is ambitious in what it does with form. Puppetry at its heart, I think, is a very humanist art form. It preferences what we are capable of over what machines are capable of, actually. When a child sees a puppet brought to life, hopefully it says that humans are capable of the impossible. The ability for someone to create wonder with just their hands, bringing something to life, is greater than or equal to the ability of someone to do that with technology. And for me it’s not through ignoring technology that I can make that statement, it’s putting technology and puppetry together in the same production.
My practice has always been in puppetry, so I’ve always been a puppeteer. After I graduated from university I worked with Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image and was an assistant stage manager so I could do some very small moments of puppetry. And I went to Korea and worked with a children’s theatre company there for six months, as a puppeteer. I’m very committed to actual puppetry being front and centre in the work that the company creates.
A man and woman meet and fall in love. She’s a messy and impulsive scientist and he’s a kindly neat freak who’s prepared for any eventuality.
Encountering each other at a bus stop, he takes out a scarf to get warm and has a spare one for her to borrow. They go to the movies, she spills popcorn and later has a look at it under the microscope, revealing the landscape of tiny things to which her life is devoted. The pair share this moment and, in no time at all, they’re expecting a Big Baby (well, they’re expecting a normal size one probably, but life has other ideas).
This unusually long prelude at 10 minutes was inspired, says director Sam Routledge, by the pre-story in the Pixar animated film Up (2009). For me, there’s also a touch of French New Wave cinema. It works for two reasons. First, the two performers, Bryony Geeves and Kane Peterson, are charismatic presences on stage and have no trouble making us believe they are in love, even without the words for realistic character development. Second, they use their physicality in a comedic, expressive way preparing us for the puppetry that’s to follow.
Sadly, while Dad is outside the delivery room, a massive clock marking every dreadful second, Mum is in trouble. A doctor comes out to disclose that she didn’t make it through the delivery. It’s a disturbing beginning to a show for children, but of course there’s precedent. Fairytales often start with the loss of one or both parents. Suffice it to say there was no audible crying at the opening night performance I attended, so I’m going to assume the balance between melodrama and tragedy was correctly struck.
The baby appears as a sophisticated puppet designed by Katrina Gaskell. Unusually large, demanding and full of curiosity and energy, it’s never referred to as either ‘boy’ or ‘girl,’ which makes him/her difficult to talk about in a review, but it’s an interesting conceit. As an adult audience member, I’d like to see that notion explored a little. Yet child audiences easily accept that babies are not gender-specific; perhaps that says it all.
So Dad is left with a baby to look after and life to get on with, and the story proper begins, with the performer who played Mum returning to animate Big Baby, thereby giving a sense of ongoing connection. Of course, ghostly puppeteer/mother presence aside, it’s not easy for the father and child. The relationship is clearly a loving one—they have little rituals like rubbing noses—but they’re temperamentally so different that the Big Baby might as well be an alien. When Big Baby begins to feel threatened by a new presence, an ‘evil’ vacuum cleaner that Dad brings into the home, s/he runs away into nature. There s/he somehow grows even bigger, and returns to the city now a Giant Baby. It doesn’t really matter why the baby grows (it seemingly has to do with Mum’s spiritual influence), it’s a fun idea.
This show is performed by Geeves, Peterson and Maeve Mhairi MacGregor, who takes on the broadly comedic role of a childcare worker who is traumatised by looking after Big Baby. At the heart of the piece is the expressive, lovable Baby character, but additional elements of animation and digital puppetry provide textural layers and atmosphere.
Aside from a couple of poetic monologues, the show is non-verbal. As such, music and sound design is especially crucial. Composer Heath Brown adeptly takes us from whimsy to melancholy and back again and shifts into pop culture mode as required, as in the climactic showdown scene between Big Baby and arch-nemesis, the vacuum cleaner. It’s a Godzilla-scale battle, complete with slo-mo ‘bullet time’ moments and the inventive use of miniatures. It’s an absolute crowd-pleaser.
Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Big Baby, director Sam Routledge, writer Van Badham, designer Jill Munro, composer Heath Brown, lighting, audio-visual design Jason James, digital puppet designer Matt Daniels, video Sam Routledge, Matt Daniels; Theatre Royal, Hobart, 4-6 July
Drew Fairley, Skye Gellmann, Jack and the Beanstalk
photo Heidrun Löhr
Drew Fairley, Skye Gellmann, Jack and the Beanstalk
A new aesthetics of childhood is emerging with some of the key contemporary performance companies of the last decade. Mammalian Diving Reflex’s ground-breaking Haircuts by Children contemplated the agency of children and the vanity of adults by reversing the conventional power dynamics of the hair salon. Italy’s Compania TPO’s multimedia works enfold children in the interactive, reactive environments of collective story-building, and stalwarts of the postmodern stage Forced Entertainment have just announced their first work for children: The Impossible Possible House.
In Australia, My Darling Patricia recently applied their signature cross-artform aesthetics to the visually immersive The Piper for the 2014 Sydney Festival. And alongside designated festivals for children (Come Out and Out of the Box) and spaces for child creativity (Melbourne’s ArtPlay), there is a genre of works for babies emerging with dance artist Sally Chance’s This Baby Life and Nursery.
These creative frames inevitably contemplate the cultural figuring of the child as a symbol of purity, morality and nascent humanity in the contemporary media landscape. They also recognise and become entangled with the truism that seems to come with societies of affluence: child audiences are a fickle and yet lucrative market. In a broader socio-political context which has witnessed seismic reconsiderations of the legal and moral agency of the child, as in Belgium’s recent legalisation of euthanasia for terminally ill children, the question of how these varying theatre practices interpret the imaginative and perceptual faculties of children is perhaps at the heart of this vibrant artistic milieu.
Jack and the Beanstalk, the final iteration of a three-part collaboration between Chiara Guidi of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Sydney-based performance makerJeff Stein in partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre is, if not a frontrunner, then an originator of this scene. Guidi’s Experimental Theatre for Children based in Italy has been operating since the 1990s and in 2010 she ran The Art of Play, a cultural exchange at Campbelltown, during which she spoke at length about her vision for the sympatico aesthetic between the worlds of childhood and theatre: both are equally invested in the reality-effects of make believe [RT100]. In 2012, Guidi returned to develop Jack [RT108] and in 2014, she came back to complete it.
Skye Gellmann, Jack and the Beanstalk
photo Heidrun Löhr
Skye Gellmann, Jack and the Beanstalk
Jack and the Beanstalk begins with a foreboding stillness. Jack and his mother appear to lie dead under a box while a strangely masked figure draws an ominous circle around them. The sonic environment is already sparse and stretching, the lighting dim, the mood dark and hesitant. From the outset this image is not easily readable: the familiar lightness of contemporary fairy tales is undone with an image that hangs like an uneasy promise over the whole work: do they die in this version? Then Jack moves, and the process of barter between beans and cow begins.
We understand that Jack is poor, his mother bids him to sell the cow and in an athletic exchange between Jack, his mother and the bean seller, Jack’s wrestle between conscience and desire is made tangible. His mother, of course, is furious and berates him for ‘dreaming.’ The audience, holding handfuls of beans, are encouraged to throw the beans “against Jack’s dream:” there is no supper for Jack tonight. This interactivity with the audience introduces a dynamic that is expertly built across the work, conducted by the deviously masked Katia Molino as the ogre’s ‘handler,’ who is neither friend to Jack nor the audience, betraying both at every turn.
Guidi spoke in a recent RealTime video interview of her interest in the fable for its spatial metaphors: the beanstalk draws a line between heaven and earth, dream and reality and the beans are much like theatre itself: a box from which magic unfolds. She also referred to Jack’s negotiations with the giant as a series of initiations into adulthood. Perhaps the fable can be read as a coming of age narrative in which we all learn an ambiguous moral lesson. Jack is a kind of illegitimate protagonist, he steals from someone without cause, and as an audience we are left to wrestle with our own responses to his acts of dreaming and desire.
If our consciences are pricked on behalf of Jack’s actions, then so are our senses. Building on her earlier experiments with chorality and space [RT90], Guidi also referenced her use of sound as a visual and structural device. Live musicians in the work (Trevor Brown, Veren Grigorov) play Max Lyandvert’s sparse, staccato and at times thunderous composition, but Guidi here also refers to the musicality of her pared back dramaturgy: tight physical sets and truncated dialogues apparently aim to access the ‘core’ of the fable, leaving nothing to waste.
Jack and the Beanstalk
photo Heidrun Löhr
Jack and the Beanstalk
The world Jack dreams is an incredible cardboard structure (created by Sydney’s Erth) that stretches to the skies as a series of hidden doors and windows. Objects exit and enter from these sinister little peepholes. At various stages spectators become bold enough to visit the giant who lives above; in their absence, the cardboard machine spits out remnants of story—a box with letters, a human skull and bones. Strange slinky worm creatures flop and poke about the stage. The children barter with the handler, collecting the giant’s discarded debris, becoming willing victims to his voracious appetite. While the golden goose majestically appears as an image of sensitive wonder amid the darkness, it is not long before the ogre himself manifests as a chilling apparition shrieking the kind of blackness you just might find in nightmares.
How to justify the death of children, the greed of children, their bravery, sensitivity, complicity and fearlessness? The work is macabre, it feels, in the historical tradition and conditions in which fairytales themselves once needed to be imagined. Perhaps it carries that historical necessity cuttingly into the present. Throughout, we are required to contemplate the prospect of a world in which the child is not always a winner, or even right. The children in the room, for one, seem unnervingly content with this bleak but complex image of themselves.
Campbelltown Arts Centre, Jack and the Beanstalk, director, writer Chiara Guidi, facilitator, producer Jeff Stein, performers Skye Gellmann, Katia Molino, Drew Fairley, Christa Hughes, Nadia Cusimano, musicians Trevor Brown, Veren Grigorov, sound design Max Lyandvert, set design Erth Visual and Physical (Scott Wright, Steve Howarth), Lighting Clytie Smith, Mark Haslam; Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 30 May-7 June
Works in this year’s Festival TransAmériques in Montreal appeared bound by the desire of each creator to express a strong thesis. In the dance program, three works in particular chose to tackle very clear concepts, from the validity of revering an artistic canon to the meaning of masculinity in today’s world. The following works shared an intense, almost relentless physicality and a total commitment to their conceptual investigation.
Christian Rizzo, D’Après Une Histoire Vraie
D’Après Une Histoire Vraie (Based on a True Story) takes its inspiration from a visit to Turkey 10 years ago, during which Rizzo witnessed Turkish folk dance. As such, the movement vocabulary for the work is drawn extensively from Rizzo’s research into traditional dances of the Middle East, the Magreb, France and Spain. He is incredibly adept at deconstructing the choreographic structures of these dances and rearranging them without diluting their original intent. The performers weave in and out of continually changing duets and trios to the rhythms of two drummers playing contemporary drum kits, revisiting not only the motifs of the dances they appropriate but also rock ’n’ roll tropes as they headbang, long hair and beards flying, to the driving beats.
