RealTime E-dition 26 October 2016

RealTime E-dition

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Reslience & Resistance. Resilience is a strikingly recurrent theme in this E-dition. In Project Xan, a woman appears as herself in performance, reflecting on the consequences of being raped and blamed for it at age 12. Emma Beech in Life is Short and Long conjures intimate conversations she’s had with people facing crises, personal, social and economic. For reviewer Francis Russell, Gosia Wlodarczak’s A Room Without A View (Extended) suggests the power of drawing as a kind of refrain for containing chaos. French-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza, performing The Shout in Dancehouse’s Border Lines, writes of being “grounded in the rhythms of Gnawa, a kind of ancient African spiritual music based on the chant-like repetition of refrains and phases.” As Andrew Fuhrmann observes, The Shout and (in the same program) Sarah-Jane Norman’s Take This For It Is My Body, resiliently secure tradition against disintegration but are equally acts of bodily resistance, as are all the works, in their own ways, mentioned here. We’ll be back 9 November; see you then.

Keith and Virginia

PERFORMANCE VS RAPE CULTURE Twelve-year-old Xan was raped by three young men in 1981. In 2016, she appears in a documentary performance, Project Xan, with a successful career but still traumatised by her memories of being blamed by the court for the crimes of others. Writer-director Hellie Turner tells RealTime about the origins and aims of the work.

OLD HALLS, NEW LIVES Arts Northern Rivers’ If These Halls Could Talk brings new life to old halls in northern NSW towns with new theatre, film, digital media works and community participation, writes Barnaby Smith.

THE AMBIGUOUS CRY OF BLOOD Andrew Fuhrmann discerns a political connection between works by French-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza and Indigenous Australian artist Sarah-Jane Norman in Dancehouse’s Dance Territories: Border Lines, part of the 2016 Melbourne Festival.

DRAWING: CALM IN CHAOS In A Room Without A View (Extended) at Fremantle Arts Centre, Gosia Wlodarczak fills walls with her drawing over three weeks, suggesting for Francis Russell, a protective song-like refrain that keeps chaos at bay.

EVERYDAY CRISIS-RESILIENCE
Performance-maker Emma Beech gently evokes people in Spain and South Australia, drawing on conversations she’s shared about dealing with “the crises of recession and change, of both the body and the world,” including, writes Ben Brooker, some challenges of her own.

FOUND READING: CELEBRATING DADA
In The New York Review of Books, the great classical pianist Alfred Brendel reports seeing recent exhibitions that celebrate the centenary of Dada. He pays tribute to artists who challenged every kind of authority with, above all, laughter of a kind much needed now.

ORDINARY MONSTERS,
AT A DISTANCE
The intimacy and immediacy that made Helen Garner’s book so powerful are absent in Sotiris Dounoukos’ feature film debut, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, writes Kirsten Krauth, “pushing the characters away to somewhere out of reach.”

GIVEAWAY: GOLDSTONE DVD
In the sequel to Mystery Road, Ivan Sen’s Goldstone probes a mining town’s pervasive corruption with Indigenous detective Jay Swann (Aaron Pedersen) searching for a missing tourist. The film’s vast desert landscapes, a beautiful sacred waterway and the scattered township make for a potent visual experience.

RealTime E-dttions are published by Open City an Incorporated Association in New South Wales. Open City Inc is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy [VACS], an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. RealTime’s Principal Technology Partner is the national communications carrier, Vertel.

Opinions published in RealTime are not necessarily those of the Editorial Team or the Publisher.

RealTime, Open City Inc
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Sydney South 1235
Australia

Tel 61 2 9283 2723

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www.realtime.org.au

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