With eight male dancers, the work is inherently an investigation into contemporary Western masculinity through juxtaposition of the handholding and physical closeness of folk dance, cultural stereotypes and stigmas around those, and the injection of hyper-masculine rock. Rizzo is a master of structure, pattern and timing, and at just over an hour the work is easy to watch, but it’s conceptually thin and needed to ask far more questions of itself.
Catherine Gaudet, Au Sein Des Plus Raides Vertus
Fast becoming one of the darlings of the Montreal dance scene, Catherine Gaudet makes work with an edginess that seems to be a hallmark of Québecois art. Au Sein Des Plus Raides Vertus (Within Steeper Virtues) is not necessarily an exploitative work, but there is enough of a fascination with exploitative relationships to induce deep discomfort. The performers, two male and two female appear topless, and the combination of close physical contact with an almost continuous disregard for one another in favour of staring at the audience (not to mention the gradually increasing layer of sweat on bare torsos) leads to a sense of sinister sexualisation of the performers’ interactions.
Religious iconography is alluded to constantly, particularly in the opening moments when the performers advance slowly in a group, singing in Latin and working with micro-gestures reminiscent of Renaissance religious paintings. A sense of demented rapture dominates the work as a male performer gently strokes the other male’s hair while the women violently slap one another’s naked arms and torsos, all gazing disconcertingly at the audience, or when three performers crawl forward, yelling and smiling, illuminated by yellow light from below.
The constant integration of conflicting aesthetics is what makes the work so brutal. Beautiful bodies gyrate while making zombie-like inhalations and rolling their eyes. A man sits down abruptly to resentfully plait a woman’s hair. Power dynamics shift constantly, with both genders abusing one another and themselves to achieve some sort of power- or pleasure-based goal, though it was difficult to discern which. At one point the women force the faces of the two men together until they kiss, then wrench them apart when they become overly amorous. This sex/violence dichotomy was key to the work, but prevented engagement with the subtleties of the choreography.
While more than merely an attempt to shock, Au Sein Des Plus Raides Vertus limited its scope by undertaking only a simplistic investigation of poisonous relationships and Christian morality.
Built to Last, Meg Stuart
photo Eva Wurdinger
Built to Last, Meg Stuart
Meg Stuart, Built to Last
Built to Last marks a formal departure from much of Stuart’s previous work. A witty investigation of cultural institutionalism, the work’s strength is in the hilarity it derives from portraying human fallibility and its questioning of Western cultural history through mashing up contemporary performance with music from Beethoven, Stockhausen and Rachmaninoff.
A giant assembly-kit tyrannosaurus skeleton, an isolated white room and a massive planetary mobile dominate the space. Over the first half hour the music builds to a level of intensity that the choreography tries vainly to match, instead achieving sublime bedlam. The performers jump across the space or repeatedly onto their knees, run, fall and tear apart the dinosaur. Finally one performer gets the attention of the sound operator and calls a halt, explaining somewhat sheepishly, “We are motivated by enthusiasm and love,” earning him a few chuckles.
Sheepishness is a recurring state as these mere humans continually fall short of the power of the musical masterpieces, even as the work critiques the concept of a Western artistic canon. When three performers enter the room-turned-vitrine dressed in bizarre tribal-futuristic costume we become amused viewers as these ‘exhibits’ struggle to find the best positions in which to manufacture some sense of historic gravitas. Later the room becomes a platform for one of the performers to play God, standing powerfully on top of it as she journeys through the planets, still ducking as they swing around her head. When the largest planet bursts open, showering the space with small foam balls, we see humans become the willful masters of the universe—the performers hold up the balls and drop them, then return to their fragile selves as they too fall to the ground.
The choreography also investigates cultural ‘greatness’ within its own form, revisiting an Yvonne Rainer solo and creating an ironic Isadora Duncan-esque duet that is almost impossible to see through an ingenious excess of stage fog ‘accidentally’ released by one performer. At other times the choreography uses the relationship between music and sharp gestures to inexplicably create humour. It’s an incredibly varied work, expertly performed and continually questioning.
Though the degree to which these works achieved their conceptual goals varied dramatically, all three demonstrated a level of artistic rigour. Regardless of whether or not they hit their marks, all raised important questions, reflecting a strong year of programming at Festival TransAmériques.
FTA, Festival TransAmériques, Montreal, Canada, 22 May-7June
A sense of the breakdown of natural and human-made systems was all-pervading at this year’s Adhocracy, Vitalstatistix’ curated hothouse of new art and performance. It seemed fitting that, as the program enters its fifth year and the company its 30th, this year’s talks, showings and open studios looked both backwards and forwards, each grappling in some way with how the recent past has challenged our species’ capacity to survive and thrive in the years ahead.
Looking backwards: 1984
UK artist and researcher Sophie Hope’s 1984 is an ongoing, global project which uses the dinner party as a format for exploring intersections between art and politics in the year 1984. Aside from George Orwell’s novel, the year seems arbitrary to Australians—Hope was thinking of Margaret Thatcher’s galvanising effect on London’s overtly political artists when she chose it—but the dinner which took place at Adhocracy, curated by Steve Mayhew, nevertheless saw a lively and provocative exchange of ideas between arts workers and a former politician—Ollie Black, Rob Brookman, Eileen Darley, Annie Newmarch and Anne Levy. This iteration marked the first time Hope has permitted one of her dinners to be held in the presence of an audience, a decision that turned out to be providential; an oversight led to the dinner not, as is usual, being audio recorded for Hope’s ultimate use in a radio piece, an installation and a publication. The conversation, which ranged freely and, owing to the frequent replenishment of wine glasses, sometimes intemperately, around issues such as Marxism, the Cold War and gender equality, will live on as memory only, as recollections of recollections.
Heat
In Hissy Fit’s Heat, the notion of the deviant, transgressive woman was investigated through pop culture representations of women in conflict with each other in female prison dramas and B-movies. Into this mix, devisers/performers Emily O’Connor and Natalie Randall also throw the choreography of Greco-Roman wrestling, their three showings combining discussion, video and their own ad hoc demonstrations of the ancient combat sport’s drags, hugs and headlocks. The marriage is a curious one—at this early stage bringing together problematisation of female gender norms with the strongly homoerotic physicality of Greco-Roman wrestling doesn’t suggest an aesthetically or conceptually cohesive whole. The work clearly has a long way to go.
Looking forwards: Black Market
In pvi collective’s Black Market, a worldwide economic collapse has precipitated the rise of a thriving underground trade in bartered goods and services. The participatory, still-developing work cast its audience members as hustlers in this brave new world, mobile phones thrust into our hands to facilitate the exchange of our own goods—pens and pencils, bus tickets, lipstick, Panadol, as well as jokes, hugs and other acts of human solidarity—for unknown but enticing rewards assigned categories including ‘medicine,’ ‘porn,’ ‘courage’ and ‘weaponry.’ Our prices set and earphones installed, we drifted out onto the Port Adelaide waterfront, pvi’s prototype app instructing us on how and where to complete our deals. A bold and playful intervention into the d siscourse around the failure of market economics, Black Market nevertheless posed a nagging question: is iPhone technology, contingent on our current social, economic and technological structures, the most appropriate platform for a work concerned with showing us the effects of the collapse of precisely these structures?
Somatic Drifts
Grounded in horticulture and neuroscience, Cat Jones’ full body experience for one person at a time was an undoubted highlight of this year’s program. Gesturing towards the emergent ontologies of a post-human future, Somatic Drifts sought, through sensory and aural immersion, to radically unsettle the sense of self of participants, who had both human and plant identities progressively imposed over their own through sound, aroma, touch and visual feedback. My initial trepidation was quickly forgotten, the work proving unexpectedly affecting in its therapeutic, closely guided dislocations of sense and self as well as its emotive engagement with ideas around the fostering of empathy between species. Still in its first stage of research and development, the progress of Somatic Drifts will be keenly monitored by this writer.
Future Present
photo Heath Britton
Future Present
Future Present
For many, the weekend culminated in the final session, Future Present: artists, primary industry & climate change, a commissioned, interdisciplinary project led by Rosie Dennis of Urban Theatre Projects. A diverse panel of non-artists (including Federal Member for Port Adelaide, Mark Butler) assembled on Adhocracy’s last, chilly night to share their hopes and fears around an irrevocably climate-changed future. For the previous two weeks, ten local artists had been engaged in a residency that saw them undertake field trips to meet South Australian food producers who, having lived all their lives with the direct impacts of prolonged natural drought, are now on the frontlines of battling anthropogenic climate change. Monday night’s conversation was predictably saturnine, the mood offset only by the panel members’ ironic wearing of colourful leis. It felt good to talk, to find ourselves if not hopeful then at least happy while in the fraternal presence of artists and non-artists alike who grasp that the way forwards may necessarily entail the way back, back from the brink, back to the people and the earth.
Vitalstatistix, Adhocracy, curators Paul Gazzola, Jason Sweeney, Lara Torr, Emma Webb, Waterside Workers Hall, Port Adelaide, 7-9 June
Nerida Matthaei, Stephen Quinn, Caligula, The Danger Ensemble
photo Dylan Evans
Nerida Matthaei, Stephen Quinn, Caligula, The Danger Ensemble
Although widely divergent in form and intention, both The Danger Ensemble’s new show Caligula and Linda Hassall’s verbatim piece about Australian war veterans, The Return, grapple with the brutal impacts of the end of empire: cultural spasm and futile wars.
Brisbane wunderkind Steven Mitchell-Wright opened Caligula with a thrumming soundscape, blinding lights that shimmered and warped and a back wall of performers wearing white paint. Not solemn Butoh bodies, but carnie cut-outs, with the heads and limbs of the performers poking out of plaster-cast statues of their naked bodies. The soundscape peaked and the statues lifted, suspended for the duration of the show, while the lights dimmed to reveal a signature Danger Ensemble mod-pop white set, re-worked into a gallery catwalk formation.
A clowning routine that relays a potted biography of Caligula is followed by 20 or so vignettes: monologues, dance sequences, improvised games, pop songs and further routines exploring the narcissistic and decadent excesses of Caligula’s Rome and our own contemporary culture’s obsession with sex and power through fetish, consumerism, pop culture and violence.
The costumes by Wright and fashion designer Natalie Ryner were so fashion forward they had my teeth grinding in envy. There were dozens of costume changes and the mash of Roman and contemporary fetish references held the show’s loose format together, providing the dramaturgical ballast needed to navigate the show’s piecing together of late twentieth century cultural references (Nick Cave, the Smiths, Camus and Charles Manson) and material drawn from Roman history.
The coup de théâtre was certainly the revelation part-way through the show that the perimeter inside the catwalk was full of thousands of transparent plastic cups that squashed and squeaked as the performers waded in and out, danced across and through them and in one of the show’s truly eerie moments provided a rubbish dump for the corpse of a skinned horse.
The Return
courtesy the artists
The Return
There were moments of intense theatrical pleasure: Brisbane feminist rock idol Lucinda Shaw as a bare-breasted Jesus with a headdress of bloody syringes singing Nick Cave; Chris Beckey as the sinuous Caligula asking plaintively if he would be remembered; an ecstatic monologue by a pizza delivery boy declaiming the joys of fisting. But when you expect the edge it takes a lot to deliver it and many of the ensemble’s set-pieces by now are familiar: the white set, the canny pop song re-delivered, the lofty balcony commentary with its cryptic mash of existential and canonical texts.
“Certainly not History” was the show’s tagline but the collation of canonical material had none of the dexterity evident in the manipulation of the visual iconography. In the most ironic of twists, this made the show feel like a history lesson—a beautifully designed, postmodern history lesson but one no less bossy in its earnest desire to draw parallels between the cultural and political excesses of Caligula’s Rome and our own polyglot, bloody and narcissist contemporary culture.
Indeed, bloody was the experience of watching The Return (presented by artists and researchers from Griffith University), which like Daniel Keene’s The Long Way Home (RT 119, p31) for the Sydney Theatre Company and Australian Defence Force, was performed by veterans as well as professional actors. The raw power of Hassall’s uncompromising aesthetic gave the work, at its best, a sort of herculean credibility and affect. A returned solider tells the story of a bomb attack where his best friend was killed and he carried his sergeant’s brains on his body across the long, despairing day as they sought medical aid. A mother tells us she considers her son’s suicide a combat injury, the wound just took longer to kill.
The show draws power from its long development process with the veterans, independent from the ADF—included are didactic sequences about the compromised role of the ADF in veteran support. However, The Return suffers from its outrage, with long, relentless sequences where the set is endlessly built and rebuilt and much of the non-verbatim material feels dogged and one-dimensional.
Indeed, since the Vietnam War Australians have tried to separate personal politics from the structural violence endured by soldiers. But somehow a piece about the impact of war without an analysis of why we went to war is too easy. Dangerous works point the finger back at us for our role in putting the men and women who patrol the walls of our imaginary empires in harm’s way.
Judith Wright Centre: The Danger Ensemble, Caligula, director, designer Steven Mitchell Wright, designers: Benjamin Hughes and Natalie Ryner, JWC Performance Space, 3-12 July; The Return, writer, director Linda Hassall, design Fiona McKeon, producer Michael Balfour, Professor, Applied Theatre, Griffith University; BEMAC Theatre, Queensland Multicultural Centre, Brisbane, 25, 26 June
“I died when I was nine months old.” The words, spoken by a synthesised voice, come out of the near darkness in which a lone man sits in an electric wheelchair.
The choppy, Americanised intonation is eerie in the gloom. On large screens behind the sentence slowly appears in Bliss symbols from the ideographic writing system. The man in the wheelchair is Jem (Anton Sagrillo) and his profoundly disabling cerebral palsy has already killed him once.
His second life, it would seem, could be worse. He has a best friend, the able-bodied Possum (Brenton John Shaw), a girlfriend, Wendy (Kathryn Hall), and two unstinting carers: grandmother Sylvia (Jacqy Phillips) and mother Jackie (Tamara Lee). But Jem wants to go to university, and his chances of living long enough to realise this dream are a fraction of what they are for the general population. It seems more than probable that, buried deeply beneath his defiant joie de vivre, Jem holds as pragmatic a view of his own impermanence as anyone.
In development for six years, Eye Music grew out of a series of conversations between playwright Pat Rix and Jem’s real life analogue, Jeremy Hartgen, which took place in the last year of Hartgen’s life. Under Edwin Kemp Attrill’s quietly ambitious direction, Hartgen’s biography is transfigured into a dynamic soap opera that freely interweaves the conventions of text-based and musical theatre. Wi-Fi technology is used to connect Sagrillo’s Bliss board (the performer too has cerebral palsy) with Nic Mollison’s dexterous AV design that integrates text, Bliss symbols, video and animation.
Along with composer and musical director Alies Sluiter’s songs—most of which are given to tenor Alistair Brasted to sing as Jem’s ‘inner voice’—all of this delivers a boldly successful account of the sound of the life of Jem’s mind. The name Eye Music hints at the difficulties inherent in bridging the communication gap between people of differing abilities, but the deployment of both aural and visual storytelling technologies, as well as enhanced disability access in the form of Auslan interpretation and audio description, effectively democratises Jem’s experience of physical impairment. The cruel dissonance between his restrictive, high maintenance biology and his unencumbered mind is most touchingly shown through a fantasy he shares with Possum about building a raft and sailing away, sans wheelchair.
Eye Music, Tutti
photo Sam Oster
Eye Music, Tutti
For all its enjoyable whimsy, Rix’s script does not fail to interrogate the profoundly contentious relationships between disability, faith, sex and assisted suicide. Jem is seen to independently navigate all of these, in the process delightfully upending the stubborn taboo that applies to sexual intercourse between disabled bodies. Within the context of the play, though, Jem’s loss of faith is the altogether more shocking transgression. The devout Sylvia rages like an uncomprehending child as Jem’s cognisance of his own mortality—and that of his friends as they are one after another consumed by physical and existential torment—turns him towards godlessness.
In the final scene, Jem’s own suffering has become too much for him to bear. A hydraulic winch lifts his lifeless body out of its earthly prison and into a vast, white armchair around which has been built the raft of his dreams. It is a transcendent, immaculately choreographed moment, reminiscent of the death of David Lynch’s John Merrick as he embraces the incorporeal as liberation. The sense of consolation that follows does not lie in the fact that we know him to be ‘going to a better place’ but rather that knowledge of its non-existence will no longer trouble him.
Tutti Arts, Eye Music, writer Pat Rix, director Edwin Kemp Attrill performers Anton Sagrillo, Jacqy Phillips, Tamara Lee, Roy Stewart, Brenton Shaw, Kathryn Hall, Alistair Brasted, Elliot Galvin, composer, musical director Alies Sluiter, lighting, projection Nic Mollison, designer Manda Webber, State Opera Studio, Adelaide, 22-31 May
The monologue is one of theatre’s base elements. With just a little fussing around in the chemistry set, the simplest solo performance can still create sparks, fire, the smell of crackling air. Or it can squat there before you like a lump of lead for an hour or more. Can anything really new be done with the monologue as a mode? Three recent Melbourne works hinted at the possibility.
Grounded
George Brant’s Grounded doesn’t immediately announce itself as terribly exceptional, but a production by Red Stitch Actors Theatre proved one of the company’s most memorable outings to date. The work’s materiality is minimal—the already small playing space is bare of props and the design is merely a subtle rendering to the walls suggestive of the interior of a military vehicle. The entire 80-minute work is performed by a single actor (Kate Cole) who does not leave the stage, and barely moves around it. Yet this is a work whose astonishing strengths come from precisely its manipulation of the immaterial components of live performance.
The subject matter itself is arresting enough. An American F16 fighter pilot stationed in the Middle East falls pregnant while on furlough back in the US and finds herself reassigned to the cold world of drone warfare. Brant’s treatment of this premise is outstanding, too. Striking images pile up from the outset: morning sickness while piloting an F16; the reasons pregnant women are barred from flying (think ejector seats); the contrast between the endless blue sky of the pilot and the tiny windowless unit of the desk-bound drone jockey.
So far, so conventional. But it is through the dynamic relationship between Cole’s mighty performance and Matthew Adey’s equally rich lighting design that the work truly soars. Cole delivers a character grounded in more ways than one. This is an earthy creature, despite her profession. Her swaggering braggadocio and coiled-spring energy are well beyond the Top Gun clichés that could have reduced the work to pastiche, and the giddy acceleration of the work’s early moments brings to mind that other great monologue that overflows with life, that of Molly Bloom’s “yes I said yes I will Yes” at the end of Ulysses. That the audience can be dragged into the slipstream of a character who also defines herself by the slaughter of war is testament both to Cole’s bravery and Kirsten von Bibra’s precise direction.
While voice, gesture and rhythm work to produce a fertile sense of presence here, of life in fullness, Adey’s lighting offers an equally charged atmosphere of transcendence and the vacuum that is both ethereal and deathly. The pilot’s job is one of heavenly surveillance and this notion of bodiless witness from upon high—and deadly judgement thereafter—is a theme throughout the work. Adey’s almost imperceptible modulation of light often makes terrific use of after-images, giving Cole a faint halo as your eyes move slightly, or causing her skin to take on unearthly hues. The avenging angel at this work’s centre is literally brought before us, and that after-image in particular lasts well after the lights are finally out.
Angus Cerini, Resplendence
photo Sebastian Bourges
Angus Cerini, Resplendence
Resplendence
Angus Cerini’s Resplendence is another work that takes place in a void but is far from empty. Here an unnamed man in a black bomber jacket fixates on a source of sharp light to one side of the stage—a television set most likely—and spends a Butoh-ish amount of time working his way across the space towards it. So quotidian is his situation that it might as well be the fridge light, really, but as usual Cerini’s command of language and its unconventional deployment renders the everyday with mythic undertones.
The man is angry at the world, or riven by anxieties about it, and as with many of Cerini’s characters his body-wracking inabilities to quell these responses are a visceral reminder of masculinity’s more threatening aspects. When the man does leave his house to hunt down some takeaway, it’s hard not to muster some deal of dread, at least if you are familiar with a typical Cerini work.
But this is not a typical Cerini work. Midway through its unfolding, its central figure witnesses a tragedy that violently rips him from his solipsism. He is forced to act—or, more importantly, to react to an event that occurs before him rather than in the world he projects from the safety of his own head. It’s a riveting moment, given that Cerini has proven so adept at bringing audiences into those disturbing worlds before. Here he illustrates what prisons they are by allowing us a brief glimpse past the bars at a patch of daylight somewhere down the hall. To describe this as optimistic would be wrong—the man never even dreams of a key to his cell, let alone escapes—but it is a work that signals a hurdle leapt by its maker with verve and grace.
LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV, Phillip Adams BalletLab in collaboration with Andrew Hazewinkel
photo Jeff Busby
LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV, Phillip Adams BalletLab in collaboration with Andrew Hazewinkel
LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV
Phillip Adams’ LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV is an even more radical departure from standard practice for the artist. It is a series of ‘portraits’ by real subjects touched by HIV over the past 30 years, and Adams has almost completely eschewed his role as choreographer in favour of a kind of curatorial position, establishing the conditions within which these non-professional performers present their own stories. He has collaborated with visual artist Andrew Hazewinkel throughout the process, and the results are each a kind of monologue not limiting themselves to the theatrical definition of the mode.
The work itself is hard to categorise. The agents on stage don’t perform, as such, but rather present their stories—as rambling monologues in the more traditional sense, as solo movement pieces, as pre-recorded audio. Most centre on an object that does not symbolise HIV but somehow speaks to someone’s experience of the virus, from pill bottles to record covers to a laptop. Between vignettes, medical and historical facts instruct or remind us of the incredible changes that have occurred in both Australian society and the status of HIV around the world in only a few decades.
These are not finely calibrated performances, and they are not carefully arranged by a puppetmaster working to shape the audience’s experience into some kind of narrative. Indeed, while some of the sequences are surprisingly literal, an equal number are abstracted, difficult to discern or simply odd. Some commentators were left baffled or bemused by the succession of voices that did not seek to justify themselves, but were simply made available to be heard. Some compared it to a kind of workshop, and perhaps it was. As theatre not too much was accomplished, though many tears were shed. But whatever it was, as it drew to a close I was surprised to realise after two hours without interval, I could happily have kept watching for the rest of the night.
Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Grounded, writer George Brant, director Kirsten von Bibra, performer Kate Cole, design Matthew Adey, composer Elizabeth Drake, Red Stitch Actors Theatre, 11 June-12 July; Resplendence, creator, performer Angus Cerini, dramaturgy, additional direction Susie Dee, designer Marg Horwell, composer Jethro Woodward, lighting Andy Turner, Lawler Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, 12-22 June; Artshouse, Phillip Adams BalletLab, in collaboration with Andrew Hazewinkel and community participants from Melbourne and regional Victoria, LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV, Meat Market, Melbourne, 17-27 July
Melita Jurisic, Hugo Weaving, Macbeth, Sydney Theatre Company
photo Brett Boardman
Melita Jurisic, Hugo Weaving, Macbeth, Sydney Theatre Company
Powerfully performed and provocatively staged, Kip Williams’ Macbeth for the Sydney Theatre Company is bracingly emotional and corruscatingly memorable. It’s almost a perverse pleasure having seen many productions and films of this tragedy, to witness so intimately the Macbeths’ intense passion for each other, their mutual delight in the prophecy of kingship for Macbeth, the extreme discordancy over whether or not to act on it and, all too soon, their utter, quaking, near dumbfounded horror at having executed the deed. Even the resolute Lady Macbeth is aghast when she returns the knife to the scene of the crime, hovering over the body of the bloodied Duncan as if afraid to put the weapon down.
In an emotionally rich, finely graded performance Hugo Weaving’s Macbeth startlingly alternates between growing confidence (his voice deepening, his forceful rationale for further killing growled), eruptions of conscience (the protracted half-howling that stifles his speech in the presence of Banquo’s ghost), panicky anger over the uncertain meanings of the witches’ prophecies and, finally, his trumpeted over-reliance on them. His lament for his dead wife is sad but distracted, his “Tomorrow, and tomorrow…” expressly bitter, devoid of any sense of self-doubt. He fights with enormous energy, falls exhausted, drags himself to Macduff, grabs at his enemy’s legs and dies.
Melita Jurisic’s Lady Macbeth complements Weaving in physical energy and emotional volatility: she weeps over his letter, is playfully girlish upon his homecoming; she is profoundly shaken by her husband’s breakdown during the banquet and alarmed and defeated by his new murders, plotted without telling her. We are well prepared for her demise. Unfortunately, in the sleepwalking scene Jurisic ratchets her voice up from mezzo to a contorted cry, swallowing the words. There is a chilling moment however when passing by Macbeth, whom she doesn’t see; she utters, “Here’s the smell of blood still,” leans towards him and is repelled by what she senses.
Weaving and Jurisic run with the beat of Shakespeare’s poetry, Weaving initially with a kind of formality that suits the soldier but is soon emotionally undone, the performer expertly holding the poetic line. Jurisic near intones her words (as she did so strikingly in Barrie Kosky’s Mourning Becomes Elektra, STC, 1998). These complementary deliveries are in tune with the ensemble’s commitment to chiming the play’s insistent couplets and aphoristic utterances that point ‘the moral’ (and all its ironic ambiguities), recalling the Morality Plays so frequently evoked in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
Macbeth, Sydney Theatre Company
photo Brett Boardman
Macbeth, Sydney Theatre Company
A DIY Macbeth
Peter Brook’s The Empty Space is prominently quoted from in the printed program. In Williams’ production, the audience shares the unadorned stage with the actors performing in close proximity to us, the vastness of the auditorium behind them. The theatre is not simply an empty space but one in which we find our usual position reversed—we might become players of a kind, or not. The effect of the reversal is certainly eerie—the sheer emptiness of the auditorium and our presence on stage echoes the multitude of utterances in the play about the loss of order, the confusion between real and unreal, the blurring of day and night and the putting on of appearances.
But before the auditorium comes into play, after some third of the performance, the conceit of ‘the empty space’ is compounded with the deployment of a complementary one—DIY theatre. Save for a long trestle table, various chairs, a simple crown, a regal cape, plastic raincoat and a ruff, the stage is bare of props. Others are added in due course: a single knife ominously handed scene to scene, character to character, plastic plates and wine glasses, black table cloth, cakes, candles, bowls of flowers, cups of stage blood and, finally, a large sword and an Elizabethan courtier’s outfit. The three weird sisters plunge their heads into water-filled Tupperware trays, burbling out their prophecies; later they use desserts to the same end in a grim bit of comedy that turns nasty with Macbeth lashed to a chair. The actors as stagehands manage the props (Macbeth sets the table for the banquet, “play[ing] the humble host”) and perform any number of roles, against gender and age: Paula Arundell is Banqo, Kate Box is Macduff, John Gaden plays King Duncan, an old man and Macduff’s child in a tender and metaphorically rich scene with Arundell, now as Lady Macduff. These effective transformations, with minimal if any costume change, confirm our sense of coherent society ravaged and undone—small tragedies within the play’s overarching cosmos.
However, this space is not so empty. Lighting constantly transforms it, creating new perspectives and ambiences and a world at once intimate and vast. A massive, eye-wateringly dense fog saturated with reds and pinks fills the stage after the murder of Duncan, until dispersed by banks of large electric fans aimed at us. The actors are head-miked, even when in close proximity to us. The sound score rumbles insistently (as in so many productions these days) but with a disturbing musicality: discrete pinged notes in moments of pathos and high emotion or a sub-melodic assemblage of distant possibly brass chords. This empty space is filled with the immersive sounds of cinema: miked voices and soundtrack. At times I wondered what un-miked voices might have done for our sense of immediacy and, especially, distance in the exploitation of this empty space.
I was surprised that greater use was not made of the auditorium: the conceit was nowhere near exhausted. Sometimes, the simplicity of the notion was effective: prior to his death, as other events unfold or he momentarily steps into them, Macbeth stands still on the forestage for a long time, back to us, staring into the auditorium, minus an audience—already on his way to becoming the “poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more.” Even in battle he is alone, tightly bound by two pulsing spotlights, furiously brandishing his long sword against invisible enemies. In the end, Macduff, lifting the depleted Macbeth’s head, pours a cup of blood over him.
Weaving’s gripping performance and fine support from the ensemble are framed by the artifice of the empty space and DIY theatre. There are times when the first feels insufficiently embodied or contradictory, while the second borders on a ragbag of devices, but among them are powerful images: simply choreographed, ritualistic moments (“Is this a dagger which I see before me…?”), the swelling fog from which steps the Porter, Macbeth bound by the witches and doused in their dessert mix, and the sparkling, falling snow in which Macbeth will leave traces of the dance of his defeat.
How well do these conceits serve Shakespeare’s play? Admirably for the most part, imbuing the production with a necessary sense of disorientation and giving body to the tragedy’s insistent metaphors of chaos and illusion with essentially simple theatre magic. They underline Macbeth’s fatal dilemma. Believe the witches. Witches are wicked. Don’t trust them. Take action yourself. But still believe.
The final image of the play has the actors dressing Malcolm, Duncan’s son, in full courtly finery. He faces the auditorium, not us, and is crowned. Order, monarchical and theatrical, has been restored, as it had been when, after the anxious times that followed the death of the childless Elizabeth I, James VI of Scotland (a believer in witches) was crowned James I of England.
In his intriguing contemplation of theatre as a not so empty space, Kip Williams conjures in Hugo Weaving a great Macbeth—initially a man deprived of a “single state” in his terrifying oscillations between guilt and determination; later an entirely resolute murderer, shorn of self-doubt but a great poet of our common existential fate.
Sydney Theatre Company, Macbeth, writer William Shakespeare, director Kip Williams, performers Hugo Weaving, Melita Jurisic, Robert Menzies, Paula Arundell, John Gaden, Kate Box, Eden Falk, Ivan Donato, designer Alice Babbage, lighting Nick Schlieper, sound, composition Max Lyandvert; Sydney Theatre, opened 26 July
Malcolm Whittaker, Bjorn Stewart, Jumping the Shark Fantastic
photo Lucy Parakhina
Malcolm Whittaker, Bjorn Stewart, Jumping the Shark Fantastic
Jumping the Shark Fantastic starts at 7pm or at least it is supposed to; in actual fact it starts at ten past. The starting time has been determined by artist Malcolm Whittaker in consultation with the local community.
During a residency at Campbelltown Arts Centre, he has asked people what would constitute the best theatre show ever. Having compiled the responses and printed them on fluorescent paper (the community wants the show to be “colourful”), this evening he is taking to the stage to describe and to some extent enact their wishes.
The show begins with Whittaker in a bear suit, shuffling across the stage to “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” As the song finishes, he removes the bear head and drags out a cardboard box containing props, including a six-pack of beer. He explains that the best show he ever attended started with an actor offering the audience a drink, so he is doing the same now. Having explained the premise of the show, he presents his results.
The best theatre show would, he informs us, start not too early but not too late; it would start on time, and it would take place in a theatre a mere 10-minute walk from home. Every seat would be the best seat in the house and there would be an empty seat between each, should you want some personal space. Tickets are $15 and no one has missed out. The show itself, he reports, would start with a kabuki drop—simultaneously a large red curtain falls with a flourish. Whittaker continues: the curtain would part, as indeed it does, to reveal a cat on its hind legs, which it does not. Instead, we see a male performer in a suit reading out the instruction. This play between narration and presentation continues throughout the show.
Together with five other performers, Whittaker conjures—which is to say describes, suggests and hints at but never fully reveals—the best show ever. The characters include a farm boy and his farm girl crush, a convict, a milliner, two sex workers and a Holocaust survivor. The action is banal (a kitten has a bad dream and a mother cat comforts it) and brutal (there is a car crash in which two people will actually die, though it is performed here with toy cars), with the occasional plot twist (not specified, but enacted as a murder-suicide). The actors are professionals (our Cate would appear), amateurs (turns out they are just as good as Cate), real (an actor playing a victim of bullying would be revealed as the actual victim) and unreal (actors playing actors playing actors).
When combined these elements will produce a show that will be simultaneously authentic (a live feed of a public bathroom projected onto the back wall) and meta-theatrical (‘the canon’ would be undermined in a thoughtful, original way) or both (the fourth wall would be broken, only for a fifth even more impenetrable wall to emerge). Of course, the fun of the current show lies in the match or mismatch between the description and the action: two actors play the mother and baby cat, which is amusingly absurd, but when the theatre is described as plunging into total darkness, it actually does. In another fascinating moment, an actor refuses to read out the description Whittaker hands to her. Intriguingly, reviewers are not mentioned, which I presume means that they are either absent or awestruck.
Like post’s recent Oedipus Schmoedipus (RT119), Jumping the Shark Fantastic combines several contemporary performance trends: it deconstructs the canon, references pop culture, includes members of the community through consultation and/or casting and pursues a deliberately and deceptively amateur aesthetic. Unlike Oedipus however, Jumping never risks staging a full-blown scene of joy, violence or catharsis. Instead it stays safe, meaning that it’s clever and entertaining but ultimately too slight to be fully satisfying. Perhaps it’s all the pop culture but on the way home I remember a line from the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Thou?, when Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) offers Everett (George Clooney) some roast gopher for dinner, to which Everett replies, “No thank you, Delmar. A third of a gopher would only rouse my appetite without bedding her back down.” Not unlike a staged discussion of theatre.
Campbelltown Arts Centre: Jumping the Shark Fantastic, lead artist Malcolm Whittaker, performers Valerie Berry, Brett Johnson, Doug Niebling, Bjorn Stewart, Christie Woodhouse, lighting design Emma Lockhart-Wilson, sound design Preston Hawkes; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 11-12 July
Darwin has seen a resurgence in high calibre original theatre in recent years, thanks in no small part to Brown’s Mart who have co-presented and supported numerous local theatre makers to develop and produce new work. Sarah Hope’s first full-length play, The Hoist, is the latest new work supported to production stage by Brown’s Mart, here with Corrugated Iron Youth Arts as co-producer.
This well-crafted and tightly directed play features a strong ensemble of five young actors. It begins with a ‘fast forward’—on a high balcony, the actors each step forward in turn into the light to speak a line which is at once revealing about a character and also intriguing. These lines are satisfyingly repeated at the play’s end and taken further.
Exploring friendship, dreams and change, The Hoist deals with the lives of teenagers in Darwin. It’s a coming of age story that avoids sentimentality while celebrating elements of youth culture. The dialogue is fast-paced and funny and sometimes deliberately stereotyped as Hope plays with current catch phrases which expose teen insecurities, cruelty and manipulation.
The play is centred around a Hills Hoist, that iconic Australian version of the clothes line. For Max, a wheelchair user who can’t always go where his mates go, the Hills Hoist becomes Shirley, his confidante and central to his dreams for the future—not only as a part of his gang’s secret plan but also as a slightly fantastical element when they climb to the top and the earth-bound Max asks, “What do you see?” Their visions reveal imaginative lives and also conjure the landscape of Darwin—expanding the claustrophobic backyard world of teens getting ready to fly the nest.
Kris Bird’s set is a beautifully simple evocation of a typical Darwin backyard: Hills Hoist, cracked concrete, corrugated iron shed and cyclone fencing—with a hole in it as an entrance/exit point. Director Gail Evans uses the whole area effectively: high balcony and side fences with the centrally placed Hoist providing opportunities for both climbing and canoodling. The ubiquitous tin shed comes alive in an explosive finale brought to life by first-time lighting designer Angus Robson. His design creates the big bang we know has to come: multiple colours from within the shed and lights that rove over the audience and high up to the ceiling of the theatre, extending the space and supporting the action.
I would like to see more empowerment in the female characters. Sarah Hope herself is clearly an empowered, intelligent writer. Call me old fashioned but I believe powerful new voices like Hope’s have a chance to make a difference in a still gender biased society—maybe even a duty.
The young actors give powerful, believable performances, testament to Evans’ ensemble building process. The writing is strong, the dialogue fluid and engaging, the characters rounded and the structure engaging—moving between linear storytelling to fast-forwards and flashbacks. It is a great first play.
Brown’s Mart Productions, Corrugated Iron Youth Arts, Salt Theatre: The Hoist, writer Sarah Hope, director Gail Evans performers Daniel Cunningham, Darren Edwards, Antony Koum, Aimee Gray, Ciella Williams, dramaturg Stephen Carleton, design Kris Bird, lighting, sound design Angus Robson; Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, 10-22 June
Helen Grogan, Geoff Robinson, Three Performative Structures for Slopes (27/4/2014)
photo Laura May Grogan
Helen Grogan, Geoff Robinson, Three Performative Structures for Slopes (27/4/2014)
It is no accident that the Melbourne chapter of Liquid Architecture 2014 begins and ends with violence inflicted upon microphones, both conceptually and literally. “Helen Grogan’s Concrete Room is the festival inauguration,” explains Co-artistic Director Joel Stern. “Helen maps the room by dragging a microphone with a very long lead around the perimeter.”
The Melbourne leg of the festival closes with Canadian artist, Christof Migone’s Hit Parade: “Fifty people with 50 guitar amps banging 50 microphones on the floor a thousand times each,” says Stern. “Christof’s work destroys microphones.”
You could say the Liquid Architecture festival is hitting its ‘difficult teenage phase.’ After 14 consecutive annual festivals focusing on sound art, the festival board put out a call for new blood and opened applications for festival curators. Stern and his long-time co-curator Danni Zuvela were awarded the position (since broadened to Artistic Directors). Liquid Architecture 2014 is set to be a more critical, confrontational and provocative festival.
“I’d like our audience to be angry, confused and critical,” muses Stern. “To be divided…less consensus,” adds Zuvela. “This year is a paradigm shift for Liquid Architecture.”
From its humble beginnings in Melbourne’s RMIT Student Union in 1998, Liquid Architecture has grown to become broadly recognised as Australia’s premiere sound art festival. Sound art has recently become akin to the latest hip thing in international contemporary art circles: Susan Phillipz won the 2010 Turner Prize with a sound work and last year MOMA staged the Soundings exhibition. So is the time ripe for Liquid Architecture to cash in on its sound art cred?
“We’re critical of the term,” says Stern. “It’s a curatorial shortcut to designate whole areas of practice that could be presented in a range of different ways, rather than just grouping them together as ‘sound art.’” Experimental culture is of more interest to the pair. “The concept of ‘experiment’ is super important,” says Zuvela. Stern agrees. “There is a broader experimental culture that crosses over questions of media.”
Stern and Zuvela may be new kids on the Liquid Architecture block (although Stern has been involved in various roles previously), but both have been bastions of experimental art curation in Australia over the past decade. The two met in Brisbane as post-graduate students (Zuvela has a PhD in Australian expanded cinema) and with Sally Golding founded the OtherFilm festival in 2004. Stern also performs in the experimental band Sky Needle and co-curated the much-missed Overground festival in 2011.
OtherFilm began by presenting multi-media happenings centred on experimental cinema and was then developed into a festival, partnering with Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. “In the early days of OtherFilm we were obsessed with film as a medium,” Stern recalls. “We were extremely militant about 16mm and Super 8 film. We wouldn’t show video.” “Yet we always went beyond film,” Zuvela adds. “There was always music, installation, food. We discussed dropping the name at one point; what if we didn’t want to do film?”
“That’s why we had the ‘Other’,” Stern says, grinning. “‘Other’ was a negative space where all these things could happen, but all in relation to film. That thinking mirrors how we address sound in Liquid Architecture. Where everything was film, we now see everything as sound.”
Liquid Architecture takes place primarily over five days in Melbourne in late September, across a wide variety of venues and situations (shorter programs follow in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Singapore). The festival’s theme is “The Ear is a Brain.” “We want works to excite the brain as much as the ear,” Stern explains. “It’s okay to have beautiful music, but I want my brain to be excited, too.”
“The program has some concert performance work, but there’s also work literally engaged in dialogue,” Zuvela says. West Space is hosting a daily series of readings and critical discussions led by visiting sound artists including Alessandro Bosetti and Christof Migone, and a program of ‘talk-performance’ lectures will take place at the National Gallery of Victoria. “The discursive aspects of the festival become a slippery slope between theory and practice.” says Stern.
Robin Fox will also be presenting his new sound and light extravaganza RGB Laser, and Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang will complete a month-long residency at Gertrude Contemporary developing her new work Conceptual Biography of Chris Mann, centring on her mentor and ex-pat Melbourne compositional linguist. “Hong-Kai is one artist who has a more radical, sharper edge,” Zuvela says. “She’s interested in letting go of her authorship. She’s aware of composition as a political act.” Wang’s work will see transcripts of her interviews with Mann’s contemporaries performed by actors to reading and listening groups, whose subsequent dialogues will also become part of the work.
The festival also travels to the dingier end of town at The Tote with a line-up of more underground-orientated acts and performance artists, with acts split between the iconic pub’s stage and courtyard.
The 2014 Liquid Architecture program is varied in the performance contexts offered (from text-based works and lectures to pub gigs), but hovers consistently around concepts of sound through critical prisms. Stern and Zuvela aren’t nervous about audiences reacting negatively to this new edge of the festival, but don’t deny feeling some anxiety. “There’s pressure to innovate an organisation with an important history in Australian sound culture, and knowing people will agree and disagree,” Stern admits. “Sound is a subject of inquiry for almost every discipline. In the contemporary art world, sound is shaking up disciplinary boundaries. It’s going to be a festival about the best ideas of sound, rather than just practices of sound. For us, that’s what’s at stake.”
The work of legendary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) is an essential introduction for any student to the field of electronic music that he did so much to establish, and though Stockhausen himself appeared in Adelaide in 1970, his work is rarely heard here.
This concert by 47 Bachelor of Music (Sonic Arts) students of the University of Adelaide was most welcome, focusing on works written by Stockhausen in the period 6-13 May 1968, when his disintegrating marriage caused emotional turmoil. That week coincided with the rioting and general strikes in Paris and elsewhere in Europe that proved a turning point in European politics, and images of these events were shown throughout the concert. Stockhausen’s consoling immersion during that week in the philosophy of Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo precipitated a major shift in his musical direction.
The 14 compositions comprising Aus den sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days) established Stockhausen’s concept of intuitive music, each piece taking the form of a short instructive text, rather than a score, outlining ideas to which the performers are to respond intuitively. For example, the instructions for Verbindung (Connection) are: “Play a vibration in the rhythm of your body/ Play a vibration in the rhythm of your heart/ Play a vibration in the rhythm of your breathing/ Play a vibration in the rhythm of your thinking/ Play a vibration in the rhythm of your intuition/ Play a vibration in the rhythm of enlightenment/ Play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe/ Mix these vibrations freely/ Leave enough silence between them.” For this concert, the selection from the 14 pieces included Unbegrenzt (Unlimited) 1–5, Setz die Segel zur Sonne (Set Sail for the Sun) 1 and 2, Treffpunkt (Meeting Point), Verbindung (Connection) and Ankunft (Arrival). The instructions for them suggest the meditative, internally focused process required of the performer to channel the cosmic awareness in which Stockhausen was interested.
The students work in groups of four or five with an array of synthesisers, the ubiquitous laptops, a tape-loop, the occasional electric guitar and even voice—the instrumentation is not prescribed and they could have chosen acoustic instruments. Such a script is almost a blank canvas for the performer, and can be seen both as a form of spiritual liberation and the ritual abandonment of conventional composition. The ensemble members presumably work independently of each other to respond to their own inner landscape, but as they also respond to each other’s motives, group consciousness and direction seem to emerge, resulting in an absorbing and musical blend of sounds. That the performers can make such interesting music with so little direction indicates the depth of their creativity and their technical, improvisational and ensemble skills.
Iran Sanadzadeh’s contribution was particularly notable as the image on her laptop screen was projected adjacent to the archival film of the 1968 Paris riots. The audience could see her typing text in both English and Arabic during her ensemble’s rendition of Unbegrenzt, highlighting the concept of textual meaning and its translation sonically, visually and culturally. Also briefly screened during the evening were critiques of Stockhausen, such as those by radical composers Henry Flynt and Cornelius Cardew, who complained that he served the establishment. Stockhausen was indeed a controversial figure, and this concert locates him in the revolutionary cultural milieu of his earlier years.
Karlheinz Stockhausen—Electronic Music, University of Adelaide students directed by Stephen Whittington; Scott Theatre, University of Adelaide, 12 June
We’re in a low, boxy room that looks as much generic seminar room as concert venue for Kupka’s Piano, a new Brisbane ensemble performing what turns out to be a beautifully structured program. Begins with Alex Raineri playing Tristan Murail’s solo piano work, La Mandragore. It’s a spooky piece, symbolically linked by the composer to “a man swinging on the gallows.”
Raineri describes it as frozen, chilling, yet with ravishingly beautiful gestures and that’s how he plays it, wonderfully light, sharp and fast up high, dark and menacing down low, sad and lost in between. Mad rushes and flurries get cut short, start up again and are dashed once more. A superb performance that finishes with the room utterly still.
Next is La Rose pulvérisée. It’s a duet of spiky interlocking chases, the flute and violin repeatedly blending and pulling apart to eventually dissipate as “a large idea pulverised into a small idea”—composer Rune Glerop’s apt description.
More performers join the stage for the premiere of Melody Eötvös’ Wild October Jones. A very emotional work—sweeping, fragmented melodies as well as subtle textural drones from piano and bass drum, bowed vibes and flute. There is something 19th century about this piece, a romance and tension that has me thinking movies, soundscapes and Sherlock Holmesian intrigue. I look forward to hearing more of Eötvös’ work.
A couple of very short pieces follow. Kurtag’s Varga Bálint Ligaturája where muted piano, pathetic scrapes and mysterious harmonies on strings tentatively creep into a very tonal chord progression that is broken only at the final chord. Then Liza Lim’s Love Letter has Angus Wilson playing some surprisingly musical snapping on and off of the snare drum snares, but really needs some amplification to make audible the subtler manipulations.
The final piece, Brett Dean’s Old King’s in Exile, is inspired by Arno Geiger’s memoir of his father’s long decay into dementia. Old Kings begins like a premonition, a bleak landscape with dismal prospect. The first movement is dominated by sad melody and frenzied descending scales on clarinet, with an occasional burst of energy briefly punctuating the gloom. The second movement changes tack with interlocking runs on woodwinds, but the grim message remains—nerves might fire for a while but will eventually fail to present any coherent vision of the world. There is only the struggle, brief victories, inevitable decline.
In this final work, and throughout the entire concert, the seamless blending of sound between instruments reveals a genuine strength of the ensemble. Whether in forming a vertical texture or in handing a phrase from one instrument to another, the sound glows with the musicality of the performers. A joy of a concert. I drive home thinking how completely inadequate listening to music is on YouTube, or compressed for streaming, when compared to sitting with others in a real space, listening to the music and musicians of our time.
Kupka’s Piano, Modern Music in Exile, flutes Jodie Rottle, clarinets Nicholas Harmsen, piano Alex Raineri, percussion Angus Wilson, violin Adam Cadell, cello Katherine Philip, conductor Peter Clark; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 23 May
Four formally experimental and expressively personal exhibitions in Adelaide reveal their artists’ feelings about life and art. They seem to search for languages to communicate their experience and fix their identity in a world dramatically in flux.
Kontaktraum: Ausländer
Joe Felber’s Kontaktraum: Ausländer (Space of contact: Foreigner) is like a personal retrospective of his work since the 1970s. Felber moved to Australia from Switzerland in 1980 and shifts between Australia and Europe. Trained in architecture, he works in painting, installation, sound and performance. Kontaktraum: Ausländer is a critical self-examination by a nomadic artist responding to cultural difference, commenting on the world’s intolerance and materialism and enquiring into the nature of art itself.
The gallery floor is completely covered in raw canvas tarpaulin on which Felber has painted a complex design of symbols, slogans and illustrations, with tyre-marks left by a bicycle wheel dipped in paint. As well as a painting, the tarpaulin may be seen as a road, a map, graffiti, a heated conversation or a record of thoughts while in transit. Memorable slogans and quotes highlight enduring debating points. Around the gallery are works from previous exhibitions, including batches of paintings stacked in racks as if in storage, denying reception and disorienting the viewer. The captions identifying the artworks’ homes (many are on loan for the exhibition) are like career milestones and thus proxies for the milestones of Felber’s wandering life. From a suitcase sitting in the middle of the floor, the sounds of the iconic Swiss cuckoo clock and of hurried footsteps are heard. Moments of Luigi Nono’s politically concerned music are also heard, triggered by the viewer’s movement.
Joe Felber, Kontaktraum: Ausländer
photo Jon Avila
Joe Felber, Kontaktraum: Ausländer
The tarpaulin is also a stage as, on opening night, three simultaneous performances occur. Performers write slogans on each other’s white T-shirts referencing the experience of migrants and refugees. Another performer stands facing into a corner or gazing at a book under a light bulb on a pendulum as if engrossed in private contemplation, occasionally singing brief passages. And a couple engage in animated discussion on art, philosophy and politics while they walk, sit, lie or dance the tango. Their performance suggests the internal dialogue that haunts one’s consciousness and the emotional states that trigger human expression. The inclusion in the script of quotes like “Who’s afraid of red, yellow, blue?” (painter Barnett Newman) and “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths” (Bruce Nauman) invite re-evaluation of artistic developments in recent decades. The couple, actors Mikaela Davis and David Geddes, are outstanding, giving a sustained performance in which they improvise around Felber’s outline directions.
Felber is sensitive to the political issues besetting the world and he questions how art might respond. He knows how art can become devoid of power and meaning, and in critically evaluating his own, he draws on significant influences, for example Pina Bausch’s dance theatre and Nono’s music. In a compelling manner, Felber combines art, sound, language and performance in a magisterial exhibition.
Metabolism: the City Coming Together and Coming Apart
Stanislava Pinchuk (aka Miso) draws by making lines of pinpricks in sheets of heavy drawing paper using an awl. The lines form images, for example, the moon’s craters, constellations of stars, spiderwebs, buildings, trees and mountains. Her tracery images also represent the movement of people in urban space. Pinchuk is an amateur tattooist and the piercing of the pristine textured paper is analogous to the piercing and staining of sensitive bare skin. This exhibition has two thematic elements: The City Coming Together, in which pinprick lines map the movement of people through Tokyo where she spends much of her time, and The City Coming Apart, in which she maps Kiev in her home country, the pinpricks tracing revolutionary action in the Maidan. She added pinpricks daily to record violent acts as they happened. Her exquisitely sensuous, minimal work is not only about image-making or mapping. It’s a coded diary recording her experience of life in the organically growing and decaying city.
A Serious of Objects
Sarah crowEST’s A Serious of Objects is a collection of many things: a row of paintings; two shelves of nondescript-looking ceramics (she calls them Nasty little brown things and Beautiful little brown things); unstretched canvases on which small pieces of cloth cut from friends’ clothes are stitched; index cards with reminders written on them (her father’s, which she has kept in memory of him); blob-like sculptural forms, some with cute teddy-bear eyes; and a wall of photos of previous work, like a mini-retrospective. The paintings suggest the tension between experimentation and commodification, while the stitched, raw canvases are a personal record of close associations, their captions listing the names of those who donated cloth. She endlessly makes things and the process of making appears spontaneous and intuitive, again a kind of personal mapping. In highlighting the importance of hand-made objects her work implicitly questions our materialism.
Roy Ananda, Slow crawl into infinity, 2014, installation view
courtesy Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
Roy Ananda, Slow crawl into infinity, 2014, installation view
Slow crawl into infinity
Roy Ananda’s Slow crawl into infinity is a huge timber framework, almost filling the Samstag Museum’s ground floor gallery. Mounted atop in plywood lettering is the explanatory scrolling text that opens Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The whole form is about 5 x 10m and the plane of lettering slopes downwards, from about 5m to 2m high. This site-specific work is designed to be viewed both from underneath, where it appears as a forest of thin wooden strips, and from the gallery’s internal balcony above, from where viewers read the text. Rather than displaying, say, a statue of a Star Wars character (Darth Vader is the typical emblem), Ananda converts the text into a wryly spectacular monument. It comprises 3,000 metres of raw timber and 15,000 tech screws, and though it deliberately looks obsessive, its presence is overwhelming. In his artist’s talk, Ananda described the work as an expression of fandom, an amateur-looking homage. Its ramshackle character suggests the rickety foundations underpinning civilisation. Ananda’s art often addresses popular culture and the relationship between an image and the reality behind it, raising vital questions about contemporary culture.
The art of the personal
The navigation point for these four artists facing a world in flux is contemporary culture’s forms, values and beliefs and the power of symbols. Their studios are implicitly open to public view—Ananda built his work in the open gallery to enable viewers to witness its painstaking construction; Pinchuk’s art-making is documented on her web-page; crowEST’s approach can be found in her photomontage; and entering Joe Felber’s show is like entering his thoughts. The studio is the space for contemplation and communication.
Joe Felber, Kontaktraum: Ausländer, CACSA, 13 June-3 July; Stanislava Pinchuk, Metabolism: the City Coming Together and Coming Apart, Hugo Michell Gallery, 5 June–5 July; Sarah crowEST, A Serious of Objects, AEAF, 23 May–28 June; Roy Ananda, Slow crawl into infinity, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, 20 May–18 July
photo Simon Cuthbertson, courtesy of Motel Dreaming, DARK MOFO, MONA Museum of Old and New Art
Motel Dreaming
DARK MOFO took over Hobart this June, a sprawling, ambitious festival that included dozens of concerts, a winter feast and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Articulated Intersect, an installation of 18 audience-operated searchlights placed at locations around the Hobart waterfront. Articulated Insersect’s presence in the Hobart sky for 10 days created a vague sense of danger, as though the city was under attack (or, as the joke went, summoning Batman).
At the other end of the spectrum, Motel Dreaming was seen by less than a 100 people, which was as many as the motel where it was staged could accommodate overnight. Yet, for me, this work was at the heart of this year’s DARK MOFO experience.
Between Hobart and the northern suburbs, a kilometre from MONA but separated from it by a bend in the river, is an architectural oasis called the Riverfront Motel. Encapsulated within a decorative arch that was built to mark the Queen’s 1954 visit, it’s a familiar local landmark and a minor masterpiece of kitsch. Artist and social theorist David Patman grew up across the road from the Riverfront. He used to think about the strangeness of communal slumber in such a place. Years later, he and co-director Michelle Boyde instigated Motel Dreaming.
The complex work was delivered by a multi-disciplinary team, including sound and electronic media artist Matt Warren, lighting designer and artist Jason James, digital artist Noah Pedrini, interior designer Danielle Brustman, contemporary artists The Telepathy Project (Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples) and many others, including performers, DJs and even a ‘mini-bar curator.’
Check-in was at 3pm and guests went to their rooms to settle in wondering, “What next?” By late afternoon they gravitated towards the motel’s bar to be greeted by a grey-coiffed gentleman wearing a smoking jacket, and offered a glass of sherry. Then followed chit-chat and hors d’oeuvres of canned pineapple and glacé cherries until, little by little, guests became aware of a noise in the distance, an eerie siren. They began to move towards it…
Siren installation, Matt Warren (sound), Jason James (lighting) James Andrews (performer)
photo Simon Cuthbertson, courtesy of Motel Dreaming, DARK MOFO, MONA Museum of Old and New Art
Siren installation, Matt Warren (sound), Jason James (lighting) James Andrews (performer)
In a performance on the riverbank was a ghostly androgynous figure, a different kind of Siren, slowly emerging from an old-fashioned bed on the river’s edge and wandering zombie-like up to a nearby house. Warming their hands over fire drums and sipping hot cider, the audience waited, on the patio of the house which they noted, with surprise, was a perfectly preserved example of mid-20 century Modernism.
Welcomed by Father, a jovial middle-aged man in a navy double-breasted blazer, and Mother, in voluminous skirt and high heels, the audience entered the house. Soon they were serving themselves from a buffet table. But where to eat? Some sat in the living room, in the glow of lava lamps. Others stood in the hallways, listening as the elder daughter played spooky music on an electronic harpsichord. In the younger daughter’s room, they found not a real child but a little woman, who sat in bed with her teddy bear and talked about her ‘mummy and daddy’ and what a lovely night it was.
After dinner a fleet of ratrods and a double-decker bus arrived to whisk everyone away to MONA. The controversial Southdale Shopping Centre exhibition had transformed the museum into a tourist visitor’s centre and an up-market mall. Satire, you see, and coming to grips with it required at least a couple of drinks from the Void Bar.
Kitchen Ghost, The Telepathy Project
photo Simon Cuthbertson, courtesy of Motel Dreaming, DARK MOFO, MONA Museum of Old and New Art
Kitchen Ghost, The Telepathy Project
Later, back at the motel, a line of tea lights led further back up the hill, to the Haunted Mansion, a mock-Edwardian house with rooms after room of strange noises and eerie, minimalist lighting. Behind this was a smaller (faux Tudor) building known as the Coach House. Here, a sombre young woman handed visitors fragrant tea. An electric heater blazed away, providing little warmth but serving as a kind of beacon, or perhaps a warning. Upstairs, stepping into a small bedroom meant coming face to face with a horse-headed man sitting on the bed, watching as a couple slept in a nearby alcove.
Those still not tired enough to embark upon the dreaming itself then returned to the late night lounge, to be entertained by projections and a silent disco. The cocktail of the night was a potent milk and nutmeg affair, as might be found at a mountain ski resort.
In the morning guests were asked to write down their dreams on postcards and hand them over, in exchange for coffee. Many did, and took the process seriously. Perhaps because they knew it was not just about them; it was about the group, the festival beyond, and society itself beyond that. The question being put was not merely “what did you dream last night?” but “what did we all dream last night?” And where are our dreams, and our nightmares, taking us?
Patman and Boyde gave their collaborators room to investigate Motel Dreaming in their own ways. Matt Warren, for example, created many discrete sound installations across the site, including in the Mansion. One of these consisted of whispered, repeated phrases heard in a dark, empty room, the text taken from guests’ “worst nightmares” (gathered before the event by Patman and Pedrini). Others were more subtle: the archway at the entrance of the motel emitted noise at four different frequencies; traffic noise recorded from the nearby highway was piped into the motel rooms via one of several in-house television channels. The Telepathy Project were given the Coach House as their domain and images of their sleep performance went out via a video feed. Dancer James Andrews, well known to DARK MOFOers for his numerous appearances across the festival, played the Siren but there was also a suggestion that his character was dreaming the events unfolding across the site.
Motel Dreaming captured key themes of DARK MOFO: transcendence, communal exploration and ritual, and the dark side of the psyche, evolving into a sort of conceptual nexus, a microcosm of the broader festival.
The 66 dreams collected from the Motel Dreaming experiment have been analysed by David Patman and Noah Pedrini with a view to determining the ‘representative’ dream of the night. The dreams will be available to read on the project’s website.
DARK MOFO: Motel Dreaming, Unconscious Collective, co-directors David Patman, Michell Boyde, Riverfront Motel and Villas, Hobart, 17, 18 June; www.moteldreaming.com.
You would think that the conceit of casting a male actor, well known for onstage cross-dressing, might add to the abundant psychological and social complexities of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. In this adaptation for Belvoir, directed by Adena Jacobs, the effect is reductive: Hedda, as played by Ash Flanders, is simply a languorously posturing, caustic, one-note man-woman monster. The rationale for the casting is opaque.
There are other hints of ‘difference:’ Judge Brack is perhaps bi-sexual and Hedda appears to ogle the black maid, with whom she elsewhere shares a cigarette in a quiet moment, but the rest of the roles are played utterly straight. Justifiably silly thoughts cross the mind as the production’s cinematic longeurs roll on (Hedda gazes out of window, Hedda plays a shoot-em-up video game, Hedda lolls by pool): when will husband Tesman reel with shock, “I’ve married a transvestite…or a transsexual!”? In Ibsen’s play Hedda expresses her boredom, which is played here as mere indolence in contrast with the generations of actresses who have realised a nervy, naïve but cruelly self-aware romantic fatally trapped by bourgeois marriage, convention, duties and corset (see for example Fiona Shaw’s riveting account on YouTube). Of course, the corset has gone and the duties, but marriage and convention still rule the plot, if archaically in this awkward transposition to the present.
It’s difficult to get a fix on just where this ‘present’ is: inside a Hollywood TV series? It’s not a noticeably Australian transposition nor has it found for the late 19th century Hedda a parallel 21st century middle class woman. Presumably Jacobs’ Hedda is meant to present modern middle class women as genderless and narcissistic, while nonetheless doomed from the outset to make the same fatal choices Ibsen’s Hedda did, but with few of the conflicting emotions and less of the moral ambiguity that power the play’s existential force so strongly felt at the end of the 19th century. Jacobs’ Hedda is no freer than her antecedents, but is more clearly, or simply, a sociopath for whom boredom, more than any desire for control or a badge of existential courage, is her determining trait. Consequently the revelation scene is played as abrupt melodrama, as if not much were at stake.
The recent ruckus over the alleged dominance of director-driven adaptations of classics over new Australian plays aside, the re-workings of great plays are a reminder of anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss’ rather psychoanalytic observation that the re-telling of a myth over thousands of years, in whatever form or permutation, reinforces the power of the original. Classic plays have mythic status in our culture; they are secularly sacred. Their recurrent appearances on our stages, the screen and in our studies sustains their power, even when diminished by productions deemed to have missed the mark. Several years ago in the Sydney Festival, a radically reconstructed Hamlet directed by Thomas Ostermeier was widely agreed to have captured the essence of Shakespeare’s play in very contemporary terms (or idiom perhaps, being reminiscent of the Dogme film genre). Adena Jacobs’ Hedda Gabler has for the most part been seen as desecratory: the narrative preserved but the text thinned out and the interpretation of the central role an unembodied conceit. (Alison Croggon makes a limited case for the director’s likely intention in ABC Arts online, ABC Arts Mail, 1 Aug). If the production had gone someway towards metaphorically pointing up the tragic suffering of transsexuals, then good; but it did not.
If the interpretation of the role of Hedda was muted and neutered the show’s production values were over the top and wearyingly cinematic (including a badly miked scene inside a luxury car by the pool), with emotion provided at a key point by a recorded thundering classical choir (a tired po-mo ploy in contemporary performance and theatre, usually Baroque). But no amount of theatre magic covers for the emptiness of the interpretation.
Belvoir, Hedda Gabler, writer Henrik Ibsen, adaptor, director Adena Jacobs, designer Dayna Morrissey, costumes David Fleischer, lighting Danny Pettingill, composer Kelly Ryall; Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, opened 2 July
Angie Milliken, Mark Leonard Winter, Amy Burkett, Anna McGahan The Effect, STC/QTC co-production
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Angie Milliken, Mark Leonard Winter, Amy Burkett, Anna McGahan The Effect, STC/QTC co-production
UK playwright Lucy Prebble’s award-winning The Effect is being widely produced (an MTC production is playing in tandem with STC’s). It’s an ‘issue’ play that directly addresses the morality of drug trials from both sides—the medical professionals and their subjects. Prebble neatly pairs her protagonists. The head researcher, a pragmatic male psychiatrist has employed a female psychotherapist friend to run the trial. There’s a mere hint of something odd in their relationship, but this is irritatingly left hanging until the second of the play’s two acts.
Much of the first act focuses on a young man, a sardonic live wire, not particularly educated and an old hand at these tests and how to get around their restrictions. He’s attracted to a young woman, a psychology student, a rationalist who is in a relationship but has doubts about love. His playful insistence, the rarefied atmosphere of the trial (no communication with the outside world, no sex) and not knowing who is taking the mood enhancing drug and who the placebo breeds intimacy at first and then anxiety—is the man’s feeling of love for the woman natural? He believes he’s on the placebo, so it must be. When the truth is known, chaos ensues: the psychotherapist loses control of the test and of her own mental well-being, her damaged relationship with the psychiatrist is revealed and the young couple enter into a post-trial relationship of complex emotional and physical dependency. It’s an unhappy happy ending.
It’s disturbing that the clinicians in the play completely remove their subjects from the real world when testing drugs whose efficacy can only be determined socially. So, in an un-real clinical setting it’s not surprising that emotions and motives are suspect or warped. It’s likewise unsurprising that a psychotherapist will find a psychiatric model unaccommodating. But these tensions drive the play, providing a modicum of suspense, two mighty shocks and much to consider. The play is convincingly staged in a super-modern clinic: black walls with a mirroring sheen and a centre-stage low, wide platform—a light box-cum-specimen table that illuminates this detached world with unnatural colour. Overhead hang several video monitors indicating trial stages and readings while a spooky laboratory hum pervades the space. Brittle human behaviour sits at odds with the architectural and technological certainty of the clinic.
Although Prebble’s critique of rarified drug trialling is lucid, her treatment of her characters is less convincing. I’ve already mentioned the Act 2 revelations about the psychiatrist and the physiotherapist, which require awkward exposition. More problematic is the punishing treatment doled out to the psychotherapist—to what end thematically? It’s established that she was emotionally troubled before she met the psychiatrist in their earlier years, then subsequent to their parting and again now—wheelchair bound even. What has changed? While the young couple’s interaction—his carefree, idiosyncratic dancing and her growing sense of freedom in his presence—convinces both emotionally and in terms of the drug testing issue, the other couple’s doesn’t add up. Yes, he, the good corporate citizen, defends his testing methods and she finally objects to them, but her reactions come to nothing and he feels let off the hook—she doesn’t blame him for her breakdown. We learn nothing of her actual condition and he’s pretty much a cipher. The young couple on the other hand grow in complexity as the trialling becomes exacting, until they finally face a tragic reversal of their roles. The young in The Effect survive, if damaged and changed; their elders are locked in, he as the head of an institution, she institutionalised. Is that all Prebble has to say?
Sarah Goodes’ direction is effective, making good use of the spacious hi-tech design by Renee Mulder with lighting by Ben Hughes and sound by Guy Webster. Angie Milliken as the psychotherapist is adept at revealing confusion and pain in a limited role; Eugene Gilfedder is a quietly charming, emotionally armoured psychiatrist; Anna McGahan ably captures the transformation of a restrained young woman by a violent act that yields her subsequent frankness and caring; and Mark Leonard Winter as the young man is disarmingly all loose energy, trickery and passion.
Sydney Theatre Company, The Effect, writer Lucy Prebble, director Sarah Goodes; Wharf 1, STC, opened 12 July
Steve Rogers, Andrea Gibbs, Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography
photo Brett Boardman
Steve Rogers, Andrea Gibbs, Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography
This felt like being subjected to eight gigabytes of pathos in a mere 90 minutes, witnessing the rapid descent of a shopaholic and a porn addict—who meet via the net in their desperation for companionship—into sheer abjection. She’s a nurse, has two children from a now dead, violent husband and her back is giving out; she’s broke and terrified of debt collectors. He’s unhappily married, an employee in a security business and a serial user of his office computer for accessing porn, for which he is sacked. His wife kicks him out.
The man and woman both believe that they fat and ugly, and see each other in the same light. For what appears to be a cathartic resolution following mutually degrading encounters, lies and fantasisings, the two stand stark naked, confessing their failings and feelings to each other—some are banally generic, others might be revealing, but we’ll never know; in the final, less than a minute scene, she tells us he’s gone, taking the last of her money. She quietly begs us, “Please don’t make fun of me.”
Although bravely performed by Steve Rogers and Andrea Gibbs, the play appears little more than a heavily narrated sketch, the immediacy of the contact between the two characters diminished by the constant inner detailing of their circumstances and fears and their past tense reporting on their encounters while these scenes are acted out ‘present tense.’ But only a little inner life is ever glimpsed amid all the paranoia, racism and sexism. Greene refuses his characters insights or moments of true connection; their lives have not been altered in meeting each other, and there is no dignity in the woman’s final utterance—it simply compounds the pathos that overwhelms the work.
Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography has nothing to tell us about addiction, save that it’s nasty and makes social engagement even harder than usual for two already socially inept people. Declan Greene’s attempt to create a form of narrational dialogue—spoken thoughts unheard by the other character, tense shifts, brief staccato lines and lists that provide exposition and action simultaneously—is interesting but ultimately distancing.
Designer Marg Horwell’s bland, abstracted living room with its deep pile carpet, white vertical blinds (onto which are thinly projected unhelpful lines from the text) and no furniture is a vacant space in which the two mid-life characters hover, living out their crises and creating, between them, a third trauma—an impossible relationship. As for Lee Lewis’ direction, it’s likewise plain, or as critical parlance goes these days, ‘transparent.’
Griffin Theatre Company and Perth Theatre Company, Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography, writer Declan Greene, director Lee Lewis, performers Andrea Gibbs, Steve Rogers, design Marg Horwell, lighting Matthew Marshall, composer Rachael Dease; SBW Stables, Sydney, 2 May-14June
In his “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), TS Eliot named dusk “the violet hour”—when the work-sodden, with charcoaled hearts, come home from thankless jobs to lonely rooms and food laid out in tins. In that terse, 133-line poem, he draws the picture of a whole time, culture and place trapped within the social and economic drives of history but, albeit half-consciously, desperate for something to change.
Vanessa Bates’ re-telling of six of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales is also set in that husk-dusk ‘magic hour’ where a combination of unspoken longing, hope, sadness, entrapment and desperation leak through into the tail-ends of our days. Her setting, however, is not the 1910-15 of pre-Great War London, but a 21st century dystopia of broken promises, intergenerational wounds, iniquities and inequities playing out in caravan parks, country discotheques and bleak high rises, Australia-wide.
While in her script, Big—as in Wolves, parents and grandparents, step-mothers and trailer-park trash, both black and white—meet Small (daughters, sisters, sons, tiny babes), there is no reassurance that anything in the Big World brings redemption. As in the Grimms’ tales, ‘homes’ are compromised: babies are abandoned, taken up and adopted, but abandoned yet again. Where is the woodchopper (the Father or overarching caregiver) who overcomes the Wolf, the Stepmother, the Rumpelstiltzkin?
Grandmothers sleep with their granddaughters’ boyfriends; fathers, rather than providing protection, betray their daughters to a scheming Frog and leave the mother with chlamydia; and Jack’s mother ends up taking one heroin dose too many, leaving him abandoned to his resilience but essentially alone.
Curiously, these stories are actually minus the Uncanny, which in the Grimms’ tales also open doorways to redemption. Bates’ “magic hour” is thus closer to the bleak hyper-realities of Tim Winton, especially his stories in The Turning.
The performance thus leaves a curious taste. The show is not quite bittersweet, not quite sour; but significant questions arise. For example: who supplied those drugs to Jack’s dad and mum? Who built that ghastly housing commission high-rise? Perhaps, as with Winton, these represent an index of deep and long-standing social malaise and, as such, much more complex than to be left to the Uncanny to resolve.
One cannot escape the fact that Ursula Yovich, a performer of Aboriginal heritage, brings a sharp poignancy to the telling of these tales just by visibly (both darkly and lightly) being who she is. This puts a sharper edge on the production than if the storyteller were cast as a middle-class white female, for whom it was generically written, but again not one that resolves anything in a simple way. With such complex history as we have in 21st century Australia, who is the Father, the saviour; where is the wisdom and resilience that survives and precipitates deep change for our society as a whole?
That said, the work—so beautifully performed, directed and staged—creates great pleasures too, and can be received on many levels. An elderly gent in the stalls before me called out a simple, heart-felled ‘Yay” as he applauded, so deeply moved and engaged was he, it seems. I am moved by his response; it’s as if he were responding to a tale told by his own grandchild: ‘Ah, here is the wound. Let me hold and feel it with you.’
Perhaps, this age, the age in which we live, is one that hears all, solves nothing. But in that very fact may be our redemption.
The Magic Hour, writer Vanessa Bates, director Chris Bendall, performer Ursula Yovich, designer, Alicia Clements, lighting, music Joe Lui; Street Theatre, Canberra, 5, 6 July
In Inverse Spaces, Elizabeth Welsh and Kim Tan lead an unnamed ensemble in a program of post-serial composition from Italy. From this body of work they curate a musician’s arsenal of space, exploring the insides and outsides of psychological, domestic, musical and sonic spaces. Excellent notes by Tan guide the audience through the program, which sometimes couldn’t help departing from its raison d’être to present some plain old fine music.
Our first stop is A Pierre. Dell’azzurro Silenzio, Inquietum, a four-channel sonic environment designed by Luigi Nono. The environment is activated by whispers and grunts from Samuel Dunscombe on contrabass clarinet and Tan on bass flute. The sonic space increases in density while maintaining the same serene volume as the performers’ contributions are picked up and diffused. While the performers’ own sounds projected beautifully within the severe art deco interior of the Collins Street Baptist Church, the electroacoustic element sounded unfortunately two-dimensional.
From a large space to a claustrophobic one, Franco Donatoni’s Ciglio II is a duo for quarrelling voices. Tan associates the piece with a muffled dispute heard from an adjoining apartment. The quick pulse of the first movement underpins an exciting rhythmic counterpoint as the two voices dart about combatively. Mocking, descending chromatic lines appear as the argument turns nasty. The gestural imitation that constitutes the rest of the piece is its least imaginative part. It is as though Donatoni had run out of ideas and shoved in a study he wrote as a student. Welsh and Tan did their best to bring out the different voices of the study at this point, breathing life into a piece written in 1997 that sounded 100 years old.
Tan writes that the patterns of breath and choked punctuations of Toshio Hosokawa’s Atem-Lied for solo flute were “parallel patterns of speech,” but they resemble more of a virtuosic snore. Either way they acted as “a passage between inside and outside.” A particularly arresting effect was breathing into the flute while clattering the keys, which produced a gruesome, insect-like sound.
In Giacinto Scelsi’s Duo for violin and cello the two instruments drone along in a monotonous wash of string sound barely inflected by microtonal shifts and changing bow positions. Judith Hamann brought out the wonderful effect of droning on one string while playing trills high up on the fingerboard on another. The two instruments form a single conflicted voice, an “inner writhing” in Tan’s words. The particular mental space evoked is familiar to us all from the early morning before coffee.
Aldo Clementi’s Due Canoni is a fascinating experiment in tempo. The same canon is played three times, each time slower than the last. The first time it is heard as an atonal canon played legato in the violin and flute. The piano’s part is scattered with dynamics that make it jump out of the otherwise smooth surface. On the second, slower repetition the ear stretches to make sense of each note, inventing harmonies and passing notes between each distant tone. The effect is like watching atonality march off into the desert to die. As it retreats, it is harder and harder to make out. The third repetition changes the game once again, for each note is so long that you no longer hear the relationship between the voices, but focus in on the sound production of each individual tone. One becomes aware how difficult it is to keep each bow and breath steady, or of the beats in each piano note.
If this review seems a little light-hearted, this is perhaps because the works (and program notes) gave plenty of space for imaginative interpretation. The particular brand of Italian new music explored by the ensemble could well be described as “new simplicity for new complexists,” such was the laid-back presentation of otherwise difficult material.
Inverse Spaces, Elizabeth Welsh, Kim Tan and ensemble, Collins Street Baptist Church, Melbourne, 28 June
Underlying the collected essays of Darren Tofts’ alephbet is the audacious, anti-historical idea that the internet can be thought about through films and works of literature that preceded its invention. To play out this provocation, Tofts chooses writers whose stories are game-like, such as Italo Calvino, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes and above all Jorge Luis Borges. 
